If you're gonna do RP shopping, you gotta establish before the session that's gonna be what's happening so everyone can come up with ways to interact with the scenario.
You also absolutely have to (looking at you in particular, 5e) establish availabilities and exact prices beforehand. The back and forth of "how much does X cost -> I can't afford that" is the biggest waste of time when shopping.
I like to make little cards for my shops with the items on it so I can just hand them out whenever one person goes to a shop
Genuinely love to break up a combat/dungeon-crawl heavy game with some light-hearted day-in-the-life-of gameplay once in a while. Having the DM describe the lazy cat stretched across the alchemist's countertop, while some mischievious pickpocket tries to nick the rogue's enchanted dagger and the knight errant helps an elderly woman cross the street can add a lot of color to a very number-crunchy game. Picking through a flea market of random niche nebulously useful magic items, while a merchant drops hints about the next sidequest, gives you a real adventurer's vibe.
Genuinely hate having long, drawn out arguments over whether the shopkeep would have the principle material component for my most import spells or basic equipment (there's no bat guano, one swayback horse, and only sixteen arrows in a fantasy city of 50,000 people? god damn, dude). Or digging through spreadsheets to figure out how many javelins the local economy can absorb. Or bickering over whether the Charm Person spell gets us in fight with town guards. Genuinely do not want anyone consulting a series of random charts and tables to determine why we can't get a full night's rest in the town's nicest inn.
Please just make this a fun story to enjoy and not a pedantic fight over the future prospective mathematical efficiency of my stat block in the next combat.
I was in a group that were all "officers of the watch". Some idea was proposed that my character would have no reason to go along with, but rather than stop the group engaging in something fun, I say so, and follow up with "my character probably has some paperwork they need to catch up on anyway."
Our chaotic player, who has the attention span of a slightly concussed goldfish goes "wait, we have to do paperwork?" and our GM, the goddamned sadist, gets that evil gleam in his eye.
Long story short, that session we role-played the sheer amount of paperwork our last session of kicking in the door and stopping a cultist ritual (by force in some cases) would have generated.
I admire that GM, but I was almost screaming in frustration by the end.
This is hilarious. I bet the DM got out some frustration that day.
I once joined a random pick up game online. Had a session zero, vibe seem alright.
On the day we actually go to play it turns out the DM invited a bunch more people and the group was going to be 8 people. Two of these people show up late, don't even have character sheets ready. Game was advertised as queer friendly, one of them I think makes their character a transphobic joke but the guy was so awkward it was hard to make out what he was doing. Vibe is now fucked. One person quits the group on the spot.
I spend like three hours of the least inspired, boring D&D of my life. There is no hint that's it's wrapping up anytime soon. All we've done is spin our wheels trying to grab on to the quest hook, being strung along to talk to the next random generic NPC to inch us closer to actually starting the adventure and had a single combat encounter with one creature where I'm not sure anyone even took any damage.
I have to stress, I think the DM was a nice guy even if he kind of sucked at it. I liked the original group of people.
But I break when he guides us to start shopping. We haven't even started the adventure and it's about to turn into a shopping episode. I panic, I have to leave this fucking moment because I can't take it anymore. I'm desperate for an excuse to leave that wont hurt the DM's self-esteem and ruin the game for anyone who was having fun. The best thing I can come up with?
I disconnect mid sentence and act as if the internet dropped out like a bad sit-com phone gag. This wasn't even well acted, my brain died when I went to disconnect and I just trailed off awkwardly. It's still so painfully embarrassing to remember. Yet I maintain it was worth it.
Meanwhile in my games PCs regularly never buy or upgrade equipment because nobody wants to waste time in session (good!) but also refuse to just do stuff through discord during the rest of the week (bad!).
I have several shops designed and NPC staffed in the characters home town. They seem allergic to selling or buying though
When I switched from Roll20 to Foundry I discovered my players hadn't been recording half the loot I gave them and barely had level 5 equipment at level 10. I had to replace the next pile of loot with 120,000gp worth of character specific magic items to get them appropriately equipped.
You should try the item piles module for foundry if you haven't checked it out yet, it shows you in the chat if they're taking items and gold and you don't have to finagle around with manually giving them items
That was back when I was on Pathfinder, I'm on PF2e now so merchants and chests are included in the system by default.
Imagine not getting to roleplay shopping because you're a wizard and spent all your money on scribing spells. Imagine thinking that keeps you from roleplaying during anyone else's shopping, assuming that you are also present for the shopping instead of doing something else.
I can't exactly talk though, last session in Curse of Strahd, my character basically turned the session into a heist because he had the best Stealth score and there wasn't enough Invisibility spell for the rest of the party. It's a CoS game, being seen by half the encounters is basically a TPK in and of itself. But he was able to turn what was supposed to be a scouting mission into a successful rescue and robbery, so it was kind of worth it.
If it's a common item with a listed price, and you're in a city big enough to reasonably have that item in stock, just do your shopping "offline". Sometimes I even include a low-level Forge cleric in small towns so the party could do their sub-100gp item shopping. (In that case the cleric charges an extra 10% donation for the Forgetemple, which they will use to feed orphans, create farming equipment, etc...)
