Truisms of any magical item economy.

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Lago PARANOIA
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Truisms of any magical item economy.

Post by Lago PARANOIA »

You can not kill a magical item economy by making magic items rare while keeping them powerful. Not only does this show a poor understanding of how economics work, it just. Does. Not. Work.

You can not kill a magical item economy by saying that people don't want to buy magical items with money. This is just completely absurd. Magical items allow people to kick ass. In a fantasy kingdom, people will be willing to trade many, many things to have a thing that lets them kick ass. Since money is a universal medium of exchange you'll probably get gold bullion in exchange for your magical item if it kicks enough ass, like an invisibility cloak. I can easily see a queen offering you her crown and the keys to the kingdom in exchange for the Arthur's Scabbard.

If there are magical items that work just as good in a peasant's hand as it does in Enkidu's hands, they will have a worth of some sort and thus it's not only logical but inevitable that there will be a price tag attached to it.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by TavishArtair »

The only thing that matters to a magic item economy is production costs, and how well it can be recycled. It's possible to have production costs that do not easily translate to gold, even if people will offer you gold for them. This actually can be highly good for your setting because people can sell off the magic item for money, or they can decide it's pricelessly irreplaceable, especially if it's hard to recycle it for anything else magical.
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Post by RandomCasualty2 »

Some ways to get around the magic item economy.

Magic item rarity (2E-style economy): Magic items are hard to create and thus rare. They're rarely sold mainly because they're virtually priceless and they're rare enough that shops specializing in them don't exist. While you can sell them fairly easy, that really doesn't matter much because almost nobody is willing to part with theirs. No amount of gold tends to be worth the power gain you get from having them, and they're sold so rarely that it tends to be a non issue. Occasionally there may be magic item auctions but it's a special game event and not a trip down to a magic shop.

Creation based economy (quasi- 4E style): Magic items are easily created, however recycling magical items is a very wasteful process. When you want a new item, typically you just go out and have one made for you. Used items run into all sorts of problems... Perhaps the enchantment has faded, perhaps the item is a weaker item in disguise or perhaps it has a nasty curse. Given the risks, nobody buys used items for anywhere close to full price. In fact, chances are only the really desperate buy used items, so mostly the people who purchase them are junk dealers looking to turn them into scrap components.

Personal Magic items: Magic items are built for specific people or groups. Unless you are a cultist of fire, you don't really know how to tap or control the power of the rod of flame. Like a storm trooper trying to use a lightsaber, he'll probably just end up hurting himself. Most magic items are made personally attuned to a specific person and his bloodline. This may well be because doing it that way saves a lot of cost in creating the item. So Excalibur is passed along the bloodline of Arthur.
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Post by Thymos »

You can also have it so that magic items aren't normally magical, but it's a special ability of heroes to make them magical.

So a bastard sword in the peasants hand is just a bastard sword. In Hero a's hands though it becomes a flaming bastard sword.
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Re: Truisms of any magical item economy.

Post by hogarth »

Lago PARANOIA wrote:You can not kill a magical item economy by making magic items rare while keeping them powerful. Not only does this show a poor understanding of how economics work, it just. Does. Not. Work.
Define "powerful". In Real Life (tm), a sniper rifle is "powerful", and yet you can buy one with money (for instance).
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

TA wrote:The only thing that matters to a magic item economy is production costs, and how well it can be recycled. It's possible to have production costs that do not easily translate to gold, even if people will offer you gold for them.
The 'production cost' of something is a completely arbitrary measure of its worth. Wheat grown in the Underdark consumes a lot more resources than wheat grown above-ground. But it's still worth the same amount of money.

Production costs just determine if something gets made and how much of it gets made. But once it's there it has an arbitrary price tag attached to it. There may be only one jade bust of James Buchanan in existence because jade is really hard to carve, but that doesn't make it worth more than Venus de Milo.
RC2 wrote: Magic item rarity (2E-style economy): Magic items are hard to create and thus rare. They're rarely sold mainly because they're virtually priceless and they're rare enough that shops specializing in them don't exist. While you can sell them fairly easy, that really doesn't matter much because almost nobody is willing to part with theirs. No amount of gold tends to be worth the power gain you get from having them, and they're sold so rarely that it tends to be a non issue. Occasionally there may be magic item auctions but it's a special game event and not a trip down to a magic shop.
Which is again trying to cause magic item non-interaction for no reason other than the fact that you don't want magical items to be sold.

