General How do planetary populations view Travellers?

[Timerover51]

On this, the smart player asks around about money exchanges that aren't "official." Somebody tells this player to see the guy in the backroom of the (pawn shop, music store, restaurant, barber shop, etc.). You go there with some tech from the ship and get ten times the official rate in money, or something like that.

There's always a way where there's a will...

The total planet population is about 70,000. No one is going to take Ten Credits and hand out 10 Silver Dollars. Credits are not currency on the planet. You take Ten Credits to the bank and you get one Silver Dollar, and have to explain how you got the Credits.. This is a metallic cash-based society.

Your plan only works when the local currency is worth less than a Credit, and Credits can be used to purchase items locally.

 

[whartung]

On this, the smart player asks around about money exchanges that aren't "official." Somebody tells this player to see the guy in the backroom of the (pawn shop, music store, restaurant, barber shop, etc.). You go there with some tech from the ship and get ten times the official rate in money, or something like that.

There's always a way where there's a will...

You don't understand. This is a monolithic society of opt-ins who are Happy, with no motivations for ne'erdowells. They don't have bored teenagers or underprivileged striving to get a leg up.

These folks will hang you from a rope without a blink, and the crowd will cheer them on.

 

[nobby-w]

[ . . . ]
Note, crew and visitors must buy local currency in order to pay for things on the planet. Ten Credits will buy you one local silver dollar, weighing one ounce. Two Hundred Credits will get you a $20 Gold Piece, weighing one ounce. Most transactions are carried out in coin, but some paper money is used as well.

So why would I bother to go there in the first place - it's not even cheap. It sounds like a fairly awful place to be a foreigner. What is there to do here but stumble about trying to guess the magic formula the DM has in his head to avoid offending the locals?¹

What is the economic incentive for me to take an expensive spaceship - presumably at the opportunity cost of going somewhere profitable - to this godforsaken hole? It sounds like the sort of place nobody would go unless they were put there by circumstances outside their control, and then forced to spend the adventure trying to figure out how to get offplanet.

What have you done to make this place interesting? Does it have a mcguffin? What adventures have you set there? Aside from the rampant xenophobia, what do the local politics look like? Who are the key NPCs that might hire a party of offworlders to do something interesting? What might they want done?

As an aside, I call this phenomenon The Law of Evil Empires™. An Evil Empire™ is some region of space or a planet or nation where the locals and/or authorities are by and large hostile to parties of random adventurers. The effect is that Evil Empires™ are really just a waste of space on a role playing map, as they are essentially treated as no-go zones² by players. By all means put them just off the edge of the map and have their minions make life hard for your party, but they really serve no purpose and just take up otherwise valuable real estate.

Now, dealing with murder hobos is a problem, but the best way to do this is to discuss the issue with the players. You're entitled to enjoy your work as a DM too, and having to plonk your party in the middle of a police state in order to get them to behave themselves is no fun for anybody. It's just addressing symptoms rather than the root cause. If you have that guy in your party, suggest that he might be happier playing Deus Ex or a shooter and discuss their behaviour.


¹ That trope is interesting for about one or two adventures and gets stale very quickly after that.

² By way of demonstrating this, when was the last time you saw a large (>6 month) campaign set in (for example) the Zhodani Consulate, Two Thousand Worlds, Soviet Union or Mordor.

 

[kilemall]

I take it then that you have an extremely low view of your players.

A lot of us like playing Space Noir. I understand you don't, and that's fine, but it's acceptable entertainment for a lot of us.

 

[atpollard]

It is just an exchange rate.
So a "Steward" earns 2000 credits per month = 200 silver dollars per month or 46 silver dollars per week or 9 silver dollars per day.

So prices on the world will be based around a $9 per day or less typical wage.
So a meal costs about $0.50 or 2 crewmen can eat out for $1 (10 credits).

The planet has an issue as well, unless the silver and gold dollars are worth their Credits in precious metal, then the local cash needs to be turned into credits to buy off-world goods.

 

[kilemall]

So why would I bother to go there in the first place? It sounds like a fairly awful place to be a foreigner. What is the economic incentive for me to take an expensive spaceship - presumably at the opportunity cost of going somewhere profitable - to this godforsaken hole?

Well, it sounds kind of like my Oort Cloud, and why would anyone want to go there?


Bases that are off the beaten track and won't be found by the gubermint.


Illegal services- biohacks, surgeries, banned starship modifications/weapons, psionic training.



Illegal goods- drugs, nukes, APHE rifle/ACR ammo, unlicensed makers, biobots.


Illegal research into above, sometimes operated by an otherwise 'respectable' corp/polity/org.


