A few sessions ago, a player announced he was going into town to try to get some potions, a new shield, supplies, etc.
The rogue's player said she was going to go with him to get him a discount. Didn't ask. Just informed me she was going to get his items discounted. At level 15, she has Legendary diplomacy. She rolled a die, looked up and informed me that her Natural 20 gave her a total of 47 (or thereabouts). And said, "our discount should be pretty hefty with that roll," and looked at me expectantly.
Um... ? Is this a thing?
And if it is, then are all the characters' items discounted from now on, since she'll just go with them?
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There is actually a feat that's sort of like this. Bargain Hunter lets you use Earn Income with Diplomacy. Basically you spend your days hunting for bargains and reselling at a profit.
Alternatively, it also lets you get items at a "discount". This works the same way as Earn Income, but instead of gaining money you purchase the item at a discount equal to the money you would have gained.
There is actually a feat that's sort of like this. Bargain Hunter lets you use Earn Income with Diplomacy. Basically you spend your days hunting for bargains and reselling at a profit.
Alternatively, it also lets you get items at a "discount". This works the same way as Earn Income, but instead of gaining money you purchase the item at a discount equal to the money you would have gained.
Okay. Well, this is good to know. But I don't think she has that feat. So, next time I'll let her know she needs to use her Bargain Hunter feat if she has it.
And, additionally, earning income takes time in Downtime. So I don't think she can just walk into the blacksmith shop with every other character, make one roll, and give them the benefit of her feat.
Yea. I like that. I don't want their skills to mean nothing. I really was just irked that the player was just letting me know they were gonna get a discount.
Buy 3 greater, get a lesser free. That's a good one to use.
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A few sessions ago, a player announced he was going into town to try to get some potions, a new shield, supplies, etc.
The rogue's player said she was going to go with him to get him a discount. Didn't ask. Just informed me she was going to get his items discounted. At level 15, she has Legendary diplomacy. She rolled a die, looked up and informed me that her Natural 20 gave her a total of 47 (or thereabouts). And said, "our discount should be pretty hefty with that roll," and looked at me expectantly.
I really was just irked that the player was just letting me know they were gonna get a discount.
I think the fundamental problem here is that she appears to be GMing your game and has confused the role of the player and the GM.
She says what she wants her character to do. You tell her what check is required to confirm whether she succeeds or not, and the DC involved. Then you declare the result of her action based on the die roll.
The only feat that gives you a discount on items is Bargain Hunter, and it's a pittance.
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Except from Bargain Hunter PF2 don't have any pre-made negotiation mechanics and Bargain Hunter isn't like a real discount it's a feat that allows you char to do some "day trading" like "spending your days hunting for bargains and reselling at a profit" or "spend time specifically sniffing out a great bargain on an item".
But as GM is perfectly reasonable to allow a player to use it's diplomacy to try to bargain a specific itens or even to use it's interpretation abilities to negotiate with an NPC a better price. This is a thing that many tables do since immemorial times but this need some common sense from both parts. The GM needs to think in the NPC conditions. Can it and is it viable to diminish it's profit in order do buy/sell that item? Is it a high demanded item or is a thing that stays days in stock due a high value or very specific item useful for a few public? The item level and rarity also can take into consideration (they usually can be used to define or change the negotiation DC).
You can take in consideration basically anything about seller/buyer NPC, city level, item level and rarity to allow or not to give a discount and and how much this discount will be (but usually is well less than 50% once this is default selling price of an item to a NPC). Or you can simply don't allow discounts at all in a city where there's only one potion trader that know that can sell them too easily to other people.
In the end it's totally to GM decide. I usually recommend to allow a player to use it's diplomacy to try gain a discount. It can be very frustrating to know that you are unable to use a skill that you are improving just because the game don't say anything about it and not all players that are able to role play well enough to do totally by interpretation.
Maybe you also need to remember your players this. That's in the end it's up to you as GM to decide if it can use it's diplomacy or not.
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Yeah, don't entertain this idea. Nothing good will come of it. The pricing of items is a balance point. If you wantded to erode that in terms of realism, than your players should also have to account for things like merchants ripping them off, not having an item in stock, or not having enough currency to purchase things they want to sell. None of that is fun for the game or a good use of time.
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I don't know if it's too in flavor area. Because diplomacy is also a mechanic. Convince a strong ally to help or avoid encounters using diplomacy also "change the balance" if you see the adventure as a whole.
