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Oct 10, 2012 -- 3:26AM, stoloc wrote:

Oct 9, 2012 -- 11:06AM, Mommy_was_an_Orc wrote:

Oct 9, 2012 -- 10:41AM, edwin_su wrote:

 
corect me if i'm wrong but prices for selling magic items are only mentioned when it comes to selling items.
so am i wrong i assume the listed price is the price a player can get selling an item and not the cost for boying a item?
as the section buying magic items basicly sais their not for sale. 

That creates a lot of stress on the D&D system. If you can't really do anything with gold past buying the best available non-magical armor, there's no benefit to having gold. Being able to buy magic items means there is an obvious something to do with it.

There are ways around this, but it is really difficult to default to being unable to buy magic items.

It also doesn't make a lot of real-world sense - most people are not going to have the ideal magic item that they want to own, so if there's an opportunity to exchange or upgrade, they're likely to take it. Magic Marts are silly, but there have to be fences who know people who'd like to give up items for an appropriate price and when they see bags of gold roll into their major city(aka adventurers), it is in their interest to figure out if the adventurers are curious about a deal.

My favorite game had no buying of magic items at all.

Money was spent on things like making contacts, cost of living (it's expensive maintaining the lifestyle of both rock stars and high level adventurers), spell compnents/magic ink for the wizard to record new spells, couple of times on ressurection (which only 1 cranky person in the world could cast), mounts (including 1 flying mount which was expensive to maintain), saving up for and staffing a keep

All of the stuff that made it feel like we were in a fantasy WORLD as real folks not dispossable pieces of paper.

In that game I can name every magic item I ever owned over many years and 9 levels (levelling was slower in 1 e than recent incarnations) and almost every one I can name where I got it.

Right. But what you're talking about is a game where the DM made some significant effort to make the world come alive beyond that of the dungeon. The DM could have likely had magic marts via the fence who hooks people up and you would have liked it because he/she sounds like a great DM. You even could likely have had people hawking magic items on the street and you would have had fun.

Games that rely on the DM to be great don't do very well in the marketplace.

Don't get me wrong. I'd love to see D&D be a game where the default is Tolkien - a character with 3 magic items is rare and special. But when the average encounter table hands out roughly 1.4 magic items per encounter and if you fight say 5 of them per day, 7 magic items every adventuring day ends up being a lot of items for a party of 5. Either the party is going to end up looking like Christmas Trees and/or they're going to be selling a lot of items. And that implies there's going to need to be a market for the gold the PCs are getting.