My players want to grab everything that isn't nailed down and then sell it or use it. The psyker even tried to strip the entire blood-soaked flak armour of a guard he killed the moment before (I gave him an IP for it, since he's fresh and doesn't have Jaded). Looting is good and all, he was just not that desperate at the time.

So my questions are: who'd buy used weapons and armour and what is a reasonable price? I went for 20-30% of the original price. And of course, did I do right to hand out an IP there? I don't necessarily view IPs as something bad, only that it reflects deviation from the normal human psyche and normal behaviour.

FYI, this was in Edge of Darkness so they're on Scintilla which of course has an impact on supply and demand.

First and foremost, I never ever would give an IP OUTRIGHT (with no willpowertest involved) for something mundane like stripping a corpse. Removing the spleen to sell it? Okay, THAT asks for IP. But getting a bloody corpse out of the armour? THIS! IS! 40K!!!

IP -are- something bad because they make you go into trauma and/or go Insane.

@Price and stuff
Well, if they want to sell stuff I would ask for a test on "Trade(Merchant)" and would give them 20% of the base price +5% per level of success. The more they want to sell or the more worthy it is the more difficult will the test be.

Maybe I was a little harsh. I just want to try to distance the game from being like a computer rpg, i.e. when the enemies are killed, their stuff drops without a dent in it or a coat of blood and guts.

My players are compulsive looters to the extent that I have now renamed our campaign Ordo Lootus.

As for prices, nothing you buy in 40K is new anyway. In fact, the older the better! The flak vests you buy from a merchant has probably been worn and patched by several users before you came along. I see no reason to cut the price on stuff unless it is damaged or clearly of an illegal nature.

Pried from your enemies dead hands? No sweat.

Darth Smeg said:

I disagree here. While "ancient technology" like Plasma Weapons or Servoarmour will have seen countless users the more mundeane things will loose value soon. Especially armour. And even the acient things are just so good since they are lovingly cared for. If the pc have the trade-skills, time and resources to refurbishequipment they shall get a better price.

In addition, buying an item from a licensed vendor and from some guy who approaches you on the street and/or inserts in the local gazeteer are different things. You will not get the list price for your item unless it is rare to begin with our you now your Trade (Merchant). Especially if you cannot wait forever since you will leave sooner or later.

@Spoiling the spoils of war
In case of armour, role a d10. 0= the armour matches the pc who roled the dice. In any other case, the armour needs refitting and will count as "bad quality" till then. If it sustained heavy damage, you can always rule that the AP is reduced till repaired or that an attack with certain levels of success will hit a gab and bypass the AP. Wearing bloodied armour should grant a huge penalty on social skills (but Intimidation) and attract unwanted attention (law inforcement, bounty-hunters, snitches, etc).

Otherwise, their is nothing wrong with looting! In fact, I see it as part of the RPG game in general. Like gaining XP.

That said, I do have a certain rule for my acolythe cell:

the Interrogator wants to see everything they took. They will be allowed choice picks but the majority of stuff will be sold by him. Part of it goes to the acolythes, the rest helps to fund the Inquisitor. Of course, they can always try to bypass him. But since he established a network for sale of stuff, he normally gets the better prices and the PC do not want to piss of the Interrogator.

On the other hand, they normally get additional "one off" gear for each mission as well.

My group are hard-core Looters, too- a side-effect of coming to rpgs from a D&D background... It bothered me a lot early in the campaign- lugging around used armour to sell in town (to a Dwarven smith, no doubt...)? Ugh. It used to snap me out of "suspension of disbelief" every time. Eventually, I got used to it, though. The mission my players are currently on involves infiltraiting the mansion of a disolute noble. I may live to regret this...

Ahem . As far as selling stuff goes, I assume that most places that buy and sell used items charge about 75% of the original price (more if it's a rare item); PCs can get half this amount, plus or minus 10% for each degree of success or failure on the appropriate skill checks.

Hey!

So, I am mostly doing something like Gregor- everything they collect on the field is evidence. They are free to keep anything they find, if they like but if the Interrogator finds out, he's likely going to be pissed. Right now, they are knee deep in Tech-heresy, so almost everything they find is heretical in nature: they can keep it for the duration of the mission without anyone really questioning it (unless its REALLY bad that is), but as soon as the Job is done they get the option to hand it over. If they don't... well... that's their problem.

