kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

See it’s called “customer” because you’d be “giving custom” by customarily getting your iron from this one forge or having a standing order with this cheesemaker for X pounds each winter, because you might buy one-off finished or consumer goods from artisans or marketplace traders, but established merchants dealt in bulk staples and intermediary goods

The RPG “item shop” is a backwards projection of a general store concept that dates to the 19th century

(Potion shop actually has earlier precedent)

I do appreciate how in Jeff “Spiderweb Software” Vogel’s Exile/Avernum tactical CRPGs the “general merchant” role was often filled by “quartermaster of an outpost, trading from its stores”, that’s pretty historically plausible

I do kinda suspect all the old school RPG creators having such item fixations (“glaive-guisarme”?) was down to the college history education you’d come out with in the 70s being more material-accumulation focused somehow (probably far downstream of the relative accessibility of inventory documents or something)