The problem, is that Fate is a narrative and story oriented game. It is about people's choices more than it is about the crunchy bits of simulating physics or maths. On the other hand, economies and markets are entities of many parts and can be very complex indeed.
Part of what makes stories of clever traders, tricky fixers, and cunning grifters interesting, is that there is enough of a tip of the hat to these entities to the audience that they can vicariously feel clever too when the score is made honestly or otherwise. Even so simple a scene as THIS is interesting because of the details. Now the scale of the political game I have in mind is quite a bit larger, but through the faces of the player state, this kind of trading should be possible. Though there are few films that tell the stories, much of my interest in the history of trade and virtually all my interest in economics has to do with the constellation of mad, daring, world spanning adventures, schemes, and adventurers who at the end of the day just wanted to make a buck. The clever trading may not be the meat of the story, but it is the culmination. But then too, is the gamist satisfaction of "winning" in a way that directly supports the narrative. This is not a market simulation, but it should have enough complexity to make daring a journey half way round the world to bargain for a shipload of cheap goods that can be sold for a fortune back home.
My favorite part of the board game version of Civilization, was not the tech cards or the war part; it was blind trading three cards for three, two of which had to be truthful. Skins for dye... gold for wheat. Trading is a fun side business to raiding in Sid Meyer's Pirates! too. Several of my favorite non-fiction books are histories of trade... Nathaniel's Nutmeg, Scents of Eden, The Devil's Cup. The idea of a ship of adventurers looking to make a king's ransom with one big score leading to a war from a rival nation that ends in a peace treaty that grants an island territory on the opposite side of the planet... is just too crazy not to be ripe for fun. HERE, and HERE we can learn about Port Royal, a city chock full of murder hobos, a veritable Babylon of the West, in which the continuous fencing and resale of cargo to (more) legitimate merchants (for a commission) is a setting in which some level of mechanical detail beyond a single die roll to support the narrative might be in order. There should be some way beyond mere hand-waving to get some fun out of this kind of story focus.
So, I have two levels of resolution that I'm looking at. One is a much simpler Fate style challenge mechanic that can make less important trade, or more uninterested players move smoothly past trade to play in which ever ring of the political circus game they prefer. But I have been racking my brains trying to figure out how to explode this into a satisfactory fractal that has the right level of granularity to feel like a live, dynamic market economy, but still not get outside of the Fate play space.
I think the editing process for the 200 Word RPG contest kick-started my designer brain again, and I had an epiphany this afternoon.
Ultimately, it goes back to economics 101... Supply and Demand. I will have to expand a little more on the acquisition of resources later, but the core of the exploded, Fate fractal market starts with goods. There has to be a quick way to get an idea of some relative value of goods in order to give trading some verisimilitude. The simplified version will merely abstract this, and transactions will have no markers for the value or quantity of goods in trade; they will merely be narrative flavor like a created advantage or stunt. Transactions will be a contest of trade between the player merchant and the target market (PC or NPC). However, the fractal version determines the value of goods based on a quick calculation from three stats (R, F, L)
Raw Materials: - Common 1
- Uncommon 2
- Rare 3
Finished Goods: - Few materials 1
- Many materials 2
- Complex materials 3
Labor: - Basic skill 1
- Advanced skill 2
- Specialized skill 3
So for instance, Wheat is stated as R 1, F 0, L 1, for a (V) value of 2. Quick intuition can figure out that it is a raw commodity (seed), it is not a finished good, and it takes basic labor to put in the ground and to gather at harvest. There is obviously a fair amount of abstraction in the modeling of farming, but it gives a fair narrative model. Compare this to Iron ore (R 2, F 0, L 2, V=4) which can be turned into Iron ingots (R 2, F 1, L 2, V=5), that is used to make Armor (R 2, F 2, L 3, V=7) for values of 4, 5, and 7 respectively. Quick, easy, and can pretty much apply to anything that can be traded in scale. This gives a relative value between a load of Wheat at market, and a load of Armor. You could hand wave this if there was no narrative importance, but just the fact that one has more value than the other mechanically (though possibly not precisely as a simulation) gives 1) some relative narrative importance to which wagon matters more to the story of the guards, 2) a model for further market value that can also contribute to an abstract but still dynamic market for the merchants.
