There are no rules in this book for selling anything at any point ever. There is no standard set out at any point in the book for what happens if I character wants to sell something. This should be rectified. I think it's unfortunate that my character setting up a lemonade stand brings this rulebook to a crashing halt. Even a simple "It's like Diablo, everything you sell is half price from what you buy" would be a great inclusion into the book.

Or the GM could just tell you the price.

Considering that both the Trader and Scoundrel specs are geared for the plying of legal and illegal trades respectively, I think it's a good idea to know how to sell things. Even if it's as simple as "base price, modified by the result of a Negotiate check."

-EF

korjik said:

Oh man do I have sweet news for you. If you dislike rules being in the book rather than just made up by your DM on the spot then you actually don't need to ever buy any rulebooks at all! That's all that's in there! Stupid rules that your DM could just make up anyway! Man what suckers we must all look like to you buying these books.

Yeah the fact that the negotiate skill as well as 5 different talents are based on changing the price you can buy or sell things for by altering them by a set percentage means you need selling rules. Improving or reducing "Arbitrary" by 5% is still just "Arbitrary".

Would be more complicated than you've realized as you're dealing with the economies of thousands of systems and millions of settlements with a trillion trillion beings… Every item would have a different value in different systems. Places with shipyards wouldn't buy ships for as much as a place totally lacking those same things. So, it is GM adjudication all the time to set the BASE… then the talents and skills go off that.

Kallabecca said:

That's retarded. What you've just said is that someone would need to write a system to make selling prices active and interesting, which is apparently something you want, but that writing it would be hard so we should give up immediately. Here is a skeleton system for what you want

*Normatively gear, ships, and equipment can be sold for 10% of it's listed cost. However local factors may alter those prices wildly. Upon arriving onto any planet a successful check with any applicable knowledge skill will inform the player which of the following rules are in effect on the planet and for which items they apply.*

We need Power Converters!=The item costs 5X it's listed cost (and can be sold for 50% of it's listed cost)

That's illegal here!= The item gains the ® symbol and can only be sold illicitly possibly attracting the attention of local law enforcement

The market is flooded= The item is in abundance here, and costs half it's listed cost (and can be sold for 5% it's listed cost)

Selling Ice to Wompa's= An item is so useless or abundant here it literally cannot be sold in any quantity for any amount.

Knockoffs!= When purchasing the item here roll a disadvantage die, if a disadvantage symbol comes up the item functions but is a knockoff and sells for between 5% it's listed cost and nothing depending on GM discretion.

Hive of Scum and Villainy=On this planet the black market is just called "the market" and anything can be found, reduce all items Rarity by 3 for finding their Black Market Good cost increase

etc, etc. Creating a baseline is good for the game because then rules can be made off of them. And as this is a rule-book you should not be resistant to the concept of rules being put into it.

Don't Negotiate and Streetwise say somthing about being used for legal and illegal selling respectively? I left the book at home tonight, sorry. Assuming they do I don't see a need for further elaboration.

An example of how I would run a sale cargo:

GM: Okay, you have returned to Bespin with a hold full of 'liberated' Alderian liquors. Do you guys want to contact a legitimate merchant factor or avoid customs and get in touch with an 'imports' specialist?

Player alpha: Last time we tried to use legit channels it ended poorly.

Player wookie: Rawr! Orrar?

Player droid: Worry not Master Wookie! I have extensive communications with all the local black marketters! With you'r permission captain?

Player alpha: Go ahead.

GM: Roll streetwise, difficulty 2.

Player Droid: Two success and a threat.

GM: okay you got a good price 12000 credits. Unfortunalty it seems the Cloud City Constublaory wants to ask you some questions…

deanruel said:

Looks like the GM told you the price….

That 500 cr for a blaster is the baseline for the price. How much you get for it is very situationally dependent. I personally would much prefer a couple paragraphs in the 'how to GM' section on how to handle money in the game, instead of a couple of pages of rules in the equipment section. Rules that dont take into account the game that the DM is trying to play.

A small bit of clarification: page 103, top half, right-hand side, second-to-last paragraph talks about selling things on the black market. Roll streetwise vs rarity difficulty (table 5-3). One success you get one quarter listed price. Two successes you get half-price, and three or more gets you 3/4 listed price.

But that still begs the question of how do you sell stuff legally?

-EF

korjik said:

Man if you would be upset by the inclusion of the -selling prices- of items you are gonna be upset when you open this book. It's full of them! Oh no! The fact that someone is supposed to SELL you a Blaster for 500 credits might ruin your DM's plotline that all blasters are made of bantha-tusks and cost One Million Quatloos a gun!

You should not be afraid of prices. If you are so terrified of maintaining DM control that you are afraid of the inclusion of pricing things then you are a madman. You and your DM can still play whatever version of this imaginary game you want, that's still fine. Saying Blasters can be bought for 500 and sold for 100 does literally nothing to stop you from telling an immersive story. It just means the world can now sensible function where it didn't before.

