First, the mood of the villagers overall (moreso tied to reputation but if you read the responses it is represented as mood) already affects not only their willingness to trade with out outright, but a bad mood will increase the villagers valuation of their goods vrs your own, while a good mood makes them more generous (they value their goods less than yours slightly).
That's just the effect of your reputation on trading prices. Sure, you can say bad rep gives the villagers a "bad mood" when they see you but that's a rather flimsy way of putting it because mood usually refers to day-to-day fluctuations which is how I interpreted your original comment. If that's not what you meant then I misunderstood. The effect of your reputation however is an experience value of your previous interactions with that village, if you've been helpful to them then of course they will have a friendlier disposition than if you've been a dick, which makes sense to affect prices but like you said it already does so the discussion is moot. In any case, there is nothing random about it nor should there be, we're not talking about random mood swings but learned experience of the interaction between player and village, which the player has entirely under their control.
If you really thing traders being moody contradicts a supply and demand system then you haven't thought about it much.
Really? I mean....
really?! Even considering a potential misunderstanding between us, "moodiness" effects have
nothing to do with a supply and demand system...
Furthermore, the random prices from village to village would simulate the demand portion of the supply and demand. Sometimes people just want certain items more than other, even of the same variety. For example, the villagers in that area might want elk meat more than stag meat, or vice versa. I don't see how this is contradictory.
Supply and demand is
the fundamental law of economics, there is nothing random about it. Why would you try to remove one of the factors and randomize it? In this particular example, if a village is short on food but has a lot of mouths to feed, prices for food go up. If a village has a large stack of boards and not much use for them right now because there is no construction happening, prices of boards go down. If a village has only one particular kind of meat, prices for that meat go down, prices for other meat go up (also modified by the abundance of food overall). This can easily just be put on top of a system of fixed prices, because these are just multiplications with various modifiers and none of those are random. At what point does it make sense to randomize anything? Imagine you are playing in such a game, where the prices of items are governed by dice rolls... you are then of course just completely at the mercy of the dice when it comes to trading, if one price in a village is particularly bad, do you move on to the next and reroll? How often do you do this? Is the price fixed for one village forever or does it eventually reroll, if so with what interval? Is it even going to be rerolled for every potential transaction? Do you then wait for it to reroll or just accept whatever is offered? Don't you see that this removes any brain or skill on part of the player? You always just either accept whatever the dice gives you or try to improve, which would mean nothing more than re-trying. Did you ever go through the stat screen in the character creator and frantically re-roll your stats because you just weren't happy with any of the rolls? Now add this for trading as well, another huge frustration level coming from all the reroll attempts. If your goal is to frustrate the player to the point where they uninstall the game and never give it another look then this would be a great idea indeed. We need sensible, realistic mechanics, that actually require some thinking and can be adjusted to, not yet another altar to RNGesus. And the whole supply and demand thing has already been mentioned by others and I agreed it would be great to have
IF we first get a solid base, a functioning and fun to use trading system, that this builds on (and of course, none of it is done randomly....).
While you may be discussing a trade with individual people, you are still trading with the group. I'm sure the village elder, or somebody else who's worldly and experienced might have something to say about you trying to trade a few handmade clubs for a spear for instance.
Yes. What's your point? Obviously spears have a much higher value than clubs.
*sigh*
Well I'm sorry that my suggestion didn't add the magic bullet you seemed to be looking for, but sustainable changes happen in small increments. The change I was focusing on was the lack of an item value being displayed to you. I understand that this is annoying, and I agree that this is annoying specifically because these items do have exact values.
Similarly, you seem to be shooting down everybody else's suggestions for improvement and feedback as well, which is a quick way to doom an idea, and prevent it from gaining any traction. Obviously if you disagree with somebody or something they've said in principle then you should let everybody know however. But as an example, turning down the suggestion of a trade blanket because it doesn't mend the "fractured" trade system completely doesn't help your suggestion gain any momentum.
OK perhaps I didn't make myself clear enough there: I did think that your idea of getting to know the value of an item based on some skill (personally I think it would make more sense to call it "Appraisal" because "Bartering" refers to the actual act of the trade but whatever) is a good one. Obviously, this requires the display of item values in some fashion though, which is one of the big points I originally made so I would be all for that. With my criticism I was referring to the second part of that quote where you made another suggestion of how bartering should work in particular,
but also to a lot of the other comments by other users that asked for features that IMO come
on top of a sound foundation for a trading system that needs to be put in place
first. So, while part of that criticism was directed at you, it was more of a general statement which I see now could have been misunderstood. I still wasn't attacking you personally but if this offended you somehow then I apologize.
