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Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Merchant Pricing, but were Afraid to Ask
by Balidil Anla'shok
Charisma and Faction As far as vendor prices are concerned, factions can
be broken up into three categories. Dubious or worse, apprehensive,
and indifferent or better. If your faction with the merchant is
dubious or worse, of course, the merchant simply won't sell to you
(I have something here that %Rs use..let me see...it's the EXIT,
now get LOST!), or will even try to kill you on sight. If you're
at apprehensive, the merchant will sell to you, but is going to
charge you an arm and a leg unless you can get your charisma WAY
up there. Lastly, any faction indifferent or better will get
exactly the same prices for the same charisma. Doesn't matter if
you're ally or sneaking so as indifferent as can be, it's all the
same to the merchants. "Greedy" Merchants
The Pricing Roller Coaster When many players have been buying from or selling to
a merchant, he seems to get it into his head that "Hey, I'm so
popular, I can charge better prices now!". Unfortunately, "better" in
this context means "better for the vendor". I'm still carrying out
research on this issue, but merchants that will normally give best
prices at 104 charisma and indifferent faction can go at least as
high as needing 134 charisma to get best prices, even with ally
faction. It seems that, with less charisma than that needed for
best prices, a set amount is added to the price you would normally
get, i.e. whether your charisma is 120 or 50, a vendor might add
3sp to the price you would pay from a vendor who hasn't been getting
so much action. The actual amount can vary widely. Stacking and Prices When buying or selling items by the stack, the cost can
be a bit more precise than the single item cost times 20. This can go
either way, making it more or less efficient to buy or sell by the
stack. One classic example is water, and other common items that are
bought for 1sp. Since the real cost is 1sp and 1/2cp, even though the
per item cost is rounded off to 1sp, when you buy a whole stack at
once you pay 2gp 1sp, a whole 1sp more than buying them one by one.
On the other hand, with my Iksar's rather low charisma, he gets
shuriken for 1sp 3cp each, but if he buys a stack, he only pays
2gp 5sp 9cp, and saves a whole copper!
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