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I am wondering how anyone can have an even slightly plausable world in the D&D setting without having "Magemarts". With all of these adventurers constantly finding magic items that they do not need, they are going to want to sell them to someone. And if there is any universal truth (other than death and taxes), it is that if there is money to be made someone will find a way to make it.

To have an example, lets take a world with the population of Eberron (15 million). I will make the following assumptions about this world:

• 1 in 200 individuals have adventuring levels
  
• The average adventurer gains a level every other year (6 encounters of equal CR per year)
  
• There are twice as many 1st level characters as 2nd, twice as many 2nd as 4th, and so on
  

That leaves 75000 adventurers in this world. Using the average treasure per encounter table, that means that these adventurers are looting about 175 million gold worth of treasure each year. I will now make the following assumptions about this treasure:

• 1/2 of the Treasure is magical items
  
• 1/2 of the Treasure is useful to the party
  

These assumptions are very generous. In my experience not even 1/4 of the treasure in a random horde is useful to the party.

That leaves almost 45 million gold worth of treasure that adventurers want to sell every year. That is over 20 million gold worth of potential profit per year for any entrepreneurs that can successfully operate a "Magemart". And that does not count any mages who are creating new items.

Remember that a gold peice is worth roughly $100 in our currency. That means it is a $2 billion industry. And this world is much smaller than Earth (population 6 billion), so a $2 billion industry is quite large indeed.

How can anyone possibly fathom that magemarts would not exist in almost every conceivable D&D campaign? I can definetly imagine there may only be 1 or 2 in the entire world because it is so difficult to protect these items from thieves, but they would still exist. There is just far too much money to be made.

And this is in a world with only 15 million people (less than 1 million would even live in towns with more than 1000 people). In a world closer to the size of Earth, there would be many times more.

Of course any DM can definetly make things different in their world, but I see many DMs criticizing others for having Magemarts with shopping catalogs and such in their worlds. These DMs are criticized for being lazy and not controlling their players enough. In my opinion, it is the DMs that do have Magemarts in their worlds that are taking the time to put at least a little bit of realism into their worlds. Instead of artificially limiting the opportunities that the player characters have just because a DM is too lazy to properly control the power balance of his/her campaign.

I'm going to go with Dugar on this one. In a world where magic exists in the first place, trying to make sense of what is essentially an abstraction to facilitate gameplay is an exercise in futility. You simply have to do what feels right for your game and your players.

In my Eberron game, I allow the players to buy whatever they can afford, but I limit the books from which they can buy. This keeps out nasty little items I've never heard of but "Surprise!" just broke my encounter all of a sudden. (I just don't have the time nor inclination to read every magic item book out there.)

But I do make a strong effort to include magic items that are actually useful for the PCs as loot. An NPC bard that just bit the dust is as likely to have a wand of cure light wounds as the PCs would. It just makes sense. I hide all sorts of little goodies in adventures that would be immediately useful to the PCs rather than go through the whole process of buying and selling. That crap is boring. I walked out on a game once when over an hour was spent shopping and haggling. I'd rather remove my gall bladder with a shrimp fork than sit through that.

Kursk wrote:

That's the way it should be.

I agree. The only people who typically don't easily find an enhanced version of their weapon or armor in my campaigns are those that have gone exotic in their choices. They kind of know this going in and if I can find a reasonable excuse to include a +1 small kama or a +1 flaming spiked chain, I will do. But that plus random small consumables is all my PCs typically need buy.