The April State of the Union Address

I want to drop a quick line just to say that I'm glad to have completed at least the basic tutorial of my trade system.  It has been 18 months since I asked people to send me $1 as proof that they cared about such a thing - and believe it or not, that money has weighed heavily on me as I've failed to live up to my part of the bargain.  I feel better, since I think I've given at least $1 worth of effort.

Contributions to the jumpstarter have completely dried up.  This was to be expected.  We raised $2,768 in the space of two months; with help from my friends and daughter, sales of the book (which were unusually high in late February), we managed to hang on by our fingernails, staying in our home and having something to eat every day.  Of course, we haven't been out to a restaurant since before Christmas, nor a movie, a concert or anything else - because that is how it is.  Right now, I can't afford coffee at the nearby Starbucks.  But the computer is running, the internet is paid for, the collection agencies are held at bay and there's new hope.

Yesterday afternoon I was given a phone call and offered a part-time job.  It is 28 hours a week at $13 an hour, and it's kitchen work.  As such, I will be soon up to my hips in sauces, hot oil and dishwater; but it is a guaranteed wage.  I sure as hell hope I don't injure myself or it turns out to be the sort of place that refuses to pay me - both experiences I've had in the last six months as I discover the restaurant industry has apparently gone and fucked itself in the head.

Just want people to know that I'm doing my part.  I will continue to ask for contributions: Ternketh Keep is worth the $10, the AirShip is worth $5 and I will have a preview ready for the $25 donation in 24 days.  The cold-hearted, pedantic editor is chafing to get the content from me each week because I'm told it is just that damn good - so if you want to see what I'm doing, help me out.

As ever, the rest of the jumpstarter rewards are as follows:

Do me a favour: pass around the image to people with a link
to this blog.

The end of May deadline for the book is . . . well, in jeopardy.  That was identified assuming I had time in April and May to dedicate myself to the book (with our minimal living expenses paid), but now I'm going to be working as well at a heavy-labour job (at least for someone who is 51), so I'm going to be either working or drained.  The book will be finished - people who know me know I don't leave things undone (re: trade system tutorial); but the exact schedule for final product may have to be pushed off a month.  I can't make it too long, however, since I need a hard copy in my hands when I go to Edmonton to the Expo there in September.

Incidentally, that was bought and paid for by my daughter.  She insisted.

I'm still hoping to have the energy to pull it together by the 31st of May; I'm two-thirds of the way through the 2nd rewrite and as I say the editor is getting final copy from me now.  However, it may be more realistic to assume the 30th of June.  I will just have to keep working and see how it goes.  One bad section in a book can really screw up forward momentum - but just now, I don't foresee a single technical issue in the book I haven't already fixed.  It is only a question of, "Can I write a given scene well enough?"  That's a question that haunts every writer.

To sum up, if the reader can help me out, please do.  I'm going to be paying for bills this month but not much more; I had some friends drop by just today to help fill up our larder, entirely without being asked (golden people that they are).  If there is a way I have made it through this life, it is upon the support I have had from the best friends in the world.  Just now, anyone who helps us out in this troubled time counts among that number.

Calculation Table for Minerals

This post plays hell with the appearance of my blog, but legibility is everything.

This is a piece of my prices table, from the page I use to calculate the price of things based on their weight, workmanship and specific density.  It is sort of a 'base page' that's used to script out items before they're gathered on another page that is cleaned up and simplified for player use.

I had to post this in three parts

Basically, this is a small piece of the content I'm making available for a $10 contribution to my Patreon.  The table is in construction at the moment, but I've gotten this section on minerals done (more than half of it is polished gems) so I thought I might post it as an idea.  Obviously, it's a very big picture and looks much clearer and easier to read in excel.

There are places on the table where the cell has been left blank, such as in the first table where there are no calculations for grey-pink marble, freestone, black marble or red sandstone.  That is because these lines are used as placeholders for materials that I know exist somewhere in my world, but are not yet in the area that has been added to the actual trade system: such as knowing that Adeese in my trade system tutorial probably has products that don't exist in Pon but as yet Adeese isn't linked up.

