The second channel of the Merchant looks like it would be terribly easy to abuse, here are a few rules to tone it down a bit, so merchants won’t completely overshadow fleshworkers.
1. Skills and Stats purchased with the Merchant avatar can’t be raised higher than the donor’s skill or stat.
Buying the painting skill of 10 high school art teachers won’t make you Picasso. If you want to be as strong as a weightlifter you need to buy your strength from a weightlifter. If you want to be a violin virtuoso you need to buy the skill from a virtuoso.
2. Health is an asset and you can’t buy it from someone who doesn’t have it.
This basically prevents a merchant avatar from finding two or more people with terminal diseases and dumping it all on one person. You can swap the diseases around, but if you want to make a sick person healthy, you need a healthy person who is willing to trade that health away. This also affects purchasing lifespan, you can’t buy 20 years of youth from someone who is going to die of cancer in the next month.
3. If you purchase a magically boosted stat (narco-alchemist), you also get the magical limitations (no impure drugs)
4. Charges don’t transfer between adept schools
You can’t use a dipsomancer to charge up a chaos mage, the kind of power they use is too different. That mo just won’t jo.
1. Perhaps simpler: name a purchased skill after the donor, so if you muy the violin skills of Ahmed, Bianca and Claire, you get the skills: Ahmeds violin virtuoso 40%, Biancas fast arpeggios 25% and Claires express her feelings through violin playing 56%, and you can’t use them all at once. By using them one at a time during a concerto with say five movements in different moods, you can use each skill where it does the best effect, but all you really can do is play violin AS these people, not play violin as yourself. BUT there’s still some point to buying copies of skills this way. If you want to be even more restrictive you can judge that you can’t improved on bought skills with XP.
As to stats I’d vote against this restriction, I really want to be able to say that he has the strength of five men. Still doesn’t mean he can use this strength in any meaningful manner.
2. So what it means is that you can’t trade in diseases, only in health. nice one.
4. Charge transfers is something that already is quite common in the game, I see no need to gib the merchant on this one. Maybe set it up so trading charges away is a general magical taboo?
Mattais, I really like the named skill idea. Of course, the main reason to hold multiples of the same skill is to trade the extras away.
If you want the strength of five men, why not name the stat’s you buy as well, Stan’s body 70 lift heavy stuff, Bob’s body 65 why yes, I do work out . Anyone who sells their Body/Speed/Mind/Soul (without getting somebody else’s in return) is reduced to a Body/Speed/Mind/Soul of 25 Barely Getting By
Adding stats or skills together isn’t just trading valuable items, it is actually creating value that wasn’t there before. It would be like sticking Thirty 1 carat diamonds together to make 1 thirty carat diamond. You can infer that this is not possible in the UA world by looking at the stats of the movers and shakers. If Merchants could make an Einstein by adding together lesser intellects, all the movers and shakers of the UA world would have Mind 100 I don’t cotton to book learnin’ , I just buys my smarts .
Allowing stats to add would also devalue the ability of fleshworkers and narco-alchemist to enhance themselves, as well as devaluing natural intelligence and athletic ability. Having a stat above 90 should be rare and impressive.
Similarly, getting a fleshworker charge (I stabbed myself in the face with a fork) from a videomancer charge ( I watched Blue’s Clues this morning ) is like going to the bank and exchanging one peso for one dollar. The merchant would be creating value that wasn’t there before.
Keep in mind that avatars get less power than adepts, in exchange for having to make less of a sacrifice. Balance the Merchant’s second channel with the channels of other avatars, not the abilities of adepts.
Ashwood: I, too, like the idea of named skills. I don’t like the idea of capping stats, however. Stats are generic and, IMHO, fungible. They should be able to be, metaphorically, melted down, mixed together, purified and made into something new and shiny. Like gold. Just like gold, buying stats from a Merchant should be expensive. Buying stats in large amounts all at once causes hard feelings in customers who realize too late what exactly it was they sold and probably attracts attention from the Sleepers. Not to mention angry friends and relatives. More so with Speed and Body as these are the most immediately obvious, less so with Mind and Soul. A Merchant who wants to stay both alive and respectable buys stats in small amounts from a large number of people over a long period of time. This is the reason not every person of note in the Underground has Mind or Speed stats of 100% It’s too damn expensive.
