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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FinalSonicX" data-source="post: 5925932" data-attributes="member: 63787">It all depends on settings and circumstance, as always. As a DM, you should generally always have the tools available to handle situations that arise in these circumstances - I was just suggesting a few in my post. Maybe the thieves guild doesn't bother with such small business? Maybe all that looting the players did actually leads to another adventure/hook? DMs are not helpless in this problem.I was not literally suggesting that the players are scrapping the dungeon to find nuts and bolts - I was comparing the concepts. Grabbing everything in the dungeon is not generally too profitable if you're delving into caves and "traditional" dungeons, so people trying to pick up every piece of equipment off of the fallen in an attempt to scrape together some extra coin seems similar in concept to me. True, overall the picture D&D paints seems somewhat incomprehensible to me. Prices are so high and wages so low the impression is given that a farmer could barely afford to save up for a dagger, yet this must mean that merchants and tradesmen make quite a bit of coin. The picture of a relatively poor merchant is a hard one to justify with prices as they are. In my games I mostly just hand-waive it and say that they have "enough" money but not enough to justifiably risk purchasing so much. At higher levels (4+), I usually stop worrying too much about how much  money the part has. If they have too little I might give them some juicy  money-making opportunities, otherwise I just let them spend it how they  will. Not worth worrying about unless you've really been handing out a  lot of treasure or unless they start buying gamebreaking stuff (which  you can usually shut down pretty quickly). In any case, rust and damage aren't the only things that can make goods non-valuable, and you needn't use it every time. A few hundred extra gold won't hurt every now and then. I'd say Rust/Damage and AC can be more easily abstracted than tracking weapon/armor condition via some kind of stat which affects item efficacy. It's not really about realism, either. It's just about maintaining control of the game.   I'd say setting up a stall is fine (and could even be the source of an adventure!) but it would take a while to sell all of the swords, unless it's a particularly large city or swords are in high demand. As for how much coin a merchant has on hand, the gmae has always been awkward on this point. As I've said, I just hand-waive it and guesstimate how much the merchant has based on their circumstances, their location, their status, and the location's gp limit (if one exists). Downtime is nice IMO, all I'm saying is that even if we were to fix prices these types of controls still exist for the DM to put in place. "I'd like to sell our 30 swords!" says the player. "Alright," I say "but it will take you a while to sell off all of them in a town like this - maybe 2 weeks. Do you want to spend that time selling your goods?". After that, the rest of the party either agrees and tells me of the stuff they're doing in the meanwhile (while I charge them for inn fees, food, etc.), or they say it's not worth it and get back to the adventure after selling the handful of swords that are in the best condition and dump the rest.  For the record, I'm in favor of the silver standard. I don't think the gold standard is at fault for some of the things people say it's at fault for, however.   That would be pretty close to scrapping dungeons for "nuts and bolts" and I'd usually tell the party they're probably wasting their time unless there's something interesting out there or unless they want to become scrappers or something. I agree - costs need to be controlled much more. As of now, prices as listed in most editions I play seem somewhat absurd. Whether it ends up in silver or gold it doesn't matter - it's all scale. I still think that silver is the better choice however, because it's more believable and makes gold more precious.</blockquote>

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