Likewise, the image above is partly unedited.  The first table says "Building Stone, Granite" and then lists all types of building stones.  That's because I was going to make it several tables and then I didn't, forgetting to fix the heading until just now, seeing the saved image.  Also, many of the items and descriptions are cut off by the width of the column.  These things can be seen on excel; I'm just keeping the column width deliberately narrow on the page so I don't have to scan left and right constantly when I'm doing calculations.

About the rose highlighting in the jewelry tables: this is just some conditional formatting that tells me when a certain gem size meets a pre-determined value, so that it can be selected and put on the vendor table as that variety and size of gem.

Anyway, I'm updating this weekly for the moment until it is back to working order, which should be some weeks.  This is an terrifically complicated evaluation process but it is the means I use to calculate literally everything that exists, from small items like a flint for starting fires to big, multi-component constructions like a gatehouse.

The Benefits of Gold

Hands up if you started working on your own trade system along with my posts and now you're anxiously waiting for me to get started on the advanced features.

Then again, hands up if you started working on your own trade system, only to think to yourself, "fuck this," then stop.  Hah.  Gotta bet that has happened.

I'm at sixes and nines regarding the advanced course at the moment - and none-too-sure what to get started on first.  Probably changing the actual references for Pon, rather than giving 2 of everything - and setting up more kinds of references, too.  I've got a complete, corrected list of raw material ratios per reference based on earth now - but I'm reserving that for Patreon.  It's tricky, trying to decide what sort of references to use . . . because somewhere down the line, something always gets simplified or left out.  Trying to account for everything is a long, dark, deep rabbit hole.  I could go with including everything - but then I'm building two trade systems, my own and one for Minaria.

Then again, I could chuck Minaria and just discuss my trade system, making all further references to Earth.  The problem with that plan is that: a) the earth references don't disentangle very well, making it hard to look at just one part; b) the earth system is ludicrously huge and therefore unwieldy for a tutorial.  Hell, right now the Earth system isn't even 'working,' exactly, because I'm steadily rebuilding the price calculations from scratch (that's step 7 of the trade system).  Because of those reasons, Minaria is better.

Perhaps I could just add 5 or 10 different references per month, going forward, until all the references were ultimately added to the Minaria system?  That might be doable.  I could discuss each type reference as it gets added (even make a specific page for it).

There is nothing in the world like inventing work.  I had this totally different idea today of building a town map in the shape of a hex that would be filled with hundreds of slots that buildings could be fit into, sort of like the Sims but more flexible . . . but hey, I don't even want to start something like that just now.  I wouldn't even know how to start it.

This is working up to a very long preamble I hadn't intended.  I was going to talk about gold.

Not the real thing

If the reader has gotten familiar with the wiki tutorial, it is very clear that gold is the critical element around which all other elements revolve.  I felt that it might do some good to talk about why I use gold and not some other base, such as I've seen others use, such as grain, food, labour or even population.  There are some strong, basic reasons.

To begin with, gold is the one that actual humans used.  There have been temporary cultures that used other materials, including banknotes, beads, ivory, livestock and even cowrie shells.  It should be pointed out that, with the exception of paper, these things were all discarded when something better came along - namely gold.  Paper, as well, only became practical as an international currency when the world became largely governed by just six or seven, predominantly European, world powers.  Prior to that, paper money was only effective in the borders of one's own country and usually only within the upper classes; the poor and foriegners still had to be traded with using metal coin or ingots.

Secondly, gold is durable.  Unlike grain, cows or paper, it can't be destroyed by simple means.  Gold doesn't chemically react with anything, though pure gold will tarnish with long, long exposure to the elements.  It can be dissolved in aqua regia, but there's very little of that around and in any case the gold can be reacquired from it if the right agent is used.  For the most part, the only way that gold is likely to remove itself from an economic system if it is actually lost . . . which most people try to avoid if they can.  Gold is bound to be lost into the sea and filtered down into dungeons (we are talking about D&D), but imaginatively it can be recovered and reintroduced.  There's always the possibility of someone like Mansa Musa, who turned up to dump huge amounts of gold into Egypt in the 14th century - but usually this happens only on a very small scale, and rarely, so that it becomes more a source for good stories than a challenge against a working system.  In any case, as I run the 17th century and not the 14th, my trade system is more world-wide . . . and a D&D trade system can be as absolutely stable as one wants it to be.

