Why Magic Item Shops?

[iceman10058]

I mean, seriously. Im my years of experience it either takes time away from playing while one or two players barter and it makes power gamers become ***** much easier.

Ive always tried to work with my players, swapping out preplanned magic items for thibgs they want or need. If that didnt work i would give them a small quest to find a wizard to craft it for him, plus the quests for the ingredients he needs.

Does anyone else do this?

[BWR]

I do a wide variety of things, including your way and shops. Shops are most common, partially because it makes sense in setting, partially because it takes less game time over all than your way. Instead of me having to look at what they have and figure out what they should get, listening to their requests, fixing encounters, creating minor quests for every little thing, they have money, spend an undetermined amount of downtime hunting down what they want and get it, be it from a MI shop, a retired adventurer, someone selling off unwanted loot, a custom made item, etc. The players spend a little time looking through books, I look over my notes, we finish up that bit and get on with more pressing adventures.

Wasting time on adventures for components usually only comes into play with very powerful items they want, like my player whose sorcerer is going to make a new artifact: the Staff of Wishes. That's a mini-campaign in itself. Getting a +3 armor instead of a +2 isn't worth the time.

[Anymage]

On some level, if gold is valuable and magic items are valuable, there will eventually be some people who want to trade magic items for gold and vice versa. Unless you have something really weird going on, magic will interact with the rest of the economy. And magic item pricing guides give a DM some basis for an idea what a good rate of exchange is.

3e's specific "you can go into a big city with enough gold and get any item you want" comes down to some design conceits specific to 3e. (Ones that didn't work out in practice, but that's a well-rehashed issue.) If you assume that X GP worth of magic items is the same power no matter what the specific items are, there's nothing wrong with allowing players to pick the items that they find most appealing.

[chainer1216]

Because in 3.x magic items arent unique character defining items, they are nessesary pieces of equipment that characters are expected to have in order to keep up with properly CRed encounters.

Besides Id much rather spend an hour in a shop getting my my +3 Flaming sword than 5 sessions questing to get components and then however many ingame weeks waiting for it to get made.

[TheCountAlucard]

On some level, if gold is valuable and magic items are valuable, there will eventually be some people who want to trade magic items for gold and vice versa.How many MP3 players do I need to trade for an F-16?

[Dimers]

I've only ever seen "magic item shops" in two games I can recall. I've seen a couple randomized auctions, plenty of bartering and rewarding, plenty of commissioning, a fair bit of PC craftwork, and a few targeted theft/loot runs. But stores that carry a broad array of level-appropriate gear that people can pay money for? Very rare in my experience.

OTOH, PCs who start with good equipment just happen to have exactly what they need, and that almost always gets ignored, handwaved or even lampshaded. The 4e D&D system relies on equipment upgrades, so I'm glad they wrote a decent justification for perfectly matched magic items in the first books.

[oxybe]

How many MP3 players do I need to trade for an F-16?

Seven and copy of the May 6th 1974 issue of TIME magazine.

[Satinavian]

Magic item shops are a quick way handling magic equippment when the interesting part of the campaign is about something else.
I tend to use them to safe time.


What i don't do is making loot fitting to the groups nee. I find that far too immersion breaking. Instead loot is about stuff the just killed enemies would find useful and aquire.

Which leaves adventures to get rare stuff/crafting subplots. Which are fine once in a while, but certainly not to fit out 5 characters with magic items. So that is reserved for really rare occasions.

[Glorthindel]

If I use magic shops (due to the setting supporting it, such as Eberron with House Cannith or the Forgotten Realms with Red Wizard merchants) I keep to the very basic items - potions, rechargable low-level wands, one off triggerable items that cast prepared spells, and such. Anything more (weapons, armour, wondorous objects) are (if available at all) only obtainable to order from very high-level crafters, and will likely involve a quest for one or more rare ingredients.

