Oddities Of Values: Recalculating the price of valuables

Image by FreeImages.com / Tracy Olson
This article is the result of some recent work that was done for the next adventure, “Boom Town”, in the Pulp Campaign that I co-referee, “The Adventurer’s Club”. Players in that campaign don’t have to worry, I’m not going to give away anything that will damage the game!
How big is a LOT of money – say, $100 million? In Pulp Campaign currency? In large bills? I recently had to work out the answer to a very similar problem, and got some very surprising answers along the way – answers that challenge everything I’ve ever read in terms of treasure for RPGs.
Currency Conversion: The effect of inflation
Pulp campaigns are generally set in the 1920s or 1930s, and ours is no exception. We’ve specified that the date is 1930-something but have played (and will continue to play) very fast and loose with what that “something” is – we have no problem with making events from 1938 and 1932 happen more or less concurrently, so long as it makes internally-consistent sense to the plotline.
The first problem that has to be faced is currency conversion due to inflation. Fortunately, the sourcebook on which the campaign is based includes a table showing the value of $1 (2005) equivalent for every year from 1920 to 1939. This table isn’t in the Currency chapter, it’s buried in a sidebar on page 261 – but it’s there.
So, problem solved, right?
Not really. This is a world in which the social repercussions of the Great Depression were not as severe as they were in our history. The easiest way to achieve that consequence is to have the Depression itself be less severe, and shorter. So we’ve decided to use the pre-depression value from 1920 of $10 – meaning that 1$ “then” will buy you what would cost $10 in the modern (2005) era, or its cultural equivalent (if there is any).
To further complicate matters, our experience is mostly in Australian dollars – but what should we use as our conversion factor? The modern-day exchange rate (about 0.72¢ US)? The 2005 value (between 0.73¢ and 0.78¢ US, depending on the month of the year)? The 1920 rate (0.72¢ US again)? Or the 1935 rate, which is used as a standard in the game system for such things, and quoted as being 1 Aust Pound = $8.24 US)?
Here’s how we’ve cut that particular Gordian Knot: if we’re converting our experience of everyday prices, we use US 0.75¢ for every Australian dollar. So, a new car costing about A$25,000 in 2005 would cost about 2005-USD 18,750 – which we already know is the same thing as 1930s-USD 1,875. If we then need to convert into 1930s-Australian-Pounds, we divide by the $8.24 quoted in the Pulp book to get £227.5 – and then round off to an even £230.
But most of the commodities and objects we care about will be quoted in US dollars, so that’s the backbone of the conversion. So how much additional inflation has there been in the US since 2005? The answer, according to www.usinflationcalculator.com, the answer is $1.22. So that lets us convert modern-day (2015) prices to Pulp prices (starting to see how complicated all this can be?)
The NTD unit and the “M” prefix
From the very first time we ran the pulp campaign, we’ve struggled with terminology. You can see how clumsy it is to include the year in order to distinguish between 2005-US-Dollars and Pulp-Era-US-Dollars. Even “1930’s USD” is too complicated, and when spoken aloud, an easy source of confusion. We’ve tried half-a-dozen different solutions but none have been completely satisfactory. It was while thinking about this article (I always think about my articles before I write them!) that I finally found a good answer. From now on, “$” will refer to 2005 US dollars, a “new” currency, NTD will refer to nineteen-thirties US dollars, and an “M” prefix will describe Modern-dollars.
What we have established so far, then, is:
M$1.22 = $1 = NTD 0.10, and A$1 = $0.75, and NTA£1 = NTD 8.24.
So intuitive is this new pair of definitions – NTD and M – that I don’t even have to define “NTA£”, the meaning is self-evident.
Size In NTD Currency
So, getting back to the question that was at hand – how big is $100 million USD in NTD?
$100m = NTD 10m.
In hundred-dollar bills, the largest note in US currency, that’s 100,000 banknotes.
So how much does a million dollars weigh?
Believe or not, you can get this information on the web! US currency hasn’t noticeably changed in weight since then, and all the denominations weigh about the same – it’s quite different in Australia, where the notes are all different sizes.