Thirdly, gold is convenient.  It is small, easily counted and provides for subdivisions when compared with other metals (unlike cows or grain).  An equipment table, even one based on grain, is bound to have the prices listed in gold or silver, so it is easier to use these as the base instead of having to first exchange the price of some other base currency into what we're going to use anyway.

Fourthly, gold is potentially everywhere - unlike grain, for example, which is difficult to grow in large areas of the world - including polar regions, basaltic/granitic regions such as Northern Canada, Siberia and Central Africa, jungles and deserts.  Grain is practical only for European-like temperate climes, just as cows.  Food would be a better measure than a particular kind of food, but then that would be difficult to add together (one could create a system based on calories, but really?  Even I don't want to do that).

Finally, gold is transportable.  I don't think I need to really go into that.

If we're going to have one substance that, everywhere in the world, is exactly the same price (as the system I've designed demands), then it might just as well be gold.  Nothing else comes close to being as practical - except perhaps copper, silver or platinum.  And if we're going to use any of them, we might as well be using gold.

Magicians and DMs

There is an old adage that says if you want to write a mystery, you need to begin at the end and work your way backwards.  Presumably, so that you can identify the order of things that need to be understood by the character, progressively away from the thing that will ultimately reveal the truth behind the mystery.

This is only half the object, however - because it only describes the structure of the content being written.  Once the structure is understood, it is absolutely necessary as a creator to play dumb - because the other half of writing a novel is to write it forward, from the point of view of a character who has absolutely no knowledge whatsoever about the book's structure.

Some authors can't quite do this - and so their mysteries tend to be filled with stock characters going through the motions, which can be acceptable to mystery enthusiasts but tends to make a rather dull, plodding case for other readers.  This is why mysteries so often fell into the category of 'pulp fiction' - because while they weren't written very well, they yet appealed to a particular audience with a particular taste, who could be satisfied with the mystery structure alone.

Where it comes to role-playing, it has to be noted that the standard practice of writing a mystery is turned on its head.  While in a novel, the writer and the character are the same person - so that the character can be pushed in the right direction to make sure the clues are discovered - in an RPG the DM and the character are NOT.  The character is someone completely ignorant . . . and that pushes the DM to use a heavy hand, occasionally, when the players aren't: a) learning the right clues; or b) interpreting them very different than the way they are meant to be interpreted.

This latter reason is likely why your last attempt at a mystery campaign failed.  Your players are not Hercule Poirot.  They won't 'conveniently' understood the clue that has been carefully 'worked backwards' by the plottist - rather, they will overthink it, massively underrate it or overrate it, and in short order make a ghastly mess of the mystery they're supposed to solve.

At the beginning of my game this last Saturday, the players started by congratulating themselves.  The very last action that had been taken in the previous session was the discovery of a secret door that revealed a nest of scrolls.  As we began, then, the players were saying, "Isn't it great that we discovered a secret door the only time we actually looked for one?"

Now, normally, the players would just assume that I had invented the secret door the moment they sought one - but this was Ternketh Keep, where everything was written ahead of time (which I could prove).  As such, they presumed they had been remarkably clever . . . and I could have left them with that notion, except that I'm an asshole.

I pointed out to them that, just before opening the door to the room where the secret door was located, without it seeming important I fitted the words "secret door" into something I was saying about game play in general.  I was talking about dungeons and their tropes, listing off a number of them.  Ten minutes later, the party - after finding everything in the room that was obvious - quite subconsciously decided to search for a secret door.  When I told the party about  this, I got a round of applause.

