So there should be no low magic settings? Every world should be like Eberron? There should be level 20 casters in every town, and you should be able to buy magic spells for 1 copper per level?

What, exactly, is it that you want instead?

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So there should be no low magic settings? Every world should be like Eberron? There should be level 20 casters in every town, and you should be able to buy magic spells for 1 copper per level?

What, exactly, is it that you want instead?

It's not low magic is my point, you would still need to craft your campaign as low magic by changing almost everything. The rules are  just "saying" that its low magic in contrary to every piece of evidence that would show otherwise. "Hello characters, there is magic everywhere... but actually its super rare, except that you have it.. but yours wouldnt be valuable.. because...."

This is not a fight about editions btw, if I was going to pick out things that annoy me about 5e this wouldn't be at the top. I just thought it was the weirdest thing I found in passing. I believe it shows a lack of consistency, just to throw arbitrary restrictions at players, in an attempt to restrict power creep if I had to guess. 

My group switched systems to 5e after well over a decade of playing Pathfinder. I’ve been rather surprised by how comparatively little use there is for wealth in 5e. There’s not much need to purchase or craft the next magic item needed to occupy the power band the way you pretty much have to in PF but the gold from adventuring still accumulates fairly steadily. There’s hardly anything for my sorcerer to spend her gold on beyond healing potions and living expenses, to the point where she visits fancy restaurants, stays in the most expensive accommodations and freely hands out fat stacks of gold to individuals and causes she deems worthy. I have given away more gold in 7 levels than I have spent on my character.

OTOH, you’ve hinted at difficulty in financing your group’s needs so I’m curious why you have such a need when my group is basically swimming in gold. What is it you need to buy or where are you spending your gold that you need to offer discount spell services to generate even more wealth over and above what you normally generate through adventuring? Granted I’ve never played a wizard so maybe I just don’t grasp how costly it is to grow a spellbook. Is it that expensive?? Is there something else I’m missing?

It's not low magic is my point, you would still need to craft your campaign as low magic by changing almost everything. The rules are  just "saying" that its low magic in contrary to every piece of evidence that would show otherwise. "Hello characters, there is magic everywhere... but actually its super rare, except that you have it.. but yours wouldnt be valuable.. because...."

But there isn't magic everywhere if it's a low magic world.

And that wasn't your original argument. Your original argument was, in a low magic world, a high level magic-using PC would not need to bother adventuring when he/she could just get rich by selling magical services. Why go adventuring when I can make hundreds of GP casting spells for people?" was your original premise. This is going to be true in any low-magic world. Or heck any world that isn't super-high magic.

Ultimately we have to make some concessions to the fact that we are playing a game about adventurers. Although it might be possible for your 5th level mage to sit there in town selling level 3 spells each week to rich nobles and get fat and happy off the profits, in the normal course of D&D play, we make up characters for whom such a life of ease and plenty would not be appealing. If you've made a character who would *rather* sit at home casting identify over and over again for profit to the real adventurers, as a DM, I'd say "that sounds like an NPC to me... make up a character with a different personality."

If the party has any magic at all, there is magic everywhere the party is. 

This is true of any RPG, and any narrative that has protagonists. Which is basically all of them. The protagonists of nearly every story ever written, have some sort of abilities not generally found in the common population -- whether it is intense curiosity to the point of risking your own sanity (Lovecraft), or superhuman powers and abilities (Avengers, Justice League), unbelievable strength and fighting skill (Conan), or magic (D&D, Fantasy in general). Because the Avengers have superpowers, "there are superpowers everywhere the Avengers are."

So... what is your point here? That protagonists in fantasy stories have more access to magic than the general population. Yeah... so?

