Hello, I am confused about the price to buy and sell magic items in a city. They all have a Base Value and a Purchase Limit. The Base Value refers to the availability of the object (75%) if the price is less than that amount, and the Purchase Limit is the maximum that a store can spend on purchasing items.
Kaer Maga, has these data:
- Base Value: 7500 gp
- Purchase Limit: 57000 gp
It doesn't make sense that a PC can sell an item for 57000gp but can't buy something for more than 7500gp.
And what happens if they want to buy any item by 15000gp?
Can you explain how you do it?
Thank you.
It's not unreasonable that a city would have some rich guys with lots of gold who'd be willing to buy your priceless magic items for a fair price, but which doesn't have a lot of expensive magic items readily for sale.
If the players want to buy a specific item that is beyond the limit you could do one of the following:
* Say no.
* Give them a small percentage chance of finding one.
* Allow them to order it if they're willing to wait, and someone will craft one or deliver it after a couple of weeks.
* Sell them a scroll of Teleport to travel to a city where they do have that item.
There are enough funds sitting in enough wealthy people's hands that if you can prove the general use of a magic item, someone will buy it even if just to resell it to someone who actually wants it.
On the other hand, even though you just brought some 57,000gp item to be sold, you didn't bring every possible item less than 57,000gp to suddenly enter the market. That's where base value comes in. It's smaller amount of money because there's some nebulous threshold where *most* (see 75% chance of availability) items of that value or less are available. That doesn't mean that there aren't more valuable items available (see above with the randomly generated items) but also a player can commission a specific item that they want, or even upgrades to their existing items, but they likely will need to wait for an available crafter, and then for that crafter to craft it for them if they even can.
I'm running Curse of the Crimson Throne, and the players have finished ScarWall. With all the treasures and items they have obtained, they can sell them for 500,000 gp.
Now they want to buy magic items of 90.000 gp, but in Kaer Maga or Korvosa, the base value is 7500 or 12000.
They have a lot of money and they won't be able to spend it.
The purchase limit is what is available for the PC’s to purchase. What it is trying to simulate is the idea that extremely expensive items will not be available in small towns or villages. This is more about basic economics than it is about the rules. The rules are to give a GM a rough idea of what can be found in a particular town.
The rules are designed to give an idea on what can be easily obtained. Anything outside this range is going to be up to the GM. Really rare or unique items should always be difficult or impossible to purchase. The chances of finding an artifact in a store are about the same as finding the Mona-Lisa for sale in a Goodwill store. The limits also factor in what the locals can afford. If you tried to sell the Mona-Lisa at in small-town chances are no one is going to be able to afford it.
If you find a really valuable item, chances are you are going to need to go to a large city to get its full value. Likewise purchasing a valuable item might require a trip.
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Ok so the easiest way I've found to think about it is available wealth vs supply and demand. The 75% of 7,500 GP items in Kaer Maga represent the cities buying and selling of magical items. You walk around town and there's a 75% chance you'll say find a ring of eloquence on some shopkeeps shelf because people are buying and selling regularly items worth 1,750 GP. Now you want to sell that ring of X-Ray vision you found you'll have no trouble finding a rich collector willing to spend 25,000 GP to buy it for you but the city isn't big enough and wealthy enough for them to resell it easily. So as the above poster said these items aren't 75% role instead they require the party to make connections, to get in touch with the thieve's network and deal with that creature stalking the sewers and rescue some members to gain access to their special stock.
Basically the rules on item generation are there to limit what is readily available to the players and instead require some effort on their part to get more powerful items. Kill an enemy, go to a larger city, roleplay finding and gaining access to restricted areas and so on.
They have a lot of money and they won't be able to spend it.
They can if you want them to. Come up with a narrative device to explain it, like a trader who has contact with a powerful djinn who might be able to provide these items. Then check what they want to buy and decide if it's OK or game-breaking. If it's game-breaking, it's not available.
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Bearing in mind this is a very high level abstraction meant for easily running a campaign and in no way represents the actual functioning of an economy…
Base value represents inventory in stock.
