Here would be my first video, Role-playing Trade 01: Placing Goods & Services:
It runs 20 minutes, which I hope is not overlong. I have a tendency to ramble when I'm voicing a video. The discussion covers in a very general way the placement of commodities and the social effects some of those commodities might have on the system as a whole. This is meant to be no more than an introduction, certainly not a detailed account of what the player ought to specifically do. I hope, however, that it leads to some thinking and consideration on the first problem, as I move forward towards what will undoubtedly be a more detailed discussion of one of the regions above.
I was asked about what common products, resources or such, ought to be included - and rather than read those off into the video, I'll just give a list here:
Precious metals - gold, silver, copper
Iron
Building Stone
Gems
Salt
Beer
Animal products - cheese, meat, leather
Milling - flour, animal feed
Fish
Oils - lamp, cooking, perfume
Wine
Cloth
Fibres - wool, silk, hemp, cotton
Wood/lumber
Wagons
Ships
Tools & woodcraft
Carpentry
Paper
Alchemy (including magic)
Cement
Pottery/porcelain
Glass
Masonry
Smelting
Smithing
Weapons & Armor
Cereals
Fruits
Vegetables
Nuts
Livestock - cattle, horses, pigs, sheep, camels, dogs, elephants
That's 49, if we count all the individual forms. That's half the 100 I suggested. Obviously, these can all be divided - and they don't include luxuries such as caviar, opium, jewelry, spices and whatnot. But then, I do expect the reader to work out their own general list and at least begin with a sense for where some of those common or odd things ought to be coming from. Remember, a single commodity will often come from multiple places! Some things will cluster around one area, others will be scattered everywhere, still others will have only a few sources. Something very special will come from only one place (high quality swords from Muscaster).
Play around a bit and I'll post again when I have done the necessary work.
Showing posts with label Trade Course. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Trade Course. Show all posts
Friday, October 10, 2014
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
Lumping Together
From Jhandar on yesterday's post:
"TO a certain degree I feel you explained this well in your previous video on the economic system and working to create a world that incorporates this economic system myself I think you are still undersell the complexity some.
There is a deep, deep rabbit hole here, and the presence of the reference material in the encyclopedia cannot be undersold. For example, jade: milky jade, or Nephrite, is found in calcium and magnesium-iron rich deposits while Jadette, the darker green jade, is found in sodium and aluminium rich pyroxene. Does Mountain 'A' have that composition, which would indicate potential markers for the other minerals? Do both makeups of jade appear in the same range at different points? Etc. Being able to reference an established map and resource distribution removes an infinitely complex resource distribution model out of the question."
There is a deep, deep rabbit hole here, and the presence of the reference material in the encyclopedia cannot be undersold. For example, jade: milky jade, or Nephrite, is found in calcium and magnesium-iron rich deposits while Jadette, the darker green jade, is found in sodium and aluminium rich pyroxene. Does Mountain 'A' have that composition, which would indicate potential markers for the other minerals? Do both makeups of jade appear in the same range at different points? Etc. Being able to reference an established map and resource distribution removes an infinitely complex resource distribution model out of the question."
Well, actually no. I don't discriminate between types of jade in my system. I could have, but I decided that the players wouldn't really care that much. One has to draw the line somewhere.
Were I to suggest a better example, I would suggest wine. I know all the places where wine originates, so if I wanted I could identify every different variety of wine as a separate entry on the system. These could then be organized on the price list to all appear under the vintner, so that the players could choose the exact region or 'field' in France, Germany, Italy and so on, enabling them to buy their wine from the region of their choosing. Once I set up the formula, I wouldn't have to do it every time - I would only need to update it when I added in a new area (like Spain, which is not fully part of the system).
But in the inexact words of Mujadaddy, would that really improve the game?