But its worth bearing in mind that I have long ago trained my players not to "expect" specific magic items to be available and make an appearance. To me, magical items is the wild card in character advancement, not a plannable upgrade route. Sure, +1 weapons will be dropping, but whether a flametongue, a certain mage staff, or bracers of strength make an appearance is entirely at the whims of the random magic item tables. I never have and never will take requests, and frankly find the idea a little alien to me.

[DigoDragon]

Something to keep in mind is that the PCs aren't the first adventurers to be commissioning magic items through quests. A GM might want them involved in a quest to obtain the ingredients to build that fancy +X sword or armor, but sometimes they will simply find it in a shop already, because 40 years ago a knight already quested to make it, she used it until retirement, and then sold it to buy a nice plot of land to retire on. Now your PCs are buying a magic item with a history. And maybe during that history, the item picked up a quirk or two, making it interesting.

[Frozen_Feet]

Last magic item shop in my games was actually founded by player characters, to sell off items from a mansion they looted. They did well enough untill another group of player characters came in demanding them to return the stolen things.

Magic item shops are quite integral to some setting. For example, in Praedor, the whole point of going to Borvaria is to find miraculous items which you can trade to sorcerers back in Jaconia, hopefully getting usefull items and services in return.

But in such settings and games, going to the Big City to do the trading is an adventure of its own. The sort of d20 metagame where players allowed to cherrypick from a whole list of magic items to some specified budget is completely absent. I find such metagame dubious anyway, there is no good reason for it. No, not even "but the game assumes you have items for equal CR encounters!", because it is trivial to adjust opposition downwards.

When I use magic shops for my games as GM, they only have items specified by me, their contents are not known to players before visiting, and their prices are set by in-universe factors, with any price in the books being a mere guideline if anything. Magic items at character creation aren't a thing, except if randomly generated.

[Frozen_Feet]

Last magic item shop in my games was actually founded by player characters, to sell off items from a mansion they looted. They did well enough untill another group of player characters came in demanding them to return the stolen things.

Magic item shops are quite integral to some setting. For example, in Praedor, the whole point of going to Borvaria is to find miraculous items which you can trade to sorcerers back in Jaconia, hopefully getting usefull items and services in return.

But in such settings and games, going to the Big City to do the trading is an adventure of its own. The sort of d20 metagame where players allowed to cherrypick from a whole list of magic items to some specified budget is completely absent. I find such metagame dubious anyway, there is no good reason for it. No, not even "but the game assumes you have items for equal CR encounters!", because it is trivial to adjust opposition downwards.

When I use magic shops for my games as GM, they only have items specified by me, their contents are not known to players before visiting, and their prices are set by in-universe factors, with any price in the books being a mere guideline if anything. Magic items at character creation aren't a thing, except if randomly generated.

[Anonymouswizard]

How many MP3 players do I need to trade for an F-16?

Depends on the brand of MP3 players and if there's anybody who has a desire for enough MP3 players to make it worthwhile.


On that note though, gold in D&D style worlds tends to mainly have value because people think it does, there's very little practical it seems to be used for (I think some magic items require it, but only a small minority). Gold's most useful property, the fact it doesn't oxidise, isn't terribly useful until you have items where the oxidisation of metal will significantly harm the item's function (so it's used in electronic devices), otherwise for most people it's just rare and shiny. At the proliferation of gold seen in some of the mid level D&D games I've been witness to (and even some of the low level ones, where farmers would carry pouches of gold) it seems like it would lose most of it's rarity value, and most people would have little desire for it beyond 'it's a common medium of exchange for some reason'.

Strangely, the Silver Piece makes a surprising amount of sense as a currency in a standard D&D world, because it's so useful for killing certain kinds of dangerous monsters. Every silver piece I have is in theory something that I can turn into an anti-werewolf or anti-devil weapon. Which in some worlds is useful enough to have silver be valuable, but not so much that you'll melt down all your silver items to make arrowheads.


As for magic item shops, I've seen two variations. The Potions Shop is mainly an excuse to allow players to stock up on minor magic items like potions and low level scrolls with ease. I've seen potions shops in many fantasy games, where GMs just want the players to have a little more capability. the other variation, let's call it the Adventurers' Mall, is where you can find anything and mainly exists for convenience where the GM wants the PCs to be able to face 'level appropriate encounters' but doesn't have or want to spend the time required to make sure the PCs get appropriate magic items.

