A Land Far Away

Does appraise skill have an effect on merchant prices?

Some servers implement scripts on some of their merchants which allows appraise to alter the behavior of merchants.


DMA and TA haven't revisited the policy in a very long time; the last time they did, they were not the current ones, and the word was "It shouldn't (because appraise is your ability to determine value, not your ability to negotiate)"

I currently content with leaving this to the HDMs of individual servers. Whatever price variations this creates allows for some element of randomness to our world. e.g. a potion does not cost exactly the same in every shop in every town. So long as price variation does not allow for "trading" of commodities btwn servers (which it currently does not) this is not a problem.

iirc 3.5 D&D "haggling" rules were primarily based on Diplomacy checks with a synergy for 5+ ranks of Appraise.

dergon darkhelm wrote:iirc 3.5 D&D "haggling" rules were primarily based on Diplomacy checks with a synergy for 5+ ranks of Appraise.

Shockingly, that seems to make a lot of sense.

Oh, but it does.

I actually had a high-int bard who combined the bard skill buff, silver palm feat, and skill focus: appraise all contributing to his ability to make better cash slanging loot.

It worked, but I've noticed it varies-- you get a dice roll each time you visit the shop. If you go back later on, sometimes the store resets, along with any random magic shit it was offering, you get new appraise roll.

Although I understand the idea that diplomacy would be the thing, haggling ought to be its own skill so I like the way nwn2 handles this. The differnce isn't much until you're selling bigger ticket items I don't think, but Raheem was able to get an extra GP or two from various sources-- when he made a good roll, anyway.

The first response was that it does-- on some servers, some of the time.

The merchants established while Ayergo was HDM of BG generally use appraise, which tends to bleed over into any merchant established by copying/editing one of those. Likely no small part of why your BG-based merchant PC saw results. Even so, it's not a thing you can rely on-- and if you want to make a large investment in appraise, you should go in knowing as much.