Rolling a haggle check

[Methinkus]

I’m just wondering what you would roll to see if an attempt at haggling with someone works or not. What do you use in your campaigns? I could see it being either a diplomacy or in many cases, a bluff check (“yeah, that sounds like a fair price and all, but the smith down the street has one like this at half that price . . .”) I would also consider a straight up charisma roll, but couldn’t a case be made for haggle as a skill one could put ranks into independently?

What do you guys do when this comes up? I try to play merchant NPC’s as generally neutral with very greedy tendencies (assuming there are no extenuating circumstances like they were befriended by the PC’s or saved or their families were saved and so on) so its easy to say “no” but D&D lends itself so easily to Hack ‘n Slash that Charisma based skills – and those poor, poor bards – get overlooked as the game degrades into table-top-diablo.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Magus_Jerel]

Haggling, like all oral argument is a function of diplomacy.

The appraise, bluff and sense motive skills only come into play if you think the merchant (or you) are lying about the actual price of the goods being sold.

 

[Malin Genie]

Profession(Merchant) would be the skill I'd generally use for haggling. It is Wisdom-based rather than Charisma-based as you are working out what a fair price is given the local market conditions, and trying to see throught the other merchant's spiel (cf Sense Motive.)