On an unrelated note, seeing as I haven't played enough with them to test out this theory (We've only had one session, where they still managed to loot some pretty beefed up gear- mainly a two handed augmented heavy chain-axe.) It SHOULD allow for more balanced encounters: as the players move in a mission, they get stronger gear, which allows them to fight stronger opponents before they hand over everything to the Inquisition and start over next mission. Would allow me to start with the weaker opponents and scale up, without having the players simply slaughter everything.

Later, when they gain a few ranks (I'd say at around 4-5), I would allow them to pick a few weapons to keep- but now, anything they manage to collect actually goes back to the Inquisition to be studied, quarantined, or given to higher ranking radical agents

As for the looting and IP points..i agree with Gregorius. As for the resale of looted gear and pricing..I got sneaky about it and while it does have some in common with others posts as to how they handle it...My group works slightly more direct.

My Inquisitor has at least 1 Acolyte and/or Throne agent under him/her at all times that has a direct background as a Merchant ( armourer/weaponsmith etc ) Currently that is one of the PCs who all the gear is given to initially to fix/repair/scrap/resell as he deems fit ( it is an understood that 50% of the money made from resale of all looted gear is given to the PCs Cell Team Leader to be given to the Inquisitor ( honestly..where do you think the Inquisitors get all the money they use for bribes and buying anything needed for all their teams... ) At current the PC is the ONLY one in the Inquisitors cadre of teams ( backstory is the PCs charater is second gen in the employ of the Inquisitor...PCs dad was a throne agent under the same Inq till untimely death..and as per agreement his son took over his spot as the family has a very close bond with the Inq ) Not only does having this PC as the shopkeeper make it supereasy to offload all looted gear but also when it comes to making special ammo or anything else more mundane ( that doesnt require a tech-priest ) as he can make it for a fraction of the usual cost ( time consuming yes BUT..when your stuck on a ship in warp transit for weeks-months at a time...plenty of time to handle it..lol )

My group loots. Not as bad as they used to, and nowadays they actually decide to police up places where they have a firefight, if nothing else to slow down the opposition groups that are in force.

The way I run it, on most hive/factory planets there's a HUGE black market for used and poor quality goods. It's nothing to dump off used equipment on higher population worlds. You just get crap (20% or 30% of market value) for it if you use an intermediary like a fence. I also figure that the Imperium is too big to really function, and there's a shadowy, black-market style economy running in the background where material and goods get where they need to go. Some Imperial Guard regiment gets wiped out on god-knows-what planet and the Imperium pulls back to regroup for a few years. The forge world making the lasguns, walkers, armor, mess kits, latrine units, prefab bases, etc... probably won't hear of the regiment's destruction for years, maybe decades, if at all, and just keep producing and sending to a planet where there's nobody waiting for the gear. Somewhere along the chain of supply someone knows this, and decides to take a bribe and ship it to this other planet where an IG regiment has been waiting for material supply for months and nothing is going to come otherwise. Hence, the Imperium rumbles on. So while it's illegal, corruption and black market is actually necessary in my version of 40k. The Imperium is simply too big, the bureaucracy too massive, and communication is too slow to do otherwise. Astropaths exist and are used, but everything I've read says they're unreliable and can take weeks (instead of months) to transmit messages. And even if that communication works, it's rare and valuable enough that not everyone can even afford it. An astropath communication costs a small fortune for private citizens to use for example. Most of the time, a factory produces something, and ships it, and probably never finds out if it even makes it to it's intended destination.

My solution to this is to give potential income avenues to the acolytes if they're ballsy enough to take it. First adventure they did a little gun running on the side to make themselves several thousand thrones which set them up for the majority of the main adventure. They've accepted bribes, seized funds, and done all kinds of interesting activities of questionable moral and legal status. The code of morality they've come to adhere to is... unique. They're already rewarded for results regardless of the means, and so their definition of which results are acceptable are kind of alien. It's pretty cool.

