CapnZapp
Legend
I can report back with some "actual play" experiences.
Try as I might, I cannot get up the frequency (of shoppe visits, with enough new coin to make the visit matter).
That is, I still consider it a good idea - but in a tabletop game (as opposed to a single-player CRPG) there simply isn't "space" (in time spent) to make the fluctuating-price-at-repeated-revisits work.
At first I created inventories for a few listed shops of Red Larch (adding the odd travelling merchant for good measure). But the party made perhaps three visits, and never more than one per level. And they mostly save up their money for permanent magic weapons anyway.
I can't really fix that. Adding much more money, sure, but then the team would be awash with gear before they reach even tier II, and I simply don't believe that will work out well in the end.
At this stage, the only way the idea would have worked is if the players would have spent a lot of time over a single consumable. For example: if a player bought a Potion of Heroism at some point, then that shop could regenerate its list to offer another potion (or set of potions) the next time.
But before level 5 there simply is not enough cash in circulation to warrant more than a single iteration of the lists. And then they level up, above what that tier I shops can offer.
---
My next attempt was a massive list over in Chult - Port Nyanzaru (this time you can actually follow along if you want practical examples, since I posted that as a thread of its own).
But here the scale of the map works against me. I realize that there will only be one or perhaps, max, two return visits to the city before the party has leveled up through the "jungle phase" of the adventure. Which is not enough to get that feel of fluctuating living prices. (Aka lots of work for little payoff).
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The reverse auction idea probably requires a so much quicker pace that we can rule out tabletop play.
I mean: when you play your computer game (Baldur's Gate or Divinity Original Sin or whatever) you can kill off a dozen monsters and three groups of bandits, and make three return trips to the town's magic shoppe - all in a single evening. That rate of content consumption is WAY higher than our pen and paper sessions. In the end, the rate of levelling per shoppe revisit is much higher in pnp than it nees to be in a crpg, so I conclude my idea can't work in practice.
The basic concept still helps out - a lot. Instead of worrying the base price is too low, leading to unbalanced / overpowered heroes, we simply accept that a few items are bargains but most cost a lot (enough that any worry of balance is lessened by how its cost is probably higher than any balanced price point).
That is, since we don't have workable 5e magic item creation formulas, and no better way to establish base prices (than the "sane" price list), I am still relieved by the very idea that item prices fluctuate wildly. The fact there isn't "time" to adjust shopping lists just means that an item that I price at five times the base price is more likely to remain unpurchased than it is to be purchased eventually (if there was time for enough revisits to make the price go down).
Try as I might, I cannot get up the frequency (of shoppe visits, with enough new coin to make the visit matter).
That is, I still consider it a good idea - but in a tabletop game (as opposed to a single-player CRPG) there simply isn't "space" (in time spent) to make the fluctuating-price-at-repeated-revisits work.
At first I created inventories for a few listed shops of Red Larch (adding the odd travelling merchant for good measure). But the party made perhaps three visits, and never more than one per level. And they mostly save up their money for permanent magic weapons anyway.
I can't really fix that. Adding much more money, sure, but then the team would be awash with gear before they reach even tier II, and I simply don't believe that will work out well in the end.
At this stage, the only way the idea would have worked is if the players would have spent a lot of time over a single consumable. For example: if a player bought a Potion of Heroism at some point, then that shop could regenerate its list to offer another potion (or set of potions) the next time.
But before level 5 there simply is not enough cash in circulation to warrant more than a single iteration of the lists. And then they level up, above what that tier I shops can offer.
---
My next attempt was a massive list over in Chult - Port Nyanzaru (this time you can actually follow along if you want practical examples, since I posted that as a thread of its own).
But here the scale of the map works against me. I realize that there will only be one or perhaps, max, two return visits to the city before the party has leveled up through the "jungle phase" of the adventure. Which is not enough to get that feel of fluctuating living prices. (Aka lots of work for little payoff).
---
The reverse auction idea probably requires a so much quicker pace that we can rule out tabletop play.
I mean: when you play your computer game (Baldur's Gate or Divinity Original Sin or whatever) you can kill off a dozen monsters and three groups of bandits, and make three return trips to the town's magic shoppe - all in a single evening. That rate of content consumption is WAY higher than our pen and paper sessions. In the end, the rate of levelling per shoppe revisit is much higher in pnp than it nees to be in a crpg, so I conclude my idea can't work in practice.
The basic concept still helps out - a lot. Instead of worrying the base price is too low, leading to unbalanced / overpowered heroes, we simply accept that a few items are bargains but most cost a lot (enough that any worry of balance is lessened by how its cost is probably higher than any balanced price point).
That is, since we don't have workable 5e magic item creation formulas, and no better way to establish base prices (than the "sane" price list), I am still relieved by the very idea that item prices fluctuate wildly. The fact there isn't "time" to adjust shopping lists just means that an item that I price at five times the base price is more likely to remain unpurchased than it is to be purchased eventually (if there was time for enough revisits to make the price go down).
