Quote from: Black Vulmea;595155That's a lot of words there that miss the point.

Adventurers trying to sell a few magic items aren't running a business - they're guys taking out an ad in the Recycler.

Pun-tastically enough, we have the 'Magic Nickel' around here.  

Has anyone ever used magical currency for the buying and selling of magical items in games? I know in Wraith souls or materials formed of souls were used to form, well, everything including currency, but would a more effective method than coins be contracts or favours owed or something.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;595094Except that, as an adventurer, you're not a guy with a carpet shop. You're a guy trying to unload a tsotchke on eBay.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;595155That's a lot of words there that miss the point.

Adventurers trying to sell a few magic items aren't running a business - they're guys taking out an ad in the Recycler.

The thing about being a player and an adventurer is that you can pretty much do this type of thing if you like.  What's stopping you?  If you have some cash, you can open a shop.  You can hire clerks.  You can stock it with your adventuring treasures.  

You're the player, you make your choices.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;595205The thing about being a player and an adventurer is that you can pretty much do this type of thing if you like.  What's stopping you?  If you have some cash, you can open a shop.  You can hire clerks.  You can stock it with your adventuring treasures.

What I have a hard time conceiving - and this is my own experience talking, of course - is having such a surfeit of magic items that one could even consider opening something like a shop in the first place.

In any game of D&D I ever played, most magic items not kept by the player characters were given to henchmen or offered as tribute or baksheesh to curry favor from non-player characters or monsters.

In different games I've played, I've seen lots of difference levels of magic items.  But I've seen lots of 'art' type treasures no matter what game I've played.  The idea of opening up a curio shop to sell a half-dozen jade chess pieces; two diamond-studded alabaster vases; a richly embroidered ottoman; a painting by an old-master depicting a red dragon razing a village; and a longsword that glows with magical energy hardly seems a stretch.

Point is - if that's what required to get a 'fair deal' on the treasure the party finds, some will do it.  Trying to ensure that players can't sell anything, but they can buy those same items at highly inflated prices isn't just unfair - it's stupid.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;595213In different games I've played, I've seen lots of difference levels of magic items.  But I've seen lots of 'art' type treasures no matter what game I've played.  The idea of opening up a curio shop to sell a half-dozen jade chess pieces; two diamond-studded alabaster vases; a richly embroidered ottoman; a painting by an old-master depicting a red dragon razing a village; and a longsword that glows with magical energy hardly seems a stretch.

Better - and probably ultimately cheaper, considering commission versus overhead - to hire a broker to contact potential buyers. Again, my experience talking.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;595213Trying to ensure that players can't sell anything, but they can buy those same items at highly inflated prices isn't just unfair - it's stupid.

Sure, which is one of the reasons 'ye olde magick shoppe' doesn't have a place in my campaign at all.

Quote from: The Traveller;595180Has anyone ever used magical currency for the buying and selling of magical items in games? I know in Wraith souls or materials formed of souls were used to form, well, everything including currency, but would a more effective method than coins be contracts or favours owed or something.

Yes, in Zoria one of these is called Dsari'ereva (pl. Dsari'erevnost). It is mystical matter in coin form, and its value is based on how much MEA it contains by mass. I don't regularly use it in my own game, but one of my playtest GMs built his entire empire around it, for the reason that mages and alchemists produced ways make synthetic mundane precious materials en mass, but mystical matter is almost impossible to reproduce, so it is the only remaining commodity that requires gathering with work.

In my game, you would use it to commission items of mystical nature, and the artificer would use some of it in the creation process of the desired object. It also has a monetary trade value, so it is used for high-denomination coinage, but not in any normal circumstances. (X|S)

On magic items as luxury goods and their markup...

If magic items are especially rare, they may be priced more like art. The primary determining factor of an art's value is how much it or something like it (say, something by the same artist) has sold for previously. Scarcity is not a factor here because each item is unique (and an artist's body of work actually increases the more of it there is).

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Of course, a lot of this discussion uses modern analogues, where:

1)There are shops.

2)People have enough cash on hand to purchase this stuff.

Even without scarcity and base price coming into play, 1 and 2 often aren't true in a fantasy setting. The common model for acquiring magic items in a fantasy setting (outside of adventuring) might more likely involve commissioned work or gifts of a similar nature to land grants.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;595227Better - and probably ultimately cheaper, considering commission versus overhead - to hire a broker to contact potential buyers. Again, my experience talking.

I would definitely agree with the magic items as high art or grey market analogue.  Correlations with the cyberpunk 'fixer' abound.

Quote from: MagesGuild;594835If an item costs 25,000gp, which is more than most single kingdoms on Earth have ever had in history, then how can a store exist that sells the item?

If you follow this logic through to it conclusion, then every 3rd level PC is richer than the local king. The premise simply isn't tenable.

QuoteI prefer to be able to justify anything in my stories with logic, not just state it and have it unquestionably accepted and I tend to break games where logic is not used in the creation of the setting.

