The second channel of the Merchant is vague enough to be seriously abused. This is my attempt to define it further and bring it into line with other avatar channels. (I’m going by the core rulebook here, if there have been any changes to the merchant please tell me)
Conservation of Value : This is the basic limitation on the power of the Merchant. Merchants can trade immaterial commodities but they can’t create or alter those commodities (at least not with their avatar powers) . Merchants can make all sorts of weird trades, but they can’t add any value to the equation that was not there beforehand. If you transfer something with a negative value (illness, madness) , it has to be paid for with an equal, positive value (health, sanity). Value is defined by the collective unconscious of the human race and you can’t get around this with fancy wordplay.
“I’ll trade you my lack of heat vision for your inability to walk through walls” is a nonstarter.
Memories, even unpleasant ones, have value.
You can buy them, you can sell them, but you can’t create them out of whole cloth. You can only alter a memory by removing bits. You can remove the memory of someone’s best man while leaving them the rest of the wedding, for instance.
Love has value, even if it makes you unhappy, (better to have loved and lost) .
You can’t make someone fall in love with you just because they agree to it. That would be creating love, it’s not within your power.
You can’t make someone fall in love with you by buying the love they feel for someone else. That would be altering love, it doesn’t fall within the scope your power. They would no longer love their significant other, but it won’t make them any fonder of you.
You can transfer one person’s love of you to another person. Just remember love doesn’t take away someone’s reason or free will. People can fall out of love, or have a love-hate relationship. Knowing that the love is artificial will also be a big issue. Your best bet is to remove all their memories of you, including their memories of the deal they made. After that, run into them “accidentally” and it’s love-at-first-sight as far as they’re concerned.
Fear has a negative value.
Nobody wants stage fright or acrophobia. If you want to transfer fears or other negative emotions, someone has to agree to take them on. (trading in their fearlessness, happiness, or whatever is appropriate)
If someone is dying of disease, injure, or old age it devalues their stats and skills. Specifically it puts a time limit on them. If you buy a skill or stat from someone who is going to die in a year, you only get one year of use out of that ability before it fades. (if someone can reasonably expect to live another 15 years, transferred abilities are permanent, in 15 years you could get hit by a bus, live to see a cure for cancer, or teach a horse to sing.)
If someone is horribly afflicted, it devalues their life span. If you buy life span from a quadruple amputee or the boy in the plastic bubble, you will suffer horribly when you have to use that life. You won’t lose your limbs or die the first time you catch a cold – think more along the lines of an effective 20 speed and body (regardless of your actual stats) or constant flu-like symptoms. This only applies to situations where a reasonable person might consider life not-worth-living (value is decided by the collective unconscious remember).
If someone is dying (disease, injure, old age) or is seriously afflicted (similar to horribly afflicted but it covers a wider range of cases) it devalues their health. You can’t cure someone by transferring an illness to someone else who is already dying or seriously afflicted. They don’t have the health to pay for it.
If John Doe has a non-lethal disease like herpes, you can’t cure someone else of herpes by giving John a double dose. You can give John arthritis and lactose intolerance, just keep in mind that after 4 or 5 unpleasant diseases, Mr. Doe starts edging over into the seriously afflicted category.
Madness or a mentally debilitating disease like Alzheimer’s devalues all skills, mental stats, and mental health.
Outside forces can’t devalue someone’s abilities or life span. You might be scheduled to hang tomorrow morning or have a cult of insane adepts dedicated to making your life unlivable, but those are things someone is doing to you, not a part of who you are.
Each skill you buy is a separate item (be sure to keep track). Everyone who graduates from medical school with a skill of medicine 25% pretty much learns the same things, adding two 25% skills together doesn’t give you a 50% skill. That’s not to say the two skills completely overlap. If you acquire two instances of the same skill and they are within 10% of each other, you can choose to merge them together. The higher skill only goes up by one-fifth of the value of the lower skill (round down) so it’s not exactly cost effective, but then again, one really good surgeon is worth any number of mediocre ones, especially if you are the person going under the knife. At least one of the skills you are merging together has to be a non-composite (you can’t join together 2 skills that are both made up of more than 1 skill).
