I took a detour from playtesting today to add something that I’ve been thinking about for a very long time: a complete re-write of the merchant appraisal system. I’m a big fan of shopping and of using the appraise skill, but the NWN1 implementation of it was really awful. Here are my criticisms of it:
- Appraise rolls encourage players to save and re-try to get better shopping statistics, especially since they are remembered from visit to visit until your appraise skill improves.
- An unlucky second roll can actually cause your shopping adjustment to get worse when your appraise skill improves, which makes no sense.
- Characters with a very high appraise skill can actually sell items back to the merchant for more than they paid for them.
- Characters don’t get a charisma-based shopping adjustment, which I always thought would have been appropriate.
I’ve just finished testing the changes that I’ve made to Sanctum v3.2 to address these issues, and I think you’ll like the results. 🙂
Yay for the new shopping system! I’ve always spend hours in just about any NWN mods shopping. This will make my time shopping more enjoyable than ever, although this means I’ll have to try and spare some skill points for appraise…
(Almost) can’t wait to play this!
Aderyn: me too. My wife teases me sometimes about how much time I spend shopping and organizing my characters’ stuff when I play. 🙂 That’s one reason why I designed the stores in Sanctum (and the play-balance) with shopping in mind.
Shopping and the appraise skill are sometimes overlooked by players, and in part because not all modules support them well. Appraise tends to become irrelevant in Monty Haul campaigns, where you’re not forced to make tradeoffs with limited resources. And if you’re making a reasonably high-level campaign, the only way to avoid the “buy low sell high” exploit is to put in a punitive markup between the default buy and sell margins, or to turn appraise skill for the stores off altogether. Builders will sometimes do that to avoid the skill’s attendant problems and complications.
I’m still tweaking the new system, but I like it enough that I’m also thinking of also putting it on the Vault as a hak when it’s done.
Sound good, Andarian. While Appraise uses intelligence as its base adjustment, I’ve always felt charisma should come into play as well. In the BG series (and IWD as well), I always made sure the person with the highest charisma score my (temporarily) party leader whilst shopping. (Queue totally superfluous “Army of Darkness” quote:) Shop smart, shop S-Mart!
NWN handles things… differently. E.g., I’ve just done a total replay of the OC – as Daniel Muth has finished his “Aribeth’s Redemption” cycle, yay. My paladin currently has a whopping 29 score in charisma, yet I get as many unfavourable or neutral reactions as a half-orc barbarian with CHA as his/her dump stat – boo & hiss, I say.
So tweaking this system is a great idea. My only worry is this: for most classes, the Appraise skill is cross-class. Will you address this issue, or will you do a complete overhaul?
(BTW – the fantastic “A Dance With Rogues” series has some great benefits for characters with a high Appraise score. Princesses with a low Appraise score will not be able to “shop ’till they drop”.)
Runeweaver: it’s really only the store opening script (gplotAppraiseOpenStore) that I’m rewriting. It turns out that all of the bad things that I mentioned (and a couple of others too) have their origin in how that script is written. Replacing it is enough to entirely change the way that the appraise skill is used in determining discounts on opening a store.
So I don’t see a need to revise the skill itself, or even the shopping discount that appraise ranks give to the player. (For anyone who’s interested, that’s 1% on the base item value per rank – down for buying, and up for selling). The roll (which I’ve removed) added a random d10 to that, which I’m replacing by adding the shopper’s CHA bonus instead. And it does that each time you open the store, without remembering these values from previous visits.
Regarding BG: I was also careful about making my best shopper the party leader when visiting shops. As you point out, though, in NWN1 the player is always the party leader. But since store opening is scripted (almost always from a conversation), there’s no reason in principle that a store can’t be opened using a companion’s skills instead — effectively letting that companion be the shopper. All it takes is a little scripting, which I’ve done — so you’ll see that feature in the v3.2 update as well. 🙂
I realize that appraise is cross class except for thieves and bards, but Sanctum does encourage players to take some cross-class skills. I think that even players with zero ranks in appraise will like the new system, though. And the new “Can you shop for me?” companion option will help unskilled shoppers from getting taken too badly at the market. 🙂