Trade and Trade Goods

[Inaubryn]

I know this was attempted before after the fact. But, now we have the opportunity to get this right from jump. What we'll need is the cooperation of the building community as a whole. Exports and Imports for any given region are located on pages 88 and 89 of the FRCS, Trade Routes and Resources. I believe we need to build to this model with exported trade goods in a region or area existing in excess, i.e. plentiful and goods that have been imported in much smaller supply. And I'll explain why in a moment. Obviously, exported goods are created for use in that region as well as export so would usually stand in large supply. Goods that are imported from other regions are quickly consumed or in some instances stored and would therefore be in shorter supply.

Now building a model like this will allow us to have this set up from the get-go as opposed to tryin' to impliment it mid-run. The whole point behind this is to promote inter-server trade. PCs who start up merchants can transport and sell goods to other servers where these goods are in short supply or non-existant. And the reverse of that is PCs who prefer to stick to one server can procure/craft certain goods that are plentiful there and trade/sell them to visiting merchant PCs.

As it stands now, every server has damn near every good in their stores, , markets, taverns, etc. There is no motivation to start up a merchant, traveling or otherwise. But, if say a tavern owner in Secomber wanted to sell Arabellan dry he'd have to have it imported. An agreement with a local merchant (PC) to have it imported at a reasonable cost could be made. That PC could then travel to Arabel and contact another PC merchant, buy the liquor from them and transport it back to Secomber.

Let's say a PC merchant in Hillsfar sells timber and a PC merchant from Daggerdale sells ale. The Daggerdale PC goes to Hillsfar to find a buyer for his quality ale. The Hillsfar PC knows that he can make a nice profit from sells of the ale from Daggerdale so he offers a trade. You all get the point.

What I'm suggestin' is that we set up a system that promotes ALFA-wide trade between PCs. It gives players something to do if there's no DM and creates a healthy player based economy on a lotta fronts because they would be negotiating the prices and such between themselves.

This also has the added advantage of PCs bein' able to start their own shops, caravans, costers, merchant companies, mercenary organizations, pirate and bandit groups, all centered on PC trading. Hell, a group of PC bandits could decide to pose as caravan guards to rob the thing with no DM around. Provided they PM'd a DM about possible CvC of course This would lead to the PC merchant who was robbed hiring adventurers to investigate the robbery and track down the bandits all independent of a DM.

[Ronan]

Sounds like a good idea. I've always been rather confused as to why a good percentage of the taverns in ALFA sell Lurien Stout and Evermeed (the latter being 30gp a bottle).

But the biggest hurdle is this, D&D and ALFA is made for adventurers, not merchants. So why would we devote a large amount of R&D and building effort to a system which a lot of people won't use? I'd love to have it, but it would be naive to think it wouldn't come at the cost of other features or bug fixes.

Granted, if you wanted to have a few standard-ish buyer/seller NPCs per town or city, it wouldn't be so hard. You'd have to make items for standard trade goods, and set a constants to indicate the pricing of each in different regions. But then you'd need some way to transport these goods, in wagons or boats. That involves significantly more scripting, building, and perhaps even modelling.

[fluffmonster]

inaub, you might want to find fionn and ask him what the status of the CTC (craft trade and caravan) group is.

[Inaubryn]

Right , fluff. And I've answered Ronan in a PM in chat. We're discussin' some interestin' things.

[wvincenti]

I'd love to see more support for this sort of thing. I know I'm not the only one who has pestered DMs at different times about trying to set up a more normal way to earn a living in game.



-Bill

[HEEGZ]

I'm currently running an explorer/merchant/trading PC and would love to see this implemented well. I do agree with an earlier post that this feature should be lower on the list of things to do though.