Merchant's Guild

Merchants will be able to buy ownership of differnt kinds of shops as he/she gains levels in the guild. They will need certain skills for each type of shop.


First draft of guild skills:

                     Merchandizing
                           |
Banking         Restaurant      Blacksmithing         Shopkeeping




        Banking                                     Restaurant
        /     \                                    /     |       \ 
 Currency   Accounting                      Cooking  Preparation  Storage

       Blacksmithing                                Shopkeeping
        /          \                                /          \
    Repair        Creation                     Salesmanship  Bookeeping 


There will be other skills of less importance to add more flavor to the guild but, this will outline the main goal of most merchants.  Which is to own the 'rights' to an establishment so they can make a profit from it.

All merchants will need the basic skills which are summarized as merchandizing here. They can learn one, all or none of the children skills. They will need each skill of the same type to purchase the 'rights' to that shop from it's owner. Plus, they will need the shoppkeeping skills for any the shops.

The purchase of 'rights' will basically work like this. An NPC will be the shopkeeper and he/she will only sell very mundane and inexpensive items until a player purchases the rights from him. The player must be in the merchant guild and have studied the appropriate skills to do so. At first, the rights will be up for grabs to the first merchant that makes it there and pays the right amount. Then they will recieve a contract from the shopkeeper stating that items will only be purchased from that merchant. The contract will last for a set amount of time. Anyone can ask the shopkeeper how much time is left so they may plan to take it over. Once the time is up, the shopkeeper will give merchant a certain amount of time(eg. 1 rl day) to renew the contract. If the player fails to do so he will then make a new contract with the
first merchant to pay the money.

We hope that this will allow merchants a realistic way of having items up for sale while he/she is not online, and therefore give them an advantage to making money over other players. All players may still be allowed to sell items to the shop, but they will only get a very
small portion of the item's worth, while the owner of the contract will get most of the worth. One of the non-necessary skills may be bargain or something, where a merchant can get a better payment for sale of an item to a shop he doesn't own than a regualar player would, while still
getting less than the contract owner.


Benefits and Differences of shop types:

Restuarant:
Merchant can sell food to the shopkeeper, not weapons, armour ect.
Shopkeeper sells food and also will cook it for a fee

Blacksmith:
Merchant sells weapons & armour here and can use the facilites to create them
Shopkeeper sells and buys weapons and will(when it is implemented) repair damaged ones

Bank:
Merchant will have an account and free transactions(eg. wont have to pay banker fee for
withdraw, change money type ect.) and will recieve some interest based on the total amount
in the bank
Shopkeeper will offer normal banking servicies