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About this mod
A price mod aiming for a vanilla+ yet more balanced trading experience, using a number of features to reign in economy-breaking issues.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
Smarter Harder Barter is a price mod which aims to create a vanilla+ yet more balanced trading experience. The basic purchase price formula remains the same as the vanilla game (as patched by the Morrowind Code Patch's 'mercantile fix'), but this mod adds a number of features which attempt to mitigate potentially economy-breaking issues, increase roleplay consistency, and make prices and mechanics more intuitive.
Version 2.0 is a complete overhaul of the mod, with heavily rewritten code and a huge expansion to the feature list. I strongly recommend you stick with the default configuration, as these features are designed to work in concert with each other, and I've put a fair amount of effort into tuning them. That said, all of the features below can be selectively disabled in the MCM, and many can be tweaked to your liking. Some of the formulae are finicky, so if you wish to change things, I've attached a (slightly) cleaned-up version of the spreadsheet I use to help me tune this mod, to use as an aid.
Purchase Price Adjustment: When you gain skill in the vanilla game, your prices while buying decrease, and your prices while selling increase. However, you eventually reach a point where these two numbers get too close to each other. After this, your purchase prices will actually increase to stay above your sales prices, meaning they will get worse for you as you gain further skill. This is unintuitive, feels gamey, and doesn't really make roleplay sense.
This feature rebalances sales prices, making them mirror purchase prices. For example, if you're able to sell an item for 80% of its base price to a merchant, you'll now pay 120% to buy the same item. While this increases purchase prices, typically by 20-50% of an item's base price, this has a number of benefits. Prices are now much more intuitive, as merchants will only sell items above their base price, and they'll only buy them below their base price. In addition, increasing your stats will now always result in a reduction in purchase price, never an increase. This also eliminates paradoxical behavior like getting better prices by lowering disposition. It is no longer possible or desirable to game the system in this way.
Logarithmic Sales Price Rolloff: In the base game, finding certain very expensive items, especially early on, can be very disruptive to the player's economy. This feature leaves items priced below a cutoff value (chosen to exclude most mundane items) alone, while gradually reducing the value of items above that. This is done using a logarithmic function, so the largest decreases will be seen by the most expensive items.
This feature has multiple difficulty settings. On Standard difficulty, prices are untouched below 300, with minor price reductions seen from 300-400. At 1,000, the reduction is about 50%. Beyond 5,000, expect prices to be 1/5th to 1/10th of normal. On Harder difficulty, the cutoff starts at 250, and expensive items are worth about 20% less than Standard. On Harderer difficulty, the cutoff is 200, and expensive items are worth 50% less than Standard.
For those of you who value a roleplay rationale for mods, I'll offer what I think is a reasonable explanation. Mundane items are probably traded in high enough volumes, and with a fast enough turnover, that merchants in Vvardenfell are readily willing to buy them for resale with a thin margin. However, high-end enchanted goods and expensive artifact items (comprising almost all items above this mod's cutoff value) probably have few potential customers both able and willing to pay their sky high prices. As such, merchants have to price in the lost opportunity cost of investing a lot of money into an item which likely won't sell quickly and may need to be heavily discounted to sell at all.
Logarithmic Purchase Price Rolloff: A second logarithmic function applies to buying items, though this uses a much higher cutoff value of 5,000, meaning it will not apply to most purchases. This is primarily a fairness mechanic, intended to make it possible to buy back extremely expensive items from merchants while suffering only a reasonable loss (thousands versus tens of thousands). This also boosts roleplay consistency with the mod's logarithmic sales price rolloff, as if these items are truly so hard for merchants to sell at full price, it makes sense for you get a steep discount too.
Haggle Revamp: The most problematic element of Morrowind's price system is haggling, by which I mean the mechanic which lets you manually adjust your price offer. Even at middling character skill levels, players reach a point where they can easily sell items for more than they can buy them for, allowing them to create money out of thin air. Unfortunately, haggling is also hard to ignore, as the proportional price difference while using it is very large, and it's the only way to raise your Mercantile skill outside of paying for training. Vanilla haggling is also partially RNG-based, which is an added frustration for some players.
Given the severity of the balance issues at play, I chose to rebuild the game's haggling logic from scratch. This revamp does significantly decrease the power of haggling, but I believe the result is a more pleasant and intuitive system to use. To start with, haggling now obeys the same rules as the rest of this mod: even with haggling, merchants will only sell items above their base price and only buy items below it. As a result, it gets harder to haggle prices up or down as you get closer to an item's base price. For example, somebody with lower barter skills might be able to haggle their price from 40% to 44% of base price, resulting in a 10% overall increase. Meanwhile, somebody with peak barter skills might only be able to haggle their initial price from 90% to 92%.
