What? Did you think the people you're selling it to are made of money?
"WARNING: YOU WILL GET LESS THAN THE ITEM IS WORTH"
— Starfield prompt when attempting to sell something that exceeds the merchant's cap
In many games, merchants (especially those who buy anything) have infinite funds and can afford to buy anything the player has to sell, from near-worthless Shop Fodder to priceless treasures of legend. However, without careful balance, this can lead to plentiful Money for Nothing and, of course, isn't very realistic.
Enter the Merchant Money Cap. Some game developers put a cap on the amount of funds an in-game merchant has available, often tied to an In-Universe Game Clock so that it "resets" after a certain amount of time passes. This limits the amount of money a player can generate at once, requires some strategy on what to sell to which vendor, encourages bartering for non-money goods, and injects some realism (no, that poor trader in a rural village can't afford the legendary treasures you looted from that tomb). That said, such a restriction isn't always popular with players, who may view it as drawing out and complicating the process of unloading loot, especially in games with a significant Money Sink and/or an Inventory Management Puzzle (where hanging onto the items is also an issue).
There is often a Cap Raiser to increase the merchant's funds available, such as an option to "invest" in their store, completing a Sidequest for that merchant, certain perks, etc.
Sub-Trope of Cap, specifically one of the "Designer Imposed" variety. Can intersect with Adam Smith Hates Your Guts or Karl Marx Hates Your Guts depending on the implementation. See also An Economy Is You, where the entire game economy revolves around the player.
Examples
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Video Game Examples:
Action and Adventure Games
- You can trade items with several people in the Daymare Town series but in the third and fourth games, everyone's cash on hand is limited, so they may not buy unnecessary items that clog your inventory from you when they're too low on cash.
Massively Multiplayer Online Games
- EVE Online: The player-driven market absolutely enforces caps: NPC buy orders have strict limits on both quantity and ISK allocated. You can’t just dump unlimited ore or loot on them; once a buy order is filled, you have to wait or sell to another player. It’s a very literal money cap in an MMO economy.
- In Fallout 76, vendors have a shared money cap of 1400 caps. They will not store any caps above that limit, and even within that limit only store a fraction of the caps traded to them.
- In Final Fantasy XIV, the Doman Enclave Restoration project allows players to "donate" items toward the restoration and get back more gil than they would if they sold the items to a vendor. But the restoration has a set amount of gil available per week to pay out. This limit and the amount of gil earned from a sale increases as the restoration progresses, capping out at 40,000 gil per week while buying items for double the vendor value.
- Syndicates in Warframe have a daily limit of standing points they can give players to exchange for favours. For the six primary syndicates, one can bypass that limit using medallions found in daily missions they provide, but for other syndicates providing them desired items counts to the limit as well.
Roguelikes
- NetHack: All store owners have a limit on how much cash they have on hand, but they will issue store credit once they run out so you don't miss out on the value, lessening the impact.
Role-Playing Games
- Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura: Merchant gold and inventory is limited (but if they run out of money, they'll generously offer to buy your items for 0 gold), but resets after resting.
- One of the main difficulties of the Ivory Lake mini-campaign is that the rest mechanic is disabled, meaning the merchants will run out of both things to sell (especially bullets, arrows, and potions) and money to buy Shop Fodder with long before the mini-campaign is beaten.
- Ristezze in the First Town is part of an Easy Level Trick: his gold is limited, but you can easily steal his safe key and empty his safe of the gold you just gave him in exchange for identifying magical gear.
- Baldur's Gate III: Merchants have a limited supply of gold to barter with, however, they restock after each "long rest". Given that the passage of time has impacts on the game world, this is a bit more penalizing than other games where Take Your Time is in full effect.
- Bethesda Softworks: Bethesda merchants have a cap in every major original series game dating back to The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall in 1996, making them something of the Trope Codifier, and every main series game since includes this as a form of a Creator Thumbprint. The merchants typically reset every 24-72 in-game hours (varying by game) and there are usually various methods to increase their maximum money at least once.
- The Elder Scrolls: Present in every main series game back to Daggerfall, Oblivion adds the option as part of the Mercantile skill to invest 500 gold in a store at the "Expert" level, permanently increasing that store's cap by 500 each time it resets. At "Master" Mercantile, all stores automatically get 500 more gold added to their cap. Skyrim continues this with the "Investor" perk adding 500 more gold to (non-fence) merchants, while fences can have their cap increased by completing quests to upgrade the Thieves' Guild (from starting at 1,000 up to 4,000 after completing all quests).
- After Bethesda purchased the rights to the Fallout series, they added their standard merchant cap starting with Fallout 3.note Much like its Elder Scrolls sister series, each merchant has a limit on their bottle caps (the in-game currency) that resets after a certain amount of in-game time passes. Fallout 4 borrows the idea of "investing" in a store via a perk that permanently increases that merchant's cap.