Is this fair of me to tell them?  Is it fair to do it at all?  In chapter 4 of my book How to Run, the chapter titled "Drama," I discussed magicians:

"A magician offers a deck of cards to the mark, asking the mark to pick one at random. This looks benign; we assume that when we draw the card, we have done so at our whim. That, however, is not the case. We have been offered the deck very carefully. It has been put artfully forward, so that one card compels the mark’s choice. The shape the deck makes in the magician’s hands, the magician’s voice, the right card directed at the right angle quite literally forces the magician’s card upon the mark. That is the ‘trick’ – that there was never a choice. We only think there was a choice because it is our nature to think everything we encounter is innocent."

If you want the players to follow a course of action, there is a greater distinction inherent in the game than 'railroading' and not 'railroading.'  These things are not black and white because we as humans are not black and white.  We're a mix of all sorts of complex patterns and motivations, each individual, and it takes experience and clarity to be able to guess at what can be said to players - more to the point, specific players, in specific situations, knowing how they'll react - if we want to motivate them in a direction.

Why is this fair?  Because D&D and role-playing is entertainment, and like magicians, all is fair in entertainment as long as the participants don't feel ripped off.  It is the blatant, obvious self-serving swaggering of DMs who stupidly show their hand rather than display a skein of cards that appeals in a particular way to a player's edification.  Magicians have to design their tricks in just such a way that keeps them from getting punched out on the street; a DM must recognize and carefully present a campaign where the players all walk away feeling warm and good about themselves.

There are some players that I could not reveal my secret door trick to, ever.  I don't play with that sort of player . . . anymore.

The trick for magicians and for DMs is to understand what can be gotten away with and what must never be gotten away with.  Magicians have an extensive network with other magicians, which rigidly - through a sort of  apprentice system - encourages the former behaviour while freezing out, coldly, magicians who get a bad reputation.  DMs have the WOTC, which does not give a shit.

When we say that magicians are bad, we mean that they do not perform their tricks well.

When we say that DMs are bad, we mean that they are self-righteous, megalomanic, controlling fucks.

It is an important distinction.

If you want your mystery campaign to work, you're going to need to learn some magician tricks.  You're going to need to understand your players better and you're will need to learn the art of subtlety.  You will also do well to put yourself in the player's position, so that you can better understand how someone will interpret your 'clue' if they don't know anything about what it is supposed to mean.

I am sorry I can't make this easier for you.  Hard things are hard, that's all there is to it.  If you're willing to slave at it, however, the payoff will be worth the work.

Publisher Versions of Maps

Visit Here

I was going to let the above image stand on its own . . . and then I remembered how much I hate it when a blog I like stops posting content and only posts advertising.

I've been trying not to do that from the beginning - to keep putting up content on the blog, advancing new ideas, remaining open for discussion and for questions.  I think this is the only fair.  I am responsible to you, the reader, to give you something to read about - otherwise, I'm not much of a writer.

My head is in the book I'm writing.  It has been a very different sort of process from other novels that I've written; someone asked me the other day if I was finding it difficult because I was used to non-fiction.

Nope.  It's difficult because I am making it that way.  I have heard it said all over, but it is true: an artist begins any work by deliberately sawing off a leg and an arm, with the premise that if the final project can't be managed with those limitations, then it is not worth managing.  There are so many problems I could easily solve by inserting long passages of clumsy, obvious exposition, or by having characters conveniently have knowledge impossible to have, or by simply creating a less intricate plot.  Unfortunately, those things wouldn't solve the only problem that matters to me:  writing a good book.

So I rewrite and redesign and find better ways to get the information across and better ways for people to meet and different ways to use characters that were originally meant to be pushed out of the story, or ways to upgrade the conflict or introduce a different conflict at the moment of a resolution and so it goes, on and on.  I find I am rewriting two words for every new word I write so that each day I go back and rewrite what I wrote yesterday and then make a few hundred words or as much as a thousand words forward - only to rewrite those words tomorrow.

