I've searched, but had no luck. Is there any sort of consensus on how you might handle paying for item identification services?
I saw elsewhere a suggestion to base the cost on the formula price of the item and rolling for the NPC... but I don't love that.
It's not really something I've seen come up as an issue. As a result, I haven't seen people talking abouts solutions, to come to any consensus on.
This is something I've been giving players free during downtime. The benefit of identifying items right when you find them is that you can use them right away. If you're in downtime, you can just find someone who can tell it what it is and I'll just handwave it. There's just nothing fun about "I have this sword, I know it's magic, I don't know what it does" particularly when that makes more work for the GM when the player insists on using it anyway.
If I wanted to run this as an roleplaying thing, I'd just do the Pawn Stars thing where you take it to a store that buys anything, and they want to buy it but in order to agree on a price both parties need to understand what it is.
Yeah, this came up during downtime when a player was repeatedly failing checks to identify, and after a few days they asked if they could just take it somewhere. When I saw someone on reddit or something suggesting this complicated system of paying based on level and requiring a roll, I wanted to see what others were doing. Glad I did, thanks!
I'll probably still limit it by the level of the settlement (if you can't buy it there, they probably won't know what it is) and if there's a cursed item, they'll mistake it for a benign object.
In a small town where only a couple merchants could identify the item, you could roll a high skill bonus for the level of said merchants until you run out of merchants. In a larger settlement with plenty of venues, I wouldn't bother rolling.
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If I wanted to run this as an roleplaying thing, I'd just do the Pawn Stars thing where you take it to a store that buys anything, and they want to buy it but in order to agree on a price both parties need to understand what it is.
20,000 gold for this magic sword?
5 copper is the best I can do.
Well, you have to be trained in a relevant skill in order to identify items. So to get someone to do it, that would be a skilled hireling at 5sp per day.
But it only takes 10 minutes to do.
So if an 8 hour day has 480 minutes, then there are 48 10 minute blocks of time available. Rounding that to 50 to make the math easier.
So each item identified would take 1/50 of that 5sp daily cost. Or 0.1sp, or 1cp for each item identified.
Well, you have to be trained in a relevant skill in order to identify items. So to get someone to do it, that would be a skilled hireling at 5sp per day.
But it only takes 10 minutes to do.
So if an 8 hour day has 480 minutes, then there are 48 10 minute blocks of time available. Rounding that to 50 to make the math easier.
So each item identified would take 1/50 of that 5sp daily cost. Or 0.1sp, or 1cp for each item identified.
In practice it would be more complicated than that, though, because some people would fail to identify the item due to bad luck or it being incredibly high. You'd want a higher level appraiser for a high level item and they'd charge more for their time. The earn income table might be a better starting point.
If I wanted to run this as an roleplaying thing, I'd just do the Pawn Stars thing where you take it to a store that buys anything, and they want to buy it but in order to agree on a price both parties need to understand what it is.20,000 gold for this magic sword?
5 copper is the best I can do.
Well, you have to be able to turn a profit and while it looks nice on the wall you don't know when another adventurer in the appropriate level range is going to wander by and want to buy it.
I just have the Magiques Road Show roll through town every once in a while.
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In practice it would be more complicated than that, though, because some people would fail to identify the item due to bad luck or it being incredibly high. You'd want a higher level appraiser for a high level item and they'd charge more for their time. The earn income table might be a better starting point.
Well, yeah. If you wanted to run it as an economy simulator. Even then, if someone is advertising themselves as an appraiser and identifier and charging for their services, they shouldn't be failing at identifying things.
But in general, the cost of having items identified should be fairly trivial if not handwaved away entirely.
I only worry about identifying items when the players are adventuring. Otherwise, to make them run through hoops during downtime just to identify items seems unnecessarily antagonistic to my players. My decades of experience running games have taught me a few things one of which is that players hate it when the DM/GM keeps saying no.
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In practice it would be more complicated than that, though, because some people would fail to identify the item due to bad luck or it being incredibly high. You'd want a higher level appraiser for a high level item and they'd charge more for their time. The earn income table might be a better starting point.Well, yeah. If you wanted to run it as an economy simulator. Even then, if someone is advertising themselves as an appraiser and identifier and charging for their services, they shouldn't be failing at identifying things.
But in general, the cost of having items identified should be fairly trivial if not handwaved away entirely.
On that we agree.
On that we agree.In practice it would be more complicated than that, though, because some people would fail to identify the item due to bad luck or it being incredibly high. You'd want a higher level appraiser for a high level item and they'd charge more for their time. The earn income table might be a better starting point.Well, yeah. If you wanted to run it as an economy simulator. Even then, if someone is advertising themselves as an appraiser and identifier and charging for their services, they shouldn't be failing at identifying things.
But in general, the cost of having items identified should be fairly trivial if not handwaved away entirely.
Yeah, regardless of the exact rules the worst case scenario for my players is that they wont identify it while adventuring and I'll just say between their attempts and downtime wherever they're based out of someone will successfully identify it for a trivial amount of money that will be ultimately recouped in the "bartering and haggling" that we don't actually do but just kind of assume happens to make sure the group is at WBL. My group always checks their individual characters for WBL at every level up and if they aren't at it they get to boost themselves up to it. But we use Automatic Bonus Progression anyways, so it's not nearly as important.
Anyways, it's not fun to spend a bunch of game time and effort on the task so it mostly gets hand waived and the only difference is whether they can immediately use it or not. I'm not even sure how to run the items if they're not successfully identified but attempted to be used.
Even then, if someone is advertising themselves as an appraiser and identifier and charging for their services, they shouldn't be failing at identifying things.
Indeed. In similar cases, I treat NPCs as if they had Assurance in their specialty skill.
That means I don't need to know their stats or roll any dice. Just need a level.
Level » Result
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01 » 13 | 11 » 25
02 » 14 | 12 » 26
03 » 15 | 13 » 27
04 » 16 | 14 » 28
05 » 17 | 15 » 31
06 » 18 | 16 » 32
07 » 21 | 17 » 33
08 » 22 | 18 » 34
09 » 23 | 19 » 35
10 » 24 | 20 » 36