Purchase limit represents funds available to expand that inventory.
Kaer Maga might have hundreds or even thousands of items on hand that cost less than 7500 gp. Along with a few more random medium and major items. But their cash on hand to buy an item from an adventurer is only 57,000 gp.
I enforced the purchasing limits while running CotCT and was happy with the results. Most PCs spread their wealth around rather than buying one huge item, but those who are desperate and determined can hire a spellcaster to greater teleport them to a metropolis. This takes time and money, but it accurately reflects the idea that different cities have different markets, and avoids the “I bought a +5 longsword at the village general store!” problem.
PCs could order/sell something very expensive through a contact and it could be imported/exported from Cheliax or Druma... which will take a significant amount of time.
You could pay a bit extra to have things teleported in - spellcasting services are cheap compared to the cost of buying a 50,000gp sword.
Other considerations that may invalidate the "just get it amazon delivery'd to me" is that there are very few people who can cast spells like sending to even establish the contact needed to show interest in purchasing an item and those people are very unlikely to be willing to waste their time and energy even for a little coin to degrade themselves as not even the glorified uber-eats driver, but the uber-eats app itself. Even if you somehow can get your message across, there's certainly some teamster guilds that will be pretty angry when this 50,000gp worth of goods was not transported through them but as a quick work around; the pathfinder economy is already janked up enough with tons of neerdowell "adventurers" who barely do more good than harm hoarding 50-80% of the local wealth, so they can make a pretty good argument about recirculation of wealth back into the populace being very important to not be circumventable (and that is also a very well documented-to-be-understood economic theory at the time). It is at least more tolerable if you are able to teleport to the city yourself, and it's not like you won't be paying for housing and food and other services while you hash out your deal, so they can't as easily get mad at you for that.
But even if we were to assume there's a black market for high level magic items being delivered globally by some sinister cabal of illuminati wizards controlling the supply of masterwork iron daggers, we still have the costs to contend with. Maybe you can find a level 13+ wizard who learned Greater Teleport and doesn't mind you wasting his time if you're lucky, but more likely you'll find the semi-successful college dropout that got cold feet in the adventuring game after half his party got wiped, that just knows sending. (We'll ignore clerics because I can envision none of them trying to help you buy things with their powerful magic, *except Abadar clerics* who will absolutely charge you full price and upsell you worse than an Asmodean offering insurance on your imp.)
The cost of a 5th level CL 9 sending is 25*5*9=1,125gp. That's for one 25 word sentence forward and back from some receiver that the wizard has to know the existence of btw in this other major city, or at least as an underhanded merchant guild (though that gets us back into the "why is the guild letting themselves be undercut" debate). I know we may in a session just go "hey GM, I wanna buy this, can I?" -- "Yeah, go ahead." but the discussions in character would be nowhere near that simple. Not only do you need to in detail explain the magic item that you want to acquire's abilities, in case it's maybe called something different, you need to then workout the price even if it just works out to be the listed price because your character doesn't have some online encyclopedia of what every item costs, and then you need to workout how you're actually getting the money to this underground merchant; and that's assuming you don't have to get the item ordered because it already exists. Oh and did I mention that if you get through most or all of this process and you find out they don't have the item or they don't like your underhanded methods of getting your magic item nd pull out, you're going to have to start all over again.
Even if you get lucky, and we assume it takes only 5 castings of sending for each of the three mandatory steps of the negotiation, that's 16,875gp of finder's fees you just paid to a wizard 9 (who by the way is only supposed to have 10,050gp of wealth as a heroic NPC) before we even get to any negotiating fees or shipping and handling costs.
