looking for a simple solution for item sell rate (to store)

[Qayinisorouse]

Hey guys!
This is my first time DMing (as i said here before) and im trying to come up with a simple and fair method or selling items.
i assume that many of you dont use the appraise\bluff\diplomacy mess that is suggested (no offense to anyone)
and i was wondering, based on Diplmacy or any other skil, how can i set the sale price of the loot my party gets?

did anyone maybe make a CR based vs. Diplomacy table they uses? or any other smart solution?
thank you!

[Zahir ibn Mahmoud ibn Jothan]

May I suggest...

The Rules wrote:

In general, a character can sell something for half its listed price, including weapons, armor, gear, and magic items. This also includes character-created items.

Trade goods are the exception to the half-price rule. A trade good, in this sense, is a valuable good that can be easily exchanged almost as if it were cash itself.

[Qayinisorouse]

Right!
But i would like to add some way to sell for more than 50% by using a Diplomacy roll...

Im just looking for an idea to calculate what % is added, maybe using the characters level, CR, etc, etc.

[Franz Lunzer]

Ok, depends on how much better you want the bonus to the sell percentage to be.

A given high diplomacy character at level X will have a bonus of:

+4 from CHA (most likely sorcerer or bard, so 16 to 20 at start, higher at higher levels, due to headband...)
+3 from diplomacy being a class skill
+X for skill points
+3 or so from random other sources (traits, feats, spells, aid another, whathaveyou)

So you are looking at a DC of around 30+X for the best percentage.

The problem here is, how does the merchant get to that?
You would have to have the merchants be experts of trade of the same level as your PC's.

[Fuzzy-Wuzzy]

How do you determine what price they buy things at?

[MeanMutton]

Qayinisorouse wrote:

Hey guys!

This is my first time DMing (as i said here before) and im trying to come up with a simple and fair method or selling items.
i assume that many of you dont use the appraise\bluff\diplomacy mess that is suggested (no offense to anyone)
and i was wondering, based on Diplmacy or any other skil, how can i set the sale price of the loot my party gets?

did anyone maybe make a CR based vs. Diplomacy table they uses? or any other smart solution?
thank you!

Jump down to "Bargaining" here: Diplomacy Skill

I'd highly recommend that you don't use this for every item bought or sold because that gets boring really quickly. Maybe just use it for rare or unique or special items.

[TGMaxMaxer]

Depends on the set-up. You can literally do whatever you want, you could let them sell for 100% if you want, since you control how much treasure they find.

If you let them sell for more than 50%, just decrease the total loot they find by half of that bonus.

For example, if they are supposed to have 3000g/character at level, but you let them sell for 60%, then you only need to drop 5000g/level in treasure instead of 6000g/level to match standard wealth.

Now, if you are looking to actually give a bonus to the players for building a good negotiator, then you can include the the normal total treasure, and let them have some extra money to work with as a reward.

We finished RotRL recently, and since we had a max diplomacy Paladin in the group, we got a flat 60% once we got to our first major city and our first real reputation boost.

Before that, we rolled each time we went to sell, (which was under level 6). Base DC was 20, for every 5 we beat it by we got another 5%.

Special/campaign specific items were negotiated with the bargaining rules to make them special, a Thassilonian +1 dagger was worth the same amount to a normal weapon shop, but a collector of Thassilonian history would pay up to 75% instead because of the specific item.

[Claxon]

The bargaining rules I believe are what you initially mention and I agree those are cumbersome.

In general I've always played where we just sell everything at half price and be on our way.

But we also use Automatic Bonus Progression since it came out, and we have everyone use exactly 1/2 WBL at level up (because of ABP) to determine what you can own. If we find any interesting loot that people want we can add that to our character sheets until level and then can decide to keep it and subtract that cost from our WBL or give up them item.

This helps drastically reduce the book keeping of keeping up with items that we can't use/don't care about. For example enhancement bonuses on weapons don't exist, so every +1 weapon in the universe is really just a non-magical weapon that happened to be worth 500 gp to us for reasons (normal value 2000, half for sale, half again for ABP since we are running an AP and didn't want to adjust all the loot for encounters). Until we decided to just stop tracking such loot.

This doesn't help to get the party better resale value which is your goal, but just explaining how my party handles loot these days.

[Zahir ibn Mahmoud ibn Jothan]

The Skull and Shackles adventure path has rules for selling things at varying levels, depending on the size of the settlement, and your skills and a dice roll.