When raising a stat up to 50, stats are fungible (you can purchase it in bits and pieces), above 50 they’re not. Why? Because 50 is average, once you pass 50 the number of people under the bell curve starts to shrink, past 60 it starts to shrink fast. Rarity adds value, that’s why professional athletes get the big bucks.
Each above-average stat you buy is a separate item (keep track). Usually, when you buy someone’s Body/Mind/Speed/Soul the donor’s stat becomes 50 Joe Average. Anyone who acquires that purchased stat needs to be at least average (stat 50) to use it to it’s full potential, otherwise they get a 1 point penalty for each point their stat was below 50. They can acquire 2 above-average stats, use the first raise themselves above 50 and then use the second without penalty, or they can pay off the penalty by buying the stat in bits and pieces. During the original purchase, if the person named to receive the stat starts below average, the donor automatically pays off difference, ending up with a lower than average stat. If you buy a stat secondhand, you will have to pay off the difference yourself.
Wound points are fungible.
Charges don’t transfer between adept schools. A fleshworker charge (I stabbed myself in the face with a fork) and videomancer charge (I watched Blue’s Clues this morning) have very different values and therefore aren’t interchangeable.
If you want to help someone charge up, a merchant avatar can make you a temporary proxy for one day with a simple handshake deal. As long as someone is getting stabbed in the face with a fork, the universe is happy. Permanent proxies require significant magic that is beyond a merchant’s power.
In the above text, I should have made it clearer that when you acquire 2 or more above-average stats, they don’t stack (aside from paying off your penalty). Your effective stat = your highest purchased stat.
After reading Mr Stepford, Cosmic Duke Copyright Topickiller, I am adding a rule to the effect that human life span / health / wounds is not interchangeable with non-human life span / health / wounds. I would also disallow or limit deals for the automatic transfer of future damage/diseases/or attacks. At the very least I would require the merchant spend a combat round and make an avatar merchant roll to shift their injuries to someone else.
The damage transfer is psuedo-canonical, from “To Go.” Not that it can’t be otherwise in your house rules, but there is precedent.
After a little further thought about the automatic transfer of future injury/diseases/magical attacks. I realized there was a simple rule that both made sense and limited possible abuse.
A merchant cannot transfer immaterial commodities (including information) further than his avatar skill in meters.
So you could have someone agree to automatically take any bullet wounds you suffer, but the transfer would not take place unless that person were fairly close by.
And if John Doe agrees to obey your every command, that only applies when he can hear you through mundane means (like a telephone), or when he is within your skill range in meters. You can’t give him the ability to know what you are saying from half the world away, because that ability is not an asset you own.
This would also disallow the Bad Man’s (Postmodern Magick) ability to force someone to telephone him just by thinking their name, unless he has purchased some kind of telepathic power in a previous deal (not unlikely).
Concerning the rule about human stats/life span/health not being interchangeable with non-human stats/life span/health, I think I have to include magically boosted fleshworkers in the non-human category, too much potential abuse otherwise.
I don’t know if fleshworkers belong in that category. On the one hand, temporary effects (shape-shifting to mirror someone else) are “standing magick” and can be messed with appropriately. But on the other hand, the book points out that the permanent effects of their magick – like boosted stats, for instance – are no longer magickal after they take effect. Spellbreaker can’t touch them, for instance. The universe doesn’t care how you got so buff, anymore.
I can understand the temptation to limit this from a GM perspective; I once ran a campaign where one player was a powerful fleshworker and another a strong personamancer with a mask of the Merchant. But remember that to do this, the PCs need to find a strong Merchant willing to do it (avatar channels above 50 aren’t common), and a strong fleshworker – who is by nature obsessed with their own body – who is willing to give up their hard-earned gains in big chunks (much, much, much rarer). I don’t think your restriction is necessary to keep power levels fixed – for example, it was my mistake to allow my PCs the scenario and tools where they COULD do that.
(P.S. I was just going to point out the Bad Man, who is such a bad ass that he seems to break most of your house rules.
