At the moment, the haggling skill is one of the least useful skills in the game. At best, you get to occasionally try to haggle a shopkeeper's prices down a little bit, with practicing the skill often resulting in prices going up instead. As such, I am suggesting a new functionality to be given to the skill.


My suggestion is that it should be possible to use the skill on any non-hostile, non-companion NPC that is capable of talking.

What would it do? 50% chance either way for the NPC to either offer you an item for some price, or look at what you have and offer you some money for something. Would only be possible once per NPC. Higher haggling skills would improve prices in both directions, and would have better chance of more specific information if they're offering you an item (low haggling skill = "Would you like to buy my sword? Just 130 gp."; high haggling skill = "Would you like to buy my mithril long sword? Just 100 gp."). The Appraising skill could also help to determine whether the deal is a good one (thereby giving new value to that skill, too). I'd expect that certain types of NPC would be restricted in terms of what they can offer - for instance, a Child probably wouldn't offer many things, mostly candy, apples, worthless pieces of glass, fluff balls, wooden sticks, and the occasional whistle or flute - but in a rare situation, a child might offer something significant, like an amulet, or a more valuable gem, or a ring.

There could also be a small chance (say, 5%) that the NPC will offer a trade of items - "Nice Clean Robes you've got there. Care to trade them for this amulet?"

If the quality of the item being offered were mostly dependent on the experience level of the NPC, it would prevent this from being easily abused, and instead just make haggling possibly a useful skill for PCs seeking to remain lawful (being, in some ways, the opposite of pickpocketing in this regard), and happening upon a neutral NPC in some dangerous location.

There could even be a few special NPCs that always offer certain things when haggled with. For instance, perhaps haggling with Ruun (when of the right alignment) will give you the chance to get, say, a few holy waters, or a ring of luck (I'm undecided on what the best option would be). Haggling with the mad minstrel could get you an offer of a random instrument. Haggling with Yggaz might result in him offering an item in exchange for a potion of booze, if you have one. Haggling with Dak might result in him offering you a special piece of armour that belonged to a previous Arena opponent (as he puts it).

It could use the same flag as pickpocketing, to prevent you from repeatedly haggling with the same NPC (with some exceptions, perhaps, of NPCs that have many items to offer and lots of money), or it could have a new flag added (or even a little more than that, to enable the PC to reject the offered item, and then haggle again for the same item later).