I repeat, that line has to be drawn somewhere. Sure, a player could establish a fetish for a particular Alfoldian vintage, even demanding the party remain within a certain distance of that region so that he or she could keep their supply stocked - but that player could just as easily ask me to set up the program if it didn't already exist. Assuming it occurred to the player to think such a thing was possible (it is!). Players tend to assume most things are impossible and that DMs won't bother, even if asked. Thus they will invent other traits.
Naturally, most DMs would decide the presence of Cserszegi Fuszeres based on a die roll, totally by fiat, with the DM rating the likelihood as a '1' or a '2' in six. Exactly the sort of thing I described with hatred yesterday. Admittedly, for most players, that's good enough.
But today I'm not looking to make an argument for why more detailed is better. I'm only arguing that more detail is indeed possible. Which is to say, LESS detail is also possible.
Yesterday I suggested that the reader seeking an economic system sort out a list of things they want the player to buy. Today I'll add that if less detail is wanted, lump together parts of your list into single groupings.
To use an extreme example, let's suppose that you decide that beef will always be more expensive than pork, that chain mail will always be more expensive than scale mail, that long swords will always be more expensive than battle axes and so on. Let's say that you gather together all the food from all the equipment lists you're presently using and designate that those numbers represent ratios. The cheapest food is flour, say, which you designate a pound as equal to '1' value. Beef is then 4:1, fish is 5:1, ale is 3:2, caviar is 32:1 and so on. Whatever works for you!
Now, just as I lump all 'jade' together as one substance, the reader can now lump all 'food' together. You then assign every ordinary city on your world as producing 1 food; a city on the plains produces 2 food, a city on the sea produces 3 food and any other city of your choosing produces 4, 5 or more.
If 'food' seems to general, you can sort it out to grain, fruits, vegetables, meats, ale, wine and whatever else you're prepared to identify. Weapons become swords, axes and clubs. Armor becomes metal or leather. It is up to you how fine you want to slice up your availables.
Up front, I would suggest being very general. In other words, NOT doing it the way I have. As Jhandar says in the rest of his comment, the real world allows me to do certain things because the information already exists. But it is as easy to point at a group of mountains and roll a die against a table full of metals and minerals, giving you random answers. You don't have to know what the rock strata is in those mountains, or how they were geologically formed - the dice tells you they were formed in some bizarre way that enables them to have emeralds, iron and jade at the same time. Do you really care if that's unlikely in the real world? I wouldn't.
Start with 100 different commodities. Force yourself, initially, to limit your choices to that or less. Believe me, once you understand the system, it will be EASY to expand the number. The main thing, right now, is to have a set of things that you're going to associate with different parts of your world. On the weekend I will set up a video that talks about placing those things and getting the ball rolling.
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
Gather Data
On the subject of trade and trade systems.
After due consideration, I believe that I have made a mistake about what I've chosen to highlight in the past. I have consistently presented the economic angle - the production of goods and services, their distribution and most ponderously their value. I've used these things to demonstrate how they can be fitted into the framework of a world and how aspects of the distribution can add dimension and substance to that world.
Yet, after all that, I've failed to direct my attention to the place where a DM might begin with their world. I've sought primarily to show by example, expecting that the problems that started my system are the same problems that everyone has already encountered. Perhaps, however, I made a connection where others did not.
Allow me to correct that error - as I've only realized in the last day or so that I've made it. I'll go back to my mindset before building any sort of system at all.
I know that most of you are unfamiliar with the AD&D Player's Handbook, so I'll ask you to insert the game required equipment list of your choosing. I think most suffer from the same issues. The Player's Handbook, for example, had two columns of print dedicated to equipment. About forty percent described armor and weapons, the latter easily being the biggest section. Half again as much gave prices for what amounted to dungeon equipment and food, most of which was designed for either drinking at the tavern or eating in a dungeon. Then there was a section for animals - with four kinds of horses. Tack took up another section. Then there were vehicles and ships, a few things for clerics and a few herbs. The book did not include any descriptions, but later editions and other games made up for that.
