Idea - Shops with custom-built items and changing prices

[ekolis]

In Angband, the "game of shopping" involves checking the shops every so often to see if any useful items are available for sale. I've got an idea for a new mechanic that someone might find useful for a variant...

Basically, instead of a list of "available items" you can choose from, instead you get to design your own item and have the shopkeeper fabricate it for you. This is basically the same as the "smithing" ability in Sil, except that you'd have to pay gold dependent on the properties of the item you want to make.

But to make things interesting, prices can fluctuate over time! These prices would of course be dependent on the various properties of the items - to-hit enchantments, armor class, resists, etc. Every so often (in a similar fashion to the current "restocking" mechanism), the prices get rerolled. So if the price of "resist poison" was set to 4d50 in the edit files, then you might start the game with resist poison costing 122 gold, but later on it might drop to 87 gold, or increase to 165 gold, or whatever the roll came out to.