Better Merchants Skills for OpenMW (BMSO)

OpenMW 0.49 or newer is required!

This mod requires OpenMW's option "Trainers Choose Offered Skills by Base Value" (from the launcher).

Fight Morrowind's broken economy by boosting merchants' mercantile and speechcraft skills. It works with any vanilla or added merchant, and it does not alter NPCs' training skills.

Settings are provided to prevent too low selling prices on OpenMW and also to scale the service prices on the player's level.

Why

In Morrowind, many merchants have a low mercantile skill which allows the player to buy at a low price, sell at a high price, get other services at a low price, and quickly become too rich, which ruins the experience.

Moreover, those merchants usually have a low speechcraft skill which makes it easy to persuade them in order to increase their disposition towards the player, which makes the business even more lucrative.

HotFusion tackled that Morrowind flaw with Morrowind scripting, then other modders improved on that technique like BTB, Necrolesian and Rosynant.
Their fixes rely on Morrowind scripting which has limitations on when and how applying boosts.

My new Lua scripting approach is more dynamic:

• doesn't require to alter NPC's or dialogue scripts
• freely boosts NPC's skills without altering their training skills, if any
• works on any NPC (vanilla or added)
  

How it Works

The boosts are applied dynamically when the player starts a dialogue with a merchant and are removed when the dialogue ends.

New Skills Value

The boosted skills value is base on NPC's level: "NPC level" * 4 + 20, and will be forced to be between 30 and 100.
If the merchant already have a skill value greater than the computed boost, then the boost won't do anything.
The boost is applied as a modifier of the processed skill.

Mod Settings Page

You can cap NPCs mercantile and speechcraft skills to not exceed a maximum difference with the player same skill with "Maximum Mercantile Difference" and "Maximum Speechcraft Difference" settings.
The default value of 30 should prevent the 1 gold selling bug many players encountered with OpenMW and economy mods. Set it to 100 for no limit.

The "Player Level Based Scaling" setting allows you to improve merchants' mercantile and speechcraft skills as the player levels up, as if merchants were naturally improving their skills over time.
If that setting is enabled and the player level is greater than the NPC's, then the "NPC level" factor is replaced by a weighted average on the player and NPC levels.
That should help reducing the player's wealth at high levels.

Example: With a setting value of 1/4, a player level 16 and a NPC level 8, the level factor will be (1/4)*16 + (3/4)*8 = 4 + 6 = 10, instead of 8, which will produce a greater boost.

Boost Application

When the player starts a dialogue with an NPC offering a service:

• The mod computes potential skills boost for the NPC
• The mercantile boost is applied
• The speechcraft boost is applied
  

When the player leaves the NPC dialogue:

• The mercantile skill is restored
• The speechcraft skill is restored
  

Installation

For this mod to work properly, you need to enable OpenMW's option "Trainers Choose Offered Skills by Base Value" in the launcher, or "trainers training skills based on base skill" in settings.cfg.

• Decompress the mod archive in a folder
• In openmw.cfg
  
  • Add the full path to the "00 Core" directory as a data path
  • Add bmso.omwscripts as a content file
    

For example:

data="C:\games\OpenMWMods\Gameplay\bmso-lua\00 Core"
content=bmso.omwscripts

More info on how to install OpenMW mods here.

Update the Mod

Just replace the mod files.

Uninstallation

Just remove the openmw.cfg entries, your game will be as before.

Compatibility

Requires OpenMW 0.49 because of the UI mode changed Lua event.

Should be compatible with anything as it is exclusively scripted, and original skills and attributes values are restored after NPC dialogues.

Load order should not have any impact on the mod.

Localization

EN: @mym

DE: @Atahualpa

Thanks to

• Bethesda for creating Morrowind
• OpenMW team for their great game engine and for adding so useful Lua bindings
• Nexus for hosting most Morrowind mods
• Rosynant for For the Right Price and the trick to prevent the 1 gold sell bug on OpenMW
• Necrolesian for Economy Adjuster Adjustments
• HotFusion and BTB for the original concept
• johnnyhostile for the CI, the website, the project structure, packaging scripts, all the Modding-OpenMW projects he created or contributes to, and for being nice
• Seichyn for the idea to boost personality instead of speechcraft
• Settyness for creating the website image
  

Repository

This is an open source project, check the repository.
Feel free to report issues or suggestions.

Author

@mym