Crunchy: Materials and money

[atgxtg]

[atgxtg]

[Mojomoe]

Whoops, good point. Consider it corrected.

What we're deciding then is whether to calculate materials based on how heavy they are, or how much space they take up.

[atgxtg]

In that case, you probably want to go with a price per ton for various items. My reasoning is that there are things that are heavy and expensive (gold), heavy and inexpensive (lead), light and inexpensive (cotton candy) and light and expensive (gemstones). Basing the costs just by mass or volume is going to give you skewed results.


As far as vehicles go, in the real world there tends to be:

Standard Materials (typically steel) - baseline cost
Heavy Materials (for instance depleted Uranium reinforced armor) -typically stronger and tougher mostly from sheer mass, but a bit more expensive. Useful for when you want to make the thing stronger and mass/weight is not much of an issue (tanks, walkers)

Light Materials (such as Aluminum) - usually not quite as strong as steel, but a lot lighter, making it useful when you want to keep the mass and/or weight down (such as with an airplane, or airspeeder). Cost varies depending on how strong it is. The closer to normal strength the more expensive.



Come to think of it another RPG I know o had multipliers for cost and weight that we could adapt to D6.

We could use the prices in Tramp Freighters as the starting point and then fine tune them and apply the multipliers.

[atgxtg]

As far as the discrepancies between Tramp Freighters and the higher prices from D20, a lot of that could be explained as as the difference between buying wholesale (in bulk) and retail.

In the real world a 1 litre bottle of watter sells for $2 or so, but no one could afford to fill a swimming pool at $2 per liter. It would cost over a water million (in dollars) to fill up a 40,000 gallon (appox. 150,000 liter) swimming pool! It doesn't cost anywhere near that using the tap.

So the higher prices could be what it costs to buy a small quantity at a retail store.

[Mojomoe]

Absolutely, the difference between bulk and single item explains a lot of prices.

I'd still love to see (and am tempted to make) a complete book on commodities, including materials, bulk items, wholesale and black market, and (seriously) speculative trading. Would anyone want to make a character in Star Wars as a money changer? Could be cool. Stuff like material and manufacturing would be great to work out, and that Combine link is a good resource.

I've heard people say this is similar to the old game Traveller. Is that true? I'd be interested in learning more about that. We could really use an extrapolation and update on Tramp Freighters, incorporating all the new info of the last 15 years.

Also not having played Traveller, is there any info anyone can suggest from it that I could pull from? Do they do stuffier this?

[atgxtg]

I played around with the idea somewhat, as one of the players in my last campaign was a freighter captain.

I had some notes somewhere, based on commodities from Tramp Freighters and D20 that kinda addressed this. Basically, what I did was assign each commodity to one of the general trade categories from Tramp Freighters, and turned the prices from Tramp Freighters into multipliers.

For example if High Tech X cost 1000Cr a ton on Corellia, and sold for 1200Cr a ton on Tatooine, then there would be a 1.2 multiplier to the selling price of, say, a 25000Cr Hyperdrive.

[tetsuoh]

we follow the major import export listings on wookiepedia for this and follow the same rules.

In our games you have the "generic" tons of high tech surplus. (In my game namely off-brand cheap arse tech scanners, datapads, hydrospanner kits, etc etc.)

Versus name brand devices, like a CEC TechMaster Electronics Scanner.

We still apply the same rules or speculative trading, and use the truth. On a world mostly devoid of that specific trade good, most of what they do have is either good brands that rarely break down and can be rebuilt and the cheap junk that almost never works.

I even implement that in my game, allowing knockoffs and cheap offbrands of some of the items listed to be bought for up to 1/2 price, but any 1 on the wild is a mishap.

Whereas with most trade goods its just - do they have it or do they not have it.

Back on the subject of materials an their worth, one of the key things you need to realize is the games era/timespace. IE have certain galactic events occured?

In SWTOR the mandalorians are in their hayday, and beskar flowed out of mandalore and its moons, the mandalorians kept large quantities for themselves, but a lot was still sold through specific channels.

In the time of the Galactic Empire, the Empire had seized control of most of Mandalore's Beskar Production and strip mined such large quantities of it that many mandalorians started looking to heirlooms and shipwrecks from the days of the crusades to recover whatever they could.

Whereas Cortosis was ALWAYS rare, difficult, and downright dangerous to mine. So much so as to make it almost worthless to mine an asteroid laden with it to some mining companys, but made the gathered ore and refined items exceedingly expensive.

In an RP setting you have to gauge those events, because they can change an items supply and restrictions.