A million dollars in US $1 bills is equal to 1 metric tonne but weighs about 1.1 tons by U.S. measure, or 2200 lb. Each time the denomination of the bills is increased, the weight of a million dollars decreases. When weighed in $100 bills, a million weighs approximately 22 lb.
Is that all?
It is, and it’s enough – because that means that 1 million notes weighs the same whether we’re talking $1 bills or $100-bills. So our NTD 10m is 220lb in weight. Unless you’re phenomenally strong, that’s about as much as you would ever want to try carrying.
How much space does it occupy?
Of course, the same is true of how much space a million dollars takes up. U.S. currency is 0.0043 inch thick. A stack of a million one-dollar bills would measure 358.33 feet tall, but if you use $20 bills, the stack is only 3.58 feet tall. $100 bills = 8.592 inches.
And our NTD 10m would therefore be 85.92 inches tall in NTD 100 banknotes if in a single stack, or 8.592 inches in ten stacks.
Next, we need to look at the other dimensions of a US banknote. Google reports that this is Width 2.61 inches x length 6.14 inches.
I drew some rough sketches, and found that the closest arrangement to a square that I could reasonably make with those approximate proportions was 13″ x 12.3″, consisting of 5 columns of bills side-by-side above a second row of 5 columns of bills:

It’s not perfectly square, but it’s close enough.
The more rows you add, the more perfect you can make the square – but the more unreasonable the size. But ten stacks, 13.05″ x 12.28″, and we already know that each stack would be 8.592″ inches tall.
I have a suitcase that is just a little larger than that, in all three dimensions. With a little padding, our NTD 10m would fit in it quite nicely. I wouldn’t want to carry it, it weighs about twice what I can comfortably manage – but I’m not particularly strong.
Gold
Might some other commodity be more convenient? Well, when you want to talk about something universally valued, the next commodity that comes to mind is gold.
Quite some time ago, we found a US Government PDF which lists the values over the last century or so of all the metals mined on earth. We’ve referred to it any number of times since. It only goes up to 1998, but it goes back to the 1800s, depending on the commodity in question. All the values have been calculated in 1992 USD.
One dollar in 1992 is worth $1.39 in 2005, according to the same calculator linked to above. But the prices are (generally) per pound, or per troy ounce – so there are other conversions involved.
Gold is a problem however, because during the Great Depression, private ownership of the metal (other than in jewelery quantities) was made illegal – so we don’t have any values in our reference document prior to 1968.
Google to the rescue again! Entering “Price of gold 1920” gives the following: “The official U.S. Government gold price has changed only four times from 1792 to the present. Starting at $19.75 per troy ounce, raised to $20.67 in 1834, and $35 in 1934. In 1972, the price was raised to $38 and then to $42.22 in 1973.” So the value we want is NTD 20.67 per troy ounce, and there are 14.5833 troy ounces in a pound (or 32.1507 in a kg, which is more convenient because that’s what the game system uses. But never mind that).
So NTD 10m = 10,000,000/20.67 troy ounces = 483,792.9 troy oz, or 33,174.4 lb (15,069kg), or 16.6 TONS. Oh, my aching back! Gold is heavy.
In fact, we were so discouraged by this result that we didn’t even bother checking platinum; and, as for silver, it had no chance.
Diamonds
The other obvious choice is diamonds, preferably uncut, and hence untraceable. All sorts of things affect diamond values, so it was very hard to track down any conversion information, but eventually we found a quote that stated that gemstone quality diamonds were worth roughly $7000/carat in 2014. That sounds promising!
Applying our conversion factors (and assuming that there’s no real difference between 2015 and 2014 values), that gets us 7000/1.22/10= NTD 573.77 per carat. Which means that NTD 10m would be 17,429 carats.
That was enough for me to decide that getting that many uncut diamonds would be almost impossible in the time frame required; there simply wouldn’t be that big a demand. 1000, I might have believed, maybe even two. Seventeen-plus? No.
My co-GM wasn’t completely convinced.
How much does a carat weigh?
This was something I didn’t know off the top of my head. The answer turned out to 1 gram = 5 carats, or 1 lb = 2267.96 carats. Call it 2268.
So our 17,429 carats would have totaled 7.7 lb. That’s nice and portable!
