Goodman Games

How do others deal with players selling the gains of their dungeon forays? Is it an in-game process? ("Want to sell those crystals you recovered in the Portal Under the Stars? Better get yourself to a city with a gem dealer, or be prepared to haggle with the local blacksmith about how many handfuls of them gets you a set of gauntlets... he has no use for them himself, but thinks his kids might like to play with them"). Or do you just allow players to immediately monetize stuff so they can get on with the Dungeon Crawling? Do they sell goods for full retail? How much less?

Semi-idle questions... sorry if there's already been a thread talking about this ...

Depends on how hard it is to value. Everyone knows what a 'standard' sword is worth (every player, if not every gong farmer) and thereby take a swag at a found sword's relative condition, so it's generally not worth making a big deal about. For those I usually give half value for nice stuff, 25% for crummy weapons taken from scum, and even less for armor after they've smashed it up in order to kill whoever was inside of it.

But a gold ring might "only" be worth it's weight in gold (i.e., 1 GP) or it might ten times that depending on its aesthetics. That's where things get tricky. One thing's for sure, I'd be more easygoing than otherwise if the seller is a PC with a pertinent zero-level Occupation, or has a connection with such a person.

I handle things in a very abstract manner, but rely solely upon the player's descriptions of where they go and how they try to get value out of what they loot - the ask blacksmiths if they want metal goods (as is or for scrap), they seek out jewelers to barter useful goods they possess for gems and jewelry (easier to carry and most people will take them in trade), and once they even gave a particularly terrible farmer a set of adventuring gear (backpack, sword, armor and shield) in exchange for his farm.

I don't have a particular formula for the value of things, I just tell the player's about what they think they could get out of an item optimally and they try to find an explanation for getting that actual value... it tends to take their characters months of downtime to off-load all their loot.

Selling loot is boring unless it has plot significance. That being said, unloading a cache of gems to a Hamlet is unrealistic, and I would certainly limit how much they can sell. Remember, most people outside of major cities will not have much in the way of coinage. They may, however, be willing to barter.

Depends on what kind of game you want to play. Personally I focus on the dungeon crawling and wilderness exploring. Because basically that's all I'm interested in. I treat gold like combat, abstractly. Sometimes I will reasonably let people have things that they didn't think of if they were recently in town, and they have the gold to cover it. But sometimes I'll deny them suddenly having 200 ft of rope. It really depends if it would help move the adventure along, or if there is a reason there is a pit that is 400 ft deep. I imagine that some people are interested in economic details. The popularity of ACKS supports this. That's totally cool. I remember designing and buying castle segments back in the day. It was fun for me back then, but I had a lot more time.

These days I give my group time to take care of paperwork, ask questions, maybe do a bit of investigating to gather information, and stuff like that. Then I throw them right into the adventure. I only have about 2 or 3 hours a week to play, so I like to cut to the chase. But that's just me, and my group seems to love it.

Yeah - I tend towards the abstract route as well. Yes, in a small village with little wealth, getting full value for items is going to be tricky. But they can probably unload a small portion or trade for something. I think I can cover this in game pretty quickly and not needing to get too detailed.

In larger cities then it will be easier to get rid of items and get a fair price or good trade.

This area of the game will be pretty seat of the pants for me.

In just about all games I DM in fantasy settings such as DCC or D&D, I play according to the following.

• Haggling for buying or selling stuff is boring to me. I hate it, really. Maybe the first 100 times I did it I had some sort of remote interest in obtaining a good price, but now I could not care less. Just be done with it!, that's my moto. So as DM I provide very quick guidelines that allow players to sell or otherwise monetize their loot quickly so that we can move on with the plot.
• for gems, I assume that the gem's value I give them is the value they'll eventually sell it for; or the value that someone will take it for if they use it to buy anything.
• for other equipment, they indeed need to sell it. I usually play in low-magic campaigns, so the PCs pretty much only sell mundane loot, which brings in a marginal amount of money, and we don't role-play this out: assuming they reach a town with at least a few merchants, they'll be able to sell their loot.
• the price of mundane equipement (weapons, armor, etc...) is usually about 20-50% of the selling price.
• the price of works of art and the like, is like for gems or jewellery: the amount I give them is the amount they'll be able to sell it for when they get the chance.
• so in the end, the exchange looks like this: (player) "we arrive in town and I go sell this/that equipment" (DM) "ok, you get the gem's value and 30% of the equipment's value". (player) "I also wish to buy equipment". (DM) "among XYZ shops, you find all mundane equipment available except ABC, at the selling price indicated in the rulebook. Pick what you want and remove the money from your sheet." (player) "ok, done". Usually, this takes less than 10 minutes for an entire party after a complete adventure's worth of looting.

