Sean K Reynolds wrote:
tyrfing wrote:
Perhaps this has been answered above although I have not seen it.
In the Core Rulebook, magic items which have a purchase price of the Base Value or less have a flat 75% availability, while the rolled items must be more expensive than that. This does make some sense, in that you wouldn't want to roll a bunch of cheap items, because they're already (almost) certainly available.
In Ultimate Campaign however, the Base Value is a cap on the price of items available. This also makes some sort of sense, as otherwise you get the (small) possibility that a thorp of 20 people has a Harp of Charming (7,500 gp) available for sale.
Which is it? Does Base Value mean different things for player-ruled settlements as opposed to ones that the party wanders through during adventures? How do we mesh these two? The Ultimate Campaign book also (p. 212) repeats the "There is a 75% chance that any item of that value or lower can be found for sale in the settlement with little effort." sentence, so I'm not sure why we would bother to generate the other items - is it to say "these items are guaranteed to be for sale and if you want other items, there's a good chance that they will also be available, but nothing above the Base Value"?
The Core Rulebook system is a generic, low-detail system for randomly determining if and what items are available in a settlement the GM hasn't planned out.
The Ultimate Campaign system is a specific, high-detail system for determining what items cannot be found or may be found in a settlement the PCs built or control.
The nature of the settlement determines which system you should use. In other words, if you wander into a neighboring land and go magic item shopping, and the GM hasn't planned out what items are in that settlement, use the Core Rulebook system. If you return home and are doing your kingdom phases and want to see what items pop up in your settlement's available magic item slots, use the Ultimate Campaign system.
I might be missing something here, but this means that no magic item available in a PC-run kingdom will ever have a purchase price over 16k. A PC who wants to buy a more expensive item has to:
1. Commission one (assuming you can find someone capable) and wait.
2. Pop over to Absalom (if you're purchasing 16k+ items I assume you have access to teleport) and check out the lists every once in a while (monthly?).
3. Get the item creation feats (or persuade someone in the party to do so) and do it yourself.
Does this sum things up correctly?
I guess there is an advantage to having the Base Price be a cap - if you don't like the items, you can only buy them yourself, so this at least puts a cap on the amount you have to spend.
Er - I just thought of something. Does the 75% availability rule still apply? Or are the items generated in the slots all the items that are available in that settlement?
