I'm in an interesting situation for a game that I'm running geared more toward an evil campaign. I normally don't write this kind of game, but I'm hoping the table-top's finest can help me out.
My new campaign begins in a city over run by high level and extremely powerful vampires. One of the quirks of the city is that there is a fluid and lucrative slave trade. My problem is how much.
The slave trade will sell anything, from high level characters to monsters to monsters with character levels. I need a system to determine how much a slave should cost based on their CR and CL. I'm looking for something formulaic that I can do on the fly, something roughly akin to:
Cost by CR (XXXX gp / CR of creature)
Cost by CL (Having X levels of Y Class Adds XXXX gp per level to base cost of creature)
Also, if anyone has any ideas for fluctuating costs I'd very much love to entertain them. Something akin to "Ah drat, the Kobold plague is back in full force so the price of Kobolds just went up 60%." I want my PCs to be able to trade slaves like any other commodity and make a profit off of unique market situations should they choose to stick around.
The cost of a slave is never going to be that static and easy.
What you are missing is the 'X' factor that they may or may not possess.
What if the slave is level 1, but also happens to be a master artisan? what about if she is beautiful and would make a good concubine? musically talented? etc. All of these will bump costs around.
What if the slave is known to be a quarrelsome one and continually a problem for their master? what if they forment revolt? how will this change the price?
A slave Cleric would be a nice concept, but are they really going to channel their gods power to be of assistance for you? Similarly would you be willing to gamble having an 'enslaved' high level wizard about? what about a powerful gladiator? could all this end in tears?
What about buying some big and frightening looking creature to keep in the basement - then put the word out that opposing factions get fed to it for sport... even if the creature has low hit dice, it could be worth its weight in gold...
So there's a lot to think about.
Also - I don't care HOW BIG the plague is, no Kobold is worth a 60% mark up :p
(edit- so what I am saying here is that there really are role-playing based problems to consider, as opposed to numbers on a spreadsheet)
I know right? Hence why i'm having a rough time portraying this one accurately, this is darker than I usually prefer to go.
Shifty wrote:
The cost of a slave is never going to be that static and easy.
What you are missing is the 'X' factor that they may or may not possess.
Well sure, I realize that there are a lot that factors but can't the same be said for magic items? X area is in the desert so endless water bottles are in high demand, etc etc. Even still we have a set price scale for magic items which doesn't account for market variances. A mark-up or mark-down is subject to the whims of the story, albeit with a healthy amount of GM fiat backing it.
Now that being said, the examples you gave me of what could effect the price of a slave are excellent, thank you for the great ideas, but I still want to move forward with setting a base-line price.
Shifty wrote:
Similarly would you be willing to gamble having an 'enslaved' high level wizard about? what about a powerful gladiator?
Well sure, even in human history there have been incredibly talented fighters that were kept as slaves, but the owners found ways to control them. The most adept swordsman is hardly a challenge without one when faced with a few dozen armed guards with magic items, for example. Sure slave revolt is very much a possibility, but that's part of the fun!
Shifty wrote:
So there's a lot to think about.
I couldn't agree more. I agree about the clerical example you provided but I just don't see a cleric circulating in this slave market. Maybe as an extreme oddity but as you aptly put, without some means of control he really isn't going to be much good.
Mostly what I had in mind for the Monster Bazaar are monsters and warrior types, which is going to lean heavily on the more combat-oriented portions of the class system.
Shifty wrote:
Also - I don't care HOW BIG the plague is, no Kobold is worth a 60% mark up :p
Hehe, if the Kobold race goes extinct and no one sees it happen, does anyone care? Poor Kobolds.
So in hopes of getting everything started, I'll put down my thoughts so far. Again, all of the below is just base-line prices without any marketing conditions factored in:
Magic items scale exponentially, so I was thinking slaves should do the same. I was considering a flat formula for a character with class levels. Lets assume a "base" race (a race with no level adjustment) and class levels. The cost of the slave would be: (class level x class level) x 100 gold pieces. So, the class level squared multiplied by 100. A 1st level character would cost 100 gp, a 10th level character would cost 10,000 gp. This would be only for non-NPC class levels, NPCs with class (Adept, etc) levels would cost significantly less, maybe half?
