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Message: <blockquote data-quote="loseth" data-source="post: 4220260" data-attributes="member: 54535">Dangerous travel makes the travel less attractive to merchants, but it also makes the reward for travel much more attractive.In real PoL settings, like the medieval Baltic, trade continued just as it had in non-PoL areas and times. Volume often went down, but not by nearly as much as the average person supposes. The medieval Baltic, for example, was a heavily forested constant-war-and-banditry zone, but it was also the hub of a thriving commercial region. Dangerous environments will not stop merchants; they will just force a different pattern of trade, i.e. larger, more heavily-armed caravans and higher-margin goods.Let's put it into a practical example:--The village of Hommlet produces an average surplus of grain that is worth about 1700gp when sold in the markets of Freeport. In the pre-PoL age, the lord of Hommlet is willing to trade this grain for 1500gp worth of luxuries and craft goods that the village is incapable of producing itself. So, the merchants making the Freeport-to-Hommlet grain run can expect about 200gp in gross trade profit, which is OK, because they only have to pay a few caravan guards.--As the situation becomes more dangerous, however, fewer merchants are willing to make the Hommlet-Freeport grain run. As a result, the people of Hommlet get more and more desperate for the goods that the merchants bring. The lord of Hommlet offers to sell his grain for less and less in order to encourage the merchants to keep making the run.--Eventually, the lord of Hommlet is so desperate that he's willing to trade his grain surplus for a measly 200gp worth of absolutely essential craft, building and military goods. Now, merchants making the Hommlet-Freeport grain run can expect a total gross trade profit of 1500gp (1700gp-200gp). Of course, they'll have to hire many more caravan guards than when the kingdom was safe, but since the trade route is now 7.5 times more valuable than it was, they can afford to do so. Instead of maybe 50gp worth of caravan guards (say, 10 guards), they'll hire more like 1000gp worth of guards (200 guards). Instead of many small caravans coming in throughout the summer and fall, Hommlet can now expect one or two very heavily armed caravans to make their way to the village each year. But the caravans will come—the high profits guarantee it.Obviously, this system breaks down at some point. There will eventually be a point when travel is so dangerous that travel is not worth the risk no matter how good the profits are. But, I would argue that this level of danger is so high that what you will get is not PoL, but total annihilation. Once the danger level is high enough to routinely stop 200 heavily-armed professional soldiers from travelling, it’s high enough to wipe out every settlement in the region. In other words, specifying that a setting is PoL presupposes that the level of danger is high enough to make travel very risky, but not high enough to stop big, heavily-armed caravans.</blockquote>

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