You laugh, but I’ve totally made this mistake. It was back in my wizarding days, and I was looking to get as much out of craft wondrous item as possible. Unfortunately, so was Galtorifrax.
As you may have guessed from the name, Galtorifrax was no mere merchant. Dude was a green dragon, a killer businessman, and a far better mathematician than me. And by that I mean that he could do basic multiplication.
“My good Galtorifrax!” said I. “I have a business proposition for you.”
“I’m listening,” said the dragon.
“Suppose that I were to produce a number of hand-crafted magic items for your next shipment.”
“You wish for me to sell this merchandise on your behalf?”
“Indeed. But fear not!” said my hyper-intelligent archmage. “You will of course receive a handsome commission. As we both know, supplies for constructing magic items cost half the item’s price. Likewise, you can count on selling items for exactly half of their listed price. Here’s the clever bit though. You are an NPC.”
“I’m a what?” said the affronted dragon.
“Shush. What I want you to do is sell my items at their full listed price. We then split the proceeds 50/50.”
“If I am following this correctly,” said the dragon. “You would pay 500 gp out of your own pocket to construct 1000 gp worth if items. I then sell these goods on your behalf for 1000 gp. I keep 500 gp in profit, then give you 500 gp as your share.”
“So do we have a deal?” I said eagerly. And that is the day that I learned that I am not half so clever as my characters. I had somehow fast-talked my way into volunteering as free magical labor for a dragon. In my fast-talking attempt to break the economy, I still have no idea how I got the math so freakin’ wrong.
What about the rest of your would-be merchant princes? Have you ever managed to break the economy correctly? What hacks did you use? Did your GM let you get away with it? And are you now living like kings? Tell us your tale of horrible haggling and execrable exchange rates down in the comments!
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For reference, in 5E, by labor-value, 1GP is $300.
An unskilled laborer makes 2SP/8 hours. A US minimum-wage worker makes $7.50/hour, $60/8 hour workday.
That’s assuming that an ‘unskilled labourer’ is paid as low as a minimum wage worker, when the former has direct access to a) blunt instruments, b) a group of similarly-paid buddies, and c) the guy handing out the cash
The Forgotten Realms enjoy a robust protest culture, lol
I had based room rental and ale as a soda equivalent, and come out with a Gold Piece being $20-$25.
Interesting thing is that with that in mind, 1st-3rd were basically the cost of a community college tuition course to learn each one, and the 4th-5th levels were a private college course worth.
Call me a buzzkill, but in my games, I just don’t allow haggling attempts most of the time.
Because if you do players will attempt to haggle absolutely all the time for literally everything they buy, and suddenly things that should take only a few seconds in game devolve into a 30 minutes long fiesta of metagaming and penny pinching.
So “regular” merchants are off limit. It’s their job, they’re savier than you in that regard, and you’ll pay the price they ask if you want the item, for the sake of both game balance and game flow. For other, rarer opportunites, e.g trying to trade with another adventurer group or something like that, I might allow it. But I prefer to keep those occasions rare.
same here.
No haggling for the benefit of the merchant can get you anything you want, eventually, payment on delivery.
And you can sell everything, always – even cursed items @10%.
In GURPS, the skill Merchant covers all monetary transactions (from simple haggling to analyzing market trends across galactic empires, though probably with penalties for the latter), so it’s as simple as a roll, and if they roll badly enough the prices temporarily go up. //Across town.//
Yeah… It’s all about rewarding the behavior you want to see. In that sense, I think it’s all about showing your players that adventuring is more fun and profitable than haggling.
This is why we should be teaching the Rules of Acquisition in schools.
What’s the conversion rate on gp to gold pressed latinum?
My current character would be the best negotiator — except that she’s temperamentally ill-suited to the job, having little interest in wealth. As such, haggling with merchants is just social interaction… fun for both sides, but not worth rolling dice for, because she’s never going to be pushing hard enough to get any significant discount.
That said, this _can_ be a significant intelligence gathering exercise… given an hour or so at the local market, she’ll certainly have learned everything important that’s happening in the city… the rumors and scandals, the things that people are worried about, etc.
My father loved to haggle. He wasn’t necessarily interested in buying the item, he just enjoyed the contest. He often ended by saying it was still much too expensive and leaving.
It’s like Gather Information but with more consumer goods!