At this point, they don't loot unless there's something specific they want or are looking for evidence. The peanuts they get for unloading a half a dozen lasguns on the black market isn't worth it. They deal in *crates* of forge world rejects being pumped into the underworld, they've greased planetary defense force precincts to "divert" weapons reported as destroyed to them so they can sell on the black market off-world (same result for the planet: less guns, and it's someone else's problem at that point), and their current mark is known to be sitting on a very impressive black slush fund and they're already starting to plot how to take control of all that money. They've already managed to make their patron Inquisitor a very, very wealthy man by exposing heresy and corruption in a noble house, take out the corruption, and allow the Inquisitor to come in, quietly seize the house, and continue running things business as usual, so the acolytes get a large amount of leeway in things like this.

I find looting to be okay at low levels of gameplay. You're one cell out of many for your Inquisitor so you have to make do on your own, and you have no contacts yet. But really, by the time you hit rank 5 or so, there should be alternate or steady income to allow the players to get on with the story. By the time my party gets to rank six, I'm basically going to give them a Profit Factor team skill (call it Wealth) at low levels, say 20 or so to start with, and let them build wealth up so that they stop counting thrones and start building a power web and focusing on the story. I figure if we get to Ascension (which I hope we do), I'll let them burn wealth into Influence at a 3-to-1 or 5-to-1 ratio. That way, they feel like they have a real influence web coming into their rosette.

The stuff with looting is of course that while you can talk normal stuff and weapons when playing as Puritans you can only get to keep the really fun stuff when being a Radical. Actually getting your hands on the really fun stuff can of course cause further problems but that's another issue.

After reading all this reselling of loot, I have a pricing question how much would 30 lbs. of gold go for? My cell has been sitting on this for a long time now and I'm wondering what it will go for pricewise, does anyone know?

Phi6891 said:

Tricky, since we do not know the value of "one lbs of gold".

You could try the following

1) Look what an .38 Revolver would generally cost in a given currency nowadays (let us take USD)
2) Use the known price in thrown to have a general feeling for "1 USD is about X Thrones"
3) Find out what is the price-per-pound for Gold; using an online search engine
4) Transfering the Gold price from USD into thrones with the formula from step 1 and 2.
5) Do some fine tuning in regard to how/where the pc sell it.

By the way: are these 15kg of Gold in the forms of bar? Or jewelry? A molten coment? Wires ripped out of some tech-device? A forbidden idol of a chaos cult?

I can't remember where my party members and I picked the gold up from, I know it wasn't a chaos statue or anything or from tech devices. I think we had this gold since about rank 4 or 5 and we are about rank 9 or so now. My best guess it was a reward or loot from something in the form of bars, we could of picked it up from a space hulk when we found astarties weapons and armor.

As of 2012-02-01 1kg of gold is worth

55790 USD
42458 EUR
35241 UK£

Glock 17 is priced aroun 550 USD.

So 1 kg of gold would be worth around 100 autopistols. I dont have the book with me so cant get the price in thrones.

And the gold price will most likely be depending on the planet it is sold on.

Ph7517 said:

I think the equivalent of the Glock17 would be the generic stub automatic. I think this was about 50 thrones? In that case, we are talking about 5.000 thrones.

BUT

Asky your GM, he is the judge of all things in the relevant game world!

price for guns change from one country to another, no? Therefore if you take the price of gold in euro and the price of a pistol in Germany, maybe the price wil be different.

Also, is the gold as valuable in 41.000 than it is today?

IMG, gold would be cheaper than today. As the majority of the population is struggling to survive, and the rest (the nobles) are more interested in xeno artefact that just plain gold.

Just my 2 cents

eponette said:

So, your suggestion is...........?

Gregorius21778 said:

I'd say... Do as you like...

In a hive, gold should be cheap. In some Feodal world, the price should be higher.

You try to compare gold vs rifle. But rifles are very cheap (look at the price of the alcool? And the drugs? In the Edge of Darkness, they say that a common salary for a hive worker is 25 T. How can they spend one minute to a bar when you look at the price of the drinks? How can it be that in any description, the 'smell of Obscura' is present. Even with the update, one dose of obscura is one month salary.

Back to the topic : Guns fall from the sky, and food are scarse. If you need to loot something, take the food and drink, the drugs,... There will be more people interested that used guns and damaged armours!

Gurkhal said:

Wait, are you implying that Power Armour, Storm Bolters,Witch Cages, Flamers and Power Axes aren't fun?