This is probably my old Rollmaster roots coming back at me but I have a chart of town sizes, available shops, and likely amounts of money for buying loot that I have kept over the years. But unless the town or loot is of significant importance I rarely bother anymore. I give out 50% or purchase value, unless one of my players REALLY wants to roleplay an exchange.

In 3.5 I rarely ever roll played it out. Loot was sold for the same value the adventure had listed. Mundane stuff was half list price in the PHB. Now that we have switched to DCC RPG I have tried to bring roll play back to this part of the game. It has been fun so far but I think eventually the players will want to go back to the old 3.5 way. They have been taking a huge loss haggling with the merchants and farmers so far.

There has to be a happy medium. The problem with only selling stuff that has plot significance is that gives players a heads up about items. Of course I think the guy who said selling loot is boring has a valid point. Not sure how ill handle it... buying stuff in pre-game was very free form and I enjoyed it.

Selling loot is boring because you let it be boring. There, I said it.

Treat it like a quest - you've got some gold bracelets you took from that dried-out corpse's wrists when he finally took the axe-bladed hint to stop choking your wizard buddy... where do you take them? What's the merchant like? Is he trying to rip you off, or is he just afraid they are cursed? How much of the story about how you got the bracelets are you going to tell? Are you trying to rip of the buyer?

There are a lot of simple and subtle things that can be done to make selling loot just as interesting as finding it in the first place... the only hard part is to remember to make loot always fall perfectly into one of three categories: Stuff the party is going to keep and use; stuff the party is taking explicitly for its being worth caring to find a buyer for; stuff that you intended the party to care about finding a buyer for that they keep because it has too much cool factor to actually sell.

Ideally, at least in my ideal, players only take weapons, armor, ammo, and mundane supplies they intend to keep and use (and keep what gets replaced by "upgrades" as spare in case of hirelings, apprentices, or equipment damage), and only takes other items that they actually care about searching for a buyer for... not dragging off everything not bolted down to squeeze ever copper possible from every dungeon. Searching out a buyer for a rare gemstone is an entertaining quest - unloading a wagon full of collected weapons, armor, ammunition, food-stuffs, empty crates, dirty skins and blankets, and a few hundred spare torches... that even I consider boring, but I get bored by it when the players are having their characters try and collect all that stuff - long before they ever try to sell it.

With this approach, anything can be made interesting, from preparing breakfast to going to the potty on a mountaintop. For me the question is not: how interesting can I make any activity undertaken by the PCs, but rather on what PC activities do I wish to pass my gaming time on? I play a sword and sorcery game, I wish to pass my gaming time on swordplay and sorcery, and not on buying and selling stuff.

I get that opinions differ on this point, one of my best buddies forces us (to my dismay!) to spend lots of time finding merchants and bargaining for anything we wish to buy or sell. I will not yield without an argument on this, and will continue until the entire UNIVERSE ditches basic upkeep from the RPGs!!! Haha!

(I'm joking of course, although I truly have that opinion, this is not a subject I feel strongly about and I'm ready to bargain my hat off when a DM plays that way.)

Shopping is boring.*

I was in a convention game once where we spent the first two hours getting ready for the expedition -- shopping around, haggling, looking for bargains. Two or three players were really into it, as was the GM. The rest of us (four or five of us) were twiddling our thumbs and would just chime in occasionally "I get that, too".

I almost walked away from the table.

Once we really started playing, it was an amazing game -- but we had to rush/narrate the end of the game because we ran out of time (in a ten hour slot!).

It comes down to "where do you want to spend your time?" -- I'd have much rather played out the ending to an awesome adventure, than have spent the time with mundanity. I suspect that, for one thing, folks that find shopping and selling more consistently interesting, are folks that have more time for gaming and do a lot of it. If I only have 10-12 hours a month (if I'm lucky) for gaming, I don't really want to do stuff that I need to do in real life that I find boring in real life.



* Sure, you can spruce it up once in awhile and make it relevant, but I have yet to spend any money on seeing a two-hour movie about haggling. What I can recollect from print fiction is generally a line or two summarizing such things. In the movies, Luke Skywalker didn't get as much for his landspeeder as he had hoped, but we didn't meet the used car salesman he was dealing with... Maybe that'll be in the next 'improved' version...

Unless something was important, interesting, or seriously expensive (and so possibly an adventure opportunity in its own right), I'd simply have the players make a few relevant Personality rolls. My general baseline is they get a third of the item's value, marked down or up depending on the condition, rarity, desirability/utilty in the local market, and how well they rolled (to a minimum of "No one will buy it." and maximum of "You get two thirds of its value!"). When you stop to consider the condition of many items they'd find in old ruins or "liberate" from slain owners, 50% has always seemed too high a baseline imo.

Colin

This is a great idea and begs for a chart.

