Appraisal (unfinished)
What is Appraisal
There’s an thing that all non player characters can do, which varies greatly from person to person, and which is of particular importance to merchants, and that is appraisal.
Each category of goods has different dimensions of quality. A sword may be evaluated, for example, on
| Dimension | Better is | Ease of appraisal |
|---|---|---|
| Hardness | More | Difficult |
| Toughness | More | Difficult |
| Wear | Less | Intermediate |
| Weight | There’s a sweet spot, but it’s low | Easy |
| Length | Judgement call | Easy |
| Decoration/Showiness | Judgement call | Intermediate |
| Workmanship | Better | Intermediate |
A person learns to appraise the qualities of a sword by having direct experience of swords with a range of values for the particular quality. A person who’s only ever handled one sword does not know whether that sword heavy or light, pristine or worn. However, once a person has handled a dozen swords of different weights, they’ll have some idea of what weight an average sword is, even if their idea may actually be a little off. Weight and length are easy to assess.
Similarly, once someone has handled a few dozen swords with different degrees of wear, will have an idea of how many chips, how much corrosion or pitting, is normal. Wear is harder to assess, but it doesn’t need particular techniques or skills to assess, just observation. To assess hardness, you really need to have sharpened the blade and then used it to the extent that it needs sharpening again, but if you’ve handled a lot of blades of varying qualities you may associate patterns in the steel, such as pattern welding, damascus steel, or a hamun, or particular markers’ marks, with varying hardnesses. Toughness is even harder to assess (without actually chipping or breaking the blade) and is really going to come down to recognising either high quality steels or particular makers’ marks.
Developing appraisal skill
So: how does one gain experience? I’m going to assume that anyone who’s bought a sword has handled it before making the choice. That anyone who’s survived on the winning side f a battle unwounded will also have handled eight of each type of weapon used, for each such battle (the victors will have the pick of the spoils on the battlefield). That a weapon smith has handled sixteen for each year they’ve been working. And possibly that a master weapon smith will at least examine more weapons in a year than a journeyman, who will at least examing more than an apprentice. But, essentially, appraisal skill develops with exposure to items in the particular category. The exact mechanism for tracking this I’m unsure of, because there is a tradeoff between richness of records and data compactness, and this game looks like getting rather big.
Of course, some people may be more observant than others, so it’s possible that some people may gain appraisal skill on the basis of less exposure than others. But at this moment that’s not a thing I’m planning to model.
What does appraisal skill buy you?
In any category of goods, some individual items are better than others, and this difference may be significant. A person with good appraisal skill will recognise this difference. So a person with good skills, offered two items at the same price, will be able to select the better one; if bargaining for an item, will be prepared to offer a higher price for the better one; if selling items, will be prepared to sell the better one only for a higher price.
Price arbitrage is how a static merchant makes money.