Why does RPG vendors have so little money? Are they all just fucking bad at business...

Why does RPG vendors have so little money? Are they all just fucking bad at business? For example in FO4 the money pool of most vendors is only 200 caps, the cant even buy much food with that money, wtf? And in almost every game you just can sell to multiple vendors so it doesnt matter if they have money or not but makes game more shitty.

If post-apocalyptic scenario came to reality for certainly all towns would have 1 mega jew who has the most money and you could sell metric shit ton to such vendor.

Stop playing shit games. Fallout 4 isn't an RPG anyway.

yeah but this also happens in most rpgs

the first and also the worst time this happened to be was in skyrim

i could never sell the expensive mage stuff i didn't use

>Questions why vendors wouldn't have enough money on them to buy a decent amount of food without realizing that they probably keep a portion separate for just such expenses that are not usable for purchasing things from murderhobos

Really makes the ticker tock

>RPG Vendor
>FO4

You sorta lost me there.

Such as?

but still 200cap money pool is just small af when you sell gear that is 1k-30k caps

Its for muh realism

I just chalk it down to that being a standard amount of money for merchants to have in that world, its why you see so many poor people. Also the player character always ends up having really high quality items that they probably wouldn't want to buy because it's hard to re-sell maybe.

I remember skipping days in BG2 so the merchant restocks money

They don't have little money, they just have a limited budget for buying junk from random strangers.

if by "most RPGs" you mean "shitty bethesda games", then yeah, let me refer you back to my first post. the point about not playing shit games.

Ok thats 1 but you say most RPG did it.

It's almost like you're getting jewed

but what im saying its really unrealistic
but then there is some few merchant that have loadsa dosh

>vendor can't refuse products.
>will literally buy anything, even unuseable trash

but Fallout 4 is not a RPG

Fucking Morrowind does this. What's the point in exploring dungeons if you can't sell all that phat loot you got?

well i mostly play wrpgs and these always seem to have money and selling loot problems

this mostly happens to me when i sell some weapons that are 50-200 a pop so pretty cheap and i sell them cos they garbage

Maybe they know that you're just there to trade in useless shit they'll never resell so they keep a small amount of money set aside to humor you and their actual profits from customers who aren't asshats are set safely aside.

>well i mostly play wrpgs and these always seem to have money and selling loot problems
SUCH
AS
?

that kind of make sense but that same money also is spend on good stuff

in witcher 3 this also happened if i bothered to clean dungeons and not just take the best stuff

>Most RPGs do this
>Name them, please
>it's like pulling teeth and he still just names 2

Nigga I have a total money pool of 10k usd for my shop and I wouldn't waste it all buying scrap from some random faggot claiming he "wants to save the world".
If you bring me shit people demands, then I will buy it but if you sell me scraps and shit nobody needs, then fuck off.

Is there any games/mods that simulate a legitimate economy in an RPG?

I feel like M&B is the only one who could

>i mostly play wrpgs
Stop playing shitty rpgs then.

its easier if you just list rpgs that have infinite/big money pools in vendors, also no jrpgs or scifi garbage

Space Rangers 2
A.I.M.: Artifical Intelligence Machine/Mechanoids

but jrpgs are even worse
>have to grind for days
>almost every character is super annoying and/or unlikeable af when they open their mouth because they are bitchy cunts
>fighting is pokemon fighting repacked
>world is full of nothing

are those any good? never heard of those

No, I'm just convinced that you only play Bethesda garbage.

Thanks lad, will check em out

2/10

>Name them, please
Not OP, but virtually all Infinity engine games (Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale etc...), Morrowind, all Witcher games, all Fallout games starting with the earliest ones, Arcanum.
There are several reasons for this. First of all, strictly mechanically speaking, it's to regulate player income and disencourage the "steal everything, sell everything" mentality. It also often makes sense simply in a logical way, as in Morrowind, where average trader is going to be carrying around enough money to buy something as rare and luxurious as say, Ebony weapon: it's just an item that is generally speaking so rare and valuable that commoners won't make enough money to buy it in their entire life. Also, the fact that the trader might have stash of money somewhere does not mean that he WANT'S to put it all on one fucking item he likely won't be able to sell either. Like: why the fuck would he spend most of his savings to buy rare, but UNSELLABLE items. Who the fuck is going to buy that ebony sword in this small village mostly populated by fishermen?

It makes sense. Despite what you might think, shopkeepers don't carry that much money on them, don't spend all their financial rewards, and usually are much more interested in selling than buying anyway.

Oh boy how frustrated will you be trying to sell stuff in undertale.
Best trading in any game ever. It's so good you'll hate it

Space Rangers 2 is GOAT, doubly so if you want to be a space Jew because the economy is simulated very well.

i just have bad memory bro, i dont keep lists or rpgs i have played because i usually tend to focus on 1 rpg at time and move on

also lot of them dont even have this grab loot and sell it nowadays, just some quests where to get money

just play dark souls, you'll have to earn the ability to sell your swag.

fuck I mean Underrail of course.