Note I've stopped running D&D so that players don't have to expect magic items. They'll still get some, even if I run a low fantasy game, but apart from healing potions they'll be rare, approximately one per party member (and picked out to be useful or interesting, depending on the game). So the group might find a magic sword, magic spear, magic ring (bonus to casting spells), magic knife, and magic saddle in one game and in another a rope that cannot be tied into a knot, a mug that transforms any liquid it holds into low quality wine, a piece of wood that always points to the closest town when hung from a string, and a scabbard that dulls any blade put into it.

[Darth Ultron]

Have I ever done the dumb ''magic mart'' that sells everything for the super low ''rules'' prices? No.

I see most magic shops as more a combination of simple, cheap magic items and ''thrift stores'' type places. They sell stuff like a tin cup that keeps a liquid cool or a needle that can mend an article of clothing. They, in general, don't sell ''combat stuff'' or ''camping stuff'' or even adventurering stuff. So you can't just walk in and buy two +5 vopral swords and 15 Heward's handsacks. Though they might carry a couple of defensive items, like a couple rings of protection.

Most combat and adventurer type items are only sold in the very high end stores....the kind of place you can't just ''go to an shop (or steal)''. A lot like gem stones/art/rare books and such in the real world.

You also have the ''common sense'' type setting: people can't just go shopping and buy 25 wands of fireballs.

In general, characters get most of their items from going on adventures. And my item creation rules also require ''going on an adventure''.

Characters that do buy items find them very ''by-the-rulebook'' mundane. Any character that found/made an item on an adventure, will get a more powerful item with unique tweeks and abilities.

[Faily]

Why not have magic item shops? :smalltongue:



A more serious answer: I don't mind people buying the cheap stuff easily (though within reason... like no stocking up with 30+ Wands of CWL, unless they're in a metropolis with several temples), within the limits of the GP-level of the hamlet/village/town/city/metropolis they're in as well as other factors. For instance, it would be very difficult to procure magic items with divine origin in places like Glantri, where being a divine-character is heresy and high-treason, but I would probably bend the GP-level on items in favor of the party given the strong presence of magic there.

If players want very expensive on short notice, such as in the middle of an adventure and they teleported to the city to restock quickly, then there is a chance that the item is not available, as I like to consider the more expensive items to be the kind that you either have to make a special order for, or the shop keeper will ask around his network to procure one for you.

So when there is downtime between adventures, it's perfectly fine that players make the purchases they want of items that are listed in the book. Almost always in the groups I play in, people will notify the GM of what they're buying, especially in the case of more expensive things, just to make sure everything is fine. Most of the time it's fine.

I generally prefer to handle shopping between sessions, but as I've seen with our weekly Pathfinder group, that just isn't doable for all members of the group (two of them have small kids, so we're very understanding for that, and the third one has a very hectic job that requires long hours), so we'll often try to help them with picking out items that could be of interest to their characters.

[Tinkerer]

It all depends on the world and the community. There are many, many places where it makes sense and many, many places where it does not. For instance in one of the worlds which I run magic items are about equal to tech and so of course there are magic item shops around. Depending on the area possibly tons of them. Of course in that world it takes much less effort to make them as compared to some others, partially due to the influence of tech.

The thing which always bothered me in Magic Item Shop worlds like 3.5 was why does no one seem to get that they most likely control the world? Well I mean I obviously understand why it doesn't come up, because no-one wants their PCs to battle a group with that much loot. But with the disparity between mundane costs and magic costs when the contents of your shop could most likely buy not just the city you're in but the whole province as well something is going on there. I mean have you sat down and actually looked at the inventory costs on a shop when putting it together? It's insane. On the rare occasion that I run 3.X it's pretty well established that magic item vendors all belong to the equivalent of the Illuminati.

[Anonymouswizard]

Well I mean I obviously understand why it doesn't come up, because no-one wants their PCs to battle a group with that much loot.

