Well this thread has gone differently than I expected hahah. I was expecting a list of cheesy tavern names not an argument over the essence of role playing.

To Dragonbone, if you played through the bloodmoon expansion you actually ended up owning a meadhall, and receiving funds from said meadhall at set intervals. How is that different from what I'm suggesting? To clarify I'm not advocating a farming sim or a bar tending game, more like a player owned house that has a function not just a chest that you put your stuff in.

Now obviously some people are against the idea of having a player owned anything. But considering tes games never end .. there would infact be "lull" time after the main quest. I mean the idea that there is no lull time pretty much negates any opportunity to complete side quests. So that argument is pretty moot.

Also if you couldn't tell the poll is pretty tongue in cheek.

Anyway, how about ...

The Dragon's Gullet?

Or Dovahk-IIN?

I haven't played Bloodmoon so I don't know how well that worked and how easy it was to exploit (or difficult/dull to maintain).

Baldurs Gate 2 did it, but weaved it into an NPC side quest. I almost never returned afterward... and when they did, the game presented you with political challenges. :yuck:

How about the 'Blind Basilisk".

I had the same problem with the strongholds in BG2. It was interesting/fun to acquire them, but they failed to do anything with them afterwards to make them worth having. My fear is that owning a shop/inn/tavern would run into the same problem. At the same time, though, I loved acquiring my Telvanni tower in Morrowind. Sure, I wished it did more at times, but I still loved it.

As for cheesy tavern names...

The Dancing Horse.

That is exactly how I feel. I will always feel like they COULD do more, but its a nice little aspect to have anyway. Even if it seems meaningless and boring, its fun to own things in your game, just because you can.

So here's an idea. You meet an ailing shopkeeper (weapons and armor) who's son has just been killed in a dragon attack (whatever) he has no one to take over after he dies so he offers to sell the place to you for a large sum after you complete some quest (avenging his son's death or retrieving something from his son's dead body). After purchasing said armor shop, Let's call it the Yagraad's Plates and Points, you hire a shop keep (again quest required) and now instead of selling all your stuff to random merchants you stock the store with your loot (said items appear in display cases). Instead of getting 30% of the item value you receive 40% minus the shop keeps cut. You can then purchase upgrades for the store, nicer ambiance maybe a smith in the basemant to auto repair the crap you stock and now you receive 50% of the item value.

Patron's come in and out, your reputation goes up, you have to hire a guard, ect ect.

I mean c'mon oblivion had a quest where you had to retrieve giant potatoes from an ogre. Let's not get too high and mighty over TES sidequests.

Edit: Am I crazy that sounds like it could fit into the tes world without being to role play nerdy. The shopkeep could get kidnapped you'd have to rescue him or her, you could lose items to theft until you make an agreement with the thieves guild ect ect.

This way seems sort of plausible. So long as you still have to produce everything yourself or else not recieve income. It seemed to me that a shop would get it's resources from a supplier. But actually this sounds like it could work pretty well, you've convinced me, so long as they don't make it too intrusive. Just make it so that your shopkeeper is your general servant so that you don't have to pay him when he's not selling stuff.

EDIT: And maker the shopkeep have a personality so you can have a (platonic) relationship with them and sometimes have them as a companion.

REEDIT: How should it deal with NPCs trying to sell you stuff. Should it automatically let them sell things? Should it only let them if you are there to decide whether it's worth it?

Thats kind of what I was getting at in my earlier post in here. There is endless amounts of things you could do to spice it up. Plus, each shop could have different dilemnas that need solved, via different and more unique quests for different types of stores. I dont expect armorer's to have the same business related issues as a bookstore, or so on.

Whatever you put in a chest it sells at whatever value percentage the store is at. In essence you just sell your loot through this store instead of random merchants. The drawback is you have to wait a set amount of days for the inventory to clear, Maybe you have a separate side quest to draw more customers and reduce the wait time (something stupid hire a town crier to advertise or something sinister burn the competing shop in town).

I mean the same rubric could be used for food and potions (tavern) or cut out the item stocking and you own a farm. You receive funds every month but you have to complete a random side quest every now and then fight off a herd of mammoths eating crops or raiders killing the farmhands.

No, I meant THEM trying to sell YOU stuff. Like a questing marauder comes into town with the spoils of his latest adventure and tries to sell his weapons or armour at your shop. Will it let him sell them to you?

As for your shops popularity, what about letting that be partially be judged by NPCs disposition to you which is achieved through your speechcraft?

My bad. Uhh sure? Maybe you could make that some sort of philosophical choice, receive items from evil band of marauding orcs (thus a percentage of sales) or refuse and have to confront them.

Disposition idea is a good one.

On a side note, if I had a tavern, could I use to display my trophies? An elk head on this wall, an orc head on that one?

I don't think the orc customers would be terribly happy about that.

They don't have to patronize my tavern if they don't want to. :tongue:

Hell yeah. I'm all about trophies. Who doesn't want to have a huge dragon skull above their fireplace? You could set it up so you find trophy worthy stuff while dungeon diving (dwemer artifacts, nordic relics) and the more trophies you acquire increases the customer base, thus increasing your weekly income.

That actually gives me an idea. In the middle ages, most people couldn't read. Because of this, most taverns and inns didn't so much have names as they had pictures. If your inn's sign was a picture of a dancing horse, it might be known as the Prancing Pony. If it had boar's head, it'd be known as the Boar's Head. And so forth. So, I could post an orc on a spike outside the front door and my tavern could be known as the Bloody Orc Tavern. (Not that I have anything against orcs, it just went well with elk.)

Lol. Ok.........?

I am going to create the very first Skyrim Nightclub. Skooma, anyone?

"Moonsugar Motel" - Seedy Inn/tavern. Rents rooms by the hour.

This was part of my other Mudcrab Merchant and Creeper thread, but as a reference to the merchant from Morrowind....

"The Mudcrab Merchant" - Fishing/general supply store in a port city. Should have a familiar looking mudcrab mounted on the wall and should sell crab legs. Maybe the owner could tell tales of how he used to fish in southern Morrowind. :happy:

Farm, as long as i can hire people to do the farm work.

Hiring a bunch of Argonians, and paying them next to nothing would be great, NO actually my Dunmer didn't like slavery in Morrowind, and my Dragonborn Dunmer won't either. But still, I like the idea of having a farm.

Also, does farm just refer to plants or does it include facilities that raise, and slaughter animals for food? I would want to own a place like that too. (Sorry, vegetarians/vegans)

I can imagine my nightclub... Nords rolling out drunk out of their head, falling into the snow and making snow angles.

Fortunately I can settle for second best, taverns.

In the last item shop thread, I posted an idea for item shop gameplay. To bullet point it, you decorate you shop to attract a certain type of client for you to sell your loot to. Ex: I have a lot of left over starves. Mages are willing to pay more for magic items then fighters would so I set them up fro sale then decorate my shop in crystal balls to entice mages into my store. Ex2: I have high alchemy skill and a lot of left over potions and poisons. Both mage and thieves will pay more for them, so I try to entice both of them. You get it, the game play is where pick who want what you sell to, then getting them in your store.


With an inn, you could work it the same way. decorating your inn to attract different classes, but we won't really be selling them things. If we did, it would be a shop not a inn. Actually that's all I can think of for an inn. I can't think of any more game play for it.

I may not be able to own a shop in Skyrim, but in Oblivion I pwned them like a motherfunker.

This poll is stupid, just because we don't agree with your dumb idea, that must mean that we want less side quests overall :confused:

I think this is the kind of thing that will make for a cool mod but I don't really think it should take that much dev time in a combat oriented game.