How to run a Trader Game

[chandley]

Other classic "trader" adventures: Having your entire ship hired to take someone to some off the beaten trail planet. Safari for a rich noble, scientific research, relief mission. None of these need to be criminal or illegal.

Note: The Nostromo was a cargo hauler...

Even on bog standard cargo runs, you can play around with the difference between speculative cargo and freight.
Speculative cago incentivizes whoever is pitched in to buy it to do some leg work to get the best price on the sale. Some of that CAN be illegal, but it doesn't have to be. If you and your rival are both trying to offload a few tons of fidget spinners, perhaps your gunners unusual hobby in modern dance coupled with the pursers advertising acumen can boost your products cache with the locals, get you a premium price. Perhaps it fails to do that, and now you have to decide if you want to take a loss now, or keep that cargo space locked up for another trip... and potentially still taking a loss!

Meanwhile, one usually hopes that freight is your bread and butter, no frills money maker. Maybe, because of the big lines, it isn't quite profitable enough to pay all the bills (see speculative cargo for that), but there is a lot of it, and it has a good credit rating. But wait! The savvy GM will giggle to himself as he pours over the implications of Gurps Traveller: Far Traders "Terms of Shipping" table! EXW and DFD (Ex-Works and Delivered Free Domicile) are both fraught with peril if the buyer or seller uses the carrier (that is the PCs!) as their pickup/delivery guys on planet too. Its a hassle for the crew, captain doesn't want to do it, but UPS is booked solid so maybe we just sweeten the deal with a big (BIG) bonus and another nice contract if you do us this favor... Don't hit the crew with bandits/breakdowns/hurricanes on the first such transaction, oh no. The first hit is free, they say. Nooo let them get a taste of that sweet, sweet shipping and handling money... FOB/CIF/DES are also fun for administrative issues with customs, irate locals claiming the goods are stolen, immoral, or violate a local monopoly (perhaps falsely! A tactic savvy PCs might turn on rival NPCs when selling speculative cargo...).

If your captain is busy arguing with the local law enforcement that this freight is perfectly legal, and the purser and gunner are busy with some market manipulation for the fidget spinners, well, who talks to the irate luxury passenger who is complaining about the damn VERMIN he saw crawling into his rooms ventilation duct and what kind of ship are you people running here?

Just saying. And hell, in Transhuman Space, where the captain is an illegal AI, your purser is a smart cat, and your gunner is a K-10, well, I guess your engineer astropus is crawling through some vents looking for whatever that was while your flying monkey chief of security closes the emergency seals behind him so it doesn't get behind him and hey, what the hell is all this corrosion... Sometimes the crew itself is a source of entertainment :)

[Refplace]

Some good ideas here and this is why we need a good merchant traders book.

[chandley]

Originally Posted by Refplace

Some good ideas here and this is why we need a good merchant traders book.

I treat my Gurps Traveller: Far Trader book with devoted reverence. I pillage it for ideas for just about any setting involving trade, right down to making hamfisted attempts to import the trade model. An updated version with a broader scope (not just Traveller, say), would make me sooooo happy.

Till then, it is available on PDF, I recommend it.

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by chandley

Till then, it is available on PDF, I recommend it.

I have it and wish I had my original Traveler one still as well :)

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by whswhs

My point is, I think, that in a kill and loot campaign, the gold pieces and magic items are the reward, not the central conflict, which is fighting monsters and disarming traps; but the players still want to keep track of both the activity ("how many hit points do I still have?") and the reward ("how many gold pieces is it worth?"). But when I run trading games, the players aren't usually very interested in either the details of how much they paid for things and how much they sold them for, or figuring the profit that is their theoretical reward. So the "game" aspect of trading is less exciting than the "game" aspect of killing and looting; the players are in it almost entirely for the roleplaying. And it's kind of tedious for the GM to keep track of gross profits and cargo stowage and operating expenses when the players have no interest.

I don't think that the answer is to provide a more detailed and exact model for figuring profit and loss. I think if there is an answer, it's to provide a much simpler set of rolls, one that doesn't require elaborate record-keeping at all.