Also good catch Eldritch! That's something real. It does mean you can only sell items with the ® tag but that's a definite start and it gives us a baseline, as well as telling us that the developers aren't in some way intrinsically opposed to set selling costs, they just forgot to include them. Still as the rules stand right now you could make characters who buy and sell illegal goods for profit. Which is really cool. Now it's still REALLY STRICT but you could still totally do the following with starting characters

Make a party, one Character is a Droid Trader with every talent required to gain the Master Merchant talent as well as a decent negotiate skill. Another character has maxed out Streetwise. If you take these characters and buy Death Sticks (250 creds, Rarity 2) and ONLY Death Sticks you can buy them for 75% cost and sell them for 100% cost on the Black Market PLUS an additional 5% for any successes you make on the negotiate checks which is at least a cool 60 creds for every carton of Death Sticks you sell. This is because Death Sticks are the only ® item that has a rarity of 2 which makes their Black Market price the same as the listed price. Additionally if you travel to the Core Worlds to do your purchasing you can also buy Surveillance Taggers (175 creds, Rarity 4) which, while they have a lower profit margin, don't have any encumbrance meaning you could possibly transport more of them for less effort. It's marketing people!

While I have everyone here let me ask, does anybody have any idea how the Black Market Contacts talent actually works? It seems poorly worded and confused. It also has the problem of actually INCREASING the cost of low rarity items for no benefit if I use the ability on, say, Death sticks. It seems to me like they should just let you reduce the rarity of an item and not worry about "Increasing it's cost by 50%"

deanruel said:

You should not be afraid of not having prices. If you are so terrified of having to make something up that you are afraid of not having rules in the book then you are a madman. You and your DM can still play whatever version of this imaginary game you want, that's still fine. Not saying Blasters can be bought for 500 and sold for 100 does literally nothing to stop you from telling an immersive story. It just means the world could sensably function in the first place.

As for Black Market Contacts, I believe the intention is for it to be used when the rarity roll is hard, not when it is easy. Going from rarity 8 to rarity 5 makes the cost go from 1000% to 450% even tho going from rarity 3 to rarity 1 dosent actually change the cost.

korjik said:

The intention is for it to be used on items of any rarity, entirely dependant on whether the item in question is legal or illegal on the planet you are trying to sell it on. If a planet/space station/etc banned civilians from carrying blasters of any kind, and you wanted to sell some, you'd have to use the Black Market Contacts stuff.

deanruel said:

No, what I said is how things really work. It is all just GM Adjudication. The prices in the book do two things. 1) Give you the buying prices DURING CHARACTER CREATION. 2) Give a Gauge for how expensive similar items should be, as a baseline. Anything else, is GM. Want to sell those items… GM decides what skills might help you find a buyer and comes up with a price (totally arbitrary or based off the books price). Then skills are rolled (and hopefully actual Role-playing occurs) and the final price is found. Just because something is cheap in the book, doesn't mean it is always available or always at that price…

It's not all just Gm adjudication it's a rulebook. It's literally providing you the opposite of "just Gm adjudication" it's providing you a stable set of rules and expectations that, housed under one roof, become one "Game". The book should have prices for selling things, that's common sense. It's also clearly an oversight as they have prices for selling some items but not others. Don't be an apologist. Stop trying to say whatever is in the book is perfect, until they change it, in which case it will be perfect again. People sell things, the book should have rules for selling things. Full Stop. And not just one out of every 10 items, the other 9 too. Don't be foolish. This is clearly just an oversight and not some grand statement on the designers parts that no one should have any clue how the economy works anywhere in the universe. Don't apologize, don't Oberoni Fallacy, just recognize that in a game where people will buy and sell things regularly there should be rules for people buying and selling things and those rules should be inclusive enough to function. Thank you.

ON GM adjudication:

You seem to be missing the point where at almost every step at this book, it is trying to encourage the GM to be highly flexible and narrative about what is exactly going on. The book is very loose in describing the exact specifics of what happens when rolling advantages on many tests, and generally, leaves this up to the GM.

The same goes with markets, and the prices of goods.

MILLANDSON said:

Well, I thought the part where the item is supposed to be illegal was pretty obvious. My point was that the talent isnt very useful when talking low rarity. Knocking an 8 rarity down to a 5 is alot more useful than a 4 to a 1.

deanruel said:

I am not apologizing for something missing from the book, I am calling anyone who cries about it a bad GM.

You have a brain. Use it.

@deanruel & @korjik, you guys are both handsome and/or pretty. And you are both right.

Something as simple as an assumed base sale % suggestion in the book isn't overly indicative of hand-holding and should be included in the final release ( a quick sentence or three and we can call it checked off ). AND conversely, not having a cut and dried economics system shouldn't bring your game to a crashing halt because that's a bit melodramatic.

