So you enter the "Magic Shoppe", and inside you see...what ?

[Dannyalcatraz]

But there is nothing that forces magic items to follow the same economic rules that govern onions or bricks.

Other than everything we know about economics, no.

 

[howandwhy99]

So far the players have thought to cast Detect Magic once when in a shop. (shoppe?) It paid off though.

Magic is a precious thing. Casting a spell costs resources and prepping it and casting it haphazardly does so too. But sometimes it pays off anyways.

Virtually no one in the campaign world can see magical auras. So trying to sell something for 1000s of gold pieces because it's "magic" is like selling beans to Jack. Most fools wouldn't even give you a cow for it.

If you really want magic items, find people you trust who have them and trade.
...and even then double check with spells or via a trusted second source (like a reliable, hired spellcaster).

Virtually no one can afford to hold enough stock in them to open a market.

Exceptions?
Alchemists who create alchemical items like components for many potions.
Herbalists who also trade in many magic spell components, palliatives, and at least 11 secret herbs and spices.
Temple Clerics who sell holy water, blessed items, as well as performing divine rituals (spells) for tithes.

Magic is around (for sale or not), but it's all part of the Exploration & Discovery game.

 

[Dioltach]

In my 3.5E campaign, rather than keep track of how much treasure the characters should be getting each level, I have a travelling salesman appear every so often and tell the players they can buy goods up to a certain value. (The salesman has a couple of iron golem guards to deter any notions of free enterprise.) When I ran a D20 Modern/Future campaign, the characters were simply given new equipment from Department 7's stores.

 

[Jhaelen]

I find this a curious statement. What is inappropriate about assuming magic items follow the rules of econimics, namely, that people will try to buy and sell them?

I think there's an important difference between generic 'stock' magic items, like healing potions or a +1 longsword and the rest.

Any magic item more specific than these will probably have been originally created with a particular recipient in mind. All of these items should have been created with a restriction that they can only be used by that recipient. That makes it impossible that they can fall into the wrong hands and removes incentive to steal them (except to deny their bearer its use). Magic items are dangerous, access to them should be as restricted as possible.

That's my basic assumption about magic items in any setting. It means that 'Magic Shoppes' are basically empty, but they may be the place to go to if you are looking for someone who can create a magic item for you.

 

[Celebrim]

Other than everything we know about economics, no.

When you have real world experience with the economics of magic items, you let me know. Heck, if you have any real world experience with a substitutionary good for a magic item, like something powered by human numina, let me know.

The real world contains no functional esoteric items. This is something that has serious impact in speculative fiction, because it means that there is no parallel to a wizard but a wizard. You either have no wizards, or you introduce wizard analogues into your setting - jedi, psions, etc. - because real things don't have wizard counterparts. You try to substitute a wizard with something you can use in hard sci-fi - a hacker, a weapons expert, etc. - and it doesn't quite work.

But even in the real world, the market for every item isn't the same as the market for bricks and onions. Real world items are heavily regulated by law and custom. So that while there is a market for nuclear weapons and many of the laws of economics apply to it, it still isn't the same as going and buying a bag of onions or a stack of bricks. It isn't even the same as going and buying a thing of comparable cost, say a luxury yacht. What is the market for small pox virus like do you think?

You seem to have forgotten that the laws of economics are based on axiomatic assumptions. If the assumptions are invalidated, the laws don't apply. I would argue that one of the critical assumptions in the law of economics is that things are 'goods' and can be commoditized to a high degree, and that almost by definition (in most magic systems) 'magic' is something that is esoteric and cannot be freely commoditized. You can't always buy it, or trade it, and to the extent that you could commoditize it, it's heavily regulated by law and custom in the way that you'd expect of anything numinous, mysterious, profound and usually dangerous.

In D&D, for example, among other things, production of magic items requires an irreplaceable investment in some property abstracted as 'experience points'. This requires us to see that among the many other factors controlling the market for magic items is the market for experience points. If there is no market for experience points, we'd expect that to heavily impact how the market for magic items works. Where do you get your off the shelf 1000 XP in your game world anyway?