As for buying charges: I would use the same rules for buying charges as I would for charging rituals. An adept that buys a charge, or gets a charge in any way other than through their designated charging format, is breaking taboo. It makes buying minor charges worthless and buying significant charges a difficult/expensive prospect. And of course, a Major charge is probably not going to be sold by the person who earned it.
Stats:
The thing you are forgetting is that avatars have a narrow focus. All my rules basically boil down to one meta-rule Conservation of Value . Merchants can make all sorts of weird trades but they can’t add any value to the equation that wasn’t already there. A surgeon could take the healthy organs from someone with lung cancer and give 3 other people an extra 20 years of life. A jeweler could take a pile of gold scraps and make something shiny and new. But a Merchant can’t, a merchant just sells goods , he doesn’t make them, he doesn’t improve them. It doesn’t fall within the scope of his avatar channel.
Sidenote : if someone loses a large amount of Body/Speed/Mind/Soul “I had a stroke” or “I’m a meth addict” is a lot more believable than “I sold it to a magic man”.
Buying Charges:
Here is a quote from the book about charging rituals “All rituals are rare, but charging rituals are the rarest of the rare. Every duke who knows Harmonious Alignment would, without exception, kill to protect the secret”
That is for 1 significant charge, once a month, at the cost of 8 minor charges.
A dipsomancer could generate 10 charges a day and trade them to a fleshworker or clockworker who would then use them to make powerful permanent effects.
Sidenote on the above sidenote : You even could force someone to tell people they had a stroke or take away their memories of the deal they made as part of the payment.
Clarification on the buying and selling of lifespan: If you buy a year of life from someone dying of aids or cancer, in your last year of life (when you use your purchase) you suffer the effects of that disease (although you don’t actually contract it). If you buy a year of life from a healthy person, you can sell it to someone dying of cancer and their disease will go into remission for one year before coming back. This only applies to a disease that is actually killing someone and is therefore inextricably tied to their lifespan. Everything else has to be bargined for separately, so you can’t use this effect to cure someone’s blindness for a year and you don’t have to worry about buying life from someone who lost their leg in a shark attack.
Ashwood: Definitely agree on cutting off charge-transfer. Looking back, I’m surprised they hadn’t covered it in the core rules. Treating charge-swapping like charging rituals makes sense.
I might go a little further, too. Adepts who give their charges to other adepts in this way – even if the charge donor isn’t getting any charges themselves – still break taboo. Part of the core of any school is that you earn your mojo. Getting a charge without charging undermines their entire school.
So if Bob the Bibliomancer knows that Ed’s an Entropomancer, he can’t trade Ed a charge – for anything – without breaking taboo.
There’s plenty in the rules about stealing charges. Kleptomancers can steal from anyone, and Bibliomancers can steal from each other, and that’s just from the top of my far-from-the-books head.
Bibliomancers get an extra charge if they acquire a book by stealing from another bookworm. The Bookworm being robbed only loses a charge if they loose a book in their traveling library. They would suffer the same effect if they had dropped the book on the ground.
Kleptomancers can steal a charge, but only by taking the risk required to generate a normal charge (stealing) with an added risk (stealing from someone who can do magic).
In both cases the effort required has been balanced with the reward gained.
In both cases “stealing” charges from other schools is within the realm of the thieving adept’s worldview – especially kleptomancers. Their magick is founded on the idea that all power can be stolen (indeed, all power is stealing, itself).
(Stealing charges from others within your school is also fitting for the same reason, essentially. They are dealing in the same currency, after all.)
But freely TRADING charges is entirely different – it means you are recognizing that the charges CAN be traded. It means you are recognizing that others who do not share your correct view of the world ALSO have a legitimate means to acquire power. It means you are recognizing they are ALSO “right.” That’s a violation of taboo.
No matter if they know that other adepts are stronger than them, fundamentally all adepts believe that theirs is the only true road to true power – if they didn’t, they couldn’t use magick. Compare this to an inquisition-era Christian, witnessing an act of witchcraft that levels a castle. That Christian can’t concede that the witch has access to true power, and STILL believe that Christ is the only true road to true power – no matter if that magickal feat is above and beyond what the Christian themselves could do.
The book says this pretty clearly, too, when talking about why thaumaturges can become adepts and keep both skills, but adepts can’t become thaumaturges and remain adepts: “A practice can be subsumed into a differing worldview, but a worldview can’t accept a differing practice.”