Again, it doesn't matter how 'rare' your magical item is. What matters is how much people want it. While I can see someone not wanting to sell Arthur's scabbard no matter how much gold they're offered, this paradigm does not work for loser magic items like Sting and Harry Potter's invisibility cloak--which are the majority of magic items in the D&D setting.

When you apply the 'it's priceless, no matter what!' rule to bullshit like +3 bastard swords and Belts of Giant Strength it just makes the seller look like an idiot.
RC2 wrote: Creation based economy (quasi- 4E style): Magic items are easily created, however recycling magical items is a very wasteful process. When you want a new item, typically you just go out and have one made for you. Used items run into all sorts of problems... Perhaps the enchantment has faded, perhaps the item is a weaker item in disguise or perhaps it has a nasty curse. Given the risks, nobody buys used items for anywhere close to full price. In fact, chances are only the really desperate buy used items, so mostly the people who purchase them are junk dealers looking to turn them into scrap components.
You mean like esoteric goods like FOOD and DRINKS? Hamburgers fit all of your criteria but according to this no one sells hamburgers.
RC2 wrote: Personal Magic items: Magic items are built for specific people or groups. Unless you are a cultist of fire, you don't really know how to tap or control the power of the rod of flame. Like a storm trooper trying to use a lightsaber, he'll probably just end up hurting himself. Most magic items are made personally attuned to a specific person and his bloodline. This may well be because doing it that way saves a lot of cost in creating the item. So Excalibur is passed along the bloodline of Arthur.
Remark A: This is exactly what 3E did: give people a production-savings if you attuned created magic items to very specific people. You can't tell me that there wasn't a magic item economy.

Remark B: Magic item crafters would still create generic magic items even if it had a higher production cost. The efficiency of a product's creation doesn't determine if people will create or sell it; what matters is how much they can get for it. If people want generic magical items despite the price markup then wizards will put these on the market and you still have a magical item economy.

Remark C: Even if you made generic magic items impossible, this approach still doesn't stop people from walking up to the local wizard and asking said wizard to craft them their shit. The wizard and presumably every other wizard will want to be compensated in some way. Probably with gold since it's, you know, universal currency. I mean, really, once you get a haircut it's completely worthless for everyone who is not you. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a market for haircuts.
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Wed Sep 09, 2009 2:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Thymo wrote:You can also have it so that magic items aren't normally magical, but it's a special ability of heroes to make them magical.

So a bastard sword in the peasants hand is just a bastard sword. In Hero a's hands though it becomes a flaming bastard sword.
Even if Excalibur doesn't do jack diddly in the hands of non-heroes, Excalibur is still going to be worth something more than a regular bastard. So what happens is that the owner calculates a worth of the item in the hand of a hero and sets it at a price.

The difference now is that kings and queens don't buy Excalibur anymore since it's no better for than than a bastard sword. But it doesn't matter, since Excalibur is still worth more to a hero than a regular ol' bastard sword.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by mean_liar »

I spam this every time a topic like this comes up, but I do it only because it's worked really well at my table:

Option #3 - Personal Magic Items - but awakening an item's power costs nothing and can be done with anything, with the caveat that these awakenings are permanent until another level is acquired.

The level thing is clunky and if you really wanted to get into the gears of it you'd limit it to, "you can only modify x% of your magic item wealth" so that a +2 weapon can become a +1 holy weapon without trouble while also preventing a +1 holy weapon from becoming boots, a ring and a misc magic item.

The corollary is that there is are no craftable permanent magic items beyond 0th level-based items, so you can have Prestidigitation trinkets and the like.
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Post by tzor »

There are two conflicting notions at work here. First, and foremost, there is the general value of an item in theory. Second and equally important, there is the general value of an item in practice. Normally these two values tend to be almost identical, but as the quantity increases, the practical worth of the item tends to decrease from the theory. The item’s shelf life as well as the costs involved to secure that item both plays a factor into the practical value of that item.

To give the classic example where the numbers go insanely off, consider a classic Dragon’s horde in nothing but copper coins. Practical value: ZERO! (“I ain’t carrying that crap … let’s rob someone else of his gold instead.”)

The same is true to some extent in the general magic economy. Generally magic has an infinite “shelf life” but does have a degree of “security cost.” Its biggest problem is that it is often at such an extreme level that the practical value of other commodities starts to diverge from the value in theory. Gold is, in the end just another commodity. Back in 1E, for example, the “weight” of 10,000 gold coins was 1,000 pounds. (This was changed in later editions to the 50 coin per pound standard.) Buyers would generally want to pay the practical value, and sellers want the theoretical value. At a certain point, even haggling just is not going to work because of non linear factors involved.

