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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6322119" data-attributes="member: 4937">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?</blockquote>

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