Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Composer99" data-source="post: 8636727" data-attributes="member: 7030042">If you are referring to my post, that is simply not true. You come across as arguing against a position that wasn't taken.Both overland and coastal freighting in the Forgotten Realms pose risks. In both cases, there are forces you can call upon to try and protect yourself from them, but you can't eliminate the risks, any more than real-life pre-modern mariners could eliminate the risks of coastal travel or limited open water travel, such as in the Mediterranean or North Sea or pre-modern overland haulers could eliminate the risks they faced.The costs and benefits of Sword Coast coastal travel:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Overseas travel is faster, therefore less expensive for daily crew expenses</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Overseas travel doesn't require pack animals, therefore less food requirements</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Pound-for-pound, you can haul more stuff on a ship than in overland caravans</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">You have to reckon with Umberlee</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">If something goes wrong, whether a natural event, piracy, monster attack, or divine wrath, you're more likely to lose an entire ship and everything on it</li> </ul>The costs and benefits of overland travel:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Overland travel is slower, therefore more expensive for daily team expenses</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Overland travel requires pack animals, therefore more food requirements</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Pound-for-pound, you can haul less stuff compared to a river barge or coastal shipping</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">You don't have to reckon with Umberlee</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">If something goes wrong, whether a natural event, banditry, or monster attack, you're more likely to suffer attrition of teams, pack animals, and freight, with only divine wrath likely to result in total destruction of the caravan; a big enough armed complement might reduce attrition from banditry or smaller monsters to zero, or at least to some acceptable amount (where no armed complement can keep a ship safe from a monster capable of attacking from underwater)</li> </ul>These considerations, along with the existence of what you might call transnational entities interested and invested in maintaining trade routes by both land and sea (such as Waukeen and her faith), along with the incentive for regional powers to maintain the ability to deploy force by both land and sea (the Lord's Alliance probably wants to be able to reinforce one another as part of their mutual defence pact), means that there is a time and place for overseas trade and a time and place for overland trade. None of these factors necessarily lead to a concerted effort to maintain a continuous overland trade route stretching from Neverwinter to Calimport - instead, they will combine with the contiguity of short-haul roads connecting town to town to emergently create a continuous route allowing such overland travel.Someone who wants to ship from Neverwinter to Baldur's Gate, much less Athkatla or Calimport, is reasonably going to ship by sea. But if you're making a short-haul trip, overland is going to be less risky - and at any rate there will be short-haul trade from any given town overland up to one (maybe two) days in any given direction when there isn't a watercourse or coast to follow. But there will also be medium-haul travel overland: do you imagine trade and travel between Beregost and Nashkel is going to be by sea?[HR][/HR]Once again, it must be pointed out that the Forgotten Realms simply isn't meant to be a "realistic" simulation of how real-world trade networks develop or operate, just as equipment prices in the PHB simply aren't meant to be a "realistic" pricing system emulating late-medieval or early-modern economics. They're a backdrop for the fantastic adventures of D&D games. It just isn't a flaw or fault of the setting if it doesn't meet any given person's more stringent sensibilities for world-building or verisimilitude.</blockquote>

Verification