Thief Abilities for the Wilderness Levels: Black Market

Parties in the wilderness levels in ACKS often run into difficulty with buying and selling goods in small markets.  The intended, long-term solution to this is to found a domain and build a market.  A shorter-term fix is the Venturer, which boosts market class.  The Venturer's ability, though, is very front-loaded and has no gameplay to it.  Commissioning goods is another workaround, but one which takes lots of time.

Enter that master of quick and easy short-term solutions with long-term side effects: the thief.

Black Market
Thieves are adept at locating merchants who might be overlooked by more scrupulous characters, the sort of merchants who deal in dubious goods with an exclusive clientele.  A thief in search of a buyer or seller of a particular sort of item may make one Hear Noises throw per day spent in seedy taverns.  On a failure by 10 or more, or on a natural 1, there are simply no goods of that kind for sale on the black market this month.  On a success, the thief locates a merchant who allows him buy or sell the good as if the market class was one class better (like Commissioning).  There might be a catch, though.

On 1d6 for buying, or 1d4+2 for selling:
1: The goods are hot.  If purchased, enqueue trouble with an XP value about four times the value of the goods.  A successful Finding Traps roll lets the thief read the situation and choose to bail on the deal, or demand a discount of 1d6*10%.
2: The goods are defective.  A Finding Traps roll lets the thief sense that something is up and choose to bail, or demand a discount of 1d6*10%.  Defective magic items are cursed.  Defective arms and armor get a roll on the Scavenging Treasure tables on page 209.  Defective animals roll HP twice and take the worse.  Etc.
3: "I'm gonna need a favor."  Merchant needs a quest done, of magnitude proportional to the value of the goods, before he is willing to sell.  A reaction throw of 9+ can make him accept a 1d4*10% markup (or discount if the player is selling) instead.
4: "But you owe me one."  Merchant wants a promise of a favor that he can call in later before selling.  A reaction throw of 9+ can make him accept a 1d4*10% markup (or discount if the player is selling) instead.  If owing a favor is accepted, throw it on the trouble queue.
5: "I'm feeling lucky."  Merchant would rather play a game of chance, with the goods as one party's stake and something of equivalent value as the other party's stake.  Reaction roll of 9+ to convince them to just transact, or make opposed d20 rolls (+4 for Gambling proficiency, +4 for a successful Picking Pockets throw for sleight of hand; natural 1 or by 10 or more on the Picking Pockets reveals you were trying to cheat and triggers a forfeit), winner takes all.
6: No problems, a pleasure doing business with you.

If PCs attempt to pass off hot or defective goods, the merchant likewise makes a Finding Traps roll and may demand a discount or refuse to transact if successful.

I guess you could let any class do this, with the standard 18+ Hear Noises and Find Traps throws...

Bonus, 1d8 black market merchants.

1. Choo-oock the Bugbear Alchemist.  Lives in a wagon drawn by a giant beetle, wears a crumpled and stinking wizard's hat.  Potions smell like feet and vodka, guaranteed "to put hair on you face.  Money-back guarantee?  What?  No, just regular guarantee."  Deals in poisons too, which smell suspiciously similar.  Skips town frequently.
2. Guillaum de Crochefontaine, dissolute noble scion.  Enjoys a wide variety of questionable substances, gambling, and sleeping with married women, gets away with it on account of family connections and being a pretty decent duelist (Fighter 3).  Magic sword enthusiast.
3. Lazy-Eye Lud, watchman on the take.  Pudgy, mid-thirties, five kids to feed, doesn't actually have a lazy eye.  Sells confiscated goods, sometimes steals from the armory.  Might shake you down if you get caught and jailed though.
4. Owen One-Foot, retired whaler.  Skin like leather, heavy wool clothes, vicious grin, missing a foot (crushed between boats, then amputated).  The ship he worked on, the Bloody Mary, occasionally does a spot of piracy when the whaling isn't so good, might be able to hook you up with some bulk cargo, slaves, or a prize ship.  Or fifty stone of stinking whalemeat, if you need dragon bait.
5. Mistress Ludhevna, proprietress of the Slap and Tickle.  "Our clients occasionally depart in haste, when their wives arrive, and neglect their personal effects.  Could I interest you in some chainmail?  Perhaps this fine dirk?  Yes, yes, I'm sure you already have a fine dirk, save it for the girls, dear."
6. Herr Gunther Grosse, gourmand and purveyor of exotic meats and livestock.  Fat, bald, moustachio'd minor nobleman, has a warehouse by the docks and a villa outside of town.  Has fingers in many pies and friends in high places.  Throws crazy parties, seems to have repeated bad luck with young wives dying during childbirth.  Rumored to be a cannibal.
7. Three hundred rats in a filthy robe, formerly known as Geirmund the Magnificent.  Used to be a wizard, but flubbed a magic experimentation roll, can't do the somatic components anymore. Can, however, explore warehouses and steal keys.  Knows a thing or two about magic items and curses.  Communicates in a cacophony of high-pitched, squeaky voices.  Hates cats.  Shits everywhere.
8. Big Hilda, taverness and pit fight organizer.  In her 40s, thick-set and ill-tempered.  Yells a lot, handy with a cleaver.  Runs the Rusty Nail, a bad tavern in a bad part of town, with a fighting pit in the cellar.  Has a bunch of kids who cook, serve, clean the pit, keep book, etc.  Husband died under mysterious circumstances.  Deals in arms and armor of dubious quality, slaves, animals, meat, mercenaries, and stimulants.

