Merchants/Trading

[kashmir666]

Hi

Has anyone found a good system for running a Merchant/Trading business in BRP (Medieval style)?

Cheers

[rust]

For sea trading I once used the rules from the Pilot's Almanac

for the Harnmaster game, and it worked quite well.

[Thalaba]

What kind of system, other than knowing your game world's supply, demand, and taxation levels, would be required for trading? Can someone give an example of what would be wanted in such a system?

[rust]

Examples would be the purchase prices and the sales prices of various kinds

of goods, depending for example on the volume of goods traded, the distance

covered by the trade route, the transport costs, and supply and demand at

the origin and the destination of the trade goods, so that a merchant charac-

ter could decide which goods to buy, where to find a market for them, how to

transport them there, and how much profit to expect.

To give an example from my setting, the Varunians can sell surplus crystals

from their seafloor mines to buy foodstuffs on an agricultural world, but it

could be more prudent to sell them to an industrial world, ship the industrial

goods to the agricultural world, and trade them there for the foodstuffs. To

find out which approach gets the most foodstuffs, one needs the prices on

the various worlds, the transport costs, and so on.

Edited January 28, 2010 by rust

[sdavies2720]

Generally I've dealt with this just from the point of vew of the characters trading opportunistically. I.e. they are travelling from one place to another and figure they'll load up an extra mule or two with trade goods. Generally one or the other has a background as a Merchant.

What I do in this case is just give them a purchasing discount of 1D6% if they succeed in their relevant merchant/trading/whatever skill. Then when they sell (assuming the trade goods made it to the destination) I give them another bonus on the selling price if they succeed in their trading skill (this one I might adjust for distance travelled -- 1D4% for near, 1D6 for medium, 1D10 for long distance). Usually Special SUccesses and Critical successes get additional bonuses.

This simple system rewards them a little for increasing their Fast Talk and other skills, doesn't require me to create lists of prices for each city, rewards them for taking the initiative, but doesn't make trading so lucrative that we spend long sessions planning out whether to take olive oil or coconut husks this time...

I've found that whenever I go deeper than this, there is always a player who games the economic system, and it's too time consuming (and boring for me) to police it.

Steve

[Atgxtg]

I suppose the approach would depend on the nature of the campaign. For a campaign where PCs move around a lot, to lots of different lands or planets, the simple model works.If, however the GM is trying to detail an area, then the economics start to play a factor in the development of the campaign.

One concern is just how good the economics of the game are to begin with. If the game's ecomony is shaky or doesn;t make sense to begin with, trading just makes it worse, putting a spotlight on the flaws.

I once ran a "sensible" D&D campaign where I underlined the silliness of the D&D economy. A lord wanted to buy some plate armor for his knights, and:

1) The plate cost more, pound for pound than gold

2) The cost for the armor would bankrupt the nation, let alone the lord.

3) Paying for the armor was impossible, since transporting it would cost several times the value of the payment.

[rust]

One concern is just how good the economics of the game are to begin with. If the game's ecomony is shaky or doesn;t make sense to begin with, trading just makes it worse, putting a spotlight on the flaws.

Indeed. Unless one is willing to invest some time and effort to create a plausible

economy for the setting, the simple method proposed by Sdavies2720 is the best

approach, because a more complex trade system could well damage the setting.

For a medieval or fantasy setting, there are a number of supplements that help

to create a plausible economy, for example this one:

http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=19294&it=1&filters=0_0_40050_0

(- but read the reviews, not everyone likes that style)

[Atgxtg]

I don't need (or want) an economic system that will stand up for scrutiny by Adam Smith, but I do want something that is basically sound. Fantasy RPGs tend to be the worst. You either have a setting where everyone is rich with tons of money to throw around, or one where nobody can afford to buy a loaf of bread. Or, as in the case of D&D, both.

D&D economics are usually good for some chuckles. Mostly becuase PCs are expected to spend most of thier money on magic items, with the prices of everything else being almost an afterthought. Since D&D hand's out thousands of gold pieces on a typical adventure, and uses real or exaggerate weights for coins (AD&D's 10 coins to a pound), you literally ended up with massive problems becuase gold wasn't worth it weight in iron, or wine.

Do any sort of trading and the game breaks down under the weight of logistics.

Again, I'm not asking for perfection, but I would like my character to have a way to cart around the money to pay for that +3 sword and armor when I get the chance to buy one.

