Allow us to rob dead shop-keepers- Revised 10/21
BCaesar
Member Posts: 454
Edited 10/21 due to suggestions and arguments by people:
BG1 if I killed a shopkeeper he didn't have the items from his shop on his dead body or anywhere in the shop. They were lost forever.
That makes no sense. If a shopkeeper is dead his items shouldn't vanish. They should all still be there. Some items shopkeepers sell are infinite and they all seem to have infinite gold, but you could set limits on those for dead shopkeepers having each drop a certain number of the items they can sell infinitely and a certain amount of gold.
However, the penalties for this would have to be high or it would completely destabilize the game, so robbing a shopkeeper would need added difficulties/penalties. I'd recommend the following:
1) GUARDS: The shopkeeper should have guards in the shop and the ability to call more. Attacking the shop keeper, or taking anything out of a chest in the shop (you could have the items for sale in locked/trapped chests rather than on the shopkeeper's body where they could be easily pick-pocketed), or even picking a lock or disarming a trap in the shop could cause all the guards to go hostile and the shopkeeper to call many more.
Pickpocketing the shopkeeper, disarming the traps, or opening the locks should require very high levels to succeed (much higher than needed for normal quests in that area). All the best items should not be on the body of the shopkeeper so a character would have to turn everyone hostile by opening a chest to get them.
2) REPUTATION: Killing any guard is already a -10 reputation loss and killing the shopkeeper could be as well. Meaning any Paladin or Ranger who did this would lose their class, and any good (or even neutral) characters would leave your party. This would discourage all but fully evil characters and parties.
3) The guards (both already in the shop and the new ones called) should chase the character anywhere they go in the city and should turn other civilians/NPCs of good or neutral alignment hostile as well. Any civilians turned hostile would run away and any fighting characters turned hostile would help the guards try to kill you. Those hostile civilians running away would turn others hostile (since obviously they would be talking about what you did), as would the guards chasing after you which would cause most the city to eventually turn against you.
Even if you leave the city, go to another city and temple and buy your reputation back up all the guards/civilians in the first city that were hostile would all still be there and hostile when they came back.
So doing this would cost you all your reputation, and your good/neutral party members, and the ability to interact with most of the NPCs in a city as any hostile NPCs would turn others hostile until most of the city was against you, making you unable to buy/sell things, get/finish side-quests, go to temples, etc. It would make being really openly evil have realistic consequences.
I think that would be enough to offset doing this for easy gold and items.
Thoughts?
BG1 if I killed a shopkeeper he didn't have the items from his shop on his dead body or anywhere in the shop. They were lost forever.
That makes no sense. If a shopkeeper is dead his items shouldn't vanish. They should all still be there. Some items shopkeepers sell are infinite and they all seem to have infinite gold, but you could set limits on those for dead shopkeepers having each drop a certain number of the items they can sell infinitely and a certain amount of gold.
However, the penalties for this would have to be high or it would completely destabilize the game, so robbing a shopkeeper would need added difficulties/penalties. I'd recommend the following:
1) GUARDS: The shopkeeper should have guards in the shop and the ability to call more. Attacking the shop keeper, or taking anything out of a chest in the shop (you could have the items for sale in locked/trapped chests rather than on the shopkeeper's body where they could be easily pick-pocketed), or even picking a lock or disarming a trap in the shop could cause all the guards to go hostile and the shopkeeper to call many more.
Pickpocketing the shopkeeper, disarming the traps, or opening the locks should require very high levels to succeed (much higher than needed for normal quests in that area). All the best items should not be on the body of the shopkeeper so a character would have to turn everyone hostile by opening a chest to get them.
2) REPUTATION: Killing any guard is already a -10 reputation loss and killing the shopkeeper could be as well. Meaning any Paladin or Ranger who did this would lose their class, and any good (or even neutral) characters would leave your party. This would discourage all but fully evil characters and parties.
3) The guards (both already in the shop and the new ones called) should chase the character anywhere they go in the city and should turn other civilians/NPCs of good or neutral alignment hostile as well. Any civilians turned hostile would run away and any fighting characters turned hostile would help the guards try to kill you. Those hostile civilians running away would turn others hostile (since obviously they would be talking about what you did), as would the guards chasing after you which would cause most the city to eventually turn against you.
Even if you leave the city, go to another city and temple and buy your reputation back up all the guards/civilians in the first city that were hostile would all still be there and hostile when they came back.
So doing this would cost you all your reputation, and your good/neutral party members, and the ability to interact with most of the NPCs in a city as any hostile NPCs would turn others hostile until most of the city was against you, making you unable to buy/sell things, get/finish side-quests, go to temples, etc. It would make being really openly evil have realistic consequences.
I think that would be enough to offset doing this for easy gold and items.
