D&D -> DFRPG: Gold to $

[ravenfish]

Originally Posted by beaushinkle

GM: Yeah, the blue book is called Elrem's Curses. The black one is called The Lesser Kunsian Book of the Dead.

Player: Ooooh those sound like they're potentially spellbooks or something; do I have any clue how much the Lesser Kunsian Book of the Dead would fetch in town?

GM: (secret Religious Ritual roll: failure). You think you could get about $4 for it.

Player: Oh... gotcha.

I would play that as:

GM: It's worth $4 dollars as paper; you couldn't begin to say whether anyone would pay for the contents.

The player then has a choice of saying either:

Player: I'll drag it back to town, then, and have someone look it over in case it's actually valuable.

or

Player: It's too heavy for us to cart around on the off-chance it's worth something.

[bocephus]

Originally Posted by ravenfish

I would play that as:

GM: It's worth $4 dollars as paper; you couldn't begin to say whether anyone would pay for the contents.

Yes this...

*edited to add - A Crit fail at appraising would absolutely give the PC the mistaken impression that its just worth the paper its printed on.*

Your under no "obligation" as GM to give a PC something valuable that they are unable to appreciate. (IE have no relevant skill or fail a default roll). You can always roll a second time at a lesser difficulty just to recognize that it's more valuable than just component cost, but your under no obligation to do so. If you put your points in dagger and not "merchant" then you'll be good at dagger but not getting a good price for your loot.

This is like the stories where someone buys something at a garage sale for $1. Only to find out later when a friend comes over who happens to know something about ancient roman jewelry that this is a genuine signet ring from a Ceasar worth eleventy-billions.

The person that had it obviously failed to correctly appraise it but its no ones fault, its just how the dice fall sometimes.

The flip side of that is just because its potentially worth $10,000 doesn't mean anyone will actually buy it for that much. You hear all the time about the new record price for some painting or the like, but you never read an article about the painting that went for less than appraised or didn't sell because no minimum bidder even bothered.

[bocephus]

A general reply to this thread

Don't get so wrapped up in the specific $ value of loot or loot per encounter.

Money is just a way to keep track of "Can the PCs buy what they need and/or want". This is really the only baseline that has relevance to the game, and I manage most of my games by try to keep the PCs in the general area of "You can afford what you need, or what you want, but not both (or not both very often)".

If you want your PCs to be able to get new armor at the end of every session then you will be giving out a lot of cash AND making a lot of shopkeepers/inventory easily available and accessible. If you are one of those "you should be happy that you have a +1dmg magic sword, I remember when I ran a numpty that didnt get a magic item till he was level 94 and he was darn happy to have it!" then giving out cash and making vendors/inventory available is of little concern for you.

If you find that the PCs have less cash than you would like them to have, then let them find some bleedin obvious stuff. A dull yellow chalice with several large gems still attached (and quite a few missing).

If the PCs have more cash than you like, then they might end up having a run of stingy merchants or needing to barter items directly for things they need cause cash won't spend.

Really the amount of cash inventory you give out should be driven by the goals of the PCs and how quickly you want them to get there.

[sjmdw45]

Originally Posted by bocephus

Really the amount of cash inventory you give out should be driven by the goals of the PCs and how quickly you want them to get there.

If you decide to directly control player wealth totals this way, then you should eliminate the Wealthy advantage/disadvantage from the game so that players don't waste points on it.

[beaushinkle]

You are free to warp your world around the players: the amount of loot in the next dungeon changes based on how much loot they found in the previous one. The amount of loot changes based on how expensive their wish-list is. The difficulty of monsters change based on how much loot your players have.

That's the polar opposite of how I want to run my game. If you put the same amount of loot in dungeon 2 regardless of what they found in dungeon 1, then now searching dungeon 1 well results in having more loot.

If you make it so that dungeon 2 has more loot if they have less loot in dungeon 1, or has less loot if they found more loot in dungeon 1, then the player actions don't matter. Agency is lost.

I'm not saying you aren't free to play your game like this, but I refuse to.

More to the point, the original post was about converting pre-written D&D modules (which have static treasure) to DFRPG, and analyzing how well using 1gp = 1$ works for the conversion. We're not trying to convert a D&D adventure and then also dynamically adjust dungeon 3 in the adventure based on how much loot the players found in dungeon 2.