Escape from oppression for various religious/belief system/criminalized behavior orgs.

 

[kilemall]

It is just an exchange rate.
So a "Steward" earns 2000 credits per month = 200 silver dollars per month or 46 silver dollars per week or 9 silver dollars per day.

So prices on the world will be based around a $9 per day or less typical wage.
So a meal costs about $0.50 or 2 crewmen can eat out for $1 (10 credits).

The planet has an issue as well, unless the silver and gold dollars are worth their Credits in precious metal, then the local cash needs to be turned into credits to buy off-world goods.

My Oort Cloud has a 10:1 exchange rate going both ways, and I hand them physical coins and make them pay in hard currency, to delineate that 'not in Kansas' immersion.

 

[nobby-w]

Well, it sounds kind of like my Oort Cloud, and why would anyone want to go there?


Bases that are off the beaten track and won't be found by the gubermint.


Illegal services- biohacks, surgeries, banned starship modifications/weapons, psionic training.



Illegal goods- drugs, nukes, APHE rifle/ACR ammo, unlicensed makers, biobots.


Illegal research into above, sometimes operated by an otherwise 'respectable' corp/polity/org.


Escape from oppression for various religious/belief system/criminalized behavior orgs.

You're expecting to find those in the location described by OP?

These sorts of things sound like great things to put at a location. They will make it the sort of place a party would go by choice. By all means put more of that in your 'verse. These are actual, interesting mcguffins to find there. Populate it with crime syndicates or other disreputable parties that might be in the habit of hiring parties of adventurers to do their dirty work.

But please, please don't turn it into another dead end populated by xenophobic local bigots who don't want the party there in the first place. And don't make up a secret code of conduct that the party has to guess in order to avoid getting arrested/fined/into a fight/stoned to death by religious zealots. That trope has been well and truly done to death. It wasn't interesting the first time, and it's even less interesting the sixteenth time around.

 

[kilemall]

You're expecting to find those in the location described by OP?

These sorts of things sound like great things to put at a location. They will make it the sort of place a party would go by choice. By all means put more of that in your 'verse. These are actual, interesting mcguffins to find there. Populate it with crime syndicates or other disreputable parties that might be in the habit of hiring parties of adventurers to do their dirty work.

But please, please don't turn it into another dead end populated by xenophobic local bigots who don't want the party there in the first place. And don't make up a secret code of conduct that the party has to guess in order to avoid getting arrested/fined/into a fight/stoned to death by religious zealots. That trope has been well and truly done to death. It wasn't interesting the first time, and it's even less interesting the sixteenth time around.

Well, I kind of get what the Space Texas planet is, given that the whole Kansas/Oklahoma/North Texas area is my native area.

Seems to me like it's more a hardscrabble by choice sort of place and you can do interstellar business there but better not try and cheat the locals, six-shooters do organ damage as well as lasers. That and they LIKE living this rough life and so dropping off your Imperial Culture holocubes and trying to set up makers to upend local economics won't go over well.

Fits quite nicely with the 'why isn't every planet TL A+' question, some want that culturally and won't sign over their way of life.


As to what might be worth going to Texasworld for?




I can think of various groups escaping repression on their worlds, Texas is filled with various ethnic and religious groups that escaped something. So you might be going there for less an economic reason and more a community or person.

If you want cattle, well this is your place.

I would expect a certain 'interstellar dude ranch' tourist industry.

And this place would be fantastic for hardcore Hunter parties hunting with local weapons and hunting dogs only.




Hmm, now as to the OP's scenario, if you don't have advanced planetgen stuff like T5 does, then simply roll on whatever reaction table for general Traveller welcome/xenophobia, then use that as the base modifier for the reaction to the specific players, further modded by how they act and what they do.


I thought of a really annoying scenario- an overly friendly planet with a LL of 9+.


So say you rolled 11 for basic Traveller friendliness, and that is a permanent +4 on any reaction rolls.


So never any fights or trouble, at worst a somewhat morose reaction but most of the time they are happy, even effusive to see you.


But, they have standards. And so that LL roll comes up and starts hammering the party. But rather then the usual gritty hassle/bribe routine, they are ever so apologetic that they must fine you Cr1000 for walking on the grass, it's a law here and so sorry you didn't know, hope you enjoy your stay and you can pay the fine in any convenient way possible before the clamps on your ship are released when it's time to go.


And even if they end up shooting at you because you cut the clamps and blasted out of the extrality line in a HIGHLY illegal manner, they will apologize profusely that they now have to blow you out of the sky, please come back again when you are settled up, no hard feelings.


How's that for different?

