Into the Wild – II: If on a Summer’s Day a Caravan…

Into the Wild is a rubric dedicated to speculative mechanic ideas relating to wilderness exploration.

In the wake of my byzantine weather generation tables based on playing around with small die pools and from them extracting several layers of information my addled thoughts occasionally dwelled there still, rather than on the task of actually getting my shit together, running a game and putting the preaching to the practicing.

If you came around expecting to find a bountiful selection of colourful characters of the trader persuasion with wich to people your stories, know that the tale of the half-genasi-half-crab-half-centaur-former-spy-turned-sex-machine-of-the-realms will have to be a tale for some other time. I’m here to talk about market scarcity mechanics. *vynil scratch*

I know I should just let this go like some ice princess rather than drive this blog once again into an expedition to the peaks of self-indulgence (I’ve got this cabin there, you see..) but, no matter how dismally unexciting the topic, once the brain gears get stuck purging comes as the only remedy known to me so this exflux will be dedicated to whoever can care for seeing a sad pony up to nothing new.

The presentation of a Problem (or the “why even bother?” factor)

People (well, me) talk a big game about wanting their wilderness exploration to mean something other than a hoof-handed shift in the soundtrack and encounter tables. Yet, despite painting myself as adhering to a refereeing philosophy of attaining a meatier, more fulfilling game by conjuring a range of problems spanning beyond opposing bags of Hp what follows can seem a bit unnecessary – excessive, even.

As the layering of rules excreta kept piling on and on this became less of a coherent post and more of a fever dream. To try and combat this I’ve parcelled the mechanics into semi-independent modules that can be used all at once or picked to preference. Even if it doesn’t all quite stand on its own, I consider that here it is important not to be correct but to raise questions and that despite the post’s skipping off the deep end coasting on disposable mechanics I’m hoping the thinking behind it may yet salvage the price of admission.

Blazing beyond the pale of civilization is represented by a few defining traits, past the tired variation in encounterable danger, these being Distance, Obstacles, Depletion and Scarcity. How to best represent and weave together these elements in an effective manner is the comet tail this series chases. What follows is essentially a problem generator relating to Scarcity, a practical measure of impressing distance and removal from civilization upon players more than anything else: once the comforts of civilization are left behind, trading interactions start becoming difficult and less rewarding.

From the Plentiful City into the Wilderlands of Singular Equine Townships

Here’s a little personal anecdote which may or may not resonate with the reader: I’ve never seen a character run out of arrows. Or perishables of any kind, for that matter. Not even close. Think about what that says about a game’s tone and of layers left unexplored. Come market time, the natural refereeing answer to the question “what’s here that our coin can purchase?” will tend usually to be “whatever’s on the equipment page”, in a quantity subtly expressed as “however many you can manage to carry” (which, provided you’re running a functional encumbrance system, already represents a step above the previous answer of “as many as you can afford”), this will then perhaps be punctuated by the occasional GM-planned limitations for dramatic purposes, if even that.

To a given extent I stand in agreement: in an urban environment characters can acquire their supplies with characteristic ease. Prices are conveniently tabled for the whole city limits if need be and shortages or lack of quality are certainly not an issue anyone sane would want to quibble over. It is typically a very smooth, very relaxed time in a running, when players get out the abacus and bean count to their heart's content. Even if sometimes strumming an unrealistic chord, urban shopping situations are well served by saying that the heavens did part and rain down all those perishables and equipment at the party’s feet and that the characters are free to claim their choices and deduct charges accordingly, with the lot of it being of a standard, nigh-uniform grade of quality. The rules are simple: if they want it, they got it. Pretty much the whole span of mundane tools and equipment are available past the barrier of an asking price.

But then, when trying to arm a retinue or a militia or scare up supplies for an impromptu expedition while removed from the heartland of civilization, a wandering merchant caravan is encountered, a ragtag band of smugglers is chanced upon or maybe market day is at hand on a town sighted in the distance by the party. How to procedurally generate what will be there to be had? Will the characters be able to find serviceable gear or will they have to settle with second or third rate run-off? Will they be able to sell their plunder?

Far from having all the answers, I do wish to go a little further in promoting a table actionable idea of scarcity. One that doesn’t hinge on spawning comprehensive market inventories ahead of time or a complete trade system with different regional equipment prices and restrictions, as such would require cheating with software and more ambition than I can conceive of mustering.

The point of this post is playing up this divide between civilization and the absence of it. When I speak above of setting apart the city, I really do mean a city – a production hub, an important trade crossroads or a sizable port. Remote outposts, rustic market squares, neglected storehouses and dingy mule caravans all ought to be faced as but dim expressions of the civilizational effort insomuch as they cling to the same abiding truth: by resorting to them, a character won’t always get what he wants, how he wants it or at a desirable price. If a character’s unhappy with the tapered lump of rust that the grubby merchant is saying passes for a shortsword, his one option is to go without, not to shrug it off and storm to the next ‘smith two doors over.

