Worlds of Design: The Problem with Magimarts

I dislike magic item stores. Here's why.

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

Magic items are a part of every fantasy role-playing game, and wherever player characters meet, someone will want to buy or sell such items. What the players do among themselves is their business, in most cases; but when non-player characters (NPC) are involved the GM must know where magic items come from, how rare they are, and how hard it is to produce them. [Quoting myself from 40+ years ago]

Magimart: Still a Bad Idea​

I don't like the idea of "Magimarts" -- something like a bookstore or small department store, often with a public storefront, where adventurers can come and purchase (or sell) magic items. I said as much over 40 years ago in an article titled “Magimart: Buying and Selling Magic Items” in White Dwarf magazine. My point then still stands: at least for me and in my games, magic-selling stores don’t make sense.

They don’t make sense from a design point of view, as they may unbalance a campaign or cause power-creep. From an adventure point of view such stores partly eliminates the need to quest for specific powerful magic items. From a realistic point of view they would only provide targets for those who are happy to steal.

The Design Point of View​

From a game design point of view, how experience points, gold, and magic fit together makes a big difference. For example, if you get experience points for selling a magic item (even to NPCs), as well as for the gold you get, adventurers will sell magic items more often. If adventurers acquire scads of treasure and have nothing (such as taxes or “training”) to significantly reduce their fortunes, then big-time magic items are going to cost an awful lot of money, but some will be bought. If gold is in short supply (as you’d expect in anything approaching a real world) then anyone with a whole lot of gold might be able to buy big-time magic items.

Long campaigns need a way for magic items to change ownership, other than theft. As an RPG player I like to trade magic items to other characters in return for other magic items. But there are no “magic stores.” Usability is a big part of it: if my magic user has a magic sword that a fighter wants, he might trade me an item that I could use as a magic user. (Some campaigns allocate found magic items only to characters who can use them. We just dice for selecting the things (a sort of draft) and let trading sort it out, much simpler and less likely to lead to argument about who can use/who needs what.)

The Adventure Point of Views​

Will magic stores promote enjoyable adventuring? It depends on the style of play, but for players primarily interested in challenging adventures, they may not want to be able to go into a somehow-invulnerable magic store and buy or trade for what they want.

Magic-selling stores remind me of the question “why do dungeons exist”. A common excuse (not reason) is “some mad (and very powerful) wizard made it.” Yeah, sure. Excuses for magic-selling stores need to be even wilder than that!

I think of magic-item trading and selling amongst characters as a kind of secretive black market. Yes, it may happen, but each transaction is fraught with opportunities for deceit. Perhaps like a black market for stolen diamonds? This is not something you’re likely to do out in the open, nor on a regular mass basis.

The Realistic Point of View​

“Why do you rob banks?” the thief is asked. “’Cause that’s where the money is.”

Realistically, what do you think will happen if someone maintains a location containing magic items on a regular basis? Magimarts are a major flashpoint in the the dichotomy between believability (given initial assumptions of magic and spell-casting) and "Rule of Cool" ("if it's cool, it's OK").

In most campaigns, magic items will be quite rare. Or magic items that do commonplace things (such as a magic self-heating cast iron pan) may be common but the items that are useful in conflict will be rare. After all, if combat-useful magic items are commonplace, why would anyone take the risk of going into a “dungeon” full of dangers to find some? (Would dungeon-delving become purely a non-magical treasure-hunting activity if magic items are commonplace?)

And for the villains, magimarts seem like an easy score. If someone is kind enough to gather a lot of magic items in a convenient, known place, why not steal those rather than go to a lot of time and effort, risk and chance, to explore dungeons and ruins for items? There may be lots of money there as well!

When Magimarts Make Sense​

If your campaign is one where magic is very common, then magic shops may make sense - though only for common stuff, not for rare/powerful items. And magic-selling stores can provide reasons for adventures:

• Find the kidnapped proprietor who is the only one who can access all that magic.
• Be the guards for a magic store.
• Chase down the crooks who stole some or all of the magic from the store.

Maybe a clever proprietor has figured out a way to make the items accessible only to him or her. But some spells let a caster take over the mind of the victim, and can use the victim to access the items. And if someone is so powerful that he or she can protect a magic store against those who want to raid it, won't they likely have better/more interesting things to do with their time? (As an aside, my wife points out that a powerful character might gather a collection of magic items in the same way that a rich person might gather a collection of artworks. But these won’t be available to “the public” in most cases. Still just as some people rob art museums, some might rob magic collections.)

Of course, any kind of magic trading offers lots of opportunities for deception. You might find out that the sword you bought has a curse, or that the potion isn’t what it’s supposed to be. Many GMs ignore this kind of opportunity and let players buy and sell items at standard prices without possibility of being bilked. Fair enough, it’s not part of the core adventure/story purposes of RPGs. And magic stores are a cheap way for a GM to allow trade in magic items.