This feature is tuned such that it's still always worth it to increase your stats, when one factors in both base prices and haggling. And while the proportional price change from haggling is much smaller now (typically from 2.5% to 15%), this also means players are much more free to ignore this mechanic without losing an enormous amount of economic potential, if they don't enjoy engaging with it.
For the sake of quality of life, randomness has been removed from haggling, meaning there's no success or fail dice roll. Merchants will now simply accept or reject a price, based on your skill and how reasonable the offer is. If you have the requisite stats and can remember your maximum haggling margin for each merchant, something which requires continued experimentation as your skill rises, that's enough work to justify the monetary and experience reward.
The XP reward system for haggling has also been rebuilt. Amounts have been adjusted to compensate for the lower haggling margins and lack of RNG, with the overall progress rate tuned to be somewhat similar to the base game for players who use the haggle mechanic. For those who don't like haggling, the minimum Mercantile XP has also been dramatically increased. It's still much slower advancement than haggling (typically about 5-10% as fast), but you now get marginal progress for buying and selling items without haggling. All of these XP rewards also now partially scale based on the base value of items traded, meaning there's no incentive to spam a large number of small transactions.
Faction Bonus: This feature offers better prices when shopping at vendors from factions you belong to. To compensate for the relative ease of joining factions, the bonus starts small at rank 1 and grows with additional rank, ranging from 7%-25% at ranks 1 through 10 with default settings. Like the rest of this mod, this bonus is tuned to keep purchase prices above base price and sales prices below it. It is also much more powerful for characters with lower stats, providing a significant bonus if your base prices aren't very good. This provides a balanced roleplay-based alternative to raising your barter skills, to help balance the increased difficulty of this mod for characters with lower barter skills.
Harder Creature Barter: By default, creature merchants like the Creeper (the scamp merchant) and mudcrab merchant do not possess a mercantile skill and do not have a disposition score. This causes them to bypass vanilla price calculations and buy items at full base price, which can be economy-breaking for those who enjoy using those merchants. This feature detects creature merchants and assigns them stats for the purpose of price formulae. To balance their high gold amounts and buy list, they have become shrewd negotiators with formidable stats. Compared to regular merchants, their stats are tuned to pay out roughly 35% less to player characters with lower barter stats and 25% less to characters with very high barter stats. This leave these merchants with some utility (due to their high gold amount) for players who enjoy them, without them necessarily being the best choice for selling all items.
Mercantile Adjustment: In the base game, most merchants have low mercantile scores, usually in the 10-20 range. This is a big part of why so many of them are pushovers mechanically, and for several NPC's whose primary career is being a merchant, their mercantile scores do not make roleplay sense either. This feature boosts these numbers to more realistic levels. Using default settings, 5 mercantile becomes 25, 25 becomes 40, 50 becomes 58, etc. The bonus gradually diminishes with higher NPC skill, with boosted and base game stats converging at roughly 80 mercantile. This setting only adjusts Mercantile for the sake of the mod's internal calculations, not the NPC's actual stats, so no lasting changes are made.
Forced Base Stats: This feature forces the mod to use the base stats of both the player and merchant, rather than their fortified or drained stats, for the purpose of price calculations. This still factors in the Personality bonus from The Lady birthsign, though. This feature is intended to reduce the power of combining menu pausing and high magnitude, low duration stat-boosting spells.
Recommended Mods: Here are some economy-related mods which I enjoy.
Silver Tongue: This mod is a great overhaul to the use of Speechcraft, and I quite like it.
Realistic Repair: On top of overhauling the item repair system, one function of this mod randomly lowers the durability of equipped gear that NPC's drop, which you can tweak to your liking. Since cost scales with durability, this can be used to significantly reduce your income from looting dead NPC's.
Wares: This excellent mod greatly expands the number and variety of items you get from merchants, though in a way that's lore and roleplay-friendly.
Poison Crafting: This great mod adds support for poison, but it also contains some really positive enhancements to the alchemy system in general.
Installation: Install as normal with your favored mod manager. Version 2.0 now has a plugin, which I've checked for dirty edits, and you can set it to load last. The plugin only changes one thing: it sets the Mercantile XP reward for Haggling to 0, which allows the mod to have full control over Mercantile XP.
Requirements: MWSE. You can download the Morrowind Code Patch and then MGE XE to get it, if you don't have it. You can also update MWSE using MWSE-Update.exe in your Morrowind directory, if you haven't lately. This mod will not work with OpenMW.