CR is a little bit trickier. I can't help but wonder if the above formula would hold for it as well, CR squared X 100, since technically adding CL to a CR creature just raises the CR 1 for 1 (assuming the class is relevant to the monster, and I never liked that rule in the DMG as I don't quite feel it's an accurate representation).
Anyone have any other ideas? And, thanks for the input Shifty, it's very much appreciated.
I'm not the best with numbers, so I don't know if I can help you on that end, but consider the opportunity cost of these slaves. For a PC to purchase one, they have to give up other wealth, namely magical equipment. At any given level, a PC should have x amount of gold, so take that into account as well. If you don't want them to buy slaves of higher CR than themselves (which would be stupid, as how could you control them?) then I'd build that into the formula. You might also model the total a typical character could afford after the Leadership feat, which provides a good starting point for numbers of "followers" one can have at any given level.
For a PC to purchase one, they have to give up other wealth, namely magical equipment. At any given level, a PC should have x amount of gold, so take that into account as well.
Yeah I agree, thanks for the input!
I think you're on to something with character wealth though. The Beta book has a table for NPC wealth, what if that was the cost per CL of the character? A heroic 6th level NPC should be worth 5,100 gp. Does that sound like a reasonable base price? That would be a lot less work on my end because the table already exists.
I could adapt that for CRs. Since the CR is designed for 4 party members, what if I multiplied the corresponding NPC Wealth cost of an NPC with a heroic CL equal to the creature's CR by 4? So a CR 6 creature would cost 20,400 gp? (A heroic CL 6 NPC is 5,100 X 4 = 20,400)
Example:
Spoiler:
So a 5th level character should be worth 10,500 gp. Let's say he spends half of it on equipment, and half of it on slaves. That gives him a budget of 5,250 gp for slaves. He could buy one 6th level equipment-less character (5,100 gp). That's one level higher than him, but that leaves him 150 gp for food, security, medical attention, supplies, etc and living with the fear that his slave could whoop him in a fist fight. That'd probably be enough for a slave unless he was a gladiator and thereby needed weapons, armor, etc.
The same character could also buy a CR 3 creature (1,200 x 4 = 4,800) and have 450 gp for upkeep. Sound reasonable?
Not sure if that will scale right or not. A CR 1 creature would cost about 2,400 gp. Would you pay 2,400 for a Pseudodragon?
On a side note, I got to thinking about monster availability and was thinking about maybe creating some kind of inverted percentile formula that I could roll to see if a monster was available. I could probably get away with the wealth to city size ratios that already exist, but I'd like something a little more random because I think it'd be a little more fun.
The idea would be:
PC asks if certain monster is available for purchase.
Figure percent chance creature is available based on CR.
Have PC roll percentile dice to determine if monster is available for sale.
It's probably over complicating it, but I wanted to see if anyone has any ideas.
PC asks if certain monster is available for purchase.
Figure percent chance creature is available based on CR.
Have PC roll percentile dice to determine if monster is available for sale.
I'd tie it more to environment than CR, though CR should come into it as well. If you're in a desert city, the chances of finding a mermaid for sale would be pretty slim, as would the chances of getting a wyrmling white dragon or other cold mountain creature. Add into this the fact that a high CR creature would be more difficult for non-heroes to capture and control in order to sell and I think you're making it more difficult than is necessary.
The way I'd determine availability is with a pre-arranged list of slaves for purchase. Since no one can craft a slave to spec like they can for a magic item, I think you should decide ahead of time who or what is on the auction block in any given town on the day your PCs are there. They want a troglodyte barbarian? Too bad, today there's a halfling rogue and a lizardfolk prostitute. Maybe next week.
The way I'd determine availability is with a pre-arranged list of slaves for purchase. Since no one can craft a slave to spec like they can for a magic item, I think you should decide ahead of time who or what is on the auction block in any given town on the day your PCs are there.
