Animation Lead on Wanderstop! She/Her & Transgenderrific! Past: Radial Games, Gaslamp Games



this is a minor thing but I think a lot about how RPGs with persuasion systems that let you talk down people's prices basically never reward any form of generosity, even when it would make sense in context (not haggling down desperately poor people for example). It's always treated as "you didn't try" or "you're the sucker", whereas aggressively trying to get freebies out of everyone you meet generally gets you xp. Really creates a specific and perhaps unintentional tone for the player character, imo


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in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:

I hadn't thought about it much, but you're right. Sometimes a quest in a game gives you the option of just saying "A good deed is it's own reward," but that never requires a check of any kind.

I generally think bartering skills are a trap, since most RPGs that have such things also give you more than enough money and treasure that it's not important to min-max your trades. But there's some kind of appeal to it, I guess. Not a type of character or player I'm interested in being.

Definitely agreed with most barter skills. Underrail had a cool approach to this where higher Mercantile (their barter skill) unlocks more and better things in shopkeepers' inventories.

You're right!. Some games will give you a classic yes or no question when picking up a quest and then give you four responses:

Yes.
Yes. [Lie]
No.
No. [Lie]

And that ethos should carry forward to other types of interaction, too

It's an interesting point. I reckon a lot of it comes down to the fact that the vast, vast majority of games don't think about how much money other characters have as a meaningful idea so much as treat them as vending machines.

If I remember properly, Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale had an odd version of this.

The optimal strategy was to be generous... at first. Each character had a hidden relationship stat, and the fastest way to raise it was to sell them items below their value instead of haggling to sell above the value. However, the reason you did this was because once a character had a high relationship stat, they're budget increased, which meant you made more money when you did jack up the price.

However, even then, you still had to consider your audience. A little girl or an old man, even at max relationship rank, does not have the budget of an adventurer, and so even when up charging, you still had to consider their circumstances. Of course, all of this was hidden information, so without a guide, many players may not have played this way. Still, it seemed relevant to bring up.