I had three basic problems with the equipment list that, I remember, left me feeling that there was something fundamental lacking in the game. First and foremost, that no matter where the players went, no matter how far they travelled, no matter what culture or climate or size of city they entered, a long sword was always the same price.
Secondly, there weren't enough items. That was fixable by simply adding more items to the list, but that would inevitably lead to the third problem: the price for everyone had to be pulled right out of the air. There was no logic for why one weapon that did a certain amount of damage costed more than another that did the same damage, nor why banded mail, for example, was 5 g.p. more than splint mail, when they both offered the same armor class. Why even have two different armours for that amount of protection?
Solving these three problems would not be an easy solution. Most, I know, simply accept the book as written dogma, arguing that at least its a bullshit number that they themselves didn't invent, and so solves the problem. Of course, players were always asking for things that did not exist on the table, meaning that I was forever inventing a price for something - leading to complaints that my made up price for one thing did not fit a pattern in the player's head regarding the price of something else. I had only been playing the game for six years and I was already sick of it.
I had been considering various solutions based upon the weight of things and how much of different types of metal went into different objects, but I really could not decide on any method that didn't begin with at least two or three hundred half-assed judgement calls. This was precisely what I wanted to avoid.
The problem at the time wasn't that my world needed an economy, it's that it needed some sort of logic for pricing things. I felt that since things ought to be of a different price in different parts of the world, somehow this pricing system ought to account for that as well. At the time, I remember being completely flummoxed.
I had been working as a statistical clerk for an oil company and had just taken a stats job with the 1986 census that would keep me busy for most of 1985. I had seen the lengths to which companies and the government will go in order to amass data, organize it, interpret it and then use it to create policy - all in a world that had not yet invented excel or even windows. Having done it myself for these companies, I wasn't afraid of a project that would take years - I did not care how long it would take, so long as whatever I came up with solved my issue.
See, I really hated those equipment tables. I hated them with a stone cold passion. After the first two levels, the players had literally nothing to spend their money on, while at the same time there was no reason whatsoever to travel from one part of the world to another. I had recently decided that I needed to give up on making my own world and adapt the real earth to my system . . . a decision that only exacerbated the problem. A sword costing the same amount of money in West Africa as in Spain? Ridiculous!
The year my parents married, 1958, they had a visit by a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman that convinced them that they should buy a set of encyclopedias for their children. My mom was pregnant with my brother at the time and so they were thinking about such things. The salesman succeeded in selling them a '1959' set of Collier's Encyclopedias, as everything was identified as next year's in those days. I would arrive on this earth six years later, in 1964; those encyclopedias would be central to my education before I grew old enough to start hunting through the city's university library.
It seems strange to me that some salesman managed to affect my life so much six years before I was born, but that's how things go. I knew those books intimately - but they belonged to my parents and they stayed with them when I moved out of the house. In 1986, as I struggled with my pricing problem, what existed in those books never occurred to me. That is, until one day I was at a used bookstore and an entire set was available for $25.
My parents paid $600 for their set over a period of five years - in 1959 dollars. The ones I would buy were much cheaper and were from 1952, not 1959. I remember I had to come back to the store in two trips (I didn't have a car), as the total set weighs 90 lbs. That didn't matter. My brain was on fire.
I realized then that the descriptions of cities, regions, bodies of water and so on included descriptions of things that were made there. That meant I could read the books, take notes, then somehow organize the location of those things into a pricing table that would account for things being a different price in different places. As far as the actual price of things, I would somehow then compare the total production of things with the production of other things, so that I could use the scarcity of things to produce a price that wouldn't be invented.
How I would do this I had no idea. But the principle was sound. Gather data. Organize data. Interpret data. Apply data. I knew going in that it would take years. No matter. I was comfortable with that. ALL statistics take years.
Here is the lesson from all this. If you're reading this and thinking about making an economy, you're thinking about this backwards. For that, I apologize. That's all I've paid attention to on this blog. The real issue is deciding, first, what things are going to exist and be available in your world. THEN, decide where those things come from.
