Social Engineering: Haggling - Broken?

[roguebfl]

Originally Posted by gjc8

You should give the PCs some ability to determine approximately what the spread is in an initial encounter, so they can avoid insulting merchants this way if they're careful. This might be external to the negotiation, like looking up the invoice price to help in a car negotiation. It might be culturally determined, so that most spreads, say, 10-25% percent of the asking price in a given campaign (and anyone with Merchant knows this). You might allow a successful Merchant roll to sound out an unfamiliar negotiation, and get the spread (approximately; say add 1d-3 x 25%).

That is done by the Connoisseur skill and related defaults or Researching the price to get a feel for the 'real price' to get a feel the difference between the that and the initial offer to get a feel for their initial counter.

Yes this does mean if the Character is that inexperanced with what he's trying to buy it means he can't risk to make too low of an initial offer. If it's the player who inexperance not the charater then this is just like any other case of the GM having to provide a world detail to the player.