Price of hides

[Desertman]

THE LUCID GROUND SQUIRREL IS HERE KEEPING AN EYE OUT FOR TASTY DESERTMANS.

[Semper]

Just become a power and influential enough figure to change things IG then...

Still, I think things are fine. They could use a little tweaking here and there, but what doesn't?

If what the shopkeepers offer isn't to your taste, set up a trade caravan to someplace that values what you make. Or trade to PCs who'll buy the item at the real value instead of being a third party to the shop owners.

In the end, you get the minimum amount of profit if you act as a third party. What you buy from shop keepers is at higher (market) prices, and what you sell is bought at lower prices, so you get the bottom of the stick no matter what, even in RL.

How do you deal with it? Find PCs who are willing to trade with you, and/or you can set your own prices through them. If you need guidance from players about this process, feel free to ask and I'm sure they'll be willing to help or do a search through old posts. Otherwise it starts sounding like a complaint.

[Tisiphone]

I'd like to point out again that selling a finished product (like a small leather pouch) for less than the materials required to make it (like a tandu hide) just makes no sense at all, no matter what people say about haggle and the rest of it.

It's like selling a car for less than the metal needed to make it. You'd be better off just selling the metal itself, rather than crafting it into a car and selling that.

Price is based on the value of the product, not the amount of work or value put INTO the product.

(That's real life, though, not Arm.)

Say you're a shop owner. You can sell a log for 100 coins. Or, you can take the log, make it into a wooden box, and sell that for 40 coins.

So far as you know, they sell equally well. What shopkeeper in his right mind would ever make boxes?

Well, precisely. No shopkeeper would make boxes, because no-one wants boxes. Don't make boxes. We don' need no steeenkin' boxes.

[staggerlee]

Part of the problem with the product/material price equation is skill ups.  You get the same thing on any mmorpg with a crafting system.
The raw parts to do your base skills are expensive, because people don't want to go out and farm them.  The finished product is cheap because every newbie crafter has to mass produce them in order to raise their skills.  That's why you can get sequins selling for six hundred bucks, and sequin studded gloves selling for a dollar each.  The players feel content because they've raised their skill for no work - at a loss, the scavengers get to sell their raw materials at ridiculously high prices, and the market is flooded with sequin studded gloves, with such ridiculous availability that you can't give them away.,

Having more recipes might help alleviate that problem, but people are still likely to go for the easiest/cheapest one and spam it till they get their skill up.  A more complex crafting system could totally fix the problem, but that's getting into a whole other realm (and Arm 2.0). 

Being able to break down certain crafted goods might be a good start, returning them to their raw state - albeit perhaps slightly less materials.  An excellent example would be seperating flour into handfuls and not being able to recombine it.    I think it would be cool if I could break a "massive obsidian battle axe" down into "a bunch of obsidian shards" and make rings out of them, and it would help remove some of the crap from the market.