Rag, please. Your sentence-by-sentence responses are a pain to even read, let alone respond to
Heard that several times ... mostly from Niara ...
I can only tell you the same i said to her and that would be: Im aware ... but its the same pain for me to write, or read long chunk of text without quoting ... so i gues that is how you maintain ballance.
Sure, this is a good idea that matches very well with D&D's contested check. Be given the dialogue option:
- [Persuasion] Attempt to bribe
You roll a check against the guard's...idk, let's call it a "Profession: Guard" check which is 1d20+their proficiency. Every interaction with a guard would then have a different DC. Alternatively it could work as you suggest; Larian could pre-roll this check so the monetary amount shown in the dialogue option reflects the guard's honorability, and a roll of >20 means they're incorruptible or something.
Furthermore, and this is getting a bit off-topic, this system would work even better if there were different stages of success/failure.
- Fail by 5 or more? The guard is offended and initiates combat
- Fail by 1-4? The guard asks for more money. No more checks required: either you give the higher sum or combat starts.
- Success? Success.
Hopefully this would be part of a larger "degrees of success" mechanic implemented throughout the game, so it wouldn't be significantly more work to add it for guards too.
That is certainly possibility ...
But to be compeltely honest, i would have no problem with it if options would stay as:
- Go to jail.
- Attack.
- [Persuation] ...
- [Intimidation] ...
- Bribe.
And invisibly in the background, the game would determine Guard nature ...
Like roll 1d4 where:
1 - Greedy (asks for double)
2 - Fair (gets offended when atempt to bribe, incerase difficiulty for Intimidation)
3 - Coward (accepts bribe, easier intimidation)
4 - Regular guard (no effect)
In case that chances are supposed to be 25/25/25/25%
Where chances would reflect type of guard ...
Meaning it would not be 1d4 but 1d20 ... and results would be different ranges.
So Flaming Fists guards would have (for example):
1-6 Fair members.
7-12 Regular members.
13-19 Greedy members. (they are mercenaries after all)
and 20 Coward member. (since the chance of coward among their ranks should be quite low ... but you still can potentialy meet newbie)
But Goblins for example would have:
1 Fair members.
2-5 Regular members.
6-12 Greedy members.
13-20 Coward members.
Of course if we would meet some I dunno Roayal Guards, or some Order of Paladin guards ...
They should also reflect that by having:
1-15 Fair members.
16-20 Regular members.
/ Greedy members.
/ Coward members.
For obvious reasons.
Now why invisibly and in the background ...
Its quite simple really ... if nature of the guard would not be created by random, people would quite fast noticed guards they can easily intimidate, or that they can easily bribe ... by this, nobody would ever know results of their actions in advance.
And that is ... i would say essential for "realism/reasonable-ness".
---
When you sell items to somebody and then kill that NPC, the NPC will drop all items you ever sold him.
This was true for early builds ... money included ...
Then it was not, things starts to disappearing when you killed the guard, only part of their whole inventory was accessible.
Pretty lame change in my opinion, i presume you guessed.
But somebody noticed that if you KO them instead of killing ... their inventory remains intact, so thats what i do ...
KO > loot > finish.
So i cant really confrim curent state, since i didnt try it, but wanted to say this.
