Building An Auction House

[Skysaber]

How would you go about building something that functions like the World of Warcraft auction house in D&D 3.5?

The easy route towards something like that is to get a bunch of guys serving as auctioneers to stand in an open square, sacks of money on one side, piles of goods on the other, and deal with customers. That won't work for reasons that should be obvious - thieves would walk in one side and out the other with everything remotely valuable, including the auctioneers tied up in ropes to sell into slavery, if they were so inclined.

It also won't work because there is no way to access it from other cities. Nor is there a secure mail system to send people the coins they earned by selling stuff via your auction. How would that even work?

You people have done everything else using D&D rules. How about this?

[KindOfGoodGuy]

How would you go about building something that functions like the World of Warcraft auction house in D&D 3.5?

The easy route towards something like that is to get a bunch of guys serving as auctioneers to stand in an open square, sacks of money on one side, piles of goods on the other, and deal with customers. That won't work for reasons that should be obvious - thieves would walk in one side and out the other with everything remotely valuable, including the auctioneers tied up in ropes to sell into slavery, if they were so inclined.

It also won't work because there is no way to access it from other cities. Nor is there a secure mail system to send people the coins they earned by selling stuff via your auction. How would that even work?

You people have done everything else using D&D rules. How about this?

If money is not a problem here then you could try to set up a number of auction house buildings across the world and connect them via Teleportation Circles. For the item storage, you can create vaults with VERY thick walls of steel or something along those lines. Within said vaults would be bags of holding and portable holes to contain everything. Also the room itself would be guarded by every defensive spell (including but not limited to) Protection from Scrying, arcane lock, prismatic spheres that would pop up at set intervals, Large vault doors with a lot of explosive runes, and in the case of a robbery in the middle of the day, each auctioneer behind the counters in the AH would have a small lever that when pulled would send the entire vault into another dimension for a set amount of time (might have to get creative for the specifics on that one). You could also homebrew a large number of scrolls hovering in place that the buyers could use to browse the list of currently available items. And right next to the name/ description there would be the current bid. Also to improve the appearance of the auction houses, you could have display mannequins in the window that are affected by Major Image to display currently up for bid items.

[Divide by Zero]

The auctioneers are all avatars of the god of commerce. Powerful enough that anyone stealing from them would be the plot of a high-level adventure, but not really interested in getting involved in mortal affairs beyond facilitating fair trade.