Interstellar Trade

[Onix]

Truthfully most interstellar trading games use trade as a way to explain how someone can go from a nobody to a famous space pirate or galactic hero. However, Firefly is technically about interstellar trade as a way of throwing the characters into the side stories. Some of the stories are specifically about shipping cargo, some arn't. I don't see it as impossible but it will either become a backstory with the player's real goals in the foreground or the industry has to be nearly lawless so that backstabbing and various troublemaking is all part of the industry.

I think if you had a tractor trailer driver from the US as a way of developing source material for plot hooks it would make it easier to keep the story on trade. Seriously those guys have weird and wild stories to tell and it's all about hauling cargo.

[Rob Lang]

[Onix]

That's true but D&D usually skips over the many hours of traveling to the Dungeon and skips straight to the good part. Similarly a game about trade doesn't focus on the travel, it focuses on the events that happen during or for the trade or on the way.

[Spacemouse]

[NoobHealer]

I play trading games very often. Hell, I was playing space trader last night. I like the concept... but I'll be the first to second Robs "Where's the fun?"

The examples you bring up are actually a clear point of what I mean.

Firefly isn't about trading. It's about cowboys in space who ride the line of legal... illegal... and just awesome. The idea that they were trading was always in the background. They never stopped to count the profits on screen unless someone was being cheated and butts were about to get kicked.

Indiana Jones isn't about an archeologist. It's about a whip wielding treasure hunter who hate's Nazi's. Him being an archeologist is not the reason people watch the movies. They watch them for the action and the great character who just happens to be an archeologist.

Trading is a good background for a role-playing game. It would be nice to have a chapter dedicated to the universes economy to allow for trader characters. But most players don't gather around in large groups so that they can crunch numbers to find the most profitable route. They come for the excitement.

If you spend half of the book explaining economics... you will alienate players. It player's don't find the concept entertaining, they won't play.

I'm do enjoy game's where you aren't cops and robbers, but not at the expense of the fun. I don't mean to give up the concept, I just want to mention that most people don't find marketing fun.

[Spacemouse]

Thank you, everyone, for the ample warning. Rest assured, this will be a roleplaying game about people, not a bean-counting game about accounting. I like to think I know what I'm doing... I was merely asking for help with the details. This achieved, I shall now try and write the rest of the game. We'll see what comes out of it.

[DOC_Agren]

[SheikhJahbooty]

Unless I am mistaken, Shadowrun has had a rigger supplement for every edition of the game. If vehicle mechanics and maintenance is fun enough to a large enough audience to support a commercial game, then I think starship finance is in pretty safe fun territory.

In case you didn't notice, fixing a fancy car is vastly less fun than financing an interstellar expedition.

It does fall into the same bottlenecking problem that decking does in Shadowrun, (it ties up the GM handling the affairs of one or at best two characters while the other players sit around doing almost nothing) so the rules should ideally be fast or require little or no GM input.

That's really the only difficulty. Otherwise I find such rules fun and they can add interesting color to a space setting. Even if the rules aren't used, players can still look at them and see what people value, what is worth moving from one place to another.

[maledictus]

If commerce is only the the starting point for the stories, I don't believe you'll need many rules on this matter. In the Alien movie, the crew of the Nostromo are on a merchant ship, but we, of course, never see them trading and counting money (we only see Brett and Parker always complaining about the salary). For this, perhaps you'll only need a simple system, like the one on d20 modern. This, of course, doesn't mean you can't have a heavy background based on commerce in your game.

[tygertyger]

Interstellar trade need not be in materials -- it can be in ideas and/or cultural goods. Works of art, especially if they're one-of-a-kind, will be high efficiency (IOW more credits per kilo) goods. Ditto intellectual property like literature or formulae -- and those can be transported in digital format, which suddenly makes a small 1-person vessel viable as a free trader (aside: you could transport data via transmission more cheaply, but you then fall prey to both speed of light limits and the security issues of sending out a wave that anyone with a receiver can intercept; encryption helps, but is not a perfect solution). In Steve Perry's The Man Who Never Missed, the protagonist at one point makes his living as a drug dealer, but he never actually sells any drugs. He just sells the instructions for making them with local resources.

Trading in lifeforms (including sapients, at least in some areas of the setting) is also possible; some worlds will want organic solutions to vermin, frex, or citizens might have a taste for exotic pets (which could lead to the aforementioned scenario...).