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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9677559" data-attributes="member: 6790260">The way I've generally gone about it is, if the players really want to make an event out of visiting an ordinary shopkeeper for ordinary purchases, they can, but doing so will almost never add much to the experience beyond....acted-out demonstrations that shopkeepers exist? Which at least for me I don't need to act that out to know that shopkeepers exist in a setting. It's more than enough to hear of the bustling market, to give a line or two of GM description that talks about how it takes their cab a few minutes to work through a plaza thronging with customers and merchants loudly hawking their wares etc.But! If they're looking for something that is, or should be, more distinctive...that's when things get more involved, because they aren't looking for functionally fungible goods, they're looking for something that is "special" to at least some degree. Hence when the Bard decided to peruse the markets looking for an instrument that would have some kind of magical benefit, or when the Druid went looking for whatever curiosities might catch his eye, or when our Battlemaster wanted to find an armorsmith to reforge the orichalcum covering-plates the party had collected, it was more than just a quick bit of bookkeeping. There there were merchants, with lives, and histories, sometimes families; there, there were backstories and requests and drive beyond just "exchange fungible currency at the nearest general-goods store" stuff.That way, we don't have to blow a quarter of a three-hour session doing literally nothing more than...exchanging ordinary goods for their fair market price. That fairly tedious task can be finished in a minute or two. But we also don't elide away the genuinely fun opportunities for new quests, new challenges, new concerns. And to be clear, sometimes what would be "ordinary goods" in one context are not at all ordinary in another--as an example, if the party had sought rations and water in the period where the Sadalbari ran black and poisoned the water and the fish, yeah, it almost surely would've been a Big Deal purchase rather than a two-minute "you want to buy X? Alright that's 10 dinars", because genuinely that was bordering on End Of The World omen stuff and people were very freaked out. Likewise, if fire-genies were roaming the streets, a potion of fire resistance isn't going to come cheap unless you have something to offer the alchemist in exchange (as occurred in a past event, from my first, failed, attempt to start up this campaign with the original group.)</blockquote>

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