Yet Another Speculative Trade System

[NickP]

Speculative trade has always been one of my favourite elements of the Traveller universe.

I have to say however that, although the Book 7 and subsequent trade systems might be more realistic, it has always seemed a bit boring to me to just be buying and selling generic cargo. I much preferred the original Book 2 system where you rolled to see exactly what type of goods were available for purchase.

The original Book 2 system though was very limited, with only 36 different types of trade goods on offer, and kept coming up with illogical results - like cybernetic parts being available on a low-tech world or grain on a high-tech, high population world.

The players in my current game also got frustrated that there was only one type of goods per week on offer. He wanted to travel around the world tracking down particular cargos which he knew would find a good price on the next world they were planning on visiting. This seemed reasonable to me that there should be more options available if the party really was prepared a lot of time and effort into find better cargos - although I didn't want to give them carte blanche to choose any cargo they fancied, with the logic that not every world has export quality goods of every type available.

I think that I have now gone through more than half a dozen different rule sets trying to come up with an interesting but fair and logical system for acquiring speculative trade goods.

The best one that I found comes from the online JTAS site, written by Robert Prior in 2001. JTAS subscribers can read his system from the following link:

http://jtas.sjgames.com/login/article.cgi?353

However, this system does not provide a way of randomly rolling up trade goods for each particular world - GMs need to create a different table for each world, which is a lot of work to do each time.

To try and solve this system, I have come up with five different tables, one or more of which should be applicable to pretty much every different type of world.

The system also covers possibilities for adventure plots coming as a result of buying particular trade goods.

The instructions for using the system can be downloaded from the following link:

http://www.pendrell.com/moor/extended-trade.doc

The tables themselves can be downloaded from:

http://www.pendrell.com/moor/trade-charts-0-1.xls

Please note that these rules should be treated as very much an extreme Beta version - they haven't been playtested at all yet and I am sure people will find a lot of elements to the system which are illogical and could very well be improved (particularly with regards to the buy and sell modifiers for particular world types).

I would be delighted if someone with a fresh pair of eyes could go through the system and the charts and make some improvements to them and fix any glaring errors so that we can create a better 0.2 version of the system and the charts.

So all comments and criticisms would be gratefully received.

 

[RainOfSteel]

I downloaded your instructions, but they say extended. If it is meant to be, as your post suggests, an extension to the rules on the JTAS article, then for me, I am out on assisting you with determining errors as I have no access to that.

As for the tables, the PriNat table does not list Lanthanum and Zuchai crystals. As those are major components of jump drivers, I think they should be on the list. (I did see the Rare Earths entry, but Lanthanum should still be separate.)

EDIT-------

Also, I think I would list the PriAgr and PriNat tables this way:

Organic -- Plants or Natural Organics Products
-- Lumber, old growth clearance (more valuable in general)
-- Hydrocarbons
-- Anything gathered from the wild with no husbandry or farming involved (drilling and extracting are not farming in this case). It's a toss-up whether to include slash and burn agriculture here, but I wouldn't.

Agricultural -- Cultured Food or Plant Products
-- Grains, Fruits, Vegetables from farms
-- Lumber, cultured forests (less valuable in general)

Inorganic -- Metals and Ores
-- Exports not dependent on the an organic biosphere

But that is just my personal preference. I think the advantages are that is allows you to have worlds that are covered by life and organics, and has a population harvesting those organics for export, but there isn't enough agricultural activity for an export market of those types of products. I guess I just separate them in my mind.

 

[jawillroy]

I'll try playtesting these, and I'll let you know what I think. Thanks for posting 'em!

 

[NickP]

Although I say that it was based upon the JTAS article from 2001, it is a totally stand-alone system that doesn't require any other sources apart from Book 2 (Book 7 is a big help though).

So it is more of an extended version of the Book 2 system than the JTAS article (it is actually a contracted version of the JTAS system as they have more steps including making characters load the cargos into their cargo hold which I thought sounded rather dull).

It's certainly not the most complicated and detailed system out there. I know that there are other systems which have rules for hazardous, flammable and fragile cargos. Again though, to me it sounded more like a PITA than something that would make trade more fun.

Lanthanum was actually separate on my original list, but I needed to cut one in order to get it to a round 20 items. So I decided that Lanthanum was part of the rare earths.

There is certainly the possibility of sub-dividing down the types of trade goods into a larger number of categories. The problem there though is that it then becomes more difficult to decide which worlds would have access to which goods.