What I explicitly
will not apologize for however is calling an idea bad (and explaining why, which I believe I so far did every time, including the "trading blanket" thing you mentioned again) if I feel that is the case, which of course goes for your ideas too, and also not for trying to keep this discussion on point - that is, a good
basis for a trading system. I appreciate every contribution to this discussion, including yours, and every time I have heard an idea I thought was good I have said so, not just when I think ideas are bad, but most of those good ideas were nice "bonuses" that should come
after the massive issues with the current system have been fixed (by the way, this also goes for the whole appraisal thing which you are not the first to mention). A lot of people, including you, were putting the cart before the horse here. In fact, all of that stuff should be part of another thread. My goal with this thread was to address trading as horrible as it is right now and why, and give some suggestions about how to fix it.
However, you need to explain how somebody without the internet and without real world experience would know what these items are actually valued at, and yet you have not explained how this is possible.
"Without real world experience"? It's fair you ask for an explanation I suppose so I'm going to give it to you but I'll ignore that part because it just makes no sense. So, story time:
Let us consider a young man living in Finland in the early middle ages, some time between 800 and 1000 A.D. - let's call him Timo. Timo has just turned 16 years old, he is a young man - he may not have much experience yet but he is not a baby or a child either. In fact, back in those days people had to face the responsibilities of adulthood a lot sooner than people centuries or even millenia later might have to. It was common for people of his age or even younger to already be married and have children, although Timo himself is/has not. For all intents and purposes, Timo is an adult.
Timo, not being some kind of wild child, was of course raised by his parents and his tribe. He was taught a lot of things, including tracking, hunting, fishing, hideworking, some herbal medicine, getting a feeling for the weather and the seasons, how to know when not to walk on ice, how to best try to get out if you do fall through, some handcrafts like making staves and javelins and much more, including of course more mundane things like language and cultural customs common in the area. Timo was by no means a master in any of these trades of course but his tribe made sure he got a good start in life and he wasn't a lazy good-for-nothing either.
Timo has since left his home to travel the lands on his own. The particular reasons for him being on his own or his motivations, what he intends to accomplish, do not matter here. Timo decides at one point to go through his pack and create an inventory of what he has with him. He pulls out an item - it is a squirrel fur, decent quality, a very common item among the Finnish tribes. Timo remembers when some foreigners visited his village a few years back, they offered exotic items in return for furs, which are very much sought-after in the southern lands where the animals do not have such rich pelts like here in the north with its harsh climate. Timo listened to their stories, and as he understood, many other peoples use precious metals pressed into some sort of discs as the basic medium of exchange for trades. There is no such thing here in Finland though, he couldn't imagine why anyone would create such items that have no practical use at all. The closest thing to it however would be these squirrel furs like the one he is holding in his hand right now, as they are so common in Finland and their value is low enough but not too low to be used very widely in any sort of trades. Many values of other items are thus expressed as a certain number of squirrel furs. [side note: "oravannahka" is Finnish for both "squirrel fur" and a colloquial term for "money" still used in Finland even today.]
He pulls out another item: an arrow, very standard make, a straight, thin piece of wood carved from a branch with some feathers at the back to stabilize flight and a head made of a sharp piece of rock, skillfully tied to the shaft with a cord. Another very common item among the Finnish tribes. He knows that an arrow and a squirrel fur are of the same value, as he has seen them exchanged 1:1 in trades many times when he was young.
The next item he examines is his hunting knife. A very useful tool but not as easy to come by because as he well knows in Finland iron-working is not yet as established as in other parts of the world, tools like this are therefore often brought in by foreign traders like the ones he just thought of earlier. The hunters and woodsmen of his tribe loved to use them and therefore traded for them, and so he knows that a price of about 20 squirrel furs would be fair for such an item. Of course, a particularly high quality version of a knife would command a higher price, 25 or even 30 skins would be fair for those.
Another very important tool in his pack was his woodsman's axe, and it was also so popular among his people that he knew its value to be the same as that of a hunting knife, meaning 20 squirrel skins for a decent quality version.
Then he pulls out his fishing rod - now this is another thing entirely. A fishing rod is so easy to make that its value is not high at all, in fact one squirrel skin would most likely even get you two fishing rods. This doesn't mean it is useless however, it's just that getting one of these is much easier than even hunting a simple, harmless animal like the squirrel and Timo has often witnessed the people of his village making these without much effort.
