Scroll price and availability

[Mercules]

My players never make it so far..................

most recently they went to a "wagon Dock", its like a dry land seaport for wagons, they were going to question a merchant about a stolen item that he was said to have purchased. Naturally he didnt like being questioned so he "encouraged" the players to leave by introducing them to 2 dozen of his hired hands and their pet clubs.

The players started to leave when someone thru a rock a the elf.......... the elf took it personally and swung his sword at one of the workers.
The party was out numbered and surrounded and was quickly clubbed into submission.

The groups rogue was clubbed silly 1st as he tried to escape
The party barbarian was backed into a wagon and clubbed repeatedly as he screamed for help from any gaurds that may be nearby
The elf dodged and parried and twisted out of grips/ holds as he was surrounded by 8 club swinging attackers but held his own
When the gaurds arrived everybody pointed the finger at the downed rogue and barbarian with their sword weilding elf companion
and because the party had no good reason for being at the docks they were thrown in the town jail for 3 days and fined 1 silver each.

The barbarian swore revenge upon his release but once free and within eye sight of his club weilding advisaries he decided to instead leave town...... after 1 week of travel the party questioned the courage of the barbarian. In an effort to prove himself, the barbarian located a bandit camp and attacked but was beaten and nearly killed. He then fell upon 2 of his own daggers, killing himself to avoid capture.

As sad tale really as many speculate it was his intent to be killed in battle......... evidenced by the fact that he had buried his gold and a few items the day before.

I sense a re-roll.

We had a Swordsman character in GURPS(classless system). He had a code of honor. The GM decided to bring that into play and a fop challenged the character to a dual after some perceived slight. Knowing he would likely mop the floor with said fop he is debating about trying to keep his honor intact but letting the fop think he had a chance. The dual starts and the PC pinks his foe with the tip of his sword but lets him push the blade away at the last second. The fop rolls a 4 on 3d6, a critical success. Normally you get no defense but our house rule is that a critical success on a defense roll would do it. Instead the PC rolls a critical failure, fails first his consciousness roll and then his roll to live since the crit did double damage tripled for piercing attack to the vitals and far more than his - Health value. Dead PC and a GM wishing he had rolled behind a screen.

We all laughed about that and then remembered how deadly GURPS combat can be, and taking on random people in pointless combat is silly.

[SkyCry]

Just another reason to remove the scrolls from the vendors all together.

Then there'd be no expectations that you have a huge stack of them just stuffed into you back pocket for when your run out of SPs.

I agree with this reasoning - removing scrolls would certainly have this kind of effect. (I can already imagine Shrieking Mines becoming the single most run quest and sudden increase in good-aligned characters.)

But while we're at it, why not remove wands too, so no one expects clerics to spend a fortune on wands too? For example best arcane wands are usually of increased CL (e.g., Wand of Resist Energy (11th level)) and you can't buy those at a vendor anyway.


One might argue that with this a lot of quests will have to be rebalanced, but perhaps those level 14 quests on elite weren't meant to be done by a group of level 10 characters anyway...

[MysticTheurge]

But while we're at it, why not remove wands too, so no one expects clerics to spend a fortune on wands too? For example best arcane wands are usually of increased CL (e.g., Wand of Resist Energy (11th level)) and you can't buy those at a vendor anyway.

Yep. Wands above second level spells and potions above first level spells also ought to leave the vendors too.

[GlassCannon]

Instead simply decrease the effectiveness of Haggle, lower the Plat Cap to the 500,000 mark and maybe lower certain item costs for certain classes at a percentage, making the items bound for the discount(untradeable, unmailable).

Solved.

New Players with less than 5,000 gold rejoice.

[SkyCry]

Just plain increasing cost is certainly a bad idea, I agree. However what about decreasing cost for most and increasing cost for select few? (In my example it is done by manipulating with base price.) It'll actually lower the average cost.

However as other stated, one should consider the whole economy side if this solution - there are already problems that people expect clerics to waste money on wands and similarly there will be expectation to have certain arcane scrolls ready. For that point we need to consider 2 things:

• These scrolls already were previously in the game and we know what it was like. Now they'll be more expensive, so there will be even less expectation for a caster to have them, than previously.
• Some scrolls are already overpriced (Raise Dead, Resurrection), so basically this is already in the game. I simply suggest to apply this approach to other scrolls as well, as I hate when some Divine casters can use certain spells as scrolls by paying more, while a wizard can't find a scroll just to scribe a spell.