D&D 4E Merchants and Marketplaces: Trading/Business Rules for D+D 4e

[Alex319]

I have read lots of discussions on these boards about how the economy in 4e "doesn't make any sense" and stops people from playing certain types of characters like a merchant who makes money trading. Lots of times people respond by saying something like "The game is called Dungeons and Dragons for a reason, not Merchants and Marketplaces" or something like that.

Well, this is the House Rules forum, so just because there's no rule existing for something doesn't mean you can't make your own. And just like any good businessman tries to find out what their customers' demands are and then peddle a product that meets them, I'm here to satisfy this forum's demand for merchant/trading rules. Whit that in mind, I now present:

Merchants and Marketplaces: Business, Trading, and Manufacturing in D+D 4e

Current Version: 0.5

Merchants and Marketplaces is a system for handling all sorts of player-run businesses in D+D 4e. It is designed with the following goals in mind:

[FONT=&quot]-[/FONT]Rather than having lots of detailed rules for specific types of goods, it establishes a general framework that can be used for just about any kind of good or service that players might want to provide.
[FONT=&quot]-[/FONT]The business simulation aspect can be as simple or as complicated as you want. If desired, you can abstract away the buying and selling aspects and allow characters to focus solely on crafting – or you have the players manage their entire supply chain, from sourcing raw materials to selling their finished products. (As an aside, I wonder if this is the first time the phrase “supply chain management” has been used in an RPG.)
[FONT=&quot]-[/FONT]There’s plenty of extra options to increase your experience, such as hireable employees, purchasable factories, and much more.


Check out the PDF below for all the details!

Completed: Introduction, Basic Rules
Coming Soon: Advanced Rules - shops, factories, and more!

 

[Omnifarious Grey]

Amazing work so far. If you could slowly work this into a pdf format and some charts that are simple and easy to read it would be very effective for implementing. Keep up the good work.

 

[Irda Ranger]

This looks really neat. I'm looking forward to employees rules, because (IME) I have only gamed with one player's PC (ever) who took on all three roles you describe above (purchasing, crafting and sales). Most PCs that engage in merchanting usually focus on only one of those and farm out the others to NPC specialists.

And there should certainly be rules for "absentee landlordism", to allow for PCs going off on adventures. Once you've got a business manager hired it should be possible to get away for a couple months at a time.

Question 1: What's with the IUs? If an IU is always worth 10 GP, just use platinum pieces.

Question 2: Any thoughts on integrating rules for real estate or "feudalism"? Most PCs who are looking to invest the treasures they get from adventuring usually go with academies/followers (military keeps, wizarding academies, founding churches - that sort of thing), but the next most common thing seems to be buying a village (more or less), defending it from monsters and collecting taxes. This is a bit tangential from your main topic, but it would be convenient it at least the two systems of investing treasure "spoke the same language" so to speak so players can compare apples & oranges.

 

[Alex319]

This looks really neat. I'm looking forward to employees rules, because (IME) I have only gamed with one player's PC (ever) who took on all three roles you describe above (purchasing, crafting and sales). Most PCs that engage in merchanting usually focus on only one of those and farm out the others to NPC specialists.

And there should certainly be rules for "absentee landlordism", to allow for PCs going off on adventures. Once you've got a business manager hired it should be possible to get away for a couple months at a time.

Yes, I'll probably include those. It won't be too much of a change. Basically the way the employees will work is that they each have a certain skill level and make their own checks, so it's basically a matter of just letting the employees do their thing while the owner is away.

Question 1: What's with the IUs? If an IU is always worth 10 GP, just use platinum pieces.

Well, the IUs don't represent money per se, they represent goods; monetary value is just the unit of account. But the reason I used the IUs is as follows:

1. To make it easy to scale up or down the entire system by a desired amount, in order to use a different money system (like the one in http://www.enworld.org/forum/4e-fan...-low-magic-games-economy-d-d-4th-edition.html) or just to make the amount of money what you want it to be.

