ashwoodWhen a merchant finalizes a deal with his second avatar channel, all parties gain a clear understanding of what is happening and have the option of turning down the deal (even if they agreed to it verbally).
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, despair) , it has to be paid for with an equal, positive value (health, sanity, happiness). Value is defined by the collective unconscious of the human race and you can’t get around this with fancy wordplay.
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 10 years, transferred abilities are permanent, in 10 years you could get hit by a bus, live to see a cure for cancer, or teach a horse to sing.)
If someone is dying (disease, injure), is seriously afflicted (their life revolves around managing their illness/injure or they can’t take care of themselves), it devalues their health and life span. You can’t cure a sick person by transferring an illness to someone who is dying or seriously afflicted. They don’t any health to give. You can’t buy their life span either, unless you are willing to take on their symptoms.
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.
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. Likewise health and life span can’t be transfered between different species.
Stats purchased with the merchant’s second can’t be raised higher than the donor’s stat (it’s a matter of mystical leverage). If Bob has speed stat of 75 and buys 10% of Steve’s Speed Stat 80, Bob’s Speed only goes up to 80 and Steve’s Speed only drops to 75, the other 3 points simply fail to transfer.
If someone acquires a skill they already know and the two skills are within 20 skill points of each other, the skills merge. The higher skill goes up by one-fifth of the value of the lower skill . 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 won’t help a professional surgeon). At least one of the skills you are merging has to be a non-composite.
TopickillerThe 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.
TopickillerThe 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.
ashwoodThe non-composite rule has the same reasoning as 20 pt rule (the knowledge of a first year medical student won’t help a professional surgeon). It prevents a merchant from merging many first year medical students together to get a skill equal to a surgeon.
In the rules 3.1 the skills will have to be within 10 pts of each other if both skills are under 50, within 20 pts if one of the skills is over 50.
For the terminally ill how about…
If someone is dying (disease, injure,old age), or seriously afflicted (their life revolves around managing their illness/injure or they can’t take care of themselves), it devalues their health, life span, and physical stats. You can’t cure a sick person by transferring an illness to someone who is dying or seriously afflicted. They don’t any health to give. You can’t buy their life span or physical stats either. Any attempted transfer fails, and the deal falls through. You can still buy skills and mental stats, since (as demons demonstrate) those outlast the body.
Topickiller, what do you think of the rules for breaking merchant contracts (the Daniel Webster post)? The basic idea is that if a deal is bad enough, you can get out of it by sacrificing a part of yourself, like a coyote gnawing off it’s own leg to get out of a trap. I wanted to prevent merchants from using undefined favors for making people slave or taking away all of their life span/health/stat/skills in one go.
Breaking a contract should be unpleasant enough that people won’t do it except in extreme circumstance, but possible enough that merchants will avoid pushing people too far.
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