As a DM, my biggest complaint about the magic item shop generators online is the lack of exact price. Most come with a rarity, but I personally feel like the vast range in prices is too great for me to just plug and play. For example: I feel like a cloak of displacement is much more valuable than say a Berserker’s Axe, even though they’re both “Rare”. So I felt like when players asked for a shop, I had to take time and read up on the item and then assign a price.
Would you use an online tool that was free (with like Google ads on side panels or something) that had associated exact prices (randomized between 75% and 125% and assigned value) that had a sliding scale based on something everyone probably has figured out for their world, like the price of a potion of Healing?
I’ve made a python script for my own personal use, and I’m thinking about turning it into a full web application. But I wanted to get your opinions on if this a tool you would like?
Great points! Sorry for any confusion. So with my current personal script, I just went in and assessed and assigned prices to everything. When I generate the shop, I take that price, add anything relevant (like armor or weapons price because i had base types for things like +1 armor), and then assign it a random value between 0.75 * base to 1.25 * base.
I agree, the prices would still be very arbitrary and based solely on my opinions. I would like to explore options on getting feedback or even allowing individual “overrides”, but that would require like user accounts and stuff that I don’t want to manage and most people don’t want to make.
I hoped to help that with a sliding scale that would be a UI slider, so you could scale it to your world’s magic item prices. So say in your world a potion of healing is 5 gold, or maybe its 500 gold. The slider would scale all the prices. Like for instance, base price of a potion of Healing is 50 gp. So if you put it down to 10 gp, everything is reduced down to 20% base price.
If you wanted to allow customization but without user accounts, you could just store all that data in a cookie on the user’s machine. Just make sure you put clear warnings about how the data is stored and what will be gone if they delete the cookie
Ooh, yeah! I don’t have much experience writing cookies, but that’s a really good idea!