How large is a 1-carat diamond?
This answer absolutely astonished us. A one-carat CUT diamond has a spherical diameter of about 6.5mm or 0.2559 inches. It’s about the same size as large buckshot or pellets. So, let’s imagine a rectangular container, about 3″ square. How tall would it have to be to contain our 17,429 carats?
3″ x 3″ works out to 137 cubes each of 0.2559″, side by side. In actual fact, you could only get 11 x 11, or 121, in an even layer. So if all our diamonds were cubical, that would be 17,429/121 = 144 layers, at 0.2559″ per layer, or 36.8″. That’s right – three feet tall.
But we’re talking about spheres, and spheres can pack more compactly than cubes (or less, if they are just tossed in a heap – something I remember from a 1950s or 60s Scientific American). Each set of four spheres creates a hollow space that can partially contain the next row. 11×11 could contain a new layer of 10×10. As a rough estimate, you can get about 26% more in any given volume when packing spheres vs cubes. So, in reality, our column would only be 74% of 36.8″, or 27.2″ tall.
2 1/4 feet is better than three feet – but still an impractical total.
In the end, I satisfied my co-GM with a point about the circumstances that were to be in effect at the time that ruled diamonds out of the question, and the discussion moved on to the next point in our planning.
But after he left, I got to thinking….
Wait a minute – diamond scarcity is linear?
If $7000/carat is even close to a reasonable estimation, every treasure table I’ve ever seen in FRP is wildly off the mark. Why? Because the implication is that diamonds are found in inverse proportion to their size. For every two one-carat gems, you would find one two-carrot gem. For every 4 one-carat gems, you would find 2 two-carat gems and 1 four-carat gem. The size and frequency of occurrence, multiplied, give the same constant value. Assuming all else to be equal, of course.
Yet, everything I knew about gemstones in an AD&D/Pathfinder world – or a Runequest world, or whatever – had value going up with increasing size by more than just the multiple of size. Bigger gems are rarer.
If finding gemstones twice the size were twice as rare an event as the linear expression suggests, it’s easy to calculate that the value would be proportional to the square of the size – still assuming all else to be equal. If it were three times, you can soon show that the relationship is roughly value = size to the power of 2.5. In fact, log(N)/log(2) works out to be the exponent of size, for those mathematically inclined, where N is the number of n carat stones that has to be found before you find one of 2n size.
This is way too complicated for ordinary game use – and too inflexible – but it highlights the general principle, which is that larger = rarer = more valuable than size alone would indicate.
The largest rough gem-quality diamond ever found was 3106.75 carats (it was cut into 105 smaller stones, including the Greater and Lesser Star Of Africa). If the relationship was linear, that would mean that total diamond production up to that point was 3,107 one-carat diamonds.
In fact, the human race currently mines about 133 million carats of diamonds a year. That makes diamonds of the record size at least 42,086 times more rare – that’s how rare they would be if we found one per year. But we’ve been mining diamonds for a lot longer than one year – at least a decade at the current rate or close to it, I suspect, and then lesser quantities for centuries earlier. We could conservatively increase that rarity factor by anywhere from 10 to 200. I suspect 50 to be close to the right number – so 2,104,300 times as rare and valuable as expected. If we keep up current production for that long, I would expect an equal stone to be found sometime in the next 150 years – but not for at least 50.
Collectible Coin Values
You can never tell where the next useful factoid in a game or game design is going to come from. In this case, the information comes from a perhaps unlikely combination of sources: a couple of websites on the valuation of collectible toys, and the TV show, Pawn Stars (more the latter than the former).
The basic appraisal method for rare and vintage coins, as explained on the show, is as follows: there is a base value, which is the inherent value of the object. In the case of a precious metal coin or bar, this is the value of the gold, silver, or platinum it contains (and definitely NOT the face value). There is then a simple multiplier applied to this value, which represents a number of other factors: the desirability of a particular item (which is related to the rarity, but also takes into account aesthetics), the condition of the item, the overall scarcity of items of this particular type and subtype, and the specific scarcity by condition.
You simply look up the type of coin, and in some cases, the location of minting, and find a table which cross-references the date of minting and the condition to get the multiplier.