Your Turn: What part do magic-selling stores play in your games?

 

[Stormonu]

One of the rules buried in the depths of the 1E DMG was that copying spells from one book to another incurred a % chance that the original spell would vanish from the book. This was clearly meant to curb PCs swapping spells and make NPC spellcasters paranoid about letting their spells be copied.

 

[Micah Sweet]

One of the rules buried in the depths of the 1E DMG was that copying spells from one book to another incurred a % chance that the original spell would vanish from the book. This was clearly meant to curb PCs swapping spells and make NPC spellcasters paranoid about letting their spells be copied.

One of the great things about magic is that, since there's no realism baseline, you can make up whatever rules you want for how it works and as long as whatever you invent is consistent it works.

 

[tetrasodium]

Yeah, the church is the great exception. They maintained an international infrastructure during the dark ages when no-one else could. Greyhawk lacks this kind of church, and doesn't have any equivalent in another field. Nor is wizardry really equivalent to any other guild. The journeyman system as its believed to have worked in the early medieval period was literally about journeys. You studied your craft as an apprentice in one town, but once you got your journeyman credentials you had the opportunity to journey to different places and learn from different masters. This spread know-how and made the state of each craft similar over large areas. If a new technique was developed in Paris, it would soon spread to the rest of Europe.

But this is not how I imagine wizardry to work. I guess my idea of paranoid wizards actually comes from Gary Gygax and the early DMG, to me this seems to be the norm of how wizardry is seen in RPGs. DnD and Ars Magica certainly has similar ideas about this secrecy of wizards. In history, the idea of technological state secrets is actually a fairly recent one, perhaps 19C. Rather, the problem in medieval history was getting people to accept new ideas, not to keep those ideas secret.

I guess what I'm saying is that you're right, there really is no historical precedent for magic being kept secret. There is precedence in fiction.

It comes from one of the appendix N books (Vance's dying earth). That's why it's such a glaring anachronism that has been getting more and more problematic every time d&d moves away from the old class balance that justified it without being clear about the reasonableness and need for scroll/spell book cross copying.

It might not have a "church" like Europe had, but there's a high level cleric in just about every second or third town & it's not like wizards couldn't spread the word with enough zeal to be sure that people would be sure to know which direction to point when another wizard asks.

 

[Maxperson]

Another thing I forgot about was that in 1e and 2e, Dwarves could create magic arms and armor without being spellcasters. I don't recall if it was ever stated how this works, but there's a good example of it in Rob Salvatore's The Crystal Shard with the forging of Aegis-Fang. So maybe, if Dwarven smiths can crank out magic items, there might be an economy for them in Dwarven cities?

In 3e there they made the norse dwarves, called Midgard Dwarves

"Master Smith (Ex): Midgard dwarves gain Craft Magic Arms and Armor, Craft Wondrous Item, and Forge Ring as bonus feats. They are considered to possess the prerequisites necessary to craft any magic item of those types, even if they do not otherwise meet the requirements or have the ability to cast the necessary spells."

Now they would still run afoul of the XP cost, so unless they were adventuring or the DM set up other ways to get XP without adventuring, they still wouldn't go full magimart. However, you could if you found one, have a good chance to commission an item for some sort of cost.

 

[Maxperson]

One of the great things about magic is that, since there's no realism baseline, you can make up whatever rules you want for how it works and as long as whatever you invent is consistent it works.

What if you invent is as being inconsistent?

 

[Micah Sweet]

What if you invent is as being inconsistent?

I mean you could of course, but that sort of incoherence would not be my preference.

 

[Aelryinth]

Overall fun analysis of some economic impacts of the different edition mechanics.

I am not quite sure if you are thinking that gold is literally sacrificed and gone in crafting 3e items.

From the SRD the cost is for unspecified magical supplies and materials used in crafting the items. The gold still exists, it is just spent on stuff that gets used up.

"Magic supplies for items are always half of the base price in gp and 1/25 of the base price in XP."

"The character must spend the gold and XP at the beginning of the construction process."

"A character can work on only one item at a time. If a character starts work on a new item, all materials used and XP spent on the under-construction item are wasted."

"To create magic armor, a character needs a heat source and some iron, wood, or leatherworking tools. He also needs a supply of materials, the most obvious being the armor or the pieces of the armor to be assembled. Armor to be made into magic armor must be masterwork armor, and the masterwork cost is added to the base price to determine final market value. Additional magic supplies costs for the materials are subsumed in the cost for creating the magic armor—half the base price of the item."

"To create a magic weapon, a character needs a heat source and some iron, wood, or leatherworking tools. She also needs a supply of materials, the most obvious being the weapon or the pieces of the weapon to be assembled. Only a masterwork weapon can become a magic weapon, and the masterwork cost is added to the total cost to determine final market value. Additional magic supplies costs for the materials are subsumed in the cost for creating the magic weapon—half the base price given on Table: Weapons, according to the weapon’s total effective bonus."

