> (a little inconvenient, but I kind of like the realism).
The whole buying-selling process isn't very realistic at all, though.
I'm willing to bet the last time you went shopping you weren't cut to peices the moment you picked up a shop item you hadn't already bought.
If you *did* pick up something that wasn't yours, you'd only be apprehended if caught putting it in your bag or leaving the shop without paying for it- and at most you'd be told to give it back, or maybe grabbed forcefully if you did a runner.
Maybe dwarf fortress should take a leaf out of Oblivion's book in this case- with guards stopping you and giving you the choice to return the goods or put up a fight (if you were known to be a bit of a baddun, or if your two nations were at war (looking forward to the armies arc), they might give you less of a chance!).
I know that, obviously, merchants in DF are more like most computer game merchants- aping some kind of hypothetical medieval street stall-cum-pawn broker who sells things *and* buys useless random junk (I've tried flogging stuff to the lady behind the counter at my local newsagents; she's not having any of it), but it still strikes me a little odd that when they give you money you have to go over to their safe and pick the cash up yourself. The lady at the newsagents started screaming when I tried to get my change out of the till.
It's even stranger that, in all these backwater rural towns, they have armed guards ready to cut your head off at the slightest mistake- yet the villagers constantly put you in incredibly precarious positions where so much as putting a foot down in the wrong direction is a death sentence. Maybe that's the *real* economy in the dwarf fortress universe? Luring tourists into their towns, framing them for some kind of petty, made up crime, then murdering them and stealing all their worldly possessions. A very dwarven take on tourism!
(Yeah, I know all these systems are such because Toady's only had time to put in a basic prototype before rushing off to do something else, but that doesn't mean I can't grumpily complain about it. )