Thoughts?
Post edited by BCaesar on
1
Comments
But I agree that there neer to be an reward for killing shop keepers.
I honestly can't conceive any other manner in which we can justify getting large numbers of shop items for free without upsetting game balance. This may simply be one of those aspects of realism that must be sacrificed for the sake of a working game.
That shopkeepers were so unprotected always bothered me. Currently, many shopkeepers in the game have hundreds of thousand of GP in merchandise, but for some reason have no guards, traps, or magical wards protecting that investment. I think Thantlyr is the only one who can kind of protect himself, and even then he is easy to cheese.
I'd only allow robbing a dead shopkeeper if an appropriate challenge were provided as part of the act.
In my view an evil char name with 1 reputation is someone true to his alignment that respect the roleplay, punish him for have low alignment is the same of instigate people to power game and do not respect alignments.
My hope was for a more plausible game, not for one with fewer player options. I honestly think having guarded shopkeepers makes more sense, but it seems difficult to do. I don't see the problem with protecting a shopkeeper with a few armoured tanks...the way I see it, most evil parties would enjoy those extra kills and XPs.
Besides, one of the paramount keys to a good RGP (at least PnP like D&D) is that there are ALWAYS consequences to actions!
Role play wise, chaotic evil characters probably shouldn't even be allowed to enter the town limits. Of course, that would make for interesting changes in game play.
Some evil people are good at manipulating people and will do anything to get their way. Sometimes it's through deception, intimidation, persuasion or just plain outright violence, but the point is they get what they want. Using these talents, one would expect these form of evil characters get better deals on items, not worse (as they currently do). One would figure these evil people would cover their tracks competently and eliminate (or bribe) witnesses, too. Think of these characters as Neutral or Lawful Evil. No one survives to tell of their evil, so why are they are being treated that way?
Evil in the Baldur's Gate universe is more akin to karma. When you do something dishonest, it affects the way someone else treats you hours later in an unrelated situation. The reputation system was a creative endeavour and revolutionary for its time, but it has it faults.
At this point I'm getting away from the OP's topic (sorry @BCaesar!) My point is that the game offers little opportunity to be a true badass (though that may change with Dorn). I don't want more gold or more items - indeed Tanthalas is right when he comments that gold is pretty much useless past a certain point. I just want more (believable) roleplay options.
/thread
If you don't do it like that, no sane meta player would bother buying anything and just kill all the shopkeepers. What's the worth for gold then? Right.
While I do think that the reputation system is flawed in terms of its effect on store prices (as discussed in several other threads), BG and BG2 are designed to allow your party to pick up plenty of magic items merely through adventuring. The stores are just an added bonus.
where would the loot drop from? their corpse? how did they carry that much weight in the first place?
it is clear to me that the game doesn't envisage the entire store stock being on the merchant's person but someplace else entirely.
that place not being accessible to the player signalizes that the game intentionally wants to prevent you from doing the very thing you're proposing.
i'll explain it to myself like this: merchants have magically warded bags of holding that require keywords (or something similar) to open; when you browse wares, you're not looking at the actual items, but at the catalogue and when you decide to buy something the merchant goes to the room in the back, whispers the keyword and pulls out the item.
but there are spells that could help there so maybe a better explanation would be a bag of holding that disintegrates itself when touched by anyone-other-than-the-owner's hand
or a bag of holding that disintegrates your hand when you reach inside unless you wear a special ring which is connected to the blood flow of it's owner; once the master is dead, the ring can not be reactivated.
or, best of all, a chest of holding that is in fact a mimic. if you take stuff out of it without putting gold in first, it lashes at you and after you break it the rest of the contained items become forever inaccessible.
but you get to take one item that way.
I liked that the shopkeepers were basically invincible. You don't get to kill them, because you're not supposed to kill them. They're staple NPCs, there to serve a specific purpose that is outside the realm of morality. A shopkeeper shouldn't suddenly become unavailable anymore than an innkeeper--because the inn is still there, and you need some kind of an interface to allow you to spend your gold there in exchange for goods (whether it's a room or a +3 halberd of chopping).
Since the shopkeepers and innkeepers of the world can be killed, I'm glad that doing so doesn't suddenly give you all of their inventory. But personally, I'd rather they behave differently from normal folk, because they are different.
Whenever I ask myself where shopkeepers keep their high priced stock I remember that and think that with the kind of money they have it wouldn't be hard to hire a wizard to create a small dimensional pocket or a portal to a room just like this where only the shopkeeper or those he allows have access.
So you kill him, you lose access. And only those he secretly gave another key will be able to reach the expensive stock.
For the poor ones, a simple explanation is that they just keep normal mundane stuff in their stores and have someone bring the expensive stuff from a hidden stash somewhere in the city.