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+---- Thread: Player Owned Merchants (/showthread.php?tid=23)
Player Owned Merchants - Jafin - 11-16-2008
Players who acquire enough notoriety may employ a NPC merchant to manage a store to sell or buy items for them. They are then given control over virtually all aspects of the store (detailed below). In essence, players have the ability to persistently affect the economy of Thay.
General Information
After attaining enough notoriety, a player can purchase a Merchant License from any Merchant Master in Thay. While in possession of this license, the player can begin wandering around central marketplaces, inns, or other likely areas a merchant could reside. You will then be informed once you enter a section of the area that a player-owned merchant could be placed there. However, player-owned merchants may not be within 3 meters of another NPC.
Once you have found a spot for the merchant, use the license to summon your merchant to the exact location you are standing. After the merchant arrives, you can talk to it and perform the following options:
1. Change the merchant's name, description, and greeting to customers
2. Adjust your store’s inventory
3. Provide available gold for your merchant to buy items
4. Set the amount of gold required for your merchant to return you a profit
5. Select the percent of an item’s value you are willing to pay to purchase it, provide a maximum amount of gold you will pay per item, or disable buying altogether for your store
6. Select the percent of an item’s value at which you want to sell items
7. Set the price the merchant will charge to identify items. For this option to be enabled, you (the merchant owner) will need a Lore skill rank of 15 or higher
8. Fire the merchant, at which time all inventory is lost and the merchant is dismissed. You will receive a new Merchant License at that time.
To make money, players will need to have the available balance in their store be greater than the amount required for a profit. Any profit though, is reduced by a variable percentage of fees, bribes, ‘protection money’, and taxes that the merchant must pay to keep the local authorities, thugs, and thieves’ guilds appeased. These variable costs decrease with each point you have in your base Appraise skill, and as you become more notorious. The merchant will automatically deduct these and give you the balance the next time you talk to him after having made a profit.
Player Houses and Player Merchants
Players who have purchased or otherwise acquired their own house/building can place a merchant at any location within it. If this option is used, upon placing their merchant, the player will receive a merchant sign that may be set up outside their home. The sign may be ‘talked to’ to change its name and description. In addition, once it is placed it marks the location as a map note on all player’s maps.
General Notes
-A character may only have one merchant.
-A character who is an initiate, acolyte, or member of a faction other than the Red Wizards may not own a merchant. However, a faction leader may own a merchant.
-Most non-player-run merchants in Thay purchase items between 3%-25% (with the upper limit being very rare) of the item’s value.
-Most non-player-run merchants in Thay sell items between 80%-125% of the item’s value.
-Traps may not be purchased by any store in-game. They may, however, be sold.
-Your merchant can only stock a limited number of items based on their size. For example, you can stock many more Short Swords in your store than Great Swords.
-If this size limit is exceeded by the owner adjusting the inventory, you will be notified and your recent changes will *not* be persistently saved. You will need to remove items from the inventory to get below the minimum space size again before your store’s inventory will be saved.
-If this limit is exceeded due to players selling your store items, a random number of items in your store will be automatically purchased by the system. However, you will only receive 10% of the item’s true value if it is purchased by the system. In addition, the fees, bribes, taxes, and other protection money the merchant must pay will come out of that amount, so in the end you will only end up making around 6-8% of the item’s true value if it is purchased by the system. You should be able to make more than that by selling unwanted items to most non-player-run merchants.
-A player's merchant will abscond with its stock and any gold it possesses if its owner does not talk to it at least once every 6 in-game months (just under 6 real-time weeks).
Please Note!
-If an Unlimited Buying price is specified for the store, the Purchase Percent is always considered 0%. This means that all items are purchased at their face value, and the store will pay an unlimited amount of gold for the item (as long as the store has gold to purchase it). Please use this option with caution as it could quickly wipe out your store’s funds.
RE: Player Owned Merchants - Balanor - 04-20-2015
I have updated this, per request, to specify the renaming/re-descripting options you can perform with a player-owned merchant.
In regard to the ability to using those options, I'd like to ask for point of 'etiquette' around the ability to rename a merchant. I think everyone has the commons sense not to rename their merchants something that would be considered offensive to most people, but I'd also like to ask that you take into consideration the 'immersion' of the setting when naming your merchant as well. For example, no person is going to have the name of "Joffrey Lannister - I am Thayan's Merchant". In other words, I'd like to ask that people not specify the character name within the merchant name. Just put in a normal name for the merchant, as if you were creating a new PC. If you feel the need to specify who owns the merchant, please put that information put it in the merchant's description and/or their greeting to customers.