Welcome to the first entry in our Goblin Log series! These are going to be brief overviews into specific mechanics you'll find in Gobutiko to give you an idea of what you can expect while running your little shop. This time around we're going to jump right into the central mechanic, Haggling!
Haggling is all about using your dice to manipulate the price and land the best deal by the end of the session.
That's great, but if all things are equal and both sides just push the price in their favor then how do you guarantee the deal ends in your favor? That's where composure comes in!
This is the most important part of landing a good deal. Manipulating it effectively will impact how well you can push prices. Think of it as both your health and power, since running out of this will immediately end the haggling session and having more than your opponent gives you an advantage in pushing the price. When both sides have an equal amount of composure then they have equal influence over the price of the item.
So, how can we move the needle? Easy, you beat your opponent with your dice until their composure drops enough to affect influence!
You could also use your dice to regain some of your own. It's important to keep your composure when haggling, not just for it's affect on price but because that composure will roll over into your next haggling session. It may be worth taking a slightly lower price to ensure you have a good amount of composure going into your next deal!
So we covered composure and how it affects your influence, but what exactly does that mean? This is a multiplier for your dice when they're used to push price. Whatever value your dice shows is multiplied by influence and that's how much the price will move.
Composure isn't the only thing that affects your influence though. The original value of the item also determines your base influence. This makes it so haggling over expensive or bundled items is more volatile than if you haggled over a cheap rock. Keep this in mind when deciding whether haggling is worth your time or not.
That's it for this entry! Next time I'll go into Core Concepts, which are modifiers you can equip to change the way dice work during a haggling session. Stay Tuned!