Thanks DonM! Nice to know I'm not the only one who felt this way about the trade and commerce chapter.
I've given them a brief playtest. You can see the results in these spreadsheets:
Open Office and
Excel pre-2007. I hope they are easy to follow.
I think simply adjusting base prices for various goods does the trick, and I think the percentage adjustments you've got going are really good. As you can see, I picked three characters to crew a Far Trader. None have any Mercantile skills really (they can operate a ship and serve passengers but that's about it). What it brought home to me was that you can break even on cargo and passengers and pay your crew, but it's much hard to get ahead without a little speculation. I think that's a tribute to how well-balanced Marc Miller & co.'s economics were right back to the LBB's and how well this has been carried forward.
The way I played it, I rolled for the available / nature and did up the profile of available speculative cargoes, and THEN rolled the task to find a seller - that is, the way I played it, the captain would have a good idea of the general nature and size of available cargoes, and then could decide to pursue actually purchasing one. This contrasts with freight, where pretty much all you have to do is look up the bookings and then agree. Then at the destination rolled the task after arrival to find a buyer. Let me tell you, on the Allel to Efate run, it was a near-run thing! I lucked out on the rolls after deciding to use a Broker - but thank goodness I did, that Broker-4 saved the ship's backside right on when a payment was due, even though they lost money on the trade.
What can I say? It seems to me to be a fun game to play, and if you engaged the right players who pore over maps and are trying to plan the next cargo to make that next payment, the various "jobs" that come the players' ways will be that much more attractive.
Time interacts with the rules in a very interesting way. When there was only a starport E on offer, wildnerness refueling is a major pain in the !#*$!#$& for a merchant, adding time delays when you're worried about making that next payment - hence purchasing fuel when it's available because it's just time-critical (but unrefined because that refining ability on-board saves so much money).
A couple of pieces of feedback in the detail. Firstly, the TL price modifiers must be a tough choice. How to keep a game moving balanced with results that don't quite make sense - e.g. applying TL modifiers to "processed" resources such as precious metals. Having said this, steel has been superceded by crysaliron and bonded superdense, etc. so I can see the general sense in it. Having said this, I think the modified system cures my want of more detail sufficiently while still keeping the game moving.
Secondly, I think some clarity around who-does-what is called for. If a ship has landed and is checking out freight and cargo, can a seller for cargo be found concurrently with accepting freight bookings, even if only one crew is out doing this job? I think it's reasonable that it's allowed, but that we accept that whoever is out there booking cargo, freight and passengers, it's a full time job for the week. It's the method I used here, and given that it lead to a tightly balanced economic situation, I think it's plays out in a balanced way.
Lastly, it seems to me that TL modifications for the number of major / minor / incidental lots of cargo (as opposed to freight) should not apply because, after all, the owner / captain is taking the risk when they purchase the cargo and they may not sell it at the first port of call (although obviously in this example they were done for unless they sold the cargo due to lack of liquidity).
But, basically, yeah, total thumbs up from me.