What kind of players do you know?

But actual point taken :smallwink:

[LibraryOgre]

One justification I have used was the mageware shops in Dragonlance. They're not common... I can only think of one in Palanthas being mentioned specifically... but they make a degree of sense.

Wizards have a variety of specialized material needs. Inks, pens, books, and a weird variety of spell components. If you have a sufficient concentration of wizards, there's money to be made providing these things for them in a centralized location (especially if you, yourself, are a mage and so can usefully direct them). If you have a business selling things wizards need, you'll likely come into contact with other stuff. Does a specialist acquire a scroll they can't use? Well, they might want to sell it, and they know you have clients who might like to buy. Have some excess stuff to unload? Again, you have clients who might like to buy, so you're in the business of buying and selling curios... on top of your usual traffic in owl feathers, pearls, and pre-rolled balls of sulfur and guano.

If you're in an edition that makes scrolls and potions relatively easy to make, this is another sideline you can get into. A scroll of detect magic, or read magic. Potions of Mage Armor, or healing, or what have you. Valuable items that nonetheless have a pretty constant demand.

[Vogie]

I think it's an issue of convenience. Time passes as fast as the DM would like, so if a party wanted to reach a town and have several items crafted for them over several weeks (either by the players themselves or by professional craftsmen), that could happen between gaming sessions. If you wanted to be more "realistic", you would have:

figured out what a specific economies would have, which would have things that are only available in that area.
Have a pseudo-leadership mechanic, where the players collect NPCs that can do crafting and research on their behalf, in a caravan or guildhall model.
have a world with hedge wizards and witches interspersed throughout the countryside by corresponding villages and towns, that can each do a handful of magic items, or direct you to whom can do the thing that is required.

[Knaight]

There's some very system specific assumptions here - not least that the system is amenable to fairly pronounced power gaming, with magic items being a useful tool to do that. There's also some setting specific assumptions about what magic items fundamentally are, and how that interacts with shops. Holding to those assumptions, yeah, magic shops don't make a great deal of sense. Once they're loosened they can become the sort of thing notable only if they aren't there - magitech without magic shops is just weird, modern economies that haven't found a way to put magic items that exist on the market are just weird, and games centered around mercantile activity that leave magic items as a class that never appears on any market are just weird.

[Anonymouswizard]

There's some very system specific assumptions here - not least that the system is amenable to fairly pronounced power gaming, with magic items being a useful tool to do that. There's also some setting specific assumptions about what magic items fundamentally are, and how that interacts with shops. Holding to those assumptions, yeah, magic shops don't make a great deal of sense. Once they're loosened they can become the sort of thing notable only if they aren't there - magitech without magic shops is just weird, modern economies that haven't found a way to put magic items that exist on the market are just weird, and games centered around mercantile activity that leave magic items as a class that never appears on any market are just weird.

I can't speak for the others, but I was working from the basis of 'assume we have a setting that allows magic item shops to exist'. Of course many settings and systems don't.

[Knaight]

I can't speak for the others, but I was working from the basis of 'assume we have a setting that allows magic item shops to exist'. Of course many settings and systems don't.

As am I - but it sounds like the assumptions made are also that the setting works better without them. It's the settings which don't allow magic items not to exist which needed to be pointed out, where things like the total absence of magic items and thus magic item shops are out of scope for the discussion.

[DigoDragon]

When I use magic shops for my games as GM, they only have items specified by me, their contents are not known to players before visiting, and their prices are set by in-universe factors, with any price in the books being a mere guideline if anything. Magic items at character creation aren't a thing, except if randomly generated.

