[Merchant Prince] Wealth Mechanic

[Kilgs]

My Free Trader/Merc group is trying to determine whether we want to actually do traditional Traveller bean-counting or something more hand-wavey (No one wants to be the accountant).

Does Merchant Prince have a Resource/Wealth mechanic? Would it work for a ship of troubleshooters? Anyone have experience with it? Can you use it to make small purchases or does it only come into play with bigger corporations?

 

[DonM]

I don't think Merchant Prince has such, but you might borrow from Dilletante and fill in the gaps you are looking at.

 

[Kilgs]

Does Dilettante have something like that? Grrr... I may be motivated to buy MP but Dilettante is more of a stretch.

 

[hdan]

Dilettante is IMHO a worthwhile purchase, especially for the wealth portfolio and broader Social Standing rules.

They have a whole RPG-friendly system of investment portfolios that randomly wax and wane in value. The player can choose to let the system run on its own and skim off the proceeds (what I call the "trust fund baby" option). Or they can step in to help run things, though if they don't have any Admin skill they can definitely do more harm than good.

I haven't had a chance to play an actual game with the system, but it reads very well and seems like it would work well for people who want to RP such things without getting into the actual "bookkeeping and balance sheets" level stuff. (In other words, not a detailed emulation of a real business, but a high level simulation of a player's fortunes.)

 

[Cryton]

I'm running a game where the players have portfolios strait out of dilettante, and so far its working very well. The players are generating enough off the top to cover their monthly ship payment and still make about 100Kcr a month, which still gives them plenty to play with and still want to adventure and trade for profit. So far none of them has tried to "boost" their profits, so its been a steady income, and pretty hand-wavy.

Give Dilettante a look, it might be worth your picking it up.

 

[Kilgs]

Hmm, that doesn't sound what I'm looking for. I'm not looking for an investment mechanic but something that just simulates the Resource skill (Fate) or Profit Factor from Rogue Trader. It would replace the characters actually possessing credits (ooc) completely.

 

[Plankowner]

I tried to map a Free Trader and its crew using Merchant Prince and it didn't work too well.

The smallest company (Rank 0) is for 1-100 employees, but it really doesn't work well for the 4-6 employee range...

What do you do with a company that has 25 employees when your vision was of a 200-ton Free Trader?

You get buyers on several worlds I guess, but now you are tied to a route, not truly FREE traders...

I think Dilletente will work better using the "Wealth" system and generalizing the money for a ship.

 

[Higgipedia]

Merchant Prince is good for starting a larger business. When I was messing around with some troupe stuff, I used the paradigm of a troubleshooting company, which the main PCs were the Board of Directors and the rest were various employees.

The business had an employee base of about 80ish, so there was a lot happening off camera.

It's a pretty vague system that'll require you to run through it a few times as a test bed before you implement it for your game.

Dilettante is good for abstract "big money" that rich people don't have to work for. It's your revenue streams that you have people actually knocking out the hard work and you are just collecting the profits.

The MP business system is pretty much a mini-game. For a Free Trader, I'd just use the RAW or include the MP rules for expanded Speculative Trading.