I used an encyclopedia to decide where things come from. And because the encyclopedia was written for other agendas with other purposes, I discovered the origin of things I had never remotely heard of - which started me on researching the processing of such things and how they fit into an economy. That last came about as an after effect of my solving the problem.
So we want to give your world an 'economy.' We'll start by giving your world things. You need to just make a list of everything you ever wanted your players to be able to buy. After that, you'll need to decide how many places produce each of those things. You don't need to do it as I did, with raw materials combined together to make developed goods. You can just say, "I want fifty places in my world making swords." We can make that work.
This is the place my course will start from. I hope you're ready.
After due consideration, I believe that I have made a mistake about what I've chosen to highlight in the past. I have consistently presented the economic angle - the production of goods and services, their distribution and most ponderously their value. I've used these things to demonstrate how they can be fitted into the framework of a world and how aspects of the distribution can add dimension and substance to that world.
Yet, after all that, I've failed to direct my attention to the place where a DM might begin with their world. I've sought primarily to show by example, expecting that the problems that started my system are the same problems that everyone has already encountered. Perhaps, however, I made a connection where others did not.
Allow me to correct that error - as I've only realized in the last day or so that I've made it. I'll go back to my mindset before building any sort of system at all.
I know that most of you are unfamiliar with the AD&D Player's Handbook, so I'll ask you to insert the game required equipment list of your choosing. I think most suffer from the same issues. The Player's Handbook, for example, had two columns of print dedicated to equipment. About forty percent described armor and weapons, the latter easily being the biggest section. Half again as much gave prices for what amounted to dungeon equipment and food, most of which was designed for either drinking at the tavern or eating in a dungeon. Then there was a section for animals - with four kinds of horses. Tack took up another section. Then there were vehicles and ships, a few things for clerics and a few herbs. The book did not include any descriptions, but later editions and other games made up for that.
I had three basic problems with the equipment list that, I remember, left me feeling that there was something fundamental lacking in the game. First and foremost, that no matter where the players went, no matter how far they travelled, no matter what culture or climate or size of city they entered, a long sword was always the same price.
Secondly, there weren't enough items. That was fixable by simply adding more items to the list, but that would inevitably lead to the third problem: the price for everyone had to be pulled right out of the air. There was no logic for why one weapon that did a certain amount of damage costed more than another that did the same damage, nor why banded mail, for example, was 5 g.p. more than splint mail, when they both offered the same armor class. Why even have two different armours for that amount of protection?
Solving these three problems would not be an easy solution. Most, I know, simply accept the book as written dogma, arguing that at least its a bullshit number that they themselves didn't invent, and so solves the problem. Of course, players were always asking for things that did not exist on the table, meaning that I was forever inventing a price for something - leading to complaints that my made up price for one thing did not fit a pattern in the player's head regarding the price of something else. I had only been playing the game for six years and I was already sick of it.
I had been considering various solutions based upon the weight of things and how much of different types of metal went into different objects, but I really could not decide on any method that didn't begin with at least two or three hundred half-assed judgement calls. This was precisely what I wanted to avoid.
The problem at the time wasn't that my world needed an economy, it's that it needed some sort of logic for pricing things. I felt that since things ought to be of a different price in different parts of the world, somehow this pricing system ought to account for that as well. At the time, I remember being completely flummoxed.
I had been working as a statistical clerk for an oil company and had just taken a stats job with the 1986 census that would keep me busy for most of 1985. I had seen the lengths to which companies and the government will go in order to amass data, organize it, interpret it and then use it to create policy - all in a world that had not yet invented excel or even windows. Having done it myself for these companies, I wasn't afraid of a project that would take years - I did not care how long it would take, so long as whatever I came up with solved my issue.