Magic items can, ironically, be used to pay for magic items, and can be used as a form of large scale durable goods. However, very expensive magic items have a rather large security cost (everyone will want to steal it from you). Of course if no one knows you have it no one will want to steal it from you and the security costs go down, but the item becomes very illiquid because no one who wants it knows you have it.

More ironically, this is starting to draw one to the dragon horde economy. After all, the only one who doesn’t care about either the storage or security costs of magic items is someone who is so over the top bad ass that the item’s additional cost is trivial. These are, ironically, the very ones least likely to barter (“what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine”).

To recap, the biggest problem with the economy at the level of most important magic items is that the economy literally starts to break down at that level. Sure you can exchange Fort Knox for Excalibur, but only in theory. This puts a real limitation on the magic item economy.

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Post by hogarth »

tzor wrote: To recap, the biggest problem with the economy at the level of most important magic items is that the economy literally starts to break down at that level. Sure you can exchange Fort Knox for Excalibur, but only in theory. This puts a real limitation on the magic item economy.
If you're talking Excalibur = +5 vorpal sword (say), then I don't see why you should need "Fort Knox" to buy it (other than sentimental value, for instance). Most D&D magic weapons are like the equivalent of a bazooka or a sniper rifle in "real life" -- dangerous and expensive, but not of particular interest to the general public, and not really that powerful in a geopolitical sense.
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Post by CatharzGodfoot »

Lago PARANOIA wrote:
Thymo wrote:You can also have it so that magic items aren't normally magical, but it's a special ability of heroes to make them magical.

So a bastard sword in the peasants hand is just a bastard sword. In Hero a's hands though it becomes a flaming bastard sword.
Even if Excalibur doesn't do jack diddly in the hands of non-heroes, Excalibur is still going to be worth something more than a regular bastard. So what happens is that the owner calculates a worth of the item in the hand of a hero and sets it at a price.

The difference now is that kings and queens don't buy Excalibur anymore since it's no better for than than a bastard sword. But it doesn't matter, since Excalibur is still worth more to a hero than a regular ol' bastard sword.
Excalibur is likely to be worth much more to the hero than the hero is willing to pay, because all that stands between her and it is a peasant with a mundane sword. In this case, there is no true 'economy' because the power disparity between buyer and seller (and police) is great enough that anything the hero pays is a gift.

As both Frank Trollman and Tina Turner are fond of saying, there are only two rules in Barter Town:
1) You break a deal, you spin the wheel.
2) Two men enter, one man leaves.
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Post by tzor »

hogarth wrote:If you're talking Excalibur = +5 vorpal sword (say), then I don't see why you should need "Fort Knox" to buy it (other than sentimental value, for instance). Most D&D magic weapons are like the equivalent of a bazooka or a sniper rifle in "real life" -- dangerous and expensive, but not of particular interest to the general public, and not really that powerful in a geopolitical sense.
Typically when I mention something like "Excalibur" I'm referring to something that is in the epic almost artifact range. The actual value of a +5 vorpal sword ( basically gives you not quite 5 levels of fighter ability and the occasion to look really cool in battle ) isn't all that's it is cracked up to be. (Although in the hands of a fighter with a ring of regeneration ... well that's the stuff of legends.)
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

CG wrote:
Excalibur is likely to be worth much more to the hero than the hero is willing to pay, because all that stands between her and it is a peasant with a mundane sword. In this case, there is no true 'economy' because the power disparity between buyer and seller (and police) is great enough that anything the hero pays is a gift.
Obviously this entire setup assumes that people can actually protect their goods. Which means that if an adventurer pulls this then there needs to be someone the merchant can call to track down the thief and beat their ass.

Of course, this applies to pretty much any crime. If an adventurer just wants to kill an entire brothel just because they can then the citizens need to be able to call on upon an ass-kicker to kick the thief's ass.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by hogarth »

tzor wrote:
hogarth wrote:If you're talking Excalibur = +5 vorpal sword (say), then I don't see why you should need "Fort Knox" to buy it (other than sentimental value, for instance). Most D&D magic weapons are like the equivalent of a bazooka or a sniper rifle in "real life" -- dangerous and expensive, but not of particular interest to the general public, and not really that powerful in a geopolitical sense.
Typically when I mention something like "Excalibur" I'm referring to something that is in the epic almost artifact range. The actual value of a +5 vorpal sword ( basically gives you not quite 5 levels of fighter ability and the occasion to look really cool in battle ) isn't all that's it is cracked up to be.
Right. Which is why Lago's first "truism" is meaningless without defining what "powerful" means. D&D has very few magic items in the "epic almost artifact range", for instance.
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Post by RandomCasualty2 »

