958 – It’s mine if nobody’s looking.
on March 11, 2024
Honestly I do this in most videogames, it’s always quite funny selling people their own stuff back to them.
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I’ve always had an issue with “item shops” in most fantasy RPGs.
In some settings like Eberron they make sense, there’s a huge base of low-level professionals producing relatively common magic items, so in a metropolis, you can have a shop that sells everburning torches or sending stones as if they were very high end lamps and telephones.
But in most settings where the average person is a farmer and earns a few silver pennies a day, a shop that sells multiple items that are rare if not unique and each cost in the regions of 10’s of thousands of pounds of silver seems incongruous. In BG3 magic items at least seem to be much more commonplace that D&D’s default settings.
Not to mention the security concerns. Even if the proprietor is a powerful spellcaster themselves, you have the GDP of a small country in that shop. You will need to contend with individuals attempting to palm small items as well as assassins trying to kill the owner when they inevitably sleep to gain access to the shop and organised groups attempting to overwhelm you with numbers, because the reward for success is so high that even a small chance of success is worth the risk.
Imagine if you approached magic shops from the opposite end.
You try and sell the crown of a lich you found.
Nobody in the kingdom has that liquid cash, so you need to hire an agent to auction and sell these rare items for the highest price you can. Then the agent trudges to the isolated homes of distant wizards (whilst the item its self remains in some high security dwarven vault) with sketches, assessments by independent professionals and the results of the Identify spell. (Okay this actually sounds like an interesting low-level adventure now, being the agent’s party)
Then maybe a month later the agent finds somebody willing to buy, who comes all the way out to the city you stay in to buy it.
Conversely, most magic items are bespoke craft projects of enchanters who can charge a kings ransom for their services. You put in an order and need to come back somewhere between a few months and a year (“No, this requires the final steps to be completed under the light of the Summer Solstice and it’s currently Autumn, you do the maths”)
You visit them several times for measurements, discussions on the function and capabilities and they will make non-magical mock-ups that you can adjust and tailor.
I suppose in a setting like that they would never sell anything and bags of holding would be the most valuable items on the market. As the only safe place to store things like this would be either on the person of a powerful adventurer or in some sort of underground bank vault. Maybe with lots of guards and deadly traps and… damned it, I just re-invented the dungeon.
There is some handling of this in DnD5e, but not a lot. By default most “shops” in the setting don’t have, or sell, magic items – many of the campaign setting books contain stores that say they only stock the table of items in the PHB. I don’t recall seeing a “magic item shop” in any of the published modules.
The core rules of 5e don’t really deal with buying or selling magic items at all, it’s kind of left as an exercise for the DM to decide how that’s handled. This is probably smart, as some DMs want there to be a local “magic item emporium” in every town, and others want magic items to be rare and special, but… it’s rough for new DMs who want guidance.
In XGtE, in the expanded core rules, there are some tables that give (terrible) guidelines for the value of magic items, and they list “buy or sell a magic item” as a downtime activity, which takes a time – you have to research to try and find someone who has one for sale, and you might fail. Or if you’re selling, you have to “get the word out” and then someone will come along to buy it if there’s a prospective buyer even available.
BG3, as a videogame, can’t really do this, but their solution is kind of okay – they made magic items far more common, and far cheaper, and thus they’re just part of the economy.
The last campaign I ran was in Rime of the Frostmaiden. That campaign gives the player characters about 100k gold over the course of the whole thing, but the only stores in Icewind Dale sell only “the adventuring gear table in the PHB” – not to mention… nobody in icewind dale is going to be buying those expensive paintings and chalices. In order to let the party spend their cash, I added an enchanter/blacksmith NPC who could order shipments of materials from Neverwinter, and make magic items to order, at very high costs – so the party could spend their cash, but didn’t really have a good outlet for selling magic items they didn’t want.
Hello Ahdok. I noticed the title says “It’s mine if nobody’s looking”. Does this mean you can steal stuff from blind people and sell to them? Please clarify.
That’s an interesting question. I haven’t met any blind NPCs yet. You could cast blindness on them, but that’s probably something that’d make them angry by itself. Darkness would probably work too.
I know if you block their line of sight to the person who’s stealing (e.g. by waiting until they walk around a corner, or standing on the other side of a tall bookshelf etc) then they don’t notice the theft. If your character is “hiding” within line of sight, but they haven’t spotted them, they don’t notice the theft. (You can do this with dim light and pass without trace if the distance is large enough.)
I imagine when you steal something that the code checks “can I see this?” and if the NPC can’t, then they don’t notice.
Be aware that NPCs who are near a stolen object WILL notice it’s gone, and start looking around the local area for the thief, if they find the person responsible, they will know it’s them. You have to skedaddle and lie low for a while, until their search is over.