P.P.S. I generally agree with these mods, though.)
Looking things over, I think that trading fleshworker stat boosts might be more like trading charges between adept schools than trading health with an automation or other non-human.
A fleshworker significant charge (I stabbed myself in the face with a fork) translates into 5 stat points (max of stat 85) and has a very different value than a natural 5 point stat boost (I spent two months eating right and exercising regularly).
The main thing I worry about is Merchant + Fleshworker + Proxy Ritual. A temporary proxy ritual (with consent and presence of both parties) takes 2 minor charges and 40 mins. It could really speed up the rate a fleshworker generates charges. Using this to boost the fleshworker is fine, being a combat monster is one of the perks of that school, letting the fleshworker trade those stats means everybody gets to body/speed 85 pretty fast. In exchange, the fleshworker would get to keep some of those charges for his own use. The PCs might not have access to both a fleshworker and merchant, but the sleepers, new inquisition, etc. would at least know where to find them.
Do fleshworkers still get charges if someone takes the pain for them? Unless there is a canon example of this happening, I think it’s a pretty clear violation of the school – and UA’s mantra of “You never, NEVER, get mojo for free.”
And after the stat is boosted, the universe has no “memory” of how it got boosted. Your flesh, nor whatever you did to it, does not stay magickal after you cast permanent fleshworker effects. “I literally shot myself in the foot” and “I worked out for half a year” are only different backstories.
There are a few examples of this – I mentioned that spellbreaker specifically notes this. As well, the One Shots scenario describing the thaumovore shows that some fleshworker effects, and not others, are still considered “magickal” after the fact.
Getting a strong enough fleshworker to trade away her hard-earned stats is going to be MUCH harder than just finding someone who is in excellent physical shape and willing to trade. Normal people don’t value their body a fraction as much as fleshworkers. So it’s not really unbalancing any system, unless someone is playing fast-and-loose where they shouldn’t be to begin with.
Postmodern magic page 53, under proxy uses. It specifically states that an Epideromancer with a proxy can hurt his proxy for charges. The mojo isn’t free, the proxy represents the fleshworker, the proxy pays for the mojo by getting hurt.
The fleshworker could trade stats worth 7 significant charges (50 to 85) in exchange for the promise of 14 significant charges in the near future. Temporarily lower stats now, in exchange for being able to boost his stats much faster than he would without help. The fact that fleshworkers love their bodies doesn’t preclude a trade, if the fleshworker gets a better body than he started with as part of the payment.
Hmmm, under the the Proxy Uses section it says “…proxies can also take the place of the original for magical purposes. … if your proxy gets in trouble, you just cast some magic on yourself and he can feel the effects”
Depending on how you read that, you might not even need a merchant avatar to buy stats from a fleshwoker.
PoMoMa is more than a little outdated (and unbalanced). The current (2nd Ed) core rulebook explicitly retracts that:
“If you and your proxy are both adepts of the same school, he can perform charging actions for you. This works for schools whose charge concept is externally focused, where you get the ‘juice’ from something other than yourself. <...> The personal attunement simply isn’t adequate: you can fool a few mundane details of the world, but you can’t fool the raw power of magick. It therefore does not work for <...> Epideromancy, <...> In any event, remote charge can only be done with the voluntary cooperation of your partner.”
Page 104, left column.
Which breaks taboo for fleshworkers, anyway.
Ah, it seems I was working under the assumption that fleshworker charges were easier to get than they really are. In that case, I withdraw any objections to buying fleshworker stats.
Anyone know if someone’s relative position in space counts as an immaterial commodity under the merchant rules? Could a merchant in America call up someone in Moscow and make a deal to trade places with him?
Bsushi, your post surprised me so much that I forgot what I originally came online to write. After realizing (incorrectly) that you can do without a merchant if you had a fleshworker and proxy ritual. I realized (correct me if I’m wrong) that if you have a merchant and a fleshworker, you don’t need a proxy ritual to increase the speed of charge generation. You just trade bodies for a day (or trade minds). The fleshworker now has an undamaged body to generate charges and work magic on. The fleshworker should be sure all his charges are spent before he makes the switch (which would break taboo).
