How do wandering merchants survive?

[tanj]

Merchants are usually shipping in Commodities or Products. Wheat for Iron Work, for example, or Cotton for Cloth.

Wood for Sheep.

 

[Mal Malenkirk]

Sorry if I didn<t read the whole thread...

The answer to the OP is obvious : Merchants are tough.

They could run the gamut from aging adventurer to inhuman creatures.

You could have a young Silver Dragon doing aerial commerce as he establish himself in the word. Or a mind flayer who uses thralls to protect his caravan.

Use your imagination. There is no reason whatsoever for normal human(ish) dominating the commerce road in a PoL setting. Quite the contray, in fact.

 

[fuindordm]

Wood for Sheep.

Snort!

Wow, this thread really took off. Lots of excellent ideas and plot hooks were provided, not to mention the humor.

Thanks, everyone.

 

[Stalker0]

Why did people sail west across the pacific, when there was a grave possibility of death?

Why did people try to smuggle silk worms out of China and Japan when they would be brutally tortured and kill if caught?

The answer: It was exceptionally lucrative if you pulled it off.

In the 4e paradigm, if a merchant is able to sell one magic item, he has made 80% profit from the deal (magic items in 4e sell for 1/5 the normal price). Think about that for a moment, for a modern business, anyone whose even able to make 50% profit is just rolling in wealth.

But the downside is its extremely dangerous. Wandering merchants in their own way are adventurers, except they don't gain treasure by killing monsters, they get profit by selling treasure and avoiding monsters. That may include secret trade routes, good use of stealth, hired thugs or adventurers, etc. Even if the merchant has to invest 30% of his profit in protection, he's still making a killing when he makes good deals.

 

[laesin]

I don't see a problem. In the setup I envision those travelling merchants aren't independent businessmen, they're employees of a factor's warehouse in the nearest large city. The occasional loss of acaravan is included in the overhead.

The PC's that sell their magic items to them don't receive gold, they receive letters of credit, redeemable by any other merchant of that factor, or by many merchants for other factors at a small loss.

Naturally these merchants make most of their money through trading mundane commodities between settlements, sometimes dealing in coin, sometimes by barter.

Any merchant may have an item for sale that is of interest to a PC but this is by no means guaranteed, on the other hand, should the PCs head to the factors city they will find that within reason that factor can acquire just the item they are looking for, albeit at a modest markup.

Even the bandits know that it is unprofitable to kill a merchant on the road, after all you can shear a sheep a hundred times but you can only skin it once.

 

[Parlan]

In the 4e paradigm, if a merchant is able to sell one magic item, he has made 80% profit from the deal (magic items in 4e sell for 1/5 the normal price). Think about that for a moment, for a modern business, anyone whose even able to make 50% profit is just rolling in wealth.

Not to be pedantic, but the merchant is looking at a profit margin of 500% for magic items.
(The legendary Berkshire Hathaway's pre-tax profit margin is about 16%)

Item is worth 100
Buys from adventurers for 20
Sells to other adventurers for 90-150 (avg: 120)

He just made 100 on a 20 investment.

With those kind of profit margins, he can afford to:
-Hire a couple of decent bodyguards
-Bribe the barbarians/gnolls/bandits into letting him pass (hell, they probably need salt from him to preserve their food, their wives want brass buttons to sew onto their festival clothes, etc.)
-Take a little risk that the Item is stolen/cursed etc.

The merchant pays his bills by selling buttons/salt/scraps of silk to the villagers, but selling just one or two magic items would make a VERY successful year.

Pushing it a bit further, City merchants might put Travelling Merchants on retainer-- "If you buy any magic items during your travels, I promise to buy them off of you when you return to City"

They might even allow the Travelling Merchant to write letters of credit that the PCs could cash in at the City Merchant's shop.

Travelling Merchant: "I don't have enough cash to buy this off you, but I tell you what, I'll give you a letter of credit at City Merchant. You said you're going to City anyway, and he has some other magic items there. Since you have to wait to get paid, I'll give you 25% of Item's value instead of 20%."

 

[Hussar]

Travelling merchants do so because they are an excellent GM tool.

If the GM want's players to be able to sell off their magic stuff easily, there happens to be a travelling merchant in town.

If the GM wants to give his players a few days of downtime, the travelling merchant should be by any day now.

