Any chance you could do a version of this mod that emphasizes the speech-based scaling? Like, for instance, values along these lines:

100 Speech - 50% Sell / 200% Buy (same as vanilla)
0 Speech - 10% Sell / 1000% Buy (somewhere around your medium values)

Another request that may be more complicated: is there any way to decrease the value multiplier on player-made potions to something more reasonable? Those sell for just insane prices, even relative to other in-game items.

For me it's about not making money at all. I like to struggle - play the role of poor adventurer spending his ill gotten gains on wine, women, and song. I want adventuring to be a skin of the teeth type business. When I get my hands on the CK loot levels are going down to 10% of what they are now and prices of inns and wagons are going up. This mod is a nice advance on that idea and is much appreciated.

It's a matter of play style. By making money hard to come by and prices high, it makes me role play hunting, cooking,and other aspects more than I have to right now.

Personally, I would not reload saves. And if you do not like this idea, I would advise you to not use that mod.

That said, note that the mod idea could allow for trumped up charges (no personal violations at all to get arrested) if you have good enough gear. I imagine this would be a high probability event if you wore such gear openly, and a low probability event (probability checked maybe once per game hour spent outside) if you were merely carrying such gear. I would also imagine that the actual "arrest" event would happen when you are leaving a building -- the guards would have collected forces they deem sufficient to subdue you and would be waiting outside. Probabilities and so on could also be adjusted based on your social standing (if you are thane you are going to need a political opponent, in town, to back the effort) on the hold's remaining resources, and so on (and those resources would obviously go up if you get raided). You might even be able to make arrangements (pay taxes) to avoid such treatment...

Also note that with a mod of this complexity (heavy scripting required) early drafts might involve black screens with text, to cover treatment of issues which are difficult to show in game.

But it's not something I think belongs in the cutthroat merchants mod. It's only tangentially related (it's another way of forcing the player to build resources and/or play the game in a different fashion). It's something that I would like and you are well within your rights to be disgusted by things I like.



There's already a version like this (though not precisely those values) -- the "Sensitive" version. Perhaps an approach would be a guide for tweaking these values?

This sounds great, but I just downloaded it with the nexus mod manager, and it seems there is only one download option (Which doesn't specify which one it is) and it doesn't let me customise it in the manager, so how do I choose which one I am using?

I didn't use Nexus Mod Manager yet, the download is a 7zip archive with 5 4 esps inside. Just pick one of the esps.

Thanks Phitt! I'm choosing easy for now, I'll see how it goes and decide whether I think I should go further.

Ahh. I didn't notice that file on nexus. Those values are on the high side for my personal taste, but I understand the difficulty in putting out a bunch of different versions to suit everyone. It may be something I just have to wait for the CK & configurable mods for.

The "Sensitive" version is a different download. It's listed under optional files at nexus: http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=2762 (files).

But I have no idea how to use the modmanager myself.

And I'll just snag some of this...

This pretty much sums it up for me too. I got frustrated though when coming back to town and all the merchants combined didn't have enough money buy it all (since each only buy certain things).
I ended up adding some mod that gave each merchant a little more money each. 2000 gold each to be exact, so no unlimited or totally ridiculous amounts. But it's pretty useless since I just keep
getting more and more gold even faster, and there's really don't much to spend it on. I have a fully upgraded Whiterun house and a horse already. I'll try this mod, might help slow down things a bit.

You can amass a fair sum just by peeking in urns, never mind selling loot, crafting, etc.

I'd love to see this affect non-merchant prices, for example housing. Is that something that can be done w/o the toolset?

I started a new character using the Sensitive Merchants plugin (the notion that maybe my Speech skill might actually have an influence on something in the game appealed to me). I am about six hours in and, boy, is it different! My character is not rolling in coin any longer, let me tell you. At level 8 she is chopping wood and mining Iron ore to afford a single Steel ingot in order to upgrade her weapon, lol. She was overjoyed when she found a few health potions in Bleak Falls Barrow because she couldn't afford to buy them at the prices merchants were asking. And she doesn't gulp them down when she finds them, either. Health potions are more precious than Flawless Garnets.

She was in the Jarl's building in Falkreath earlier today and saw two display cases. One of them looked like it had some valuable amulets inside. Before I knew what I was doing I was picking the lock. I stopped myself and said, "Wait, no. I'm playing a good character here. This isn't right," and, reluctantly, reloaded. It's amazing the psychological effect this mod can have on a person.

I'm really liking this Sensitive Merchants mod. This is just what I wanted. Thank you so much.

Public math-geekery in case anyone's interested: I've customized my personal numbers to fBarterMin = 3.5365, fBarterMax = 6.2356.

Barring multi-craft exploits, the best non-skill multiplier you can get is 2.145: (haggle) 1.3 * (allure) 1.1 * (potion + enchant) 1.5.

I want the best possible buy/sell ratio to be euler's number (won't go into the reasons for this here). Since the barter settings both multiply buy and divide sell values, their effects are actually squared in practice; so my 100-skill buy value is sqrt(e) * 2.145 = ~3.5365.

Now, I want the total effect from skill to also be e. Again, I want to see this in the buy/sell ratio, rather than the individual prices; which means I want the actual difference between minimum and maximum skill to be sqrt(e) once again. Multiplying this by the previous value yields ~5.8307. However, this isn't quite right: that's the ratio at zero skill. You start at 15. So we adjust by taking the difference, converting it to be the difference from 15 to 100 instead of from 0 to 100, and adding that back to the minimum value.
5.8307 - 3.5365 = 2.2942
2.2942 * 100 / 85 = 2.6691
2.6691 + 3.5365 = 6.2356

This is actually less punishing than Phitt's "Easy" version at low skill ranks (though very close to Sensitive), but midway between Medium and Hard at the top end. The idea that the Speech perks are worthless honestly astonishes me, those are enormous benefits when you consider that they're multiplicative with everything and that their effects are squared in practice... though increasing the raw scaling from skill makes them significantly less valuable.

Edit: D'oh, I forgot the Volsung mask! That's +20% in the potion/enchant group. Correcting for this, my results would be min = 4.008, max = 7.067. (Geekery indeed. Sane folks are probably safe with 4 and 7.)

Edit 2: I swear, this has got to be something like the 20th time I've wondered if Bethesda secretly hired me to come up with numbers and I just didn't tell me about it... take the process above. Leave out the gear/potion modifiers, only use perks. Don't perform the 100/85 conversion. And instead of sqrt(e) * modifiers, do sqrt(e * modifiers) -- something I did, before realizing it was a mistake. The results: min ~1.97, max ~3.25. Round to tenths: 2.0, 3.3... the vanilla numbers.