Storyteller, there are a lot of things that an average pesant couldn't afford that is easily accessable to the PCs. For instance weapons, horses, large houses. By the way, if a healing potion were needed for an emergency, it would most likely be a potion of cure minor wounds, since that does just as good a job of stabilising a dying person as a clw potion for half the cost. It is completely resonable that pesants can't afford magical items anyway, they are the people that don't have anything. According to the level distributions as listed in the DMG, there are quite a few higher-level NPCs that can afford that kind of item in a given large settlement, which provides a market for that kind of item. If your game specifies that there are no higher-level NPCs in the world, then of course the situation is going to be different. That would be rather odd however, considering the way you treat the suggested income for a lvl 1 commoner as an inextorable fact of nature. If the income for a pesant is what makes the system not work for you, why not change that instead of changing the parts of the game that will negatively impact the PCs?
I don't think anyone is suggesting that individual merchants are going to have a barrel of clw wands lying around the store, but on the other hand some people seem to be suggesting limitations on magic items that are a bit extreme. It's difficult to tell since most of the posts just say things like "games nowadays have too many magic items" instead of citing examples of the percieved problem. (this is understandable as outlining a specific example both takes time and opens you up to specific criticism) The extreme is not allowing the PCs to buy magical items at all, which I've left games over before (wether from not making the items available or not awarding the party with any loot that they can use to buy magic items) as it is a major part of the game, and IMO breaks the system.
I think I'll be using Quasquetons system in place of a more difficult to use system I've been mulling over. (an extension to a town generator I've written that actually generates the contents of every shop within a given settlement, so I could just hand the group a list of what was available based on a Gather information check. Saves me the time of writing the program and the time and expense of generating and printing the lists of shop inventories.)
That's there to keep the majority of the players happy! MMO players don't want to play realistically, they want to kill stuff and have a good time doing it. Problem is, the majority of the critters designed will kill an average player without buttloads of healing on site.