And as I said is more a question of common sense. The GM need to take it with a little care, for example try to avoid give a discount greater or equal to a Bargain Hunter discount to prevent make the feat useless is a good one.
Yeah, don't entertain this idea. Nothing good will come of it. The pricing of items is a balance point. If you wantded to erode that in terms of realism, than your players should also have to account for things like merchants ripping them off, not having an item in stock, or not having enough currency to purchase things they want to sell. None of that is fun for the game or a good use of time.
This already happen in AP. Many settlements have restriction of specific itens available, different level from city level, merchants trying to ripping them off and so on.
For example I still remember that in Plaguestone the only place that has potions to sell is the INN and had only 3!
Balance is really an important thing in PF2 but remember that is a TRPG not a videogame one. If you restrict everything inside the rules area without any consideration to creativity and some improvisation you will end in a game too much closer to than you can play in your console than the freedom of a TRPG. Including this is one thing that many people criticized some systems to be too video-gamey.
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I don't think 10% off an item will kill balance*. But digging deeper than that will.
* AP Developers do this all the time. Most recently in Graveclaw - 10% off water breathing/swim speed potions/items in Sallowshore.
I don't know if it's too in flavor area. Because diplomacy is also a mechanic. Convince a strong ally to help or avoid encounters using diplomacy also "change the balance" if you see the adventure as a whole.
And as I said is more a question of common sense. The GM need to take it with a little care, for example try to avoid give a discount greater or equal to a Bargain Hunter discount to prevent make the feat useless is a good one.Yeah, don't entertain this idea. Nothing good will come of it. The pricing of items is a balance point. If you wantded to erode that in terms of realism, than your players should also have to account for things like merchants ripping them off, not having an item in stock, or not having enough currency to purchase things they want to sell. None of that is fun for the game or a good use of time.This already happen in AP. Many settlements have restriction of specific itens available, different level from city level, merchants trying to ripping them off and so on.
For example I still remember that in Plaguestone the only place that has potions to sell is the INN and had only 3!
Balance is really an important thing in PF2 but remember that is a TRPG not a videogame one. If you restrict everything inside the rules area without any consideration to creativity and some improvisation you will end in a game too much closer to than you can play in your console than the freedom of a TRPG. Including this is one thing that many people criticized some systems to be too video-gamey.
Settlements have item levels and exceptions to the normal formula, but the whole concept of tying item level or settlement level is a convenience to avoid having to do asinine things like roll to determine if any given item is in stock. APs will give you a framework if they are meant to deviate from this, like a 10% discount for popular heroes. Letting Diplomacy get involved in every transaction just slows the game down.
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Honestly, the easiest way to handle this (in my opinion) is to tell the player "Okay, you're doing something covered by the skill feat Bargain Hunter. I will give you this feat for free as a reward for attempting to role play your character but don't want to spend valuable group time to do this multiple times."
Be prepared to also give the rest of the group free level 1 or level 2 skill feats. It's not going to hurt anything to do so. And then you've given your player mechanics that they are bound by which helps keep things balanced based on the amount of downtime spent. And it's no more than what someone else could earn by making Earn an Income checks.
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Honestly, the easiest way to handle this (in my opinion) is to tell the player "Okay, you're doing something covered by the skill feat Bargain Hunter. I will give you this feat for free as a reward for attempting to role play your character but don't want to spend valuable group time to do this multiple times."
Be prepared to also give the rest of the group free level 1 or level 2 skill feats. It's not going to hurt anything to do so. And then you've given your player mechanics that they are bound by which helps keep things balanced based on the amount of downtime spent. And it's no more than what someone else could earn by making Earn an Income checks.
Yeah, that's a fine idea.
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Honestly, the easiest way to handle this (in my opinion) is to tell the player "Okay, you're doing something covered by the skill feat Bargain Hunter. I will give you this feat for free as a reward for attempting to role play your character but don't want to spend valuable group time to do this multiple times."
Yes, that's the easiest and the most conflict-avoidant way. It also rewards bad behavior and says "I will roll over if you push hard enough, please don't hesitate to dictate the game's terms to the rest of us again". Like I said, there's a more fundamental issue at hand.
Likely a hold over from D&D where economy and money have never been well thought out, so people often think it's ok to talk merchants down.
Tell them that stores set prices, if you want to haggle, go to the market, but don't expect to be able to find everything you want from small sellers.
