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Message: <blockquote data-quote="airwalkrr" data-source="post: 3290025" data-attributes="member: 12460">Recently, I was looking through Chapter 7 of the PH and discovered a passage I had never noticed before. On page 112 under "Availability," the text says essentially that PCs may purchase any item worth 3,000 gp or less and that for more expensive items, it essentially depends on the DM. This is something that seemed to make a modicum of sense. Obviously the DM could overrule this text, especially as it pertains to oil of magic vestment +5 and similar items being available. But it seems like a good guideline overall for a medium fantasy world like the default Greyhawk. However, if you go beyond 3,000 gp items to more expensive items (i.e. the cool ones), it becomes stickier.The DMG gives DMs guidelines on what can be purchased, basically boiling down to a simple formula wherein the bigger the city, the more expensive the items available. While this is reasonable in a broad sense, to give unrequitted access to any item under the gold piece limit is often a bit unrealistic. Even in a medium fantasy world like Greyhawk, the City of Greyhawk may have 60,000 people, but it does not have +5 weapons sitting on store shelves, much less any kind of +5 weapon. Unfortunately the DMG does not give much more of a guideline than the GP limit, which is woefully inadequate unless you want a frenzied magic item mart in your campaign.It would seem to me the most "realistic" way to handle it would be to generate semi-random item lists for shops in a community by rolling on the treasure tables relative to the size of the community (ala Baldur's Gate and similar fantasy games). But this would hardly be practical, especially for a city like Greyhawk with probably at least a dozen or so magic item vendors, not to mention the 10-15 temples, Wizards' Guild, and University of Magical Arts. For that matter, if your PCs travel a lot, it would be difficult to generate lists of available items in every village, hamlet, and thorp they pass through if they just want to browse. But at the same time, just letting the PCs have any item they want within the GP limit can often promote powergaming, metagaming, and over-planning.How do you judge the availability of items for your campaign? Do you just wing it, letting the PCs ask if an item is available and rolling dice to see if it is or deciding on the fly? Do you have charts for various localities listing the typical items available? Do you maintain special lists of items in specific store inventories?</blockquote>

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