If the D&D book says that the Kobold Burial Chamber has jewelry worth 380g, our gurps Kobold Burial Chamber has jewelry worth $380, otherwise the conversion is getting harder and harder.

Finally, I'm really confused by the need/want distinction. My players (we are talking about 250pt adventurers, right?) need almost nothing. They can create food and water, and already have everything they need to survive indefinitely. What they want is progressively more expensive upgrades. Bigger power items, higher levels of fortify on their armor, deflect on their shield, puissance, penetrating, accuracy, fine, balanced, dwarven, orichalcum weapons. More potions / scrolls for niche utility, and stat-stick items. This is stuff that essentially progresses their character. They don't need any of it, but they want it, and will buy it in whatever priority.

[beaushinkle]

The player then has a choice of saying either:

Player: I'll drag it back to town, then, and have someone look it over in case it's actually valuable.

or

Player: It's too heavy for us to cart around on the off-chance it's worth something.

Both of these assume that there's some sort of second-opinion system right? I don't see such a system in the book. How much does it cost to get the book appraised by a NPC in town? What do they roll? Does adding a second-opinion NPC appraisal system increase fun? I want to make it clear that we're not fully simulating reality, which is why we generally skip boring scenes like bathroom breaks and brushing our teeth. Is this a part of the game we want to focus on? Any amount of time spent here at the table is time not spent on intrigue, mystery, exploration, or dungeon delving.

This is like the stories where someone buys something at a garage sale for $1. Only to find out later when a friend comes over who happens to know something about ancient roman jewelry that this is a genuine signet ring from a Ceasar worth eleventy-billions.

In those stories, someone has a positive experience. They bought an item, and then found out later that it was worth much more. In the situation I'm describing, they found an item that actually is valuable, but are told that it isn't. So they sell it for low-value and never find out that it's valuable. The only person aware of the irony is the GM, so it's "fun" that your players don't experience, and don't know they aren't experiencing. The whole thing is weird.

They might have an inkling that some of the items described might be treasure instead of trash if they weren't failing their secret identification rolls, but who knows.

The flip side of that is just because its potentially worth $10,000 doesn't mean anyone will actually buy it for that much. You hear all the time about the new record price for some painting or the like, but you never read an article about the painting that went for less than appraised or didn't sell because no minimum bidder even bothered.

Worth pointing out that the process of finding a buyer for an object with a known worth is a completely separate problem from learning the worth of an object. Someone who correctly identifies some painting as having great cultural significance and that it's worth six figures still has to find a buyer (if this a part of the game you enjoy focusing on), and that's a completely separate and unrelated problem from anything I'm describing.

see https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comment...f_the_weakest/ for a reddit thread of folks generally complaining about buying/selling stuff and how other systems handle it

[sjmdw45]

Originally Posted by beaushinkle

see https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comment...f_the_weakest/ for a reddit thread of folks generally complaining about buying/selling stuff and how other systems handle it

That thread is not applicable to DFRPG, which actually has a very strong money mini-game, assuming the DM's random loot tables do a good job of having lots of hard-to-identify good stuff. A party who invests in a lot of hidden lore/connoisseur skills will discover that there's a lot of good stuff to be had, as will a party who hauls everything back to town and (e.g.) pays 20% of the gross receipts to a good appraiser. So if the The Lesser Kunsian Book of the Dead is sold by an Wealth: Average PC to a secondhand book merchant for 40% of its hypothetical full $5000 value, the appraiser gets $400 and the party keeps $1600. That's a fair deal on both sides. If the party invests in becoming Very Wealthy with good reaction bonuses and high appraisal-related skills, they will keep the full $5000 next time they come across a similar tome.

That is much, much more interesting than the buying-and-selling minigame in e.g. Dungeons and Dragons, and we haven't even discussed yet the effects of encumbrance on loot retrieval.

[beaushinkle]

That thread is not applicable to DFRPG

I think "not applicable" is a little strong. The fact that DFRPG makes it so that you have a percentage chance of thinking that some of your treasure is worth less than it actually is doesn't suddenly invalidate that thread.

A party who invests in a lot of hidden lore/connoisseur skills will discover that there's a lot of good stuff to be had

A party is covered with alchemy (wizard default), all three connoisseurs, analyze magic, religious ritual (cleric default), and thaumatology (wizard default).

So ultimately it ends up being a relatively small character point tax for whoever has decent IQ, and then you have a "game", where you ask how much a thing is worth, and the GM tells you a number based on random chance.

