Adventurers making money with profession
- Thread starter Byronic
- Start date
Byrons_Ghost
First Post
Microeconomics and edition wars aside, the important question is this:
What does the player expect to get out of having an exotic weapons merchant?
If it's just background info and he doesn't expect anything more, then you can file it under the "duly noted" category and get back to the game. Occasionally he finds a cool weapon or gets to make a sale.
If he wants to craft his own unique weapons, then you'll have to come up with some sort of crafting rules (probably based on 3.5 or a variant) or tell him he's SOL.
If he wants to make extra money, either do as suggested above and count it as part of the party's wealth advancement, or give him a attribute roll (say, Wis or Chr) to make a few gold per week, as the 3.5 Profession rules.
If he wants to use this as motivation for a treasure hunter, Indiana Jones type character, then give him lots of exotic locations with legendary (but level-approriate) weapons full of traps, undead, hostile natives, and the like.
That's about every variation I can think of. No matter what the case, the easiest thing to do is to ask him before the game what he has in mind.
What does the player expect to get out of having an exotic weapons merchant?
If it's just background info and he doesn't expect anything more, then you can file it under the "duly noted" category and get back to the game. Occasionally he finds a cool weapon or gets to make a sale.
If he wants to craft his own unique weapons, then you'll have to come up with some sort of crafting rules (probably based on 3.5 or a variant) or tell him he's SOL.
If he wants to make extra money, either do as suggested above and count it as part of the party's wealth advancement, or give him a attribute roll (say, Wis or Chr) to make a few gold per week, as the 3.5 Profession rules.
If he wants to use this as motivation for a treasure hunter, Indiana Jones type character, then give him lots of exotic locations with legendary (but level-approriate) weapons full of traps, undead, hostile natives, and the like.
That's about every variation I can think of. No matter what the case, the easiest thing to do is to ask him before the game what he has in mind.
LostSoul
Adventurer
Byronic said:
How would I do it?
I'd tie the adventure to travelling around, trying to buy and sell exotic weapons.
"You hear rumours about the demise of the New Nerathian army on the Plains of the Dead. Nerathians always stockpiled gozarian healing eels before going into combat - and now that they're dead, there must be a load of them just sitting around. Whoever can get them first will make a killing!"
So in this case, the adventure is about trying to get to that stockpile before your competitors do, dodging whatever killed the army in the first place.
I'd handwave actual transactions - the haggling, buying and selling parts - and just reward standard treasure packages for completing the adventure to represent that wealth. The PCs could do their buying and selling - their trade goods handwaved as well - and we're off to the next adventure!
If the players were interested in the the transaction part, then I'd make those Skill Challenges - but not about the deal; I'd handwave the monetary rewards. No, I'd make success and failure about something else - something that leads to adventure, like getting thrown into prison for smuggling, getting allies, learning about new lucrative deals, losing your cargo, etc.
If they were really interested in counting coins I'd let them, keeping track of cargo values, simulating an economy, etc.; but I'd change the economy so that no magic items, ritual components, or magic item components could be bought or sold. I'd have to replace it with something else, though I don't know what kind of fluff would fit off the top of my head.
darkrose50
First Post
Wormwood said:
=p
I had a similar post on the WotC webpage. People went nuts saying all sorts of silly bits about how the rules are the rules because they are the rules and are rock solid, and should not be messed with. Not only that, one should not try to have fun in D&D by having any sort of economics involved . . . having economics in D&D was wrong, and not fun.
Mostly people were going on, and on, about how no one would want magical items in a D&D setting. I think in a feudalistic society (the base D&D setting?) people would want magical items, and the people who want them would be easy to identify. Thus making selling them for 20% of there trade value stupid.
The first list is a list of reason I heard (warped to my viewpoint), and the second list are the reasons why economics should make sense.
darkrose50 said:
You know, selling items for full price would work just fine if the players promise that they'll only spend 20% of the cash they get on magic items. All that stuff you posted is about PCs with some decently deep involvement in the game world. Given that, it one would assume that they'd have in-setting desires like buying houses, bribing officals for noble titles, building that big church for their god, patronizing artists so they can produce masterpieces, tithing to the the church, and that sort of thing.
The base rules assume none of these things and that PCs will basically be ploughing all their money back into magic items so they can loot more dungeons.
That may be part of the disconnect you're feeling.
My experience of this sort of situation is that it's very hard to avoid either having people make too much money, breaking the economy of the game, or constantly failing and losing money, which is not fun at all.
That being said, if he's buying and selling, the skill challenge rules + the existing skills will handle it fine.
A set of economic rules I've used with some success (and some disasters) can be found in the Darokin and Minrothad Gazeteers, though you'd have to adapt it to 4E.
That being said, if he's buying and selling, the skill challenge rules + the existing skills will handle it fine.
A set of economic rules I've used with some success (and some disasters) can be found in the Darokin and Minrothad Gazeteers, though you'd have to adapt it to 4E.