Thanks: Special thanks to mort. Harder Barter served as the basic inspiration for this mod, and I built this on top of the original's code. Also thanks to wisp for checking over my code and giving me pointers. I learned a lot! And thanks to you, for checking out my first mod!
Permissions: You can freely do whatever you want with this code. I would appreciate a thanks and a link to this mod, if possible.
Version 2.0 is a complete overhaul of the mod, with heavily rewritten code and a huge expansion to the feature list. I strongly recommend you stick with the default configuration, as these features are designed to work in concert with each other, and I've put a fair amount of effort into tuning them. That said, all of the features below can be selectively disabled in the MCM, and many can be tweaked to your liking. Some of the formulae are finicky, so if you wish to change things, I've attached a (slightly) cleaned-up version of the spreadsheet I use to help me tune this mod, to use as an aid.
Features:
Purchase Price Adjustment: When you gain skill in the vanilla game, your prices while buying decrease, and your prices while selling increase. However, you eventually reach a point where these two numbers get too close to each other. After this, your purchase prices will actually increase to stay above your sales prices, meaning they will get worse for you as you gain further skill. This is unintuitive, feels gamey, and doesn't really make roleplay sense.
This feature rebalances sales prices, making them mirror purchase prices. For example, if you're able to sell an item for 80% of its base price to a merchant, you'll now pay 120% to buy the same item. While this increases purchase prices, typically by 20-50% of an item's base price, this has a number of benefits. Prices are now much more intuitive, as merchants will only sell items above their base price, and they'll only buy them below their base price. In addition, increasing your stats will now always result in a reduction in purchase price, never an increase. This also eliminates paradoxical behavior like getting better prices by lowering disposition. It is no longer possible or desirable to game the system in this way.
Logarithmic Sales Price Rolloff: In the base game, finding certain very expensive items, especially early on, can be very disruptive to the player's economy. This feature leaves items priced below a cutoff value (chosen to exclude most mundane items) alone, while gradually reducing the value of items above that. This is done using a logarithmic function, so the largest decreases will be seen by the most expensive items.
This feature has multiple difficulty settings. On Standard difficulty, prices are untouched below 300, with minor price reductions seen from 300-400. At 1,000, the reduction is about 50%. Beyond 5,000, expect prices to be 1/5th to 1/10th of normal. On Harder difficulty, the cutoff starts at 250, and expensive items are worth about 20% less than Standard. On Harderer difficulty, the cutoff is 200, and expensive items are worth 50% less than Standard.
For those of you who value a roleplay rationale for mods, I'll offer what I think is a reasonable explanation. Mundane items are probably traded in high enough volumes, and with a fast enough turnover, that merchants in Vvardenfell are readily willing to buy them for resale with a thin margin. However, high-end enchanted goods and expensive artifact items (comprising almost all items above this mod's cutoff value) probably have few potential customers both able and willing to pay their sky high prices. As such, merchants have to price in the lost opportunity cost of investing a lot of money into an item which likely won't sell quickly and may need to be heavily discounted to sell at all.
Logarithmic Purchase Price Rolloff: A second logarithmic function applies to buying items, though this uses a much higher cutoff value of 5,000, meaning it will not apply to most purchases. This is primarily a fairness mechanic, intended to make it possible to buy back extremely expensive items from merchants while suffering only a reasonable loss (thousands versus tens of thousands). This also boosts roleplay consistency with the mod's logarithmic sales price rolloff, as if these items are truly so hard for merchants to sell at full price, it makes sense for you get a steep discount too.
Haggle Revamp: The most problematic element of Morrowind's price system is haggling, by which I mean the mechanic which lets you manually adjust your price offer. Even at middling character skill levels, players reach a point where they can easily sell items for more than they can buy them for, allowing them to create money out of thin air. Unfortunately, haggling is also hard to ignore, as the proportional price difference while using it is very large, and it's the only way to raise your Mercantile skill outside of paying for training. Vanilla haggling is also partially RNG-based, which is an added frustration for some players.
Given the severity of the balance issues at play, I chose to rebuild the game's haggling logic from scratch. This revamp does significantly decrease the power of haggling, but I believe the result is a more pleasant and intuitive system to use. To start with, haggling now obeys the same rules as the rest of this mod: even with haggling, merchants will only sell items above their base price and only buy items below it. As a result, it gets harder to haggle prices up or down as you get closer to an item's base price. For example, somebody with lower barter skills might be able to haggle their price from 40% to 44% of base price, resulting in a 10% overall increase. Meanwhile, somebody with peak barter skills might only be able to haggle their initial price from 90% to 92%.
This feature is tuned such that it's still always worth it to increase your stats, when one factors in both base prices and haggling. And while the proportional price change from haggling is much smaller now (typically from 2.5% to 15%), this also means players are much more free to ignore this mechanic without losing an enormous amount of economic potential, if they don't enjoy engaging with it.