Lol, Galtorifrax, you should have tried with Gordon Gekko 😛
Suppose that is one of the advantages of living on the country I live. One gets good with math and prices and looking for a better offer 🙂
About the only things we did that affected the economy was make sure one particular archmage had a continuous supply of ingredients to fuel his research. Literally every exotic creature (dragon, manticore, etc.) we killed would be field dressed and parts removed (blood, brain, heart, spleen, etc.) and tucked away in a bag of tricks (doesn’t freeze the item and the DM allowed it!).
We also would mark possible mining sites on our map or buy into already running mines if we could and give all that to our favorite dwarven smith. We also went and got him the Anvil of the Dwarven Lords and Cold Fire. Didn’t get stuff made for free, but got a hefty discount. Also would get bumped to the front of the line on when an item could be started. He also worked with our family archmage (see first paragraph. He finally just moved in with the family) and the high priest of the temple of Athena (who 90% of our adventuring group prayed to and tithed to that temple) to make various magic items.
Proceeds specifically refers to profit, not revenue. Your math worked out, with each of you should have gotten 250 from the profit and you should have been reimbursed for your 500gp initial expenses.
You didn’t get tricked on the math, he gaslit you by proposing a raw deal saying that’s what you asked for.
I had a sorcerer who became very interested in becoming independently wealthy in order to fund her crafting goals. (She met a wizard who was a successful merchant and city councillor, who became something of a role model for her small hamlet self.)
She had the Hedge Witch trait, which gave her a small discount on crafting magic items. But she quickly determined that wouldn’t be enough.
We were earning mythic tiers, so she took Component Freedom and the spell Masterwork Transformation. Easy way to get a lot of gold. She could earn hundreds a day using her lower level slots.
She put that money into the downtime rules to start a business, and buy a home for herself. (Others in the party bought a tavern, a brothel, and a temple.) Pretty soon, the limiting factor for her being able to pursue her interests became time rather than money.
Then she lost an arm while adventuring, and the trauma from that diverted her interests. While we did eventually get our positions of power in the city, she never really participated in the high society living that had so enchanted her when she first arrived.
We emptied out the dragon’s hoard, managed to get it all back to the village and promptly wrecked it’s economy. With all the gold we were flashing around, prices went up to the point that none of the locals could afford to buy anything anymore and the village died.
That was a game but you see the same thing happening in RL today when people expect to buy a four bedroom house with a swimming pool and a brand new SUV by working at a fast food joint for a ‘living wage’. The net result is that the restaurant closes because nobody can afford to pay what a burger now costs and all the jobs go with it then the rest of the economy inevitably follows suit with all the companies that used to supply those restaurants closing for lack of customers and those jobs lost. Minimum wage jobs aren’t meant to be a life’s goal, they’re for kids to work after school and learn how to do real jobs later on. Working hard for the priviliges of paying someone else’s debts off after thay make bad choices like taking ‘degrees’ in subjects nobody want to pay them to use merely disincentivizes them to work at all if the gov’t will write them a cheque anyway.
/rant off but dungeons can be a reflection of the modern world and online economies do get wrecked…frequently enough to require ‘adjustments’ and ‘patches’ that aren’t available in RL.
Wow, just wow.
Talk about missing the point.
In both authors question and real life example
Two sentences of vaguely on-topic pablum to segue to your real “point”: a smug, badly-reasoned rant about your contempt for low-wage workers. You must be great fun at parties.
and that is why a ‘happy meal’ costs fifteen bucks…not happy.
My father taught me to be a min/maxer through truly cutthroat games of Monopoly when I was little. My son grew up playing D&D and MMOs with his old man (c’est moi). Apparently, I raised him well. One day, he came to me and suggested that RAW 3.5 was broken: a 9th level caster could craft a Robe of Useful Items for 3,500 gp, remove the 16,000 gp of gems from it, then sell the robe with the basic daggers, lanterns, rope, etc. to recoup that initial material cost.
I liked it so much as a DM, I immediately envisioned a minion having the same conversation with the campaign’s BBEG, who promptly realized there was more money to be made in crafting that in revenge and promptly retired from villainy forever.
Amazing. Love the lessons passed down through generations.
I definitely learned some min-max tendencies playing Scrabble with my dad. He didn’t have the longest words, but he sure knew how to play his letters to take advantage of every multiplier on the board.
I don’t have much of a story in regards to this, in part because the one game I run with currency is modern enough that you wouldn’t be likely to get away with it, but I do know that the prices have changed for things since I started playing. Which is gonna be fun when I eventually switch over to the final rulebook.
“What about the rest of your would-be merchant princes?”
