CLOK BBS

Ideas for ways we can make traders be more like actual traders.

Have weekly or monthly caravans show up that only traders have access to, with unique items. Have the inventories change or fluctuate a little each time. They can hoard them to themselves or resell them to others. A good idea would be to have a lot of these be one time use items, so they are in constant demand. Things like special bullets, rare cooking spices and ingredients, rare healing herbs, special fish bait, things like that.

Allow traders to hire wagon drivers who can cart a bunch of commodities from one town to another. The wagon driver would get a cut of the profit and there would be a chance the driver would be waylaid and lose some/all of the commodities, or things like that, to have an element of risk. Players could choose to accompany the wagons and help keep them safe, or try to raid the wagons. Give the mercenaries and templars something to do (guard the wagons), maybe even give them guild points if they accompany a wagon all the way from start to end.

Have special crafting materials that only traders can get, which they can sell to others. I think this might already be the case for a few metals. Add more unique materials that are desirable to others.

Allow traders to pay their way into factions. So a trader could potentially be welcome in all cities, as long as they don't cause trouble in any of them of course or abuse that somehow. They would have to continually supply goods or commodities in order to keep this neutrality, if they stop being useful then they lose the faction benefit.

Allow traders to take contracts of some sort, like say the carpenter in Shadgard needs oak. A trader could take a contract to deliver 50 oak logs, or planks, or whatever, by a certain time. They could acquire the oak however they want. Chop it themselves, pay others to do it, buy it from a market elsewhere and deliver it. As long as the oak gets there, the trader gets paid and gets some guild points. A trader could even fill up a warehouse with stuff just to be ready for opportunities like this.

If you ask me traders should be paying others to do the work, not doing the work themselves, if they really want to known as traders and not laborers.

I really like the caravan idea, I think right now special merchants only show up at GMs discrection, the last time being quite a while ago (where I got all my sunsteel).

Caravan sounds like a good idea, unfortunately most of the cities do not have any surplus commodities most of the time and the way the market currently works you would likely be losing money and recognition points.

Special materials: So far there is Bloodsand and Cobalt, both of which can also be obtained through other means (glittering cavern in mines, lockboxes) and the new alloys that anyone can make if they figure out the formula.

Bribing into factions: I like this one, Ardor actually tried to bribe himself into the scarecrow mine once (using Evelyn as a mediator) and offered a full bronze plate armor as a gift for their leader. Unfortunately that never got anywhere (no idea what happened to the armor).

Contracts sounds fun as well, it could be the trraders version of tasks since so far we do not have any. Unfortunately buying from the market might not be the best option since traders still pay recognition points everytime they buy something from the market.

I agree that traders should not slave away doing menial labor to get richer. Slaidh, how much do you charge for mining?

Maybe all towns could have a few resources that they actually generate surplus on automatically. Like Shadgard would generate pine and copper. Mistral Lake oak and iron. Then traders could for instance buy copper in Shadgard and sell in Mistral Lake, then buy iron in Mistral Lake and sell in Shadgard. Buy low sell high. Possibly even only traders could have access to this auto-generated stuff.

They couldn't abuse this by doing it over and over because supply would still be somewhat limited, it would just be among traders only, plus it would go into the regular surplus and make the price go down until it disappears.

Or have a crystal tuner for traders and like every now and then they'd hear an announcement, "Shadgard has struck a mother lode of turquoise and prices are unusually low there with the resulting surplus." Then traders could be aware of that, unlike others, and could rush to the market to buy it all up, and sell it elsewhere for a profit. Or save themselves on the rush and use a special command to have an associate do it for them. It would take the funds out of their local bank. So in the turquoise situation, the trader could, even from say Mistral Lake, send out an order to an associate in Shadgard to buy up as much turquoise there as their funds in Shadgard would permit. Maybe this would require initial investments in the town first, like setting up a small little trade warehouse in that town.

So you would go to Shadgard and buy a warehouse (traders only). It would require monthly fees and wages to pay the person operating it in the trader's stead. But once you do that, as long as you have access to the trader tuning crystal, you could check the Shadgard market inventory from anywhere, and order your worker there to buy things and store them in the warehouse. Then you could go get the things from your warehouse when you have time, and cart them elsewhere to sell. A good way to get a jump on good deals and opportunities.

Sorry that's all kind of jumbled, I was writing as I thought of it.

With warehouses they should have a limited capacity, so they can't just keep filling them up forever and have more and more stuff. So it would take some tactical thinking and risk evalutation. Do you want to buy all those copper bars and fill up your warehouse space? What if something better comes up? What if you buy all the bars only to see that oh wait, someone beat you to the rush and flooded Mistral Lake, now you've got a bunch of copper and you have to figure out what to do with it. Hold on to it and hope the market stabilizes and you don't miss another opportunity while your warehouse is full, or sell it anyway and take a small loss so you can empty up your warehouse?

Shoot now I want to make a trader.

This sounds a lot like what trader's have going on in Dragonrealms. Buy low, travel to another city, sell high. Love that system.

Commodity trading: http://elanthipedia.org/w/index.php/Trader

Helping elaborate on Caravans:

Maybe they should buy caravans from the trader shop, move them to a city, and designate a warehouse to them. The traders would initially have to drive their own caravans until they got enough riln/rec points to hire a wagon driver. Then they would have to hire messangers to alert the drivers of when to ride.

As long as I get to sneak into a caravan and take stuff outta their wagons. The flat-out raid isn't my style.

I've got a horse, I've got a gun, I've got a bandana. Run those wagons and stagecoaches along the road, I'm ready!

oooh, and hired guards (who get paid) and maybe some traps, and a free pile 'o' poo