Has the "barter" stat ever been done well in an RPG? It's always pretty fricking useless from what I've seen. How would you make it actually useful?
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Has the "barter" stat ever been done well in an RPG?
Make it useful in speech checks like Underrail and NV did.
In New Vegas most Barter checks have a Speech equivalent so it's basically useless. The fact that you can break the economy easily even with a Barter of 15 makes the "get better prices" part pointless, too.
It's useless in both games and trading in Underrail is the definition of pointless tedium.
Trade is one of the best skills in m&b2.
M&B lets you have a actual economy to fuel your warband, and have USEFUL HIGH END SHIT you most likely can't afford in entire playtroughs.
Even more so if you decide to companionmax
Trade is well done in M&B2, except for how Smithing completely ruins the economic balance of the game. But Trade itself is a remarkably useful skill yea.
I thought trade sucked because the value of goods get buttfricked the second you sell like 3 items, which in turn made worshops completely nonfunctional. My playthrough was pretty recent too.
What?
Get a companion with max crafting and you basically gain infinite money.
it's not about the money, you can buy towns and castles right under the nobles ass with maxed trading
in short you win the game by buying up whole Calradia without sieging/defending s single castle or town
I always seek to buy Sanala first (4 villages attached, never runs out of food, good prosperity since it is never sieged)
Bc economy in games is fricked
This. I like how Kingmaker just did away with barter as a skill since it doesn't actually do anything besides adjust prices for stuff and how often does barter come up even if it is a skill check compared to persuasion/speech checks.
Turn barter into an active skill
>Walk in store
>Smile and wave get you 2% discount.
>Talking about the weather or joking about your purchase, 5% discount with a 35% chance of the shopkeep having a bad day and this being -5%.
>Knowing the shopkeeper and asking about their family, 10% discount
Press X to be a pleasant person.
Barter should unlock extra stuff to buy, like some unique things
>Can now barter with everyone
>Can buy everything in their house and on their person.
>Can just buy the quest item that they were refusing to give you through dialogue.
Well i was kinda thinking about unique parts of equipment like that endless sack in Baldurs Gate 2
to make Barter meaningfully different from Steal the player should be able to buy things they can't steal, such as real estate
or people
maybe titles as well
Titles are usually earned through actions not transactions.
Making a generous donation to the crown is often among the most appreciated actions a wealthy commoner can take.
You know nothing of how royalty works lol.
do you?
>Titles are usually earned through actions not transactions.
This is when the warrior aristocracy is still in charge
>Making a generous donation to the crown is often among the most appreciated actions a wealthy commoner can take.
This is when the ~~*merchant caste*~~ has taken over
that is how it is in Arcanum. Can I buy thaT?
>barter should let you defeat the final boss
bravo soiyer
Oblivion has perks so that you can buy/sell any type of item with any type of merchant. This also enables you to buy some unique items some merchants have.
In addition to this, you can later invest in stores to increase the amount of gold they have.
It is kind of fascinating how there were so many rpgs made in the last 30 years that have this skill and yet it's useless in all of them. At the same time devs keep adding it to their rpgs, thinking THIS TIME, they will be the ones that make it work. It just keeps happening, over and over again. Why is that? Why is it such a cursed skill?
I woner if there are people who do merchant run. Interesting choice
I've seen people roleplay merchants in Bethesda games, especially with mods.
I'm going to be surprised if TES 6 doesn't add the possibility of setting up shop and hiring someone to run it, selling items you donate and generating passive income. Otherwise there's already features supporting it: hiring mercenaries for protection, buying crafting supplies and then selling what you produced, going out and exploring the world with your guards to collect rare ingredients, supplies, or powerful artifacts.
>I've seen people roleplay merchants in Bethesda games, especially with mods.
Bethesda games would be great for this if they didn't do everything they can to force you into combat or shitty dragonborn quests.
I ain't exactly the target audience I guess, but I would love it if more games would let you de-emphasize combat and trade instead.
Do you know of any good merchant mods?
Bethesda is literally too dumb for living economies. Having different prices in different regions due to scarcity is a foreign concept to their developers.