[kashmir666]

Cheers guys. I like Steve's idea as the party want to Adventure but also want to Trade. I certainly don't want to end up needing a degree in economics; so that looks like a nice easy system to use. If they want to set up a business later on I'll tackle that then, proabably just using the same system over monthly periods based on how much they invest.

Tony

[threedeesix]

Again, I'm not asking for perfection, but I would like my character to have a way to cart around the money to pay for that +3 sword and armor when I get the chance to buy one.

Bag of Holding, Floating Disk, Teleport, or convert your gold to gems and jewelry. A far fetched economic system usually has far fetched methods to deal with it.

Edited January 29, 2010 by threedeesix

[Atgxtg]

Bag of Holding, Floating Disk, Teleport, or convert your gold to gems and jewelry. A far fetched economic system usually has far fetched methods to deal with it.

Except how can you pay for the bag of holding in the first place?

Run a D&D campaign and enforce carrying capacity and the weight for coins and watch what happens. Do it in AD&D and it's hysterical.

The problem is that D&D imposes a fairly modern price structure, with things of values going for thousands or hundreds of thousands of GP, without modern methods of payment, like paper money or credit cards.

[sdavies2720]

I don't need (or want) an economic system that will stand up for scrutiny by Adam Smith, but I do want something that is basically sound. Fantasy RPGs tend to be the worst. You either have a setting where everyone is rich with tons of money to throw around, or one where nobody can afford to buy a loaf of bread. Or, as in the case of D&D, both.

I have an always-in-process-never-finished-and-repeatedly-lost personal project to make an economic system in a price list.

What I wanted was a price list that was not the same in each city/country, which was plausible, and which I could change quickly.

So it was/is a spreadsheet that lists about a dozen or so inputs/raw materials (things like 'wheat', 'Copper', 'Tin', 'Unskilled Labor', 'Skilled Labor' ). Then each item on the price list had an amount of each input and a fudge factor. For example, a Bronze Sword might be 3 lbs of copper, .3 lbs of Tin, and 10 hours of Skilled Labor.

The trick is to get something playable without adding every factor.

I've never gotten much beyond setting this up multiple times (and losing the spreadsheet multiple times). But it should work, and with a suitable fudge factor get a simple way to make regional price lists. I thought that this would at least eliminate the most obvious market inefficiencies.

Steve

[sdavies2720]

The problem is that D&D imposes a fairly modern price structure, with things of values going for thousands or hundreds of thousands of GP, without modern methods of payment, like paper money or credit cards.

I've been watching the Water Margin, based on someone's recommendation here, set in medieval? China. The characters are always pulling big pieces of silver from their sleeves to pay for meals and other stuff. I keep thinking that shoppers in the market must be injuring each other as their 40-pound sleeve purses bash into each other.

[Atgxtg]

What probably works about as well as anything for a medieval price list is Harn. It's got as much detail as you want or need, and varies things depending on where you are.

Pendragon is another good one to use, as is RQ3 (more or less).

Of course, people probably would not have that much coin and use barter.

Where most fantasy RPGs blow it is that they tend to greatly devalue the money, equating a gold piece with a dollar, pound, make or other modern denomination, and go with a modern price scheme.

it would be like buying a big ticket item today, and paying for it in $1 bills (or dimes).

[rust]

Where most fantasy RPGs blow it is that they tend to greatly devalue the money, equating a gold piece with a dollar, pound, make or other modern denomination, and go with a modern price scheme.

Yep, for example the Holy Roman Empire did not use gold coins for about the

first 500 years of its existence, the standard currency was the silver Pfennig.

There were simply too few goods with a value high enough to justify the use

of gold coins.

This changed only in the High Middle Ages, when the merchants of Florence

and others began to build their "trade empires" that handled a sufficient vo-

lume of goods to make payments with gold coins reasonable. But even then

the average citizen did rarely see a gold coin and would have found it a night-

mare to try to spend it, because hardly anyone in town would have been able

to change it.

Values changed a lot over time, but as a very rough estimate a tiny gold coin

with a weight of about 3.6 gram was the equivalent of two monthly incomes

of a normal labourer ...

[Atgxtg]

Yep, for example the Holy Roman Empire did not use gold coins for about the

first 500 years of its existence, the standard currency was the silver Pfennig.

There were simply too few goods with a value high enough to justify the use

of gold coins.

Probably too little gold around for the to have done so, anyway.