Though it could have been handled a little more tactfully, I think the OP brings up a good point ( it helps if you read it in the voice of Roger from American Dad ). People are going to be confused about sale prices…and they are going to endlessly wonder about it in 10^15 threads when the game hits the street.

This thread really has been a lovely example of RPG Forum psychology.

deanruel comes along and says "This part of the game is broken, it's an oversight and should be fixed. He's also a bit of a knob about it, but he's an entertaining knob so he can be forgiven. As my dear old Pappy always used to say "excoriate with humor", he does it well. But I digress.

Then, instead of accepting that because EotE is a beta game, such that the developers readily agree there could be oversights and flaws and have released the game in an imperfect state specifically so we can find said flaws - people come out of the woodwork to protect the game from deanruel and is galloping tongue.

And then when the O.P. goes on to prove that he's right, it becomes Tribe against Tribe - with the home team protectors still forgetting that the game is almost certain at this stage to be flawed and what deanruel points out is precisely what he's supposed to do.

I used to see this all the time on the White Wolf Forums. It was "my game, right or wrong", and the partisanship was as thick as Clan affiliations. I swear, I used to get the impression sometimes that if - as part of buying a White Wolf game - the Developer was allowed to come to your house and hoof you in the junk, well that was just fine as far as some of the Boosters were concerned.

Wild. Just Wild.

I'll say first to the last few posters that you are correct, I am a knob. I am. I'm direct, brash, forceful and rude. However the trade there is you can be just as much of an ******* to me and I don't mind at all. I mind polite ignorance more than I mind aggressive intelligence. What I am more importantly is REALLY GOOD at designing RPG's. I probably spend 2 hours a day reading on RPG design or keeping up with modern developments in the field so I hope you can all tolerate me cause I'm gonna be here testing this thing with you guys for a while.

That said Corradus is correct. People's instinct is to be proprietary about things they like which does no good for a game we are trying to improve. As a community we should be MORE negative, MORE aggressive, and LESS tolerant of mistakes because those things will make for a better final product. This is true in Beta after Beta that the products that created a culture of forgiving testers got worse games. I like this game, there are things it does well but there are a lot of things it does poorly and the more of those things we can attack and tackle before release the better the released game will be. The stuff alot of you guys are doing already is amazing. I've seen people's Dice Math, and statistical analysis of certain die probabilities, as well as posters in depth analysis of the games Genre Emulation ability which in a Star Wars game is just so important. As a community we're starting to know this book backwards and forwards and by doing so, then critiqueing it harshly we will get a better product out of it. And I care about this product, so I'm gonna be mean to it. And to you guys. Because I'm kind of a knob.

deanruel said:

That is a bit of an extreme example, i.e. bringing the game to a crashing halt by setting up a lemonade stand. For my part, economics is one of the last reasons why I would pick up an RPG. You being a designer hoping to sell the fruits of your labor must understand this about your audience. I would imagine that I am not alone concerning this position with respect to economics and role-playing games. As a GM and/or player of RPGs for over 30 years I have yet to meet any player or GM who felt that an inclusion of rules specific to bartering in a particular rule set would turn them away from playing that game. That is a weak excuse, in my opinion.

What to do? As stated by other posters in this thread, just make it up and move along just like you offered by your Diablo (what is that? some video game?) example.

If FFG decides to explicitly make this accommodation within their core rules, good for them. I won't need it to run this game, but good for them nonetheless. And good for you.

angelicdoctor said:

Normally I'd agree with you, that it's not needed. However, there are two specs that are specifically geared towards buying/sellings. Also, Edge of the Empire is a game about making it out on the fringe of society, and buying/selling are is a big part of that.

The lack of specific rules for selling on the open market seem to be an oversight, considering they included rules for buying and selling illicit goods. Heck, the negotiate skill specifically calls out how to make a profit on what you're selling, but no where we have been able to find tell you what the base selling price is.

-EF

EldritchFire said:

Respectfully, I disagree. I don't need rules codified for this neither in this system nor in any of the other multiple and various RPGs I run. Again, if FFG makes it a point to place these 'Papers and Paychecks'-style rules in their core, more power to them. I would think it over complicating and unnecessary (and certainly not in the spirit of an exciting and cinematic Star Wars game), but I'd be well with it. After all, a new player/GM may need the additional hand-holding. For myself and my players, we can play well without them.

OK. If FFG should be including the rules for selling stuff, then they also need the rules/costs for docking fees, refitting fees (fuel, food, etc…), meals, drinks, bribes, motels, hotels, etc… Han Solo wasn't exactly rolling in dough. He won the Falcon in a game and quite a few of her mods were already in place before she came into his hands. He was able to keep the ship repaired from jobs, but was always needing a new cargo and quickly to keep ahead of his bills (and his Bounty after dumping his cargo of Spice).

They do have rules for upkeep costs like food and hotels and whatnot. They are in a sidebar. What they don't have rules for is selling things.