 

[Mishihari Lord]

When you have real world experience with the economics of magic items, you let me know. Heck, if you have any real world experience with a substitutionary good for a magic item, like something powered by human numina, let me know.

Danny's an IP attorney in the music industry. There's enough similarities between selling magic as a product and selling musical art as a product that I'd say he's as close to an expert in this area as can be found in real life. That said, your points are good.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

Other than everything we know about economics, no.

The economics that you and I learned in MBA school rest on a lot of assumptions. Someone famous once said that the free-est free market it is just clobber the guy who has stuff and take what you want. Just to exist, a store requires a cultural and legal framework to support it. In a genuinely feudal society, I'd expect laws that magic is the property of nobility and any of it found elsewhere is to be confiscated. Similarly, I used to work in defense, and we were only allowed to sell to the US government and governments approved by the US. Again, no stores. I'd say that even your example of Sotheby's auction house is not a store, but a brokerage service. So even in modern societies with familiar economic systems, there aren't stores for everything.

Given that most D&D worlds are not feudal, but modern with feudal trappings, and given the large amount of magic items implied to exist by the rules, I'll concede that a magic shop is not unreasonable. Still, for genre reasons I wrote about above, I won't ever have a MagicRUs.

Edit: After rereading the posts I may be making the wrong argument. If you're making the narrow point that economics applies to magic items I have to agree. If you're saying that economics says that there will be magic stores, I disagree.

 

[Hand of Evil]

It is an big old Wizard-Mart, with retired wizard greeters and friendly staff of blue robed part-time workers. Magic food on the right, clothes and house hold goods in the middle and your magical gardening needs and magical vehicle needs to the left.

 

[Celebrim]

Danny's an IP attorney in the music industry. There's enough similarities between selling magic as a product and selling musical art as a product that I'd say he's as close to an expert in this area as can be found in real life.

I'm struggling to see how they are even close.

Danny is required and employed because music is something that is easy to commoditize but hard to derive profits from outside a protective legal framework, because in some sense music itself is just information. It's easily passed, spread, and acquired without needing to spend resources on it. It can be duplicated in some sense just by me humming a tune. Danny exists to prevent me from deriving income from humming tune I don't legally own, and the market is highly artificial because of societies recognition that artist ought to derive some income for their contribution to society.

Magic by contrast is something which is usually portrayed as inherently hard to commoditize, difficult or impossible to pass on, and requires tremendous resources to duplicate even if it can - it's not clear that the Hand of Vecna can be created by a repeatable process. In a society where magic exists, unless magic shares properties with being music(!!) like anyone can hum a little ditty and accidently burn a house down, societies relationship to magic will still be almost certainly very different to their relationship to (real world) music. I would think Danny could hopefully see that if anyone could hum a little ditty and purposefully (or accidently) burn a house down, that the laws governing music - and around which the market for music is organized - would be very different indeed. I would likewise hope that he could see that magic as it is usually presented is very different from music in almost all ways would perforce have very different laws and markets.

Societies interest is more likely along the lines of seeing wizards don't take control of the society, or in the case of wizards that have taken control of the society, in ensuring they maintain a monopoly on the source of their power.

I think the 'brokerage house' model is a reasonably well thought out take on magic, in that trust is almost certainly an overriding concern by both the buyer and seller. There are several problems I have with it though.

One thing I think what is missing from the model as described is that it assumes that anyone can just walk in the door. I don't think you ought to assume a free market with many buyers and many sellers - classic Adam Smith. Trust is likely to be such an overriding issue that I would guess buyers are by invitation only. So there are likely to be few buyers.

Likewise, there are likely to be few sellers and production/acquisition of items is likely to be so hard, that neither the buyer nor the seller has any control over what is in the market. However, despite this situation, I agree that demand is likely to be high. So I would think that typically items stay on the market only for short periods. I would think that the model of Sotherby's auction house is probably closer to the actual market.