I guess economy isn't really their focus, but it's kind of baffling considering how they're praised for world building in general.
>Years ago I used Skyrim Unbound, which is a configurable alternative start mod, which helped for non-dragonborn characters.
Thanks, that one in particular sounds great. It's time to finally do the deep dive on Skyrim mods, I guess.
>Requiem overhaul also had craftable bombs of sorts for alchemists
I'd like to be able to avoid combat in general (not to completely neuter the element of danger, but have it de-emphasized) but that still sounds like a cool addition.
>I'd like to be able to avoid combat in general (not to completely neuter the element of danger, but have it de-emphasized) but that still sounds like a cool addition.
Yeah, I think bombs could be a good back up plan for situations that can't be solved with allies, invisibility potions or other indirect means. In any case, I hope your playthrough ends up going well.
>In any case, I hope your playthrough ends up going well.
Thanks anon, and for the interesting discussion too
It's a foreign concept to RPG devs. I can't think of a single one where that's the case.
It's probably not an RPG but buying low and selling high in Mount and Blade could have been really fun if there was risk involved.
>I've seen people roleplay merchants in Bethesda games, especially with mods.
Like which? Last time I checked there's not a single mod that varies the prices depending on a supply and demand simulation in any of the TES games. Yes, there is an economy mod for Skyrim called Supply and Demand but all it does is set new prices for different items at different cities. They're still fixed, so once you know X sells Y for 100 g in Whiterun, and you can sell it for 200 g in Markarth, the most effective way to get money is just fast travel between the two cities and grind gold in a manner of minutes. That's not very fun or organic.
NTA
Supply and demand simulation deepens the complexity and makes a world feel more dynamic, but it's not really necessary for roleplaying a merchant in an RPG. Maybe I'm a shitter, but I never cared much about that element. 'X city doesn't produce Y good, therefore Y good fetches a higher price' is enough for me without the prices needing to change dynamically, at least outside of a dedicated trading game. The city is going to need more of Y good eventually unless they start producing it themselves so it's doesn't negatively impact my immersion or my fun if the prices stay static.
Even just a simple randomness variable would make me happy. Each region having a different scale for certain groups of items (say Markarth selss and buys ores and metals between 10-30% cheaper than elsewhere) would make for a much more fun economy.
I just wanna run my own caravan from town to town and defend it from random bandit attacks, damnit.
>I just wanna run my own caravan from town to town and defend it from random bandit attacks, damnit.
Me too, anon.
Now imagine being able to conduct trade between provinces with different goods, flora, fauna, etc.
Goods have volume, employees need wages, some goods degrade over time, others are lost if their containers take damage, wagons are destructable and packmules are skittish, big shipments are more likely to face more organized bandit attacks, prices fluctuate and your trade impacts them (so once you trade in big enough volumes you can't just go back and forth), middlemen lords and such attempt to charge tolls (options range from paying them, smuggling, negotiating with them, bribing the toll clerks, etc). Someone make this.
I'd fricking love this shit. Especially once you get to a point where you can buy real estate and have a passive income. You start small, buy a stand at a market place with one guy, then you invest in a proper general store and eventually you run brothels and plan shipping routes. Preferably with just enough chances of failure to keep the player interested. Shit like passive income can quickly spiral out of control and just break the game. Have big investments matter, too many frick ups and you will lose your business, lots of staff that you need to pay etc.
How far does FO4 go with its settlements? From what I remember, there's are stalls and passive income, you need to gather people to work and that takes resources in the form of food and defence, attacks occur in the settlements. Maybe mods could take it further.
Not going to be a merchant simulator, but I'm interested in trying it out now.
Terribly boring. Eventhough it technically has caravans, there's frick all depth to it. Don't get me wrong, the settlement feature is fun as hell but it's mostly a creative endevour.
If you wanna make the most of it, I recommend Sim Settlements 2, a mod that turns the settlement system into Sim City lite. It adds way more economical dynamics and even lets you build proper caravan outposts. Also there's a shitload of quest content to do that rivals that of the main game.
Well, it's not like there's a lot of options to choose from lol. I'll take what I can get. I'll go with that mod, it sounds good. And thank you for recommending it.