If the GM doesn't want his players to sell, then the travelling merchant won't be there for weeks or isn't expected.

If the GM wants to push the players into a new adventure, the travelling merchant should have been in town already, but is late. Lets hope he didn't get delayed by those recent [orc/kobold/bandit/goblin/dragon/other country/guinea pig] attacks, the PCs should go check it out.

If the GM wants to move the PCs elsewhere, then the travelling merchant won't be around for some time, but they could go to the city.

If the GM wants a combination or these, the travelling merchant will show up in a few days late, after an attack and will buy and sell from the PCs at a discount if they help escort the travelling merchant to their next stop.

Sounds good to me. We've had to turn a blind eye to massive amounts of stuff in 3.0/3.5 this is not only easy to do, but it actually adds to the game.

This.

Considering all we've learned about 4e in the past eight months or so, why oh why is anyone surprised to learn that 4e concepts are not based in world building? Considering the strongly gamist bent of pretty much each and every bit of flavor or crunch, why do people insist on trying to shoehorn new previews into a simulationist preconception?

 

[FireLance]

I think it was stated in World and Monsters that the darkness between the points of light wasn't all that dark. Yes, most people prefer to live within cities, towns and villages, and yes, the uncivilized areas between the points of light could be dangerous. However, stepping into the wilderness is not automatically deadly, or 1st-level PCs would never survive their first adventure.

So, perhaps a gang of hobgoblins controls the roads between Town A and Village B, and the merchants that move between the two villages have to pay them a toll in order to use the road. However, the hobgoblins also patrol the road and make it relatively safe for the merchants to travel along.

Perhaps the road between Village B and Village C passes through a wood of mischevous fey. However, the merchants know how to appease the fey with offerings of pastries (which they are unable to make themselves) and generally pass through the woods unmolested.

Maybe the road between Village C and Town D are part of an owlbear's hunting grounds. This part of the road is dangerous even for a relatively experienced merchant, so they pass through it as quickly as possible, and are always prepared to run away as fast as they can (possibly dropping packages of meat as a distraction) if they encounter the owlbear.

And, as mentioned, most of the time, the merchants will be dealing in basic goods such as food, clothes and tools. They're not wandering around looking for magic items, but if the PCs have a magic item to sell, the best person to sell it to would be the wandering merchant.

 

[loseth]

None civilisation on earth ever had to exist in a state of darkness like the darkness found in D&D. Since grain is very important large cities would patrol their outlying farms to secure their supply.

You've misunderstood. Cities cannot supply themselves from outlying farms. They are too big. That's part of the economic definition of what a town/city is: too big a non-farming population to be self sufficient in food. They can only supply themselves by transporting grain (or, in North America or Early Modern Europe, potatoes) from villages. Any fantasy medieval setting that is even vaguely based on the real thing* will have to have a similar set up.



* I'm not implying that people should want worlds like this.

 

[Mirtek]

In "the real world," the very word "adventurer" was coined by merchants. They were "merchant adventurers" like the Muscovy Trading Company, the Turkey/Levant Company, and even the East India Trading Company. Merchants funded exploration. They financed voyages of discovery. And they did all of this in search of goods that they could sell for a profit.

Why did people sail west across the pacific, when there was a grave possibility of death?

These traveled far and wide in a world that wasn't dark in a D&D sense and even then only did it because they expected an exotic wondrous world goal at the end of their journey where they would get the most exotic things to bring back home.

The PoL commuters set out for small hillbilly village with 12 shanties, a small wodden wall, 70 human and 7 animals. Nothing to get their that justifies the costs of raising your own private army just to get their alive.

You've misunderstood. Cities cannot supply themselves from outlying farms. They are too big. That's part of the economic definition of what a town/city is: too big a non-farming population to be self sufficient in food. They can only supply themselves by transporting grain (or, in North America or Early Modern Europe, potatoes) from villages. Any fantasy medieval setting that is even vaguely based on the real thing* will have to have a similar set up.

And any sensible city will extend the protecting of their army to the villages it needs. The romans needed to import a lot of grain too and they did raise huge armies to protect their trade corn champers as far away as egypt.

A big city who needs lot of grain it can't produce in it's immediate surrounding will extend it's influence until it covers a large enough area to safely produce it's food. That's how city states are born.


If PoL X is crucial to feed the blob of light Y, you will see the army of Y securing the route to PoL X and thus absorbing PoL X