Players love haggling in Dungeons & Dragons, but haggling mechanics usually suck, players suck at haggling, and modern roleplaying games treat shopping like a trip to a modern mall. Fortunately, I’m here with a better way to handle shopping trips and barter exchanges. You might even pick up a few tricks to sharpen your own house-ruling and system-hacking if you pay attention.

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Haggling Over Prices

Have you ever noticed players love to haggle? At least, they love to try.

It’s funny, isn’t it? We Game Masters know that gold is utterly and completely worthless in modern Dungeons & Dragons because of the game’s design, but players love piling up gold, they hate spending gold they don’t have to, and they love squeezing every treasure and transaction for every last copper.

That’s why, whenever you actually play a shopping trip at your table, one of your mouthbreathers will always say, “How about 30,” after you tell them the blacksmith wants 50 crowns for that greatsword.

Haggling’s just fun. Movies and shows make it look fun. And they make it look easy, too. Haggling’s a great way to save money, and it’s also a great way to make a bookkeeping task feel like living in a real fantasy world.

It’s such a shame that it sucks.

This Isn’t About Fixing Haggling

I know some of you don’t give a crap about this haggling horseshit. Some of you think spending table time on shopping trips is an utter freaking waste. You are wrong, though. You shouldn’t spend too much table time on mundane town tasks, but if you’re not spending any table time on such things every few sessions, you’re bad, and you’re wrong, and you should feel bad. Of course, you don’t need my permission to run your game any wrong way you want, so you do you.

Either way, though, don’t check out on me here. This feature ain’t just about haggling. I’m going to give you a simple way to handle haggling, but I’m also going to talk about how and why I do it the way I do. See, this sort of follows from my recent thing about pass-or-fail dice mechanics. There are a couple of mechanical tricks in here you can use to spice your pass-or-fail rolls without completely gutting the core mechanic.

That’s why I’m really doing this.

Anyway…

Your Players Suck at Haggling; But So Do You

Let’s start with the non-mechanical reason why haggling or bartering or negotiation or whatever sucks. It sucks because players suck at it. You see, haggling is a skill. There’s more to haggling than just throwing numbers back and forth. Movies and shows make it look like that’s all there is to bargaining, but there’s a lot of psychology and social acumen involved. Most Game Masters actually don’t know any better than the players how to do it. Thus, whenever a player initiates a haggle by throwing a number back at the Game-Master-as-shopkeeper, it devolves into a quick flurry of numbers before the exasperated Game Master bounces a die and says, “Fine, he agrees to take 40 gold crowns. Moving on.”

But even if you and your players do know how to haggle, you still can’t do it at the D&D table. You just don’t have the context. No one knows how much anything is actually worth in D&D. There are prices, sure, but prices aren’t the same as worth and haggling is, ipso facto, trying to agree on a worth because the sticker price isn’t it.

Then, too, there’s no actual economy in the game world. That ain’t a problem, by the way. No one wants a frigging economy in D&D. Anyone who claims to is a moron, and you can ignore anything else that comes out of their noise hole.

The lack of economy means there’s no economic pressure underlying every transaction. Characters have literal ass-tons of gold to fling around. In real life, you only have so much money to pay your bills with, and that affects how much you’re willing to pay for that rare copy of Little Samson for the Nintendo NES System or that original Ravenloft adventure module signed by the Hickmans themselves.

Meanwhile, the D&D blacksmith doesn’t have to worry about how much it costs to actually make that sword or how much he could get listing it on the magical equivalent of eBay instead. He ain’t thinking about whether he can make payroll and pay rent and taxes. He’s not thinking about whether he’ll have enough profit left over for him to buy a month’s worth of iron Ramen-brand rations because, remember, business owners get paid last from whatever’s left over.

In the real world, haggling is two people trying to settle on a price that maximizes the value of the transaction while still making sure the transaction actually happens and while staying one step ahead of crushing financial ruin. Honestly, I could do a whole, big-ass thing about haggling and how it really works and how both sides think and what happens when they don’t or can’t come to terms, but that ain’t important here. What’s important is that haggling is a thing that’s fun to play, but impossible to play in-character. You need some game mechanics to moderate it.

