Standard DM behavior?

[Ariosto]

Nifft: Go back and read a bit more carefully, eh?

If we assuredly are going to venture into the realms whence magic comes and get our hands on some in the normal course of events, then there is really no need for us to carry coin back to middle-man merchants of magic, to change Elfland into Poughkeepsie, conquerors into consumers, magical treasures into mundane technologies.

That's the original premise of D&D, drawn from classic fictional models. It's not about going from super-duper magic land to "not just an adventure -- it's a job" land to get a paycheck one can spend at the mall back in fairyland. That would be backwards (at least by the old-fashioned perspective).

But the values are all topsy-turvy now, eh?

Pave paradise and put up a shopping mall

 

[Ariosto]

There's a cultural -- perhaps in part generational -- rift here.

If you don't allow PCs to use material wealth to buy magic items, what good is it? Magic items are the main tools PCs use.

I never claimed that I somehow prohibit purchase of magic items. (I certainly do not prohibit selling for a profit, even for whatever the market will bear! Whatever the case in 4e, my D&D-land is not Communist.)

You can pretty much take the behavior of PCs as indicative of what's typical among NPCs as well. What would induce your character to part with his favorite goodies? How much is she willing to give for what she wants but hasn't got? How eager is your cleric or mage to get tied down in industry, making magic for others and getting money in return, rather than going off on adventures?

You can't always get what you want, and when you can it doesn't come cheap. If it were otherwise, then it would not be adventurers running around with lots of magic -- it would be the trust fund babies.

"Adventures - nasty uncomfortable things. Make you late for dinner." [The Hobbit]

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered. [G.K. Chesterton]

It makes sense to me that dungeon-delving and dragon-slaying and so on should be the way to get magic in such a game as D&D (rather than inheriting a pork fortune or the like).

Piles of gold and other flashy loot are also impressive, but if money can't buy true love then it can at least buy a lot of other typical reasons to retire from a dangerous career. Thus, it is indeed desirable that adventurers should have appropriate drains on their finances and making or buying magic items is traditionally among those.

It just is not much to the purpose to make the magics on the market cheap, or to have that source cut out the lure of enchantments as a "hook" for adventures. If someone really, really wants something, then that's half of drama.

The other half is obstacles in the way of desire's fulfillment.

 

[FireLance]

I am not against commerce in magic items. In the old game, baubles enchanted with continual light are likely to be pretty common. Scrolls and potions are not dime a dozen if only high-level characters can make them, and they tend to get used up, but usually are produced in such quantities as to be readily obtained at least in certain regions. Arms and armor (especially swords) make up the next tier of frequency, in which it might not take very long to find something of the sort on the market (if only a +1 or +2, not quite the Intelligent Holy Flaming EHP-Slaying Two-Handed Sword of Sharpness +5 with which a PC would not part for any price).

The more exotic stuff just seems to me more gratifying as souvenirs of exploits more impressive than finding a parking space at Wally Mart.

It's a "flavor" issue. YMMV of course, and what's normative may vary not only from campaign to campaign but more broadly over time.

I don't think we're in disagreement here.

There's a cultural -- perhaps in part generational -- rift here.

(snip)

It just is not much to the purpose to make the magics on the market cheap, or to have that source cut out the lure of enchantments as a "hook" for adventures. If someone really, really wants something, then that's half of drama.

The other half is obstacles in the way of desire's fulfillment.

If there is a cultural or generational gap, I guess it would be in seeing gold as a medium of exchange, or to be more precise, a shorthand for all the resources available to the PC. Hence, the acquisition of magic items (to paraphrase Winston Churchill) is simply the DM and the player haggling over the price (or accepting the standard prices in the rules if they prefer not to spend time negotiating). If the magic item is significant and powerful, the price will be high, and this in itself an obstacle in the way of fulfilling the player's desires. Which brings me to the next point.

The other variable that must be considered when it comes to trade in magic items is the means of the character. The prices of certain magic items may be set so that by the time the character rises to a certain level of wealth, eminence and influence (all of which are assumed to be approximated by his level in standard games), acquiring the item is fairly straightforward for a character of his level. There is no need to play through this process at the table because the task is assumed to be trivial. If you don't like the flavor of the character walking into a shop and buying an item off the shelf, you could describe the process as the character tapping on contacts to locate the item, commissioning the item from an allied wizard or temple, or even hiring a band of lower-level adventurers to obtain the item on his behalf (as he is busy with more important matters). Of course, powerful items (relative to the character's current level) cannot be obtained in so straightforward a matter and must be quested for as normal!

 

[Oryan77]

it's exactly as interesting as your treasure-grubbing side-quest, when what we'd rather be doing is harrying the dark forces of the Lich King, before finally smiting his ruin upon the grave menhir of his tainted necropolis.

I'm not sure why you're passionately arguing about this as if "questing for your magic items" & "defeating the Lich King" can't be one and the same. If the group wants to defeat the Lich King and one guy wants to get his hands on a Collar of Girlfriend Control, why can't that be accomplished in the same adventure? The player doesn't even have to know that he is questing for that item...you can surprise him with it as loot. It's like you're saying that questing for a magic item has to be an adventure dedicated to just that.

I've been DMing 3.5 since it was released and I don't use magic item shops. My players don't complain about having too much gold & nothing to spend it on...if anything, they don't have enough gold.