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Yes, that's the easiest and the most conflict-avoidant way. It also rewards bad behavior and says "I will roll over if you push hard enough, please don't hesitate to dictate the game's terms to the rest of us again". Like I said, there's a more fundamental issue at hand.Honestly, the easiest way to handle this (in my opinion) is to tell the player "Okay, you're doing something covered by the skill feat Bargain Hunter. I will give you this feat for free as a reward for attempting to role play your character but don't want to spend valuable group time to do this multiple times."
Wow, you went super negative.
Sure, the player is presumptive that they can get a discount. But they can, they just happen to not have the feat to do so. Rather than make the player have a bad time because they possibly did not realize this is the only legal way to get a discount, to me, it's more savvy to give the players a free low level feat.
I don't really see this as rewarding bad behavior, as much as the player assuming something like this could be done by default and not knowing that wasn't the case. Absent awareness of specific abilities, it's not unreasonable to think you could negotiate prices.
If you really feel the need to define a boundary with the player you could start by telling them "Normally you can't do this without the Bargain Hunter feat, there simply aren't rules for it. I believe you were unaware of this, so I'm going to grant you that skill feat and to be fair to the table everyone will get to choose a level 1 skill feat for free. Please try to make sure your familiar with the feats available and what they cover as this will be a one time deal only. Activities/actions covered by some existing rules element will only be permitted if you have the associated feat/rules element."
There's nothing wrong with giving out a small thing like a level 1 skill feat so long as you manage your players expectations. I don't see this as rolling over but rather as facilitating fun for players.
Your response to my suggestion comes across as very confrontational and I'm not sure why you felt the need to do that.
As a GM you can be nice and give the player what they're looking for without being a "pushover" as you might describe.
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Yes, that's the easiest and the most conflict-avoidant way. It also rewards bad behavior and says "I will roll over if you push hard enough, please don't hesitate to dictate the game's terms to the rest of us again". Like I said, there's a more fundamental issue at hand.Honestly, the easiest way to handle this (in my opinion) is to tell the player "Okay, you're doing something covered by the skill feat Bargain Hunter. I will give you this feat for free as a reward for attempting to role play your character but don't want to spend valuable group time to do this multiple times."
Or it is more along the lines that if earning discounts by social interaction fits the theme of their campaign, then the GM will be happy to roleplay it. The official standard for haggling for bargains is the Bargain Hunter feat. The player can make the same Diplomacy check as Bargain Hunter, but since they lack the Bargain Hunter feat, the DC for hunting for discounts will be much higher. Given that the PC has Diplomacy at legendary proficiency, they should still succeed despite the higher DC, but with much fewer critical successes.
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You are taking all this too hard.
Money is never such strict balance factor for the game. You usually can gain way more than value listed in Party Treasure by Level table in APs also crafting allows to do the itens for half price if you have enough time, even formulas aren't a real problem once that Basic Crafter's Book provides many of initial items, Inventor allow to easily make any common formula and Craft Anything basically ignores them allow a player to craft anything literally.
So no. It's not like a discount would break the game but yet I recommend to restrict it to values bellow Income Earned to prevent that a discount be better than Bargain Hunter feat.
. The player can make the same Diplomacy check as Bargain Hunter, but since they lack the Bargain Hunter feat, the DC for hunting for discounts will be much higher.That would be a homebrew rule, wouldn't it?
Because the feat enables for diplomacy the possibility to use the skill as it were a lore, for what concerns earn income ( meaning you can't use it without the skill feat).
Yes, this is homebrew rather than RAW. I customize my rules to enhance the flavor of an individual campaign. However, I like Guntermench's suggestion in above for accomplishing it with RAW mechanics.
You are taking all this too hard.
Money is never such strict balance factor for the game. You usually can gain way more than value listed in Party Treasure by Level table in APs also crafting allows to do the itens for half price if you have enough time, even formulas aren't a real problem once that Basic Crafter's Book provides many of initial items, Inventor allow to easily make any common formula and Craft Anything basically ignores them allow a player to craft anything literally.So no. It's not like a discount would break the game but yet I recommend to restrict it to values bellow Income Earned to prevent that a discount be better than Bargain Hunter feat.
The crafting rules and Bargain Hunter both serve as a spin off of Earn Income checks. The difference is that with crafting the value you can create isn't limited by the level of the city and jobs available there.