Which brings us to the mechanical problems.

Haggling is Never the Wrong Move

Most game systems these days either don’t give you any actual haggling rules or else their rules are crap. That’s why most Game Masters default to what I described above. Once a player tries to haggle, the Game Master makes a cursory counteroffer, they go back and forth a bit, then the Game Master rolls a die and says, “He agrees to take such-and-much,” or else, “He won’t be talked down; you have to pay the list price.”

See? This is where that whole pass-or-fail problem arises. I told you it was in here. Also, there’s a little bit of The Hacking Problem, too. Man, I’m showing you how to fix everything today.

So we have our baseline haggling system, and we can see it sucks. There’s a list price for every item, and as a player, you can either pay that price or try to haggle. If you try to haggle and your Game Master plays along, you get to roll for a discount. If the roll fails, you can still just pay the list price. Thus, there’s never any good reason not to haggle if your Game Master lets you. The only reason not to is that your Game Master eventually gets sick of wasting table time on shopping altogether. Which is crap.

Seriously. While you shouldn’t play every shopping trip like a whole, big-ass roleplaying thing, there’s a vast spectrum between, “Just buy whatever you want at home between sessions,” and “Let’s spend an hour acting out every second of your bracing trip to the Waterdavian Galleria.”

The problem, again, is a pass-fail roll with no costs, risks, or consequences. That means the players should always haggle, and maybe you should just assume they always are. In fact, if I were telling a different story today, I might be talking about a different way to do equipment lists and resolve shopping altogether.

But I ain’t telling that story today.

There is actually a very simple solution here. In fact, there are several. I can think of two neat, mechanical approaches that would both work. One fits better than the other, but I’ll share both.

The Double or Nothing Approach

I’m resisting the urge to explain the origin of the phrase double or nothing here and to defend my use of it even though I’m not actually advocating, strictly, for double or nothing. Technically, it was mathematically misnamed before I got to it anyway.

The double or nothing approach assumes a baseline outcome that’s available easily or automatically. Say, for example, that a blacksmith will sell you a sword for 50 gold crowns or whatever. That’s just the price in the book. You don’t need any checks, and you don’t need to play anything out.

But, you can roll a check. In this case, you can try to haggle with the blacksmith. If you succeed, you get a better result. Say, the blacksmith agrees to sell you the sword for 30 gold crowns. If you fail, though, you either lose the original opportunity completely or else you have to eat a worse result. Maybe the blacksmith says, “You’re wasting my time with your crap offers. Get out of my shop,” or maybe he out-haggles you and the price goes up to 70 gold crowns.

I know you see a problem with those outcomes. You’re wrong, but I know what you see. I’ll get to it.

Mechanically, do you see how choosing to haggle changes the risk profile? You can accept a middle-of-the-road sure thing, or you can risk having to pay more for the chance to pay less.

This is the solution I use, by the way.

The Push Your Luck Approach

The other approach you might consider is called a push your luck mechanic. I don’t think it’s a great fit for haggling, but you can make it work.

You still start with a baseline outcome, but you let the players make rolls to nudge the outcome in their favor. Every time they keep the action going, if they succeed, the outcome gets a little better. Say, every success drops five gold crowns from the price. But if a roll fails, things get worse, and there’s a risk of catastrophic failure.

So, for haggling, it might be that every price volley involves a roll. If the player succeeds, the price gets slightly better, and if the player fails, the price gets slightly worse, but if the check ever fails by, say, five or more, or if the players roll a natural five or less or whatever, the blacksmith gets pissed off and says, “Screw it all. You’re wasting my time. You can either pay 70 gold crowns or get lost.”

Now you’ve got this dynamic where the player is constantly deciding whether to risk catastrophic failure for a slightly better success. It’s a fun mechanic where it fits, but I don’t like it for haggling, especially because I don’t want to make five dice rolls for a shopping trip. Maybe you do.