>Adventuring just hasn't been paying the bills since some asshole flooded the market with monster dicks and sparkly rocks

new FF certainly fits all those categories, well maybe the characters were more of a boring af instead of annoying but thats as bad

but in most cases you dont even have to steal to easily go over the vendor's money

atm doing melee run in FO4 so it's a bottlecap tsunami when i can sell all the guns and ammo

and that makes sense but it doesnt make sense that the hub/biggest city also have those rat merchants

>go to the ancient cave of tutenkhamen and find his crown and scepter of pure gold, diamonds and other valuable jewels
>go to joe's pawnshop

WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN YOU DON'T HAVE 20 MILLION DOLLARS FOR THIS ANCIENT ARTIFACT?!

Wait, BG games had limited cash vendors? I don't remember that.

I must be getting old

I have played thru 1, but souls for me is a series that easily burns me out and I have to take a break

>but in most cases you dont even have to steal to easily go over the vendor's money
Read the rest of the post to understand other factors playing into it. I could add another one too: making loot feel like individual items and not interchangeable different-shaped currency.

There is usually one or two vendors that can actually accomodate you in just about every single one of these games. They are however difficult to find.
Here is ANOTHER reason why you want your merchants to have regulated spare cash: it prevents you breaking the economy the instant you'll find something out of your level good. So again: if you by complete accident find the dead Ordinator in badlands Morrowind on level two, who has like 40k worth of gold in equipment on him, it does not mean that you suddenly broke the economy and do not have to worry about cash for the next 100 hours of game. You keep the good feeling from finding something rare and valuable, but don't sacrifice economy balance.
Which is why really high money holding vendors are almost always gated and difficult to access in all of these games. So that you only get access to large sums of cash flow once you have already passed the lower-level economies and their own challenges.

>walk 100m to nearest scum cave of villains
>kill everyone and take their stuff
>have to go 5 different merchants to sell their stuff
el oh el

Oblivion already had ridiculously low vendor money caps.


The reason why Bethesda is being a lazy cunt about salesmen's money is that they don't want you to stack up cash too fast. You can find expensive magic shit that either loses 90% of its worth once you try to sell it, or you can only get a few coins because that's all they have. If you could sell it for the true price you'd be a millionaire without any need of money right away.

This is a shitty solution. Why? Because most games before that had a haggling system, or merchants that sold wares of differeng quality. Staying with the Bethesda example, shops have different quality. When you enter a shop, it has a distinct look hinting at the quality and a textbook appears describing the shop. If it's a ramshackle store you'll get decent prices for your wares because the quality of the vendor is low, and he'll be happy to buy anything nice that you have. Better shops have smarter businessmen in them that will drive a hard bargain. So you might find a daedric weapon and want to sell it, but the best store in town will only offer you half of what it's worth. It's up to you to find the proper store to get a good bargain.

This keeps the gold cap and the cashflow in the game dynamic and "realistic", insofar that you can strike gold item-wise, or get outwitted of sorts.

Also there's a higher gold ceiling for truly expensive items. Buying a house or a ship costs a ton of fucking gold, 20.000 gold and more instead of like 8.000, and for ships several hundred thousand.

Bethesda has repeatedly dumbed down every RPG they have made since Daggerfall, and it shows. You cut out the complex shop mechanic and haggling feats, and you have to compromise. You can't just give players all the cash they can carry, so you give hard money caps for merchants. It's a terrible system and shitty compromise. Magic items are either useless or are sold way, way under their worth.

>do the enchanted iron daggers power level
>wipe out the gold of 4 villages trying to sell them all

In Starmade, merchant bases have actual inventory space, so you can sell them stuff you need, buy stuff you want, empty their inventories, empty their bits and you are rekt cause then nothing to buy or can't sell more of that shitty stuff because they have no more cash.

You literally dragged into a small armory with you and you are surprised that no single mechant is going to buy it all of your hands? Are you sane?

>Hey, blacksmith, I have these twenty swords on me. Wanna buy them all at full price?
>Dude, I sell like one sword a fucking year to some random adventurer and can barely afford my living. What the fuck would I do with twenty of them?
>FUCKING ASSHOLE WHY DON'T YOU TAKE THIS ENTIRE FUCKING WAGON WORTH OF JUNK?! WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN IT MIGHT NOT BE EASY SELL A SMALL ARMY WORTH OF EQUIPMENT IN THIS TOWN OF 500 PEOPLE?!

and what if you go to a blacksmith with a big enterprise, or a arms dealer in a city? If they have the cash they might buy all of them. Also why would you assume that they just buy it at full price? Ever heard of haggling?