(Cont, I guess)
Although I do take your point that it removes any necessity to pursue other routes, if you can just keep farming the same one. It helps to have some incentive to branch out, and having prices fluctuate is a good way of doing that.
It's complicated to balance, depends on many things. It's pretty easy to plan on paper, but then the player ends up with too much money, gets access to OP things making the game trivial. Or they don't have a reason to spend gold, because they get everything from somewhere else. And if you limit things to only be purchasable, the rest of the game becomes more boring or frustrating. Or players find a way to break an otherwise well thought out economy..
It's an interesting challenge, making it all work.
One way to deal with it would be to make a high merchant skill come at the cost of other skills (or require you to have guards for your inventory) so you can't just make money and hoard it, you have to hire helpers or otherwise invest your earnings to keep making more.
But then you're getting into a different kind of game.
That's a good approach. Bethesda games allow the player to choose their skills, so it's up to them. There's no hard limits that would step on the toes of other players who may prefer more freedom.
I don't know mods. I believe one good fit for a merchant character would be to take the role of a supporter, supporting hired guards with purchased/crafted items or just magic.
Combat will probably always be the meat of the game, since it provides gameplay for most of the characters. It's best to somehow figure out a way to deal with those encounters appropriately for more niche characters.
>Combat will probably always be the meat of the game, since it provides gameplay for most of the characters. It's best to somehow figure out a way to deal with those encounters appropriately for more niche characters.
Yeah, and it can be a shame sometimes. I always get caught up in the setting and wish I could explore it in more depth than just hitting things and doing quests. But I understand I'm in the minority and it'd be a waste of resources to build alternative systems.
Do you have any ideas for alternatives? It would be interesting to hear.
I've found gathering supplies in the world and crafting to be a nice change of pace from dungeon delving. Like looking for ingredients and mines and ore. I've also collected books and just went sightseeing.
>Do you have any ideas for alternatives? It would be interesting to hear.
For incorporating it within the combat-heavy framework that's already there? Personally, I'd just give more resolutions for quest options, so you can buy people off or hire someone to do your a job for you. Maybe have a simple economic system and the ability to organize caravans. The crafting systems in the Elder Scrolls games really lend itself economic gameplay, you could maybe have clients who want something specific, or supply contracts.
For making a whole new game with trading as the focus? Well, the same kind of thing but with a more in-depth system, I guess. Hiring helpers and guards and sourcing materials, maybe the option to buy influence and have political sway. There are games that do that sort of thing, like The Guild series, but they don't quite scratch that itch of being able to play a travelling trader in an immersive world, dealing with the same obstacles in an alternative way.
Good suggestions. Certain items selling for higher prices at certain cities would give more incentive for a merchant to travel.
There are misc quests in Skyrim that I completed by buying those required items. Maybe encountering suitable quests is also a problem. Some mod for misc quests could also help, if you're interested in trying out this merchant playthrough.
>Some mod for misc quests could also help, if you're interested in trying out this merchant playthrough.
Yeah, I've only played vanilla so I'll probably check out some mods.
It's possible to just ignore the main quest, even though the dragonborn stuff tries to push itself on you really early.
I did try to play an alchemist merchant once, and my biggest problem was that buying houses was gated behind combat quests. I just ended up sucking it up and making him a combat mage, but selling loot wasn't nearly as fun as selling potions.
Years ago I used Skyrim Unbound, which is a configurable alternative start mod, which helped for non-dragonborn characters.
Requiem overhaul also had craftable bombs of sorts for alchemists, you might want to take a look at that, or mods adding a similar feature.
In game inflation is the answer, friendo
NTA but it could be done if locations/cities have a hidden tag that states "this city purchases x at a lower price than usual but purchases y at a higher price" kind of like a character feat in RPGs but applied to cities. Like, say Markarth has easier access to dwarven steel so purchasing dwarven weapons and armor there should be cheaper but because other metals are rarer in the region, the hold would have to purchase it at a higher price. In practice, it would at least address the problem of whatever scarcity the city/region is facing in a very basic way but it doesn't address the problem of having a continuously evolving economy.
