In our last couple of sessions, the party found many gems. Initially, I simply told them something like, "You find five gems. Two are really big, well-polished and beautiful. Three are smaller, and one of them has some flaws."
Now I know what the actual values of these gems are. 500 gp, 400 gp, 100 gp, 100 gp, and 20 gp.
But how should I adjudicate this? I thought about have the players refer to each gem by a key, so that I could reference my secret value. They would take them to town and decide to sell "Gem A-1" and I might give them some sort of market value for the gem. But this is a lot of bookkeeping for very little benefit.
In the end, I decided that the listed gem value is not the appraised value, but rather what the party could sell it for. When they get back to town and sell the gems, I simply total it up. It's not very mysterious, but it's really just a number-crunching part of the "boring stuff".
How do you handle gems and jewels?
Preferably on my fingers but ears and neck will suffice.
ReplyDelete(wink, wink)
Hey Tim,
ReplyDeleteI wanted to ask you some mini painting questions.
Csn you drop me an email? kilted DOT yaksman AT yahoo DOT ca
cheers
I always go the Ken St. Andre way with gems, with a little help from Gygax: just roll for the g.p value as normal, but tell them it's a "small" "medium" or "large", "flawed" "good" or "perfect" gem, (each of these is a column or row on the gem value table). And if the players get pushy about details I have a table of the weirdest gem names in the world: tourmaline, smaragd, bloodstone, chysoprase, tiger's eye, etc. (Grab a thesaurus and get the first 20 strange names.) After all, this is fantasy... can't have them getting plain old diamonds and rubies.
ReplyDeletePerhaps not timely or exactly responding to question, but the more or less new "Gems" supplement has some guidelines for both descriptions and also how the PCs interact with gem appraisers. Possibly useful (I'm not pimping the product, but I bought it and I like it for a couple of bucks).
ReplyDeletehttp://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=82562