Investors/Social Engineering

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

Just to point out-- I chose Amazon because it is real. Accordingly in a real world setting there is enough money to buy and sell it, making it a better test for the rules than the OP's aspirations of $26T.

I'm not sure that's the case. I assume Amazon is owned by shareholders, not by a single proprietor or investor or a single financial organization. So it doesn't automatically follow that any one economic actor could pay to buy it outright.

[Donny Brook]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I'm not sure that's the case. I assume Amazon is owned by shareholders, not by a single proprietor or investor or a single financial organization. So it doesn't automatically follow that any one economic actor could pay to buy it outright.

Absolutely.
As I have alluded without perhaps sufficiently clarifying, I have been taking the rules for finding investors at very large scale to include the commercial methods realistically used at those scales, e.g. banking cartels and stock markets. If the rules were never intended to operate at that scale, then my example is somewhat moot.

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

Absolutely.
As I have alluded without perhaps sufficiently clarifying, I have been taking the rules for finding investors at very large scale to include the commercial methods realistically used at those scales, e.g. banking cartels and stock markets. If the rules were never intended to operate at that scale, then my example is somewhat moot.

Same here. I think that the rules are completely intended to include every possible method.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Alonsua

Same here. I think that the rules are completely intended to include every possible method.

No. Definitely not. The way the Search rules are written in the Basic Set, it's clear that you're finding a hireling (one person) or a job (working for one person or organization). Nothing I wrote in SE explicitly changes that, and a lot of the additions assume you're finding one actor; for example, there are rules for the size of the organization affecting your chance of finding it, which only makes sense if you're looking for something that already exists as an organization, not putting together a new consortium.

Search rolls are intended to let you find something that already exists, so that you can deal with a need without a huge amount of roleplaying, from "I want to find a buyer for our dungeon loot" to "I want to get drunk and laid." They aren't intended to replace roleplaying things that aren't so easily available.

And you could try to extend them, if you like, but since I wasn't considering such cases when I wrote my extensions, I didn't think about the issues, and you mustn't expect what I came up with to give results that make sense. Nor do I have any suggestions on how to fix them. You might conceivably need to write entirely different rules, or to roleplay a long process of seeking funding from multiple people, setting up a partnership or joint stock company, and so on.

[Alonsua]

World total bank assets.

These figures are not updated, but I guess that at 1% as per Pulling Rank the maximum loan would be about 1 trillion dollars, maybe 2 trillion dollars with a critical success or excellent reaction.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Alonsua

World total bank assets.

These figures are not updated, but I guess that at 1% as per Pulling Rank the maximum loan would be about 1 trillion dollars, maybe 2 trillion dollars with a critical success or excellent reaction.

But only if you borrowed from all of the banks. That means making a series of Search rolls until you've found every one of them, one at a time. It isn't as if there were a single global financial organization that could make decisions for all of them.

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by whswhs

But only if you borrowed from all of the banks. That means making a series of Search rolls until you've found every one of them, one at a time. It isn't as if there were a single global financial organization that could make decisions for all of them.

I dont think it is intended to work like that. I will check my rulebook asap.

After reading the pages I dont think it is intended to be rolled sixty times, since the roll will allow you to take a loan, the details are for you to entertain, it doesnt matter if you interpret is as "you find a wealthy angel" or "you run a succesful crowdfunding campaign".

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Alonsua

I dont think it is intended to work like that. I will check my rulebook asap.

After reading the pages I dont think it is intended to be rolled sixty times, since the roll will allow you to take a loan, the details are for you to entertain, it doesnt matter if you interpret is as "you find a wealthy angel" or "you run a succesful crowdfunding campaign".

You can check the rulebook all you like. But I *wrote* Social Engineering, and I intended it as I say, and I play it that way in my own campaign. For you to say a rule is intended to mean something that its author explicitly tells you it is not meant to mean seems odd.

[mr beer]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I'm not sure that's the case. I assume Amazon is owned by shareholders, not by a single proprietor or investor or a single financial organization. So it doesn't automatically follow that any one economic actor could pay to buy it outright.

Yeah agreed.

Say you have the market value of Amazon available in cash today, you can buys shares on the open market. You will be able to buy some shares at current market price, lets say $1B or so. Then the price will rise. And rise. And rise. Even if you have infinite money, you can't immediately buy all the shares, or even a controlling stake, on the open market. You will need to approach stockholders and make an offer.

How it would work is you have to make a deal with the controlling shareholders as well as make a deal with the financiers. You will have to offer a premium over current share prices in order to entice them to sell. Of course, you then have to 'sell' the concept of paying over market prices to your financiers, if the collateral is the company itself.

All of this is likely moot because I imagine it would be tricky to do any of that without the cooperation of Jeff Bezos and as far as I know, he's not currently in the business of not running Amazon.

[Donny Brook]

Originally Posted by mr beer

Yeah agreed.

Say you have the market value of Amazon available in cash today, you can buys shares on the open market. You will be able to buy some shares at current market price, lets say $1B or so. Then the price will rise. And rise. And rise. Even if you have infinite money, you can't immediately buy all the shares, or even a controlling stake, on the open market. You will need to approach stockholders and make an offer.

How it would work is you have to make a deal with the controlling shareholders as well as make a deal with the financiers. You will have to offer a premium over current share prices in order to entice them to sell. Of course, you then have to 'sell' the concept of paying over market prices to your financiers, if the collateral is the company itself.

All of this is likely moot because I imagine it would be tricky to do any of that without the cooperation of Jeff Bezos and as far as I know, he's not currently in the business of not running Amazon.

While all that is correct, it is not really germane to the question of how/whether the rules provide for raising the funds.