>complicated to balance
I consider it to be a world-building problem because if the devs have full control of the setting then the rest of what you said shouldn't be too hard to address.
>player find a way to break an otherwise well thought out economy
I mean if the player wants to do it, why not? I'd rather leave it up to the discretion/restraint of the player to play as intended or break the game.
I'd be fine if the shops just sold what their region produced.
Like, if I know there's dairy farms around the town I want to be able to buy lots of milk. Alchemy ingredients as well. It doesn't matter much to me if Markarth sells dwemer items for 20% off, I'd just like it that if I ever wanted to buy a lot of dwemer related items I could buy plenty there.
In Skyrim there was an ebony mine infested with giant spiders. Would have liked if clearing that mine out made ebony available nearby since you would have been able to mine some yourself anyway so this would just make things easier.
>It doesn't matter much to me if Markarth sells dwemer items for 20% off
It could be anything really, it doesn't just have to be buying/selling stuff for cheaper. I was just using that to illustrate. Its like those tags that some city building sims have in their games but applied to RPGs.
>there was an ebony mine infested with giant spiders
Yeah, in the Rift. Its a damn shame that once you cleared it out it has no impact on the war effort and they just respawn again. I'd rather they do a smaller world but with more outcome variety like Kingmaker but even the world there were just instances rather than one continuous open world.
World size is comparatively easy. Interesting decision trees and branching pathways is extremely difficult by comparison. In other words, it's a lot easier to make a large world than a small one populated with lots of intricate content. And Skyrim's isn't even big.
Skill is not a problem per se, the problem is that mid-late game money becomes irrelevant.
>gamers like being kicked in the dick
>let's continue kicking them in the dick because we have no unique ideas of our own
imo
how is it useless if you like buyin and sellin shit
most people that play dark souls rip through the content until they are done
they don't care about exploration
In underrail taking mercantile is optimal even in the hardest difficulty
Because it is always "Persuade but only involving money" as an entirely seperate skill
because you're dealing with a computer and not a person
Barter should just be merged into the persuasion/speech skill if a game has both, their basically the same thing anyways
Mount and Blade Bannerlord, trade skill allows you to buy towns/castles
you can buy up the entire continent without waging a single war
Just because it doesn't help in combat or have unique utility like speech and science, that doesn't mean it's not useful. Being able to afford better equipment earlier helps.
And I don't remember if this is the case in Fallout, but skills like this can let you break some games by infinitely reselling at a higher price than what you initially paid.
I do wish it was MORE useful or reactive, however. Same with skills like gambling and survival.
Literally every rpg
>Has barter skill
>Max barter skill reward is to sell items for 100% of their value
This is why.
It doesn't really work any other way. If you went above 100%, you could buy something from a vendor and sell it right back at a profit. Rince and repeat until you exploit an npc from all his money in one swift con.
That is very smart. I don't know how to plan around that. But I've always felt like if I choose to be a Merchant I should have literally OP amounts of gold and have to use expensive items to supplement my power. I'm even fine if that trivializes huge parts of the game. Like I said, the final reward for barter being 100% sell price is fricking lame.
>100% sell price is fricking lame.
I don't see why that's a big issue. You end up filthy rich anyway, few percents more would only affect your perception of the usefulness.
Like you mentioned earlier, a decent way for non-combat characters (physical, magic, stealth or otherwise) to still participate in combat is through a hireling system. As a rich merchant character, you could afford to more crewman (through charisma perks) and equip your entourage with higher quality gear to do the fighting for you, but also use your speech skill as a party buffer. Whether it's passive bonuses like an aura that gives your party members buffs (think bard) or perhaps your charisma gives you perks and unique combat commands (think DnD battle master), or you could stand in the backline and drop performance enhancing potions on your crew (think alchemist). Or you could give shady merchant characters a "parley" skill where mid combat you can bribe a hostile NPC to turncoat and fight for you. There's so many ways to make a non-fighting character still viable in a mostly fighting oriented game like TES, and Bethesda just didn't bother, and made everything available for illusion mages. Yawn.
Unless buying prices are above selling prices, which they are in Bethesda games. In Skyrim even at max speech skill, I think you still buy items at 150% of their base value, I think.