If someone was to add them to the spreadsheet though, I would be absolutely delighted.

 

[jatay3]

If you have time, you can give a romantic sounding description of a product. Instead of "plants or organic products" they are a sacred plant that is used by the priestesses of the temple of whatever to feed their sacred fire. That matters not for trade but is good for decoration.

And come to think of it, it might make the product interesting enough for someone to try to assassinate the PCs over it.

 

[NickP]

It would need to be left to the GM to come up with a more detailed description for each of the trade goods, as they should be different almost every time (i.e. in the example I went through, Wild Animals - Pets I decided would be Red Lemurs. Next time I rolled it, it could be Miniature Pandas.

BITS 101 Cargos has some detailed trade goods worked out for any GM who is lacking in inspiration.

 

[jatay3]

It would need to be left to the GM to come up with a more detailed description for each of the trade goods, as they should be different almost every time (i.e. in the example I went through, Wild Animals - Pets I decided would be Red Lemurs. Next time I rolled it, it could be Miniature Pandas.

BITS 101 Cargos has some detailed trade goods worked out for any GM who is lacking in inspiration.

Of course. I just thought it an interesting suggestion.

 

[Dolphin in a Robot Suit]

I cast Thread Necromancy!

I know this is a long shot, but does anyone still have the documents for this? For the past few weeks I've had a bug up my butt about improving the speculative trade system in my (HEAVILY homebrewed) CT game, and I'm trying to get inspiration from all over the place. This sounds like it would be great for my purposes.

 

[NickP]

Thanks for the memories!

Wow, this is a blast from the past!

I totally forgot that I ever did this! Thanks for reminding me.

I often joke that I can find documents on my hard drive from 20 years ago, whereas any piece of paper that I put on my desk is lost inside 24 hours! Thanks for providing a challenge to see whether the above is true.

Amazingly I found both documents, which you can now download from:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zmvqa6ijpdmxfv4/extended-trade.doc?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/m2gi74sxmfp1fm1/trade-charts-0-1.xls?dl=0

Having not looked at them for the best part of a decade, it may all be complete garbage, but it should satisfy your curiosity if nothing else.

Enjoy!

 

[Dolphin in a Robot Suit]

Woooo, that was fast! Heck, I didn't even expect to get any replies! Thanks NickP, for both your work on this system AND your willingness to materialize out of the mists of time just to help me out. After just a cursory glance, I can see it's gonna provide me with a lot of inspiration. I can tell you right now I'm definitely stealing your price volatility mechanic :rofl:

 

[kilemall]

It occurs to me that you could reasonably cap the cargo buy/sell tries at 1 per Pop level.
Of course the exponential aspect of pop would argue against a linear scale, but my thought is that a larger economy would buy and sell a lot faster and most 'deals' would be ended before a character was aware of them.

I quite like the MgT1E tables, just reverse the plus and minus and you can plug them into the CT resolution readily enough.


I never felt the need to rationalize the cargos to the planets.

The interstellar trade zone aspect of starports means a lot of through cargos destined for other places not strictly desired import/export to the host planet, and some just got stuck there due to no one paying to move them onto the 'proper' destination.

Several cargos are no doubt seized for starport fees/adjudication/evidence/lawsuits and disposed of afterwards. I expect a lot of those are storage where the company or speculator moving the product did not pay warehousing fees and the cargo is being sold off at a discount.

People can be irrational in their business as much as anyone else, so the massive bulk of 'natural' seed that ended up on the Industrial planet missed the organic farming craze and is now available at centicreds on the credit.

Or the robot harvesters send to Grainworld would have been really great sellers- if they weren't 3 TLs above the planet and designed to harvest fungi on methane worlds.



I'd take those crazy cargo results and treat them like crazy UWP results, an opportunity to spin a 'only in space' backstory, and maybe just maybe one of those little nuggets that get things going into the Big Story for the players.

Besides, I always though of those trade code modifiers as clearly delineating which ones are cheap local sourced or highly desired exports, and since you are making so many rolls you are bound to get some profitable opportunities.


Heh, me being me I would probably rule that you had to make a deal or not on the one you are aware of before it closes and being able to roll the next one. Then just cause I'm evil I'd probably roll one last eligible one just to let them know about 'the one that got away'.

If you max out your cargo hold, guess what? You will now have to buy cargo space on one of the other ships to get it moved along, or send an agent along with the cargo if the destination is different and pay them to catch up via passages or work out a rendezvous world. Better trust them with the money.