- Starfield also includes the cap, though with less justification than the creator's other series. While it makes sense that a trader in a fantasy village (The Elder Scrolls) or post-apocalyptic wasteland (Fallout) would have such a limit, Starfield takes place in near-future outer space where it's no longer logical that major merchants should have limited funds with things like credit transfers available. Further, there is no means to "invest" in a store to raise its cap, while the caps tend to be shockingly low to the point where single late-game quality items will sell for 2-3 times what even the wealthiest vendors have available. It also doesn't help that the game has a massive Money Sink in the form of shipbuilding, where the best ships can cost upwards of 300,000 credits while you can only gain a few tens of thousands by selling out to every merchant in the game's largest city.
- Cyberpunk 2077: Merchants carry varying amounts of eddies based on profession and location. For example, a junk dealer will likely carry somewhere in the neighborhood of ~30,000 eddies, while a gun shop that sells more expensive mechandise will have an amount near the ~300,000 range. If you loot everyone you disable/kill, you'll likely have more than enough loot to clean out the vendors, though said loot can also be broken down into crafting components, making it a choice between which resource you need more of.
- Deus Ex: Many of the game’s arms dealers (e.g. Smuggler, certain NSF contacts) have limited credits on hand. If you try to sell them too much ammo or gear, they simply run out of money. This forces you to be selective about what you sell.
- Divinity: Original Sin II: Vendors have a maximum amount of gold they can spend which resets after each hour played or when you level up.
- Gothic: In the first game of the series, the stock and capital of traders has a fixed limit, which can be easily exhausted. Later games reset the inventory when a new trade is opened.
- Kingdom Come: Deliverance: Being a game heavy on realism in many ways, merchants naturally have a cap on their available funds to buy from the player. They reset every 2-4 in-game days and tend to follow a logical pattern of how much they have available, with poor rural merchants only having a few hundred groschen at most while wealthier luxury good merchants in bigger cities may have tens of thousands. If one particular merchant (or a group of them) is being traded with on a regular basis, their money cap is going to steadily increase in relationship with the value of items sold to them, as long as their money-storing chest isn't tampered with (which resets their cap to the default value). Miller Peshek and the Rattay's tailor are famously capable of getting to near 100 thousand groschen by the mid game, since those are two relatively rich buyers that are going to be steadily supplied by Henry with all sorts of expensive items and in bulk.
- Mount and Blade series:
- Mount & Blade: Town merchants have a limited amount of cash on them, so they may run out of money if you try to sell too many things to them. This limit can easily be circumvented by just going to a different merchant in the same town since every shop in a town has the same prices. Meanwhile, village markets don't have spare cash at all, so you can't sell anything to them unless you buy something from them first.
- Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord: The cap returns from the first game, though is lifted considerably for both villages and cities. Villages now typically have around 1000 gold, meaning you no longer need to barter first if you want to trade with them. Most cities now have tens of thousands of gold between their merchants for buying items, with the cap changing based on the city's "prosperity" rating. (Impacted by things like food surpluses, having a variety of goods in the market, and any nearby warfare or sieges.) With high-end loot, it's still possible to hit the cap, though less likely than in the first game.
- Neverwinter Nights: Merchants in the base game and most expansions have an unlimited supply of gold along with a partially unlimited inventory, meaning that non-magical weapons and armors, low-level scrolls and potions, and other mundane consumables like first-aid kits, alchemist's fire, etc. are unlimited whereas powerful magical items are not. The Hordes of the Underdark expansion, a high/epic-level adventure for characters of level 15 and higher, exclusively features merchants with limited gold supplies. On top of that, all merchants also have a cap on the prices for which they buy items from the player, and that cap is sometimes ridiculously low. It doesn't matter that an item is worth well over 100,000 gold pieces, that merchant is still only going to pay 3,000 for it. Period. Yet merchants are still going to run out of gold sooner or later simply because enemies drop that much loot despite the game only having a set amount of enemies and not endless random encounters.
- In Outward merchants have a relatively small money cap, usually around 300 silvers, which they can easily exhaust if the player is returning from plundering a dungeon's main treasure chamber. However, they restock every few days, and there are several merchants in every town, so it's easy enough to go from one to the next, selling off junk as one goes. And they often carry small valuables that can be used as de facto currency, like gems, as well.
- Planescape: Torment: The game is heavy on personal interactions and those with vendors, who have a max amount of gold per transaction, are no different. The bartering system is complex, reputation/relationship is taken into account, and the "economy" will actually change as you buy/sell. (For example, an individual item may sell for 60 copper, but selling a second will only get you 45, and on down with more, representing that you're saturating the market.) The max gold tends to be the least of your worries when selling.
- Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale: People can try to sell items to the titular shop, but sometimes the amount of money that would satisfy the seller is more than the shop possesses.
- The Witcher 3: The game has a cap in place, varying by merchant with poorer merchants having less than 100 crowns while wealthier ones can have over 1,000. They reset every five in-game days. For selling the most valuable items, you'll likely need to engage in a little bartering to get fair value as they exceed what most merchants have.
Simulation Games
- Echoes of the Plum Grove: Foraging, gifts and quest rewards aside, anything the player doesn't already have needs to be directly purchased or bartered for with another villager. Each villager has a limited inventory and sum of money on hand, ranging from children with a handful of coins to shop workers with Bag of Sharing access to their workplace's funds. The Mayor and workers of the more prosperous shops will be those with access to the most money.
