How to appraise items?

[SubMatirx]

Am I missing something somewhere or are there no rules covering how to appraise items, specifically gems and art.

I feel like identifying magic items works well enough as an appraisal for magic items since the player would understand its power and therefore have a position to bargain from.

However, if the players find gems or art, and run across an unscrupulous merchant who tries to cheat them, what recourse would players have aside from opposing deception?

This is also relevant if coming across stone or similarly heavy artwork in a dungeon where bulk is an issue and the party needs to determine value in order to decide what they should take vs. leave behind

I've seen a couple of homebrew rules but find it hard to believe there aren't any official rules covering this.

[MEATSHED]

Crafting can be used to recall knowledge about the value of items.

[Fuzzy-Wuzzy]

MEATSHED wrote:

Crafting can be used to recall knowledge about the value of items.

Yes, and I believe the entirety of the rules on this consist of the phrase bolded below.

CRB p243, Crafting wrote:

You can use this skill to create, understand, and repair items. Even if you’re untrained, you can Recall Knowledge (page 238).

• Recall Knowledge about alchemical reactions, the value of items, engineering, unusual materials, and alchemical or mechanical creatures. The GM determines which creatures this applies to, but it usually includes constructs.

[James Jacobs]

And don't be afraid to simply tell the players what items are worth. It might sacrifice a bit of verisimilitude, but the time you save yourself in having to keep track of the value of every single bit of treasure on your own and the complexity to players having to split up treasure when they don't know or can't trust their character's appraisals of the loot they earned is more than worth it in my opinion.

I'd suggest doing that and saving the Craft check to appraise things ONLY for items that aren't obviously of value.

[Thebazilly]

James Jacobs wrote:

And don't be afraid to simply tell the players what items are worth. It might sacrifice a bit of verisimilitude, but the time you save yourself in having to keep track of the value of every single bit of treasure on your own and the complexity to players having to split up treasure when they don't know or can't trust their character's appraisals of the loot they earned is more than worth it in my opinion.

I'd suggest doing that and saving the Craft check to appraise things ONLY for items that aren't obviously of value.

This is how my table has always handled Appraise checks.

I'm curious on a closely related issue. How do people generally handle magical loot? My group usually just gives out the name of an item when its looted: "you find a +1 longsword," or "you find 3 potions of minor healing." But that does skip the item identification rules and makes Detect Magic a little less useful.

I'm interested in knowing if other groups religiously use item identification rolls or make characters use detect magic to find magical items.

[SubMatirx]

Thebazilly wrote:

James Jacobs wrote:

And don't be afraid to simply tell the players what items are worth. It might sacrifice a bit of verisimilitude, but the time you save yourself in having to keep track of the value of every single bit of treasure on your own and the complexity to players having to split up treasure when they don't know or can't trust their character's appraisals of the loot they earned is more than worth it in my opinion.

I'd suggest doing that and saving the Craft check to appraise things ONLY for items that aren't obviously of value.

This is how my table has always handled Appraise checks.

I'm curious on a closely related issue. How do people generally handle magical loot? My group usually just gives out the name of an item when its looted: "you find a +1 longsword," or "you find 3 potions of minor healing." But that does skip the item identification rules and makes Detect Magic a little less useful.

I'm interested in knowing if other groups religiously use item identification rolls or make characters use detect magic to find magical items.

Personally, I still require detect magic, read aura, and identify magic checks, because if you use cursed items you still want to give your party a chance at knowing it's cursed. But if you only require an identify magic check when the item is cursed your party will catch on pretty quickly.

That being said, I treat all identify magic successes as critical successes (unless the item is cursed), mainly because it's a pain as a GM to try and dumb down what an item's properties are and annoying to a lot of players. It might be fun the first couple of times watching players trying to experiment with an item to figure out how exactly it works, but it gets tiresome rather quickly.

[James Jacobs]

Easy enough to roll a Secret Identify Magic check for those cursed items if they show up and still give out the goods on magic items as they're found. Cursed items are so rare (usually) that it's not gonna come up often anyway.

[SubMatirx]

James Jacobs wrote:

Easy enough to roll a Secret Identify Magic check for those cursed items if they show up and still give out the goods on magic items as they're found. Cursed items are so rare (usually) that it's not gonna come up often anyway.

That's a fair point. The majority of my players are in their 30's and this is their first experience with any sort of tabletop RPG so I'm trying to familiarize them as much as possible with the core rules first before I start introducing additional house rules.

[Ascalaphus]

I think skill checks to appraise loot are normally not exciting enough to bother with. But sometimes you might want to use a Craft or relevant Lore check to do a spot appraisal.

For example when you're running out of an angry dragon's lair, pass by it's hoard, and have time to pick up maybe one item so you wanna spot which is the best one to take with you.

Or perhaps you're trying to impress a merchant by picking out the real antique item from among a heap of tourist trash.

[SubMatirx]

Ascalaphus wrote:

I think skill checks to appraise loot are normally not exciting enough to bother with. But sometimes you might want to use a Craft or relevant Lore check to do a spot appraisal.

For example when you're running out of an angry dragon's lair, pass by it's hoard, and have time to pick up maybe one item so you wanna spot which is the best one to take with you.

Or perhaps you're trying to impress a merchant by picking out the real antique item from among a heap of tourist trash.

I definitely agree with you that appraising can be boring. It has mainly come up as a topic because 3 of the 4 players are constantly trying to steal from each other. So whenever new loot is found that contains gems, art, and other items of not-immediately-known-value, they begin scampering over each other to determine what to grab and appraising (especially with inaccurate amounts on crit failures) has been a fun way to deal with that.