Effects of Equipment

I am amidst the reformatting of my pricing table, a long overdue task involving the correction of many, many errors that have been there for years, along with expanding details and adding features.  At present there are something like 1,500 items for sale and no, I don't think that's too many.  Honestly, I don't think it's enough.

As many of you know, my daughter runs a game of her own, and some of her players also play in the game of another DM, Tatyana, that my daughter knows.  My daughter uses my equipment sheet, while Tatyana doesn't ... and in Tatyana's campaign, everyone has plenty of money and doesn't know what to do with it.  They have so much coin they use it as road gravel (joking...).  Yet these same players in my daughter's world never have enough money—not only because there are many things to buy, but because the existence of things create their own game effects.

For example, we might add a dozen or more kinds of hat to our equipment table; there are, after all, many kinds of hat.  That might lead to a stipulation that in certain parts of the world, everyone has to have a hat; not having a hat is considered a moral offense ... and of course, which hat you purchase has an influence on which persons you speak with.  If everyone in the party wears one kind of hat, that being the "safe" hat, the one that draws the least attention, it can mean there are dozens of factions they can't speak to at all.  Moreover, don't ever get caught with two different hats.  It means you're not a true believer in one or the other (effectively both), and therefore worthy of having an "accident."

The various substances and manufactures of my world are brought into existence by my patient research through a 1952 encyclopedia; many of these things I had never heard of before: kumiss, garum, seratonin, witherite, kaolin ... a long list that is second nature to me now but were a mystery 20 years ago.  One list that I've inherited through the encyclopedia is that of wines; there are many thousands of wines, of course, but there are just 23 of name that the encyclopedia thought worthy of mention.  I've included these in my pricing list for a decade, but reviewing the list recently, and how they're described for the players, suggested I could go one better.  These wines needed more description ... and thankfully, as the wines are real, I could simply look them up and steal a brief description of each:

This should be readable if you open the image in another window; I thought it might be nice to set the list against an appropriate background.  That's not how it will appear on the equipment list, of course—I'd need a thousand pictures!

For the most part, the explanation is simplified from the real thing (wine experts tend to go on and on) ... yet I think it grants a feel for the wine that a player can appreciate for their character.  All of these specialty wines (sherry not included) are hard to find except where they're bottled ... and thankfully, my world takes place far enough along in Earth's history that there are bottles, even for champagne.  Granted, I fudge a little on the dates; magic and divination help to solve certain problems, like how to keep the cork in the bottle.  I am the DM, you know.  I'm allowed to add features to my world that I like.

The above list gets me to thinking ... and it is one of those things about rules again.  I may have mentioned this on the blog before, because it doesn't seem like an entirely new idea, but hell.  I would have proposed this a long time ago, and old men do repeat themselves.

Taking the different kinds of wine, distilled beverages, beers, cheeses, confectionary, smoked meats, with cider, caviar, opium, tobacco and such, not to mention rare naturally occurring fruits, vegetables and treenuts, I could create a list of "Cravings" that could be rolled upon randomly for every player.  A good, lucky roll would mean getting an item that could be found nearly everywhere, and was relatively cheap, though not very special as far as a character building notion; while a bad roll would be getting a Craving that was expensive and damn near impossible to find.  An example of that would be Arrack, a coconut liqueur which is distilled in only one place my world, that being on the Cochin coast of India—a long, long way from most places my players choose to be.

Here's the rub.  You get hold of your craving—Edam cheese, treacle, a bottle of Strega, gingerbread, whatever it happens to be—and if you eat it up to 12 hours before getting into combat, you get a 5% bonus to your experience from that combat.  You're in such a fine mood, you understand.  This is not such a game balancing wrecker.  There are always certain classes (as gotten from old AD&D) that get 10% and others that don't ... and how you arrange your ability stats affects that too.  Thus, if some characters got a mere 5% bonus on a day some other character didn't, that's not such a big thing.  But it would, I think, serve as a motivator for players who had trouble getting hold of some rare Craving ... which might motivate the party to walk towards that craving (the closer you get, the greater the chance it will turn up on an equipment list—you don't have to go all the way to India) and then to corner the market on it at the next opportunity.  "Arrack?  Excellent.  I buy all of it.  Let me know when more comes in.  I'll buy all of that, too."

Now, some might think the Cravings ought to be equalled out, but where's the fun in that?  Life isn't fair; and I don't play with players who grumble about die rolls or bad luck.  Others might think I ought to give a +1 to hit or damage, or both, but I tell you, I already use that bonus often enough, thank you.  Lot of the time, I'm looking for other benefits to offer.

Come to think of it, I have 33 kinds of fabric/weaving in my world.  Could be, it's not what you eat or smoke, it's what you wear ... acknowledging that things wear out, meaning you can't wear your favorite scarf forever and still feel special.  Hm.  There are lots of ways to think about this; might be fun to make a list and give it a try.