This changed only in the High Middle Ages, when the merchants of Florence

and others began to build their "trade empires" that handled a sufficient vo-

lume of goods to make payments with gold coins reasonable. But even then

the average citizen did rarely see a gold coin and would have found it a night-

mare to try to spend it, because hardly anyone in town would have been able

to change it.

One of the reasons why the trade empires did develop was that more gold was being "discovered" (looted) in the New World and brought back than existed in all of Europe until then.

Values changed a lot over time, but as a very rough estimate a tiny gold coin

with a weight of about 3.6 gram was the equivalent of two monthly incomes

of a normal labourer ...

[rust]

One of my former patients, a historian, wrote a book about the "Umkaufbücher"

(= accounting books, I think) of merchants from Augsburg who traded with Italy

and the Netherlands.

It must have been a mindboggling task to handle all the various currencies invol-

ved in a simple purchase of goods in Florence, its transport across a landscape

of tiny semi-sovereign states with different currencies (= same names, but dif-

ferent values, depending on the silver or gold content on the coins they minted),

tolls and taxes, and finally its sale in Antwerp.

I once attempted to design a "realistic" trade system that simulated this kind of

trade, but gave it up very soon - even players very interested in playing a mer-

chant character and willing to do some accounting would have run away screa-

ming, probably never to return to our gaming table (and also not to sanity).

[Atgxtg]

That was one reason why the merchant class rose like it did. Only the bankers really understood how their system worked, and the nobles could just stare and scratch their heads. Generally every time something was exchanged or curries converted, the banker made a profit.

Probably the simplest solution is to just give the merchant a % mark up, modified by skill rolls, and Degree of success. Someone posted something like that back on page 1 or 2.

One thing I used to do for fun every so often was to have a group go to a different world that used a different price list. I've seen D&D groups react when they found themselves on a world that used RQ, or Pendragon pricing and the PCs realized that they were fabulously rich. Usually about ten seconds after they try to buy something and see the shopkeeper choke when the PCs pay in gold instead of pennies.

It's kind of funny to watch. In 1086 the Domesday Book estimated the annual revenue of Britain at something like 73,000 pounds (gold pieces) and the PCs are walking around with 3 times that. One guy got himself landed and proceeded to pay the taxes for all his peasants out of his own pocket.

[soltakss]

The idea of gold, silver and copper pieces is fine for a generic setting, but medieval settings, as pointed out, often used the silver penny, or its equivalent. I wouldn't use the D&D currencies and economics but would use setting specific values.

Silver pennies are the main coin of Merrie England, but the shilling, mark and pound are accounting terms relating to 12d, 160d and 240d respectively. Silver Groats, worth 4d, are introduced in England in the 13th century. The gold bezant is used in the Byzantine Empire and is worth 20 groats or 80d. The gold florin is briefly introduced in the 14th century and is worth 72d (six shillings) but was quickly replaced by the Gold Noble, worth 80d.

Many merchants used credit notes and the exchange of such notes was pioneered by the Lombard and the Templar banking systems, often at trade fairs. It is safer to carry a credit note for 240 shillings than a big bag of silver coinage. Many fantasy medieval games don't use credit notes and have sacks of coins to pay for expensive equipment.

Merrie England has various tables showing wages for different professions and a lot of them earn a penny a day. In contrast, a Duke could earn 30 pounds, or 7,200d a day. Equipment is expensive, a warhorse costs 80 pounds, or 2 1/2 year's income for a knight. Merrie England doesn't have armour or weapon costs, perhaps it should as these are staples of medieval equipment, it used the RQ armour/weapon costs in pennies as I didn't have access to real costs of weapons/armour in medieval England.

In any case, most trade is not in weapons and armour because most people didn't need such things. If someone fought in an army then he was provided with weapons and armour. Knights won theirs in Tourneys or bought them. Bandits stole their or lifted them off their victims. Medieval armies had groups of people whose job was to strip the fallen armies of their weapons and armour so they could be reused. So, killing them and taking their stuff is a common and honourable practice in Medieval settings.

Merchants traded in cloth, in spices, in wool, in ornaments and jewellry, in perfumes and soaps and in livestock. Such things are bought by the common people and they have enough money to make trade worthwhile. A good tunic could cost 5s, or 60d, two month's wages for a common tradesman but 2 weeks wages for a Master Mason, so trading in these goods could be quite profitable.