I hate to say it because it's more work but yeah, what you're saying makes a lot of sense and it should probably be predetermined given the nature of it all.
The environmental factors is a good thing to bring up. Let's say you had a white dragon in the desert for sale, that would probably really jack up the price all things considered, native environment is something else I'll need to keep in mind as a cost factor. Good stuff! Thanks for the great ideas.
I hate to say it because it's more work but yeah, what you're saying makes a lot of sense and it should probably be predetermined given the nature of it all.
It wouldn't have to be more work. Just use a random encounter table for the environment you're in. You might replace things that don't make sense with "roll on other environment table" to add in the chance of getting something really rare. I guess this wouldn't account for the proportionally large number of civilized humanoid slaves you'd find in a city's slave market over exotic and dangerous monsters. I'd imagine there would be an 4:1 ratio of humanoids to monsters, if not larger, but it depends on where you are.
Just use a random encounter table for the environment you're in. You might replace things that don't make sense with "roll on other environment table" to add in the chance of getting something really rare.
Good thought, I don't suppose you know of an encounter table that spans all five monster manuals by chance?
yoda8myhead wrote:
I'd imagine there would be an 4:1 ratio of humanoids to monsters
Arbitrary number? Kind of curious where you got it from. I don't really know of anything published that was designed for this kind of thing. Something akin to 80% of the slaves for trade are humanoid and draw up the different races and how many of each there are and have another 20% that are non-sentient monsters. Most of the humanoids/monsters will be straight out of the manual, any ideas on how many should be different? For instance, how many of the 100 Lizardfolk for sale should have class levels? I imagine the highest character level would actually depend on the specific caravan. A 4th level merchant isn't going to have near the stock of a 16th level merchant, for example.
Historically speaking, I believe slave prices who typically based on their projected producivity and expected remaining active years. So how much someone would pay for a slave depends on how much money that slave could make for the master in a year, modified by how long the master expects the slave will be able to work (slaves could die, or run away, or catch disease, etc). I'm sure there were actuarial tables worked out.
Prices for non-productive slaves are of course different, and there would be no standard formula for those. How much someone is willing to pay for a concubine slave depends wholly on his or her entertaining budget, so the price for those slaves should always be negotiable, and average price would be based on how much the local masters are willing to pay.
I would probably derive a formula for availability based on several things, most of which were mentioned above: the CR of the creature, the environment it was from, and the creature type and subtype.
For instance, say I'm running a campaign in Calimport, City of Slaves right now. It's a desert city bordering the ocean with heavy sea trade. The local population is mostly humans and halflings. The city is a metropolis. Now to evaluate the slave population: I'll assume that because of the difficulty in taking higher level slaves that the highest level of slave available in the entire city is based on a city population three levels smaller than metropolis, which is a large town. That means that rolling for the highest level character that's a slave will have a +3 modifier (this is all on pages 138 and 139 in the DMG).
So, the NPC class most likely to be a high level slave is probably the fighter as they are more easily controlled. So, that's 1d8+3, or an average of a level 7 fighter. But wait, the slave population changes constantly, so we can probably assume that given a set amount of time the buyer can locate a slave of the maximum level possible, or 11 in this case (for NPC classes, the highest level commoner is 4d4+3, an average of 13 (CR 6.5), a maximum of 19, for a maximum CR of 9.5). Let's go ahead and set the bar for highest monster CR at 11 as well, with the average highest that's always available at 7.
Sweet, now to go on and derive the actual formula for availability. This should be a 1/day check. Let's set up a percentage roll to decide. We'll set the base chance of availability at 50% for the average CR, in this case 7. That way you're almost guaranteed to locate one within 2 days. Now we set modifiers.
CR Modifiers: +1 CR is -10%
-1 CR is +10%
Environment modifiers:
Local environment: +10% (in Calimport both warm desert and ocean)
Nearby environment: no modifier (in Calimport warm plains and warm forests)
Somewhat distant: -20% (in Calimport warm swamps and warm mountains)
Truly distant: -50% (in Calimport artic, jungle, etc.)