So it goes.  Sorry I can't seem to talk of anything else just now.  I'll try to have something to talk about tomorrow.  The third podcast is being posted this Sunday.  When relaxing, I've been working on the pricing table.  I'll try to put up something for advanced trade table mechanics - but no promises.

Where You Eat Matters

Five years ago I wrote a post about compelling players to observe some kind of nutrition rules for campaigns.  It was a mental exercise and no more: just an example of the sort of thing that can be reviewed and considered but which is impractical for actual gaming and accounting.

That idea has sat on the shelf since I proposed it.

And now, today, I had an idea.  Have a look at this table, that I've only just designed:

Sorry about the size of the text; I recommend opening it in another window.

Undoubtedly, some are not familiar regarding my very basic rules about the consumption of food.  I am now very seriously considering augmenting those rules by implementing the above table where it comes to where the characters eat and how much effort they make towards that goal.

Basically, the characters make up their mind what sort of food they want to eat and how they wish to prepare it.  The next day, after they've slept, they make a saving throw on the top third of the table; for the most part, the saving throw is going to have no effect on most of the characters.  If it does have an effect, it is likely to be on less than 1/3rd of the party, even if the sorest rations are consumed without any cooking.  However, it makes a significant difference if the party wants to take the time to get themselves a proper wagon, or eat from a kitchen in a house they build, or eat at the local tavern when they get the chance.  The above could seriously punish characters who insist on eating food out of their pockets rather than spend a little for the boar at the local tavern.

Note that the actual food eaten does have some influence.  If the characters do not buy leafy vegetables for their campfire or chuckwagon, they don't get the chuckwagon's effect, no matter how nice the cooking is.  The same is true if the characters insist on drinking beer and not wine or coffee - at least, with regards to amateurs.  I see I will have to make a note that the kitchen has to obey the rule of food choices, but the tavern and up the scale from there does not - because with vegetable stock, cooking with wine and so on, the fortified benefit is cooked right into the meal.

The chance of disease eating field rations is 1 in 20; but I see that the chance is only 1 in 400 with campfire food and 1 in 8000 with wagon food.  I think that's fair.  Characters need to know what they're doing in making their food choices.

Incidentally, the cellar food option comes from a game, Patrician III:

This is the sort of meal that the players can only get if they know people (or they've joined a guild or some such in a given area).  The lord's kitchen, obviously, requires knowing someone in nobility or royalty circles.

There is an ultimate solution for the proposed rule: Heroes' Feast.  A cleric can obtain the spell at 11th level.

Trade System - End of Round 1

Once we have obtained prices for undeveloped and manufactured goods, we are ready to use weight and workmanship to create individual prices for goods that would appear on an ordinary equipment list.

This is a very easy process. For example, we have already determined that the cost for a pound of manufactured pottery is 18.685 c.p., or approximately 19 c.p. per lb. We need only determine how heavy a given object made of pottery weighs, multiply that against our ratio and then judge for ourselves how carefully worked the object is.

Let's take something very simple: an earthenware pot, the sort of object that might be used every day and be churned out in large numbers, for ordinary use around the house - such as would be used for flour, cookies, buttons and so on. We already know that the pot is fired, as this was part of the process that increased the cost from mere clay to being pottery. We can add that the capacity of this pot is about a pint.

Let's establish the weight of the pot at ½ a pound. Let's also establish that because the pot is very ordinary, the workmanship is 1.0. This makes the cost of our pot equal to 18.685/2*1 (in excel calculation), or 9.343 copper pieces. For the players, we will round that out to 9 c.p. That's a reasonable price; an ordinary household may have half a dozen of such pots. An orc lair might have a hundred or more.

By why limit ourselves to ordinary workmanship? There is such a thing as 'art pottery,' some of which is spectacular in design and color. We can well imagine establishing a set of perameters for pottery of greater workmanship, based on quality of clay (the best material is reserved for the best pots), additions such as handles and lids, color, sculpting, quality of sculpting and so on, so that workmanship for a given piece can be rated as x 2 (fair), x 4 (ornamental), x 8 (fancy), x 16 (artistic), x 32 (quality), x 64 (excellent) and x 128 (exquisite). Thus, a truly exquisite pot (still the same weight) can now be rated at 1,152 c.p. (or about 6 g.p.).