The first Fable literally lets you do that, you just have to make sure to buy and sell everything in bulk because of how supply affects price. Honestly I never had a problem with that since otherwise grinding money in Fable is a pain, it almost feels like you're meant to do it.
The problem is how the economy works in game, you need to have a supply and demand system, the price needs to vary based on the local economy, selling weapons to a weapons trader might no be a good idea if you want maximize profits, you have find a npc/settlement where you can maximize the profits.
its useful in fallout
just because your minmax autist brain thinks its not "optimal" doesn't mean its useless
barter is fricking broken in fallout 1 tho
By making it possible to buy and sell goods and make a profit.
Most RPGs just have static prices for all vendors regardless of inventory or location. Even copying babies first trading game's market system would help. If you could be a traveling merchant and make money it would make pacifist runs seem less moronic as you would have a mechanic to acquire resources to expend to avoid combat rather than magical jedi powers.
It was useful in Morrowind. With a moderate but not low mercantile skill, you could buy a bunch of arrows from a merchant, sell them back for higher, buy them back for cheaper, then sell them for higher again, until you depleted the merchant's gold.
Generally speaking, I think barter overlaps a bit too much with speechcraft. Both are about convincing someone to see things your way, but while speechcraft is useful in a multitude of situations, barter is only applicable when buying/selling stuff.
>speechcraft is useful in a multitude of situations, barter is only applicable when buying/selling stuff.
Depends on quest design. If you can afford having additional options for both skills as a solution to a quest, have them both. Merging the skills into one makes quest design easier, and that skill more viable compared to combat skills in a combat heavy game.
>but while speechcraft is useful in a multitude of situations, barter is only applicable when buying/selling stuff.
This is a problem with speechcraft, not mercantile.
barter is good if it hard to get money in a game, but if you can get rich in 3 seconds it just trash
How beth games ever entered into the discussion relating to a useful barter skill just shows how much of a joke this RPG board is. Bethdrones are casuals who have played nothing else and continuously talk about their casual dog shit "RPGs".
Did you even read the discussion? No shit they're casual games, the entire discussion around them is about wishing they had more depth, and talking about ways that could be accomplished.
The fact that you came into this thread just to swing your dick around and didn't even get your facts right makes you seem like more of a casualgay than anyone else here.
Real gamers aren't as obsessively insecure about their gamer cred as you are, and can allow themselves to enjoy casual games once in a while.
Because its a classical simulation v.s. design problem. Nobody is going to plug an entire set of systems for economics and trade into the game they're devving unless it's a core gameplay feature, which it isn't going to be for RPGs because that becomes really difficult to balance. So at best you have weak simulationist elements and the rare design element of having a dialog skillcheck for a quest or something. It's never going to become actual gameplay outside of the tycoon genre.
*laughs in Victoria 2*
Imagine being so illiterate you think bringing up tycoon games is a refutation of my point that RPGs are not tycoon games and RPG devs don't want to make tycoon games.
>Caravanner
>Tycoon game
Might want to learn the definition of a word before you start using that word.
Might want to bring up games people actually play instead of sophistic definition 'tisms.
You're the subhuman throwing around tycoon games like it's some kind of own.
It's not as if RPGs copy mechanics from other games. Fallout 4 used a different FPS dev team to make the FPS gameplay good. Why can't they hire one person to make one of your aspects of the game good?
>Why can't they hire one person to make one of your aspects of the game good?
Because that element doesn't exist in a fricking vaccuum? And FO4 threw out 90% of its RPG elements to make the gunplay more streamlined. You're getting mad that you're being told there is an entire genre of the game you actually want to play.
>Because that element doesn't exist in a fricking vaccuum?
Then why the frick would you bother adding a whole skill fixed around a mechanic you don't want to bother making good?
Just delete the barter skill and nobody can complaining the skill is poorly implemented.
>Just delete the barter skill and nobody can complaining
>nobody can complain
Anon..
>Then why the frick would you bother adding a whole skill fixed around a mechanic you don't want to bother making good?