This process takes all the complication out of the problem. You don’t need to know fancy maths, you just need a value that seems reasonable. In most cases, precious metals never lose their intrinsic value (which can be looked up online for minute-by-minute accuracy – for example, right now, gold is fetching A$46.478 per g, while the current US price is $1078.24 per ounce. (Which makes gold worth about 122% more at the Western Australian Mint (theirs was the price I quoted) more than it is in the US. Of course, by the time you bought and shipped it here, anything could have happened – and gold is too heavy to airfreight! The electronic transfer of ownership, on the other hand, is quick and simple, and banks and governments do that sort of thing all the time.)
Other collectibles
Other types of collectible, from stamps to rifles to toys, operate on the same basic system. There is a base value, which is the depreciated purchase price, and a multiplier that combines the same specifics. However, there are two big differences: the first is that these are manufactured commodities, and the rate of manufacture is something that can be adjusted according to demand; and the second is that there is no absolute inherent value, which means that for a while, the value of such things drops toward zero. The collectability is being outweighed and overpowered by the depreciation, i.e. by the assumed wear and tear. The result is that what should be a relatively smooth progression is full of lumps and bumps.
Art Appraisal
Both of these are fundamentally different to the values attached to works of art. While the size of a painting or sculpture plays a role in assessing it’s value, it’s by no means the bottom line. Of greater importance is the ‘name’ of the artist, and the quality of the work as it presents in the modern era. Put those three items together and you get the base value of the work.
To those considerations you need to factor in the number of works by the artist – and, in this case, more generally means more valuable, especially if the artist was making his living from his art, because that signifies a commercial appeal (and also determines the frequency of forgery, which often goes hand-in-glove with his popularity). Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875), who few will have heard of, holds the distinction of being the single most-commonly-forged artist; in 1940, Newsweek reported that out of 2,500 paintings produced by Corot, 7,800 were in the United States. Corot sometimes authorized poor artists who imitated him to put his name on their paintings so that they would be easier to sell. In an ARTnews survey of art forgery, experts were asked, Who are the ten most faked artists in history? The almost unanimous vote went to Corot. Of the rest, the most recognizable names are Salvador Dali, Vincent Van Gogh, and – possibly – August Rodin. At least, I’m not an expert, but those are the names that I recognized!
Such imitations form a third category of artwork, usually considered distinct from actual forgery. Many famous painters had workshops where they taught students their art, and some went so far as to permit the students to paint over sketches that they themselves had in fact done. So the lines between artist and forgery are a lot more blurred than most people realize.
Great store is set by the provenance of art – who sold it, who bought it, and are there any suspicious gaps in the ownership records.
On top of all of that, there comes the question of damage to the work. This is generally not like the depreciation or deterioration or even condition used by other collectibles markets; instead, it tends to be an accelerated linear scale based on the amount and severity of the damage. Slight damage to a small area has a small negative effect on the value; greater damage to a small area has a disproportionate negative effect, and so does slight damage to a larger area. Substantial damage to a significant portion can render a valuable work worthless – or not; you also have to take into account the location of the damage. In general, damage to the face of a subject costs more than damage to their clothing, which costs more than damage to the floor or background, or lesser figures.
Art Restoration “repatriates” damaged art to something as close as possible to the original, and techniques have come a very long way. But it’s always a risk; there have been occasional failures, in which a painting worth X, which would have been worth ten or twenty times as much if successfully restored, has been completely destroyed by the process.
Nevertheless, that’s how the current value of a piece of art is established. But, there is another complicating factor: most (collectible) artwork is sold at auction. And every sale at a higher price increases the value of all other works by that artist, while every sale at a lower price – or failure to sell at the ‘reserve,’ or minimum asking price, reduces the value of all other works by that artist. It’s not unknown for owners of extensive collections by a given artist to bid the price up on other paintings by the same artist, regardless of whether or not they like it or actually desire to buy it, simply to protect the value of what they already own.
