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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9326085" data-attributes="member: 4937">Sure it does.  The market for magic items doesn't mimic the real-world market for "weapons".  It resembles in some ways the real-world market for jet fighters or tanks.  You don't expect open markets in jet fighters.  Those are specialized highly restrictive markets with a limited number of buyers and sellers.  There are no ungrounded assumptions in assuming magic items in D&D are relatively rare, relatively expensive, relatively difficult to produce.  That isn't an assumption.  That's the default state of magic items.  The relative scarcity of magic items is a function I think of how relatively rare PC type individuals are and how stingy their production of such items would be if they were making their own.  If you want to move to a magic mart concept and have it make sense you have to break the assumption that magic items are rare, expensive and difficult to produce.  Eberron for example attempts to break this paradigm by adding to the typical D&D setting some magic crafting options and factions, but then the way that it changes society isn't just superficial D&D but also with magic marts.Capability to produce and access are very different things.  A place of business provides access.  You might not be able to make the business yourself, but you gain access.  Society is going to see this and realize, "This is a thing.  Magic Mart has thousands of employees sharing a central store with entrance and egress around the world."  And then the whole world is going to be like, "If magic items can be sold this way, why not other stuff?  The economic and military implications are profound!"  And then if there are any other high level mages in the world or if the mage of magic mart inc is ambitious, the world changes.  What was first offered to simplify trade in magic items gets offered as access to allow armies to move between border forts so that if you attack one, you've attached them all.   It lets you have a gate in each city that is a gate to each other major city in your trade network so that trade between cities takes minutes or hours instead of days or weeks.  See the problem with your argument is that it isn't consistent.  Up above you say access would be limited based on the unavailability of high-level mages.  But now you say that they don't dominate the world because of the economic and military advantage that they provide because they are numerous.  My argument is based on a consistent paradigm, that magic items are rare, expensive, valuable and (above the level of low level potions or scrolls) not commodities because magic tends to have restrictions on its production that mere technology does not.  I don't understand the counterpoint here.  The deities you list don't engage in the behavior you describe and aren't congruent to the "god of arms dealers" you postulate.  And that's not even getting into the valid complaints that Green Ronin's "The Book of the Righteous" makes against the typical D&D pantheon, of which Forgotten Realms might really be the worst offender.  But whether or not such deity could exist misses the main point, which is whether or not the presence of such deity in and of itself makes magic items so inexpensive and trivial that it makes economic sense to have warehouses of them sitting around awaiting purchase.  The post-industrial revolution commoditization of all products is a feature of the post-industrial revolution society and technology.  If it doesn't apply to magic items, then the secondary features of that like magic marts shouldn't apply either.  But if it did, then you'd expect something closer to Eberron with pervasive magic as technology, and not magic as rare numinous esoteric objects of the sort you find in dungeons in D&D.</blockquote>

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