So, if every player had a skill capable of being used with the Earn Income activity during downtime (which can dependent on the city and what;s in demand), everyone would have equal chance to earn equal amounts of money, degrees of success on dice rolls notwithstanding.
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You are taking all this too hard.
Money is never such strict balance factor for the game. You usually can gain way more than value listed in Party Treasure by Level table in APs also crafting allows to do the itens for half price if you have enough time, even formulas aren't a real problem once that Basic Crafter's Book provides many of initial items, Inventor allow to easily make any common formula and Craft Anything basically ignores them allow a player to craft anything literally.So no. It's not like a discount would break the game but yet I recommend to restrict it to values bellow Income Earned to prevent that a discount be better than Bargain Hunter feat.
Balance isn't really the biggest problem here. The biggest problem is that introducing haggling into the game is a water of everyone's time. Trying to come up with alternatives to Earn Income and spending extra time on it is silly when Downtime is already the least interesting part of the game.
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In general there is always the risk that something that a player wants to do is covered by some obscure skill feat.
Not having the feat shouldn't mean that the character isn't able to do something. But it is also not the best idea to give out the skill feats for no cost, and especially if it is done in an imbalanced way - giving more free skill feats to one creative character than the rest of the table gets.
But there are a lot of obscure skill feats that characters may stumble upon accidentally. Read Lips for example.
My general rule of thumb (yes, a house rule) is that anything reasonable can be done with two actions and a skill check. I haven't seen any skill feats that cost that much. Some require one action and a skill check, others allow things to be done automatically for some number of actions. But I haven't seen anything that requires two actions and a skill check.
To extrapolate that to exploration or downtime activities is a bit more difficult. I could see doing things like increasing the DC by 5, lowering the effective level of the task by a few levels, reducing your effective proficiency on the earn income table by one step, or making it take twice the normal amount of time.
Things like that. This way it doesn't hinder creative play, but it doesn't give skill feats away for free either.
In general there is always the risk that something that a player wants to do is covered by some obscure skill feat.
True, but I think there is a difference between something that someone might expect to be able to do by default (like negotiating prices) and something that most people would expect would require some additional training (which may be represented by a feat).
If you're really opposed to giving a level 1 skill feat away for free, you could offer to let players "instantly" retrain a feat they have to fit the vision of their character if they were unaware of the rules element which enabled them to do something.
Worth pointing out this is a 15th level character. No 1st level skill feat will break that. Heck, Paizo published an AP which gave out like 3 skill feats on top of other bonuses.
Worth pointing out this is a 15th level character. No 1st level skill feat will break that. Heck, Paizo published an AP which gave out like 3 skill feats on top of other bonuses.
In this specific case yes, but I was more thinking of this as a general problem.
With a 15th level character, no amount of level 1 skill feats are going to move the needle in a substantial way.
However, it's not completely insignificant on a level 2 character. But even at that, I personally prefer to find a way to enable something like this when (IMO) it's a reasonable expectation to think "I can do X". And the easiest way in this specific instance of negotiating prices is to say "Hey, here's this free skill feat that already explains how to handle it and sets up balanced conditions for it to happen it so I don't have to worry about making something up that is potentially broken and makes things worse."
"The merchants won't budge on the sale of equipment, but will give a 5% discount on consumables for a success, or 10% on a critical success. There's the Bargain Hunter feat for more serious negotiation."
If you really want to give a discount by using Diplomacy, you could make it up to 25% of the full price of the item. That way, if they are cheeky and try the same trick again later to sell the item for a higher price with absurd Diplomacy rolls, and you make them sell the item for 25% of the full price more, then they haven't earned any income, meaning the Earn an Income activity and the Bargain Hunter feat are not useless.
Example: they want to buy an item worth 100gp, they get critical success on Diplomacy (I would require multiple rolls, to make the NPC helpful and make a request, etc.), the NPC hesitates but sees the hero really needs the item, and it offers up to a 25% discount, meaning the PC buys the item for 75gp. The NPC would then still have made a 25gp profit to cover their costs, as someone has sold them the item for 50gp at some point in history. Later, when the PC comes across a better item, they want to sell the same item again. This would normally yield them 50gp (half the normal price), but they convince the new buyer to pay 75gp with several high rolls. Then in the end they earned nothing, and if they actually want to earn something with diplomacy they would need the Bargain Hunter feat.