 

[Enoki]

The total planet population is about 70,000. No one is going to take Ten Credits and hand out 10 Silver Dollars. Credits are not currency on the planet. You take Ten Credits to the bank and you get one Silver Dollar, and have to explain how you got the Credits.. This is a metallic cash-based society.

Your plan only works when the local currency is worth less than a Credit, and Credits can be used to purchase items locally.

My plan works like a pawn shop would in this case. The value of the item other than credits traded is what it's worth locally. You are on say, a TL 7 planet and you have some TL 13 item that is really useful then the store will give you far more for it than if you exchange credits at the bank, even if you paid next to nothing for the item originally.

The other case is that there are people locally who know that credits are worth far more than the government's official exchange rate. You see this right now, today, in countries that have official exchange rates. Venezuela, for example, has an artificially low exchange rate. The real rate is set by an exiled colonel from their military that works at a Home Depot in Alabama.
Sure, you can go with the official rate but there's a black market that will give you the real (and astronomically higher) real rate.
If this world has people that travel, or do off world business, they are likely willing to give more local money for credits that are accepted off world.

The third way to go is if this world's money is available elsewhere, you exchange for it there instead of locally. Metal coinage might be very valuable locally, but it might not be on other planets who are going with the world's GDP, or other economic measures.

The last one might be to simply forge coins using advanced technology, particularly if the local technology is relatively low by comparison. You hit a world where gold is dirt cheap and plentiful, and make the coins using some advanced method that produces perfect copies.

I did the off world exchange one in the Navy for example. I knew the Philippines had an artificially low exchange rate locally. So, I exchanged dollars for Philippine pesos in Hawaii at a much better rate. What I didn't spend in the PI, I exchanged back for dollars at the bank on base. Technically, you needed a receipt showing you had gotten the pesos in the PI. But, since most of the sailors exchanged their money there, there were literally hundreds of receipts on the ground outside the bank. You picked one up and voilà! you could make the exchange...

If you had $50 bills (the Navy paid you in 20's to try and prevent this), you could get more pesos by going to the music shop on Magsaysay street and you got about 50% more money in exchange from the owner in the backroom.

In Haiti, you could get great deals for trading stuff rather than cash. Everybody that was smart locked their sheets and blankets up because those were a hot commodity for trade. A guy in my shop traded a broken boom box for some really nice mahogany nesting tables.

You just have to be creative when dealing with the natives. Maybe you can buy a nice island for beads...

 

[Tiikeri]

A lot of assumptions made about tr's example planet.

He said x credits will get you x silver coins. He did not say it was an official rate or an exchange rate. Therefore it's probably a natural market rate. The workarounds people suggest only work when the official exchange rate is worse than the market rate. This requires a lot of government control which it seems like his example planet doesn't have. Even with a lot of govt there would still have to be dysfunctional currency controls to create the discrepancy between official rate and market rate.

Going to a local pawnshop or dark smoky saloon to get a better exchange rate assumes that there's interested buyers for ship tech, that imports are rare to make that ship tech so valuable, and that for some reason buyers wouldn't pay in silver or the other commodities they have. If the 3I is a legend to them, theyll have little interest in its money because they have nowhere to spend it. Low demand, so low price. Nobody cares.

They get raided by space vikings every so many years, so of course they're xenophobic. Space vikings in this context (piper) are extremely destructive. Anyone with half a brain would waste armed foreigners on sight after one of those raids. No secret code, incoming ships probably get briefed via comm as soon as theyre detected.

Why go there? Same reason as going to any other cow town, whatever the adventure requires. Range wars, frontier settlement, planetary romance, defending plucky independents from space murder hobos, convincing independents to form an alliance vs a greater threat.

Evil empires are no go zones, until people have a reason to go. Firefly went to reaver planet. Rebels sure went to imperial bases a lot. No go zone happens because of a power differential. If the evil empire will whip Murder-Hobo behind every time, they won't go. If Murder-Hobos always win they'll go there all the time and laugh about it. A good adventure requires a compelling reason to take the risk. One swords and sorcery game, an evil empire didn't field mages, so people with mage capability were worth their weight in gold if they could be captured from the evil empire. The players wouldnt leave the evil empire alone. Evil empires don't have to be closed societies. Rome could be an evil empire (conquest, slavery, etc) but it was open and cosmopolitan, with plenty of reasons to go. Same with sparta.

 

[Timerover51]

The Gold exchange rate comes from Adventure 2: Research Station Gamma, page 38.

