Saturday, October 28, 2017

How Much, And If At All

I've gotten through my equipment list and established Sets for each object.  I realized as I went that the Sets are quite crunchy enough to manage every item, as many things are simply excessively rare and happen to be made of things that are bound to be made of a common good: say, a floating castle made of stone, as an example of something not on the list.  That can be solved by simply dividing the reference availability by the workmanship number on the table, but even that has to be arbitrarily tweaked somewhat.  I'm never happy with an arbitrary solution, so no doubt I'll be messing with this system until I am happy ... or until I die, which ever seems more likely.

Still, I'm more pleased with it than I have been with any other availability system, and that's good.  I'm just rebuilding the pretty table for players to use during the game, then I'll post it on my drive for patreon users.

There's a different aspect to availability that needs addressing, and that connects to the quantity of goods that can be bought (a whole other headache).  I'll use elephants as an example.

Let's say that we're in Stavanger: a cool Norwegian climate in the summer and bitterly wet and cold in the winter.  In my system, the total number of references for elephants in Stavanger is 0.0200.  I have 7 world references for elephants just now (there would be more, but Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia have not yet been added to the system).  Here's the breakdown of how the sources of elephants affect the Stavanger market:



All of these are in India.  The distance between Stavanger and Mysore, Bombay, Galle, etc. are all over 300.  Myingan, in the region of Pagan, in the Empire of Toungoo, is in Burma (and I'll bet you recognize none of those names), making it the farthest away.

It's no use arguing that these are mastodons in Norway, because the table clearly shows where they're coming from.  And since 0.015625 is the minimum for set one objects, and since and "elephant" is a set one object from elephant references, this puts elephants in Norway.  I can eliminate elephants by arbitrarily listing them as "set 2," but then I would have to remember to personally change that set if the trade numbers were being generated for a market in India.  No good.  The programming has to work for everywhere.

Put that on a shelf for the moment.

My trade system bases the price of an elephant on the number of references vs. the number of elephants.  I have 50,637 head of trained, domesticated elephants in the world, obviously in India and Burma.  This doesn't seem like many, but it compares with established numbers early in the 20th century.  And I don't have many references, because the source comes from the 20th century and even India had been advanced enough that not every town in the country named elephants as a resource.

If we take that number and divide it by 7, we end with slightly less than 7,234 elephants per reference.  If we multiply the number of references in Stavanger by 1 reference of elephants, we get 144.55 elephants in Stavanger.  In Norway.

That's ridiculous.  There are only 2,500 people in the town of Stavanger in my game, so where the hell are they keeping all these elephants?

It helps to think of products appearing on the market tables as things going through the market, rather than as things being kept there.  Most of anything is a wholesale product, piling up in a given town like Stavanger before being distributed throughout a large section of the hinterland.  Stavanger market serves a population ten times its number, and of course merchants in Stavanger import things they expect to then ship forward to other trade cities.

If we think of the number of elephants, or any other product, as the amount going through Stavanger in a year, it reduces the physical appearance of every commodity.  If we divide the year into 52 weeks, however, it still means almost three elephants moving through Stavanger per week, but that's at least a little easier to swallow.

Technically, it could be the same three elephants, or even one elephant, being sold over and over, since that's how economies work.  We could also argue that only the paperwork is moving through Stavanger.  A fellow doing business in Stavanger has a plantation in India and as such, he's managing his elephants overseas; yes, you can buy an elephant in Stavanger, but you have to pick it up in Mysore.

That's a way of handwaving the issue and it has been the thought process I've had for a long time.  Besides, no player character wants to buy an elephant in Stavanger, even if it is only 89 g.p.  Even if the thing is in a stall, as a DM I'm going to be a complete asshole about it and tell the player the elephant is going to die if it doesn't get a sufficient shelter or moved pretty quick to a warmer climate.  That's a way of controlling it too.  That and the fact that an elephant eats 450 lb. of food a month.

None of this actually solves the problem, however ~ as I say, it is handwaving.  Logically, the trick it to establish another variable that states an elephant won't or can't be sold in such-and-such a climate, even if the adjusted references say it exists.

And that is easy to write and to propose but it includes hundreds of other items that must also be arbitrarily limited in market appearance based on a very wide variety of issues.  Saltwater fish and shipbuilding being sold inland (along with defining what is "inland"), furs and heavy cloth items even being available in hot, humid climates (why would you want a fur even as a rug in Burma?  And who would bring it thousands of miles to market it there?), wagons existing in places without roads and so on.  These things are fiddly and highly particular to some areas and we're talking about a lot of work defining the margins of where a product occurs and where it doesn't.