Type and Subtype Modifiers:
These will have to done per location. For instance, while humanoids are likely more common everywhere, giants would be available more in hills and mountains and practically nonexistent underground.
For instance, in Calimport humanoids, monstrous humanoids and giants could all have no modifier. The air and fire subtypes would have a positive modifier, while the cold subtype would have a very negative modifier.
So, for instance if one of my players wanted to buy an elite minotaur ranger 6 (CR 11) it would have a base chance of 50%, modified down by 40% to 10%, with no environment modifier or type modifier. If they didn't want to physically roll it every day I'd let them have it after 10 days, if they paid a broker to keep an eye out for one.
On the other hand, let's say all they want is a dwarf to act as a pack mule for the party treasure haul. So, we just need a dwarf commoner really, let's spring for level 5 though, so he has some hp. That's a CR 2(.5). So base chance of 50%, plus 50% for being 5 below average CR, with no environment or type modifier, means they can have a dwarf commoner 5 as soon as they can be bothered to pick a specific one out.
For my last example, let's look at the wyrmling white dragon mentioned above. Let's set the base at 50%. Then add 50% for only being a CR 2, putting us at 100%. Then knock that down 50% for being in cold mountains. Tack on a -30% or so for being a dragon and another -20% or so for being of the cold subtype (yes, double dipping here) and you arrive at a 0% chance. Well, there goes that plan for defeating that pesky salamander in the basement.
This thread has given me a good idea for an adventure hook, the PCs will find out that the only way of infiltrating X is to become a part of the slave work force, so they'll willingly have to be such. The considerations here are excellent support for the prices they'd get for themselves.
Rather than go with formulas, I would assume slaves are fairly expensive, probably too expensive for the common man to own them (especially slaves with levels or advanced HD).
Then I would find a table in the book that already has an incremental price/value for something and apply it.
Fortunately, there is a perfect table. Take a look at Table 12-5: Treasure Values per Encounter on page 293 of the Pathfinder Beta.
IMO, the value listed as "Fast" would be perfect. A 1st level or 1 HD slave would cost 400 gp, while a 10th level/10 HD slave would cost 8,200 gp, and a 20th level/20 HD slave would cost 100,000 gp.
No messy formulas.
Then you can adjust individual cases up or down for RP reasons. A 5th level sorcerer might be worth 2,300 according to this chart, but she's gorgeous, so the auctioneer gets double or triple the going rate. An ogre with 4 levels of barbarian might be worth 5,000 gp, but he killed his last 3 masters so the auctioneer only gets half what he's worth because nobody is anxious to buy him. A troglodyte might be worth 800 gp, but he smells so awful that the auctioneer can't get more than 50 gp for him. Etc.
In the City Of Brass (necromancer games, 3.5) saves are valued by calculating strength x charisma x HD. Casters then get a x1.5 markup.
This gives you their cost in BP (Brass pieces). I'll let you know when I find out how many gold a brass piece is worth (page 100 and still waiting) unless someone else can help.
Sorry for the vanishing act, thought my thread was dead. I'm very glad to see it isn't!
Nathan Morse wrote:
The city is a metropolis. Now to evaluate the slave population: I'll assume that because of the difficulty in taking higher level slaves that the highest level of slave available in the entire city is based on a city population three levels smaller than metropolis, which is a large town. That means that rolling for the highest level character that's a slave will have a +3 modifier (this is all on pages 138 and 139 in the DMG).
I like that you're working in the city size modifiers here, I think that's something I'll definitely pick up.
Nathan Morse wrote:
This should be a 1/day check. Let's set up a percentage roll to decide. We'll set the base chance of availability at 50% for the average CR, in this case 7. That way you're almost guaranteed to locate one within 2 days. Now we set modifiers.
CR Modifiers: +1 CR is -10%
-1 CR is +10%
Environment modifiers:
Local environment: +10% (in Calimport both warm desert and ocean)
Nearby environment: no modifier (in Calimport warm plains and warm forests)
Somewhat distant: -20% (in Calimport warm swamps and warm mountains)
Truly...