Man I'm gonna name everything thief-related after cocktails now, that was a good idea.

Hijinks Again Follow-Up

After consultation about this prosposal with my former spymasters and the internet at large, comments were as follows:

• Additional complexity is annoying
• Reduction of thief income might have unclear ramifications for the domain ecology
• On the other hand, our thieves were generating operating revenues far in excess of that intended by the system's designers.  Scaling a cash-generating Fraud hijink to intended levels might solve this problem, with extra cash from stealing and selling cargos of treasure mapping being a bonus for work done
• Agreement that reduction of timescales down to weeks is a nice idea, but punishment remains problematic
• Realization of incompatibility between the mid-level wilderness exploration style of play and thief hijinks being town-centric
• The immediate nominal counter is that magic research is also town-centric, but the counter to that is that wizards can be gathering monster parts and unknown spells while wilderness adventuring, whereas the thief can't really use wilderness adventuring as leverage for hijinks
• Treasure hunting and stealing are both enablers for the wilderness game, but there is nothing in the wilderness that compels a gold-desiring mid-level thief out into it except want of magic items.
• Upon further reflection, Witness' comment on previous post solves this to some degree.  The thing in the wilderness for thieves is not being in town while law enforcement are investigating the case.  Hate to use the term, but an 'aggro'-like mechanic might serve.  Multiple hijinks in rapid succession boost probability of being caught, lying low reduces probability of being caught, and being out of town reduces it even further (but sometimes they figure it out anyway, the wanted posters go up, and the bounty hunters come out...).

And if resolving lots of hijinks and investigations for a pile of thieves sounds like paperwork...  well, guess I might have to write a script.  Feed it a list of thieves, their levels and proficiencies, what hijink they're attempting, and it spits out results.  Good way to run lots of tests of a new hijinks system, too.

Speaking of scripts, been thinking about the Mother of All Scripts again.  Some stuff from work has me thinking about ncurses and XML (both sort of groty technologies, but serviceable).  In particular, XML seems like it might be somewhat useful for encoding deep structures in text; all the contents of a 24-mile hex, subdivided by 6- and 1.5-mile hex, including NPC and monster stats down to treasure, spells known, and Markov-generated names is not an easy thing to put into a text file in an organized and reloadable fashion (see: the Art of Unix Programming).  XML could do it, but it would be verbose about it.  I guess that's the tradeoff.  The other option is to handle depth via directory structures in the filesystem, and then put hundreds of small text files all over the places throughout that directory tree.  They're sort of equivalent; seek a way to handle a gross use case, end up with gross alternatives.  As for ncurses, the problem there is one of displaying deep data in a useful way, as well as handling hex-mapping (and zooming in multiple layers of hexes) in a way that doesn't involve actual graphics...

So yeah...  cue the A(CKS|X)ML jokes...

Hijinks Again

Been thinking about hijinks again.  This time about sort of the core mechanisms of it, rather than the ecosystem surrounding it.

One thing that bugs me is that most domain activities are measured in increments down towards weeks, while thief hijinks are in solid-month blocks.  This somewhat hampers the utility of PC thief hijinks at the mid-levels.  Consider the case where a mid-level party decides to take two or three weeks of downtime.  The fighter can recruit mercs in that time, and he gets to exercise his +morale modifier.  The wizard and cleric can each attempt to make a potion or scroll or two.  And the thief... can't do his thing because he's a week or two short.  Now, I get that setting up a good heist takes time and planning.  But it doesn't necessarily need to be a contiguous month's planning.

Another thing that somewhat bothers me is the perhaps-unnecessary complexity involved in having many different hijinks, each with different rates of return, different rates of success, and different possible punishments, all of which ultimately serve to just generate gold at different rates.  When combined with proficiency selection (stacking, for example, Skulking and Lip Reading for +3 to spying), the system gets to be a bit complex mathematically, and the consequences for choices become...  not opaque, but somewhat obfuscated, for effects which are (except for stealing) largely identical.  Consider by comparison the spell research system - you get a target number based on your level, stats, and one proficiency that applies across the board, and then you apply situational modifiers based on the thing you're attempting.  One mechanic with a bunch of functionally-different and interesting applications to a wide variety of ends, rather than many mechanics which all lead to the same end.