And since people are trying to make my head pop by saying "What do I do with all my gold if I can't spend it at Magic-Mart?" (Really? You can't think of anything else to do with your gold?)...then here's a mind-boggler for you....my 3.5 game is a Planescape campaign, and there are not even any magic item shops in Sigil

 

[Hunter In Darkness]

Not sure how it works in 4th but what always bugged me in 3rd was you have all thease magic items around, and I didn't understand how

1. it costs xp to make?
2. it costs an arm and a leg to make

I just did not understand how anyone could afford to churn em out in great heaping numbers. A few scrolls sure, some potions you beat, thousands of bloody +1 longswords, no way. Not a chance someone is just popping them out in massive numbers. Magic items are not cheap and easy to make, it never was so while;e magic items are floating about there are no legions of wizards mass producing them

Sorry end of threadjack

 

[Nifft]

I'm not sure why you're passionately arguing about this as if "questing for your magic items" & "defeating the Lich King" can't be one and the same. If the group wants to defeat the Lich King and one guy wants to get his hands on a Collar of Girlfriend Control, why can't that be accomplished in the same adventure?

It certainly can, if the DM allows you to make a wishlist and then allocates treasure from that list.

Wishlists work fine for me. (But then, shopping for magic items also works fine.) I think I brought up wishlists a few pages back.

Cheers, -- N

EDIT Remember, the context is a DM who:
- Doesn't give magic items
- Doesn't respect wishlists
- Doesn't allow shopping

 

[Cadfan]

The big problems with the "just quest for it like we did back in the day you babies" attitude are:

1. D&D assumes you have a lot of magic items. If you have to quest for all of them, either the quests will be short and dumb, or you'll spend a lot of time at it. Remember, you'll advance in level as you quest for items, creating a need for newer, more powerful items. As long as the game assumes this, you'll need to obtain items without specifically questing for them.

2. It requires you to use a plot based solution to what is fundamentally a mechanical or DM-based problem. This constrains your possible plots.

3. If your DM doesn't give magic items, doesn't allow you to buy them, and doesn't allow you to enchant them, what makes you think he'll let you quest for them? Isn't it fair to infer at this point that he doesn't let you do these things because he doesn't want you to have magic items except when he explicitly chooses? Won't coming up with a new way to get them just result in him figuring out a new way to thwart you?

In my own game, I allow unlimited purchases of magic items. My players have agreed to a non aggression pact with me in terms of optimization, so I can do this without risk. Personally, I wish D&D was a little less magic item dependant. But its not, and people (including my players) like acquiring magic items so it probably never will be as magic item independent as I'd like. So I get along.

 

[Ariosto]

I'm not sure why you're passionately arguing about this as if "questing for your magic items" & "defeating the Lich King" can't be one and the same.

That's something I'm not getting, either. It's not to me a matter of "can" but what in fact has been standard practice in the D&D I've known. It's been right there in the books from the start. I can see how this on-demand delivery of miscellaneous magic items from player's book to character's backpack is also compatible with some sense of adventure, but I cannot see how it's necessary.

I wonder what makes it so much more attractive (to some) in the first place. I can imagine some appeal in a shopping trip to an emporium of enchantments, a la Harry Potter. However, cutting out even that altogether to get down to accounting seems to foil that as much as it negates the more usual modes of discovery.

Why has it become so distasteful to find magic treasures as part of the "story" emerging in play? What is the motive for dissociating it?

What fantasy fiction reinforces this concept of heroic shopping?

(The Nifft the Lean tales did not do so for me, any more than did those of Cugel and Rhiallto, or those of Fafhrd and Mouser).

 

[FireLance]

That's something I'm not getting, either. It's not to me a matter of "can" but what in fact has been standard practice in the D&D I've known. It's been right there in the books from the start. I can see how this on-demand delivery of miscellaneous magic items from player's book to character's backpack is also compatible with some sense of adventure, but I cannot see how it's necessary.

Well, I for one won't argue that it's necessary, only that it shouldn't be disparaged. As for why players would want to do that, it stems from the basic desire to convert spare resources (gold) into a tangible advantage for the character. Individual DMs may decide (i) whether they will allow it in the first place; and (ii) whether this conversion can be handled offline or must be played through at the table, but the incentive on the player side is fairly widespread.

I wonder what makes it so much more attractive (to some) in the first place. I can imagine some appeal in a shopping trip to an emporium of enchantments, a la Harry Potter. However, cutting out even that altogether to get down to accounting seems to foil that as much as it negates the more usual modes of discovery.

Simply put, convenience. Some groups prefer to only quest after significant magic items and to gloss over the acquisition of minor items, with the threshold between significant magic item and minor magic item being defined as whether the character has sufficient gold to purchase it.

Why has it become so distasteful to find magic treasures as part of the "story" emerging in play? What is the motive for dissociating it?

It has not become distasteful to find magic treasures as part of adventuring, any more than it should be distasteful to acquire magic items through the expenditure of gold, whether through direct purchase, commissioning the creation of the item, or hiring other adventurers to acquire it on your behalf. I do not think that either method should be disparaged.

What fantasy fiction reinforces this concept of heroic shopping?

I would say that this is more of a gameplay trope than a fiction trope, and one that is not restricted to computer games. As mentioned, players interested in improving their characters' abilities would want to be able to convert a passive resource (such as gold) into a more tangible benefit.

 

[Ariosto]

The big problems with the "just quest for it like we did back in the day you babies" attitude are:

1. ?? How is it that your PCs need magic but nobody else does?? This is in my experience not a "big problem" but a practically nonexistent one. The need for magic tends to arise in a magic-rich environment, which provides opportunities for acquisition along the way.

2. ?????????? I just can't make head or tail of this.

3. As a DM, I make sure there's magic in the world that players potentially can take. They're free to buy whatever they can, but -- and maybe this is the heart of the matter -- I like my D&D Fantasyland to be different from modern Dot Com Land. Enchanting items? Knock yourself out! The time and trouble involved may explain some things.