Quick and dirty Trade rules

[PhilHibbs]

24 minutes ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

a table of price items (with offer and demand ratio) should be a great data to help any gm, I m fine to rule how determine if a pc knows or not, but I have no idea of the knowledge I could give ^^

Sounds like a great idea for a Jonstown Compendium product. It's not high on my list of priorities so I'd rather the core Chaosium creatives worked on other stuff, but I'd probably pick up a decent JC effort in this direction.

[Squaredeal Sten]

17 hours ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

My interpretation is "if nobody (or a book) tells you something, the only way to know something is skill roll"

...........

What is the price of an iron sword in the west ? in boldhome ? in sartar ? what about war dog, war horse, book, clearwine, coconut ... ? Is there any interest for these items in sartar, kralorela, safelster ?

Skill roll - supplemented by observation.  That is, if the player or party roleplays going there, then the GM who operates the world should decide what they may see and evaluate as valuable back home.  With a bias toward spotting something and perhaps more things the more exotic the environment.

On the other hand if the player wants to ask some other merchant who goes there to bring something back - that's a Lore roll to know about it.

Iron sword?  Rare and valuable anywhere, but more available and slightly less rare near dwarves who produce iron.  So moving the iron sword from Pamltela to Peloria should not guarantee a price increase because it's not a particular export-import combination for the areas, iron is not more plentiful in either place.  It is only well chosen imports that will get a price increase over distance.

War dog or war horse -  the horse's value is actually in RQG, the dog's will have to depend on the GM's imagination and concept of the area.  But horses are rare (and therefore more valuable) in Pamaltela, so should be more expensive there, might be a well chosen export-import pair.  My suggestion is +12.5% per season of travel  plus a risk premium set by the GM.

Clearwine -  a unique product already defined as desirable and given a Sartar price in Chaosium canon material.  My suggestion is +12.5% per season of travel  plus a risk premium set by the GM, plus some additional arbitrary premium as a unique product, potentially a monopoly if you are the only merchant bringing it into a place where it has not been available before.  However this last premium may evaporate when a second, third etc. importer appears.

Coconut - Evaluate roll to recognize whether or not it will sell.  if the Evaluate roll is a success and IF the GM conceives of it as actually a popular import (a well chosen export-import),  then  the GM will set a base price based on its status as a common foodstuff in the place of origin.  +12.5% per season of travel  plus a risk premium set by the GM, plus some additional arbitrary premium if the GM defines it as a unique product in his or her Glorantha.  I have not seen a canon reference to coconuts.

In all cases the risk premium is part risk of banditry and encounters with Walktapi, and must be set by the GM because  only the GM produces Walktapi.

It strikes me that we should have an evaluation of the difficulty of transport to an area, but that's not part of the market price formula:  Transport by ship over the ocean is easier and faster than transport by manpacking the item overland over mountains: The ship moves more volume over more kilometers per man-day, so the GM must ensure that this overhead cost is reflected in the campaign.  You have to pay and feed the crew, you have to own and maintain the ship.   You can have a lot of capital tied up in a ship, they don't grow on trees unless you are very specialized Aldryami.  It may be that a given item will sell well, but the potential price premium won't pay for the transport overhead cost.  That's why people import spices from Asia to Europe, but don't import bricks over the same route even though they may be exotic bricks.  If your players insist on importing bricks from Pamaltela to Peloria they should lose money.  Perhaps some as ballast?  OK, that's one solution to the logistical issue but it will limit quantity.

 

Edited September 15, 2020 by Squaredeal Sten
spelling, my nemesis.

[styopa]

On 9/12/2020 at 10:26 AM, Rick Meints said:

I must confess I hadn't looked at Traveller Book 7 - Merchant Prince since the late 1980's. I love those little black books. The Merchant Prince trade system spans about 10 pages (little pages at that). I chuckled when I remembered how the trade identification abbreviations sound like items found on a Thai restaurant menu ("Lo Ni Po Ba" for example, is short for Low population, Non-industrial, Poor, and Barren). Anyway, adapting the Merchant Prince system to Glorantha would be fairly easy. If anything it could be even simpler, while also being more granular. By granular, I mean that in traveller you were basically shipping X tons of generic "goods" while in Glorantha we might as well just start with the standard price tables, which deal with specific items.

The Trade and Commerce process has to two main activities: calculating the buying cost when you are buying goods, and calculating the selling price when you sell those goods. They have the same modifiers for both calculations. Of note is that with a base buying cost of 4,000 credits, and a base selling price of 5,000 credits, you have a base profit of 25% prior to any buying and/or selling modifiers being applied. The modifiers are basically the tech level, market level, and your personal skills. None of those three things would be difficult to adapt to Glorantha, or RuneQuest in general.

  

This was something I'd set myself to back in the 1990s, all loaded up with Access programming skills.

And then I thought, well, I need to develop a rutter that covers the Gloranthan coastline so I can figure out what ports/stops are available and what they sell.

So then of course one would need to know sailing speeds to figure out trade routes...and to do that OF COURSE one would need to write a program that would reasonably simulate Gloranthan weather (at least in Genertela) and voila!  25 years have passed and I've completed precisely..none. 

[Squaredeal Sten]

2 hours ago, styopa said:

This was something I'd set myself to back in the 1990s, all loaded up with Access programming skills.

And then I thought, well, I need to develop a rutter that covers the Gloranthan coastline ... and voila!  25 years have passed and I've completed precisely..none. 

I love your story, Styopa!  That's why the great big matrix approach is a dead end.  Not because it won't work, but because we all have something better to do than make that world sized matrix.  Like actually play and have a life.

