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The price of things

Does 4E have similar guidelines for rituals? Or do you think just charging the price of a scroll is fine?

I think the price of the scroll is ok. The basic costs (as for anything) would be cost of materials plus cost of labor. In the case of rituals that's the component cost. But labor? Comprehend language is a 50 gp market price (cost that it took the wizard to scribe it into his book). Assuming (for no good reason) that he casts 10 such rituals a year, and he wants to recover his market price investment in 5 years, that's 1 gp per casting. A detect object spell is twice as expensive per level. So that's 2 gp per casting. Say 3 gp for the caster's time (150% the alchemist wage in 3E) and I would say roughly 5 gp labor cost total for the caster - assuming the adventurer's go to him (travel is extra for time and risk). You could take a multiple of the 5 gp value based on different assumptions (eg. fewer rituals performed per year, rarity of spell casters).

If you charge much more than this then your economics minded PCs might go into the business of casting rituals for others. Also - a wizard who enchants 100 gp of materials to produce a 100 gp magic item isn't making any money for labor. Taking the above figures, you can reduce the cost of materials by 5 gp per day (or fraction) of the ritual - so 95 gp of materials are required to produce a 100 gp item. Only detail oriented players might care about this, but it's not hard to do once you've established a cost for labor.

With regards to "magic item shops" I think such a concept would only make sense in the highest of high magic worlds. I can see most magic items sold on comission, to auction, or to government offices with huge amounts of cash. The King's Armorer might buy +1 swords at a good price (for the king to give out to loyal nobles later). This means taking the "peddlar" approach - and doesn't make a physical building or market stall necessary at all (or useful - I just don't think there are enough people walking around with astral diamonds falling out of their pockets to justify it).

I'd take the reduce treasure parcels approach. Figure out the value of goods that an X level adventurer should have. Figure out the same for X+1. Subtract the second from the first and that's how much treasure you should give out. Of course this will mean that PCs will have to cobble together/sell piles of lesser value stuff in order to get that Sword +6 that they've been wishing for - but your economically minded players shouldn't mind too much. They won't be finding +6 swords in treasure hoards.
 

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[sarcasm]
I would RP every magic item sell in real time. If they want to sell 10 or more items that could take 2-3 sessions. Sounds like a blast!

And maybe once they find out how profitable it is they will hire another group to go adventuring for them and bring back treasure to sell! They could buy that at 1/5th price and make a killing! Now all you have to do is find another group for them to outsource their adventuring to… Heck maybe if the next campaign world is Oriental Adventures they can find some really cheap labor!
[/sarcasm]

But really… the treasure in 4e is different than in previous editions, you and your players are going to have to come to terms with it and move on or do some radical work to fix it. I think my group is going to start keeping a running tally of how much treasure we each have in items and let the DM increase or decrease the treasure as needed.
 
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The very first time they get back from an adventure, they find that the commoner has pocketed all the money from the sales and gone on a long voyage.

I think it's better just to be honest with the players and tell them that the game was not designed to provide a rational economic component at all. I don't think the costs of selling a 525,000 gp suit of Angelsteel Armor can be justified to return only 20% of the value. Having an NPC act out as a DM proxy to "teach the players a lesson" IMO runs contrary to the DMs role as a fair administrator of the game.
 

I think it's better just to be honest with the players and tell them that the game was not designed to provide a rational economic component at all. I don't think the costs of selling a 525,000 gp suit of Angelsteel Armor can be justified to return only 20% of the value. Having an NPC act out as a DM proxy to "teach the players a lesson" IMO runs contrary to the DMs role as a fair administrator of the game.

It's very D&D, though. Go and have a look at the 1st edition DMG.
 

I don't think the costs of selling a 525,000 gp suit of Angelsteel Armor can be justified to return only 20% of the value.

Honestly, if I were the type to try and rationalize the game's economy, I'd have a harder time justifying how the Angelsteel Armor can be sold for as much as 20% of its value. I mean, that's over 100k gold, which is probably more than the entire wealth of all but the largest nations. Sure, only 10 astral diamonds, but frankly the whole idea of an extraplanar astral diamond-based economy is just kind of silly if you really think about it.
 

I hope DMGII has some tables of mundane items and services, I'm lazy to create one myself and my players use to be very creative buying...
 

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