>Dude, I sell like one sword a fucking year to some random adventurer and can barely afford my living. What the fuck would I do with twenty of them?
well that way the blacksmith cant even make a living, i tend to think there is other adventurers out there just like me and the game devs dont usually show them cos too much work

also like in skyrim the blacksmiths are supposed to be legendary and/or supporting army and making them weapons so ofc that kind of guy would want to buy 20 swords and in rpgs everyone has a weapon so i think there would be lot of people buying swords and some gear to defend themself

>at some point in game a single weapon you find is worth more than any merchant can afford

I fucking hate this

Oblivion had a price cap per item, I think the highest you could get for something was like 2500 septums. but you could dump as much shit on them as you wanted.

>and what if you go to a blacksmith with a big enterprise, or a arms dealer in a city?
I don't think you realize this, but even in a city, the arms trade is not going to be a matter of massive volumes of shit going through. This is not consumer electronics we are talking about: not everybody needs a weapon, and those who do usually don't need to buy a new one every few weeks.
And even then: if you are dealing in large volumes of weapons, then you probably have your own suppliers as well as deals with people wanting specific things. You are not going to trade in large volumes of second hand junk some random asshole brought in.

All you people are asking for is convenience. Narratively speaking, it really makes no fucking sense for common traders, outside of perhaps one or two extremely rare people, to be willing to buy large amounts of shit at any time and more importantly, to part with large amounts of cash. Cash is generally speaking safer than the commodity. You'll rather hang on to that than you risk it in buying large amounts of stuff you don't know for sure you are going to sell. That is, and always has been, the basic trader logic: you are careful about your investments.

All of this is you whinning because the games ask you to do little extra work. And you don't like that. Fine. But don't fucking complain about how it does not make sense: it makes perfect sense, you JUST DON'T LIKE IT AS A MECHANIC.
So top being fucking retarded and own up to your issues.

>find artifact of immeasurable worth
>surprised no one can afford it

I'm surprised someone else here played AIM. I loved the novelty of being an AI but it just felt like a mini-Freelancer but not in space.

>not everybody needs a weapon
but almost everyone has at least a dagger in rpgs or they are inside of guarded place and the guards need weapons

and if you want to go realism mode lot of swords get fucked in just a one fight

Jesus you are a fucking idiot. This is sad. Why is it so god-damn difficult for you people to be little honest with yourselves?

i like this answer best

>walk outside of town
>get murdered by werebears or bandits
so they just sit inside a wall all their lives?

that makes sense in some games but in lot of rpgs stuff you sell is weapons and ammo, certainly stuff they gonna need

Can. You not. Read?

If that were true, how do you think armies were ever armed they way they were? Soldiers didn't individually travel all across the country searching for the last blacksmith who produces a sword a year. There were many blacksmiths all across the land and many craftsmen like them in cities. It's ridiculous to believe that blacksmiths worked as slow or as inefficient as you make it out to be. Maybe for the poor village blacksmith, but not for the artisans of that craft who worked in big cities and had lucrative trade relations with nobles and other such higher ups.

Buying and selling 20 swords is not as impossible or ludicrous as you make it out to be.

And regarding You're wrong. Everyone in the middle ages was by law required to own arms, at least in feudal countries like Britain. You were not allowed to carry them at every occasion like say a knight, but you had to own them. You were by feudal law bound to follow your liege law should he levy troops to follow the king. And to do that you needed weapons. Men in Britain were required to practise marksmanship regularly, and for that you needed bows. Bowmen were also required to do their fair share of fighting in the front row, and for that you also need training.

Maybe if we're talking Renaissance/Enlightenment period your argument would carry more merit, but to state that "not everyone needs a weapon" for a medieval setting is downright stupid.

what i said was that everyone does need a weapon, the other one i replied said everyone doesnt need a weapon, read again dummkopf

Well, if we're gonna stick to Bethesda as examples (as everyone and their mothers have played their games) it should depend on the type of artifact
Surely something as Sunder or Daedric artifacts like Goldbrand should be of immeasurable worth and thus no one should be able to buy it
But I would guess there would be a market for Daedric weapons, sure it would be between rich persons, but apart from that, it should be possible

>Why does RPG vendors have so little money?
>For example in FO4
So you mean "Why do Bethesda RPG vendors have so little money?" Because sitting here right now I can't think of many other RPGs that have the feature of vendors having limited money.

The answer to your question is "Because Bethesda RPG games are fucking shit as RPGs and are better thought of as action-adventure sandboxes"

bethesda really doesnt think the end game at all, there should always be a hangout/city/den for high level adventurers where they can at least trade

I just used your post as a reference point for that conversation point. I got what you were saying.

read the thread, many other example has been said, like almost every old school wrpgs like baldur's gate for example

Has OP not been to a 7/11 in his life? They keep around $50 in the register max, and they tell you about it. This devalues the prospect of robbing the store for cash. Now, if your storefront were instead the side of the road in a nuclear wasteland, might you not squirrel away some valuables, elsewhere?

