While planning my next campaign, I was brushing up on some of the core rules regarding influence tests and endevors and an idea for an auction came to mind

Say the group need a particular star chart or piece of machinery for a new colony, there's a ship coming to port selling what they need but another party is also looking to aquire it and there's only one. So, they meet at auction in a battle of the wallets.

The first bid is a skill test against their PF. No degrees needed, just a straight success. The other party offers their bid doing the same.

Next, the first party makes a second PF roll with a -10

Rince and repeat with an accumulative -10 per round of bids.

If one side fails, they can deside to succeed by permminantly reducing their total PF by the degrees of failure.

Their PF is only reduced if they win the item at the end and they can burn PF as many times as they like to succeed.

They can also bribe various parties before hand, to say increase their total PF just for the auction or ignored a single fail (regardless of degrees of failure)

This is just off the top of my head, I'm sure there are flaws and ways to improve it but I liked it and thought I'd share, see what the masses think =)

I'd simply have the initial roll be made by every participating 'bidder', with the bidder with the lowest degrees of success being eliminated each round (Fails are auto-eliminated) until there is only one bidder left.

I'd simply have the initial roll be made by every participating 'bidder', with the bidder with the lowest degrees of success being eliminated each round (Fails are auto-eliminated) until there is only one bidder left.

I have used this exact system, which includes forcing my PCs to decide whether or not they will burn Profit Factor before I tell them if they stay in or not.

You might also give them the option to "pre-burn" at a higher bonus to represent them taking the time to liquidate assets to use for the auction. You can also, potentially, allow the party to use other skills (such as blather, device, commerce) to attempt to "save" a minor failure into a success. Ultimately, if you're going to do it in multiple rolls there should be some kind of description (Fine... I'll add in the next 7 years of the profits from the Damaris Accords) and/or decision between each one. Otherwise you might as well just make it a single opposed PF roll.

Alternatively, if its a big enough concern, you can have the players literally bidding what roll they have to succeed at.

"10% of my fine art collection" (Commerce -10 or suffer -1 PF)

"This year's harvest from Secundus" (Commerce -30 or suffer -1 PF)

"The Dormantus Ore Contract" (-1 PF)

...

At which point you may simply start making willpower rolls for the NPCs once they reach their "easy" limit.