Haggling/bartering
An interactive negotiation over an item's price, letting the player attempt to talk a merchant down (or up, when selling) rather than accepting a fixed listed price. Red Dead Redemption 2's persuasion-flavored trading and Kingdom Come: Deliverance's Charisma-gated haggling both turn a routine transaction into a small social encounter with a skill-based outcome. Designers use haggling to give social or Charisma-focused builds tangible economic benefit, to add texture and personality to otherwise-mechanical shop interactions, and to create a light skill-check minigame that rewards specific character investment. Key decisions: resolution method (a dialogue mini-game, a stat check, or a simple percentage roll), how much the price can actually move (a wide negotiable range makes the skill matter; a narrow one makes it decorative), failure consequences (does a bad haggle attempt anger the merchant?), and how frequently players engage with it (a system used constantly needs to stay quick). Pitfall: haggling that adds friction to every single transaction without meaningfully changing prices becomes a skippable formality — the price swing needs to be large enough that engaging with the system is worth the extra clicks.
- Dev effort: Small
- Timing: Real-time or turn-based
- Common in: rpg, open-world
Seen in
- Red Dead Redemption 2
- Kingdom Come: Deliverance