Hi everyone!
so a topic i thought worth abit of looking into and dropping ideas about is how people handle buying trips in their games. Im pretty new to all this so i thought its a topic to see how other people work in this ingame, while giving a few experience in real life which may be useful.
Im in india at the moment and there is no lack of strange shopkeepers doing everything they can to push their wares towards you, tiny market stalls lining streets and touts running after their friends hotels.
So im wondering how you guys run the buying parts of your games. Everything from smithys and taverns, to market places, inn rooms and carriage rides.
I love the idea of coming up to a stall (like in the start of Alladin the Disney Movie) and a shopkeeper describing his immaculate wares to you. The threat of being stooged with some inferior piece of equipment, and the chance of some special something under the table, hidden from your average customer.
When players are walking through the cities of your worlds, do most stalls use a similar pricing list for their weapons, armour etc, do they find discrepancies between shopkeepers (shopkeepers shouting at each other trying to outbid the other for the sale?).
Do you use random generators to get those less usual items out onto the selling table or personally create all your more interesting items for the sale? I guess you could use a treasure generator for creating interesting but random items to sell?
Anyway love to see peoples shared experiences, ideas and methods for making this part of the game more interesting for the players (my first try at DMing i pretty much handed the players a sheet and said "pick what you want" DOH! There was one mistake
)
Considering my lack of game experience in this area, i thought id share a few real life experiences i have had while overseas. Eastern countries are very interesting for the market type atmosphere.
In israel i went up to a stall in an arab market and tried to buy a small malachite ring. The shopowner said a price like 50 shekel or something. I said "but there is a guy down the road selling them for 20!". His reply which i found really funny was "really? go there and buy me a hundred!". Sarcasm, gotta love it!
Here in northern India, they get alot of tourists (Mcleod Ganj home of the Dalai Lama) so many shops/market sellers will start at 2 or 3 times the true price for the new travellers who never have to haggle back home (like me in Australia). Also there are TONS of market stalls and shops which sell the same things people are interested in. Souveneirs, tibetan prayer flags, crystals and Mala pendants (crystals held in a net worn at the throat), cloth, clothes etc. This means theres lots of chances to go to multiple places and compare prices to see if the first shopkeeper was actually giving you a decent price.
You give them, half the price and they are like "no no no...give me a better price". You go up a little and slowly you haggle towards something. You can watch the way they react to see if they are really giving you a decent price, or just making you feel better about the price you are taking. If they are quick to accept your responding price you know they are still doing very well out of the deal. If they are hard to push for a certain price, they are slowly dropping trying to get you to come higher every time, you know its a more decent price, even a good one. If they stop at a price and you say its to much i guess i will leave it, you play your big trump card (or attempt to). For the haggler, your trump card is always walking away. Either they will sit on the price and call your bluff, as you walk away (in which case at some point you come back and they know they have you) or they get worried they will loose the sale and so drop the price even more.
Here, saying you are a travelling student without alot of money sometimes can help with that. (thankfully its actually true for me! lol). They build up an idea, compared to say an older couple dressed nicely carrying a camera, they will change how they react to you depending on how you look (ie. ingame a traveller in rumpled clothing and a rugsack, compared to a mage in a beautiful wizards robe). Course then if you dont look the market, they might not bother to try and sell their more treasured/expensive items on you!
Another experience I had in Israel, I walked away from a sale and continued down the market. 15mins later the guy came up to me (300m down from his stall) and said "ok ok i will give you 150 (instead of the previous 300)" Seeing a more reasonable price i decided to follow him and check it out. I think he got his brother to watch the stall in the meantime but anyway I followed him back. As soon as he had me back at the stall he says "250" much to my irritation. (I ended up walking off again hehe)
Usually they have lots and lots of "my lowest price" and another great trick they use is "hey my friend, i will give you a special price" or "you are my first customer i will give you a special price".
Walking down the street here, you have to be careful how closely you look at someones goods or they will be on you like a hawk trying to sell to you. They ask what you are looking for and if there is nothing in particular many will start suggesting things to you, almost forcefully sometimes "here look at this!" "no not what i want" "here look at THIS!" "no not what i want" etc etc.
Some emphasise their "honour code" as a seller, for example a crystal seller i met. He was quite passionate about his crystals and so below a certain price he simply refused to go (even haggling with israelis which is always an interesting experience). He offered me tea, and was very inviting saying better to give the buyer a good experience because then he will come back, rather than wring him for a buy and never see him again (place where the seller is all business and will take every turn to steer you towards a buy.)
