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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FinalSonicX" data-source="post: 5925654" data-attributes="member: 63787">While most DMs do not charge maintenance costs for arms and armor, I  think many DMs have their NPCs limit the amount of trade that can be  conducted with the items looted from a dungeon. I know I do not allow players to sell all the nuts and bolts they strip from a dungeon because usually it's damaged, in poor condition, or vendors simply don't want to tie up their inventory with a bunch of stuff that is barely useful.Selling 30 swords to blacksmiths is kind of difficult in my games. First, there's the weapon's quality to consider. If it's a mundane sword and not masterwork, it MIGHT be worth purchasing, if there's no damage, no rust, and the merchant has a bit of coin to spare. Unfortunately, rust and damage are commonplace when held by creatures or organizations that don't concern themselves too much with weapon quality (probably orcs, some bandits, kobolds, goblins, etc.). Furthermore, there's the question of who used to own the sword - if these orcs have nice swords, where did they get them from? Dead soldiers or guardsmen? In my world, there are trade laws which prohibit the sales of such items on the open market - so prices are going to be considerably lower once the local government "buys back" said swords.Merchants don't have a ton of coin laying around, so there's little reason a merchant would throw 100 gp (probably a sizeable amount for the average merchant!) at a party selling them swords of questionable quality and origin. Unless he/she's certain that the inventory will sell quickly, it represents a risk to their livelihood to have so much of their wealth tied up for any significant amount of time. Swords may not be in demand in this area at this time. Even if a merchant purchases a portion of the party's loot, they'll have to find more vendors to sell to to get rid of all their swords. So there might be only 1 blacksmith in town, or in a larger city it might take 2 weeks to find merchants willing to take the swords off their hands.Then again, the orcs MIGHT craft their own nice swords and they're brand new from a week ago by the time the PC's kill the orcs and take their stuff. That's fine, it might be necessary for your story, and I think it's important to keep prices reasonable (I've often thought many prices from previous editions were surprisingly high. Too high for even a farmer to own a dagger it seemed) and prevent these issues from ruining campaigns. That said, a large portion of wealth distributions issues need to be handled by the DM - the game cannot anticipate how well-equipped enemies might be at lower levels. A level 1 party is just as likely to be fighting wolves as bandits. Why is it "way off" to say that at 25% sell price a 4 gp longsword is worth 1 gp? Have I missed something?</blockquote>

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