Originally Posted by Imora DalSyn
Originally Posted by Sharp
I think the game needs the following to make items feel valuable.

• Merchants only trade in goods they are interested in. The food vendor does not by weapons, the weapons vendor does not buy oil barrels, etc. That, or if they do buy it, they buy it at a significantly reduced rate.
• Reduce the value of many items within the game.
• Vendor gold is not replenished on rest. Either tie replenishing gold to quest progression, or some other metric.
• Vendors have 1 or 2 "high value" items, which are incredibly strong relative to the power of the campaign (so say a +2 item in the terms of this campaign), which sells for a large percentage of the gold you could possibly acquire (say 20-40% for a single item).
• Vendors do not store their entire stock on their person. It could be contained within a chest somewhere and the chest should be something you can lockpick, but it should be difficult to steal their high value items.

These measures would go a long way to making items in Faerun feel more valuable.


All of those would result in people hoarding loot because they've nowhere to sell it off.

High value items would be nice, and I'd prefer if you can't just pickpocket all the nice items. Hell, I tried pickpocketing Crushers ring and it wasn't on him so idk.

I had trouble with gold in this game, unable to buy +1 items due to lack of cash. I don't hoard stuff to sell because of weight. Making it more difficult for players like me because of metagaming hoarders and compulsive looters is a terrible idea.

The game incentivises hoarding loot already. Larian should simply use realism as a balancing mechanic and NOT allow characters to carry more than real-life elephants. A person wouldn't be able to carry around multiple barrels, weapons, armor and countless smaller items no matter his or her strength. A backpack should be REQUIRED to carry more than an armful of moderately sized items (and I would like to see backpacks visibly represented).

This would force the player to choose instead of incentivising the player vacuuming up everything not nailed down - which feels like a compulsive anti-roleplaying mechanic and a chore. I'm getting bad Fallout 4 vibes in BG3 already lol. Items not picked up should possibly despawn after a set time, perhaps abstracted or be looted by bands of roaming scavengers/raiders/adventurers (yay, random encounters).

Larian set the stage for excessive loot focus and this limits the debate regarding possible solutions as well (though I really like Sharp's ideas). In BG2 you "had" to collect money to ransom your sister Imoen and I would like to see some more non-materialistic use of wealth be made possible in BG3 as well.

Last edited by Seraphael; 02/11/20 08:35 PM.