I went looking for a particular semirecious crystal pendant at a shop, and the guy said no i dont have anything like that. My friend was looking for a stone for his g/f and so the shopkeeper focused on him trying to make a sale. When my friend wasnt interested in any of his stones and we stood to leave he said "wait you want X pendant" i replied i was and he said "ok sit down i have a few to show you". Rather than waste time on me at first he went for the more profitable sale, but when that disappeared, he went back to me to try and get something out of us.
Express a tiny bit of interest and he was showing me 8 different crystals of the type. Dont find the pendant you want? he shows me 8 different types of pendant with the same stone. Or 8 different stones in the same pendant. Desperation to make a sale can make them really pushy (life is pretty hard here for a seller
)
Touts are another common appearance in India. A hotel or establishment will people to get you into theri hotel or establishment. This comes in two main forms here.
First you have the person, usually a taxi driver (but sometimes even just a person on the street who notices you as a traveller) who recommends you try out X hotel. If they take you there and you accept, the hotel pays him a commission for getting you there, and raises how much they charge you to cover that.
The other type ive noticed happens espeially with poorer people who have "taxi bicycles", a bike with a two person carriage thing on the back. The more subtle ones will recommend you check out X store on the way, recommending their wares as really good or cheap etc etc. By coming there they get paid an amount. When i was in Thailand my driver told me there was a one day a year sale on at a place, which i then figured id go check out. He got paid abit for it and i ended up buying some things later. Everyone was happy, i just found out later that in a way i had been taken advantage of (meh its all part of the experience and i bought a cool ring for my mum there! much cheapre than aus!). I also had a good expereince here in india with the same thing. Basically the bike taxi guy was very poor (as they all are) and asked us if we could just have a look in a large shop so he could get the small bonus for taking us there. He was honest with us so we were cool with it, it was a government run shop so things were more expensive (like normal western prices as opposed to most prices here in india which are really really cheap).
Also going to special places like the Taj Mahal have a different price for locals and for tourists. Obviously its much more expensive for a tourist to get in (but when its a place like the Taj you dont really have a chocie if you want to see it).
Anyway i hope some people find this interesting/useful for expanding that side of your game. Id love to hear some of your experiences ingame/outgame which can broaden the fun of trying to get a good buy
M
so a topic i thought worth abit of looking into and dropping ideas about is how people handle buying trips in their games. Im pretty new to all this so i thought its a topic to see how other people work in this ingame, while giving a few experience in real life which may be useful.
Im in india at the moment and there is no lack of strange shopkeepers doing everything they can to push their wares towards you, tiny market stalls lining streets and touts running after their friends hotels.
So im wondering how you guys run the buying parts of your games. Everything from smithys and taverns, to market places, inn rooms and carriage rides.
I love the idea of coming up to a stall (like in the start of Alladin the Disney Movie) and a shopkeeper describing his immaculate wares to you. The threat of being stooged with some inferior piece of equipment, and the chance of some special something under the table, hidden from your average customer.
When players are walking through the cities of your worlds, do most stalls use a similar pricing list for their weapons, armour etc, do they find discrepancies between shopkeepers (shopkeepers shouting at each other trying to outbid the other for the sale?).
Do you use random generators to get those less usual items out onto the selling table or personally create all your more interesting items for the sale? I guess you could use a treasure generator for creating interesting but random items to sell?
Anyway love to see peoples shared experiences, ideas and methods for making this part of the game more interesting for the players (my first try at DMing i pretty much handed the players a sheet and said "pick what you want" DOH! There was one mistake
)Considering my lack of game experience in this area, i thought id share a few real life experiences i have had while overseas. Eastern countries are very interesting for the market type atmosphere.
In israel i went up to a stall in an arab market and tried to buy a small malachite ring. The shopowner said a price like 50 shekel or something. I said "but there is a guy down the road selling them for 20!". His reply which i found really funny was "really? go there and buy me a hundred!". Sarcasm, gotta love it!
Here in northern India, they get alot of tourists (Mcleod Ganj home of the Dalai Lama) so many shops/market sellers will start at 2 or 3 times the true price for the new travellers who never have to haggle back home (like me in Australia). Also there are TONS of market stalls and shops which sell the same things people are interested in. Souveneirs, tibetan prayer flags, crystals and Mala pendants (crystals held in a net worn at the throat), cloth, clothes etc. This means theres lots of chances to go to multiple places and compare prices to see if the first shopkeeper was actually giving you a decent price.
