selling loot

[earcaraxe]

1) What does "eye of this creature worth 100 silver pieces" in a creatures description mean? Does it mean that the party can sell it for that amount? I mean, do they know how much it worths (is it kinda common knowledge, like I know the price of a car altho i havent bought any yet)?

2) What is the buying price of an item like that? (lets suppose the party would like to buy a couple lightning lizard eyes in bartertown).

3) How u handle when the party tries to sell a bunch of jewelries they found in a kaer, but they have no evalute talent. I'd appreciate a rule of thumb. 10% price? 50%?

[ragbasti]

1) Well that only means that the items has a value of about 100 silver pieces. If your party will actually be able to sell it for that has many different factors. For example one character could accidentally damages the eye, that would of course make it worthless; or you could have gathered the eye at the beginning of a long adventure, meaning that by now it is nothing more than a rotten, gooy, unrecognizable blob.
The knowledge of how much something is worth is a tricky one. I always take Knowledge skills here as the general guideline.
If someone has wild animals or alchemy and find such a creature i let them make a test against whatever difficulty seems reasonable and if the succeed they just happen to know.

2) Buying prices are just about the same as the selling price if bought from the person who found it. If serveral parties were inbetween you and the final seller of course everyone tried to make a winning and the price has gotten up. So if you look for such an item in a mechant house or an alchemy shop you will most likely pay ~20% more

3)Well you could LET someone else do the evaluation for you. That is a standard service offered by any jeweller. Of course he'll try to make some money of that, so taking of 20-30% off the price seems reasonable.

1+2+3) Talent/Skill Haggle could still change all of that

[arma]

Just adding a couple things, the above is basically correct:

It's the net worth of the item, if it is in top condition, you can in theory sell it for that as a base price. So, base price means a theoretical price, and that can be further modified.
In most cases, it also assumes that you have to travel before you sell it, so degradation is not much of an issue unless it says so or is obvious from the description. It's also the amount the item is used for as a magical ingredient if used in Enchantment (but it's probably not much of an option for you at this point, so this is just an FYI).
As ragbasti noted, any selling or buying price will depend on location, the merchant, your haggling, and whether or not you know what it's worth (which falls back to the merchant's first offer). These all modify the base price.
Any skill you think works out to determine worth should be able to be used, though Evaluate would cover almost everything. This informs you of what it's base price is, but it doesn't guarantee you can sell it at that price.

[Mogre]

I read somewhere (an Earthdawn Book for sure, not sure of the Edition) that Knowledge Skills are used to determine the price of items. Somebody with Gems (K) would be able to make a Knowledge Skill check to find the rough price of a Gem. I would probably allow a Weaponsmith to appraise weapons, armors, and metal goods using Half-Magic. The generic for most RPGs is that an item sells for about 50% of its listed price.

[Dougansf]

If you have a Weaponsmith in the party, refrain from allowing Knowledge skills from knowing how much things cost. That's what the Evaluate Talent is for (and it's a Discipline Talent for them).

Instead, let the Knowledge skill know what to look for (this creature has feathers that are worth money) and how to extract them. But the Evaluate Talent will point out the pieces that are actually worth keeping. Especially at low levels, this will help make your Weaponsmith feel like he's contributing.

[Mogre]

The issue with only allowing the Evaluate Talent to gain market values is that it targets the Spell Defense, so there is no Skill equivalent. This would mean that you would need magic to determine the value of everything. I believe this is why they allowed Knowledge Skills to fill that gap. I imagine it would be an ad hoc roll against a general difficulty (see page 89 of the Gamemaster’s Guide).

[werefrog]

Knowledge skills would let players know something has monetary value, and it might give a range of how much they are worth, in general. However, the Evaluate Talent would let you know how much those specific items are worth. Think of it this way. You are told PS3 is worth $500. Therefore, you find a PS3, you think you should pay $500 for it. However, the one you found is missing parts inside and is actually worth $250. The Evaluate Talent would let you know this, but the knowledge skill just says that PS3 is worth $500.

[thezombiekat]

I play very simply with this.

The price listed is the price the PCs will get before use of a haggle talent or similar. It could conceivably be altered based on the market they are selling to but I have never bothered.

The PCs may role any skill they can justify to know what to take, another roll may be required to remove the part (but probably not)

Once the PCs know the item has value they automatically know what it is going to sell for, the same skill role that had them know it was useful told them how valuable.

These guidelines are used for two simple reasons, myself and all but one of my players fine trading very boring and would like to spend as little time dealing with it as possible. And the other player is an economics student who would inevitably confuse me to death engaging in economic warfare against Thera if I didn’t make the trade system to simple to be useful.

[werefrog]

Your mention of economics student wanting to start economic war against Thera reminds The Werefrog of a game The Werefrog ran.

One player was a certified mechanic, and he had his weaponsmith build an internal combustion engine (using true fire instead of gasoline) with the purpose of driving around Barsaive. He kept arguing that it would work. The part that made him angriest was he could get it to work on a battleboat, but when he hooked it up to the wagon, it wouldn't go.

Sadly, the rules state that the engines only work on boats because the Passions prevent it from working for anything else. You could pull the same with economics. He tries to set up economic warfare, but it fails for reasons that you don't explain. It's a different world, and magic just makes it not work the same as in our world.

[Telarus_KSC]

The invisible hand of the market is Named Chorrolis.