Economics: Do you use it?

[warrl]

While we are at it... why are you the only one in the world working at half wage?

You aren't. Not by any means.

Suppose that, as you travel through this town, you decide to make a magic sword. (And have all the necessary skills and powers among your party.)

You don't have connections among the suppliers - no family, no friends. You are buying a small quantity of metal ore. There's no reason to expect you'll be a repeat customer - heck, you're staying at an INN, not even looking for a house.

So, you pay retail.

Now you need a forge. You don't have one. You need to rent one. You'll have to pay the smith for disrupting his business. You'll be renting smith's tools too, so he charges you enough to cover the risk that you'll damage them - he knows NOTHING about your skill as a smith, so doesn't really trust you. And at various times during the process of making the sword there's probably waiting time; the regular smith would turn to another task on his list, you'll just sit there. In short, you are talking about the most expensive, effective-time-consuming manufacturing process.

Then, having made the sword, you look to sell it. You have no reputation as a smith, OR as a supplier. You aren't offering to be a regular supplier, you're selling just a single item. For that matter, unless you're in a good-size city there isn't that much demand for magic swords.

So you sell it to, in effect, a second-hand store or maybe a pawnshop.

Now if you want to go to an adequately large town to have a suitable market, buy houses and a forge, establish yourselves in the community, enter into a contract to buy a fair amount of metal ore & scrap per week, and establish a steady sales operation, maybe you can start buying wholesale and selling retail.

But then you aren't adventurers. You're higher-level townsfolk.