Selling spells

(I initially considered putting this in Ask the Autarchs, but I figure it’s not exactly a rules clarification and I’d be open to input from other Judges too)

What’s a good method for determining if a PC can sell their spells? I know prices are listed for the cost of spells at the bottom of chapter 3, but to me that only makes sense for the purpose of buying in those quantities, it doesn’t make sense to let PCs sell that many spells per day, They would very quickly rack up a lot of money.

My initial solution is to use market availability. If you’re in a class VI market you can sell 1 level 1 spell per month and there’s a 10% chance you can sell a level 2 spell. But then I thought about it, that’s supposed to be availability per kind of thing for sale, so would that be 1 for every level 1 spell you have in your repetoire? This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, though, I can’t see someone in town buying magic missile, command, hold person, etc. but I can’t really think of what criteria would determine if a spell was saleable.

So, anyone got any suggestions/methods you used yourself?

I think there’s definitely some room for judge’s discretion here. Plenty of spells will probably be largely unsalable; nobody really needs a fireball in town on their day off, unless they’re recharging a ring of spell storing or something (my players bought many lightning bolts when they had one). On the flip side, plenty of people need folks charmed, languages read, or plausibly heavy loads floating disked (though I don’t have the book with me at the moment and wouldn’t be surprised if a casting of the disk cost more than just buying an ox), and cure light wound is one of the more universal trade spells. Would depend a lot on player spells known I think.

I agree with Jedavis, but I would also use the market class availability as a guide.

Even if you know the high-demand spells like Cure Light Wounds, I would expect that the demand for them is limited in the smaller markets. (Or, at least, the demand who are actually capable of paying you; if you’re going for charitable castings to work up a congregation, you can probably just cast all of your healing spells every day.)

So in summary, I’d start with the spell availability by market class as the base amount you can sell per day, and adjust it based on a posteriorally extrapolated percentage based on the specific spells being offered.

It would really depend on how common a specific spell is among the magic community. If everyone and their dog has sleep, then anyone who didn’t have it and wanted it would be able to trade for it or buy it for a low cost. A rare or especially powerful spell, however, could fetch a high price from a mage who had need of it.

The rareness of mages and variance in the availability of different spells makes pricing them extremely difficult. Maybe you’ll find a mage that needs the spell you have and can’t find it elsewhere, maybe the mage guild trades that spell to its members relatively freely.