Anyone else notice the insanity of the magic item creation costs vs the magic item purchase costs table in Xanther’s? if you somehow haven’t compared them to each other take a look and get a laugh at how a mage can burn through their loot trying to craft and sell items. As an example a common item is listed in the crafting table as costing 50GP (and 1 week) to create, but sells for 1D6 x 10 GP in the purchase table. In other words you loose money 2/3 of the time, break even 1/6 of the time and make a whopping 10 GP profit 1/6 of the time. Looks like my prices just went up 😜😁
Umm, if you read the actual table for PC's selling a magic item in XGtE, you'll see the baseline of a common item is 100 gp. Now, it does take 25 gp to initiate the process, so yeah, you're not seeing much return like this if you craft the item yourself. That is, I expect, partly by design, as D&D is not an economics/industry-based game. The selling mechanic is for offloading extraneous pieces, not making like it's Skyrim. As to why you're selling higher than the list, indication is that you're actively running an auction/courting buyers as opposed to just selling it in a shop.
The entire economic system being revamped is one of my hopes for OneD&D. 5e's system is a complete joke--it's utterly ridiculous that (unlike prior editions) 5e could not even be bothered to provide recommended prices for items, leaving everything to the wild west of uncertainty. Sure, there's things like the Sane Item Table to give guidance, but folks shouldn't have to rely on a third party internet forum post for basic information about the game.
It also leads to some ridiculousness, like the crafting situation you ascribe above. All of crafting, buying, and selling feels like someone's bad incomplete homebrew that somehow made it into the actual game.
What I’ve done (because I need it now not later) is take the sale prices and add that to the creation prices to get a fairly reasonable profitable price to tell my players. What I’m in the midst of doing is going thru the resulting list and setting prices based on my own rarity index for the items so that there is a price list that is profitable and that show the relative rarity of items. So things like +1 weapons and armor that should be relatively common ( for magic items) don’t have a high mark up but have an enough markup to be profitable in “mass production”. So something like the clothes of mending that most adventurers should have is affordable (200GP) while a vanity item like a cloak of billowing is more expensive (500GP).
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Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
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Anyone else notice the insanity of the magic item creation costs vs the magic item purchase costs table in Xanther’s? if you somehow haven’t compared them to each other take a look and get a laugh at how a mage can burn through their loot trying to craft and sell items. As an example a common item is listed in the crafting table as costing 50GP (and 1 week) to create, but sells for 1D6 x 10 GP in the purchase table. In other words you loose money 2/3 of the time, break even 1/6 of the time and make a whopping 10 GP profit 1/6 of the time. Looks like my prices just went up 😜😁
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
Umm, if you read the actual table for PC's selling a magic item in XGtE, you'll see the baseline of a common item is 100 gp. Now, it does take 25 gp to initiate the process, so yeah, you're not seeing much return like this if you craft the item yourself. That is, I expect, partly by design, as D&D is not an economics/industry-based game. The selling mechanic is for offloading extraneous pieces, not making like it's Skyrim. As to why you're selling higher than the list, indication is that you're actively running an auction/courting buyers as opposed to just selling it in a shop.
The entire economic system being revamped is one of my hopes for OneD&D. 5e's system is a complete joke--it's utterly ridiculous that (unlike prior editions) 5e could not even be bothered to provide recommended prices for items, leaving everything to the wild west of uncertainty. Sure, there's things like the Sane Item Table to give guidance, but folks shouldn't have to rely on a third party internet forum post for basic information about the game.
It also leads to some ridiculousness, like the crafting situation you ascribe above. All of crafting, buying, and selling feels like someone's bad incomplete homebrew that somehow made it into the actual game.
What I’ve done (because I need it now not later) is take the sale prices and add that to the creation prices to get a fairly reasonable profitable price to tell my players. What I’m in the midst of doing is going thru the resulting list and setting prices based on my own rarity index for the items so that there is a price list that is profitable and that show the relative rarity of items. So things like +1 weapons and armor that should be relatively common ( for magic items) don’t have a high mark up but have an enough markup to be profitable in “mass production”. So something like the clothes of mending that most adventurers should have is affordable (200GP) while a vanity item like a cloak of billowing is more expensive (500GP).
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.