And one more complication: buyers have been known to buy based not on what art is worth, but on what it will be worth. Few artworks by famous artists deteriorate in value, assuming that they are properly maintained; growth in value may slow or stagnate, especially if the style goes out of favor, but it will rarely go down, damage notwithstanding. On top of that, every year a few paintings are damaged or destroyed, either by accidents, failed restorations, vandalism and/or crime, or carelessness, with the first cause ranking way above all the others. That inherently makes the remainder more rare. The longer a painting has been in existence, the greater the opportunity for these forces to come into play, so age has a definite but vague relationship to value.
The bottom line is this: Art is worth what someone will pay for it.
Real Estate
The final commodity of value that I’m going to discuss is land. When you see a house for sale, how has that value been set – and what’s it really worth?
Property valuation is not an exact science, but some years ago I had the opportunity to chat for a while with a broker and was astonished by how far removed from a science it actually was.
The oft-touted first consideration is Location, or more specifically, the general locality and its’ economic prospects. Next, there’s proximity to a past sale value, which establishes a baseline. Ideally, like will be compared to like, in terms of building size (usually measured by the number of bedrooms and the overall size of the home). Relative location compared to the past sale is also important; closer to the economic heart of a location, even by a few feet (or meters) can have a small but appreciable impact on the value estimate. Another all-important factor is the relative “worth” of homes – what’s been happening in the housing market lately, and what has inflation been like?
Next, the agent will typically consider any changes to the neighborhood since the reference sale took place. Does the home now being sold have greater access to amenities than was the case when the reference home was sold, for example. Have bus routes changed? Is there a new railway station? Has a shopping mall opened just down the street, or a new entertainment venue?
All of that will get taken into account, more-or-less intuitively, to provide a “base value” of what the agent thinks this particular home is actually worth. On top of that, agents will sometimes add on any taxes that will have to paid, stamp duty, etc, and their own fees or commissions; or these may simply come out of what the owner actually receives of the value when the sale takes place. The latter is more common, I think.
It’s actually quite routine for two separate values to be placed on a prospective sale – one represents the reserve, or the minimum price that the seller will accept; the other represents what the agent thinks the property will actually fetch in an auction. Which is, of course, the next variable. Again, experience permits a Realtor to make an educated guess as to how these will play out, based on recent auctions in the area.
I have to admit that I was rather surprised that, as far as the broker I spoke to was aware (and he had been in the real estate game for 30-odd years), there had never been any attempt to statistically model the different influences on price to produce a more definitive set of estimates. There aren’t even any guidelines to follow – no hard-and-fast, universally-accepted ones, at least, beyond the self-fulfilling maxim that property values always go up in the long run.
What’s more, the broker didn’t think that such a study was possible; there were too many variables to be taken into consideration, and the values in any give case too “noisy”. Nor would he be all that interested in the results of such a study, for the same reasons.
Most of what a real estate agent does, in terms of property valuation, is use instinct and experience and an awareness of local issues and improvements to guesstimate a base value and a level of interest – which, in turn, will manifest in more spirited bidding in an auction, and a greater likelihood of a higher price. Beyond that, there is their ability to talk up the property; the more positive things that the agent can use as selling points, the more the property is (nominally) worth.
The bottom line: Like art, Real Estate is worth what someone will pay for it, and Real Estate valuation is a performing art – with no disrespect meant to any real estate agents who may happen to read this!
The treasure comparisons
Look at the treasure tables from any game system – at least from every game system that I’ve ever seen – and you will find patterns that look nothing like what I’ve discussed here. They don’t even come close to being a representation of reality, let alone a reasonable one.
Coins are worth their face value, nothing more nor less. Gems are worth an amount rolled on one or more dice – either a linear scale or a bell curve. Ditto jewelery and art and other collectibles like rare books.
The question is, can we do better? I think so.
Adapting the collectibles system for Objects & Commodities of Value
I think there’s an easy way to adapt the “real life” system for valuing commodities into a simple system for GMs to take control over treasure, with pronounced advantages for the game.