Because it is a holdover from TTRPGs where all design is implicitly on the DM/GM and all simulation is in the rulebook. When you have to actually design the gameplay to work on its own without theater of the mind and days/weeks between play sessions, that system breaks down.
I agree with you that Barter skills should just be cut out of most RPGs because they do nothing but act as time/resource sinks and aren't engaging, but if you suggest slaughtering a sacred cow people get the 'tismus.
So RPGs again ruined by DnD the worst TRPG
All TTRPGs have the same problem when being translated into vidya you fricking goober. Fallout's barter skills and systems are not better than TES's for having been based on GURPS. You've never played a single tabletop game in your life though so what do you know?
I have played multiple campaigns of GURPs and one of DnD. And no Fallout doesn't actually use GURPs. Or GURPs adapted system. It only loosely copied the main attributes and not even properly.
Fallout's entire design philosophy is based on GURPS even though they switched systems, every conceptual element of the game was inspired and informed by GURPS. Tim Cain and other Interplay staff have been very open on this subject for decades. That's not really up for debate.
Hilarious attempt to sidestep getting called out for making a moronic reductive point by making up an elaborate falsehood though. Keep posting so I can keep laughing.
>Fallout's entire design philosophy is based on GURPS even though they switched systems,
Is that why none of the attributes affect each other. There is no real advantage system. Skills are based of percentage. So on and so forth. I could go on but you are quite clearly a pseud.
>Tim Cain and other Interplay staff,
They wanted the license, they didn't get it.
>Hilarious attempt to sidestep getting called out for making a moronic reductive point by making up an elaborate falsehood though.
You are the pseud who decided to claim I never played any TRPGs. Have you played GURPS?
>Fallout's final gameplay engine which does not use GURPS is somehow evidence that GURPS never influenced the design of the game at all
>Rather than evidence of them intentionally changing things to avoid getting fricking sued
>This somehow relates to the claim that all RPGs with bad mercantile skills are products of D&D, a game nobody has mentioned
What in frick is lil bro yapping about?
>What in frick is lil bro yapping about?
The argument was already over, but internet arguments never end in a reasonable manner
There's really nothing to argue about the Fallout GURPS thing with though, it's very heavily documented especially by Tim Cain. Yes they changed everything mechanical because the licensing fell through, they're legally obligated to do that by IP law. But the entire setting and concept was Cain et al asking, "What can we do with GURPS that no other TT system can do?"
>There's really nothing to argue
That's what I'm saying
NTA if that isn't obvious
DUDE imagine if they hired one person for every aspect, and then they combined it all into a perfect game?? How cool would it be?
If one man using flash can do it and make not one but two great trading games that could be classified as RPGs(Caravanner 1 & 2). Why can't the "authors" with multi million dollar budgets and years of "experience" and dev time do it?
This is all predicated on there actually being nonconsumable items worth buying, which there unfortunately usually aren't, but I'd make the disparity between the selling and buying price for items increase the greater the items value is. At the lower levels you're selling hordes of early game gear to buy mid game gear, whereas in the end game you're selling all the end game gear you don't need to buy the end game gear you actually want. The buy sell ratio being the same for high and low value items doesn't work when you go from selling low value items to buy mid value items to selling high value items to buy other high value items.
Age of Decadence has uses for barter if you play ~~*merchant*~~ in service of Commercium. Highly recommended
it will always be a useless stat outside roleplay because "making your transactions more favoring to you" is irrelevant when you will always have some economy breaking loophole in any RPG that you can just meta game and abuse instead
It would be useful if there was ever a need for money. Most games just give you the best gear but even if you could buy good gear, you'd only need to buy it once. There'd have to be some upkeep costs that make it more useful, like how sim games sometimes let you automate the trade to build a small fleet.
If it's a system like Skyrim, one thing would be divorcing some of the perks or whatever from the big pool. Training up speech and getting more benefit not so much of an issue. Spending a limited number of perks on the tree is something else.
The weakness of barter is limitless encounters that you can grind on which makes +money meaningless.
Wasteland 3 for example has limited amount of enemies in the game including random encounters. So total loot is capped. Then they have barter which makes you raise what you can earn in total. And money is tight in this game so it is noticable.
