Magic Item Market Discussion
I would like to be able to give out magic items without having to consider their market value.
While the Magic Item Compendium reduced the gp value of the items I give out, I think you'll find the resale value of your items is quite high regardless.
It is easy to manage the party's wealth when I give out gold and gems. I know you're going to convert valuables into liquid assets, so I know how much disposable income you'll have.
With magic items, I don't know if you're going to keep them or trash them. MIC reduces the likelihood of getting useless, high-value items (such as +5 chakrams with 16 special abilities), but doesn't eliminate it, since it hands out psionics, incarnum, and other silly items.
The supply of magic items is not very high, but still much higher than the demand. Few people want +5 swords, especially at adventurer prices. Sure, now and then, adventurers wander by with deep pockets and high demands, but such folk are quite rare. Consider how few people in a given campaign setting are high-level adventurers, and now consider that all adventurers spend about 99% of their lives not actively adventuring, and therefore not in the market for new swords.
Thus, very low demand would drive prices down, a lot, when selling items. However, extremely low supply would cause prices to skyrocket when PC's wanted to buy. Why is this? Simple; the market is not very big. Even Thayan enclaves do most of their business in the sub-100gp market. The market for items 1,000 gp and up is so small that certain market anomalies occur.
To explain: if there were millions of active adventurers buying and selling, then the market would stabilize. Like the WoW auction house, the buying and selling price of (non-soulbound) magic items would be virtually identical (rather than 2:1 as in d&d standard). If not for soul-binding, WoW players would be fabulously wealthy, able to liquidate near 100% of the value of every drop, to exchange for something they really wanted. However, this would simply inflate prices.
In either case, the price of goods is controlled by their perceived utility (demand) and their relative scarcity (supply). Every PC's primary source of income is from selling items, rather than finding liquid assets (vendables). Craft skills are almost always a money-lost proposition. Harvesting can be very profitable, but pure harvesting PC's are rare: almost all PC's use gathering skills to power crafting skills, either their own or those of others, losing money overall.
In other words, WoW shows what happens with a very full market. The result is that the kind of items most people want to sell make you very little money, whereas the kind of items people really want to buy are very expensive. It's all about supply and demand.
D&D doesn't have this. It has set prices for everything, and a constant ratio (2:1) of buying price versus selling price. Never mind that the term "market price" could refer to either buying or selling (since every market transaction includes one instance of buying and one instance of selling). Never mind that the most useful value to a PC is selling price; PC's receive (and sell) more items than they buy.
Most importantly, the D&D system, unlike the WoW system, is not self-regulating. In WoW, setting the drop rate of an item at 0.01% on a 73rd-level boss pretty much guarantees the item will be ridiculously rare. In D&D, the rarity of an item is entirely level based. At 10th level, Staves of Power are very rare. At 25th-level, they are laughable common.
This doesn't make sense. Why should the supply and demand of the world change as you level up? Where there really that many magic item vendors holding on to epic items, just waiting for the PC's to level up? Just how often do 20th-level parties come around, anyway? How silly would you be to invest several million gold into a magic item store, all the while hoping some 20th-level adventurers wander by so you can earn your modest 2:1 profit?
And thus, we get the the core of the argument. The reason magic item vendors charge a premium is because their service is very valuable. All stores have to take into account the risk of owning stock. One does not want to own too much stock that it cannot be sold. Obviously, one's inventory is limited by one's available capital.
An adventurer doesn't want to spend the time (possibly years) to find a buyer for his +5 shocking, throwing, returning spiked chain (especially since only one end of it is throwing/returning...how does that work?), so he sells it for quick cash to a vendor. The store this most closely resembles is a pawn shop.
A pawn shop gives you cash for things you would find difficult to sell; anything, it doesn't matter what. These are likely things that don't sell easily...otherwise, why are you at a pawn shop? Thus, the pawner pwns you with the margins. He gives you $100 for a diamond ring that he might be able to sell for $500, $1000, or even $5000. Maybe the next day. Maybe never.
Not to mention he figures well over half his stock is stolen. Some things may be easily sellable, but one doesn't want to risk selling "hot" goods. Why not pawn them off? The pawner can just pretend he didn't know. And hey...aren't the vast majority of magic items stolen?
It's easy to see how the value of the pawn shop-cum-magic item vendor's service is far, far higher than a 2:1 profit margin. Without these guys, just what value does an Amulet of Mighty Using of Rope +15 have to you? Not a single copper piece, if you can't find a buyer. Meanwhile, you have to hold on to the thing, or store it (and risk having it stolen), while you waste your precious adventuring time looking for a buyer.