- My Time at Portia: Vendors keep limited money on hand, so if you sell too much to them, they won't be able to pay you anymore, and you'll need to move on.
- In Paleo Pines, most merchants have between 2,000-4,000 Shells on hand daily, and if you sell enough to them to empty their wallets, they can't buy from you any more that day, though you can continue to Trade items in your inventory for an equivalent value worth of something from their stock. Most merchants will only buy certain types items from you, so it's very difficult to empty one merchant's entire stock in the first place. Nalroc, the one merchant in the game who will buy anything, has a massive purse compared to all the other merchants to compensate, usually hovering near 50k Shells.
- RimWorld: Trade caravans visiting your colony have a limited amount of silver to buy your goods, and trying to sell them more than they can pay for is essentially giving them away. Though since buying and selling are done on the same screen it's possible (if difficult) to trade without any actual silver changing hands. However, the caravan's carrying capacity acts as another cap, especially if you buy their draft animals. Both these caps also apply to player caravans, so remember to order your caravan to load up some silver before setting out.
Text-Based Games
- AI Roguelite: A merchant NPC has a limited amount of Gold available for accepting items the player chooses to sell, so selling items too costly for the NPC will have their selling price reduced or even not worth anything at all.
Turn-Based Games
- Jagged Alliance 2: The arms dealer Tony has a finite cash pool that resets every 24 hours. If you sell him too many high-value weapons, he literally runs out of money to pay you. This reinforces both realism (he’s a black-market dealer, not a bottomless ATM) and strategy (sometimes you need to hold back gear until he’s restocked).
Wide-Open Sandbox Games
- Merchants in Kenshi have a limited amount of money that resets every 24-48 hours. The available currency for each vendor varies based on the type of merchant and the general prosperity of the town or settlement they're in. Merchants that handle expensive goods like armor and weapons also tend to have more cash available than those that sell mundane goods like food or camping supplies, though the cap on how much money a merchant generates on each restocking cycle is 25,000.
- Villagers in Minecraft can give players a limited number of emeralds in exchange for items, which they can replenish by going to their job sites.
- S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow Of Chernobyl: Most NPCs you meet in the general world have a finite supply of funds. Only the major quest-givers have unlimited funds.
- Sid Meier's Pirates! plays it with a degree of realism. While your fleet can carry an impressive amount of plundered goods that can be sold at a friendly port, that port can vary wildly on how much money they have on hand. Making it even more challenging is that many of the richest ports usually don't like to trade with privateers, especially ones who have attacked their nation's ships.
Non-Video Game Examples
Fan Works
- Shattered, Scattered: On a day of prep, Ryuji brings a chest of what he thinks is silver from a pirate ship-themed sub-Palace into Untouchable to sell, but when Iwai checks, he realizes that what he actually has is a chest full of platinum. Since Iwai doesn't have enough liquid funds to pay for it and Ryuji'd be an idiot to walk back out again with that much wealth on his person, he effectively gives Ryuji enough store credit to have the run of the place.
Literature
- Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill: For individual merchants, which is why they work together to make big purchases. For example, the various guild masters across the continent all vouch for Mukohda's character whenever they deliver reports and pay tribute to the royalty of their kingdoms. Among themselves, they also spread word that when Mukohda comes to town, he'll typically either be loaded with rare and highly valuable monster drops already or be on a quest/dungeon run that will inevitably result in those rare drops. So they either make sure they have enough money set aside to buy the drops they want or, in one case, work with the Merchant's Guild to negotiate the purchase of exceptionally rare/valuable materials like dungeon jewels or draconic materials (such as when Mukohda requested Ughol's help selling dungeon jewels to avoid being cheated by the Dolan Merchant's Guild, a female guild master didn't want her city's Merchant's Guild to do likewise—and she needed their help to pool funds for buying Mukohda's drops).
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons
- Basic Dungeons & Dragons module B2 The Keep on the Borderlands. In the Keep, the Jewel Merchant will buy jewels from a Player Party, but only has 3-18 silver pieces, 100 gold pieces, and 200 platinum pieces available to make such purchases.
- Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition module T1 The Village of Hommlet. The moneychanger Nira Melubb will buy gems from a Player Party, but only has 1,200 copper pieces, silver pieces and electrum pieces, 700 gold pieces, and 250 platinum pieces with which to do so at any given time.
- Pathfinder: The Gamemastery Guide for First Edition gives each settlement a "purchase limit" stat, the maximum any given shop in the settlement can afford to spend on any single item the Player Characters are trying to sell. This is set chiefly by the settlement's size (merchants in populous cities are richer than those in villages), and can be adjusted by a trait system.
- Shadowrun 2nd Edition main rules, section "Fencing the Loot". A fence has up to 1.2 million nuyen with which to buy stolen items from Player Characters. This amount can be multiplied by up to the number of successes the party received in its Finding A Fence test. That's the maximum the fence can pay, no matter how valuable the party's items are.
Real Life