That's nice - but the party isn't likely to get excited about 6 g.p. (though a household of such objects might make someone take notice). Still, we can always enlarge the pot. Our one-pint pot is about 7 inches tall (23 cm); how much would it be worth if it were, say, 14 inches tall?

In such a case, we need to multiply all the dimensions by 2: height, width and thickness of the material (though the latter may not be necessarily true - it is up to us). This would mean our 14-inch tall pottery vessel would be multiplied by 8 times and be worth 48 g.p.

Now, that's something. But let's not stop there. Let's suppose the party stumbles into a big lair and finds that the chieftain sits between two massive pottery urns, each 49 inches tall (about a meter and a half, for all us moderns who aren't familiar with imperial measurements). And let's say that the workmanship is magnificent (x 256). How much would they be worth? From a usual game standard, we're just guessing - but now we don't have to guess. 49 inches in height is 7 times our original pot's size; we're increasing the size in 3 dimensions, so the urns are 343 times as large, or about 172 lbs. each in weight. The base cost, size multiplied by the value of ordinary pottery, is 3,204 c.p. The workmanship, however, increases that value to 820,346 c.p. In my game, that's 4,273 g.p. Those are pots that are very definitely treasure!

By this method, we can logically determine the precise value of any pottery object in a way that is consistent with all other pottery objects. We can do the same with metal goods, horses, leather work, ale or anything we like. We need only establish the difference in "workmanship" between an ordinary ploughhorse and a heavy warhorse to give us a range of possible prices all based on the same original price we generated for horses.

If this isn't precise enough, we only need to create another set of references for a particular kind of metal, horse, leather or beverage, running through the same system we've already built, to produce another set of numbers we can use to price things.

And always remember, the price for one market in our world always has the potential for different prices, both higher and lower. Where is the best place to sell those big pottery urns?

How heavy is something? We have the whole internet to use as a judge. In fact, we can find specific objects on the internet and say, "such and such a pottery jug, in this picture here, weighs this amount and I'm calling the workmanship this." In reverse, the player can present an object, describe its dimension and ask what the price would be and we can work it out in a few seconds, without worrying about whether or not it would 'break the system.'

For those who would be interested in going on the 'net to find the weights for objects, I have a hint: search for 'shipping weight.' Most sites will be very unclear about how much a depicted object weighs, even on sites that are selling things - but those that ship objects are always interested in specifying weight; often distinguishing the difference between shipping weight and 'actual weight.' This can save a lot of hours wandering about trying to determine how much a telescope, a ship anchor or a pair of boots weighs. For historical objects, such as swords, museum sites are often very helpful.
I have priced more than 1,300 objects in this manner; my blog has many examples of equipment tables, some of which do give the exact weights of objects. As I write this, I am upgrading my prices table, reorganizing it to make it easier to expand and to more deeply adjust for the price of an object. I do plan to make this table - in excel - available for users, but only those prepared to invest $10 per month in my patreon account (see link for details). Sorry about that.

We're not done, however. This more or less describes the skeleton of the whole system. Having described it thus far, I can now begin detailing specific elements of the system, such as how to build structures that will calculate trade distances between multiple cities, organize hundreds of different references at the same time, splitting and handling more specific references, calculating out things like different products, adding wages and performed services (from getting a shave to hiring a berth aboard a ship) and so on.

We have a lot of things yet to expand.

See Trade System

A note about Patreon

After some reading on the site, I've learned about a disappointing practice that only seems human.  Fans pledge an amount for a given creation, only to withdraw that amount when the artist sends the creation before waiting for the pledge to materialize.  Not at all unexpected.

Therefore, I'm willing to give a 'taste' of the content for my pricing table for anyone who donates, particularly since it is in a state of rebuilding (and therefore is lacking a huge amount of information); rest assured, the long-term gains from pledging will far outweigh what can be gotten immediately.

