Shops should not buy everything

Currently I always have my carpenter maintain a wooden buckler in the inventory, as this item provides the best monetary value per resource (70 gold for 1 wood?!), so I can sell one to every merchant that comes by, and easily amass moneys.

Obviously the money values of many items should be adjusted sooner or later (and the selling value should be less than the buying value), but I want to throw something else out here for discussion: Should all shops equally buy everything from you? I say no, not all shops are equally interested in your things, and not all of them should pay the same price for everything. It should make a reasonable difference, who you sell your things to.

Who would be interested in your goods is again another question. I would suggest something like this: if you sell your wooden buckler to a survivalist or militaristic shop, they can really use it themselves, so they will pay you the full price. A wandering carpenter has no immediate use, but they can resell it, so they would buy it at an OK price. A weaver shop on the other hand has no use for this, so if they buy it from you at all, they do it only for a minimalistic price.

Thoughts on this? ^^

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Reading this made me think of Spice & Wolf (anime), in which a much ant would travel and trade depending on the season as well as what towns need. He himself wasnt a craftsman at all, but he still delt in spices, armor, weapons, ect.

  • So to my point, I think it should be both. A traveling skillsman would only pay what they could resell and thus would pay you more or less depending on how well they could resell it, but a tradesman would buy and sell anything they knew they could turn a profit anywhere, and thus woukd probably give you flat rate for everything.
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I’d say it should be dependant on the individual merchant, with a random chance weighted in favour of not buying.

Another way to do it would be to have two types of merchants, solo and syndicated (you could have syndicates as an actual thing, or it could just be a label to define merchants that buy different goods). Solo merchants buy only their type of goods, while syndicated merchants will buy others in order to sell them on to an appropriate merchant within their syndicate; the catch, of course, is that selling to the wrong type of merchant will return less profit, because they’re only acting as a middle man.

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