You give them, half the price and they are like "no no no...give me a better price". You go up a little and slowly you haggle towards something. You can watch the way they react to see if they are really giving you a decent price, or just making you feel better about the price you are taking. If they are quick to accept your responding price you know they are still doing very well out of the deal. If they are hard to push for a certain price, they are slowly dropping trying to get you to come higher every time, you know its a more decent price, even a good one. If they stop at a price and you say its to much i guess i will leave it, you play your big trump card (or attempt to). For the haggler, your trump card is always walking away. Either they will sit on the price and call your bluff, as you walk away (in which case at some point you come back and they know they have you) or they get worried they will loose the sale and so drop the price even more.
Here, saying you are a travelling student without alot of money sometimes can help with that. (thankfully its actually true for me! lol). They build up an idea, compared to say an older couple dressed nicely carrying a camera, they will change how they react to you depending on how you look (ie. ingame a traveller in rumpled clothing and a rugsack, compared to a mage in a beautiful wizards robe). Course then if you dont look the market, they might not bother to try and sell their more treasured/expensive items on you!
Another experience I had in Israel, I walked away from a sale and continued down the market. 15mins later the guy came up to me (300m down from his stall) and said "ok ok i will give you 150 (instead of the previous 300)" Seeing a more reasonable price i decided to follow him and check it out. I think he got his brother to watch the stall in the meantime but anyway I followed him back. As soon as he had me back at the stall he says "250" much to my irritation. (I ended up walking off again hehe)
Usually they have lots and lots of "my lowest price" and another great trick they use is "hey my friend, i will give you a special price" or "you are my first customer i will give you a special price".
Walking down the street here, you have to be careful how closely you look at someones goods or they will be on you like a hawk trying to sell to you. They ask what you are looking for and if there is nothing in particular many will start suggesting things to you, almost forcefully sometimes "here look at this!" "no not what i want" "here look at THIS!" "no not what i want" etc etc.
Some emphasise their "honour code" as a seller, for example a crystal seller i met. He was quite passionate about his crystals and so below a certain price he simply refused to go (even haggling with israelis which is always an interesting experience). He offered me tea, and was very inviting saying better to give the buyer a good experience because then he will come back, rather than wring him for a buy and never see him again (place where the seller is all business and will take every turn to steer you towards a buy.)
I went looking for a particular semirecious crystal pendant at a shop, and the guy said no i dont have anything like that. My friend was looking for a stone for his g/f and so the shopkeeper focused on him trying to make a sale. When my friend wasnt interested in any of his stones and we stood to leave he said "wait you want X pendant" i replied i was and he said "ok sit down i have a few to show you". Rather than waste time on me at first he went for the more profitable sale, but when that disappeared, he went back to me to try and get something out of us.
Express a tiny bit of interest and he was showing me 8 different crystals of the type. Dont find the pendant you want? he shows me 8 different types of pendant with the same stone. Or 8 different stones in the same pendant. Desperation to make a sale can make them really pushy (life is pretty hard here for a seller
)Touts are another common appearance in India. A hotel or establishment will people to get you into theri hotel or establishment. This comes in two main forms here.
First you have the person, usually a taxi driver (but sometimes even just a person on the street who notices you as a traveller) who recommends you try out X hotel. If they take you there and you accept, the hotel pays him a commission for getting you there, and raises how much they charge you to cover that.
The other type ive noticed happens espeially with poorer people who have "taxi bicycles", a bike with a two person carriage thing on the back. The more subtle ones will recommend you check out X store on the way, recommending their wares as really good or cheap etc etc. By coming there they get paid an amount. When i was in Thailand my driver told me there was a one day a year sale on at a place, which i then figured id go check out. He got paid abit for it and i ended up buying some things later. Everyone was happy, i just found out later that in a way i had been taken advantage of (meh its all part of the experience and i bought a cool ring for my mum there! much cheapre than aus!). I also had a good expereince here in india with the same thing. Basically the bike taxi guy was very poor (as they all are) and asked us if we could just have a look in a large shop so he could get the small bonus for taking us there. He was honest with us so we were cool with it, it was a government run shop so things were more expensive (like normal western prices as opposed to most prices here in india which are really really cheap).
Also going to special places like the Taj Mahal have a different price for locals and for tourists. Obviously its much more expensive for a tourist to get in (but when its a place like the Taj you dont really have a chocie if you want to see it).
Anyway i hope some people find this interesting/useful for expanding that side of your game. Id love to hear some of your experiences ingame/outgame which can broaden the fun of trying to get a good buy
M