I once made a killing on monetary exchange and speculation between distant countries. Both countries somewhat prized the other’s currency, one country as “art” and “collector’s items” (the coinage was made from obsidian and gemstones), the other country’s coinage was almost pure gold and silver, which was rare in obsidian coin land. So once per month my character would teleport between countries, using different cities each time, swapping coinages, making a tidy profit. But not too much, so as too avoid flooding the market. So my PC made maybe a thousand per month on the coinage speculation.
“Have you ever managed to break the economy correctly? What hacks did you use? Did your GM let you get away with it?”
Didn’t break the economy, just angered the Mage’s Guild (and the mage country) by using teleportation over extremely vast distances without a teleportation circle (apparently being able to do this was super rare and they didn’t like rogue mages (ie ones not under their thumb) having that power. Luckily my PC and his master (I was playing an apprentice mage) had entered into an agreement with the dwarven nation to assist them with enchanting and teach their people human magics (which the Guild also forbid)… so we did a raid into a lesser protected guildhall, stole all their spellbooks, and then proceeded to go to war with the Mages…
So get away with it? Eventually. Once the upper circle members of the Guild were mostly all dead leaving the Guild vulnerable to the uber religious “we hate mages” country (who was also at war with the dwarves over the dwarves not worshiping the same gods) they backed off on their war with the dwarves who basically agreed not to teach any humans any of the human magics they were learning…
“And are you now living like kings?”
The campaign ended with the resolution of the war, so I like to think that my PC and his master lived well in the dwarven kingdom as honorary dwarves (we were both human).
In Traveller, this comes up so often that there have been official, mainline supplements by the primary publisher (the equivalent of WotC for D&D) literally titled “Merchant Prince” to support this sort of thing. It has been noted that speculative trade, with a suitably equipped (proper skills & proper equipment including a good trading ship) party, can rack up a lot of currency in short order.
The setting is vast enough that even a dedicated party can usually only affect the economy in a corner of it – and the largest human nation-equivalent, the Third Imperium, is basically a trade confederation designed to support, enable, and harness those who can do well at commerce. Amass a vast personal fortune? Great, now what do you do with it? Anything less than conquering a whole planet – or even actually conquering a planet, if it is low population – tends to be too trivial for the interstellar government to care about.
In Pathfinder 1e, something I’d come across was using Planar Ally/Binding to nab up to three Lantern Archons. Planar Ally comes with its own expenses, so I can’t really recommend it other than it being less icky (using Planar Binding to forcibly bind anything other than an evil outsider feels a bit off for me). Anyway, Lantern Archons can use Continual Flame at will, and with three of them using it to create Everburning Torches (which cost 110 gold), you can make an amount to break the economy. If you need to bargain with the archons, you can promise that a certain amount will be donated to help provide light to the streets/orphanages/etc. so they’ll be more likely to help you willingly.
Why three specifically?
A PF1 Lantern Archon just have Continual Flame as a spell-like ability, so you could do the same trick with just one (or more if you want to speed up the process).
Lantern Archons in really screwed with the costs of Everburning torches in general.
Even at lower levels you could summon one with Summon Monster II and then have them cast Continual Flame on a Torch every round for a pretty decent profit for your level.
110*3*0,5-0,03 = 164 gp 9 sp 7 cp for a single 2nd level spell for a 3rd level character. Pretty good for a days work in downtime.
With those profits, you could in theory even make money by just paying for spellcaster services to have some other wizard do the summoning for you… but at that point it’s really your GM’s fault for not having the wizards you hire steal your idea
My lore bard brought capitalism to an online 5e play-by-post community with a shared world, and single-handedly upended its economy and power balance. Well, not entirely single-handedly; I must credit his employees and summons for their fair share. Essentially, he set himself up in the central town providing magical services to other PCs rather than going on quests himself. Previously the server had little more than a small magic item crafting economy, but he carved out a completely untapped niche in summoning and resurrection services, used the lack of competition to establish a monopoly, then expanded to incorporate cooperative PC magic item crafters into his trade guild, Finnegan and Co.
He managed to secure himself a ring of spell storing which he could use to store casts of Find Familiar, Find Steed, and Find Greater Steed which he had obtained through Magical Secrets. By letting any customer put on the ring and cast the stored spell, he could provide them with a familiar or steed with the full benefits of the spell — except of course that if their creature died, the PC had to return to him and pay to resummon it. Planar Ally and Planar Binding later added more powerful summons to his roster — just make sure to return with coin in hand to renew that binding or it’ll get loose! Finnegan and Co. accepts no legal liability for summons whose binding is allowed to expire.