Maybe someday, I’ll tell you about the things where I do like using push your luck rolls. There are actually several. One’s a big wilderness thing, and the other is a dungeon thing.

Tools for Your Box

If you ain’t interested in haggling and shopping, then this is where you can check out. Just take double or nothing rolls and push your luck rolls and drop them in your Game Mastering toolbox. The next time you need to come up with a mechanic where a pass-or-fail die roll ain’t working on its own, pull one of them out.

Haggling the Angry Way

I use the double or nothing approach to haggling in my game. Every item’s got a list price. The players can usually just pay that and get the item. No muss, no fuss.

If a player starts to haggle, though, I’ll play a little back-and-forth with them so they can have the fun haggling scene, but I don’t really pay attention to the numbers. The interaction is mostly just for funsies. If the player says something utterly ludicrous, I’ll ask the player to confirm their intent to insult the blacksmith with a patently idiotic offer, but beyond that, the numbers are just nonsense. It’s just a chance to play in-character.

After that, I’ll call for a Charisma (Persuasion) check and give advantage if the character has an appropriate tool proficiency. Sometimes, for rare or esoteric items, I’ll give disadvantage if the character doesn’t have an appropriate tool proficiency or hasn’t even fully identified the item. Obviously, you can substitute in whatever rolls are appropriate for your system due the jury.

So, yeah, it goes like this…

Me: Okay, the gnomish jeweler agrees to give you 50 gold crowns for the gem.
Chris: “50 crowns? Are you too blind to see past that distended gourd you call a nose? It’s worth 300 easy!”
Me: He squeaks in consternation, either at the offer or the slur. You don’t insult a gnome’s nose. “300? The thin air up there must be affecting your brain. 50 gold is a gift. I’ve seen polished glass with a better sheen. But, to get you and your stench out of my shop, I’ll give you 75 and not a copper more… You haggle back and forth for a while. Roll a Charisma (Persuasion) test. Take disadvantage because you don’t have proficiency with Jeweler’s Tools and a further -2 penalty because you insulted the gnome.
Chris: Wow… that sucks. Can I just take the 50 he originally offered?
Me: Not at this point. You might not get a deal at all, or you might have to settle for a really crappy price.
Chris: I guess I shouldn’t have opened my mouth.

Obviously, I set an appropriate difficulty, usually just the passive Intuition of the target.

If the check succeeds, I use a d4 to determine whether to give a 5%, 10%, 15%, or 20% discount or premium. Whatever favors the player. But that’s a lie. I usually just pick a random number in my head. I don’t roll shit. I can look at a number easy and know how much 20% of it is. I also tend to give bigger discounts for cheaper items. I’ve been known to let 50 gold swords go for 30 gold. I do it by vibe. It’s just easier, and it really doesn’t matter.

If the check fails, I apply a premium of 10%, 20%, 30%, or 40%. Or a discount. Depends on whether the player is buying or selling. Again, I don’t actually roll; I just come up with a number.

Once the dice are rolled, by the way, the negotiation is over. If the player keeps trying to push, it becomes a “take the deal or get out” interaction. I make it clear that the NPC has no more patience. He just ain’t playing the game anymore. That said, the players are not locked into the transaction. Haggling just sets the final price. The players can nope out and walk away if they don’t like the result. But it means they don’t get the item or the sale or whatever.

Now, I don’t tell my players all the details here. If I told the players the actual percentages, it’d ruin haggling. See, I worked out those numbers so that haggling is actually kind of a wash. Assuming players usually have a 65% chance to succeed on a check, then a 20% discount on a success versus a 40% premium on a failure basically balances out to the list price, mathematically. Kind of. I did some rounding to make it easier to work with. But human brains have this thing called loss aversion that makes those numbers look like a scam instead of a perfectly balanced, fair deal.