Lago PARANOIA wrote: Which is again trying to cause magic item non-interaction for no reason other than the fact that you don't want magical items to be sold.
Well, no. The goal isn't so much to prevent magic item sales (though sometimes we do do that), but rather to prevent people from actively looting every little thing from every NPC and bogging down the game. Now some methods of doing that actually involve magic items that aren't readily buyable (because that way there's less incentive to get every gold coin you can).
Again, it doesn't matter how 'rare' your magical item is. What matters is how much people want it. While I can see someone not wanting to sell Arthur's scabbard no matter how much gold they're offered, this paradigm does not work for loser magic items like Sting and Harry Potter's invisibility cloak--which are the majority of magic items in the D&D setting.
As you say, magic items translate into ass kicking. If gold commonly doesn't translate into ass kicking, you're not going to trade magic items for gold.

You mean like esoteric goods like FOOD and DRINKS? Hamburgers fit all of your criteria but according to this no one sells hamburgers.
Well yes, nobody buys used hamburgers. Everyone buys them new. Which is the entire point of this magic item economy variant. I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make here.

If people won't buy your items, then obviously it's probably not a big deal to go looting every last item.

Remark A: This is exactly what 3E did: give people a production-savings if you attuned created magic items to very specific people. You can't tell me that there wasn't a magic item economy.
Well no, the discount was basically a rules variant that nobody used. Now that variant could make for good world building if it was widely used. But the basic block of 3E was general use items, which really needed to be eliminated almost entirely.
Remark B: Magic item crafters would still create generic magic items even if it had a higher production cost. The efficiency of a product's creation doesn't determine if people will create or sell it; what matters is how much they can get for it. If people want generic magical items despite the price markup then wizards will put these on the market and you still have a magical item economy.
Not if the generic items were alot more expensive. If an attuned item was say 50% cheaper, then there's no reason to make general items. You sell the item for 50% value normally anyway in 3E. Thus having it 50% cheaper means you get those savings right off and also limit the chance someone can steal the item.

And if you don't like that explanation, you could simply rule in your system that generic items simply can't be made at all. Every item has to be tuned to someone with a specific prestige class, specific feat or just a specific person.
Remark C: Even if you made generic magic items impossible, this approach still doesn't stop people from walking up to the local wizard and asking said wizard to craft them their shit. The wizard and presumably every other wizard will want to be compensated in some way. Probably with gold since it's, you know, universal currency. I mean, really, once you get a haircut it's completely worthless for everyone who is not you. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a market for haircuts.
Well again, the idea isn't necessarily to prevent people from buying items, but rather to prevent magic item from being sold.

PCs buying items is actually not a bad thing for the game at all, because sometimes there are interesting items you want. What is bad for the game is never having any miscellaneous items that you find because you just sell them all.
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Post by TavishArtair »

Lago PARANOIA wrote:
TA wrote:The only thing that matters to a magic item economy is production costs, and how well it can be recycled. It's possible to have production costs that do not easily translate to gold, even if people will offer you gold for them.
The 'production cost' of something is a completely arbitrary measure of its worth. Wheat grown in the Underdark consumes a lot more resources than wheat grown above-ground. But it's still worth the same amount of money.
That may be true when you can transport commodities across such environmental boundaries, but in a universe where grain costs more to make, the cost on grain is going to be higher (with the caveat that this applies only if you are the one who is paying the actual cost... you might not be). You don't get to escape universal setting laws. The only thing you get to do is adjust to the new rules... you learn to do something else. There are plenty of creatures that don't eat grains. However, if you can get around the cost of magic by reproducing it with mundane means, it isn't very magical, so I don't know why we'd bother discussing it with terms like "magic items".
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Post by Grek »

Just throwing some numbers out here:

The density of wheat is 800 KG/cubic meter, or about 50 pounds/cubic foot.

Marvelous Pigments, a magic item, allows one to produce 1000 cubic feet of mundane goods with a DC 15 Craft (painting) check and 10 minutes of effort.

That's 50000 pounds of wheat per 10 minutes

Marvelous Pigments cost 2000 gold to create assuming wish isn't used.

That's 4cp per pound of wheat, if you want it factory produced by a wizard in kingdom-sized units every two days from now untill forever.
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Post by MGuy »

Ban Pigments. Not worth keeping it or similar things if you even want to take a shot at making a stable economy.
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Post by NativeJovian »

Grek wrote:That's 4cp per pound of wheat, if you want it factory produced by a wizard in kingdom-sized units every two days from now untill forever.
Well, given that (presumably) naturally-grown wheat is worth 1 cp/pound according to the SRD, that seems reasonable to me. It's cheaper to make wheat the old-fashioned way than it is to magic some up, but if you're magicking things into existence you don't have to deal with its mass or bulk while you're traveling with it, or worry about it spoiling or anything like that either.

