Haggle Skill/Talent

[etherial]

[Baravakar]

[Flowswithdrek]

This thread so reminds me of

[Telarus_KSC]

[Baravakar]

First I just want to thank you for responding to this post. I do appreciate this discussion and all of the feedback. There are two difference systems being presented in this last post.

This second system seems even more convoluted then the one Panda mentions. Under new proposal, your recording the results of 10 dice rolls and applying the overall results.

I'm no student of statistical probability but it seems to me that with your system of making multiple rolls against a low target number and recording the number of successful times will generally average everything out. Which is how your example works.

But if you just kept it to the first two rolls of your mini game the overall result is basically the same.

Your thief had two successes, the merchant had four. This means the price of the item increases by 10%. Just leave it at this and move on with the game. The merchant is willing to sell the 100sp base item for 110sp. If the thief can't afford this price, he needs to find another way of securing the mission critical item.

Why waste the time making a further eight die rolls?

By completing one set of tests for this encounter (Haggle is form of Social attack) and applying the difference for each test, the price of the object will average out. Sure there are times where the seller will ask too much and there are times where the Hero will gets a ridiculously low price. So be it, they rolled good.

Under Panda's system, you record the results of ten tests counting each that meets the social defense. This mitigates the heroic dice rolls to being meaningless. I can't see that a player rolling exceptionally well feels happy that is counts exactly the same as if he rolled the base target number. (Your target number is 8. Yea I rolled a 47. That counts as one roll of 8, please roll again. WHAT!!)

This is also why I suggested to modify the price differences based upon the third edition four levels of success chart.
Average 5%
Good 10%
Excellent 20%
Extraordinary 30%

From what I understand this has been removed from the fourth and now for every 5 points above the target number you count one additional level of success. Is there a cap on this?

I still don't think I will modify the system I'm implementing into my game. I think one set of dice rolls per transaction is fine. And the ability can be used any number of times per day.

[Telarus_KSC]

Oh, I see what you mean by having the first roll set the stakes. That's definitely a simple way to go.

In 4E there's no cap on successes. +1 success for every +5 over target number.

I also wanted to avoid the feeling of high rolls having minimal effect. But my example was the same step rolling vs the same target number, so it might not have been the best. There are debuffs that can come into play like Taunt, possibly other modifiers that might shift the odds suddenly, but then if one side fails the Haggling stops. Like if the Merchant failed that third roll the results would be very different. The risk of rolling the dice, I suppose.

[Slimcreeper]

See, I think it is fun to role-play a haggle scene every once in a while - like for a major purchase, but sometimes there are just higher priorities. I don't want to spend a social combat on shopping on a regular basis, because I just don't have that many opportunities to game. But - if a character has a Magical Haggle talent at rank 15, that character should get good deals all the time in addition to the occasional super-star haggle scene.