Post #2019

"Those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it.  Those who do learn from history are destined to watch others repeat it."

-Anonymous

There are certain things we don't control.  I do control my will to keep on writing my book today.

Honesty

I've finished the manufactured goods page on the wiki, for those who are following along.  It has been . . . an interesting progression.  I look forward very much to continuing.

I wish I hadn't written the last post.  Since publishing it, I have thought strongly about taking it down.  When I consider doing so, however, I am faced with an uncomfortable truth: the words were honest.  They came from an honest place.  The urge to take them down originates with a strong feeling of shame - not because I overreacted but because I reacted exactly as much as my heart wanted to.  As it still wants to.

There is nothing that I've accomplished with game design that I am as proud of as these trade tables.  I conceived of them out of the blue.  The intention was never to create an 'economy' or a trade system.  The intention was to have a method for the price of things being different in different parts of the world.  I could have just assigned different prices but my brain does not work that way.  I wanted 'logical' changes in price.

I've never seen any company or role-playing manufacturer even propose something like these tables, much less follow through.

Yet I feel bitter that I exist in a game-playing atmosphere that continues to be, even after forty years of participation, consternatiously juvenile.  Worse, not only is puerility practiced, it is goddamn celebrated, as something for the participants to be proud of.  And I wonder, how the fuck did I ever fall in love with this game?

I can keep a lid on it for the most part.  Every once in a while it gets away from me.  I've gotten better in the past year.  I had my last flame war on this blog a little more than a year ago.  But the wise reader can go back and look over the blowups and violent incidents and see a single thread that runs through all of it.

Well.

I'll move past this and go back to writing intelligent posts for intelligent readers who see this thing the way I do.  They've made that very clear with the donations and the support.  It's been incredible, really.  My partner Tamara and I have discussed it a hundred times.  Do we believe this?  Did we think this was possible?  Would you have ever guessed?  Wow.

It makes me feel that I'm doing some good.  But it's all so unreal that - like a dream - I keep expecting to wake up.  And despite the success and the drive that has created things like the podcasts and the module and the wiki, there's this incredible wave of stress that we're both managing, that makes us a bit . . . tetchy.  Ready to go off.  Tamara and I have had more than a few goes at each other - but since last fall, we've found a new level of supporting one another.

Anyway, I'm sorry.  I'm only writing this post out for the same reason as the last one.  A stupid need to be honest, to record that honesty and to write it down.  I'm a writer.  The best thing in the world to write is honesty.

Grrr

It stands to reason that if I take the time to put up the trade system, block by block, that some people are going to squawk, "Why, why, why?"

I feel I need to be clear about this.  The fundamental reason why any part of the trade system exists is this: it works.  That's the whole reason.  It isn't a simulation, it isn't accurate, it doesn't reflect the real world trade system of the modern day or of the medieval world, it has virtually nothing whatsoever to do with economics and a great deal of it is created by completely ad hoc decisions.

This is part of the reason why I chose to put myself into the straight jacket of using an encyclopedia to determine what references existed in the world and where, because I didn't want to do what I'm recommending the reader do when using the system:  randomly place goods and services wherever it felt good.  Understand, however, that most readers don't have a choice.  They aren't running a real world so they don't have a source they can go to outside of their own head.  I'm addressing that as best I can by encouraging people to go at it anyway they like.  It doesn't matter, anyway; as long as they embrace the recommendation for scarcity, the system will work.

I banged my head against all sorts of different systems for fifteen years before realizing none of them worked. Then I spent six years in my head doing nothing but thinking about it.  I mean that literally. As I would tell my partner after 2001 (when we met), "I'm just going to go out for awhile and think about the trade system."  Then I would walk around for two hours, thinking.  I would lay in the bath, thinking.  I would lie in bed, thinking.  I would while away an afternoon, thinking.  For six freaking years, from 1999 until I finally got it.

What I 'got' was a logical, adjustable, applicable system that would work with any product, any raw material, any final item of equipment, as far down as one would want to go in complexity, in an effective manner.  That is all that mattered to me.