Speaking of skins and hunting - Timo thinks back to all the hunting trips the men of his village used to do, which were frequently celebrated upon a successful return. They brought back skins that could be used for clothing or trade and meat that would keep the village fed. He remembers, that a single pelt of an Elk, if it wasn't too beat up, was mentioned to be even a little more valuable than a decent hunting knife, or of about equal value than a high quality one - that is to say, around 25 squirrel pelts. One particular type of fur, the lynx fur, however, he remembers especially well because this was considered to be the most valuable type of fur you could obtain: it is worth the same as two full Elk furs and still almost twice as much as a bear fur, even though those furs are a lot bigger and heavier than just one lynx fur. This is because lynxes have such rich, thick and soft pelts that everybody would prefer them over the pelts of the other animals and they are also harder to find and hunt. The winter variant of this fur, if tanned by a skilled hideworker, would be considered one of the most valuable items one could ever hope to obtain, potentially worth more than one hundred of the small squirrel skins or four high quality hunting knives. The foreign traders would be more than willing to give you a high quality piece of jewelry made of a precious metal like silver for it - or perhaps two or three made of bronze. Returning with a lynx kill was always special cause for celebration in his village.
Now Timo may not know all the values of every single item he could ever hope to come across by heart, but his experience is already enough to make very well-founded estimates. If he were to collect some more experience, however, he would become even more confident about the value he owns and that people would not take advantage of him in trades. For now though, he just continued on his way.
See? No internet required and still a very plausible story for this setting. You can expand this with your idea of an appraisal skill but it's not stricly necessary because, like you said, sustainable changes should come in small increments. Do you disagree?
Now it's your turn: if I were to turn on UrW right now and load my character, then open up the inventory screen, it would look something like this: masterwork northern bow - 3 lbs, northern spear - 7 lbs, masterwork handaxe - 3 lbs, masterwork hunting knife - 2 lbs, 20 fine arrows - 2 lbs, all my clothing yadayada... a partially eaten dried elk cut, 0.7 lbs, a wooden bowl partially filled with elk stew, 3 lbs etc. etc. (forgive me if any of the values are off, i can't actually load the game right now)
Now I leave the inventory, take a look at the penalty screen to the right: it says "110.8" lbs or something like this, which gives me a penalty of 11%.
I open up my skill screen: among others, it says tracking: 83%, bow: 92%....
So let's see, my character knows at any point the exact, and I do mean
the exact weight in pounds of all of his inventory combined down to its first decimal place. He knows the weight of individual items with less accuracy because for some reason those values arrive in his mind rounded to the first significant digit but it's still pretty accurate - and even if he wanted to know precisely, he could always just drop everything except that item and magically get the information because like I said, somehow he always knows the exact weight of his whole inventory down to the first decimal place. He knows that every kind of item, disregarding any use or wear/tear effects, always have the same weight. He knows that on a scale of 0 to 100 where 0 is completely unskilled and 100 is a grandmaster, his archery skill is currently exactly at 92, his tracking skill exactly at 83 and so on. He knows every time these values improve and he knows roughly at which values he started his journey when he was 16 years old. He also knows, that at his current condition due to the weight he is carrying his skills are reduced by exactly 11 points on that scale. He also knows, if he were to receive an injury due to a fight or even just some frostbite, that his skill would be reduced further and by how much exactly depending on the injury. He knows the exact effect of starvation on him currently, if he suffers from it at all, and how much it would reduce his skills further. He knows exactly how long he can do a particular job before his exhaustion reaches this mystical value of "100%", assuming he suffers no other penalties, and adjusted accordingly if he does, at which point he would be forced to take a break. He knows exactly, down to the minute, how long he needs to rest for his exhaustion to go back to zero. He also knows his body's current nutrition level at all times. Heck, he even always knows his speed in km/h (without decimal places) at every possible moment. His name is Floki Kaumolainen... he lives in Finland some time around 800 A.D... the fanciest tool he has ever seen was a heavy crossbow....
Now, you tell me which one of those two scenarios (Timo or Floki) makes more sense and why.
Please tell me how someone without the internet, without precision scales or even crude scales for that matter, without any kind of measurement instruments at all would have access to this kind of information? And of course in particular, how in light of this and Timo's story earlier the idea of a simple display of trading values is so outrageous? And, seeing as how this seems to fall into your original question, "how would the character know item values", how do you suggest to remedy this obviously absurd flood of information we get? Are you going to uninstall the game because of this, I mean, this is obviously completely ridiculous...
Sorry for the sarcasm, I just can't resist here.
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