Social Engineering: Haggling - Broken?

[gjc8]

Originally Posted by Snoman314

The problem for any scheme where you draw a line and say: Here is where I start haggling, is that the ratio of minimum-PC_offer to NPC_offer-minimum has the effect of directly affecting how successful the PCs will be for a given set of skill rolls, and that doesn't seem right to me.

Well, if you don't like that, it's your game. IMO, if the PC's initial offer doesn't matter to result of the skill rolls that's a disadvantage, by removing player choice. If you wanted that, you could simply resolve the result according to a single quick contest of Merchant, consulting a chart to see where a given margin of success/failure puts you relative to initial asking and final prices.

The intent of my system is to allow the PCs to choose the level of risk they're going to take in the negotiation. They do want their offer to be as close to the minimum acceptable offer as possible, since they'll get a better price that way, but if the offer is too low, they risk insulting the merchant and losing the ability to make any negotiation at all.

Edit:ninja'd, tried to edit to better respond to Snoman's post.