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Re: CF: Rampant volunteerism



Making the identify skill require the player's abilities must exceed the lore
rating of an item makes sense.  The scarcity of the item (chance as random
treasure) is the perfect basis for determining an item's lore rating.  Things
that are common are easily identified, things which are uncommon are more
difficult and things which are unique (never random treasure) cannot be
identified by lore, but require the magical spell identify.

> 
>  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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