How to: Identify and Classify Shops

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As I am an explorer and a cataloger of the many (many) wonders of NS, my intrest often turns to Shops. Shops come in several varieties and types; Finding out what type it is - and classifying it - can come in handy if you need to make some money or something of the sort; or just unload some "unusual" item.

There are 4 key things to know about a store: What it sells, what it buys, what it's "markup" is, and what it's "markdown" is. These 4 things make life ever so much easier in sticking stores into clear-cut catagories. It's easiest to do this by example, as opposed to explaining it in some other way. For this example, we'll use a Guild shop - the Necromancer Guild.

We know what it buys and sells - weapons (obviously). Now we need to know how much it's Markup and Markdown are. First buy something - preferably something you can ID (say a kris of Death in this instance). We pay 120 gold for it - but we can only sell it for 80 gold. Also we know (from id'ing it) that it's value is 10000 silver - or 100 gold. (note: All shop prices are in silver, not gold). So, we run some simple math - a 20% (or 1/5th) markup, for sale, and a 20% (or 1/5th) markdown for buying. Not to shabby - but that's hard to read, so we would write it as: Weapons/Weapons, 80% resale, 120% sale. Nice, easy, mathematically sound - and perfect for a spread sheet or other listing format.

But what if the shop won't buy it back? Or won't by anything at all? In this case we use a "place holder" for the parts of the listing: Weapons/Null, 120%, 0%. This way, we know that it's a weapon shop - but that it buys nothing (hence the Null and 0%). Interesting, no? It would be possible to make a "serial number" for a shop, in the form W/W/80/120, for example - perhaps even including an area and room encodement - but there'd be little purpose - it's not that signifigant.

Just wanted to throw this out to anyone who'd ever want to take on such a suprisingly complex task.