Offer and Bartering

[nauta]

So, a neat trick from help offer:

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  To exchange one item for another, say a shield for the sword:

  > offer shield sword


And it even works, provided the item you are offering is less valuable than the item you are trying to obtain.  (I haven't played with it much, but this seems to be the case.)

This is so awesome for tribals and those who wish to avoid pesky obsidian coins.

But, there's a limitation: you can only offer one item for one item.  But often you'll come in with a load of hides or stones and want something of equal value to a set of items.  So the idea:

1. Allow multiple items to be offered, e.g., offer item 2.item 3.item 4.item desired_object.

If this is already the case, the syntax isn't obvious, since when I tack on a third argument, it thinks that is my specification of a vendor.

Sub-idea:

2. Allow 'haggle' skill to work with all of the above.  (As far as I can tell it doesn't.)

Anyway, I imagine it'd be a non-trivial coding change.  Just saying: there's at least one player here who would find this awesome.

[Riev]

I would love if you could even "offer <x> <amount>" and when you've gotten it up to, say, 200, you can then offer it in exchange for that 180 piece of equipment you ACTUALLY want, rather than offering it for coin, then using the coin all over again (though this would give a much cheaper 'cost' in terms of coins).

There's been a few times I wanted that shield real bad, and offered my leggings and bartered them up over the cost of the shield, but then it didn't matter. So I bartered, but the vendor had no coin! Woe!

[Dar]

If you do not mind using coins. You could still do something like that.

Shopkeeper has 40 coins
Shopkeeper sells a shield for 160 coins

You know you can sell your leggings for 200 coins.

You buy the shield. The shopkeeper now has 200 coins.
You offer the leggings and barter until it's 200 coins and then sell them.

You've sold the leggings for the cost of 40 sid and a shield.

[Hauwke]

Yeah but it rarely works out that way so well.

[Chettaman]

The bazaar [NESW]
People are everywhere and they smell like sweat and dust.

A vendor is here selling goods.

>offer vendor

(Offer or whatever command you choose would bring up a list of things in your inventory like so...)

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What would you like to offer?
A) A lamp
B) 149 coins
C) a strip of dried meat
D) A lump of soap
E) A hunk of dried dung

and then you choose what you want offered and the system does the math and comes up with a sum. For example; a lamp and a lump of soap.

>A
After offering a lamp a vendor says he'll give you 10 coins
>C
After offering a strip of dried meat and a lamp a vendor says he'll give you 13 coins.
(and if you want to barter those things down... you can and the offer you made will be given a temporary tag of sorts called "trade")
>Offer 10 trade
A vendor refuses your offer.
or
A vendor will give you 12 coins for your goods.

and I guess you could do the same thing for buying or buying /and/ selling, but it'd be more complicated with "AA's". Or numbers would be easier, I guess, but I'll have to think more on how to do it.