tukkek
commented
3 years ago A trivial way to bypass the sell value resulting in less rewards per encounter if sold is to make sure it always sells at 100% price, bypassing the skill-based "haggling/trade" system. This still leaves the issue of early shops having a sell price cap but hopefully that's not too big an impact as Town populations are designed to grow more-or-less on par with the Squad level.
Crafting would be an ideal case for Trophies. Both normal crafting #197 and endgame #269 crafting could be based on Trophies - one type per monster type and four ties in total. Each individual trophy could have one fixed effect based on type and tier (different for normal crafting and endgame, supposedly) and one random effect based on tier alone. These random effects could be determined on World generation so that it's easier to focus-farm, with ideally (but not necessarily) one random effect per type and tier, the same as static.
In fact, all Encounter gold rewards could drop Trophies instead - it's assumed that the gold value comes from monster parts, anyway. This would mean players get less gold since they sell at half value but that can be remedied by doubling the gold value of each trinket or something to that effect (note that this would unbalance treasure the other way around as player with high Appraise can sell items closer to their full value).
If Trophies could be used to enhance spells, working as consumables with Metamagic feat effects, that would add a great sense of immersion since functional reagents are highly underutilized in OGL rules. This would take some theorycrafting to accomplish but I wouldn't be surprised it someone has crunched the numbers for that already, so some research could go a long way.
All Trophies would be stored in a Trophy pouch. #239
Magical Towns could have trophy-related Quests, Quest rewards and Shops.