2. Some random events can change the value of an IU - for example, a shortage of raw materials might raise their price. The IU system makes it easy to understand what's happening if, say, the player stocks up on iron and the price goes up - the physical quantitiy (number of IUs) in stock didn't change; just the price did.

I will however rewrite that section to make the concept behind it more clear.

Question 2: Any thoughts on integrating rules for real estate or "feudalism"? Most PCs who are looking to invest the treasures they get from adventuring usually go with academies/followers (military keeps, wizarding academies, founding churches - that sort of thing), but the next most common thing seems to be buying a village (more or less), defending it from monsters and collecting taxes. This is a bit tangential from your main topic, but it would be convenient it at least the two systems of investing treasure "spoke the same language" so to speak so players can compare apples & oranges.

[/quote]

Yes, I'll think about that. I can imagine one simple change as using the Production rules to produce gold instead of goods - basically you take the number of "IUs" you produce, multiply that by the value of an IU, and then that's how much gold you can produce.

I was also still thinking about how to handle capital investments like improved workshops, storefronts, etc. One idea was to have these investments give a static bonus to the relevant check, so say an advanced forge could give a +3 to Production checks for blacksmithing.

However, something else to add is a standalone production facility that simply produces a certain amount of goods per month, without requiring any checks. Using this system, you could model a village as a production facility that takes in multiple inputs representing types of goods the village needs for survival (like food, water etc.) and produces tax revenue as output. If you wanted to get more detailed, you could model the supply chain within the village itself (like have the farm be a separate production facility that produces food which then goes to the peasants, etc.)

 

[Irda Ranger]

I was also still thinking about how to handle capital investments like improved workshops, storefronts, etc. One idea was to have these investments give a static bonus to the relevant check, so say an advanced forge could give a +3 to Production checks for blacksmithing.

That's probably wise. Just treat them like Masterwork equipment.

Another tweak though might be to introduce that you need Masterwork tools and a MW Forge to work with MW weapons and armor, or the special various materials available to 4E.

 

[Alex319]

Well, you know "masterwork" has a different meaning in 4e than it did before, particularly in reference to armor...

But anyway, I'm thinking of a couple major tweaks to the system.

1. I'm probably going to refactor the entire "production" part of it. Rather than having a "production multiplier," I'm going to specify each production process by a set of inputs and outputs, which can include labor (e.g. 1 IU of iron + 1 unit of labor = 2 IUs of swords) and the production roll determines how many units of labor you produce. This is a lot more intuitive, and also is much easier to generalize to other scenarios, like multiple types of raw materials for the same production process (e.g. you need both wood and horses to make a horse-cart) , substituting one raw material for another, etc. (Going with the village idea, you could even have one of the outputs be "production points" that go towards making new village improvements or buildings. On the other hand, that all depends on if players want a little Civilization IV mixed in with their RPG playing.)

2. Another important thing I'm going to try to address is the progression of money-making ability. In the system above you essentially have twice as much profit potential for every 5 points by which your skill increases. Even if you suppose your skill increases by 1 per level (still a little optimistic) then you get x2 money making ability every 5 levels, which is not nearly enough to keep up with the "x5 per 5 levels" progression of magic item/treasure values. Simply steepening the skill-to-money curve would not help, because skill levels vary so much (much more than say, attack bonuses) that a player who min-maxed their skill would be so far ahead of a player who didn't that the latter might as well not even bother participating. (Even a +3 skill focus and +2 racial bonus is already +5, which would mean a fivefold increase in effectiveness.) It would also open the system up to abuse by a player pumping their skill to high levels to make large quantities of money so they can outfit their party with much more powerful items than they are supposed to have. (Although it's no longer possible to pump skills to absurdly high levels like it was in 3.5e, there are still some skill boosting items etc.) Probably what I'm going to do is keep the x2/+5 progression but also add in a "quality bonus" that is based on levels and increases by a factor of x2 or so every 5 levels. Thus players still benefit from increased skill, just not too much.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

One interesting option, which you sort of touched on a bit but didn't elaborate, is the choice between making fancier high price point goods and less fancy basic low price point goods. So for example a workshop might decide to make cheap swords for the Duke's army, or they might choose to make expensive fancy swords for the nobility, or maybe some in-between type.

