Who goes shopping for magic?

[I'm A Banana]

I have a widespread family of merchant clowns who sell items from McMagic shops.....

Seriously? Yeah, I let them buy stuff. Why should I stop them? The only limit is the gp cap of the particular area their in (e.g.: big cities will have higher-level stuff than a small thorp), but in D&D, spellcasters are common enough, even at the NPC level, that they've gotta spend their time doing something other than divining the local weather and healing the guys who got hurt at the mill accident.

 

[Li Shenron]

Seems like the most common thing is to easily handle lesser magic items and to restrict availability of greater magic items.

As a side question, how do you let PCs sell their item? I have always used the default sell price = 50% of market price, which makes it impossible to make money from magic item crafting. This has the disadvantage that every magic item in a random treasure which is not usable (or duplicate or simply inconvenient) by the PCs effectively lowers the treasure value by half of its value; the result is just that, as I have said before, I don't roll a treasure completely random Anyway, several players have complained about the selling price rule - although they very rarely want to sell their magic gear - because they won't accept that their PCs are treated differently than the NPCs.

-bump-

 

[Plane Sailing]

I allow potions to be purchased from towns with a temple or wizards tower (as appropriate), possibly a few low level scrolls that way too. Villages, hamlets etc never have any magic for sale.

Other magic can be commissioned (and a houserule allows anyone to contribute the xp required for a magic item, imbueing it with a bit of "soul". When the PC's commission magic items they have to participate in the construction and contribute all the xps for the process. Evil NPC's will often sacrifice unwilling innocent victims to mitigate xp costs)

Cheers