Maybe you'll say, "fine, I'll hold out for a wizard with teleport", which you're not getting a wizard who will just wait in the hotel for you, so you are paying for their ride back home and then their trip to pick you up plus the ride back. If you splurge on greater teleport so you don't run the risk of error (or that your wizard isn't as well traveled as they say they are), you can only have to pay for 4 castings (there, back, pick up and back again), but that's still 25*7*13=2,275gp or 9,100gp all in. If you pay for the cheaper option, well you probably want some assurance that A, your wizard will arrive in their destination, B they want assurance they can get back home, and C they can get back on time to take you back to your quest. We'll just go with 7 castings (one possibly off target casting to destination but they don't care so much about that; two castings (1 + insurance) to get the wizard back home while you deal, 2 (1 + insurance) castings to get the wizard on target to your city of dealings, and then 2 (man insurance is a b~@%$) to get you back home with your new toy. Now, granted, you are down significantly in cost over the sendings, but that's still a whopping 7,875gp just in taxi fees that can still in very unlucky circumstances put you very unpreparedly in danger. Oops, your wizard accidentally teleported you not into the underground thieves guild, but instead into the cistern full of otyughs and other evil bandits and brigands.
It doesn't make sense that a PC can sell an item for 57000gp but can't buy something for more than 7500gp.
It makes a lot of sense, actually. It is bad business practise to stock up on merchandise that a store will have a hard time selling, and thus a small town won't offer stuff that no one can or does buy on a somewhat regular basis. Meanwhile, the profit margin from buying an expesive magic item at half price form an adventurer and then selling it in a larger city at full price is significant, and thus it makes sense that that merchants would want to do that, limited to what funds they can aquire.
The system only really works if there's either something like a merchant guild (where they can pool together their aviable cash), or a bank of sorts (where the merchant can take on a loan to buy the magic item with cash he doesn't have), but for most settings that works out fine.
It doesn't make sense that a PC can sell an item for 57000gp but can't buy something for more than 7500gp.It makes a lot of sense, actually. It is bad business practise to stock up on merchandise that a store will have a hard time selling, and thus a small town won't offer stuff that no one can or does buy on a somewhat regular basis. Meanwhile, the profit margin from buying an expesive magic item at half price form an adventurer and then selling it in a larger city at full price is significant, and thus it makes sense that that merchants would want to do that, limited to what funds they can aquire.
The system only really works if there's either something like a merchant guild (where they can pool together their aviable cash), or a bank of sorts (where the merchant can take on a loan to buy the magic item with cash he doesn't have), but for most settings that works out fine.
Get your low interest* business loans today at Bank of Abadar!
*25% APR subject to good tax standing.
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It doesn't make sense that a PC can sell an item for 57000gp but can't buy something for more than 7500gp.It makes a lot of sense, actually. It is bad business practise to stock up on merchandise that a store will have a hard time selling, and thus a small town won't offer stuff that no one can or does buy on a somewhat regular basis. Meanwhile, the profit margin from buying an expesive magic item at half price form an adventurer and then selling it in a larger city at full price is significant, and thus it makes sense that that merchants would want to do that, limited to what funds they can aquire.
The system only really works if there's either something like a merchant guild (where they can pool together their aviable cash), or a bank of sorts (where the merchant can take on a loan to buy the magic item with cash he doesn't have), but for most settings that works out fine.
Get your low interest* business loans today at Bank of Abadar!
*25% APR subject to good tax standing.
I'm reading a series currently (The calamitous Bob) where a banking guild tries to put the squeeze on the main character when the new kingdom they've set up is still apparently vulnerable to get a lot of favorable terms for them that will harm it. Her response is to have her adopted daughter (a dragon) set up her own bank with reasonable rates and lending plus a firm flaming policy on those who try to cheat it.
Something tells me putting a dragon in charge of a bank is going to lead to a very high probability of a run on the bank as soon as anyone wants to make a withdrawal...
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Something tells me putting a dragon in charge of a bank is going to lead to a very high probability of a run on the bank as soon as anyone wants to make a withdrawal...
She has her own money funding it and has worked out all the costs to avoid risk. She just likes the idea of giving humans a small part of her gold in return for them working hard to pay her back more gold. She is also the adopted daughter of the ruler of the kingdom who has in the past defeated a neighbouring royal prince then poured gold down his throat as punishment for his actions. Only time she was ever afraid of her mother. So I doubt anyone is really going to try any shady manipulations any time soon.
I was more implying the dragon won't give up what they might now see as their hoard that is actually the lawful deposits of the citizens of said kingdom.