So make the players, not the GM, worry about whether a given trade route will actually pay.  They can discover that step by step, while if we discuss it to a conclusion the GM can employ a page worth of simple rules and not build the world machine matrix.  (Is the Mostali problem with fixing the world machine something similar?) 

Your story makes me think of the time back in about 1971 when I decided that with access to a computer that actually had a hard drive, I would write a brute-force redistricting program for a term project for a Poli Sci class.  In Fortran IV, which might as well be ancient Sumerian  cuneiform today.  What I learned was that's not a workable approach.  Which is actually valuable knowledge.  I found another more conventional term project.  Yes, in 1971 there were hard drives.

Edited September 19, 2020 by Squaredeal Sten
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[Baron Wulfraed]

12 hours ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

 Yes, in 1971 there were hard drives.

And the larger 11-platter models eventually reached a whopping 100MB of storage! As I recall, my college machine (late 70s) had six 100MB drives, and they later added two 300MB drives -- not for student data, but for swap files! (Hmm, the CP/V user guide I just found via Google talks of 24MB removable drives and a 6MB fixed drive) Students taking BASIC had a quota of 30 "granules" or 15kB.

[Lordabdul]

15 hours ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

Yes, in 1971 there were hard drives.

Interesting, I wasn't aware they were going as far back except for rare hardware. I remember as a kid in the late 80s when my computer engineer dad replaced one of the two floppy disk drives on our computer with a hard drive. I ask him "what's that thing marked 'C:/' here, dad?", and he says "ah, that's our new hard drive". "What's a hard drive?", I ask. "It's like a floppy disk, only you can't take it out", he says. With my 10 year old wisdom, I reply: "well, that's obviously completely stupid".

On 9/13/2020 at 6:00 PM, Squaredeal Sten said:

I have recently noticed that in Volume II of Guide to Glorantha, page 470, there is a table of "Important trade goods' by region (imports and exports).  This is at the end of the "The oceans" chapter.  It is at the level of "Dragon Pass", "Holy country", "Lunar Empire", "Teshnos", so is pretty macro.

That's indeed where I would start for long distance trade between broad nations. I'm a big fan of "trader" campaigns where the main PC (or, possibly, NPC patron) is a merchant, and the rest of the party are associate merchants, bodyguards, rangers, etc. I have yet to run such a campaign in Glorantha, though.

It's worth pointing out that the crunch for the trading rules really depends on what the focus of the campaign is. If the focus is to get from point A to point B safely and with as much merchandise intact, then there's not much need for crunch for the actual trading... one can keep track of the percentage of cargo lost to Tusk Riders, Wolf Pirates, tornadoes, taxes, and whatever else happened on the way, and then we sell what's left with a fixed markup and the possibility to get a bonus/penalty on it with some skill rolls. For a bit more crunch one could keep track of where small-but-expensive-items are vs bulky-and-cheaper items (front/middle/rear of the caravan, or different decks/cargoes on ship) so we can better track what gets lost, stolen, or confiscated. Rolling for hiding illegal goods against, say, a Lunar patrol, also adds a bit of tension. But anyway my point here is that the focus is on getting the stuff to the places where you can sell it. It's not so much about the spreadsheet sums and margins, and more about the adventure of transporting valuable merchandise.

Another focus can be on actually finding good trade routes with good margins. In this case the crunch might still not be on what's valuable here vs there and by what percentage. It might be more about establishing political and commercial agreements to get less taxation going through a specific area, maybe even bribing a few key people. It might be about taking a shortcut through what is thought as being a dangerous path but somehow we manage to befriend the trolls or placate the spirits or whatever is making this path unused. It might be about eliminating some competition, getting your stock featured more prominently at the market by bribing the city officials, and so on. Again, this can be done as a fixed markup for the trade route, but with bonuses/penalties for each advantage/disadvantage we accumulated.

Of course, one can still go and make up tables about, say, what bear pelts are worth here vs. there compared to Tarshite patterned textiles or Praxian knives or Lunar jewelry... those are fun to make! But I'm pretty sure it can all be abstracted into a combination of bulkiness ratings and value ratings (which in turn lets us compute the total value and volume of our stock, so we know how big a ship we need, how many mules and guards we need, etc.). Figuring out exactly what goes in the "Bulk 1, Value 3" amphorae vs. the "Bulk 4, Value 2" barrels can be mostly improvised, as appropriate for the supply source.... mmmh.... I should check back on a few RPG books and come up with a real system now  

[Squaredeal Sten]

23 hours ago, lordabdul said:

I I'm a big fan of "trader" campaigns ....

It's worth pointing out that the crunch for the trading rules really depends on what the focus of the campaign is. If the focus is to get from point A to point B safely ....

Another focus can be on actually finding good trade routes with good margins. In this case the crunch might still not be on what's valuable here vs there and by what percentage. It might be more about establishing political and commercial agreements to get less taxation going through a specific area, maybe even bribing a few key people. It might be about taking a shortcut through what is thought as being a dangerous path but somehow we manage to befriend the trolls or placate the spirits or whatever is making this path unused. It might be about eliminating some competition, getting your stock featured more prominently at the market by bribing the city officials, and so on. Again, this can be done as a fixed markup for the trade route, but with bonuses/penalties for each advantage/disadvantage we accumulated.

....

That's a nice catalog of sub-adventure hooks.   The decision for a party to attempt long distance trade is one thing, but you have listed the daily or seasonal obstacles and exercises of ingenuity which are the subject  of play, in other words adventure hooks for each session.   This is good advice, and thank you.

Edited September 20, 2020 by Squaredeal Sten
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