If you're worried about high-level casters completely outproducing unlettered peasants in terms of mundane items, then simply implement a rule saying that you can't turn a profit on crap like that. If it costs 2000 gp to make some Marvelous Pigments, then you can't get more than 2000 gp worth of stuff out of it. No harm, no foul.
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Post by violence in the media »

MGuy wrote:Ban Pigments. Not worth keeping it or similar things if you even want to take a shot at making a stable economy.
Are you nuts? Pigments are one of the coolest magic items in the game. Now, maybe they shouldn't simply work, and instead require a Craft:Painting check to make full use of, but they should most certainly exist. A set of paints that can bring things into existence is awesome beyond words--even if most people's child-like scribblings would be manifestations of horror and despair.
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Post by MGuy »

Having it based on a simple craft check won't do anything. How hard is weat to draw? Beyond that you can always take 20. Cool though it may be if you want a stable economy you're gonna want to get rid of it. A couple of months and a group can produce millions of gold by having a single bard in the party. I know because our logistics master/bard performed it. If you go with the suggestion above then I suppose there is little harm to it besides explaining why it works that way.
Last edited by MGuy on Thu Sep 10, 2009 2:57 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by K »

The essential problem of a magic item economy are twofold:

1. Rare items bring whatever price the market can bear. Look at fine art or collectibles. Anything rare has a value exactly equal to what people are willing to pay for it, and otherwise rarely has any intrinsic value at all. Van Gogh's painting barely put food on his table, and now his collected works could buy an island nation.

This means that a Potion of Cure Disease might be worthless to the Rock Men of the Broken Caves because they don't get diseases, and worth a dukedom in a Kingdom with no clerics.

By the same token, gold is only precious and capable of buying goods as long as it is rare. Thus, we can see why one particular mythic hero chose to keep his treasure locked away in the castle rather than go on a spending spree.... because once he did that, the value of his treasure would drop dramatically (guess the hero and get a cookie).

2. Sword and Sorcery Fantasy embraces cleptocracy. The basics of just about every hero myth have heroes stealing crap from their enemies and anyone else. This means that while the peasants can exchange coppers for beers and silvers for bags of oats, kings and heroes alike take what they want, meaning that there cannot be a high end economy.

There is a reason that places like Africa and Russia don't have the wealth of the West despite vast natural resources.... and that's because even armed guards are rarely an adequate protection for things of value.

--------------------------

That being said, there cannot be a stable economy of magic items. Attempting to make one is pointless, since the only way to do it is to embrace anti-immersive crap like in video games ("if the magic item store has the items I need to save the kingdom, wouldn't the LG thing to do be to take those items and save the kingdom? Oh wait, I can't target the merchant or pickpocket him because he has a green halo. Oh well, looks like the kingdom is going to burn!")
Last edited by K on Thu Sep 10, 2009 7:34 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by MartinHarper »

NativeJovian wrote:If it costs 2000 gp to make some Marvelous Pigments, then you can't get more than 2000 gp worth of stuff out of it. No harm, no foul.
So, say that I'm dying of thirst, and would pay 10,000gp for a cup of water. Suddenly, I can no longer create a cup of water with my Marvelous Pigments?
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Post by Meikle641 »

K wrote:(guess the hero and get a cookie).
Poor ol' Siegfried. Now that drinking and bathing in dragon's blood thing? That should be a 'magic item' type deal, I think. Should be ways to get such permanent buffs, but that isn't the discussion at hand.

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hogarth
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Joined: Wed May 27, 2009 1:00 pm
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Post by hogarth »

K wrote:That being said, there cannot be a stable economy of magic items. Attempting to make one is pointless, since the only way to do it is to embrace anti-immersive crap like in video games ("if the magic item store has the items I need to save the kingdom, wouldn't the LG thing to do be to take those items and save the kingdom? Oh wait, I can't target the merchant or pickpocket him because he has a green halo. Oh well, looks like the kingdom is going to burn!")
It's not clear what you mean by a "stable" economy. Is the economy for art objects in the real world "stable" or not? How about the black market for weapons in Somalia or the Democratic Republic of the Congo?

On a side note, why do people like discussing the price of magic items (or lack thereof) so much? It's always the same thing -- moaning that magic item stores don't make sense. Well, duh.
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