Both of these lead me to a proposal inspired by Iron Heroes' token mechanics.  The gist is as follows:

• Single hijink throw number as a function of level and Dex, much as with magic research.  There's an argument to be made that in a multi-part operation of reasonable duration, aggregate skills and ability to perform consistently (level) matter more than any one single skill.  Some of the hijink-skill mappings, like Treasure Hunting for maps to Find Traps and Stealing bulk cargo to Pick Pockets seemed sort of forced anyway.
• Thieves can generate 'intel points'.  Intel points are attached to a particular settlement and represent the groundwork, rumor gathering, and connections the thief has made in that community.  Intel points expire at some uniform rate as operational intelligence goes stale - sometimes the guard you bribed retires, they sold the piece of artwork you were after, and the plumbers' guild changed their uniforms.
• Intel points are gathered by spending time performing a carousing-like hijink in town and making a hijinks throw.  Taking more time than the baseline provides a bonus, while taking less time provides a penalty.  Every n points of success beyond your target number generates an extra intel point.
• Possibility of bonus to intel-gathering attempts for spending gold?  For bribing guards and buying drinks.  Requires some math to get right, probably.
• Actual hijinks can be attempted with an expenditure of intel points, a small amount of time (somewhere between a day and a week - most of the groundwork has already been done), and a hijink throw.  Intel points may be spent to lower the target number or boost the payout (to a cap based on performer's level and market class - payouts now a function of intel points spent, rather than per-class-level).  Higher payout levels increase risk of being auto-caught (as with experimentation in ACKSPC magic research) and penalize sentencing roll.
• Ex: Assassination: per intel point allocated to payout, +1 to victim max HD, -1 to hijink throw.  At 5 HD, auto-fail on 1 or 2, -1 on sentencing.  At 9 HD, auto-fail on 1-3, -2 to sentencing.  Per 'ease of use' intel point, +1 to hijink throw.  XP on success: per target's hit dice.
• Hijinks should serve distinct purposes - assassination is for killing a guy (I'm OK with this; high-power opponents rarely stay dead anyway, they just come back madder and uglier than before.  Might warrant a save vs death anyway).  Spying is for learning a secret (possibility of secrets as a second, higher-tier type of intel point?  "The only way you're going to pull that off is if you blackmail the prince...").  Stealing is for acquiring commodity cargoes.  Treasure hunting is for getting maps.  Smuggling is for avoiding tariffs.  The Domains at War: Campaigns hijinks already fit into this mould.  Some means to find stuff on the black market would be a neat one (or maybe a class prof - spend an intel point to reroll an availability roll, but also increases price if available), as would fomenting rebellion to penalize domain morale.  Conflicted on having one to just generate gold (fraud?), and if it does exist, should have low RoI relative to treasure hunting, smuggling, and stealing, due to necessity of follow-up effort (ie, interesting play) on those.  
• Thief hijinks as urban toolbox, rather than thief hijinks as slot machine.
• Thieves may pool or transfer their intel points.  Carousers now useful to a guild in that they gather intelligence that higher-level thieves can act upon.
• Some math would need to be done here to re-figure simplified guild incomes.

Is this proposal actually simpler?  I dunno.  But it does seem a bit thiefier than "I'm going to sit in town for a month and then hope I don't roll a 1."  There's an element of resource management present here which is not present in the main system, as well as ideally an increase in thief versatility at the cost of gold-generation capabilities.  Thoughts on this structure?  Any glaring holes before I try to start filling in specifics?

An Unreliability of Ruffians

I've talked about our issues with hijinks and ruffian morale before, but I think I've hit a simpler solution which makes ruffians more perilous to employ, but does so without adding an additional roll to the hijink mechanism.  Should a ruffian roll a natural 2 on a hijink attempt, he defects and betrays the guild in some fashion.  If he's also caught on such a roll, he may betray the guild to the authorities in exchange for a reduced sentence, or he might become a mole.  If he isn't caught, he may instead become conspiratorial and begin plotting against the guild's leaders, or he may sell the guild out to a rival criminal organization.  Further, ruffians of 5th level or higher may defect on a natural 20, taking the big score and deciding to go freelance (this is also likely outcome should a remarkably-skilled ruffian succeed on a hijink with a natural 2).  Such high-level ruffians may induce others to defect as well, at the judge's discretion.

So - a ruffian defection mechanic that I'll remember to use, and which generates minimal extra paperwork.  As an aside, I kind of like a further proposed rule, that in certain high-law areas, should a henchman or PC thief roll a natural 2 on a hijink, even if they are not caught, they are witnessed.  Wanted posters, going to ground, and other shenanigans ensue.  This rule seems punitive enough that I would not want to employ it except as a means of characterizing certain settlements as being particularly law-abiding, though.