The random component
Let’s start with a simple principle: a random roll that yields a value, in which extreme results are possible, but unlikely. There are three ways that I know to achieve this:
- Cascading Die Rolls: roll d whatever, and if you roll the maximum, add the maximum result to a subtotal and roll again. There are variants, which make cascades less likely, for example roll a d6. If you roll a 6, add five to the subtotal and roll 2d6 the next time. If you roll 11 or 12, add ten to your tally and roll 3d6 – and so on. This stacks bell curve upon bell-curve to produce an open-ended roll – but one in which the most likely result is fairly low: average on the first d6 comes from 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, and is therefore 3 and 1/3. In one-in-six cases, you then get to roll 2d6, with possible outcomes of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10, 10, or an average of 6.1666 – but because these only happen in 1 in six cases, the contribution to the overall average is 1/6th of that, or about 1.028. In two out of 36 cases (i.e. one in 18), you then get to roll 3d6, with possible outcomes of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 15, 15, 15, or an average of 10.125 – which only adds one sixth of one 18th to the overall average, or 0.09375. The probability of increases become increasingly remote as you go up the scale, and hence the impact on the overall average, which currently stands at about 4.455. Note the pattern of increasing maximum results (multiples of five) – these are increasing with each additional dice, and will continue to do so until they get to five in length – and then it’s back to one again. Or you can simply cap the results, say at the 3d6 level, resulting in a minuscule increase in the average. With that, our maximum result is 5+10+18=33.
- Multiplied Die Rolls: roll d whatever, and then multiply the result by d something-else. Let’s say d10 x d6. That gives a mean result of 19.25 but a maximum result of 60. Every dice multiplier that you add increases the maximum faster than it does the mean. But I don’t like this method, because the means are so high, and it takes a LOT of die rolls to get them down – and you have to divide the end result by a constant to keep the results somewhere in line. d10 x d10 x d10 x d6 / 60 gives a maximum result of 100, but an average of 9.36 – but the calculation is pretty hard work.
- Divided Die Rolls: paradoxically, it’s a lot easier to work with Divided Die rolls. This can either be AdB/CdD in structure, or dA x dB / dC. An example of the first might be 5d6/d6 – which gives a maximum result of 30, but an average of 6.85; and there’s just one in 46,656 chance of getting that maximum. The alternative is even easier: d6 x d10 / 2d6, for example, which has a maximum of 30, the same as before, but a mean of only 2.87. The calculation is relatively easy because it doesn’t need to be exact; the multiplication is easy, and if we say “round down” then all we care about is how many whole results from the dividing die roll will fit within the result. For example, d6 x d10 / d6: rolls of 4, 8, and 3 respectively, so 4×8=32, and 32/3 rounds down to 10.
On the basis of simplicity and speed, I recommend the simpler form of the divided die roll. There may be occasional minor anomalies, such as the chance of getting a 12 being higher than those of an 11, or the fact that it’s impossible to get a 19, 23, 26, 28, or 29, but those are worth living with. If they really bother you, subtract 6 and add a d6 to all results of 6 or more.

The two basic value patterns
The rational component
Next, we need something to interpret those die rolls against. And the simplest thing in the world is for the GM to do a quick and simple graph. There are two basic forms, as shown:
Use the top one for precious metals, gems, jewelery, art, and real estate; use the bottom one for anything else. If in doubt, decide for yourself whether or not this is an item that is ever likely to decrease in value. If not, use the top one; if it is, use the bottom.
The top graph shows a gentle curve that steepens before leveling out. The bottom shows a curve that drops, levels out, drops again, steeply increases, flattens, levels, and then rises sharply. The main difference is that the second one declines below “base value” before rising, and it’s a lot lumpier and misshapen than the first. NB: don’t use these graphs, draw your own – these are just examples!
Combining Roll and Graph
The far left is the minimum random result, the far right is the maximum. Simply estimate by eye where on the graph your result falls and look at the vertical value relative to the base line.
To do that, you’ll need to assign a vertical scale. This can be whatever you want – just do a rough one by hand if you like. There are two options: the first assumes that this is a logarithmic graph (usually base 2 or base 10), and the second is a standard linear graph. I recommend the former for the former type of curve and the latter for the latter.
Base 2? Base 10? Why? Base 2 because that means that you are reading off how many times the base value has doubled – a relatively simple calculation to perform; Base 10 because it’s a standard that every scientific calculator can handle (such a calculator can also handle base 2 if you know the maths of logarithms, but that’s too esoteric to go into here).
