Player shopping

Hey everyone. During the last session I ran with my group, I gave them access to buy things from a store. With 5 players this took about an hour, since I had to look up stats, deduct funds, figure out their totals etc. The worst part of this is not the time it took, but the fact that for each player I processed, the other four had nothing to do. I was wondering if anyone knew of any programs that might streamline this process, preferably for free. Specifically a program that acts like a virtual store. Failing that it would be great if people might share the way they do it? DMing is still very new to me.

Unfortunately that's really more a question for Reddit or another forum. The Roll20 forums are pretty heavily moderated to only be about Roll20(for good reason) That being said, PCGen is a decent Pathfinder / 3.5 character sheet generator that has a built-in inventory section with accurate pricing. I suggest popping over to <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/new/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/new/</a> (If Pathfinder) or <a href="http://www.reddit.com/user/GhostMatter/m/dnd/new/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/user/GhostMatter/m/dnd/new/</a>... if D&D specifically.

We do our shopping outside of the game, in a forum if it sounds like it'd take a lot of time. If it's a simple 'buy, deduct gold' of course, it's ingame. If all you're figuring out is total costs and it's taking this much time; let them have it - figure out remaining total later. If it's all stats and number-crunching - player by player with lots of waiting: If you GM a lot, you'll know whent hese things will come up; Warn your players, and hash it out on a forum / discussion thread. Just how I'd do it - it may or may not float your boat :).

Thank you both for the advice. I'll take a look at the forums in those links and get some ideas. But I think my best bet is the forum idea. I think that's a simple way of doing it. I guess I was overthinking it a bit. Thanks again.

My players love shopping. The best instance was when they managed to get a legitimate three week head start on the big bad; rather than make preparations or set traps they spent the three weeks (and three game sessions) shopping, in character. It was awesome fun with the highlight being visiting tailors and dress makers to get bespoke costumes made for the upcoming masquerade. We haven't done it to that extreme since and it's become a bit of a running joke but I guess the point is - if everyone is having fun doing it in session then it's great, if not then the suggestion of doing it via forum or email makes a lot of sense.

I try to time my sessions to end in a town where possible (they've been in a dungeon for a month now so by the end of tonight should be back in town...) so that in the last five minutes i can brief them on the possible items/services available and then give them a week to 'sort it out'. Usually i'll predefine the resale value of used items (base 50% up to 60% depending on a skill check/town disposition) and any discount they get for reputation etc. That way they can figure it all out either in chat (sometimes i'll put them on a splash page with price lists on for ease) or outside of roll20, ask me questions throughout the week but ultimately by the time we come to play again it should all be sorted :) It helps that all my players are relatives so they can always call each other to discuss finer points ;)

Definitely a borderline post, but discussing how you might use Roll20 to facilitate this is certainly within the scope of the forums.

Certainly and API script could be created for doing purchasing (I have some grand designs around this if I ever get to it (sorry Michael!)). There was a script a while back that implemented a store. It hasn't been working because of the way it originally operated, but it could be revived with the API buttons from Update of Holding.

My players have a "home base" village which they return to between adventures. The available inventory and prices for the various shops in the village are always visible to the players as handouts and I just let them do their own shopping and book keeping. As the DM, I get involved only if they have a special order request, want to haggle over a price, etc. While this approach greatly speeds up game play, it also requires a certainly level of trust. But I've never had any problems with my players abusing it.

I also have a player handout made in their adventurer's handbook with items and prices, then I tell them to buy what they need, giving them the percentage price above or below "book value" they would need to pay for items. It does require a level of trust, but I actually keep track of all of the party money on a spreadsheet out of the game. EDIT: That's for my OSRIC campaign. For my Cyberpunk campaign I'm running, I do it completely differently. Each player has an attribute called "Finances," which basically amounts to their disposable income. When a player wants to make a purchase, they run the macro, it queries the cost of the item, compares it to their disposable income and comes up with a difficulty number which they have to beat in order to make the purchase. If their successful, this number is then subtracted from their Finances attribute (I made it one of the bubbles on their token), thus making the next purchase more difficult. When they get paid, Finances gets reset back to zero.

Setting up a 'shopping/store' map for players sounds like a useful idea. I don't know as I would go to the trouble of making inventories per-store, or unique stores in general, because that isn't a focus of my game, but certainly a map-page with the listings from the books for whatever system/setting you're using would be helpful. Use drawn filled rectangles and lines to obscure stuff you are declaring Not Available At This Time, and add a little 'You may sell goods at X% of listed price; You may buy goods at Y% of listed price' textbox, and then have the players Deal With It between sessions. (The two games I am in long-term, there's a designated Quartermaster player whose job is to keep track of all loot obtained during play, and they both maintain a spreadsheet on Googledocs listing the items, Book Price, and Sale Price, so the GM and PCs may doublecheck the Quartermaster's work. Hmmmm. I wonder how hard it would be to bring spreadsheet functionality to Roll20. (Don't mind me, I'm a former accountant and I adore spreadsheets!))

GenKitty said: (The two games I am in long-term, there's a designated Quartermaster player whose job is to keep track of all loot obtained during play, and they both maintain a spreadsheet on Googledocs listing the items, Book Price, and Sale Price, so the GM and PCs may doublecheck the Quartermaster's work. Hmmmm. I wonder how hard it would be to bring spreadsheet functionality to Roll20. (Don't mind me, I'm a former accountant and I adore spreadsheets!)) (( Depends on what you want for the functionality. Displaying it would be pretty trivial. You could also write a script that looked at a table and on save would look at all the table cells and sub in the result of formulas. It would need to keep track of what formula is where and provide a "show formulas" method so you could edit them, but even that could be handled. Could even add references to other journals containing tables... hmmm.... Should I add that to the list? =D ))

Gozer the Gozerian said: Each player has an attribute called "Finances," which basically amounts to their disposable income. When a player wants to make a purchase, they run the macro, it queries the cost of the item, compares it to their disposable income and comes up with a difficulty number which they have to beat in order to make the purchase. If their successful, this number is then subtracted from their Finances attribute (I made it one of the bubbles on their token), thus making the next purchase more difficult. When they get paid, Finances gets reset back to zero. ..Is there a formula or something I can get from you, to do all that? I have an interest in cyberpunk games of late, and this look good.

Not for my main game but for a few 'dungeon crawl'y games I have a price list as part of my splash screen - thus players can log into the campaign at any point to do shopping. Just to be a little prettier, I did it by making cards for all the equipment and dropping them on the page (it helps that the game had a fairly small item list). In theory it wouldn't be hard to have a (or multiple) "what can I buy here?" maps with relevant information on. Or even have a bunch of 'shopping' handouts for each town and just share the relevant ones depending on where the players are.