I was looking at the crafting rules for non-magical items and I noticed that it was possible to kind of reverse engineer them to figure time, production costs, and profits for a given sale price.  You started out with the asking price.  You assume the player needs to spend 2 gold per day, because that's what a Skilled Hireling would get, and you need to pay half the costs of the materials as the production cost.  The DM has to figure out what those are.  You figure out how many weeks are needed to make the item once you know what it costs to make it.  Anything over what it costs is your profit.  If you feel the need, you can take a month's worth of Lifestyle cost for a given lifestyle to figure out how much cash someone would have on hand might have.  Obviously, people could raise more, and a group could all chip in, so it's not much of a problem if you've got wealthy people around to sell to, so it's only if you're looking for a quick sale, or if you want to figure out how many days, weeks, or months it would take for them to come up with the cash.

What a magic item ought to cost is something you could use resources like the Sane Magical Item Prices Guide, or whatever.  As for spell services to just get a spell cast, that ought to be exactly the same as making a scroll of the spell is, because it's essentially what you're doing, you're selling scrolls and using them yourself to cast them.  It might also work to use the price it takes to write a new spell into your spellbook.  For Divine spells, it's a bit tougher, so what you really need to know is what the Deity in question thinks of you selling the things they granted you.  Some might not be all that pleased, but the god of Merchants ought to love it.

The use for magic an active adventurer getting into trouble on a near-daily basis has is very different from a rich noble’s who’s biggest risks include undercooked chicken or a prospective heir trying to knock them off before their time. I’ve never bought a new car, always second-hand ones because I don’t drive a lot. My brother drives at least 80k km every year, I can’t recall him ever not buying a new (and more luxurious than mine) car. The value we put on a car is very different. Magic in D&D is no different. Forget what people can afford for a sec, look at what they want and how badly they want it - for the average upstanding citizen living a boring and uneventful life, magic’s just not something they value highly.

The apparent contradiction between magic being expensive when you want to acquire it and cheap when you want to sell it largely doesn’t exist. Magic for sale is often a bespoke business. 

I tried a campaign where magic was much more common. Humanoid groups frequently had shaman and warlocks with low level spells. Educated individuals in cities or wise folk in villages might know the odd cantrip. We all thought it would be a good idea.

It was deadly. We abandoned the idea because if the n.p.cs & monsters were allowed to act intelligently they would constantly overwhelm adventurers. The survival rate of characters was ridiculously low.

However arbitrarily and illogically the rules achieve it, restricting the amount of magic used by anyone other than player characters is necessary. Thus selling magic to the general populace has to be restricted.

Although it might be possible for your 5th level mage to sit there in town selling level 3 spells each week to rich nobles and get fat and happy off the profits

Is it, though? A wizard is basically a walking WMD. You'd get swept into local politics because everyone wants you on their side. You'd face assassination attempts from those who want to get rid of a possible threat. You'd be hired to perform assassinations yourself. This could still be an adventure, just one that comes to you.

Although yeah, my first reaction when someone would ask to do that would be, "ok, you do that and grow old peacefully and die in a comfortable bed at a ripe old age. Now can we play D&D?"

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Although it might be possible for your 5th level mage to sit there in town selling level 3 spells each week to rich nobles and get fat and happy off the profits

Is it, though? A wizard is basically a walking WMD. You'd get swept into local politics because everyone wants you on their side. You'd face assassination attempts from those who want to get rid of a possible threat. You'd be hired to perform assassinations yourself. This could still be an adventure, just one that comes to you.

Although yeah, my first reaction when someone would ask to do that would be, "ok, you do that and grow old peacefully and die in a comfortable bed at a ripe old age. Now can we play D&D?"

 

Not sure about WMD. At 5th level, you are a cannon that can fire a maximum of one shell per day at a fraction of the distance. Flashy but not likely enough to turn the tide of a battle of any real scale. Important and useful, yes, but mass destruction? Not so much.

How aware is the regular population of the limitations of spellcasters? I'm not asking as a veiled counterargument, I genuinely want to know how other DMs handle this. And not necessarily about the flashy stuff either, that's more for show - it's more the witches killing babies in the womb and making men's crowning jewels shrivel up superstitions, or the red priestess from Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones being able to send an unstoppable shadow assassin, or necromancers raising an army of the dead, etc. We know what casters can  (and more importantly can't) do because we have metagame information on classes and spell lists, but I imagine that for most non-casters in a setting casters my appear extremely dangerous. 