What my players do know is that they can try to haggle any price ever. They can either do it in character, at which point we’ll do a little in-character interacting or else they can say, “I want to negotiate the price.” They can even say things like, “I want to push for a steep discount,” or “I want to be polite,” or whatever. Then, based on their approach and their character’s skills, we’ll make a roll to determine a final price, which may be better or worse, but which they can take or leave.

Sounds great, right? Mechanically? But there’s a problem. And the problem is shopping. Except that the problem is actually modern dumbasses thinking they know about shopping.

Modernism Sucks the Life Out of D&D

Shopping in fantasy games is total crap. Especially nowadays. Even though the rules haven’t changed, people’s perceptions have. Mostly because of how the rulebooks present things. That said, even back in the day, most players were kind of dumbasses about shopping.

So you have these equipment lists, right? They’re right in the rulebooks. They’ve got prices for everything. When you create a character, you just pick the stuff off the lists, pay the gold, and you’re good.

Meanwhile, most Game Masters can’t be assed to care about shopping as an actual game activity these days. I’m not even talking about the roleplaying opportunity of it all, where it lets the players do a little slice-of-life show about their little cartoon avatars. I’m actually referring to shopping as an in-game action that deserves an actual, proper resolution. Most Game Masters, though, just do the whole, “Buy whatever you want and mark off the gold; just leave me alone.” I get that urge, and I’ve been there, but for reasons I won’t go into today, I think it’s a bad urge.

Meanwhile, video games have trained us to expect item shops and weapon shops and armor shops where you just pick the items you want off a menu, select a quantity, click yes, and you’re done.

But in a medieval, fantasy world before the era of industrialization and mass production, that’s all a load of crap. There shouldn’t be too many general shops filled with a bunch of ready-made everything outside the biggest cities. Even then, they should be the exception. There shouldn’t be any fantasy Walgreens or Dollar Generals. If you need candles, you go to the chandler. If you need arrows, you go to the fletcher. If you need a sword, you go to the swordsmith. If you need rations… well… that’s more complicated than you think. Rations in roleplaying games are frigging stupid.

Now, common staple items might be in ready supply, but most of the stuff adventurers buy isn’t just kept stocked on shelves. When you need a sword, or even a lantern, and you need it today, you’re hoping to get lucky that a smith has one sitting around, ready-made. Maybe one they bought off someone recently, or one someone commissioned and didn’t come back for. Artisans don’t waste materials making shit no one has asked for. Not unless they know it’s something someone is always looking for.

Of course, some folks make their trade buying and selling random crap. Peddlers and traders buy crap and sell it. They gather in markets. As do itinerant craftspeople. These folks are especially important in smaller settlements that rarely have more than one artisan of a given type and often lack specific crafts.

The point is that shopping is a whole big-ass thing. At least, it should be. Characters don’t simply run down to Walmart to buy some pitons, a rope, thirty people-days of rations, a sword, three bottles of ink, and a potion of minor healing. They wander markets and visit merchants, hoping they find all the crap they need ready-made and don’t have to commission anything. If you’re buying just one thing, it’s a scavenger hunt. If you’re buying lots of things, it’s laps around the market district and in-and-out of artisans’ workshops.

That’s why, at my table, Shopping is a Town Activity that always fills four hours. However big or small your list, you’re wasting a morning or afternoon. In fact, it’s smart to do all your shopping in one trip precisely for that reason. I make it a point, by the way, to describe shopping the first time my players go shopping so they know what shopping is really like. I let them know precisely why it’s hours of wandering, scavenger hunting, and negotiating.

I also don’t let my players shop away from the table. Shopping is an in-game action. It has to be resolved at the table. I encourage them to prepare shopping lists between sessions to speed the process along, but you don’t get to actually put anything on your character sheet or mark off any money until you spend a half-day of in-game time doing the legwork.

As I said above, this isn’t to make it a roleplaying thing. Sometimes I do, especially if there’s a rare or unusual item someone’s trying to buy or I want to drop a plot hook, or I just want to bring the world to life, but otherwise, I just treat it like any other action in my game. It needs a declaration, I need to determine the outcome, and I need to describe the results. Declare, determine, describe, right?

