A Land Far Away

I was thinking on this a bit over the last couple of days and have decided that the simple "opposed appraise check" as the determination for an agreed upon price isn't so great.

Unfortunately, I really don't have a better idea so I thought I'd bring it here.

I can't find anything in the PHB or DMG upon which to base it on in the PnP rules but I figure a few things come into play when buying/selling:

First is a fair appraisal of the item's value ---- I think PnP is something like a DC12 appraise check for a common item.

Then comes a more complex interaction in which one person tries to convince the other that it in their best interest to "sell it for less" or that one "really can't beat this price".


This to me sounds like a "bluff/sense motive" type of interaction.

So the best I can think on is

a) appraise check (unopposed) to determine base price
b) some use of both the merchant's bluff/sense motive vs the same on the player's side to settle uopn a price.



Comments?

Complete Adventurer is the first introduction of skill use to bargain for prices. Here's what it says...

Haggle: You can use the Diplomacy skill (NWN replaces Diplomacy with Persuade, they function basically the same way) to bargain for goods or services, including those of magical nature. When discussing the sale of an item or service, you can attemp to lower the asking price with a Diplomacy check made to influence NPC attitudes (see the sidebar on page 72 of the Player's Handbook). If you manage to adjust the vendor's attitude to helpful (most vendor's begin as indifferent), the vendor lowers the asking price by 10%. Add the vendor's Diplomacy check modifier to the DC needed to achieve the result. For example, to adjust the attitude of an indifferent vendor with a Diplomacy modifier of +3 to friendly, you must achieve a result of 33 or higher on your Diplomacy check (a base chance of 30, +3 for target's Diplomacy modifier). If you worsen the vendor's attitude, the vendor refuses to sell anything to you at this time. The DM is the final arbiter of any sale of goods and should discourage abuse of this option if it is slowing the game down too much.

Action: Haggling requires at least 1 full minute, as normal for a Diplomacy check.

Try Again: You can't retry a Diplomacy check to haggle.

Here's everything you need to know about the Diplomacy skill: http://www.d20srd.org/srd/skills/diplomacy.htm

Awesome .........

persuade ...........................i like it

Appraise has its place as well, though.

If you don't know the value of something, you can haggle the storekeeper to double his original offer and *still* get ripped off.

ALFA2's skill we be called diplomacy, regardless of what NWN2 calls it.

As for the rest of this, it may not be possible without making our own merchant system... But, we'll see.

I like the haggle scenario above but yes I have to say that appraise should also be used too. Maybe appraise could be used to determine if the asking price is a fair one. Anywhere from say 95% to 100% and then you could try to haggle if you figure out it is higher than 100%.

I've been playing the baldur's gate series again recently and It really does have an awsome system in place, much better then what ALFA has with NWN1 with regards to item costs and what you get in return for selling them.

The value you can buy or sell an item for can vary immensley.

I understand NWN2 will have some form of reputation system in place that is similar to how the baldurs gate reputation system worked but more extensive to the point where your reputation will vary with different factions.

For example: your charisma modifier will give you a bonus to your reputation with everyone.

(Diplomacy skill could obviously be used to boost reputation values in stores too)

Getting caught stealing from some nobles house in waterdeep will reduce your reputation with the local guards and also the general shops around the city.

With a now low reputation your sell and buyback rates in the local smithy's and supply shops will be affected perhaps even to the point where they may not even do business with you anymore.

However! The local thieves guild thinks your awsome. They have fences and dodgy geezers who stand on street corners at night who will move stuff on for you and therefore give you a good price on your swag.

They won't do business with well thought of paladins of course, but that doesn't matter since those decent types can buy stuff from the local smithy for less than he sold it to them, with thier well standing rep.

Also, a massive feature is stock takes. If you come in with 200 masterwork daggers over an afternoon of farming some over wealthed spawn. Fair enough you might get 500 gold a piece for the first two but then the next few only get 300 a piece and then eventually your maybe getting 1 gold a dagger cos the shop really doesn't need that much of one thing.

(P.S. I'd love to see gems used like currency too and tradebars something that could be just used like a 475gp value giant coin directly in shops. Hell knows if that kind of stuff is possible though)

Well we know that cp's are not in the game but what if we made
1cp=1nwn2 gp
1sp=1nwn2 gem of alfa sp
and so on.
How hard would this be to implement? The advantages would be tremendus to the player base and make everything that much closer to pnp.

Stormseeker wrote:How hard would this be to implement? The advantages would be tremendus to the player base and make everything that much closer to pnp.

Already planned, and in the works. No one is scripting it currently, but it shouldn't be TOO hard if I get around to it.

*grins* It's not that important, your work load for this project is already above and beyond the call.