And that's a fair way to run magic shops. Generate your own list and present it when the place is visited. Change up the stock every so often (I like this part because if the PCs know that items aren't guaranteed to be there when they come back in a week, it makes choices interesting). And it's fair if prices fluctuate like they would in the real world. Supply and Demand. If everyone wants a Necklace of Adaptation, then those pretty things are gonna get marked up a couple grand. That +2 Shield that hasn't sold in eight months because it seems to attract arrows to it? Discount it a bit and see if that'll get a buyer. This is the only magic shop within two weeks ride? Prepare to pay a premium. :smallbiggrin:

[icefractal]

How many MP3 players do I need to trade for an F-16?Depends on the MP3 player, but you can get a MIG-21 for about $70k apparently. An F-16 is considerably more expensive, but yes, they are sold for money. And for something that was looted from a forgotten tomb in a world where the reach of even empires is local, as opposed to manufactured by a nation with global reach and an interest in controlling who gets one, it would be much easier if anything.

[Bohandas]

How many MP3 players do I need to trade for an F-16?

Vendors buying vendor trash is a seperate issue

[LordCdrMilitant]

I assume there are some large stores that sell lots of common items, and then a few small specialist stores. I also generally assume that most of what they sell is useless to the party, and after a while stop describing things like 8-Piece +1 Metric Allen Wrench Sets of Improved Torque, unless the players ask. Sometimes, if I'm feeling humorous, I'll describe there being different brands of the same item, but also qualify it with the statement that there is no functional difference to the players between them, so they don't ask me whether or not they should by the store brand version, the premium brand version, or the chinese knockoff version of the +1 Dagger.

I mean, it makes sense to me that most of what these places sell are the sort of thing you find at a hardware store, and that there's more than company out there manufacturing this stuff, but it doesn't really matter to the players. I, of course, think it's funny to have them buy a Craftsdwarf-Brand 85-Piece Metric +1 Socket Wrench Set of Hastened Bolt Tightening, but you can only repeat a joke every so often if you want it to stay funny.

[Thunder999]

Well it takes far less time if you don't bother bartering and just let players buy and sell at standard prices, and it's very important that they exist in systems where magic items are important to the game and not having access to them sucks.

[JBPuffin]

I've seen them a couple times, although I forget the contexts. Usually, the DMs pass out loot our characters want or plot-important stuff - I've yet to play an honest-to-God dungeon crawl, so everything revolves around the story being told.

As to "magic shops are a must when getting your drops on time matters," you definitely don't need them if you're not doing random or semi-random loot. If you get what you want as you need it, they don't have to exist at all, but that's not what every DM wants.

[icefractal]

One reason why is that they can be a useful abstraction. Like, yes, it's probably more plausible to have magic items traded via dealers and auctions, and some can only be found on the black market, and have fakes and wild price fluctuations like you were buying fine art, which there's a fair amount of similarities to.

But - then your game is likely to turn into Marketplaces & Merchants. Which can be fun, don't get me wrong. But if you what you wanted to play/run is an adventure about infiltrating the Unsleeping King's summer palace to rescue the Mithral Songbird, then it's a huge distraction.

[Quertus]

Simply put, the existence of magic item shops is by far the easiest and most efficient way to ensure a) that players can outfit their characters during downtime, between sessions; b) that the players have the agency to control the item advancement of their characters; c) that the world follows the logical evolution that a world capable of producing magic items believably should. As other posters have pointed out, even the PCs often try to open magic item shops in such worlds - it just makes sense that they'd already exist in the world. And anyone who is not using divination to know what items will be purchased, and have them available before the PCs get there, will quickly be put out of business by those who do.

Personally, I have no interest in derailing the session with a 4 hour long search-and-haggle - I'd rather just have the PCs know that they can purchase the things that they want for the listed book prices, and get on with the game.

And I certainly don't want to leave it in the GM's overtaxed hands to be responsible for delivering the items the party needs in not so random drops. Better to distribute the workload among the party, and allow their successes and failures to be their own, rather than succeeding or failing on the GM's whim. And tailored drops really ruin the believability of the setting (unless the party is explicitly questing after specific items, of course).

That having been said, outside of D&D 3.x, where the CR system, fighter dependency on items, etc, largely necessitates their use, I rarely use magic item shops (and certainly not well stocked ones), because of the reasons not to use them. However, that's not what was asked, so the specifics of those reasons are outside the scope of this thread.

