Life's Price Tag in GURPS

Life's Price Tag in GURPS

In my pursuit of a perfect monster statblock, I found something that isn’t covered that much detail in GURPS – the price of a creature. The animal section of GURPS Basic Set has prices for some of the more common domestic animals and guidelines for adjusting them for training and exceptional stats. The same book later has rough guidelines for pricing slaves. However, this is not enough for me, as I’d like to delve into the minute details. I just want to find a way to calculate a price for a captured monster.

First of all, we have to understand that non-sapient monsters and sapient creatures will have to use different pricing schemes. GURPS Basic Set says that a slave should cost as much as he would earn on his best possible job in five years. This is where employment of slaves comes up, as it will define the cost. Pyramid #3-47 has the Monster Slavers article by David Pulver that says that slaves, at least in the context of a dungeon fantasy game, can be employed in the mines, on the farms, on the galleys, as gladiators, soldiers, or pleasure slaves. For pricing, we can group them up into three categories – slave laborers, slave soldiers, and pleasure slaves.

Slave laborers and slave soldiers earn about $120/month, according to that article. Thus, an average slave sells for $7,200. Then, we have to modify this price for higher or lower strength, as this price assumes ST 11 with Basic Lift of 24 lbs. To modify the price, multiply it by Basic Lift / 24. Then, for slave soldiers multiply it by DX / 10.

Slave laborers also have the following additional modifiers. Each extra arm adds +25% to the price. Laziness divides the price by 4. If the slave has points in crafting skills, then his price is increased by +50%. Bad Temper divides the cost by 2.

Slave soldiers also divide the cost by 2 for Bad Temper. In addition, if the slave has Berserk, he will only be fit for a gladiatorial arena and have his cost divided by 2.

Pleasure slaves use a different pricing mechanism. They sell for $2,000 times the point value of their Attractiveness, and sometimes more, if they are particularly exotic.

Of course, there also are general modifiers that can be applied to slaves of any kind. Crippled slaves will not sell, injured slaves sell at half cost. Slaves that speak a language no one in the area understands sell at a 10% discount. You can come up with many other modifiers. For example, Combat Reflexes could increase the price of a slave soldier by +15%, Immunity to Disease could increase the price of a pleasure slave by +20%, useful spell-like abilities could add +50% each, just like crafting skills do. The same goes for negative traits.

Obviously, this should only apply to sapient creatures that actually can work as slaves. For example, a sapient cat won’t be of a higher value than a normal cat.

Now, what about non-sapient monsters and sapient monsters unfit for slave labor? On page 459, GURPS Basic Set has guidelines for increasing or decreasing costs of animals based on their stats and training received. Some more domestic animal prices can be found in GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3. However, there are no guidelines for how to actually get the base cost in the first place! I thought about what I can base the cost on, and my main options were HP, weight, and Basic Lift. I put all the numbers into an Excel spreadsheet and got the following formula: Cost = 6.7*weight^(0.78). This gives values that are decently close to those in the books for animals ranging from a chicken to an elephant. This assumes an animal trained up to IQ 3. For untrained animals and exceptionally trained animals, refer to the guidelines from the Basic Set.

That should work for more-or-less mundane animals that work as work beasts or livestock. But what if you want to sell something like a captured griffin? Monsters that can serve as exceptional guards, hunters, war mounts, or war beasts, should be priced differently, as they may have traits that make them more dangerous or valuable that are not related to their weight at all. For this purpose, I suggest we use the Combat Effectiveness Rating from Pyramid #3-77 and combine it with the simplified formula for trained value from ACKS II Monster Manual. I got the following formula: $250 * CER * (1 + # of special abilities). It has no economical basis, and it an absolute asspull, but it feels decent enough. Sure, the GM still will have to think what he will count as a special ability and what not, and perhaps add extra modifiers, but at least now we have a baseline. This way, a griffon from my blog that has CER 44 will cost $11,000 if we consider Flight a special ability. That sounds fine to me, even though it’s way off of the trained cost value from ACKS II that would be more than $3 million in GURPS.

You could also use the suggestions from the ACKS II Monster Manual to modify the effective CER, such as halving it if the monster is bestial or mindless and not a mount, doubling it if it can fly, quadrupling it if it can fly very fast, and doubling it if it can serve as a mount. That way, my griffon would cost much more, and I’m okay with that.

As before, to get an untrained cost, decrease this value by one third.

Phew, I think I’m done here. What can I say? This has been bothering me for a very long time, and I’m glad that I made some progress. This system definitely isn’t perfect and requires some adjustment on the case-by-case basis, but it’s better than nothing. And I finally found a use for the CER that I found useless otherwise, so that’s nice.