With that scratch-pad reckoning, that gets an idea of market value at the point of origin. But cost must also figure in getting it to market. At point of origin, silk in China was far cheaper than by the time it went thousands of miles west to Roman markets. The cost at every transfer port increased price. As such, zones are taken into account based on the difficulty of crossing from one zone into another zone. Essentially, you could travel a thousand miles across the Asian steppe in summer and it would be one zone, as there is little challenge between entering the zone and crossing into the next. Zones are measured by their final borders in other words; you can come in for free, but it costs to succeed in leaving (passing through). But, crossing the Tarim desert might count as a zone change calling for a +3 difficulty to pass through, and moving from the Tarim into and over the Tian Mountains along the Northern Silk Road is yet another zone change calling for a +4 difficulty before moving into the Steppes (easy enough... call it a +0 difficulty). So the basic distance mechanic calls for a +1 to the base value for every full +3 of difficulty in crossing zones to market.
So a load of silk in the Roman market at Antioch would be scratch pad priced thus:
Silk: R 1, F 1, L 2 (V=4) + shipping (quick estimate +4). It is an exotic item indeed, to Roman wives at a (C) cost of 7.
But while all of that deals more with the supply side of the market, there is also the demand side. This was also a tough part to crack, but I ultimately simplified it into a value based on how much the item is needed (or wanted enough to not distinguish a difference), and subtract the cost from that, dropping the integer to make a difficulty number to overcome by the merchant at sale.
Need: - Few need it 1
- Many need it 2
- Everybody 3
So again, in the case of Wheat (V 2) / (C 2) everybody needs it (N 3). N - C = -1, drop the integer, and you get 1, so the difficulty in selling wheat in a local market is +1. That means that the merchant has to overcome that difficulty to make a profit. Selling a load of Silk (V 7) imported from afar however, may prove harder. While most people would certainly like silk, probably you could judge it to have N 1. N - C = -6, drop integer and difficulty to sell it is +6 simply because it is exotic and expensive... most people simply can't pay the price.
Now the third ingredient mechanically, is to take into account a dynamic market. If you flood a market with wheat, the value of wheat is going to drop drastically as the supply outstrips the demand. Or if you can increase the supply of silk on the market, you can lower the price, and more people will be able to buy, which means that you can make up the profit over time. Since this is Fate though, we don't want to track a hundred commodities in real time, only the ones we are interested in for our story. So we need a way to put a lens on that. Thus, markets all have a stress boxes and consequences. In effect, the merchant player is attacking the market, and taking the stress as profit which goes back into replenishing that player's Resources stat, which I will discuss in another post. But if you attack the market too much, you put a narrative consequence which mechanically has enough detail to provide verisimilitude.
So in one last example, suppose your character sent a caravan east to bring back a load of silk to begin a trade monopoly so you could get filthy rich enough to buy the armies you need to keep your northern border safe from the stinky barbarians. The caravan does return from the daring venture (a whole separate series of sessions of story in play). Having cleverly used two create-an-advantage boosts (The Softest Clothes in the Empire, and Everyone Important in Tyre is Wearing Silk) to overcome the market in Antioch, ticks off two shifts of stress, and gives a consequence (Demand for Silk is Up) which allows an extra invoke the next time a silk shipment is in. Suppose another consequence came up though, and the market had so much silk that even the senior servants are wearing it? You might have the moderate consequence be Silk Demand Down. Anything important to the story about the market can be adequately, intuitively, and pretty realistically dealt with in this fashion.
So next, I need to deal a little more with Resources.
Here is a cool map that shows a little about the markets along the classic silk road. Too Cool!
No comments:
Post a Comment