James McMurray
First Post
JohnBiles said:
That's a good idea. The skill challenges are already set up to generate rewards appropriate to their level, so "how much do you want to make on this deal?" can directly translate into a level for the challenge. The only concern would be making sure these challenges don't steal spotlight time or vault him ahead of the rest of the party.
Goumindong
First Post
all the arguments against the current 4e rules are not economic in nature nor are they logical.
4e is a game. Games need to be balanced. 4e balances buying items by making a bought item, I.E. one that you specifically are looking for to be less valuable than a found item, which may or may not be what you are looking for.
Regarding economics:
Large margins between buy and sell prices are common in low volume situations. Where there is low volume transaction costs and time on market are increased. These increased costs mean that you need a larger margin to make a profit.
E.G. Lets say you could buy magic items at a 5x margin or you could buy standard items at a 20% margin. But it takes 1 year to sell the magic item and it takes 1 week to sell the standard item. A magic item costs at the minimum say, 680 GP and we are looking at 10 for a mundane. So you can buy 1 magic item or you can buy 13.6 swords.
In 1 week you have turned your 136 of mundane into 163 gold and you pick up 163 gold worth of mundane items.
This continues. In 20 weeks you have bought and sold enough mundane items to be worth 5000 GP. In 52 weeks, the year it would take you to sell that magic item you have made 1.7m gold and are a magnate.
Now granted there is going to be some efficiency loss there(probably a lot) as marginal returns decrease. But this only highlights just how much the turn over rate on magic items can easily reduce their profitability. The merchant has to make his rent and keep up the shop, keep it secure, and keep it staffed, all costs incurred which are difficult to eat when you do not have significant income via other sales.
There is also the problem with merchants knowing what items reduce to for residium. They aren't going to offer much more than what you can get for the result of disenchanting the item because they know that it will take you a quest to sell the damn thing. So they offer you the disenchanting value of the item and save you the time it takes to sell the item.
If you want to sell a magic item for full price in the Points of Light Economy its going to be a quest to do so. Or you are setting up a shoppe and are going to be expected to pay for all the advertisement, staffing, security, and rent that is necessary to sustain that operation and all the risks that that entails without seeing return on your sale for upwards of a year.
4e is a game. Games need to be balanced. 4e balances buying items by making a bought item, I.E. one that you specifically are looking for to be less valuable than a found item, which may or may not be what you are looking for.
Regarding economics:
Large margins between buy and sell prices are common in low volume situations. Where there is low volume transaction costs and time on market are increased. These increased costs mean that you need a larger margin to make a profit.
E.G. Lets say you could buy magic items at a 5x margin or you could buy standard items at a 20% margin. But it takes 1 year to sell the magic item and it takes 1 week to sell the standard item. A magic item costs at the minimum say, 680 GP and we are looking at 10 for a mundane. So you can buy 1 magic item or you can buy 13.6 swords.
In 1 week you have turned your 136 of mundane into 163 gold and you pick up 163 gold worth of mundane items.
This continues. In 20 weeks you have bought and sold enough mundane items to be worth 5000 GP. In 52 weeks, the year it would take you to sell that magic item you have made 1.7m gold and are a magnate.
Now granted there is going to be some efficiency loss there(probably a lot) as marginal returns decrease. But this only highlights just how much the turn over rate on magic items can easily reduce their profitability. The merchant has to make his rent and keep up the shop, keep it secure, and keep it staffed, all costs incurred which are difficult to eat when you do not have significant income via other sales.
There is also the problem with merchants knowing what items reduce to for residium. They aren't going to offer much more than what you can get for the result of disenchanting the item because they know that it will take you a quest to sell the damn thing. So they offer you the disenchanting value of the item and save you the time it takes to sell the item.
If you want to sell a magic item for full price in the Points of Light Economy its going to be a quest to do so. Or you are setting up a shoppe and are going to be expected to pay for all the advertisement, staffing, security, and rent that is necessary to sustain that operation and all the risks that that entails without seeing return on your sale for upwards of a year.
Dude, don't be a punk. The rules in the DMG make good sense for someone who's primary interaction with buying and selling things is finding stuff on the ground (or in tombs or gripped in the dead hands of their enemies) and then unloading it quickly so that they can get back to saving the world.darkrose50 said:
If your campaign requires detailed rules for buying and selling material goods, then great for you. You'll need more than this. But that doesn't make it a poor decision to create a default rule that focuses on the way the game is usually run. There's a very real downside to having more rules than you strictly need, and its easier to add rules for those who need them than subtract them for those who don't.
If you need better economic rules, I hope you find them. Or create them. Or ad lib them based on the DM's mental interpretation of a hypothetical economic model for your campaign. Or whatever it is that you feel is best. But that doesn't mean that the rules as presented in the D&D core are objectively bad or deserving of abuse.
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