These mods are really great, I like the idea of figuring outwards from the average CR then adjusting percentages based on that. I really like what you're doing with the environmental modifiers, I think that's a great idea.
Your work is very dynamic, I really appreciate your suggestions and will most certainly work them into my campaign.
I'm dealing with two sets of scenarios right now. The first is "I'm looking for this, do they have it?" and "I walk up to a merchant and ask to see what he has." This will most certainly help me take steps forward with the first question, thank you again!
Take a look at Table 12-5: Treasure Values per Encounter on page 293 of the Pathfinder Beta.
IMO, the value listed as "Fast" would be perfect. A 1st level or 1 HD slave would cost 400 gp, while a 10th level/10 HD slave would cost 8,200 gp, and a 20th level/20 HD slave would cost 100,000 gp.
I actually glanced over these tables briefly. As I continued to work on the Monster Bazaar, I found that figuring the price was going to be the easy part and determining what was available was a bit trickier.
I wound up going with the NPC Treasure worth for the slave cost, adjusted for different factors (such as environment, appearance, class, etc) but I'll revisit the Treasure per Encounter table. Thank you for the suggestion.
In the City Of Brass (necromancer games, 3.5) saves are valued by calculating strength x charisma x HD. Casters then get a x1.5 markup.
This gives you their cost in BP (Brass pieces). I'll let you know when I find out how many gold a brass piece is worth (page 100 and still waiting) unless someone else can help.
Interesting idea, that would definitely stream line the costs. If you figure out how much a BP is worth, by all means feel free to post it so I can run some examples in time with your formula suggestion.
---------
I dabble a little in web design so I actually wrote up a page to randomly generate a merchant. Unfortunately I don't have it hosted right now, but it breaks down like this:
The merchant's level is determined randomly from level 10 through 20, assuming that a character under level 10 is more or less not going to be in competition (under sold by other slavers, not powerful enough to control a large amount of slaves to make their trade profitable, etc).
I then set a value for the highest CR based on the Merchant Level. A merchant will not have a creature with a CR above half his character level. I came to this value because I determined a merchant would want the ability to easily put down any possible revolts, so he would make sure to only carry monsters that he, or his cohorts, could easily put down. This formula is also for humanoids with class levels, but that was primarily to easy the formulaic burden on myself for the page. Higher level merchants, however, are willing to fill special orders if the buyers are interested.
Finally I determined that the number of unique creatures and the number of those creatures available were also a function of the merchant level. For CRs, I pretty much limited them to approximately 1d4 creatures for those above CR 1 or 2. Generally higher level CRs occur more infrequently, but this was a choice by me the GM to make monsters rare.
Humanoids/Giants/Monstrous Humanoids occur a little more often than the other monster types, so these creatures are "in stock" about four times as often as a monster will. While I limited the number of different types of these creatures a merchant would have available, I greatly increased the amount compared to how many of one type of monster a merchant could have. This assumption was arrived at the fact that most of these types of creatures will form a "city" of some sort, and a slaver would just attack the city and take the town hostage for the slave trade. The number of creatures scales with the merchant level, postulating that a higher level merchant is able to keep control of more smaller creatures easier (area of effect spells, etc).
This is a really dumbed downed version of the page itself. The page currently stores every monster by every type for every CR, 0 through 10, with MM 1-5. Anything bigger than large size is omitted, as I imagined it would be too encumbering for the merchant but rarely I will make exceptions. I have more products than that, but if I ever decide to host the page, I don't want to use too many obscure sources.
End Game for the page is it will tell me the merchant level, randomly determine the merchants stats and relevant skill bonuses, and display, by CR, the creatures available and the amount of each. The page will then randomly determine some flare for each listed CR of creature, including creatures with character levels and creatures with templates.
I'd love to hear some criticism of the above if anyone is interested. Thank you all again for your suggestions.
Director of Brand Strategy
