In Defense of the Magic Shop

It's no secret that I hate 'low magic campaigns'. Whether you intend it or not, when you say "I'd really like a game with fewer magic items in it, so we could put more of an emphasis on mundane equipment and make the items you get feel more special" all I hear is "I'd really like a game where I give you way, way less reward for your efforts, so we can fuck up the game's balance, and make the PCs smile through clenched teeth and strained expressions while I do whatever I want." I can't help it, I feel the idea is inherently flawed. Some people might consider a 'compromise' of insisting that they'll be using a normal amount of magic items, but there won't be any shops who buy or sell magic items.

Let me be clear, I hate that more than I hate the idea of a low magic game.

One day I'm going to buckle down, grit my teeth and try to write out some advice for getting that low magic feel without screwing up your game's balance or the PC's feeling of reward, but today is not that day. Today I'm going to defend the idea of the good old Magic Item Shop which is much maligned and often for damn good reasons.

The reason being of course is that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I don't hold to the idea that a farmer only makes a few copper a month, but they certainly don't make much money. Plenty of tradesman make several gold a day and spellcasting services or alchemist items can bring home heaping handfuls of bacon, but the magic item creator? You sell ONE +1 dagger and you could probably retire for life, right? Add in the fact that most people feel skilled spellcasters are few and far between and a shop that sells or buys items that go for hundreds of thousands of gold doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. I feel you, I do, but let me try to debunk the two major reasons.

Pathfinder really helped me out with the 'rarity' problem. In the core rulebook there's a feat called Master Craftsman that lets 'normal' people take and use magic item creation feats. The 'new' idea that you can get magic weapons from the blacksmith, magic hats from the haberdasher, and magic jewelry from the jeweler sure does go a long way toward justifying the idea that magic items would be for sale. After all, if you were an enterprising blacksmith, what would YOU try to learn to hone your craft? Where would you put YOUR feats? Even if you hate the idea of Master Craftsman and hope it dies, you can't deny that learning to enchanting items is a natural progression in a society that includes the concept. Even a craftsman who is too inept to enchant is served well by hiring or partnering with someone who can.

Let me walk through a little object lesson for both our sakes. To take a single item crafter feat, our craftsman must be a level 7 expert. Let's assume they're the best reasonable craftsmen they can be, so their INT is 14, and their feats include Skill Focus, Master Craftsman, and a single item creation feat. That would make their Crafting check +14(INT +2, Ranks +7, Skill Focus +3, Master Craftsman +2). If they've got an apprentice who can reliably Assist them, that means +16. If they take a ten each day, that means they can create a shortsword in two days, or roughly 16 hours. The same person would take a little less than three weeks to make a chain shirt. In contrast, enchanting that chain shirt as +1 would take...one day. One whole day. You know what? Let me get back to what this means in my closing paragraph, my skull's starting to hurt.

But, it is a lot of gold, right? It is. Our boy the blacksmith up in my example could retire off selling one or two +1 longswords. Only, if you replace enchanted items with expensive services or technology and blacksmiths with real world entrepreneurs, how often does that REALLY happen? How often does someone make or do one thing then retire? I can't say it happens very much at all, and it's for two reasons. One is that someone who's plying a trade creating things is doing so for the craft and not solely for the money more often than not. This is especially true in a fantasy society where picking up a sword and running off to hunt for Pirate Lich treasure is on the table. Even if that's NOT true and they ARE only in it for the money...nobody's in business for a LITTLE bit of money. Tastes grow expensive and exotic, and what profit that's not being pushed into raw materials for new items is likely going to a lifestyle that requires the professional in question to keep plying their trade.

So that's the logical argument, but running a game really has nothing to do with logic(Har Har Har). So what's my other reason? Let's run a few more numbers and hopefully I can make my point. Pathfinder Core says that the average party of four level 1 adventurers are going to get 100 XP and 65 gold per (CR 1) encounter, meaning on average they're going to have 20 encounters by level 2 and a grand total of 1300 gold each. The book says you use gold budget to determine magic items in the hoard and says it should be used with 'good common sense' (sidenote, that line legit made me laugh.).
So assuming a ridiculous 50% of the budget is gold and valuables, the staple of adventuring, they've got 650 gold. So far this seems okay, right? The book says 20 CR 2 encounters will get them to level 3, and that'll shape up to be 2,750g, or another 1,375 in gold. They've got 2,000 gold in change now. You know what? I think I've proven the 'character wealth by level' chart is scary accurate, so assuming that FIFTY PERCENT of your treasure has been magic items by level 10 our adventurer is going to have 31 thousand gold laying around.

What are they spending it on? There are no magic item shops, remember? I urge you to go open any silly equipment book you can find and look for mundane items that'll total up 31,000. I'll wait. Basically, Either they're buying 31 water clocks, or someone in the group is taking Item Crafting Feats to circumvent you entirely and end up with MORE magic items than an average group who had access to item shops. It did the opposite of what you wanted to happen.

So what did we learn today? Well, I learned that the item crafting rules are completely absurd and you should either handwave crafting time or make 'weekly' skill checks count as daily. We learned that it and the magic item creation rules were probably designed by two people who didn't even talk, and all of this stuff is best handled by creating 'downtime' portions of time instead of tracking precisely how long it takes. We also learned how removing magic item shops creates a weird little game of chicken in your PNP that probably ends in the opposite of what you intended. The thing is, players will naturally want control over their magic items. What was something mysterious and cool in earlier editions is now an integral part of building your character, and taking any amount of control away from that is likely to cause problems. It could be just a ridiculous glut of gold sitting on the player's sheets and being forgotten, or it could be the party wizard getting 'fed up' and working within the rules to accomplish what the PCs wanted in the first place: Control over their gear.

P.S. While writing this I found that Pathfinder has rules on making magic item purchases based on the size of settlement you're in. Adhering to these rules strictly instead of my usual handwaving or 'fast and loose' decisions on availability sounds like a good 'compromise', though their random rolling nature could still see some breakdown at level 15 or higher. I'll close this out saying this. To everyone who thinks you shouldn't be able to buy magic items at all? The developer's intentions are on my side, not yours.