As has been stated, you need to work out the overheads that the merchant must bear. These include the costs of transporting trade goods and the costs of services. The easiest way of doing this is to work out the wages and food/drink/lodgings costs of everyone involved in the transporation (Guards, drovers, merchants) and multiply that by the number of days travel, adding in the costs of feeding the beasts carrying the goods. You should also add in any customs charges, bribes, trading licences, guild membership and so on. Some of these would be annual costs, others would be on a per journey or might depend on the goods being traded.

You also need to know what the market can bear and how much demand there is for certain goods. A Craft (Merchant) or Knowledge (Trading) roll should suffice, with a normal success allowing the merchant to sell goods at market (book) value, a special at 1.5x market value, a critical at 2x market value, a failure at 0.5 x market value and a fumble meaning that nothing is sold.

Obviously, there is much more to this if you delve in deeper. If your players are a mix of accountants and economists then you might want to use more detailed rules.

[dragonewt]

I did some limited research a while ago regarding medieval economies to compare them with the naive perception presented and encouraged by early RPG's (eg: D&D). It is ironic that E.G.G did more to damage myth, legend and historic fact, resulting in damaging the creativity that was supposedly being encouraged. But I digress.

I still need to collate my notes and produce a finalized list that represents something of a coherent (if not slightly adjusted and simplified) view of a working economy. Here are a few examples. Remember, these are very rough examples, as economies and values can change dramatically depending on circumstances and availability.

Somewhere between 13th and 14th century: 1 pound (libra, ducat, 2xflorin) = 20 s. (shilling, solidi) = 240 d. (denari,diniar, penny)

Some example Wages:

- Laborer Men - 2d per day (Pay also supplemented with allowance of grain, rarely paid by the day, but by piece work)

- Laborer Men - 2 pound, 11s, 8d per year (based on 293 days of work)

- Laborer Women - 1d per day

- Laborer Boys - 0.5d per day

- Domestics - 13s to 40s a year, including board/lodging + annual livery

- Clerks and Scribes - 50s per year

- Carpenter- 3.5d per 8 hour day.

- Laborer Family (Man, Wife, 2 fit children) including harvest time and piece work, excluding Sundays and 20 holidays - About 4 pounds per year.

Some sample costs:

Board - 1.5d per day

Meat - 0.25d per pound

Pepper - 1s per pound

Wax of Tunis - 25d per pound

Reap wheat - 5d per acre

Year's worth of bread for a big family - 1 pound, 3s, 6d

Horse - 3s

Sheep - 3d

Property - 1 pound 15s, to 2 pound 8s per acre

Morton College Bell Tower - 142 pounds

Quarter of Wheat - 2s 10d in 1287 (lowest), up to 16s in 1316 (highest)

Coinage Weights (this is one thing I found very silly in AD&D)

# 1gp (AD&D) = 0.1lb of gold, which is 45 grams, which is the equivalent in mass of about three (3) Australian 50c coins (these are BIG coins - 15.8g each).

# 1327 - 1 Florin (23 carat gold) 6.9 grams = 6s

# 1327 - 1 Noble (23 carat) 7.8 grams = 6s 8d

# 1327 - 1 Silver Penny (possibly billion alloy) 1.2 grams = 1d

So, on rough approximation, the laborer family earns 92 grams of gold per year (for a rough comparison). What do two AD&D gp's buy in AD&D?

Payments in pepper and other spices were sometimes considered as durable as gold.

Remember, that these figures are a very rough generalization reconstructed from some scraps of my old notes.

Edited January 30, 2010 by dragonewt

[dragonewt]

Except how can you pay for the bag of holding in the first place?

Pay?

Kill them and take their stuff. :thumb:

[Atgxtg]

Pay?

Kill them and take their stuff. :thumb:

Silly me, that's right it's D&D.

In my current Star Wars campaign, it took awhile for some players to realize that killing people and taking their stuff is not accepted behavior, and is in fact, punished under the law. Actual dialog:

GM: You can't kill people and steal this ship and possessions just because they attacked you.

Player: But, we're the good guys!

[dragonewt]

Has anyone found a good system for running a Merchant/Trading business in BRP (Medieval style)?

There is this Glorantha oriented document that may have some ideas for you:

TRADE IN GLORANTHA, ©1994 by Gerald Bosch

Edited February 1, 2010 by dragonewt

[kashmir666]

Cheers guys, not only some useful hints and tips but some interesting insights into trade and banking! Nice get more than you aasked for. :-)