On generating a Market or Caravan

The questions wanting for answers in a market procedural generator:

- What is on offer?

- How much of it?

- Of what quality grade?

- At what price?

The generator that follows is bound to be a far cry from the complete answer. Liberal amounts of context-dependent adjudication are still required and the system has severe limitations, as would inevitably be the case for modelling so many complex variables and reducing them to a practical handful of rolls. By laying the categorization and rarity of objects and materials at the feet of the referee we are of course only substituting one layer of arbitrariness for another. It then being desirable that the worldbuilder burrow down further still, so as to pour some sort of in-setting rhyme and geographic reason into the results.

The system is designed with small-scale operations in mind, from a single camel or oxen team up to the odd hundred beasts of burden as the upper limit. If a caravan is so huge as to become a veritable mounted grand bazaar, there will be little point in talking about scarcity, although the system can be lent to partial use for rarer items amid an otherwise placcid sea of abundance.

The Crunch

At its most basic, the system is composed of two types of rolls:

- An initial roll of multiple d6, supported by two tables for the caravan’s loadout;

- Several 2d6+variable die, consulting one table for individual purchases;

Basic precepts for using the system:

1. Yielded results must be noted down, progressively unraveling a caravan’s usable contents (and avoiding duplicate results for something already requested).

2. Minimizing the number of rolls is a practical necessity. A single roll should be extrapolated to cover a broad swathe of items, modifying the rarity interpretations as needed, making new a roll only once the first is exhausted or a distinctly different category of objects is requested for.

3. The simplified nature of a system made for encountering small caravans and markets on far-flung places in the wild dictates that the quantities of Rare and Uncommon objects can never exceed five items. It is important to take this into account when adjudicating the rarity of goods, if you think an item should be available in greater quantities.

4. Smaller/agglomerate items (nails, ammunition, marbles, etc.) are sold by the slotsworth.

5. The rolls made represent things that the sellers are willing to part with, past which a caravan will still be equipped with a senseful amount of market-bound cargo, rations and feed set aside for its own travel needs.

The Merchant Caravan

A. Number Encountered: minimum d6, increasing the number of d6s for larger caravans (includes a minimum crew of three, plus two handlers per additional d6).

A.1 Caravan Composition: Roll the dice pool for “number appearing” on the caravan drop table below to generate the cargo contents and persons of interest present in the caravan. Those wishing to do without the die dropping can instead sequentially read the pool of d6s from left to right, and then from top to bottom to input on the table matrix. These are generic  descriptors that should be fleshed out or modified based on the actual location where the caravan encounter takes place as well as the realities of the setting at large.

Make Table Great Again

Artisans: Specialists travelling alongside or retained by the caravan. Each one rolled adds a +1 bonus to the quality rolls of related wares. Their presence also increases the buyback price on related items sold by the party by 25% (up from an assumed baseline of 10-25%).

Raw Materials/Processed Goods/Exotic Goods: The main bulk of whatever the caravan is carrying is hereby determined, the nature of the cargo then informs the referee on the relative rarity of what is to be up for barter. If no entries of this type are rolled, apply the lefmost d6 rolled to Exotic Goods and call it a smuggling operation.

Weapons: An important concession to the realities of a game of DnD. Only the rightmost entry rolled in this category is counted, as it indicates the most advanced type of weapons that are potentially available for purchase.

Special: Caravan followers and hangers-on, the place to inject local colour and all manner of useful NPCs. The die rolled on the drop table can indicate level for single individuals and/or number appearing for groups such as explorer parties and guards.

A.2 Caravan Stock: Quantitatively speaking, how rich the loadout is on this particular convoy. Of the d6s rolled for number encountered, select the three highest results and apply their sum to the following table:

A.3 Purchase Rolls Counter: All the above details having been jotted down and either openly exposed or adequately relayed to the players through some choice purplish-hued prose, gather up the rolled totals and use them as a counter. The party will be entitled to these many purchase rolls before the caravan is considered exhausted of supplies useful to a group of explorers and won’t part with anything else. This abstracts the whole thing into more of a mini-game but is included as an optional way to impose a cut-off point and prevent ad nauseum rolling.

Market/Purchase Rolls

Once the specifics of the caravan have been determined, rather than being handed a list of items players will take turns searching for wares. These won’t all be on display especially if the party chances upon the caravan in transit, but a trader will know at least roughly what he does have and where it is being stowed, granted a little time to search about.

B. Item Availability (2d6 + caravan’s stock die minus scarcity modifier)

The referee makes an occluded roll consisting of 2d6 plus the quantity die derived from the caravan’s stock. From this single roll, four simple and distinct quantity readings can be extracted, each then downgraded by the scarcity modifier also inherent to the caravan’s size, these being:

- Mundane items: Sum of the three dice rolled.

- Common items: Highest roll

- Uncommon items: Middling roll

- Rare items: Lowest roll

Players are encouraged to bundle their requests concerning related items, so as to save on rolling.  If they successively ask for two different items of the same rarity either use the same reading to save time or make a new roll, adjusting the number of purchase rolls left if you do.