For the sake of quality of life, randomness has been removed from haggling, meaning there's no success or fail dice roll. Merchants will now simply accept or reject a price, based on your skill and how reasonable the offer is. If you have the requisite stats and can remember your maximum haggling margin for each merchant, something which requires continued experimentation as your skill rises, that's enough work to justify the monetary and experience reward.
The XP reward system for haggling has also been rebuilt. Amounts have been adjusted to compensate for the lower haggling margins and lack of RNG, with the overall progress rate tuned to be somewhat similar to the base game for players who use the haggle mechanic. For those who don't like haggling, the minimum Mercantile XP has also been dramatically increased. It's still much slower advancement than haggling (typically about 5-10% as fast), but you now get marginal progress for buying and selling items without haggling. All of these XP rewards also now partially scale based on the base value of items traded, meaning there's no incentive to spam a large number of small transactions.
Faction Bonus: This feature offers better prices when shopping at vendors from factions you belong to. To compensate for the relative ease of joining factions, the bonus starts small at rank 1 and grows with additional rank, ranging from 7%-25% at ranks 1 through 10 with default settings. Like the rest of this mod, this bonus is tuned to keep purchase prices above base price and sales prices below it. It is also much more powerful for characters with lower stats, providing a significant bonus if your base prices aren't very good. This provides a balanced roleplay-based alternative to raising your barter skills, to help balance the increased difficulty of this mod for characters with lower barter skills.
Harder Creature Barter: By default, creature merchants like the Creeper (the scamp merchant) and mudcrab merchant do not possess a mercantile skill and do not have a disposition score. This causes them to bypass vanilla price calculations and buy items at full base price, which can be economy-breaking for those who enjoy using those merchants. This feature detects creature merchants and assigns them stats for the purpose of price formulae. To balance their high gold amounts and buy list, they have become shrewd negotiators with formidable stats. Compared to regular merchants, their stats are tuned to pay out roughly 35% less to player characters with lower barter stats and 25% less to characters with very high barter stats. This leave these merchants with some utility (due to their high gold amount) for players who enjoy them, without them necessarily being the best choice for selling all items.
Mercantile Adjustment: In the base game, most merchants have low mercantile scores, usually in the 10-20 range. This is a big part of why so many of them are pushovers mechanically, and for several NPC's whose primary career is being a merchant, their mercantile scores do not make roleplay sense either. This feature boosts these numbers to more realistic levels. Using default settings, 5 mercantile becomes 25, 25 becomes 40, 50 becomes 58, etc. The bonus gradually diminishes with higher NPC skill, with boosted and base game stats converging at roughly 80 mercantile. This setting only adjusts Mercantile for the sake of the mod's internal calculations, not the NPC's actual stats, so no lasting changes are made.
Forced Base Stats: This feature forces the mod to use the base stats of both the player and merchant, rather than their fortified or drained stats, for the purpose of price calculations. This still factors in the Personality bonus from The Lady birthsign, though. This feature is intended to reduce the power of combining menu pausing and high magnitude, low duration stat-boosting spells.
Notes:
Recommended Mods: Here are some economy-related mods which I enjoy.
Silver Tongue: This mod is a great overhaul to the use of Speechcraft, and I quite like it.
Realistic Repair: On top of overhauling the item repair system, one function of this mod randomly lowers the durability of equipped gear that NPC's drop, which you can tweak to your liking. Since cost scales with durability, this can be used to significantly reduce your income from looting dead NPC's.
Wares: This excellent mod greatly expands the number and variety of items you get from merchants, though in a way that's lore and roleplay-friendly.
Poison Crafting: This great mod adds support for poison, but it also contains some really positive enhancements to the alchemy system in general.
Installation: Install as normal with your favored mod manager. Version 2.0 now has a plugin, which I've checked for dirty edits, and you can set it to load last. The plugin only changes one thing: it sets the Mercantile XP reward for Haggling to 0, which allows the mod to have full control over Mercantile XP.
Requirements: MWSE. You can download the Morrowind Code Patch and then MGE XE to get it, if you don't have it. You can also update MWSE using MWSE-Update.exe in your Morrowind directory, if you haven't lately. This mod will not work with OpenMW.
Thanks: Special thanks to mort. Harder Barter served as the basic inspiration for this mod, and I built this on top of the original's code. Also thanks to wisp for checking over my code and giving me pointers. I learned a lot! And thanks to you, for checking out my first mod!
Permissions: You can freely do whatever you want with this code. I would appreciate a thanks and a link to this mod, if possible.