It’s like searching a room, right? When my players search a room, I don’t play out the whole search in character, but I do determine the outcome and describe the results. There’s no difference between “You spend an hour searching the room. You peer behind the bookcase and open all the drawers. You find all the common little shit you’d expect, but you also find a gem that might be a ruby and a magical nipple ring of protection.” Likewise, for a shopping trip, I might say, “You go shopping. You wander the streets and markets and notice how crowded the city is with refugees and beggars because of the plague in Downsouthtown. The soldiers seem on edge; everyone seems on edge. By noon, you’ve found everything on your list except the sword. Unfortunately, with Lord Pellingham arming the city watch for fear of unrest, there’s a shortage of ready-made weapons. You can commission one. It’ll take a few days. You also don’t find a buyer for your nipple ring of protection because the tiefling goth convention doesn’t start until Summerstide.

Done and done. And you can see how this leaves a place to slot in haggling. And it also solves the issues you were going to point out.

The Problem With Haggling in an Equipment List Economy

Given that I treat Shopping as an action to resolve, even when it doesn’t require a die roll, which it often doesn’t, it’s easy to see how haggling slots in. Players can either specify a single, expensive item they want to haggle over on their shopping list, or they can say they want to drive a hard bargain on every price and try to get a discount for the whole list. Either way, they only get one roll per shopping excursion. If they want to make it more complicated than that, it eats up more in-game time.

I should also note that trading in rare and esoteric items always requires haggling. If an item doesn’t have a published, player-facing list price, a check is needed to settle the price. I should also note that Selling Treasure isn’t the same as Shopping. At least it isn’t how I do it.

My approach to Shopping also answers a question my mechanical double or nothing approach to haggling leaves open. Why must the players accept the crappier price? Why can’t they just get back to the sticker price if the haggling goes bad?

If you assume the world’s full of shops stocked with ready-made goods, the way most players do and as the equipment lists imply, then, if you blow a haggling check, so what? Don’t pay the higher price, just go to another shop and pay the list price there. Or try haggling again. If there’s always a sword to be had and finding it is as trivial as walking from the Gnome Depot to the Loews up the block, then failed haggles don’t mean anything.

But if a shopping trip chews up half a day and the sword being haggled over is the one the characters lucked into because a merchant just happened to have a sword to sell or a blacksmith had an unsold sword sitting around, the take-it-or-leave-it thing has some bite, right? Maybe this sword really is the only ready-made sword available in this town or district. Or maybe it’s the only one with a reasonable asking price, and all the other ready-made swords were even more expensive.

The point is, in a world filled with infinitely stocked shops of ready-made goods, failing a haggle has no consequences at all. But in a world where shopping works like it should, choosing to haggle is a real risk, as it should be.

Town Mode…

Some of you may have surmised from all of this that I’ve actually got a lot of little rules and procedures for handling Town Activities. Over the years, I’ve sort of accidentally built a mechanical framework for resolving between-adventure town things. I’ve never really tried to write down most of it. It’s just shit I do, you know? One that’s leaps and bounds above the crap that D&D keeps trying and failing to pass off as Downtime Activities because the designers there keep forgetting that a roleplaying game needs actual, well-designed gameplay in addition to allowing the players to interact with the the world and that Town Activities have to exist in service of the character’s adventures, and that random five-entry Wacky Complication Tables for the purposes of collaborative fanfic storytelling just don’t cut the mustard.

Of course, if I were building a roleplaying game system of my own, I’d definitely be building a coherent and systematic approach to Town Activities to fit Between Adventures, and I’m sure my high-tier supporters already know a thing or two about my grand plans for the future.

But I’m also wondering if my D&D-running fans would be interested in more crap about how to fill the space between adventures with actual gameplay while bringing the world to life. And how to pace that shit so your game doesn’t become full sessions of day-in-the-life dicking around horseshit.

So? Do you guys want more of this shit?