See, I really hated those equipment tables. I hated them with a stone cold passion. After the first two levels, the players had literally nothing to spend their money on, while at the same time there was no reason whatsoever to travel from one part of the world to another. I had recently decided that I needed to give up on making my own world and adapt the real earth to my system . . . a decision that only exacerbated the problem. A sword costing the same amount of money in West Africa as in Spain? Ridiculous!
The year my parents married, 1958, they had a visit by a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman that convinced them that they should buy a set of encyclopedias for their children. My mom was pregnant with my brother at the time and so they were thinking about such things. The salesman succeeded in selling them a '1959' set of Collier's Encyclopedias, as everything was identified as next year's in those days. I would arrive on this earth six years later, in 1964; those encyclopedias would be central to my education before I grew old enough to start hunting through the city's university library.
It seems strange to me that some salesman managed to affect my life so much six years before I was born, but that's how things go. I knew those books intimately - but they belonged to my parents and they stayed with them when I moved out of the house. In 1986, as I struggled with my pricing problem, what existed in those books never occurred to me. That is, until one day I was at a used bookstore and an entire set was available for $25.
My parents paid $600 for their set over a period of five years - in 1959 dollars. The ones I would buy were much cheaper and were from 1952, not 1959. I remember I had to come back to the store in two trips (I didn't have a car), as the total set weighs 90 lbs. That didn't matter. My brain was on fire.
I realized then that the descriptions of cities, regions, bodies of water and so on included descriptions of things that were made there. That meant I could read the books, take notes, then somehow organize the location of those things into a pricing table that would account for things being a different price in different places. As far as the actual price of things, I would somehow then compare the total production of things with the production of other things, so that I could use the scarcity of things to produce a price that wouldn't be invented.
How I would do this I had no idea. But the principle was sound. Gather data. Organize data. Interpret data. Apply data. I knew going in that it would take years. No matter. I was comfortable with that. ALL statistics take years.
Here is the lesson from all this. If you're reading this and thinking about making an economy, you're thinking about this backwards. For that, I apologize. That's all I've paid attention to on this blog. The real issue is deciding, first, what things are going to exist and be available in your world. THEN, decide where those things come from.
I used an encyclopedia to decide where things come from. And because the encyclopedia was written for other agendas with other purposes, I discovered the origin of things I had never remotely heard of - which started me on researching the processing of such things and how they fit into an economy. That last came about as an after effect of my solving the problem.
So we want to give your world an 'economy.' We'll start by giving your world things. You need to just make a list of everything you ever wanted your players to be able to buy. After that, you'll need to decide how many places produce each of those things. You don't need to do it as I did, with raw materials combined together to make developed goods. You can just say, "I want fifty places in my world making swords." We can make that work.
This is the place my course will start from. I hope you're ready.
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
Done Deal. I'll Do It.
Very well, I shall make the videos. Apparently, there ARE quite a few of you out there interested. I'm actually quite happy to hear it - so I shall do the best job I can with the material.
I feel that rushing would not be the best tactic, so let me warn all of you: I'm going to pace myself and try to cover every little detail down to the bottom of the well - I hope you don't find it gets to be too much. Sometimes I really wonder about myself.
Yesterday I set up the map for the port cities along the French, Belgian and German coasts and felt a little green at the work involved in making the trade routes - but, after all, it's still less than the Mediterranean was. It's all just a matter of digging in and doing it.
I shall strive to have the first video ready to launch come the weekend. Thanks to all of your for your terrific support!
I feel that rushing would not be the best tactic, so let me warn all of you: I'm going to pace myself and try to cover every little detail down to the bottom of the well - I hope you don't find it gets to be too much. Sometimes I really wonder about myself.
Yesterday I set up the map for the port cities along the French, Belgian and German coasts and felt a little green at the work involved in making the trade routes - but, after all, it's still less than the Mediterranean was. It's all just a matter of digging in and doing it.
I shall strive to have the first video ready to launch come the weekend. Thanks to all of your for your terrific support!
3 Left
The number has reached 17 where the trade system course is concerned. Felt you'd like to know.
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