(two ounces of gold at Cr200 per ounce)

That is the standard gold exchange rate in my entire sector. Gold is used a lot in trading as there is no universal currency. This puts it about where international trading was around 1900. Countries were on the Gold Standard, and their currency was priced accordingly. I use the term "Credit" in a very loose sense, indicating some form of currency. New Texas uses the 'Peso", with a quote of 20 pesos to the ounce of gold. The Space Viking worlds have all agreed to the "Kroner" at 50 Kroner to the ounce of gold. Baldur uses the "Krona", at 20 Krona to the ounce. Ukko, in the Kalevala Sub-Sector, uses the "Thaller" at 5 Thaller to the ounce of gold, and a large number of silver coins.

Now, suppose a ship crewman or a visitor gets off a ship and starts spending new one ounce silver and one-half and one ounce gold coins with casual abandon. If not made to resemble El Paso coins, the only check is do they equal El Paso Mint standards for purity. If El Paso coins, then very quickly some merchant lets the city marshall know about this, and the marshall shows up with several deputies, and points a 12 gauge double-barrel shotgun at the visitor mid-section and marches him or her down to the veridicator at the space port. Once hooked up, some very pointed questions are asked. If the coins were made off-planet, all remaining coins are impounded, and the miscreant is marched to Viking Hill, where the portable gallows are waiting. Then the individual is given a shovel and told to dig. It they put up a fuss, they are knocked out, hands shackled behind their back, and then hoisted upside down so that their head is about 6 feet up and they can contemplate their grave being dug. The major question then is whether to drop them in the hole as soon as dug, or let them hang for a while.

Does anyone think that someone is going to get away with passing a large number of newly minted coins when they just got off of a star ship?

 

[Tiikeri]

At 70,000 people, everyone is probably related or at least acquainted to some degree. Small scale forgery might be possible if coins can be made to pass simple tests a shop keeper might use. It wouldnt be worth the effort, unless it's a Murder-Hobo getting his kicks from passing fake coins to a barmaid. No wonder they're xenophobic.

 

[Tiikeri]

Only issue I can see is if a big spender like a government or a corporation wants to fill immense orders for local commodities for some reason (war) and they have the bullion to pay. It could depress the value of gold and silver.

 

[BRJN]

As to what might be worth going to Texasworld for?

Some Amish moved in. Their enclave is almost self-sufficient and they like it that way. They produce a trickle of surplus grain to sell, usually in the more-transportable forms of C-Ration biscuits (or sometimes alcohol).

Another world not too far away is barely producing enough food for all the hungry mouths. They have learned that the Amish get much better yields on their crops. Would the PCs (and their ship) be willing to go buy a ton or so of grain seed and bring it back? A sort of 'charter', if you will.

 

[willtron3030]

That's a problem if the increased currency supply doesn't find an outlet in off-planet trade, increased productivity or increased population. If population and off-planet trade remains unchanged save for the influx of off-planet currency and export of the valued resource, I'd expect to see some productivity declines as part of the planetary economy shifts to satisfy increased demand for luxury goods. If overall off-planet trade increases, I'd expect to see improvements in infrastructure, standard of living, and population growth (if the world can support it). There are still many many edge cases where even smart re-investment catapulted the planet into a boom economy, on the fast track collapse and further exploitation by off-worlders.

Forward-thinking regional economic powers will want to advise the world economy towards sustainable growth or some kind of equilibrium. Less scrupulous types will not care about the planet a generation from now, and will extract as much value as possible, as fast as possible. "All the traffic will bear", etc.

A backwater planet with a post-bust economy is a (played-out) goldmine of adventure opportunities.

 

[whartung]

Fits quite nicely with the 'why isn't every planet TL A+' question, some want that culturally and won't sign over their way of life.

But they are TL A+, they just live in a theme park that gates it at, what, TL 4? It's TL 4 shrouded in a TL A+ bubble.

It's an opt-in community. Folks are free to leave if they don't like the rules, and the rules are made clear when folks show up. Don't they banish people that don't want to play along?

As to what the economic incentives are for someone to go there who's not retired, I don't know.

That said, they're not some open refugee destination either. It's an enforced mono-culture.

 

[nobby-w]

[ . . . ] If El Paso coins, then very quickly some merchant lets the city marshall know about this, and the marshall shows up with several deputies, and points a 12 gauge double-barrel shotgun at the visitor mid-section and marches him or her down to the veridicator at the space port. [ . . . ]

Gold is gold. This clown has just shaken down my crew member, who is purchasing goods with perfectly good gold, for his money. If he was passing off dud coins I might be a little sympathetic, but you're harassing offworlders for purchasing stuff with legal tender.