Either way, it means we get to set a maximum value for whatever the PCs find, relative to the base value that we assign for the commodity.

The same two pattern curves With simple divisions
On this version, I’ve simply divided the top one in half (by eye) and then halved each of those halves to get four divisions. Each will represent two doublings of the base value. That means that the maximum value is 2^8, which you can count off on your fingers anytime you need to (if you don’t know it by heart): 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256. So the peak is 256xbase.
I’ve done the same thing in the green (profitable) part of the bottom graph, and divided the bottom part the same way. The divisions aren’t exact, exactly as you would expect. The in-profit part divisions represent a multiplier of 1+ 2 per division mark, while the lower divisions are 75%, 50% and 25% of base, respectively.
To use these, I simply roll a result for whatever it is that the PCs have found using the divided die roll, find where on my graph for that commodity that puts me, read off the adjustment, and apply it to my base value.
Using d6 x d10 / 2d6: I roll a 9 out of 30, so I come across about 1/3 of the way and then back a tenth (by eye) and find myself almost exactly at the mid-point between base price and the first mark, representing one doubling – so the value of the item found is 2xBase Price.
Same roll on the bottom graph: this time I get a four, so I go across about one-third of the way, then back about half-way (which gets me to five) and then about 1/5th more, and find myself about midway between the 75% and 50% mark – so what has been found is worth 60-65% of base value; there are lots of them and they aren’t very desirable at the moment.
Top one again, and this time I roll a zero – so this example is worth base value.
Bottom one, and this time I roll a 15, half-way across the graph – finding an example that is past the bottom point of the graph but only just beginning to climb in value; it’s between 25% and 50% of base value at the moment, perhaps a shade close to 50% – call it 40%.
If you want a higher chance of getting a more rightward result, use a smaller divisor on the divided die roll. One d6 instead of 2d6, for example.
The collateral benefits
The curves that you draw for your graphs tell the story of the commodity in question, but you are in command of interpreting it. If the curve rises steeply, it means the value is climbing quickly – why might that be the case? If the curve is flatter after a steep curve, it means the value isn’t climbing as fast as it was – why might that be the case?
Attaching a reason to any given change in a valuation curve not only gives you more information about whatever it is that has been found, it gives you an avenue for converting bookkeeping into roleplay. A player correctly interpreting the description of an object into a probable value also gives you a chance to embellish your campaign history, and in the process, embed clues to current events for the players to pick up on. if there’s a particular historical episode that you want to reference as adventure backstory, simply salt an encounter with a relevant period item instead of a randomly-chosen one; telling that item’s story and description gives you a window into the past, which you can use to deliver that backstory.
Suddenly, everything not only is connected to everything else, it feels connected to everything else. What was perceptibly random has been given meaning, and a narrative value beyond mere worth.
Level of differentiation
How many graphs you use is up to you. You could use just one for all precious metals, for example, or one each for gold, silver, and platinum, or one each for coins from the Kingdom of Gunwalla, or one for each type of coin from that Kingdom. You can be as explicit and specific as you want. Since it takes seconds to draw a rough box, seconds to roughly divide it horizontally into quarters, and seconds to draw a curve, there is no reason not to have a hundred of them, produced ad-hoc as needed.
If you want a little consistency, use one master graph to cover a group of relevant commodities and subsequent detailed graphs to make finer adjustments.
Using biases
Finally, you can bias the results. Replacing the d6 on top with d4+2, for example, obviously biases the results to the higher end of the scale somewhat; but it’s simpler just to add something to the pre-divisor roll. This can be used to cover makers with known reputations for good quality of workmanship, or fame, or whatever.
By the same token, adding anything, even something as small as +1, to the divisor makes a massive difference to the end results that are possible, biasing results to the lower end of the scale. A craftsman with a reputation for shoddy workmanship, for example, or an artist regaled widely as a “hack”.
The tools are all in your hands, and very easy to use; what you do with them is up to you.
Okay, so this is Campaign Mastery’s 749th post – and you know what that means? It means it’s time to break out the party hats…!
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December 29th, 2015 at 7:07 am
[…] Oddities Of Values: Recalculating the price of valuables […]