The Hedge Mage in my own example is selling what passes for commodity magic in my campaign. This is the sort of magic that is sufficiently producible that it resembles an industry producing and selling goods. Buying from a hedge mage is something like a cross between buying from an art dealer and a gunsmith. An art dealer because his work is somewhat unique and personal, and a gunsmith because he's in a heavily regulated industry where something as simple as 'love potions' are treated as potential weapons of mass destruction because of good experience with the consequences. As the magic scale of power slides toward the higher end of the scale, any 'shop' would increasingly look like a cross between Sotherby's and an international agreement to sell military hardware. Any player that thinks he ought to be able to roll into town as a stranger, pop into a shop, and pick up a handmade one of a kind F-16E with a full weapons load out from the local blacksmith who thinks that pig iron is a pretty cool technology is likely I think to be disappointed.

The only substitute for magic is magic. What is the market for Tony Stark's armored suits in the Marvel comics? Tony is the only seller. The technology is esoteric. The technology is gnostic. It can't easily be replicated by anyone else, even if they have a copy to study. Replication comes only from revelation. Tony doesn't need a patent attorney or copyright laws to protect his invention. The invention protects itself! Of course, everyone (in this case) wants to be a buyer, but the problem is that Tony (rightly) has trust issues and so considers buyers by invitation only. And Tony does not appear to consider money to be a major factor in the transaction. For some reason he stoically refuses despite being a greedy man to consider every transaction from a purely economic perspective. Three hundred years of economic theory just vaporized. What is the market for superhero gadgets in a superhero universe? Why can't you just buy baterangs on the street corner? Because, superhero gadgets are magic. But it's not hard to imagine sellers where almost no one wants to be a buyer. You might well buy Tony Stark's gadgets if they are offered to you, but what about Red Skull's? Only the insane make such a purchase.

In short, magic is not a fungible manufactured good with many buyers and sellers unless you go out of your way to make it those things, at which point it stops resembling magic and becomes to a greater or lesser extent a metaphor for technology.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

When you have real world experience with the economics of magic items, you let me know. Heck, if you have any real world experience with a substitutionary good for a magic item, like something powered by human numina, let me know.

There are many things in this world that are exceedingly rare or unique, whose existence at one time or another was either thought legend or lie, and in times far preceding the existence of the information gathering tools that exist now.

For all of human history, in any culture you can examine, trade in things humans THOUGHT were magic or otherwise supernatural- potions, talismans, artifacts of the divine, holy relics, etc.- has occurred. That magic may not actually exist is immaterial- the purchasers (and sometimes the sellers) entered into transactions with the belief in the reality of magic or the supernatural, and that shaped their decisions as actors within RW markets. People made decisions to spend their money on a sacred ritual instead of fertilizer, on love potions instead of hygiene products, on sacred talismans instead of body armor.

Those are economic decisions. They may not be rational, but rationality is not a prerequisite for deciding to buy or not buy. (In fact, many economic decisions are IRRATIONAL, often based on the flawed belief that your information is better than that of the other parties in the transaction.)

And they obeyed the rules of supply and demand. Why? Because there is no economic difference between buying a magic sword and buying a sword you only think is magical.*

The reason why "Its magic" is sufficient to explain why a cloak can make one fly like a bat is that the maker made it so, using the supernatural physics of the world. But what maker decides to create items that do not follow the rules of economics?

Again, the only times when the rules of economics go wonkyjog are when you are talking about Giffen goods, which, by definition, are inferior products to their alternatives**; or when there is active interference in the operation of the free market.

As for the nature of the market in magic, I made no assumptions as to form other than that one would exist. Specialists in magic items- especially dangerous ones- would probably arise, since dealing with them would require expertise. And the auction house model is likely, probably in the form of a wealthy merchant house.

But just as likely is the decentralized market in arcana, in which an apothecary might have a few potions, as might the local temple, the local arms smith might deal in special weapons and armor., and so forth, and the dedicated magic store does not exist except in the larges of commercial centers.

Besides...where do casters get their material components but from those who specialize in the handling of magic?




* efficacy is not required, only belief. See Enzyte, perpetual motion machine kits, and any other snake oil on the market.

** And unless you're talking about cursed items, magic items simply are not inferior goods.