"Ten for That? You Must be Mad!"

[3catcircus]

We used different options in different campaigns: Charisma opposite checks, Diplomacy skill, and some Appraise house rules.

One problem we've always found is that as soon as you have a rule for haggling, the players will use it every single time they want to buy something. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but at least it should be kept in mind, particularly if your group goes shopping very often, and it has suggested to us that the benefits should be hard-limited (e.g. 10% max discount ever is a good limit). Also, it may be better to roll once for the entire "shopping encounter" and not for each item.

Which is why MMS:WE or MMS:SR is so great. Chances are, the players will end up having to spend *more* than the "book" prices if they really really want an item that is fairly rare and they want it *now*. If they want a standard longsword and they are in a big city, they could get away with trying to bargain them down to, say, 75% of book price. If they want that longsword in a small village, they're probably going to be paying book price or greater. They want a rare spice or a dwarven waraxe in a non-dwarven town? Yeah - either they are paying upwards of 2x book price or they get to wait a few days and try again.