[Basic] Skill of the week: Merchant

[weby]

If has never been a focus. But the current characters in my fantasy game all have it and the skill levels range from 19(the group holy warrior who has 2 points in it) to 32(the character with 120 points in faceman!). They have all found it useful to have at high levels.

[Anders]

Is this the skill used for evaluation?

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Anders

Is this the skill used for evaluation?

Yes, for ordinary stuff. For esoteric items, you might well need to use another skill to understand properly what something is.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Yes, for ordinary stuff. For esoteric items, you might well need to use another skill to understand properly what something is.

In those cases I either do 'Lower Of The Two Skills' or make the secondary skill a Complimentary Skill.

Not sure of the top of my head how DF does it, I think it uses the other skill in place of Merchant for estimating value, but it's still Merchant to sell it.


And like VariousRen and weby I've never seen Merchant as a primary focus for a character but rather as a support skill.

Even in Face/Agent style characters, it's never a primary.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by Humabout

once they got back to town and realized they were only getting 40% of their loot's value, the wizard sunk a CP in it.

Yeah. I tend to play relatively high-IQ characters (mages and techies), and so having a decent level of Merchant becomes a fairly trivial exercise as long as there aren't social disads to worry about.

Originally Posted by evileeyore

And like VariousRen and weby I've never seen Merchant as a primary focus for a character but rather as a support skill.

Even in Face/Agent style characters, it's never a primary.

Well, it is only one skill; on its own it's unlikely to be exciting. (The guy with the higher skill usually wins.) It gets more interesting when you can add situational modifiers with careful prep work; sure, Merchant buys the obscure mythos tome for a decent price, but other skills have been used to find out whether it's worth having at all, how best to approach the seller, who else is interested and how they can be nobbled to keep them out of the bidding, and so on. That is stuff that generates adventures in a way that "roll a better margin than the other guy" doesn't.

[Rindis]

I don't think it's ever really come up, though it would be likely to show up on any character sheet of more than one potential player since it's a reasonable background skill.

However, both Christopher Rice's "Purveyors of the Priceless" in Pyramid #3-87 and Spice and Wolf have put thoughts about merchant-centric adventuring in my mind.

The usual place for merchant adventuring is of course a Traveller free trader campaign. I thought about running something in that general format for a while, but I was worried it would have too strong a taste of 'struggle to pay the rent each month', which we have enough of in real life.