Selling the Party's Loot

I'm interested in how characters divest themselves of their ill-gotten gain.

I've noodled with a poisoned Monty Haul where the adventure begins with finding a huge, unwieldy treasure trove in some remote, inaccessible area. The challenge would be getting to treasure back to civilization and disposing of it without getting killed or tipping your hand to the millions of interested parties who'd love to find the source of the goods and cut out the middle man. Do you cut the giant ivory statues into smaller pieces? Melt down the gold throne? Do you make a circuit to several cities to dispose of the loot slowly? Can you hire henchmen and trust them around such temptation? What happens when a bandit king gets wind? Or a group of fellow adventurers? A young dragon? Did you know that the local king has an ancestral link to this horde, and considers not handing it all over to him to be treason? So does the king next door. And the leader of that death cult. And then there's the curse...

Yesterday, +John Stater posted "What's It Worth?", an article about using his experience researching real estate markets to provide insight into the experience of a party trying to unload their treasure.

The Gist: Nothing has value beyond someone else's willingness to pay for it, so instead of stating a flat value for a treasure item, Stater came up with a haggling matrix. Compare the type of item to the type of customer to see what you roll for their opening bid and then calculate their maximum bid.

It looks like a great system, and I knew I'd want to implement it. So, I redesigned his haggling matrix to include more information from the article for ease of reference. With Stater's permission, I present it here:

A preview screenshot.

WHAT'S IT WORTH? pdf file

It's system-neutral, but using this in Beyond the Wall, I'd probably let characters with with merchant backgrounds have direct access to this chart. Everyone else would have to rely on the general knowledge that the rich tend to have more money. Role-play the haggling when it seems relevant or fun. Otherwise, transactions could be based on a Charisma (+Haggling) check. Each point below the target might represent a five or ten percent increase over the starting bid, up to the maximum price generated.

Comments

Knaves, fancypants

I've prepared a new layout document of Ben Milton's Knaves . Knaves is a great, light rules set that has an extremely elegant core mechanic while retaining total compatibility with OSR material. It's pretty much the rpg of my dreams. This document contains the complete rules, plus a bunch of useful hacks from the community, plus a few of my invention, plus some useful resources from Ben Milton's previous effort, Maze Rats . EDIT: I've updated the layout to fix errata and make a few tweaks. Further, I've made 3 variations: KNAVES TABLET LAYOUT The Tablet Layout is meant for scrolling on screens, and contains hyperlinks. KNAVES SPREAD LAYOUT The Spread Layout is set up to print on Letter-sized paper. KNAVES A4 LAYOUT The A4 Layout is set up to print on A4 paper, and is probably the most elegant of the three versions. This is presented with generous permission from Ben Milton, and should in no way be an excuse for not purchasing a copy of Knav...

Reviewing Rules for Play-by-Post Optimization

I’ve played a lot of PbP games: all your favorite flavors of OD&D, AD&D, and their retroclones, Call of Cthulhu, Marvel Superheroes, Traveller, Dungeon World, etc. ad nauseam. In almost every instance, I forgot what ruleset we were using at some point. Which is a good thing. Once chargen is over, you spend a lot more time describing your characters actions and poring over the GM’s descriptions than you spend interacting with rules. When you do roll, it’s usually a combat to-hit roll, which you’ve probably programmed into the online dice-roller as a macro. Pretty much any game will work for PbP. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t points of possible optimization. Point 1: Resolution. Anything that can keep the action moving is a boon to PbP. A game that requires a back-and-forth exchange of information to resolve an action is going to progress very slowly. A good rule of thumb is that it’ll take 2 or 3 days to get a response from any given player. At that pace, an exch...

Maze Rats by Post

In my previous post , I reviewed a bunch of my favorite rulesets for optimization for Play-by-Post. It occurred to me almost immediately that I hadn't really thought about Maze Rats enough. In fact, I'd mis-remembered and mischaracterized it. Upon reflection, one of the mechanics I took issue with is actually a big strength. Re-reading the rules, it seems like just a few very simple hacks could make it a highly-optimized PbP game. As follows: Danger Rolls are rolled by the GM. Danger rolls usually fail, so it is in the player’s interest to describe their actions plausibly and mitigate as many risks as they can, in the hopes that they don’t trigger a danger roll. 2d6 + ability bonus ≥ 10 If you have taken enough precautions to have a distinct advantage in an action, but not enough to have eliminated the distinct possibility of danger, the GM will give you a roll with advantage. 3d6 keep 2 + ability bonus ≥ 10 Because each character only has 3 ability scores (S...

An Abominable Fancy

Search This Blog