Conning Your Players

I always get nervous about bringing con artists into my campaigns.  I believe that they must exist in the fantasy world that I have created and even have an entire ethnicity that is well known for being tricksters (the Yugsalantis).  But the idea of conning the players always rubbed me the wrong way.

Let me explain what I mean.  I am absolutely for quest givers tricking the party.  That is a natural part of the game for me, and the players know for them as well.  Outright lying to them about their surroundings is most commonly the result of bad die rolls (Senses tasks).  Even having people they are questioning lie to them - absolutely normal.

So what don’t I like?  Well, selling them a charm from an “enchanter” and having it be a fake.  The Yugsalantis are not just con men, they have the world’s best fortune tellers.  Because of this, they are often selling trinkets to protect yourself against the evil eye (an actual spell in LEGEND QUEST) and other such things.  Some of their other common tricks are to sell tools and even weapons that are made of substandard steel and therefore far more prone to breaking.

So with me being a pretty mean spirited game master, why am I against this?  Well, mainly because I do think it is cheating.  It really isn’t though.  A warrior should have the Weaponcraft skills to tell a good weapon from a bad one, and if he doesn’t, then he deserves to be cheated.  Same with magic.  Why would you trust a witch selling “healing potions”?

But it does feel like cheating to me.  Honestly a big part of it is the logistics of it.  Say one of the PCs does buy a faked healing potion.  But then he finds or buys three more that are real.  You know his character sheet is going to read “4 healing potions” and not “one healing potion from witch and three from that dragon hoard”.  So how do you as GM remember that he has a bad one and figure out when it is to be used?  Now healing potions are probably noticeable when they work and when they don’t, but what about a strength enhancing potion?  As GM, you could probably completely hide the fact that the strength potion wasn’t working, but you will have to keep doing math in your head and remember that the strength potion was fake in the first place.  That’s a lot of work for a cheap scheme to take a few gold coins away from one of the PCs.

So instead of punishing PCs for buying dumb stuff, I go at it a different way.  When they are buying something important (a magic item), especially from someone they don’t know, they need to bring in a tester.  Think of it as taking a used car to your mechanic before you buy it.  If the enchanter says it is enchanted with vorpal sharpness, someone is going to bring in another enchanter to check it out.  Same type of thing with healing potions and the like.  This makes it more expensive to buy magic items, which is a good thing.

But the same goes the other way.  If a party hands an alchemist six potions and claims they are three fire and three frost resistance, the alchemist is going to say, OK, give me a couple of days to check them out.  He is then going to charge them for the amount of testing he needs to do, which means they get less for their loot.  But again, I’m OK with that.

With the assumption that there are these “auditors” around who can be hired to confirm what something is, I can run a game where I don’t sell fake objects to PCs.  All the NPCs may still be buying faked objects, because not being professional adventurers they do not normally bring an appraiser to the market with them to check everything out.

As per usual, I’ve just explained why role-players will like that this is part of the world / story, but what about those non-role-players?  Well the gold farmers can enjoy this added bit of lore, because it opens up possibilities for missions.  If someone is trying to sell faked magic items, they might kidnap the local auditor enchanter, or better yet, his daughter.  Now the party has to rescue the little girl before the big exchange goes down or their friend / boss / king will wind up paying big money for crap.

This is one of the main reasons I dive so deep into my game world - You never know when some idea you came up with to cover fraud among enchanters winds up giving you a great idea for an adventure.