Haggle

Haggle is a simple, system-neutral valuation system for items and services in your ttrpg. Tear up your item tables and roll some dice!

Many games present items as a list with their associated costs. There are several problems with this approach. Abbreviated item lists obviously only cover only a small selection of items and 80% of the time what your players are shopping for won't be there. Lists that try to be more exhaustive become cumbersome to use but will still never be complete. Static prices make your world flat and dull. Prices in a living world are dynamic and vary by time and place, by the forces of supply and demand; a drought or bumper crop, peace or war, and nuanced causes of all sorts can affect the cost of items.

Haggle solves all these problems by providing a simple and dynamic dice-rolling system to generate item costs on-the-fly, for anything anywhere at any time. Quit fumbling through item lists only to find that a second-hand ballgown with pockets isn't accounted for. Bring your world to life by letting players find that prices have changed since they last visited this shop, or walk a couple of miles uptown to splurge on more exotic and pricier items. As GM, take this change and spin a plot thread -- why has the cost of 10-foot poles doubled since last month?

Additionally, a simple optional rule gives your players an opportunity to haggle with merchants, providing fun a social encounter with NPCs.

Licensing and Credits

Haggle is inspired by Weird North.

Haggle is licensed under Creative Commons — Attribution 4.0 International — CC BY 4.0

UPDATE: I just "rediscovered" the Merchant Tables from Technical Grimoire. I'm sure I've seen it before, so I'm giving it credit here as well since it must have been living in the deep parts of my brain when I wrote Haggle.