Yeah reading some replies it seems that OP just has a very limited definition of "RPG". Even with the examples of that's still a fairly narrow spectrum and completely unsuited to the description "most RPGs".

I live in Finland and every chain store has at least 1000 euros in the register, maybe some individual shit shops dont have that much but they are small fry anyways

well I do admit that i mostly play wrpgs with either old school systems or new rpgs that are not that well made because world of those attract me, japanese ones usually have either bland characters, boring world or just are mediocre so they dont really grasp my interest

Expect a Bulgarian on the news.

oh yeah and what i really meant to say i enjoy murderhobo simulators mostly

the money is insured, dont care, btw if you steal something under 50e and dont get caught in the act police dont even investigate

> comparing a country with a cashless economy to a setting that basically only deals in bartering or cash

A lot of people pay with credit cards/debit cards or whatever cards to buy things nowadays, which also decreases the necessary amount of money to have in a store.

When was the last time you bought something with a credit card in Fallout?

This is true a lot of the time. I know in skyrim/oblivion/NV a decent amount of vendors have safes or hidden coin/cap stashes you can steal.

Just because it's unusable to the player doesn't mean an npc can't use it to craft shit.

Since this discussion thread didn't specify the game, I wanna point out that it doesn't necessarily make perfect sense. It doesn't make sense if it's the kind of game where every random civilian or traveling salesman is armed to the teeth if you actually decide to attack any of them, for example.

I'm just sayin', without specifying which game you're arguing about you lose the ability to say "Narratively speaking", and as a different user I find the way you're getting up in people's asses for "owning up to [their] issues" of not liking the mechanic to be odd and unfair.

Then you should've said "most old WRPGs" because removing the old games that basically leaves only Bethesda RPGs and the Witcher series that still do this.

As a personal aside, I love JRPGs but I don't always have to take them seriously. I've never been able to do any story missions in any Bethesda RPG because none of the lore is interesting and everything about it is boring to me. Like on the one hand it tries to tell some serious story about politics and ancient prophecies that I'm supposed to get immersed in actually, and then you get the talking dog that leads you to the demon prince of being a jackass?

Why not just buy some of his items so that he has the money to pay for your loot?

Meant to add: Also Molag Bal sounded like a really interesting and formidable demonic entity until I actually met his voice in some guys basement and he kinda seemed straight out of He-Man or some shit.

Like, I'm more interested in a walking pink-haired dreamcast in a skirt spouting memes and fighting poop with dog faces and killer tables because at least it's more consistent in focus and execution.

In Oblivion, vendors have infinite gold. They won't buy for higher than around 1000 coins, but they'll buy an infinite amount of 1000 gold valued items from you.

that's true that most main plots start sucking at some point but i like the meat and potatos of side quests and the world of wrpgs more, i dont like scifi that is polished for example and lot of jrpgs tend to push into that "we are fashion models in the future plot" and hyperdimension neptunia 1 on ps3 left really bad taste to my mouth about moe jrpgs

also non-scripted rng things are more interesting to me than scripted stuff like lot of drops in jrpgs for example

Most people don't go to store to sell items. They buy stuff.

It'd make more sense if there was a dedicated pawn shop in some cities.

Well the original nepnep was as far as I know a legitimately shit game. The Rebirth remakes are better but lets be real, even as a fan I don't think it's possible to play nepneps unironically. It's interesting to me precisely because it's so trashy but throws itself at being trashy with such earnestness that I find it endearing.

I get what you mean about the polished sci-fi aesthetic coming off as unreal and I also enjoy sidequests and world exploration in WRPGs. I personally still am drawn towards JRPGs simply because they tend to be more interesting on a more broad scale. I mean you hear about the mouse rape thing in Witch & Hundred Knight but the game gets even darker and takes it seriously, and I walked away from that game thinking "I don't think I'll ever get a game story like this out of a WRPG that isn't a small indie title".

Also I prefer a game telling a concrete and scripted narrative over trying to string together one from different "moral decisions" or else throwing up a an illusion of choice that gets shattered easily and leaves a hollow bitter feeling. On that point it's probably just down to preference I'll admit.

Yeah, wrpgs are ridden with moralfaggotry but what i meant about the polished thing is that its boring because it looks like no one lives or does anything in that world, i get it that some shop for example is super clean but not everything can be super clean, it leaves you with empty feeling that only robots live there and even robots stuff is way more interesting if you give them human faults, for example someone is murderous or greedy.

It's your own fault for not leveling Speech until you can start investing in shop owners.

It's to prevent you from hoarding a bunch of shit just to make a fuckload of caps.

Not to mention only a shifty trader would blow all of their caps in one go. Stop bring an underage Mongol OP.