This site's @amacris was the "Lead Designer" on ACKS, which has a quite nice trade system tied into the worldbuilding. Settlements have a market class (how much trade goes on) driven by their size, and some supply and demand modifiers (which categories of goods are relatively cheap or expensive there) driven in part randomly and in part by their location / history / status. The math behind it all seems to work.

One of the classes in the Player's Companion is the Venturer, meant to represent an adventuresome trader: thief-like, but charisma based. Exploiting a safe trade route gets PCs nothing but a little gold, but going on a risky caravan with exotic goods to a novel destination can yield really nice XP; the higher the character level, the more risk and greater profit they need to continue to advance. (This is much like Alex's approach to domain rulership, where first-level characters might get decent xp just for keeping a small farming village safe, but at tenth level they'll need to be ruling a duchy or principality to advance further _from rulership as distinct from adventuring_.)

(Aha, the MW Merchant Adventures linked to earlier (https://www.batintheattic.com/downloads/MW%20Merchant%20Adventures%20Rev%2004.pdf) is an open content reworking of the ACKS trade rules, more OD&D than B/X. I've heard rumours there are OSE versions of a lot of the ACKS systems but haven't seen them.)

QuoteThis site's @amacris was the "Lead Designer" on ACKS, which has a quite nice trade system tied into the worldbuilding.

I was just going to post this.  I've always wanted him to take a shot at a Traveller type game where he could expand some of his work to scifi gaming.  Sometimes his stuff is a bit more detailed than I need, but it always well thought out and easy to sift for great ideas. 

I think the Basic D & D Gazetteer "The Republic of Darokin" had some sort of trading system in it.  I don't own it so can't comment too much, but a friend owned it and was quite impressed with it, so much so that his character became a merchant  and established a trading route.  I've read other good comments about it over the years.

space merchants should be hauling biomass and nutrient rich soil and might be restricted from providing free samples in public restrooms because in terraforming and colonization baterial cultures are the real treasures.

All of the RPG trading systems I've seen have been some variation of "buy low, sell high" where the players buy the product and hope to sell it later at a profit. It is easy to implement as all you need is a price list but not very realistic. Imagine in today's world buying something from China and then sailing over there to pick it up.

I was wondering if any games had a more "Space Trucker" system. Where you get paid just for delivery. It would be more complicated because you'd need some method of determining destination and corresponding price point and you'd need a method to generate multiple deliveries for the players to chose. You would probably want some sort of complication system to add something to do along the way.

Has anyone seen anything like this?

Quote from: I on June 16, 2022, 02:05:15 PM
I think the Basic D & D Gazetteer "The Republic of Darokin" had some sort of trading system in it.  I don't own it so can't comment too much, but a friend owned it and was quite impressed with it, so much so that his character became a merchant  and established a trading route.  I've read other good comments about it over the years.

I wasn't too impressed. The system requires a lot of judgment calls from the DM, and the modifiers are wonky. For instance, there's a "broker bonus" that ranges from +1 to +5, and which is applied to everything from 1d6 to 1d100 rolls, without any seeming awareness of the vast disparity in effect. There's also a similar system in the Minrothad Guilds.

The maps and trading routes may be useful, tho:
https://mystara.thorfmaps.com/gaz11-major-trading-routes/
https://mystara.thorfmaps.com/gaz9-major-trading-routes/

Since the ancient times, I've just used the Book 3 Traveller Merchant trading charts in a modified form for any OD&D trading expeditions. But I steer away from those because Conan doesn't give a shit about trading sheep for wood. Conan wants a cargo of gems, magic and piles of gold!