[Knaight]

Simply put, the existence of magic item shops is by far the easiest and most efficient way to ensure a) that players can outfit their characters during downtime, between sessions; b) that the players have the agency to control the item advancement of their characters; c) that the world follows the logical evolution that a world capable of producing magic items believably should. As other posters have pointed out, even the PCs often try to open magic item shops in such worlds - it just makes sense that they'd already exist in the world. And anyone who is not using divination to know what items will be purchased, and have them available before the PCs get there, will quickly be put out of business by those who do.


A and B are both downright negatives for certain types of campaigns.

[LordCdrMilitant]

Simply put, the existence of magic item shops is by far the easiest and most efficient way to ensure a) that players can outfit their characters during downtime, between sessions; b) that the players have the agency to control the item advancement of their characters; c) that the world follows the logical evolution that a world capable of producing magic items believably should. As other posters have pointed out, even the PCs often try to open magic item shops in such worlds - it just makes sense that they'd already exist in the world. And anyone who is not using divination to know what items will be purchased, and have them available before the PCs get there, will quickly be put out of business by those who do.

Personally, I have no interest in derailing the session with a 4 hour long search-and-haggle - I'd rather just have the PCs know that they can purchase the things that they want for the listed book prices, and get on with the game.

And I certainly don't want to leave it in the GM's overtaxed hands to be responsible for delivering the items the party needs in not so random drops. Better to distribute the workload among the party, and allow their successes and failures to be their own, rather than succeeding or failing on the GM's whim. And tailored drops really ruin the believability of the setting (unless the party is explicitly questing after specific items, of course).

That having been said, outside of D&D 3.x, where the CR system, fighter dependency on items, etc, largely necessitates their use, I rarely use magic item shops (and certainly not well stocked ones), because of the reasons not to use them. However, that's not what was asked, so the specifics of those reasons are outside the scope of this thread.


In response to point C), I generally imagine that the various stores that sell magic items don't primarily cater to adventurers, but to the inhabitants of the area in which they are located. It doesn't make sense to stock a large amount of magic items only useful to the passing adventurer, and to make your entire business model on supplying them, because they're not only uncommon, they frequently have most things they need anyway. And, even with divination to predict ahead of time, you can't survive on making one high-value sale to an esoteric traveler every decade.

In the same vein, I also generally imagine that magic items are sold at their appropriate mundane retailer as mid-to-high-end stock, and are generally sourced from an external manufacturer as opposed to made in house. Of course, there are shops entirely dedicated to magic items, but they mostly sell homemade tchotchkes and other useless items to tourists.

The large manufacturers also generally have contracts with retailers around the kingdom, and may have contracts with the government, and it's much more efficient for them to produce a large number of +1 Spears and +1 Shovels than it is to fill an order for a +5 Vorpal Greatsword for a passing wealthy adventurer, and because there's almost no demand for +5 Vorpal Greatswords, it's not in anyone's interest to produce or stock them at all.


Hence, there are always magic item shops, but they never have anything the party wants to buy. I do have fun describing all the pointless stuff that they can buy, and more than half the time they end up buying something anyway.

[Faily]

A and B are both downright negatives for certain types of campaigns.

How so? I am curious.




In response to point C), I generally imagine that the various stores that sell magic items don't primarily cater to adventurers, but to the inhabitants of the area in which they are located. It doesn't make sense to stock a large amount of magic items only useful to the passing adventurer, and to make your entire business model on supplying them, because they're not only uncommon, they frequently have most things they need anyway. And, even with divination to predict ahead of time, you can't survive on making one high-value sale to an esoteric traveler every decade.


I don't know... there are plenty of settings that could justify people setting up shop in frontier-places that would draw a lot of suicidal adventurers. Or for big cities to cater to adventurous rich folks who at least like to pretend they are "cool". I could totally see rich snobs buying magic items/weapons to show off at parties. "Oh, this thing? It pierced the heart of the great dragon Abrexias in the Battle of Brindol, carried by one of the great knights of that battle." Rich snobs show off all the time with other things IRL. xD