Which is why magic item stores need to exist in any D&D game that uses anything remotely resembling standard treasure distribution. Because otherwise the game turns into realms management right around the time they're hitting level 2.

Quote from: Doctor Jest;594871Thats not true of all D&D. BECMI has no assumptions about magic items, for example...

Yes it does. It has random treasure tables. Any DM, of course, can ignore those guidelines. But to claim they don't exist is absurd.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;595213In different games I've played, I've seen lots of difference levels of magic items.  But I've seen lots of 'art' type treasures no matter what game I've played.  The idea of opening up a curio shop to sell a half-dozen jade chess pieces; two diamond-studded alabaster vases; a richly embroidered ottoman; a painting by an old-master depicting a red dragon razing a village; and a longsword that glows with magical energy hardly seems a stretch.

Point is - if that's what required to get a 'fair deal' on the treasure the party finds, some will do it.  Trying to ensure that players can't sell anything, but they can buy those same items at highly inflated prices isn't just unfair - it's stupid.

Yup.
My PC is only an adventurer so long as he adventures nothing stopping him setting up a shop, a castle, a training academy, a pub or whatever. Nothing to prevent me staffing them with hirelings either.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;595332If you follow this logic through to it conclusion, then every 3rd level PC is richer than the local king. The premise simply isn't tenable.

Dear Saeros, someone has been terribly generous with you. I have never run a game (that I started) where a low-level character had access to that measure of wealth. Even those who come from important or noble families had limits, often needing to ask permission, or having a specific cap to their credit as authorized.

PCs that could amass such wealth would be doing so by stealing it from very rich, and probably extremely dangerous figures in my settings. That might be enough to buy your own (small) starship in the Empire, with your quoted value being around 2,500,000Mk, assuming you are using small gold coins. Think of this: If each of those coins was 1/2 oz troy (about the size of a quarter, as illustrated in 'the book'), that would be £26,541,250 or $42,777,500 right now, just for the metal. If coins are 1/4 oz, around what they were in the 12th-century, then halve that amount.

To each their own, but that is wealth far in excess of anything any book suggests for a character of that level. (X|S)

Quote from: jibbajibba;595338Yup.
My PC is only an adventurer so long as he adventures nothing stopping him setting up a shop, a castle, a training academy, a pub or whatever. Nothing to prevent me staffing them with hirelings either.

My exact words to any player that joins one of my games are You may do whatever you want; or rather, you may try to do it.

I, as a storyteller, would not simply state 'You cant do that.', without giving a logical reason, but I would require and expect them to role-play and act it out. I run an illegal electronics firm in a Cyberpunk game, so anything is possible, as long as 'tis in the context of the story.

On another note, I love the stat-block (specifically, I find the skill-selection quite amusing) in your signature: Very nice! (X|S)

(Crumbs, I meant to merge these two replies, and it slipped my memory banks.)

Adventurers are very wealthy, but until they reach high levels they are certainly not wealthier than kings or even dukes.

When creating ACKS I worked up the expected net worth and monthly income of different social ranks. Net worth includes value of land, tools, animals, clothing, etc. It's very useful for understanding where your PCs fit in their world.

Rank / Net Worth / Monthly Income
Peasant / 100gp / 3gp
Baron / 15,800gp / 481gp
Marquis / 70,000gp / 2,000gp
Count / 257,000gp / 7,800gp
Duke 505,500gp / 15,000gp
Prince 1,800,000gp / 54,000gp
King 4,500,000gp / 137,500gp
Emperor 13,000,000gp / 400,000gp

In ACKS, an Old Dragon's hoard will have about 45,000gp in coin plus substantial magic items. If sold, a sword +1  is worth 5,000gp while a ring of invisibility is worth 33,000gp.

An unstated point regarding the market for magic items is how difficult they are to appraise. In the real world, merchandise that can be easily appraised in value tends to be easy to buy and sell. Merchandise that cannot be easily appraised has considerably lower re-sale value when not brand new and coming from a reputable seller.

In ACKS, there is no "Identify" spell and, indeed, no reliable way to identify an item's properties at all. The best you can hope for is time-consuming and expensive magical research on the item, which requires a high-level mage and considerable expense. This makes selling items very challenging. "It's a ring of wishes!" "Sure it is, buddy." How do you prove it?

Thus we wrote "ACKS assumes that the market for magic items is illiquid and inefficient. Most magic items found by adventurers were created long ago, and are of dubious origin and uncertain ownership history, which drives their price down."

Using the Magic Item Transactions by Market Class table for a huge city, in a typical month you'd find 7 buyers for a potion or scroll, 2 buyers for a minor item, and have a 10% chance of finding someone willing to buy a 10,000gp+ item.

Pricing for Magic Item transactions:
Commission Specific Item: 3 x base cost + provide any necessary material components
Buy Existing Item: 2 x base cost to create item
Sell Item You've Made: 2 x base cost (known creator, known powers)
Sell Item You've Looted and [Claim to Have] Identified: 1 x base cost (dubious origin, unknown powers)