I would imagine that making higher quality goods requires a greater input of labor and possibly higher quality raw materials, but obviously sells with a better price multiplier. The various options for price points and whatnot seem to sort of suggest that kind of possibility, but it might be interesting to make it more explicit, since each sort of strategy requires different marketing and maybe different infrastructure costs.

Of course you may not want to make the whole thing TOO complex... lol.

It does seem like a pretty workable system. There may be some corner cases where players could exploit it, but only experience would tell.

I can see how all of this could be a nice way to hook in adventures as well. Suddenly the market for swords is flooded with cheap weapons of higher quality than the PCs can make. Why? Maybe the competition has a secret. Maybe you need to find out. Maybe the local thieves guild starts leaning on the PCs for protection money, that cuts into the old profits quite a bit! Maybe a local trade guild hires thieves to drive the PCs out of town. The possibilities are endless

 

[Alex319]

One interesting option, which you sort of touched on a bit but didn't elaborate, is the choice between making fancier high price point goods and less fancy basic low price point goods. So for example a workshop might decide to make cheap swords for the Duke's army, or they might choose to make expensive fancy swords for the nobility, or maybe some in-between type.

I would imagine that making higher quality goods requires a greater input of labor and possibly higher quality raw materials, but obviously sells with a better price multiplier. The various options for price points and whatnot seem to sort of suggest that kind of possibility, but it might be interesting to make it more explicit, since each sort of strategy requires different marketing and maybe different infrastructure costs.

Of course you may not want to make the whole thing TOO complex... lol.

It does seem like a pretty workable system. There may be some corner cases where players could exploit it, but only experience would tell.

I can see how all of this could be a nice way to hook in adventures as well. Suddenly the market for swords is flooded with cheap weapons of higher quality than the PCs can make. Why? Maybe the competition has a secret. Maybe you need to find out. Maybe the local thieves guild starts leaning on the PCs for protection money, that cuts into the old profits quite a bit! Maybe a local trade guild hires thieves to drive the PCs out of town. The possibilities are endless

Good ideas. Actually, I'm in the process of reworking the entire production system. My plan is instead of having a flat "production multiplier," what you do is you write down a "production formula" with all the inputs (like raw materials, labor, possibly bonuses for advanced workshops) on one side and the outputs on the other side, and each item in the "production formula" is given a value and the inputs have to be balanced with the outputs. This makes it very easy to handle all the ideas you suggest while still preventing it from being exploitable.

And I also thought about the "quality" idea too. I was originally planning to just abstract "quality" away as more IUs of the product (thus making more money.) However when I worked through the math of the system I realized that I would have to have some sort of level-scaled bonus in order to keep up with the general cost progression, and decided that "quality levels" would be a good way of doing this, where at higher character levels you can make higher quality goods which are worth more per IU. Of course quality levels can serve the purpose you describe as well. One thing I am planning to add is ways of increasing the quality level of goods, like "refining" (which increases the quality level of raw materials), "mass production" (which enables players to produce a large quantity of lower quality goods rather than a smaller number or higher quality goods) and feats which enable players to produce higher quality goods.

 

[Alex319]

New version posted with PDF. Check it out!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

So far, so good I'm still wondering about price vs quality and how that would maybe relate to supply and demand. IE if I make swords and decide to use my fantastic sales ability to sell them at 300% of base price I'd think I would get few takers. You have a reduced sales volume factor, but wouldn't a more realistic notion be that people simply wouldn't buy the goods at 300% at all? Unless of course they have no other ready supply, but in that case they aren't really at a 300% markup anymore, the price has just gone way up in town for swords...

I guess different quality levels of stuff could simply be different goods with different materials required and different formulae. OTOH an IU doesn't represent any fixed number of goods, so in a sense it is not relevant, except at the sales end where fine swords would have a different market than cheap ones.