Better Merchants Skills (BMS) (OpenMW)

Better Merchants Skills (BMS)

OpenMW 0. 49 or newer is required!

This mod requires OpenMW's option "Trainers Choose Offered Skills by Base Value" (from the launcher).

Fight Morrowind's broken economy by dynamically altering the difficulty to barter, haggle, and persuade with merchants.

It works with any vanilla or added merchant, and it does not alter NPCs' training skills.

Settings offer ways to prevent too low or too high selling prices, configure the difficulty, and scale it with the player's level.

• []Control the prices of bartering and other services

  []Control the haggling difficulty

  []Control the difficulty to persuade merchants

  []Ensure a minimum selling price of items, by defining a percent of their base value (5% by default)

  []Prevent the bug where any item is sold for 1 GP

[]Ensure a maximum selling price of items, by defining a percent of their base value (50% by default)

• []Prevent profits when buying and selling the same item over and over when mercantile and disposition are too high

[]Difficulty settings to alter the merchant's new skills during bartering and other services, haggling, and persuasion

• []Preserve the merchant's skill and attribute modifiers

  []The bartering difficulty takes into account the merchant's wealth

[]Settings to scale those difficulty settings with the player's level (optional, customizable)

• []Default difficulty settings during bartering and other services: 75% to 100%, from player level 1 to 20

  []Default difficulty settings for haggling: 25% to 75%, from player level 1 to 20

  []Default difficulty settings during persuasion: 50% to 75%, from player level 1 to 20

  []Limit the scaling to a maximum player level (useful to ease the early game, 20 by default)

[]Control the disposition impact on purchase and sale prices (50% by default)

[]Control the disposition impact on haggling (50% by default)

• []Easier haggling at low disposition, harder haggling at high disposition

[]Scale barter disposition changes (customizable, on by default)

• []Disposition increases and decreases are scaled based on the NPC's disposition, the mercantile level difference between the NPC and the player, and the amount of gold exchanged

[]Highly customizable

[]Settings to disable BMS on specific service windows to allow compatibility with mods that disable those windows

[]Works for any vanilla or added merchant

[]Safe to install or update mid-game

In Morrowind, many merchants have a low mercantile skill which allows the player to buy at a low price, sell at a high price, benefit from other services at a low price, and quickly become too rich, which ruins the experience.

Moreover, those merchants usually have a low speechcraft skill, which makes it easy to raise their disposition towards the player, which makes the business even more lucrative.

HotFusion tackled that Morrowind flaw with Morrowind scripting, then other modders improved on that technique like BTB, Necrolesian and Rosynant.

Their fixes rely on Morrowind scripting which has limitations on when and how buffs can be applied.

This new Lua scripting approach is more dynamic:

• []Doesn't require altering NPC or dialogue scripts

  []Freely buff NPCs' skills without altering their training skills, if any

  []Works on any NPC (vanilla or added)

How It Works

The buffs are applied dynamically when the player talks with an NPC offering services and are removed when the dialogue ends.

New Skills Value

The new max skills value is based on the merchant's level: "NPC level" 4 + 20

When bartering, the merchant's base gold also affects the final mercantile value: The richer the merchant, the higher their mercantile.

The buff is applied as a modifier of the affected skill.

This mod preserves fortifications, drains or damages on skills and attributes, but they may alter the expected effects of the settings.

Haggling Difficulty

As mercantile affects both the price offers and the haggling difficulty, increasing the mercantile skill for bartering will also increase the haggling difficulty.

This mod manages to offer an independent haggling difficulty by exploiting a difference between Morrowind formulas to compute the prices and the haggling success:

[*]The price offer formula uses capped NPC statistics (