How to balance purchasing gear?

[c0matose]

I feel sometimes that buying gear is almost too easy. DF has nice rules for selling whereby you cant always sell something for the full price, but i wondered how it is possible that all blacksmiths always have all variants of weapons available for the same price.

I recently watched a Witcher III video in which Geralt spoke to the blacksmith and got the speech option "is my sword ready yet?" I assume this means that you select what weapon you want and then after a few in game days the blacksmith has made it for you.

I was wondering how I could implement this into a GURPS DF game. My idea was that a vanilla item (eg Broadsword) has a 75% chance of being available in a blacksmiths shop, modified by the population of the area because a large city would have better stocked blacksmiths than a small village. For each enhancement you take 15% off its availability, so a Dwarven Broadsword would have only 60% chance, and a fine dwarven broadsword 45%, and very fine only 30%. If it isn't available you have to order it. You have to wait a day per $1000 that it costs. A large knife or other object cheaper than $100 is available the next morning/afternoon depending on when you order it. The final price is then increased by $50 per day you wait, to pay for the craftsmans time. eg a very fine dwarven broadsword would take 12 days and then have a further 240 added to the price, adding up to 12600, or would have a 30% chance of already being in stock.

A second idea was that the price of all items simply vary by 10% either side, depending on the success of a roll, and modified by haggling.

How balanced do you guys think this is? I feel it adds more immersion and tactics to buying items, particularly "late game" when you really need specialised items, and would make the player think if they really need that Very Fine Dwarven Broadsword between now and the next city, or if they can wait and possibly save time and money.

[Flyndaran]

Low Tech and its companions 2 and 3 have some nitty-gritty things related to this topic.
Though there would be so many variables in item availability, I imagine it might be easiest for a GM to just eyeball the numbers.

Such as if the local smith is a dwarf he's far more likely to know how to make dwarven X. But if he's just a local horse shoeing sort, getting basic weapons out of him would be the most you could expect.

[T.K.]

This is tied with your world building.

To use vanilla races and world as example:

Your players are currently at an elven city or settlement...what the eleven culture normally use and produce on a normal basis?

Do they use Halberds and 2-handed swords for the troops, fighters and normal warfare? So those should be always or almost always available and be pretty close to the stock book prices, say 10% more expensive than book prices.

Players want something they don't usually produce or use, let's say, like a 2-handed double axe? So, this one would only be able to be requested for production, taking a lot of time and a willing smith...OR you could maybe have 1 smith in the city that does have one, after the player do a lot of marketing checking and info gathering and so on...and even still, it would be quite expensive, say something like 40% more expensive than book prices.

Also, we normally use selling prices of used equipment at 50% of their book prices, to represent depreciation, use...

[Varyon]

DF is typically meant to be fairly simplistic. While enchanted items may not be available in all the flavors, it's generally assumed you can get mundane items rather easily. That said, there are other options.

First off, you'll need a way to determine what a given shop has. One way would be to stock it beforehand - put in items that you figure would be readily available, then add $N (N depending on size of the town) worth of randomly-generated (using DF8) weaponry/armor/whatever (depending on the shop). Another way is to wait until the character goes looking for a specific item, assign a probability, and roll to see if it's available.

If an item isn't available, it can generally either be made or ordered for the character. In general, the book prices assume some profit margin, so there's no reason to charge the character extra - paying extra Cost of Living while waiting, or going on an adventure or two without the item, is price enough. However, the character may have to pay extra to get the order expedited. Using LTC3 as a guideline, weapons and armor are crafted at a rate of around $60 per man-day. A shop with other paying work probably isn't going to dedicate much more than a single craftsman per day to your item (although one without a lot of paying work is going to dedicate more). You can get them to set aside some of their other paying work to expedite the process; it's arguably fair to multiply work rate and price by the same factor (so you can get your sword twice as fast for twice the price). Using similar guidelines for ordering the item would also work.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by c0matose

I feel sometimes that buying gear is almost too easy.

How so? I'd note that the rules already make it difficult to buy a lot of stuff. For example, items on DF1 p. 23-24 are apparently fair game, but there are a bunch of fairly mundane items (read the paragraph on Special Orders at the top of p. 25) which can only be obtained under limited circumstances. Likewise, p. 30 notes vaguely that powerful magical items are only found in dungeons. The point is, the default assumption is that lots of gear isn't easy to buy, even though it's up to the GM to come up with just how hard it is to get.

In my own games, I place some simple but absolute limits on things: Enchanted items are not available for purchase, nor are items with total mundane enhancements with a value greater than CF +4. If you want stuff like that, go adventuring; that's what dungeons are for. I've tried fiddling with costs, but that tends to just annoy my players without materially impacting the availability of unusual items. It's possible things will go better for you.

[Kromm]

Remember that starting gear is a lifetime's accumulation of material goods up to the beginning of the campaign. It might have been bought, made, inherited, won, awarded, found, stolen, etc. at any time prior to the events of the first game session, in any place previously visited by the character. As assigning a date, location, and means of acquisition to each arrow and bit of armor could get very silly very quickly, all of this is brushed under the carpet: "You have $X worth of stuff, whether it's a pile of coins, a kit of gear, or a wagonload of scrap iron."

Later, the GM decides what's available at shops, which won't be "everything." Most villages won't even have shops. Towns will, but most goods will have to be made to order, requiring a wait; something like armor might even involve parking in town for weeks while the armorer fits and refits things. Genuine cities may well have market districts, competing vendors, huge bazaars, etc. where you can get anything, possibly quickly because nobody wants to lose business to the competition . . . that's what makes cities cool for adventurers. Of course, cities also have gate tolls, watchmen who expect bribes, tax collectors who insist on the King's cut of any loot, pickpockets, etc.; where there's heavy commerce, there's heavy corruption, taxation, and opportunism.

[Micahel Silverbane]

If I did not already have planned out what particular items were available in a shop, I might use something like the Reaction Table to decide if that particular item was in inventory.

Reactions might be something along the lines of...

0 or less... No, I don't have it, and I'm tired of people asking about it, now get out of my shop!

1 to 3... I haven't got that item, and there is a waiting list of other clients waiting for such an item.

and so on up to...

19 or more... I've got so many of those things that I'd be grateful for you to take one (or more) off of my hands at a generous discount.

Modifiers to the roll would include things like, how big a population center you're at, how exotic the item in question is, whether or not it requires a particular specialty to craft the item, and so on (mostly completely arbitrary).

[RyanW]

I would use the Searching for People rules from Social Engineering. After all, you aren't just looking for a broadsword, you're looking for someone who has one they might be willing to sell. Or someone that would make one to order.

Then, you only need to come up with a bonus/penalty for how common it should be. Maybe a base of +3-(digits in the list price) modified for type/location.