Selling Food in Our LARP: A Simple Guide to Item Cards
Gather 'round, fellow adventurers! If your character is looking to make some coin by selling delicious provisions or refreshing brews in-game, you need to know a few important rules about Item Cards.
These rules are in place to make sure all transactions are tracked fairly and consistently, especially when it comes to the tangible in-game effects food and drink can provide.
Here is a straightforward breakdown of how to handle Meal Item Cards and Brew Item Cards when selling your culinary creations:
1. Selling to NPCs (Non-Player Characters)
When you are selling food or drink to an NPC, the rules are very simple.
Any food or drink sold to an NPC must be accompanied by the appropriate Item Card: a Meal Item Card for food and a Brew Item Card for drinks.
These cards can be generic type cards. This means you don't need a special, named card like "Gold Label" or "Rover Tea"; a standard "Meal Card" or "Brew Card" will suffice.
In short: NPC buys food/drink → You hand over the food/drink and a generic Meal/Brew Item Card. Easy!
2. Selling to PCs (Player Characters) for In-Game Currency
At DRPA we are requiring food and drink merchants to take part in a small way by establishing a ZOM when setting up your food service. The reason for this is to define what part of your setup is safe to interact with mechanically. After all, we don't want anyone RPing poisoning the hootch overtop of your actually for sale food, or trying to attach a clothes pin to someone working over a fire. So what does this ZOM do and what does it take to make it?
Food Stall:
ZOM Creation: Present 2 generic food item cards (2 brews, 2 meals, 1 of each) to a guide and inform them of your Food service area. The guide will mark the cards as (Serving [event date]) you and the guide will then decide where the card will be displayed in your area. They must be visible to any one that is being served at your ZOM and must be reachable by all players without having to enter any out of play (for cooking safety) areas of your setup. The cards may be placed in 2 separate places in order to allow this access.
Effects. The displayed cards represent where players may interact with your food items using in game mechanics. Such as poison, blessings, inspections, and theft.
If a poison is used on one of the cards all meals served from that point on are poisoned, unless the meal/brew sold has its own accompanied meal/brew card, or the server presents fresh generic meal/brew cards to a guide and resets their ZOM.
If one of the two cards has a pick pocket clothes pin attached a guide will collect from the server an amount of scrip equal to half of what they charge for one serving. This represents the stealing of some food without actually wasting food.
We will be making adjustments to this system as we go based on feedback so please bear with this trail and let's go eat!
