Comic: The Economic system and why Karond is so rich...

[Maximvs]

The comic is really funny and a good argument in itself, but I still think it's a bad idea. This is an old school roleplaying game, not a modern MMORPG.

[Xorena]

Is a merchant-as-goldsink still something people want?

You might want to check out this mod that Khaevil made: http://www.bgtscc.net/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=52075

I've cut and pasted some of his description below for those who don't want to click over. It's rather clever.

I should also mention the merchant, Fred Drumpf, has recently brought his business acumen all the way from Waterdeep! We really should examine what he has to offer. He makes the best deals.

The store inventory changes over time, so checking the merchant at any time has a chance of revealing something desired, not just after reset. For my demo module he doesn't have anything for sale right after reset.

I think this could also be an opportunity to add a gold sink. A scripted store that will stock items from a list, but it has to be able to afford to purchase the item to stock it. It will also sell off stock randomly, so that the inventory doesn't stagnate.

Initially the store is too poor to be able to stock any highly valuable items. But, as players do business with the store the store is able to use the profits to stock more valuable items. Wealthy players with lots of gold, but wanting epic items, will have an incentive to dump gold at the store to pump up its resources, in hopes it will stock something good. My hope is this will create a gold sink that is proportional to the excess wealth, in a manner that doesn't just benefit the super wealthy.

Right after dumping a large amount of gold on the store would be the best time to find high quality items, as the store has a large surplus of gold and can afford a really expensive item if it comes up. Over time the store will tend to spread that capital over a bunch of mid range items. So while the quality of goods will increase overall until reset, the person dumping gold on the store and waiting to see what comes up next will be able to spike the quality.

I scripted it to just pull items off a list from a .2DA file. But it would be straight forward to use another loot generation script instead. There're a few lines for creating the item, just replace them with whatever loot generation is desired.

Click the link to the thread to read more.