"The creator of a potion needs a level working surface and at least a few containers in which to mix liquids, as well as a source of heat to boil the brew. In addition, he needs ingredients. The costs for materials and ingredients are subsumed in the cost for brewing the potion—25 gp × the level of the spell × the level of the caster."

"All ingredients and materials used to brew a potion must be fresh and unused. The character must pay the full cost for brewing each potion. (Economies of scale do not apply.)"

and so on.

So more like spending money on food that gets eaten for economic analysis purposes. The money sill exists in the economy and is not removed, no?

My point on this comes from extremely high-end items, and a comment in the Forgotten Realms that components consumed in making magic items and spells are actually taken by the gods and inserted back into the ecology to be recycled and used again.
What exactly IS 100,000 gp of expensive magical reagents and such? If powdered gemstones work, then powdered precious metal should work such as well. spending gold directly instead of 'expensive reagents' is just subbing one for the other. The raw materials to make an item have top limits, and where do all those extra gems and jewels go?
Things like making holy water are specifically called out as consuming the silver involved in making them, so actually consuming/using up the precious metals and gemstones is a more valid interpretation of actually buying 100k worth of random stuff, and burning xp and tying it to said precious metal is also valid. If it happens for spells and alchemy, it should happen for magic items.
But, ymmv, it's just how I assume gold inflation is controlled in a magical world. Actual 'money' is likely symbolic and doesn't have more than symbolic value, as if its truly valuable, it's going to get Burned away.

 

[James Gasik]

My point on this comes from extremely high-end items, and a comment in the Forgotten Realms that components consumed in making magic items and spells are actually taken by the gods and inserted back into the ecology to be recycled and used again.
What exactly IS 100,000 gp of expensive magical reagents and such? If powdered gemstones work, then powdered precious metal should work such as well. spending gold directly instead of 'expensive reagents' is just subbing one for the other. The raw materials to make an item have top limits, and where do all those extra gems and jewels go?
Things like making holy water are specifically called out as consuming the silver involved in making them, so actually consuming/using up the precious metals and gemstones is a more valid interpretation of actually buying 100k worth of random stuff, and burning xp and tying it to said precious metal is also valid. If it happens for spells and alchemy, it should happen for magic items.
But, ymmv, it's just how I assume gold inflation is controlled in a magical world. Actual 'money' is likely symbolic and doesn't have more than symbolic value, as if its truly valuable, it's going to get Burned away.

Yes, if we have to invoke "gods" to explain why there's no shortage of 100 gp pearls, silver, and diamonds with spells consuming them like crazy, we should probably stop worrying about it. : )

 

[tetrasodium]

My point on this comes from extremely high-end items, and a comment in the Forgotten Realms that components consumed in making magic items and spells are actually taken by the gods and inserted back into the ecology to be recycled and used again.
What exactly IS 100,000 gp of expensive magical reagents and such? If powdered gemstones work, then powdered precious metal should work such as well. spending gold directly instead of 'expensive reagents' is just subbing one for the other. The raw materials to make an item have top limits, and where do all those extra gems and jewels go?
Things like making holy water are specifically called out as consuming the silver involved in making them, so actually consuming/using up the precious metals and gemstones is a more valid interpretation of actually buying 100k worth of random stuff, and burning xp and tying it to said precious metal is also valid. If it happens for spells and alchemy, it should happen for magic items.
But, ymmv, it's just how I assume gold inflation is controlled in a magical world. Actual 'money' is likely symbolic and doesn't have more than symbolic value, as if its truly valuable, it's going to get Burned away.

I see your logic... but I think that's stretching past plausibility. The way I've usually seen fiction plausibly avoid questions of weimar republic levels of hyperinflation by switching from "mortal" currencies like copper/silver/gold at some point to things like mana & spirit stones then improved versions of them that powerful types somehow absorb to help fuel their advancement. While that might not be a perfect (or even good) fit for a lot of d/d settings it does a nice job of ensuring that characters continue encountering situations where they simply lack the funds to know where to look for $thing when appropriate & never really feel like they can better solve problems by buying the town (or whatever) instead of adventuring to solve the problem.

D&D once kinda did similar in how you needed to spend gold that usually got spent on carousing or investing in things like building keeps/bridges/etc

 

[Starfox]

About the economy of magic item creation.
In my 4E campaign, one of the players decided they would accept having their main attack item being one point below the expected value for their level - this was in the 20-25 level range. The money saved made them extremely rich. Building their own palace and spa was peanuts. Rituals were not quite peanuts, but still cheap - that spa was the result of a magic ritual, situated high in the mountains!