Evil shops ?

Loophole

Do evil vendors exist so my evil party can buy stuff cheaper ?
Or am I forced to pay extra always just to play evil ?
I try to stay at 6 reputation. Not interested in being neutral.

dzyngis

Character(alingment) of a vendor doesn't influence prices. Price are dependant to charisma of the buyer, and as noticed reputation.
Having in team Viconia, Dorn, Baeloth and kicking them when shopping will rise the reputation by 6.

argent77

Theoretically there can be stores that ignore reputation. But they are rare since it's an EE feature. Afaik only a single store in SoD ignores reputation.

With the reputation at 6 you'll pay about 130 percent of the original price, which is still manageable.

atcDave

It is literally “the price you pay.”
Life is easier if you’re good and people like you.

Of course, it would make sense if there were a few more shady or fence-like venders who would cater to less ethical parties. But with very few exceptions that wasn’t done.

deadinside

BG1 actually had a few fences. BG2 had even more. ToB did away with them, I guess so people would no longer be able to do the pickpocket exploit (which was "fixed" by mods anyway). But even fences still obeyed the reputation scale when it came to prices. It always bothered me some, even more so in IWD (I guess they "forgot" to remove the pricing scheme in that game). However, I can see the logic behind it. Your reputation in the game precedes you everywhere you go, making people be nicer to you or outright hostile (or just simply not wanting to be friendly or help you). I just think it was implemented poorly or in a very basic and rudimentary way.

If your main concern is to be able to buy things cheaper and not worry about reputation, Tweaks Anthology has a mod for that. Low reputation discounts or just remove the pricing reputation scale altogether. There is another that makes NPC companions not complain or leave with reputation extremes.

atcDave

@deadinside yeah I think “rudimentary” is exactly the key word. In the late ‘90s implementing any sort of reputation or ethical monitoring was sort of a new concept. It was a new idea, and its impact on shopping and character reactions was thought through, but at an elementary sort of level. It was kept simple because of keeping the program simple, for all the usual time/cost production issues, and because it was a fairly new idea.
No doubt it seems overly simple today, but it was cool and revolutionary at the time.

deadinside

I'm no game historian, but I'm fairly certain some earlier games had a player reputation tracking system. Basic also, but it wasn't a new concept by the time BG came out.

atcDave

I never meant to say it was "the very first". But I've been playing such games since the early 1980s, and it was broadly a new idea. The reputation system in BG was the most complete and well done I had seen yet at the time it came out (and no, I hadn't played "everything"). So the idea was revolutionary in the sense it wasn't universal or deeply developed yet. More prototypical.
And I think the place of the game historically is a big part of assessing what it is. The fact that there are mods out there that add extra depth and sophistication is just awesome. Even better, the player is free to use them or not.

DinoDin

atcDave wrote: »

I never meant to say it was "the very first". But I've been playing such games since the early 1980s, and it was broadly a new idea. The reputation system in BG was the most complete and well done I had seen yet at the time it came out (and no, I hadn't played "everything"). So the idea was revolutionary in the sense it wasn't universal or deeply developed yet. More prototypical.
And I think the place of the game historically is a big part of assessing what it is. The fact that there are mods out there that add extra depth and sophistication is just awesome. Even better, the player is free to use them or not.

Correct. The big thing is that the game does not have a ton of reactivity, in general not just reputation. This especially true once you get past the first few chapters of BG1. Oddly, the game included a fair amount of reaction in the beginning and kind of... forgets about it later. Ironic since it's the later game where you could have the most divergent reaction scores.

That being said, yes, I think the somewhat complex "reaction" system, which combines your reputation plus your charisma was quite novel at the time, even if it wasn't the first such system. It was complicated enough to remain mysterious to most players back in the day, you couldn't look this stuff up on a wiki page. But it was also visible enough that you knew how to improve it, even if you didn't know the underlying math.