Epideromantic charges are an intensely personal affair (unlike, say, videomancy or cliomancy) – the real punchline is that you have to hurt YOU to get them.
Whether you could do this by switching minds with someone is hazy territory for that reason – because the “YOU” that has to be hurt is the physical body; does the magick care that the body’s not yours while you’re in it? (This would make it impossible for epideromancer demons to charge.)
I think that’s a fudge zone for each GM to decide, at the moment.
Although, I’m not sure if that sort of Freaky Friday scenario is possible with the Merchant’s second channel. UA doesn’t seem to separate mind and soul – so “mind-swapping” would in essence be possession. I don’t know how possible it is to remove someone’s soul from their body without putting it immediately into a new, permanent home – doing otherwise is generally the province of demons and dipsomancers. But I could see it being done by a clever Merchant deal.
The 2nd edition book does say you can buy someone’s soul. Of course, when someone talks about selling their soul, you tend to think of that only taking effect when they die.
Right. Again, I could see it going either way.
As for physical locations being traded…I don’t think that’s a “thing” one can “possess.” Citizenship in a given country, an address – even a social security number, passport, and flight could be traded as a package, but I don’t think you can trade your “being there” for my “being here.”
A powerful Merchant (like the Bad Man, or the current Godwalker) may have some tricks that let them pull it off, but I wouldn’t expect it to be part of the standard package for these avatars.
On the same general subject:
Fleshworks can’t use their magic to heal self-inflicted damage that generated charges. Does this mean that no magic can heal those injuries? If a merchant agreed to take damage from fleshworker after the charges were spent, could he?
I’ve been thinking about Bsushi’s comment “I don’t know how possible it is to remove someone’s soul from their body without putting it immediately into a new, permanent home” , it made a lot of sense, so I made a new rule.
Marketing is all about the Packaging
A merchant requires an appropriate container for any asset he aquires. You can’t buy someone’s eyesight unless you have a sightless person to transfer it to. Memories and skills need to be kept in someone’s head. Injury and disease have to be transfered an individual of the same species as the donor and they have to have the metaphysical room for it (they can’t already be full of disease or injury). Merchants can no longer hold two Body/Speed/Mind/Soul stats or two identical skills at the same time, there’s no room.
Stats purchased with the Merchant avatar can’t be raised higher than the donor’s stat. (it would be like getting water to flow uphill, possible with some types of magick, but not within the scope of the merchant avatar)
If you acquire a skill you already know and the two skills are within 20 skill points of each other, they merge together. The higher skill only goes up by one-fifth of the value of the lower skill (round down) so it’s not exactly cost effective, but then again, one really good surgeon is worth any number of mediocre ones, especially if you are the person going under the knife. If the new skill is more than 20 pts lower than your current skill, you get no benefit (the knowledge of a first year medical student isn’t going to significantly help a professional surgeon). At least one of the skills you are merging has to be a non-composite (two first year medical students are better than one, but to get past a certain point, you are going to need someone who actually graduated medical school).
Made a few additions and changes to the house rules. I posted them on the forum for feedback, since I don’t want to spam the Mods section.
Can’t seem to respond on the forums, this is the response I tried to post.
The only one I really don’t like is the expiration date on skills bought from the terminally ill. I’ll agree that someone who is dying of natural causes doesn’t have years of life to give, but if you buy a car from a manufacturer and then the manufacturer goes under, the car doesn’t vanish. It also creates a bizarre medical research angle of Merchant transactions, as it is an attunement-robbing taboo for the Merchant to be taken advantage of in a deal; every deal would therefore be contingent on an exhaustive health check on all parties. Also, given medical technology, it’s hard to know what a terminal illness is, outside of pretty narrow parameters.
I dispute the coherence of the “non-composite” rule – all skills we have are composites assembled out of different experiences, teaching environments, etc. I do like the 20 point rule, though.
I do like the “you have to be healthy to sell health” clause, the max stat = donor, the species specific transfer of health or life, and the requirement for informed consent.