Should I let my player sell effigies at market price?

[gogogome]

1. Player spends the 1 or 2 weeks required to make an effigy
2. Player uses the effigy for a level or two
3. Player sells effigy at market price, reaping tons of profit
4. Player spends the 1 or 2 weeks required to make an even stronger effigy

Should I allow this? This breaks WBL. On one side, it's costing the player XP per effigy creation, and the player is gambling on the effigy's survival. On the other side, effigy XP cost is tiny, XP is a river, and he's basically increasing his WBL for his level by 50% every time he sells it, which is every 2 levels.

I don't know how powerful he can get (No hydras, only dragon effigies).

This is a mid-op game. Would allowing this make him too OP? If so, how can I deal with this? Just a complete refund with the 5gp per 1xp spent rule?

[Flickerdart]

There's no guarantee that the effigy will have a buyer at the place and time he wishes to sell it. The entire point of the half-price sale is that you're selling it to a merchant who is willing to have it take up space in his storage until a client is willing to buy it.

Relying on having 1-2 weeks of downtime every time he wants to upgrade his pet is also a potential flaw in the plan.

Here's what I would do to make sure that everybody has a good time:
The first time he wants to sell the effigy, give him a few checks to make with a reachable DC: Gather Information to find someone willing to buy, Diplomacy to extol the virtues of a robotic guard and convince them that a used effigy is still worth full price, that sort of thing. Have the search and negotiations take a couple of days, as well they should.

The second time he wants to do this, there is no buyer. If he makes some tougher checks, he might find out that another wealthy man in a distant region is willing to purchase the effigy if it is taken to him first.

Regardless of what he decides to do, the effigy craze catches on among local nobles, and one contacts the character with a commission. However, he has his heart set on a suboptimal effigy the character would rather not craft (because the family crest is the Stag, so of course the guardians need to be stags, what the hell am I going to do with a robot hydra in my garden? Underpowered? If you can't make them powerful, that's your problem and not mine!).

This gives the player some choices - suck up the XP costs and sell the effigies for half-price like normal, start crafting effigies that fit demand instead of what he actually wants, or cart an obsolete monster across the country, dealing with bandits, breakdowns, and that kind of stuff that's rife for quest hooks.

[Inevitability]

Selling things implies there are buyers. The selling (half) prize for an adult white dragon effigy would be 20500 GP. None but the wealthiest of nobles would be able to afford that, and they most likely have wizards able to create such a creature under already. Heck, said customer would be better of finding a Neogi and buying an enslaved living adult white dragon.

Besides, an effigy's creator can always resume command over it. Would people really want to spend thousands of gold pieces on something knowing there is someone out there who can take it from them with a single word? If the player does sell anything, he shouldn't be surprised when someone tries to assassinate him.

[gogogome]

The game I'm running has simple economics. All items are available, at any number, so a guy can buy a million scrolls of prestidigitation and unload 1million gp worth of magic items anytime anywhere if he wants. I can easily fluff it as some super giant multi-national corporation has branches everywhere. My group (including me) isn't very experienced yet so we are focusing on combat stuff instead of politics or economics.

The effigies listening to the creator makes sense. That way the creator can ensure his weapon can't be used against him. So rather than assassination attempts, the effigy creator maybe the target of kidnappings, where the kidnappers wants to torture him until he deactivates the effigy.

I guess selling at half price would be best, after all, it's a "used" good, and finding a noble/royal buyer would require me to actually plan out an economy for my game. Maybe, I should make a sidequest out of it. That's giving me ideas.

But form a balance perspective, would his make the character too powerful for a mid-op game if he sacrifices his XP like that for gp profit?

[Flickerdart]

form a balance perspective, would his make the character too powerful for a mid-op game if he sacrifices his XP like that for gp profit?
He could just craft his own magic items, though, doing the same XP-for-GP trade. If that's okay, selling used effigies for half-price is okay too.

[Harrow]

I see no reason for why a player should be allowed to sell his goods for full market value instead of half, especially if the rest of the group is only getting half. It's unfair to the other players and it would be stepping on the toes of the Mercantile Background feat. If a feat let's you sell for 75%, I don't see why a single player should be allowed to sell for 100% on grounds of 'the NPCs get to do it!'.

[Surpriser]

This is simply an asymmetry between NPCs and PCs for balancing reasons:
All PCs (barring special circumstances like Mercantile Background or shortages and other campaign-related things) sell items for half market value and buy for full.
This holds for effigies as well as for any other item created or found by them.

And yes, that means that it is very hard to be a professional merchant/crafter as a PC. If someone wants to do that (for flavour reasons!), a sensible approach would be to have that part of economics happen "off-screen". That means: The above rules still hold for any item the PC wants to use themselves or finds as loot, while all other items (traded or crafted, but not for use by the party in any way) are abstracted into some sort of monthly (or even daily) income, without incurring either material or xp costs.

PHB2 has rules for operating businesses that essentially do just that.