On the other side, when you are in the market for a Fountain Pen of Fantastic Forgery +22, do you want to embark on an epic quest for the rare, rare, ultra-rare fellow who has one for sale? Do you want to pay his ridiculously exorbitant fee, which takes into account the difficulty in finding the thing, and the pains he's taken in trying to find a buyer for the last 12 years? Do you want the smell of the other things in that guy's Bag of Holding all over your new pen? Do you even want to run into this guy? Maybe he's Chaotic Evil! And higher level than you!
Enter the magic item vendor. He's got what you need, at the right price (multiplied by about a d12). Sure, it's expensive, but it's ready, right now, no questions asked. Cash only, please. Don't leave your real name in case the cops show up.
And that's another good point. What about laws? Surely most kings, consuls, and especially magocrats would want to place limits on the sale of magic items. Imagine if there were abundant guns, bombs, poisons, mind-control devices, lottery-winning contraptions, king-dominating gadgets, and country-ruining doodads, all without any sort of regulation? It's easy to see why that shouldn't be the case. And, it's easy to imagine a king, even a muggle king who rules nothing but muggles, managing to control (mostly) the magic item economy in his land. That pawn shop owner would have to be pretty spiffy to overpower 1d10*1000 men-at-arms. Enough muggles can stop anyone (except a wizard, of course).
Thus.
The Conclusion (omg!)
It should certainly be possible to buy and sell items. It is not entirely unfeasible to have a system which modifies their value based on supply and demand (simulated, of course). Having rarity for each item would be useful not only for pawn shop value, but also to know how likely you are to find a wizard who can make it on commission, and (gasp) how likely it is to be in a treasure horde.
If the rarity of Girdles of Giant Strength +6 was in line with, say, Draenei priests, then I wouldn't care about the market value. The point is, it would be hard to find one.
Depending on rarity, the cost of buying (and selling!) a magic item would vary, well below or even well above the "market price". The cost of creation would be standard, assuming you could find that rare mage who knew how to make the item.
The most immediate effect of this would be to greatly reduce the resale value of most random treasure. The rarity system could be easily simulated by plotting resale value on a curve. Common items are more marketable simply because the market is bigger--scrolls, for example, are desired by any wizard who wishes to scribe them, even if the spell is dumb (hey, knowledge is power). Potions, same thing. Thus, these common (read: cheap) items would be reduced in value to a minimal degree.
Conversely, rare items (generally all expensive items) would be reduced in value quite a bit. Like a $1000 Blu-ray Disc player in 2016, it may be rare, but you'll have a tough time convincing a pawn shop owner that he ought to give you at least $500. He figures that, even in the unlikely event that he sells it for, say, $300, the year and a half he kept it in his inventory is worth at least 80%. So, he'll give you $60 for it.
Now try to sell him a 200,000 gp magic item, and watch him be thrilled. Just because the item GP limit of Eltabbar is 300,000 gp, that really doesn't mean there are generic vendors who will pay you 150,000 gp for a generic item. (Oh wait...item GP limit doesn't apply to PC's selling items, only buying. The asset limit applies to selling. Yikes. Fucking yikes. You could sell Eltabbar the Azure Fucking Phoenix.)
Thus, when I disburse treasure, I can give out 500,000 gp worth of magic items without fear that you'll get much more than a few grand each out of vending them. Anything else would have to be negotiated in a number of ways:
- You could take your ever-growing stock of unwanted items and open a store, higher a shopkeeper with a good Diplomacy (and of course Bluff) check, and a bunch of guards, and have them sell the items for you. They'd probably sell a lot higher than vendor prices, albeit with a delay.
- You could talk to in-game NPC's, either ones you already knew, or ones you found through good old-fashioned Gather Information, then give them the hard sell on Toasters of Bagel-Burning +5. They have much more to spend, assuming they actually want your crap.
- There could be, in fact, an auction house, especially in major magical metropolises like Eltabbar. You'd put your crap on the AH, pay a deposit, and hope for the best. Unlike the nonsensical WoW AH, it would be a real auction. You could set a reserve, but otherwise, the auction would control the selling price. This would require a lot of work in generating the rules to govern it, but it would be nifty. Of course, the house would take a sizable cut of your profits. But hey, you'd also have yet another place to buy items.
- You could just hang on to the crap items, just in case you need them someday. It's a long shot.