Maybe there's something obvious I'm missing...
The Core Rulebook has "Table 15-1: Available Magic Items" on page 461, where you roll d100 to determine how many of each classification of magic item -- Minor, Medium, or Major -- can be found within its shops.
But if I cross-reference to Ultimate Equipment, it has further subdivided these categories to "Lesser" and "Greater" for each category.
I would like to use Ultimate Equipment to not just create treasure hoards, but also to fill my towns' magic shops, but I need the equivalent of Table 15-1 so that it gives me the chances of finding "Lesser Minor", "Greater Minor", and so on...
For now, I guess I'll just roll one of the basic 3 categories, then roll a d6 and if it shows a 5 or 6 then it becomes a "greater" item within that category. But that's clunkier than I would like.
That is exactly how I did it. Same odds too, heh. I couldn't find anything that described the probability of greater vs lesser when dealing wtih the minor/medium/major tables from other books. 1 in 3 being major seemed fair enough.
It did result in a traveling merchant offering a Staff Of Power for sale. The wizard was all but frothing at the mouth to betray his alignment (NG) and steal the thing, heh. Luckily the rest of the party figured any merchant with a staff of power for sale is probably capable of defending himself from some level 7 adventurers.
I would just jettison the CRB system. It didn't work well ever, and generates huge headaches.
The majority of GMs simply populate shops however they desire. It should be a simple matter to choose an "encounter level" for a settlement and do a simple series of rolls to get a good picture of what's on sale there.
When in doubt, use the GP Limit as a budget to simply buy up treasure.
I also randomly roll for lesser/greater. I wrote a program to do it for me, though, so it's not a big deal. I would like to make it publicly available at some point, but I'm dragging my feet on it. I need to finish a couple features before it's truly ready. (edit: the program does all the work, not just the lesser/greater thing...)
And yes, the CRB system is... suboptimal. If one were to actually follow it, the number of d100s you have to roll is ridiculous. In particular, the rule about rerolling if an item falls under a settlement's base value is problematic. This happens alarmingly frequently, so that's a lot of rolls for items that get rejected. There's almost no point in rolling a potion for a large city. Bleh. Some re-tuning of the tables would be nice, but I don't know of anyone who's done that.
Edit: I use equal chance of lesser/greater.
This is just begging for someone to program a way to deal with all the rolling involved. But there's so many tables to put in there, even before Ultimate Equipment came out, that I'm not surprised no one tried to do it yet.
That said, I kinda LIKE the process of rolling through tables to some extent. But I agree with Evil Lincoln that it's suboptimal. I don't see the point of having values for minor items, if the town's base value is higher than most minor items anyway. And I figure that once a town is big enough, you will have dealers with connections who can order items for you even if they don't have them immediately on stock.
I plan to use the tables for smaller settlements and towns, with some GM discretion (planting some optimal items for certain PCs who are lacking, for example).
As for my original request, I'm inclined to create my own "greater/lesser" table myself. I would need to do some math to see if the 2:1 ratio between lesser and greater averages out...
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The Rot Grub, I have programmed this, though I'm not sure the thing is ready to make public yet. I use the CRB tables for settlements for the number of minor/medium/major items, and base value, and then more CRB tables (or GMG?) for the item types. I then use my arbitrary solution of 50% lesser, 50% greater to bridge between CRB and UE (and in the case of minor slotless wondrous items, I use either 33% least/33% lesser/34 greater% , or perhaps 25% least/25% lesser/25% greater, not sure). Then, once "I" know how many items of each "strength" are needed, I generate them. Its usable in its current state generating items using Ultimate Equipment tables (edit: yep, I did up all what, seventy some-odd tables?), but at present it's just a console program, and it doesn't reroll items that fall below base value. (edit: there is an advantage in it being a console program, since I included a "roll manually" option, where you can roll dice and tap in the numbers if you'd rather use dice than a pseudorandom number generator)
If there's interest in it, I'll stop dragging my feet and finish it! This is technically not in the thread's topic, and for that I apologize, but if anyone's interested in my finishing this, please let me know (PM or favorite this post, maybe, as not to clutter the thread?) -- I'll get it going with a simple web interface and start a thread on it. If I know someone wants this, it's more likely I'll get going on it. :P
If this thread ever figures out what the ratio should be, I'll switch to that, or just make it an option or something.
Something I picked up on while working on my item generator:
I think some new tables, or some rule alterations, are in order. The usual random generation method in the CRB is very "wild", and probably doesn't suffer from this problem (it suffers from others), but going from the CRB to UE cannot correctly work, unless some sort of correction is made. Now, it is apparently not a design goal of UE to be connected to settlements, so it's not really a fault of UE per se, but there is still at least a little demand for some sort of bridging solution.
For example, let's say we look at a large city, and it tells us to generate 4d4 minor items. I've analyzed the possible results from the UE generation tables, and that right away means that any armor, potion, ring, scroll, wand, or wondrous item that is in the "minor" category will get discarded due to falling below a settlement's base value. That means only weapons can pass through the filter, if they are +2 modified bonus equivalent, since the +2 cost is 8000 gp (before item cost and masterwork cost), which is a large city's base value. A +1 weapon could potentially pass the threshold if it were made of a special material, but that is probably rarer than a +2 weapon.
That's just the standard settlements. If you look at a specific city like Riddleport, which has a 30k gp base value (according to the Varisia Player Companion), that wipes out a whole slew of options. The unwary dice roller might not immediately realize they would roll themselves into oblivion before they randomly rolled a minor item that exceeded 30k. The number of times one has to roll for items is absurdly high as it is (it's mostly unavoidable, but the assessment is still valid).
One method is to ignore the "reroll if worth less than base value" rule, but the result of that is low-value items. Some GMs might like that, and perhaps one way of adjusting (slightly) would be to double the number of dice rolled for determining how many minor/medium/major items to generate. But I think we could do better.
I think augmenting the Item Type table would be the answer, and I have an idea of how it would look, but deciding how to populate the table is probably a matter well suited for folks well-versed in statistics. I am not, but I might give it a try.