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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6322346" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.</blockquote>

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