It really seems to me that the obvious answer would be not playing a trader game with players who find trade uninteresting. Is there some reason to want to make it happen despite this?

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

It really seems to me that the obvious answer would be not playing a trader game with players who find trade uninteresting. Is there some reason to want to make it happen despite this?

The setting mostly.
Trade is a viable reason for traveling and interaction in almost any setting. Going in and killing things and looting the bodies, not so much.
So a merchant based campaign makes a good background or reason for the PCs to be there. However it cant be all about the accounting or boredom will ensue.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by chandley

I treat my Gurps Traveller: Far Trader book with devoted reverence. I pillage it for ideas for just about any setting involving trade, right down to making hamfisted attempts to import the trade model. An updated version with a broader scope (not just Traveller, say), would make me sooooo happy.

Till then, it is available on PDF, I recommend it.

I tried to run a game with this book. It was dismal and didn't get past the first session. I don't think it got past rolling for speculative cargo. This is exactly what Bill is talking about with a detailed system for trade being at odds with what the players are interested in doing.

[thrash]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I don't think that the answer is to provide a more detailed and exact model for figuring profit and loss. I think if there is an answer, it's to provide a much simpler set of rolls, one that doesn't require elaborate record-keeping at all.

I did an article for the old JTAS Online called "Cash and Carry," that abstracted the trade system in Far Trader down to a few rolls. The intent was to take the burden of actual bookkeeping out of a trader campaign, if the group was just using trade as an framework for adventuring.

I seem to have lost my back-up copy, but it should be available on the JTAS CDROM from Far Future Enterprises.

[Rindis]

Originally Posted by chandley

I treat my Gurps Traveller: Far Trader book with devoted reverence. I pillage it for ideas for just about any setting involving trade, right down to making hamfisted attempts to import the trade model. An updated version with a broader scope (not just Traveller, say), would make me sooooo happy.

I learned more about economics from that book than in high school. (Some of that was just putting it in a more interesting frame....)

I would also like to see broader-scope version of the book.

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

I tried to run a game with this book. It was dismal and didn't get past the first session. I don't think it got past rolling for speculative cargo. This is exactly what Bill is talking about with a detailed system for trade being at odds with what the players are interested in doing.

Well, there are people who are interested in such things. Just these days they're far more likely to play an Anno game than an RPG.

But to run a game that has trade as more than a background element, you need to have the campaign focus on money as a way of 'keeping score'. Old-fashioned dungeon crawls focus on supplies (food, torches, rope, ect.) as a method of generating overall tension (i.e., outside of combat/non-moment to moment tension). Trading campaigns do it with money.

I'll note most fiction dealing with trading has similar patterns. C.J. Cherryh's merchanter novels, and Chanur books show some of the mechanics of trade, but they're not the backbone of the plot. Instead, you get more concerns of 'I've got to keep this situation under control for another hour, because I'm in the middle of loading cargo.' Trade restricts choices, but doesn't drive them. On the other hand, Spice and Wolf does have trade drive the plot in several places.

[thrash]

Originally Posted by ericthered

This is one of the things that causes a huge disconnect for me. When someone says a "traders" campaign, it seems to often mean a "criminal" campaign. Is this a fair assumption? Are most traders games about folks more or less on the outs with the law? is "smugglers" or "illicit dealers" a better name for this type of game?

"Adventure," by its nature, requires risk -- anything uniformly safe is tourism. Merchants, by their nature, are risk-averse: danger implies unnecessary costs. A campaign about successful merchants would be tedious and dull, because that's the way merchants remain successful. The only "merchant adventurers," then, are the desperate, hanging on by their wits, guts, and luck. That these often skirt the law is a sign of where the potential rewards are to compensate for the risks they run.

A smuggler or illicit dealer (or pirate, for that matter) would be a specialization of the general trader campaign. Most "merchant adventurers" tend to dabble in all of these areas as circumstances dictate and opportunities present themselves.