04-03-2016, 01:34 PM | #11 |
Join Date: Oct 2008
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Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Merchant
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.
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04-03-2016, 01:50 PM | #12 |
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
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Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Merchant
Is this the skill used for evaluation?
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04-03-2016, 02:00 PM | #13 |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Merchant
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04-03-2016, 02:18 PM | #14 | |
Banned
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: 100 hurricane swamp
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Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Merchant
Quote:
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. |
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04-03-2016, 03:23 PM | #15 | |
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: near London, UK
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Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Merchant
Quote:
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.
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04-04-2016, 01:25 PM | #16 |
Join Date: Sep 2004
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Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Merchant
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.
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Tags |
basic, merchant, skill of the week |
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