A way to counter this is to give the player an incentive to avoid combat altogether (earliest DnD/Chainmail had this where most encounters were actually detrimental). Or if you must fight you make wasting ammo/people/potions i. e. resources or weapon/armour durability more noticeable, so restocking and repairing put a natural bump into the kill and loot grind.
>Wasteland 3 for example has limited amount of enemies
I like this approach a lot. I have to give WL3 a try sometime.
I've tried to play wasteland 2 a couple times but every time I get filtered by the party creation screen
it expects me to make long lasting gameplay choices when I have absolutely no concept of meaningful breakpoints.
It's like fallout character creation but even worse since it's a whole party and agility+intelligence isn't so obviously broken compared to everything else
>it expects me to make long lasting gameplay choices when I have absolutely no concept of meaningful breakpoints.
Yeah, the break points thing is a bit weird. Once I knew them I basically made 3/4 of my character the same, just with different types of guns and trinkets. But without knowing them it really sucks when your heavy armor guy ends up with 0.9 movement speed and takes 2 action points to move 1 space.
Wasteland 3 is a bit better in that you get attribute points pretty often and can repec but boy does the tutorial level suck if you have 7 action points and you brought a gun that takes 4 to use. But at least that happens during the tutorial so can be fixed quickly enough with a restart.
Roll it in with Speech.
>I can charm you into giving me the shirt off your back, but I can't get you to sell it to me for a discounted price
Frick off.
Stat-bloat is the worst shit in RPGs. It's complexitivity without comprehension.
Just roll it in with speech, and have some perks in the speech skill-tree relating to buying and selling.
My father was a used car salesman. Don't tell me that shit doesn't require charisma and an ability to sweet-talk.
Rolling it together is how Fallout (1 and 2) Speech became the super skill it is. Early version of the game had dozen sub-sections of talking to people - Persuade, Intimidate, Bluff, Seduce, etc. with different type of check for different type of situation, but it was deemed "too complex" and got all merged into almighth Speech. Barter was originally split into Haggle and Salesmanship.
It's not too complex. It's just muddled horseshit.
If you can persuade someone, you can bluff them. That's what a bluff fricking IS. Persuading them that you have a hand you do not have. Seduction is just persuasion with some extra effort in your appearance.
And intimidate can easily be rolled in with a stat check. Strength or agility or any other body check.
There's no reason for them to be separate. As I said, complexity without comprehension. There is no comprehendable reason why I could persuade you to trust me, but not persuade you to trust my bluff. There's no reason why I could be able to seduce you and let me frick you, but oh, you won't sell me a drink for a better price. Are you seriously suggesting that I'd have a harder time getting a cheaper drink than having you suck my wiener just because I specced into seduction?
Frick off.
>let's have 5 different fighting style skills, on top of +12 weapon skills and divide combat up into physical, stealth and magic
>different varieties of speech and barter? Nah roll that shit into the same stat, who cares
>I can persuade you into betraying your God
>I can't buy your cassock for a discount however
I summed it up better here.
c**t, if you're good at speaking you're good at selling.
The only reason you and shitwits like you think otherwise is because you're so uncharismatic that the concept is completely alien to you. Just as physical fitness is, apparently.
Turns out buddy, that someone really fricking good at throwing a knife isn't always gonna be the best at donning some plate armor and swinging a claymore around.
And it turns out that dedicating yourself to a scholarly pursuit is not the same as dedicating yourself to an athletic pursuit.
So it makes absolute sense for different fighting styles to be separated. They are entirely different from one another. The same way biology and cybernetics are sciences, but entirely different.
But persuading and bartering? The frick do you think bartering is? It's fricking persuading, dipshit.
You want complexity in speech?
Make it affected by Charisma and Intelligence, and have any intimidation checks be affected by stats and skills related to combat.
Because that's the shit that actually affects someone's "speech and barter" in reality.
Have an inherent speech stat, and have its benefits assisted heavily by charisma and somewhat by intelligence, because people are more likely to listen to a beautiful person than an intelligent one, and intimidation being related to how likely they feel your character will behead them, perforate them, or incinerate them.
the barter skill also implies knowledge of in-world economics and the actual value of items, that's why it isn't just speech or charisma. speech 100 barter 0 is going to expertly convince an npc to rip them off
You need to make gold an actually scarce resource rather than just a progress meter.