The adjudication part comes as the referee must decide what rarity to attribute to each item. As it is not possible to reduce gut feeling to rules, here are some guidelines:

- Whatever cargo the caravan is carrying will rank as mundane, as will anything related to it (e.g. horseshoes, reins and bits, saddles and saddlebags on a caravan containing horses);

- Basic consumables such as rations, torches and water are mundane;

- General use tools and other sundry supplies (ropes, 10’ poles, lamps, iron spikes) will rank as common;

- If the relevant entry's been rolled to indicate any are for sale, simple weapons will be mundane or common, martial weapons will be common to uncommon, ranged weapons will be one step rarer than their melee counterparts;

- If present, the different classes of armour will be common, uncommon and rare respectively.

B.1 Item Quality (2d6 portion of the purchase roll)

A quality roll, derived from reading just the 2d6 portion of the purchase roll like any old reaction roll, will tell if the items returned are well or ill made. The downward slant of the sample tables was made to enforce the perspective that it is easier to craft something subpar than above average, though it can certainly bear adjustments. In the vein of the samples included below, most any significant item can have its bulk, sturdiness and numeric properties affected by quality to a representable degree.

- Consult or create a table for the rolled item and simply add the appropriate descriptive as a prefix to the item’s name on the inventory.

B.2 Quality Grading/Dispersion

The function I’m calling quality dispersion comes as a means to impress that in more primitive societies standardisation would be by itself pretty much a minor display of magic.

A quality reading will typically be distributed as follows:

- The lowest roll will be the number of objects actually conforming to the rolled quality.

- The middle roll will represent the number of objects of a quality grade one step lower than the one rolled.

- The high roll will represent objects of two quality grades lower than the one rolled.

B.3 Item Pricing

Provided you accept that the “being surprised by one’s own dice” effect has extra pull here, then just as the previous logic gave us quantity and quality, so it can do for price, based on a handy reversion of the dice pool’s four readings:

- The referee decides whether an object’s contextual or inherent value is measured in copper/silver/gold or, for a direct barter, in whatever thing conforms to the NPC’s needs. As the quality grading shifts it may be appropriate to halve or double the price tag accordingly.

- If the object is rare, use the summed total of the three dice as price, if uncommon use the highest roll, if common use the middle result and if mundane use the lowest roll.

- Alternatively, if social combat, reaction rolls or haggling in funny accents are your thing you can instead set one of the interpretations as the initial asking price and then use the remaining three readings as the cornerstones of an “unfavourable/satisfactory/favourable” haggling subsystem.

Granting that some nonsensical results are bound to crop up, the items’ quality does reflect on the price and it can be rewarding to see the dice allow the PCs to score the occasional juicy bargain. On the other hand, economically speaking, it does not necessarily square well how the rising and lowering of the quantity die may potentially raise or sink some of the prices. Either adjust and compensate by asking for a higher or lower value of currency or let it roll with the argument that a caravan of wandering losers can’t be choosers whereas large enterprises can set prices on their own terms.

Some Totally-Not-Doctored Examples

Caravan Composition

Say, for example, the party comes across a 2d6 caravan, as dictated by random encounter roll or otherwise. The number encountered/stock roll comes at 9, meaning a stock die of d10 and a scarcity modifier of -2. Relevantly, the cargo category includes martial weapons.

Quantity & Quality

After asking for the party's weaponry needs and taking a number of purchase requests including spears, daggers, longswords and heavy crossbows the 2d6+d10 (-2) is rolled by the referee and returns: 2,5 & 10.

Since it has been determined that spears are common we go for the high roll, that shows that there are (10-2): eight spears somewhere among the stocks of this caravan. Of these, two conform to the rolled quality of 7 (standard), five are fragile spears and the remaining one is of downright inferior grade.

Daggers too are weapons much in the vein of spears but the referee decides in a pique of papal infallibility that, with them being traditionally tools of multifarious purpose, they are to be counted as mundane. This means they will be counted as (17-2) fifteen in number and, following the same dispersion of quality as above, among these we’ve got two serviceable daggers, five fragile ones and a runoff of eight inferior ones.

Longswords, being rated uncommon, are numbered as three (middle roll minus scarcity mod). Two of which are hot to trot and the remaining one being less sturdy.

Finally, no exemplar of the decidedly rare heavy crossbow is to be found on this caravan (lowest roll minus scarcity mod).

Prices

Spears are common weapons requiring a modicum of crafting effort, the referee values them with the setting’s go-to standard of silver piece. As they are common we go for the middle roll: 5 silver coins apiece.

The posited daggers, despite being mundane, are valued equally as silver piece items. Their price conforms to the lowest roll meaning they're only 2 silver pieces each.

Longswords are a much more prestigious object. The item is valued at gold, which with them dubbed as uncommon means they’ll go for 10 gold pieces each, a hefty purchase. The player might latch instead onto the lesser quality one in the back, valued at 5 gold but less sturdy (d6 breakage die rather than d8).