Ziggurat Zagger
Posts: 6454
Joined: Tuesday, 30th October 2012, 19:06
Modest cost normalization suggestion
I noticed that books pretty much randomly have a shop value associated with them, more or less regardless of the spells contained within.
I suggest that books get a base cost (before shop greediness) based on the spells contained within.
The example that brought this to my attention:
Note that these two books are for sale in the same shop, so it's not a matter of two different merchants having different greed ratios, to be honest I'm not sure why Envenomations is so expensive, it's not really all that good of a book, and Ice is fantastic.
From the same shop:
Note this book nets you a level 9 spell for the same price as the book of ice, and for less than envenomations.
I think a consistent base value based on the spell levels contained within a book would probably make things a lot less weird, and give us better shop prices for books in general, as well as give us something good to go off of for randart spellbooks. I think maybe that book values were just sort of ignored and that they could do with a pretty simple overhaul to make them proportional to the value of the book.
Something like:
Sum of (spell-level*spell-level*5) gold or something in that neighborhood would probably give close to ok numbers, as a shot in the dark.