Presumably if your DM wanted to give them a gem encrusted breastplate, then you should be able to sell it, because it's something valuable. But by default, githyanki don't have that.FrankTrollman wrote:RC, the complaint isn't that you can't sell gemstones that come in treasure piles, it's that you can't pick up gemstones that aren't in Treasure piles. You fight a githyanki warrior and he has a gem encrusted breastplate because that's awesome, but then when he's defeated there aren't any gemstones for you to pry out in his corpse treasure parcel.
Now if your DM chooses to give monsters gem encrusted breastplates and tells you that you can't sell them. That's just stupid, and he's a bad DM. It doesn't really have much to do with the 4E treasure system, only a stupid DM. A gemencrusted breastplate would at the very least qualify as gemstones, if not artwork, and those by 4E rules are sellable at full price. So if the DM says you can't sell gemstones, then he's not playing by the 4E rules.
I'm not sure where you're getting the descriptions from, because 4E monsters don't even have a description line. So where they're getting the jewel encrusted breastplates is beyond me. The equipment line description just says "chain mail".That's the infuriating part. The part where the descriptions of things while you are fighting them are explicitly more valuable than the things you actually get once you defeat your enemies.
The silver sword is probably the only thing you can sell.
Again, not really sure where you're getting that you can't loot magic shops. You're using the treasure by level rules as some kind of super strict guideline, and pretty much I could make the same argument for 3.5 too (which also had WBL guidelines). If I can get more money in 3.5 by robbing a magic shop, I can do the exact same thing in 4E. I realize 4E has a lot of flavor from MMORPG setup, but there's nothing explicitly preventing you from robbing a magic shop.And it's completely unnecessary. If they are going to force you to collect money and run it through the sausage grinder just to keep from falling behind the curve, then they could make a world where money was actually hard to come by. Instead there are magic shops filled to the brim with every kind of jewel and magic blade your mind can imagine and you can't get them for no reason.
At worst it means that you'd just have to take the magic item values and reverse engineer them into an encounter by using the Treasure parcel guidelines. So if you're getting a bunch of level 14 items, then it'd probably be around a level 13-16 encounter.