Morrowind:Mercantile

Skill: Mercantile
Governing Attribute: Personality
Specialization: Stealth
Increase: Successful Bribe: +1.0 (see bugs) Successful Bargain: +0.3 Successful Max Bargain: +30.0

The Mercantile skill is the art of buying low and selling high. This skill guarantees lower initial prices for goods, equipment, and services, and improves chances of getting better deals by bargaining. See the commerce page for more information on how the skill is used.

Character Creation

The following races receive bonuses to their Mercantile skill:

• +10 bonus: Imperial

The following classes have Mercantile as a Major skill:

• Pilgrim, Rogue

The following classes have Mercantile as a Minor skill:

• Agent, Bard, Knight, Thief

Factions

The following factions include Mercantile as one of their favored skills:

• Census and Excise (not joinable)
• East Empire Company^BM
• House Hlaalu

Trainers

The Master Trainer of Mercantile is Ababael Timsar-Dadisun in his yurt at Zainab Camp. There are no other particularly noteworthy trainers. See Mercantile Trainers for the complete list.

Books

The following books will increase your Mercantile skill:

• The Buying Game
• The Wolf Queen, Book IV
• 2920, Sun's Height
• A Dance in Fire, Chapter 6
• A Dance in Fire, Chapter 7

Quest Rewards

• 1 point from The Silver Bowl
• 2 points from The Price List
• 2, 3 or 5 points from The Angry Trader

These rewards do not count toward your level-up requirements if Mercantile is a Major or Minor skill, nor will they count toward your Personality level-up multiplier. They also cannot raise your Mercantile skill above the 100-point maximum; if your Mercantile skill is already maxed, you will effectively receive no skill-reward from these quests.

Notes

• The skill increase in Mercantile is proportional to the percentage of the bargain. Lowering a 3 drakes item to 2 will increase your skill more than lowering a 1,000 drakes to 900. Therefore the highest increases will occur if you're able to sell a single cheap item for all a merchant's gold, or buy an expensive item for 1 gold. The easiest way to do this is to fortify your Mercantile skill to 400 or above for 1 sec before talking to merchants, as they will then accept any offer you make. Another method to convince merchants to accept any offer is to fortify Luck to a large value, which can be done much more easily, either via a custom Restoration spell or via alchemy.

Bugs

• After you reach 70+ skill in Mercantile, there is a chance that traders will begin to offer you less for your wares the higher their disposition is to you. A work-around is to temporarily lower their disposition by asking for a high price and getting refused a few times. Cancel the trade and then offer the goods again, and hopefully you'll get a better deal. This is especially useful when dealing with enchanters trying to recoup your money with high-priced weapons.
  • The Morrowind Patch Project fixes this bug.
• Some builds of the game have an additional bug that causes prices when you sell to a merchant to often be better with a lower player-character Mercantile skill, sometimes in combination with the above bug, and with reduced Fatigue and Disposition. This can mean that a Drain Mercantile on Self spell, sometimes with Disposition and Fatigue reductions, is required to make a good sale. The results vary by merchant (who have differing stats of their own), and vary over time as Disposition, Personality, and Mercantile change. See here for details.
  • The Morrowind Code Patch, version 2.4+, addresses this issue. Turn on the "Mercantile fix" patch in the bugfixes section.
• Bribes are supposed to increase your Mercantile skill, but this isn't true in-game. Bribes will increase your Speechcraft skill, but not your Mercantile. However, bribery is still based on your Mercantile skill.