I am more than happy to explain HOW the system works.  I am not, however, interested in any query that wants to ask WHY I have made this choice or that about a given calculation or method for determining one price over another.  I know that most readers will not accept my decisions on faith.  However, I expect my readers to accept my decisions on faith.

Regarding those for whom this is not good enough, here is what I suggest: shut up.  Shut up and take the system I've built and that I am making available for use and mess around with all the numbers to your heart's content.  Change the calculations, adjust the methodology, do whatever personally fits your need to achieve the results you feel will work for your world.

Know this, however - whatever you think you're going to try, I've already tried it.  I've tried it in seven different ways.  I know this because I have screwed and fucked and messed with this system since 1986.  That's 30 years of spending about a billion hours on this system.  I know that I am not wrong in my guess that the reader asking me to explain "Why?" has spent about five minutes on their question.

When a professional engineer tells you that your head is up your ass about the thing you want to build, don't argue.  Just accept it.  A professional doesn't have time to give you all the education you need to have to understand why your project is dumb.  You want to know, go get your own damn education.

Anyway, I've put up half a tutorial on how to calculate the prices of manufactured goods.


UPDATE:

I've cooled off somewhat since writing this.  I guess what really pisses me off about it is the endless fucking meta-game that goes on.

There are people who see a system like the one I'm building and think, "This is cool, I can't wait to plug it into my system and solve this problem."

And there are people who see the system and think, "Wow, I can masturbate with these numbers a hundred different ways as I rebuild this system from scratch again and again!  Yay!"

I don't suppose I am much bothered by the latter people - I'm just saying, leave me the fuck out of it.

Undeveloped Goods Prices

The wiki tutorial on setting prices for undeveloped goods took me four and a half hours - gawd.  This is counting the time I was interrupted to grant a brilliant interview for a job opportunity with Shaw Cable.  I must have just been on.

Here's the frontispiece:

Goods in the trade system are divided into two categories: those resources that possess a natural value at the moment they are found or uncovered and those resources that have value only after processing. This page will concern itself with pricing natural and undeveloped goods.

Undeveloped goods include materials that are dug up, caught, harvested from fields, chopped down or picked from trees. In our tutorial, we are counting 'bricks' as a raw material because our use of the term is meant to include stone; however, a more proper and detailed system would have separate references for stone and count bricks as manufactured products made from clay and other materials.

Similarly, while it would seem that animals are 'naturally' born and therefore collected as undeveloped goods, the fact is that before an animal can become valuable it must be fed for periods up to several years - the cost of this feed represents a form of 'processing' that we are not taking account for in this system at this time. Later, I will be describing how to make these sorts of distinctions - but for now, our primary goal is to create a simple system that accounts for most things the players will want to buy. We can add nuance later.

Some readers will be familiar with the post on my blog describing my trade system in 2010. It should be clear that I have made adjustments to the details described on that post in the last year - changing the overall behaviour of my trade prices. While much of what I described 6 years ago still reflects things I do today, my old method should not be confused with the method described here.

Also, the details below will be presented as calculations done in Microsoft Excel. While calculations for the system can be done with pencil and paper, the reader will discover that once ten or more markets have been added to the system that working without a computer calculating tool will quickly make the system impractical. My use of excel will be simple and I shall try to make it as easy to understand as possible for those who have never taken the plunge and used the system.

Keep reading

It rather goes into great depth on the matter, for those looking to actually build a trade system. That is, after all, the point.  Look to the end of the page for a copy of my excel file that I built to write the tutorial.

And then, if it interests you, please remember that I am still looking to support myself with donations either to my Jumpstarter or to Patreon.  I trust no one doubts that I'm working here . . . heh heh heh.

Transport Section Finished

I am steadily moving through the trade system; I've just finished the section on calculating references through transport.  The next goal will be to write about the pricing of raw goods.  I will get to that in good time; I'm going to be working on the book for the rest of today and I feel I'm going to take a break from the blog for that purpose tomorrow.  I'm beginning to feel the pressure.