How do the merchants know you didn't change the money legitimately at the bank anyway? Is the bank seriously going to publish a daily gazette of money changing transactions for the local merchants? Unless this is just a comfortable, middle-class theme park¹ then there will be folks with families to feed and an economic incentive to trade. They're not going to check with the bank, and the bank is not going to tell them.

If counterfeiting is a problem and your authorities are really serious about controlling inflation then they need to be minting something a little harder to forge than gold coins. There are companies who make bank notes and it wouldn't kill the local authorities to spend some of the bank's reserve of credits to buy in currency that offworlders can't easily forge.

If you're going to try and hang someone because he's not paying your money changer his inflated rates you've got every right to expect a few laser bolts up the jacksie and your world marked as an amber zone on the charts. That's the sort of stuff kleptocrats do in third world countries with corrupt regimes. You're describing a society run by a deeply corrupt and rather oligarchic boys club using xenophobia as a tool to keep the chattering classes in line. Nobody's going to trade there if they have a real expectation of getting ripped off or shaken down for their money by the authorities.

The sheriff is going to get to do that once or twice and then nobody will bother landing there without an armed escort. If the world produces nothing of value then nobody will go there at all. If the locals have this sort of attitude I don't blame the space vikings for shooting first.

If there is an ongoing problem with pirate raids then the authorities here are going to have to make a choice between their splendid isolation and sovereignty, pony up and join the 53rd century.

¹ Where is a small town in the middle of nowhere going to get the heavy industry to make a breech loading cannon? A far more likely scenario in the face of a threat of pirate landings is that the authorities raise some sort of constabulary and buy in some small arms and a few refurbished heavy weapons from offworld - these might not be all that expensive either.² If you're only dealing with pirate raiders they don't have to be state of the art. These would at least be available on the open market, and being a sovereign state they could easily do the paperwork to get an export permit from the offworld authorities.

Actually, if Space Vikings are that much of a problem, the New Texas government might well be up for some military aid if the locals aren't too full of themselves to accept it.

² For example, the URLs below are for various outfits that sell used armoured vehicles and various other bits of military kit. If you have the right paperwork you can buy the weaponry intact. There are other outfits that horse trade in secondhand military kit as well. In the OTU, Interstellarms specialises in this sort of trade.

http://www.mortarinvestments.eu/
http://www.mod-sales.com/
http://contact-kalia.com/military-surplus-inventory/

 

[Enoki]

This is why I invented a more-or-less universal, portable, difficult to impossible to forge, form of currency for use by players, the Sliver. It is made mostly of gold (not a particularly rare material in terms of Traveller I'd think) and mostly because that metal doesn't easily tarnish and acts as a radiation barrier. Inside is a microgram (very small amount) of the very rare super-heavy, island of stability, element Organisium. Found only near or in nova core remains or neutron stars for the most part making it both rare and something that governments tend to horde. It has a known (and very high) value but has little application outside its rarity.

The presence of Organisium within the sliver can be determined by scanning with something equivalent to an X-ray diffraction machine (XRD) or by checking the radiation decay rate count which is unique to this element.

Each sliver is stamped with the date of manufacture, so the quantity of Organisium within it can be measured and the presence of the proper amounts of decay particles present.

That makes it portable (each sliver is about the size of a Kuegerrand), easily (given the TL in the game) verified at places like banks and financial institutions or money exchanges, and nearly impossible to forge. That makes it very useful for people moving from system to system or traveling wherever. I allow these at an exchange rate of 1000 IC to 1, but that can vary with location too.

 

[Tiikeri]

No, the sheriff is pointing a gun at someone suspected of counterfeiting, then detaining him for questioning under polygraph. It wouldn't even get to this point because the suspects are unarmed and tell the sheriff at which bank they changed the money and with one call to the bank the sheriff could confirm. Tr already said only local coins in suspicious quantities would be an issue, the gold in other forms would just be checked for purity. Seems like gold and silver is the currency in his region of space so exchange rate will be market rate of those metals. There's no shady guy in a dark corner of a brubeks buying imperial credits for gold at some advantageous to travellers rate, the same way there's no shady airport bar where I can change dollars into Canadian dollars at some advantageous rate. Only when govts are trying sustain an artificial rate significantly divergent from a currency market rate does this happen to any appreciable degree. Yes I can change dollars into bolivar in a home depot at an advantageous rate, because a certain government is keeping an artificial rate instead a market rate.

It doesn't have to be a mono culture either, although with only 70,000 people how different can things get. I'm sure there's neerdowells, and other rough characters, and probably a bunch of ranchers daughters who'll say anything to leave cow town world behind, but none of these people are going to be involved with backroom currency trading because the economic incentives for that don't exist in tr's setting.