Considering in Fallout a high enough barter skill can have you trade back and fourth in a manner where eventually you can clear out a merchant leaving them nothing but bottle caps would suggest that it's implemented well enough to get the "jist" of what bartering is.
However if you mean bartering outside of game mechanic manipulation. Then yes it's pointless. It's almost an entirely circumstantial skill in the real world dependent on so many factors that trying to turn it into raw math is practically impossible. Comparatively game economies aren't subject to anything that actually makes real economies function - there's no labour cost to anything, scarcity is purely artificial and there's only one entity that contributes to its function (the player)..Finally it's not demand driven.
Probably the best way it could be implemented is if games had NPC's actively generate demand for various goods and the game had a pseudo-random time lag of production to market. But it's alot of pointless code to put in just to let the player go "please get more bullets in" to a vendor.
Merge speech and barter. Dialogue options for non-violent resolutions should be transactional and require a resource or a favor.
Skyrim did that and it sucked.
Why? I just think it needs to be an option more often in quests. I can only remember few occasions, one being able to pay some mercenaries to frick off instead of fighting them.
It sucked because speech was barely a skill to begin with, there are barely any opportunities to use it and even if you fail the speech check, it doesn't matter anyway.
Mercentile is the same, you have no impact on the prices since they took out haggling from Morrowind/Oblivion, it's a completely passive skill.
But as I mentioned in an earlier post, given the two systems were actually expanded upon by B*thesda, why are combat skills allowed to be split up into dozens of skills but god forbid we actually diversify mercantile and speech?
>But as I mentioned in an earlier post, given the two systems were actually expanded upon by B*thesda, why are combat skills allowed to be split up into dozens of skills but god forbid we actually diversify mercantile and speech?
You mean a post that got a response which you ignored?
You mean the argument that got refuted by
which you conveniently ignored?
Speechcraft is invariably either boring or broken. Barter is kind of the same way. Any game design where barter becomes useful (e.g. by placing hard limits to gold availability) makes barter essentially become mandatory. Any game design where speech is actually useful (like, say, bypassing major fights) makes it hilariously broken.
>makes barter essentially become mandatory
Not necessarily. A game where you could either get 1 potion, or 2, if you invested in barter, just means you have a more items available to help you offset frick ups.
>A game where you could either get 1 potion, or 2, if you invested in barter, just means you have a more items available to help you offset frick ups.
That's a game where barter is useless. If I don't need the extra potion to survive, I would be much better off investing points into a combat skill. If I do need the extra potion to survive, I have no choice but to invest in barter.
If gold is so scarce that I can't simply just grind, exploit, or otherwise cheese the game in order to obtain the same level of monetary wealth that barter would provide, barter becomes essential in any instance where usage of a shop is also essential. If I can - why bother with barter? Barter can only ever be a superfluous luxury or game making/breaking.
>why bother with barter?
Because it's faster and more effective?
If I can kill an enemy in 10 hits with my current fighting level, why would I bother leveling up my fighting skill only to kill the same enemy in 9 or 8 hits?
>Because it's faster and more effective?
Sure, if the decision was made in a vacuum. But stat points are a limited resource and gold practically never is. I end up saving more time and making more gold by investing into combat skills than I ever would have investing into barter. To make the investment into barter useful, you either had to make stat points so ubiquitous that your character's a master-of-all-trades (aka the modern TES/Fallout 'solution'), or you have to make gold so scarce that, again, barter ends up becoming mandatory if buying from shops is mandatory.
You seem to arguing from an entirely clinical and mechanical standpoint and seem to forget some people like to roleplay in a roleplay game, they don't care if a skill or perk or background isn't mathematically minmaxed to be useful in every situation or even in the grand scheme of things.
>thread is about why barter is mechanically useless
>well what about roleplaying???
I gave OP and the discussions reasons why barter is the way it is from a mechanical and game design standpoint. Maybe you should read the thread before contributing next time. 🙂
no