Because many of these summons cost my bard very little to produce, he was able to offer them at very affordable prices — so even low-level characters could spend their first quest’s loot on a CR 1 Dire Wolf steed to join them in quests to come. I reached a compromise with the DMs that I would at least keep my flying mounts at exorbitantly high prices, to spare them from having to balance all of their low-level encounters around griffon-riding PCs.
Resurrection was the main breadwinner, though. By providing resurrections at a comfortable markup above material component cost, he siphoned wealth from daring PCs while encouraging them to grow more reckless, fueling a cycle of pursuing more lucrative and more dangerous quests while establishing a dependency on him and his services. He set up life insurance policies, using his steed-summoning trick to assign griffons to retrieve dead clients from TPKs, and on a few occasions (with the players’ OOC consent of course) resurrected PCs who couldn’t afford it and placed them under a Geas to repay their resurrection fee with interest. Previously, economic stability had been maintained as gold entered the economy through quest loot and left it when a PC died and all of their gear and wealth was lost. Now, PCs weren’t staying dead, so their wealth was staying in the economy — and much of it was going into the coffers of Finnegan and Co. Predictable economic consequences ensued.
Eventually his sheer mercantilism inspired other PCs to approach him with business offers: spellcasters lending their own summoning spells to expand his rental roster of bound summons, high-level artificers cutting deals for access to his vast resources in exchange for crafting on his behalf with their time- and cost-reducing skills. Ironically, community staff had tried several times to implement a guild system from the top down, with no luck — but Finnegan and Co. became the first true PC guild. At its head, my bard was the richest and arguably most powerful PC the community had ever seen, and the single greatest enemy of game balance.
Levels went by, and with new spells new services were offered. DMs quaked in their boots once “True Polymorph” appeared on the Finnegan and Co. bill of fare. Eventually the staff declared a full reset of character levels, equipment, wealth, etcetera. My bard wasn’t specifically cited as the reason, and to be fair there were other factors at play. Nonetheless, the multiple houserules about steeds, simulacra, and polymorphing that had been implemented during his career up to this point made it clear that since nothing less than a god could stop him, this was necessary divine intervention.
The player character community had been quick to take a shine to the bard who rode into town and promised to keep them all safe from death. Little did they know he brought something far more dangerous — ambition.
Didn’t Barmaid die on August 6th 2018?
I thought Tavern Wench had taken over
Maybe that’s not Barmaid. Maybe that’s Tavern Wench’s cousin, Barmaid.
I can imagine it would be easy to mix up those two.
Many moons ago, I was part of a large RPG club and part of a D&D 3.X Forgotten Realms “Living Campaign”.
(Twice a week interested players could turn up, and a handful of volunteer DMs would each run a one-shot game for one table. DMs would coordinate their individual plots with the campaign founder/organiser. Players would bring the same character week after week, each week playing with a (mostly) different party.)
IIRC the campaign started with around a dozen players and eventually climbed to about 30 before the campaign folded due to not having enough DMs.
One character had a Regional Feat (a Feat that can only be taken at first level and only if the character is native to a particular region of the setting) which was called something like “Mercantile Background” which allowed him to sell items for 75% of list price, rather than 50%.
The player made an open offer to all the other players, that he would buy any and all of their loot for 60% of list price. So everyone else would make an extra 10 percentage points, which was nice. And for each game session he would make 15 percentage points *per other player*. If it were a normal gaming group with 4 or 5 players then it wouldn’t be that crazy, but with the player-count of the Living Campaign he was rolling in cash.
He had the best magical equipment, and the right scroll for every occasion. Towards the end of the campaign, he invented a Ressurection-insurance scheme which he would sell to the other players *at a loss* just because he felt like spreading the wealth.
I was a high level artificer who just got fabricate and time to craft. My magnum opus was a Legendary wagon, by working out a deal with the nobles we were on good terms with I got a loan and spent the last half of the 40 downtime weeks needed to craft it but me 20kgp in debt right before the end of the campaign. Doing the math with fabricate and my skills and the material costs the DM set (little high but in hindsight reasonable) I would have been able to pay it off in 3 weeks if I did nothing but make plate-mail for the army. Would have rather built up the village but that has a much poorer ROI.
One of the campaigns I ran back in college had a Forge Domain cleric who made a little extra money whenever the party was in a town by blacksmithing. The party also included a wizard, who I’d given a notebook of “rejected spells” from a defeated caster. (https://coinsandscrolls.blogspot.com/2017/09/osr-1d50-discount-spells.html)
One of them, “War Cape” turned out to combo nicely with the above money-making strategy – the PCs convinced folks at the market that they were legendary adventurers with rare artifacts to sell. They were about lv. 3 at the time.