Rogues wearing the randomized “fencing gloves” should be able to sell items to shopkeepers which they have stolen from somewhere else at full price, as a pun on “fencing” stolen goods.

Rogues automatically see rings as “low value”, “moderate value”, or “high value”, roughly (but not exactly) corresponding to their base price.

Various effects for armor pieces based on their randomized description:

• Buckled boots and old gloves: cost (and sell for) twice as much in a shop.
• Hiking boots: prompt before walking into known pits or holes.
• Mud boots: autocurse when worn.
• Padded gloves and visored helmet: +1 to AC.
• Tattered cape: -1 to Charisma.
• Ornamental cope: +1 to Charisma.
• Opera cloak: some sort of bonus when using musical instruments.
• Plumed helmet: +1 to Charisma, -1 to Dexterity (or have these adjustments multiplied by its enchantment).

Bags of holding should cost 500 zorkmids; this makes them trivially price-identifiable, but it’s not hard to identify one in a shop anyways.

Make the identification game less regimented. Currently, a rational spoiled player (who will not take the risks associated with direct use-ID) is restricted to indirect use-ID (and monster use-ID) of most objects until such time as they can find a general, book, or scroll shop, at which point they can price-ID the scroll of identify and other items. Once identify is known (and could be blessed), the good items (as determined by price ID) can be fully identified. This is problematic because it’s not at all a gradual process, and it feels like it should be.

Some ideas have been floated to remove price ID outright (presumably, a shopkeeper would pay the same amount for each item of an object class as they currently do with amulets). This has some advantages; price ID is tedious, encourages stashing to some extent (because stashing near a shop where you can ID new things is good), and roguelike players who don’t primarily play NetHack tend to hate its price ID system. In this case, either the scroll of identify should start out identified for all characters, so that identification doesn’t take forever to get off the ground, or some other mechanic should be added so identify is easy to pick out for spoiled players (such as retaining price-ID for only that scroll).

A designer may not want to get rid of the price identification system entirely. But there are some options for amending it. Overall, it should become less regimented and predictable, and less necessary of a strategy. NetHack’s entire idea of price tiers doesn’t appear to be based on much of anything, and having items organized into tiers makes it easy to disregard entire sets of items once their base prices are known. Ideas include:

• Change price ID so that each item is assigned to a “band” of possible prices. There are four price bands, and each item class has its base price randomized based on its band. The price bands show up on unidentified items, e.g. “an expensive scroll labeled KIRJE”. Some items might fall into more than one price band.
• Implement price tiers (e.g. all scrolls cost either 100, 150, 200, or 300), and items are placed into 1-3 possible tiers at the start of the game.
• Fuzz the prices of items so that it’s not possible to definitively say what an item is, only that it’s cheap or expensive.
  • One way to do this is to scatter the base price of each previously tiered item each game on an interval so that it overlaps with the intervals from other previous tiers, perhaps a random number from 1/2 the original price to 2x the original price.
  • Or fuzzing is done on a per-shopkeeper basis. Each shopkeeper sees each type of object as having a different base cost, based on hashing their monster ID. Asidonhopo sells a scroll of fire with a base cost of 86; Enniscorthy sells it with a base cost of 103.
  • Or, do away with tiers entirely and simply scatter the base costs permanently. A ring of free action might be 240 or 260 base, because it’s on the higher end of usefulness in the former 200 tier. Some fuzzing would probably be needed here to keep things from being unambiguously identified.

While you are in a tended shop, items in your inventory are automatically displayed with their sell price appended to them, so you don’t have to go dropping them to find out what they will sell for.

When you are inside a tended shop, that shopkeeper’s sell prices of items in your open inventory are displayed along with the item names.

Shopkeepers offer a lower sell price for a diluted potion, though they still sell the potion at full price.

New shop type “thrift shop”. Contains items priced at a steep discount but which aren’t very useful on their own. Examples include negatively enchanted or eroded (not necessarily cursed) weapons and armor, blank scrolls, magical tools with zero or one charges left.

Increase the price of the magic whistle to 50 or 100 zorkmids. Identification of the whistle type is trivial anyway.

Wearing a cheap plastic imitation of the Amulet of Yendor gives you the sucker markup in shops.

A small fraction of wearable items are generated with a “trendy” property, which is pre-identified and not hidden from the player. Trendy items have an increased base price and add one charisma when worn.

Chatting with a shopkeeper makes them offer to appraise your inventory; if you accept, they will automatically type-name all your unidentified and un-type-named items (that they would be willing to buy) with the price they would buy it for.

When you are quoted a price for an unidentified item, it is automatically remembered on the discoveries list. (Not specified how this would interact with being quoted a different price by different shopkeepers, or being quoted both a buy and sell price for the same item, or whether this price should be stored as the object type-name or independently from it.)

Fuzz the base prices of objects at the start of every game, between 75% and 125% of the item’s defined base price.

Archeologists can ascertain a rough estimate of an item’s sale value without a shop handy, due to their profession.

Make all unidentified objects of the same object class cost the same (rather high) amount until you know what it is, at which point it can be bought and sold for its correct price.

In item classes which have multiple price tiers (scrolls, spellbooks, potions, rings, etc), unidentified items will sell for the lowest price tier and cost the highest price tier.

Figurines cost 50 times their monster’s base level (or some other constant).

Silver variants of gear should cost more, and “precious” rings should have some kind of surcharge too, above the base cost of that type of ring.