Re: CF: Rampant volunteerism

[Mark Wedel <mwedel@scruznet.com>]

Scott Wedel wrote:
> 
> The trouble with shopkeepers giving no money for cursed items is then
> shopkeeper has just identified the cursed items for the player.  So if
> a player doesn't have detect curse then shopkeeper has significantly
> helped the player.

 I see that as no worse than it is now.  Right now, a player can actually sell
cursed items for money, and the shopkeeper will still identify them.

 In most cases I can think about, knowing what the cursed item is isn't really
going to do any good - at that point, it definately is not worth anything, and
at current time, I don't believe there are any cursed items that are really
useful.

>  Thus, it could
> be argued that if someone ever comes up with an alchemy formula requiring a
> cursed item then upto 60 gp for a cursed item makes sense.

 If that is the case, then cursed items should have some inherent value, and not
be worth nothing like they currently are.  In AD&D, cursed items do have some
value - generally less than the non cursed counterparts.  Such a model may not
be bad for crossfire.

> 
> Until there is some attempt at supply and demand (decreasing the price based
> upon recent sales of such items) and a concept of town reputation then it
> probably isn't possible to solve this perfectly.

 There is a problem in that a player can get an items worth, at any time, by
examining it.  This in itself causes problems - if you figure out what the shop
will pay for it (based on cursed, real value, and so on), then the player can
get a pretty decent idea of what the item is.  If standard default information
is given (which does not match the shop price), you then have a problem that a
player has no idea what he will get for the item when he sells it.

 the above is also a problem with the supply and demand model.  If value the
player gets paid varies depending on the reputation of the player in that shop
and how much of an item that shop has, then on field value costs are difficult
or not very accurate - if sold to the shop in navar city, maybe it is x, while
the shop in scorn is 5x.


 Philip Brown wrote:
> 
> It depends on your perspective of the shopkeeper, in "real life".
> You might argue that doing an "identify" is a drain on someone,
> so the shopkeeper will generally not bother to do it, unless he is looking
> at spending some serious amount of money.
> For cheapie items, it just isn't worth the effort.

 But currently, there are skill identification methods which are not a drain. 
They are probably overly powerful, as even a moderately skilled person can
identify most of that stuff.

 Baldurs gate deals with this in an interesting way - each item has a lore
rating.  Each player also has a lore value (based on level and other criteria). 
If the players lore is greater than the items, he identifies it, otherwise, he
doesn't.

 Such a system has a nice feature in that random chance is no longer used, so
you don't need to track what items a player has tried to identify.    It also
means a low level character might be able to identify some amount of stuff, and
take the remainder to his high level friend which identifies the rest.

 Under such a system, shop keepers could be given some default lore - stuff
lower than his lore he could in theory identify and give the exact price.  Stuff
above his lore would be a different story - he could either by it for an
estimation (what he thinks it is worth, which may be a bonus or penalty for the
player), or require that the player identify it (through whatever means) before
he will buy it.

 Note that lore should not just be set because and item has a lot of magic or is
valuable - lore should probably be based much more on rarity.  A +1 high shield
of gnarg, while not incredibly valuable/useful (compared to better shields) is a
pretty rare item, and thus has a high lore

 This could actually be not too hard to do.  Each item would have a base lore
(swords might be low, while spellbooks, just by their nature, have a higher
default lore).  Then entries in the artifacts file would have a lore value that
gets added, and some other fairly simple mechanisms could be used for other
magical items (for spellbooks, add the level of hte spell to the lore, for
weapons, the magic*5 gets added or the like).  Thus, you could get some items
with a high lore because of strange combinations (which makes sense)


> 
> On the other hand, doing a "detect curse" should be a fairly minor effort,
> as opposed to a full appraisal.
> 
> contrariwise, shopkeepers might charge an "appraisal fee", for large
> items...
> 
> Or customers might be reluctant to have shopkeepers mess around with
> their stuff, if the shopkeeper ends up not buying it for whatever reason.
> What IS the normal proceedure at pawn shops, anyways? :-)

 Some of that goes to the above - there is currently no way to negotiate.

 I could certainly see shop keepers not willing to buy non identified items (too
risky), or if the player insists, buying them at a greatly reduced rate.

 Currently, most of the major shops have detect magic and detect curse tables
for a fairly low cost (10 and 25 gp respectively I think).  Since one spell
covers all the inventory, it obviously makes sense to try and store up.

 The skills of sense curse and sense magic should probably be removed - or if
they are not, the spells might as well be removed - once you get the skills, no
reason for the spells anymore.  But if the lore idea is added, then perhaps
those skills can work up to a higher lore total (for example, the player may
have a lore skill of 60, but sense magic will work on lore items up to 80). 
With this, players would need to know fairly easily if an item is beyond their
lore (in real life, the character would look at it and see they have no idea
what it is).  In terms of game balance, a player would want to set aside those
high lore items to be dealt with in other ways, and you wouldn't want to
accidentally drop one because your detect magic didn't work.
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