On top of this, add the argument of seasonal availability, something I have always wanted to incorporate but which was just a bridge too far.  I think I see now how this could be done more easily, but again it is a process of going through each item one at a time and arbitrarily deciding whether something can be bought in a given season at all, and then how much of what is sold in what season ~ and even that doesn't yet take into account fruit that is shipped a thousand miles vs. a hundred.

I've hand-waved that by saying an apprentice mage with a freshen cantrip can restore a cubic yard of vegetable material a day, enabling a full wagon to be restored entirely every four-six days, depending on the size of the wagon, long enough for it to be hauled from Andalucia to Warsaw or further.  But a system that argued that Israeli hushhash couldn't be bought in Stavanger at all would be better.

These are long-term plans, and hopefully will be implemented one by one.  The hold-up until now has been a base system that could be used to adjust items; now that I have found one (hopefully, it holds up), I can patiently figure out these other issues one by one, creating features that will discount something if it is such and such a distance from the sea, if it is autumn, if it is in such and such a climate that discounts its presence and so on.  A long, frustrating process towards a deeper, grittier detail, but I think in the long run worth it.

I look back at what I've created thus far; it would be hard to imagine something this big and this complex at the beginning of this project without losing heart at ever accomplishing this much.  Yet I have accomplished it, because I didn't think of the whole scale.  I just thought of one little bit of it at a time, letting the process itself determine the monolith of the project that it became.

4 comments:

  1. " 1 Ref / 354.2 days = .0028 refs Adjusted " "TOTAL .02 refs Adjusted"

    Maybe the distance from the source affects the *price* linearly, but would not available stock be depleted more rapidly?

    (Aside: I think your provender number is off by a factor of 30 or more: 800lbs/DAY rather than 450lbs/Month)

    Maybe I'm mis-reading the Sets and Tiers post or don't have enough of your hidden thinking, but under 6.25% of a Reference qualifies it as Tier 4. How/why are you jumping 2% of Elephant into Set 1? Because it's common at the source?

    Happy New Year.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Okay.

    The available stock might deplete more rapidly, but it would also be resupplied steadily as well, so it evens out.

    Yes, the system is linear. I'm fine with that. Most of the economic texts I read to found the system proposed linear structures; probably wrong with relation to the real world, but this isn't a real world, this is a game world, and can therefore follow the fictions of economists without trouble.

    Elephants DO eat between 200 and 600 lbs of grass, tree foliage, bark, twigs and other vegetation. However, for the raiser of elephants, all of this foliage is FREE. What is not free is the 15 lbs. of fruit and vegetables per day that you feed the elephant to give it a better health and tone, as these things are not typically part of a wild elephant's diet. Thus, 450 lbs. per month.

    "Set" doesn't mean what you think it means. I was quite clear.

    ReplyDelete
  3. '"Set" doesn't mean what you think it means.'

    I don't know what "Set" means at all in your context.

    You already have a number which indicates how much of a Reference influences a Market, which governs the Price.

    This already introduces Rarity into the system, especially when combined with your Workmanship levels.

    There are many, many ways out of the mathematical corner in which you find yourself. Probably the simplest way is to increase the steepness in your Tier math: instead of dividing by flat 4s, divide the next tier by 16 and the next by 64. (ie, T1>1, T2>.25, T3>.015625, T4>.000244) The numbers are already arbitrary; I would presume that if you could emulate the Sets with your Reference Supply you would, just to avoid having to add another column to the Products themselves.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Mujadaddy, I don't know what your agenda is or why you're busting my chops here. I built the system and it works fine.

    You are quite welcome to wander off and make your own system.

    It says plainly in the link to the post above: Sets are categorized according to the "commonality" of the item in the system as a WHOLE, rather than in the system as it pertains to a specific part. So if an item is common on average, it is set one. It may be much more common here than there, like elephants, but if ON THE WHOLE is represents a large number of items, then it is set one.

    Now, like it, don't like it, I don't care. I only posed the system, as anything I do on the blog, in order to encourage people to rethink their game design. I'm not going to quibble with you about what problems YOU have with a system you didn't build, don't have access to, don't understand, and are NEVER going to run in as a player.

    For the record, I'm usually willing to discuss this sort of detail, but I really find myself resistant to readers who approach me with what I'm doing wrong as their opening statement. Doesn't exactly get on my good side, before making a request ... which is what asking me to explain myself is. A request.

    ReplyDelete

If you wish to leave a comment on this blog, contact alexiss1@telus.net with a direct message. Comments, agreed upon by reader and author, are published every Saturday.

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.