After you figure out how much an item is worth, you sell it. Characters can invest character points into being-better at selling things (and thus relatively worse at staying alive, killing things, and getting things to sell). The haggling game comes down to a dice roll: decide to play it or not, and calculating the expected value is straight forward. Is that part fun-positive? Do we want to spend more time at the table haggling over items when we could be exploring / delving / etc? No such thing as wrongfun, and I'm sure some people enjoy the DFRPG mechanics of selling stuff to merchants as written, but I don't see it. I'd rather use that table time to do something else.

So if the The Lesser Kunsian Book of the Dead is sold by an Wealth: Average PC to a secondhand book merchant for 40% of its hypothetical full $5000 value, the appraiser gets $400 and the party keeps $1600. That's a fair deal on both sides. If the party invests in becoming Very Wealthy with good reaction bonuses and high appraisal-related skills, they will keep the full $5000 next time they come across a similar tome.

That is much, much more interesting than the buying-and-selling minigame in e.g. Dungeons and Dragons

Where's the interesting part? You make one player spend 10 character points to sell all future items for 50% extra. Everyone else gets 1 ST, 1 HT, or 2 attack skill, and the unlucky designated wealthy-person gets to be the person who sells stuff for 60% instead of 40%. Selling all future items for the rest of a long-running campaign for 1.5x their value (a $100 item sells for $60 instead of $40, 60/40 = 1.5), for 10 character points on 1 character is pretty close to a non-decision, just a character point tax that they should pay sooner rather than later.

A wizard with IQ-16 getting Merchant to 18 will win the quick contest against Merchant-15 72% of the time, and that costs the wizard a total of 8 points, so these are just more point taxes for something that's hugely important (now you're selling almost everything you find for double, for a total of 18 points), but it only comes up in this specific but important situation. The rest of the time, those 18 points are doing close to nothing while the Wizard's friends are having fun with theirs.

I get that this opens up an interesting decision. Taking merchant skills instead of combat skills relatively increases the risk of a delve (one member of your party is 10-18 points weaker than they would have been), and relatively increases the reward of a delve (you can sell non-coin loot for 1.5x to 2x as before). I just wonder if this is a fun decision to give the players.

Imagine the pitch of trying to add it to D&D. "Hey, I added a homebrew feat. If one of you takes it instead of whatever you would have taken, you sell stuff for 1.5x as much as before". It would be really bad value to not take that feat on someone, but I don't think essentially forcing the group to figure out which player "has" to take the feat makes the game better.

The nice part about the D&D / Pathfinder system is summed up in this quote on the reddit thread:

You can go shopping if be you want. The equipment list is on page 60 of the book. You can sell items up to 20gp value in this town. You have 5 mins. I'm going to the bathroom.

[Anthony]

What I would tend towards is "there's a bookshelf; roll to see if you find anything of note", and only provide details on a success, because players are disposed to think anything you gave a name must be important.

[bocephus]

Originally Posted by sjmdw45

If you decide to directly control player wealth totals this way, then you should eliminate the Wealthy advantage/disadvantage from the game so that players don't waste points on it.

In a DFRPG 'style' game the wealth advantage has never come up, but that's mostly because of how I use DFRPG, you obviously are trying to use it differently than I do. DFRPG, for me, is really just a lets do some mindless hack and slash because we need/want a break from what ever or maybe its around the holidays so only half the group can show up what can we set up quick like for those of us that still want to game. I haven't ever had to "forbid or manipulate" wealth because no one has ever wasted time on it, the characters and the setting aren't long term.

Not to twist things up, but DFRPG really isn't my go to for anything but a quickie largely disposable setting/characters. I prefer long campaign style play (100+ sessions), GURPS DF if it will be that genre, which is going to be much more thought out and discussed up front with the players before we start. It will also not be dungeon crawling because, as a GM and a player, I personally don't care for that genre as anything but a one off (maybe 3 sessions tops) or just a small subsetting within the larger campaign.

I think our disconnect is the difference in mind set, it's obviously important to you. We just play different styles of games, in hindsight I shouldn't have tried to offer you advise because we don't game the same way.

When I convert old D&D adventures I just take the parts that would add to my game. I don't worry about keeping the loot the same because each time I use it it will be tailored to the situations and the table. I can't honestly say that since leaving D&D I have ever run a "canned adventure" out of the box. I use them to make my life easier, but I don't feel obligated to use them exactly as is.