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Dugar wrote:

You appear to be operating under the false assumption that the rules make sense economically.

They don't.

I mean look at wall of iron, polymorph any object, make whole, create water, create undead, and animate undead. Just between these core spells, we've eliminated the labor market and turned every resource into a commodity. Throw in suggestion/charm person, and suddenly, the world doesn't make a whole lot of business sense.

Basically, D&D isn't realistic. You can try to make it more so, but ultimately, it'll always be a game. I think the best route is to just pretend it works, and make your world however you want it.

Everything makes sense economically if you take the time to think about the economy of your world. It will never be perfect, but then no simulation ever is. But just because you cannot be perfect doesnt mean that you shouldnt try. That is just being lazy.

Wall of Iron: Takes a 50gp material component, including sheet iron and gold dust. An 12th level caster makes 6.25 cubic feet of iron (3000 lbs). Iron costs about 2gp per pound (based on crafting rules and the cost of a Greatsword), so that iron is worth about 6000gp. It only costs about 720 gp to have a wizard cast Wall of Iron for you, so at the surface it looks like you are spending 770gp to get 6000gp of Iron.

But all a good DM has to do is say that it takes alot of work to rework this Iron. There are no rules regarding whether this Iron is Wrought Iron, Cast Iron, or another "magical" form of Iron. Perhaps this magical Iron does not smelt properly. This is obviously not an impossible problem to solve.

Polymorph Any Object: This has a duration, and even says that you cannot create material of great intrinsic value. Basically, just limit the cost of any items created to under 1200gp worth, or it isnt permanent.

Create Water: Obviously any area with enough divine casters is not going to have a problem with their water supply. But it will take alot of casters to bring water to a large city. A 1st level cleric can only make enough water for about 10 people, and that is if he has no other use for his spells all day.

Undead Spells: Any civilization in your world that is evil enough to have many undead walking around doing manual labor and enough casters to control them will probably not need much living laborers. But then again such societies will be fairly rare.

Compulsion Spells: These are the kinds of problems that elite businessmen will spend most of their time solving. I would figure that using compulsion spells for personal gain would generally be heavily punished in most societies, probably by death. These types of spells are definete problems for small merchants, which is why Magemarts are so necessary. Only huge stores could afford the kind of magical protection necessary to do business with powerful casters.


And I definetly agree that you should just make your world however you want it. I was mostly commenting on how idiotic it is to say that Magemarts are a bad idea or bad DMing in any way. They are something that would almost definetly exist in any world with as much magic as the ones described in the D&D rulebooks.

_Jayne_Cobb_ wrote:

A D&D world with SpelMarts is about as plausabile as a Fabergé Eggs shop in every town. I don't know about your city, but I don't see many of them around where I live.

Just cos magic exists doesn't mean it needs to be common or ubiquitous.

First off, the Faberge Eggs comparison is pretty bad since I bet most D&D worlds have more than 69 magical items.

Second, I even said that you will probably only have a handful of "Magemarts" in an entire world. But when you are talking about player characters, there wont be a big problem for them to get anywhere on your world so it doesnt matter how few there are.