"How aware is the regular population of the limitations of spellcasters?"  It's the things we don't know that are the most scary.

In my game, people know little about magic.  It's very rare.  What they know is that casters speak, wave their arms around or wiggle their fingers, and sometimes they have some object they wave around.

So the way that works out is that the moment someone starts speaking in a language they don't understand, they get scared.  The may or may not run.  if the same person is doing the Somatic component, it's almost certain to case a panic, and if they are also carrying a staff, they will be almost certain that it's a spell being cast, and they have no way of knowing what it might be.

In my game, there are laws about spells, who can cast them, where, and when.  You can be arrested for violating the law.  You will have a trial, and if you get a good lawyer, you'll get out of it.

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It's a permanent affect.  That adds up over time.

 That was really my point -  for wealthy families or businesses it pays for itself over time so while it is expensive it’s a worthwhile expense. Same thing for adventurers a human fighter with a helmet could have one embedded in the helmet with a cap on a pivot so when he needs it he has it and when he doesn’t it’s covered. Never has to buy or carry torches again. Granted torches are very cheap in cost but their encumberance is hefty especially when you realize you need a new one every hour. 

 

It is literally an everburning flame though. That would make carrying it as an adventurer much trickier than carrying a conventional torch.

 0not really - while it looks like a flame and gives off light like a torch flame it gives off no heat and doesn't use oxygen. so a fitted cap in a helmet would work fine - when opened the flame would spring forth and when closed the flame would be enclosed and "burning" but no heat woud be given off to harm the wearer and it wouldn't go out - heck it could even be used underwater technically. think of it more like the "flame tip" electric candles folks often put out at Xmas.

keep in mind that low magic doesn't mean no magic.  If you go to Blackstaff tower in Waterdeep do you expect to see torches or continual flames? Even a place like the Yawning Portal may have replaced their torches with continual flames and the only way you would realize it is if you were paying attention all night and realized that no one had changed the torches (lasting 1 hour) over the several hours you had been there. since most folks in the place are focused elsewhere they will never notice unless maybe they grab a torch off the wall and try to burn a Troll coming up from below with it and it does nothing, most adventuring magic has no real use in mundane life. Adventuring magic is rare because adventurers are rare. Realistically we (adventurers) make up no more than 1-5% of the population. Where does our magic come from? typically we find it in the dungeons/ruins/etc we explore or off other adventurers or BBEGs that took it off earlier adventurers that tried to explore the place. look closely at the lore descriptions of some of the great magical weapons like the Moonblades and the Leaders blades of Myth Drannor - years of time and great expense by very high level mages.  Even a +1 sword is going to take a lot of cash and time to create under the best of circumstances (1 magic weapon spell every 8 hours by a 4th level+ mage for X days till the magic stays permanently) and under the worst (magic weapon has to be cast each hour for X days by a team of Y L4+ mages probably using scrolls they wrote first as well as their 3 level 2 spells) it could get really outrageous so they aren't  going to be common either. someone sometime had to have a lot of time and money to "waste" to get that 5% + hitting magical creatures benefit without calling on their party mage to enhance their sword for that combat. the economics of magic is much like the economics of super cars and racing cars - you either have to have a lot of "spare change" or have to have really strong need for even a small improvement to overcome the "competition" AND have the cash to get it.  should your characters be able to create their own magic items - maybe I can see a party's mage using the downtime of a long winter to improve their own or their party's weapons/armor/etc. at the cost of the whole winter being down and basically all the party's wealth. or the cleric doing much the same to brew a variety of healing potions and other potions or the party's use but getting the materials for these might well be an adventure (or 3) all its own first. most of the rules for any of this are going to be homebrew because so far as I've seen 5e has none (older editions did have a little but not much their either).