SO HERE GOES

d16 (because!), add Personality modifier (+ or -) for each mundane item to be sold

1 "No one will buy this wretched, damaged item."
2 "This item is valuable only as scrap materials. d4 copper pieces." (If normally worth less than 4 cp, then 1 cp.)
3 "This item is valuable only as scrap materials. d8 copper pieces." (If normally worth less than 8 cp, then 1 cp.)
4 "This item has some minimal value as scrap or otherwise. 10% of normal value."
5 "This item has some minimal value as scrap or otherwise. 15% of normal value."
6 "This item has some minimal value. 20% of normal value."
7 "This item has some minimal value. 25% of normal value."
8 "This item is decent, but low quality. 30% of normal value."
9 "This item is decent, but low quality. 35% of normal value."
10 "This item is of moderate quality or condition. 40% of normal value."
11 "This item is of moderate quality or condition. 45% of normal value."
12 "This item is of moderate quality or condition. 50% of normal value.
13 "This item is of good quality or condition. 55% of normal value."
14 "This item is of good quality or condition. 60% of normal value."
15 "This item is of exceptional quality or condition. 65% of normal value."
16 "This item is of exceptional quality or condition. 70% of normal value."
17 "This item is of fine quality or condition. 75% of normal value."
18 "This item is of fine quality or condition. 80% of normal value."
19 "This item is perfect, flawless, outstanding. 85% of normal value."

Nice! And for those lucky souls with negative personality modifiers:

0 You insult the shopkeeper with your copper-grubbing haggling. He refuses to deal with you again, and if he sees you on the street expect a fight.

-1 You've offended the entire guild! Roll 1d3: (1) They demand a hefty bribe before dealing with you again; (2) Penance is required - a dangerous quest on behalf of the guild might do the trick; (3) Assassins are hired.

-2 You are driven out of town at the head of a crazed mob! A reward is offered for your capture, and for miles around you are regarded as a nefarious blackguard and villain.

//H

Nice work, both of you.

Colin

Yeah, good catch, I forgot about the -s... even though I did remember the +s!

Derp.

Hey so this should get submitted to CRAWL!

I'll give Harley a 1/2 credit!

Heh, I like it! It'd appear in a Judges Issue. Write a short intro to it (like 25-50 words). Email me (see my submissions links: http://crawlfanzine.blogspot.com/p/submissions.html

nm, ... I just saw your email...!!!!

I type fast, dude. !

Good, this will be a handy chart to have in Crawl!.

I can't interpret your anecdote as anything having to actually do with handling shopping in RPGs. To me, it's a tale that illustrates that there are necessary differences in maximizing the enjoyment level of an adventure based on whether it is meant to be run at a convention in one sitting or run at your home one 4 hour block at a time for as many sittings as it takes.

For a convention game I would expect everything pre-built and pre-loaded, the GM gives a paragraph or two explanation about the goal and the situation the characters are in and we dive into the action as immediately after that as possible (the amount of immediately varying by player questions, not necessitated by the GM).

For a home game I would expect the situation you describe... and to have had the characters built by the players rather than pre-built and dropped into the market square. It would then have been 2 hours of enjoyable (for at least some) shopping followed by 2 or so hours of enjoyable (for at least some) action with full intent to continue the following day/week/month as player availability dictated, and would hopefully result in everyone having an overall enjoyment level they felt was worth coming back for more of.

So, Noble, we agree that it is enjoyable for some. Which means we just might agree that it is not enjoyable for others.

Buying stuff or selling loot is much the same thing; you have something, but want something else.

Now, if I had an item to sell, and the reaction the merchants had to it was telling me something about it (even if obliquely) that I hadn't realized and that seemed to have some significance/importance, that might be interesting. But in my entire gaming career buying/selling is usually an excuse for the GM to put on a funny voice and just be contrary. "You want 30? I'll give ya 18, sonny." On rare occasions, it's humorous. But particularly, when it is done item by item, merchant by merchant, it grows thin, fast.

If you have cracked the equation of making an in-game shopping trip interesting for a table of players for up to two hours, kudos. I've never seem such a thing done.

I prefer to handle selling loot in-game, though I do not mandate it be played out completely. For example, a player may ask, "What can I get for X?" and I answer "Y". They can take it, wait for a better offer, or choose to play it out further. For example, at the end of Sailors on the Starless Sea, the PCs ended up drifting downsteam in a dragonship. When they landed at a fishing village, the villagers had no particular use for a fishing boat, but were willing to trade some goods for it the PCs wanted. They could not have paid its full value in gold, even had they wanted to, and they had little use for it, and thus didn't care to buy at full value even if they could.

It's like chain: It's expensive to buy in the game, but not that many folk need it enough to pay for it. When the PCs sell it, they generally do so at far less than 50%.

Most shopping/selling loot takes only a few minutes to accomplish. But not everything can be bought everywhere, nor can everything be offloaded for its full value (or even close!) no matter where the PCs are.

I spruced up the table for a future issue of CRAWL! It should do the trick nicely, requires less brainpower for the judge and could lead to FUN(tm).