tiny lampe
Insider
This distinction between (weapon) merchants and blacksmiths feels a bit strange to me. I mean, sure, today we have middlemen that buy from manufacturers and sell to consumers but, would that be true in a medievel setting? I would expect most merchants selling weapons to be blacksmiths in the first place. If they are not, where did they get the weapons from?Other things to ad, is blacksmiths, you need to pay them to repair, and craft weapons, and in order to craft weapons, you'll need materials, which you need to find or buy from another merchant.
Crafting weapons should also not be instant. Crafted weapons should be less expensive than buying one from a merchants. But if u ask I blacksmith to craft a Steel shortsword for me, it should take 16/24H of ingame time, before the sword is ready. That way it would still be a valid choice to buy weapons directly from a merchants.
(Time is money, and you can decide if u want to pay 100% money, or 80%money and 20% time)
One option is that they stole them or took them from the corpses left by a recent battle. In those cases, I'd expect those weapons to be cheaper than those provided by a blacksmith, both because they would be used weapons and because the seller could probably be in a hurry to get rid of them.
The other option is that the merchant is indeed selling the equipment crafted by another blacksmith, although that would only make sense if such blacksmith is from another village that uses a different crafting style that is not available anywhere in town. Here paying a premium could make sense if the weapons are of higher quality than those sold by locals.
As for commisioning a weapon vs. buying an existing one, another consideration besides time it takes to make it is customization. Indeed, if you commision a weapon, maybe you can be very specific regarding certain features like how much it weights, how long the blade is, what kind of grip it uses...certain requests may require more skill than others and more time in order to be fulffilled. I would say price should be in accordance to that and could indeed surpass the amount a merchant would ask you for an existing weapon.