It’s not nitpicking, its exploring issues that rise up in actual play! This is how ACKS got developed in the first place, through interaction with players. It’s great and it makes the game better. Thank you for asking the tough questions!
Actually, I’m really appreciating your questions (and Alex’s answers), because they’re given me things to think about for my own games. The value/weight chart for mercantile ventures suggests what size ships would be seen in the various ports, since anyone who can will want to bring in a ship of with at least that much cargo capacity, in order to be taken seriously. Merchants going to smaller markets will want to be as close to the minimum as possible to reduce costs (so a merchant sailing between a class III and class IV market will want to be right at 3k stone), while one sailing between two markets of the same size will want whatever is most efficient within that range (a merchant sailing between a pair of class III markets will want to be somewhere between 3k and 6750, depending on what sort of ship they can afford to crew).
Interesting. What’s the genesis of those numbers?
Except for Class II, it’s 2.25 GP per stone (or 1 stone per 2.25 GP). Class II is 2.31 GP per stone (2.25 would be 6,667 stone, so it’s rounded to the nearest 250).
I thought at first that it might be based off the Total Investment required to create that size of a market. Class VI requires 10k GP, which is 37.037 (repeating) times the GP requirement to effectively use the market. Class V is also 37.037 times, but then it goes to 33.33 times for Class IV, 29.63 for Class III, 41.67 for Class II, and 55.56 for Class I, so the required investment becomes a bit steeper when going from V to IV and from IV to III, but once a venturer is able to effectively trade at Class III, it becomes easier to grow to Class II and I.
Using the 37.037 ratio between infrastructure and liquidity and the 2.25 ratio between liquidity and cargo space, it would shift slightly to:
Class VI - 270 GP, 120 stone
Class V - 675 GP, 300 stone
Class IV - 2025 GP, 900 stone
Class III - 5400 GP, 2400 stone
Class II - 16875 GP, 7500 stone
Class I - 67500 GP, 30000 stone
Compared to the official table, this one’s a bit easier to get up to Class III, gets a little harder at Class II, and requires 50% more investment to effectively handle Class I markets.
And this is one of the MANY reasons I love ACKS and Autarch as much as I do. Instead of getting the “you’re over-thinking it” or “you’re playing my game wrong” response, we get these really well-considered and thought-through responses that maintain an internal consistency.
It's based on the average number of merchants x average number of loads per merchant x average value of a load, then rounded off to a pleasantly round value.
| Avg. Merch. | Avg. Loads | Avg. Value | Avg. Cargo |
| 9 | 27 | $43,740 | 19440 |
| 6 | 14 | $15,120 | 6720 |
| 5 | 7.5 | $6,750 | 3000 |
| 2.5 | 5 | $2,250 | 1000 |
| 1.5 | 2.5 | $675 | 300 |
| 1 | 1.5 | $270 | 120 |
Does this apply when looking for mercenaries too? I mean you could be looking to hire cargo capacity. Shouldn’t only the wealth side matter when looking to hire mercs?
To further expand on this. Say a venturer arrives in a class 2 with no real carrying capacity but 100,000 gold and says he wants to hire an army. Would he treat the market as a class 1? Than say he wants to buy some goods while hes there too. Would he than treat it as a Class 2?
I would assume that these market limits only apply for ventures, and you don’t need to bring 20k and a sailing ship to Tidewater just to find someone that’ll cast Stone to Flesh.
It is worth re-asking whether the “One guy can only find 5%” also applies to non-ventures though. Can me and my eight henches descend on a class I market and hire 36d100 light infantry?
Also while we’re at it, can one multitask and, say, look for interested merchants for a mercantile venture while recruiting henches, trying to sell a magic sword, and trying to buy a boat?
I would assume that these market limits only apply for ventures, and you don’t need to bring 20k and a sailing ship to Tidewater just to find someone that’ll cast Stone to Flesh.
APM: Sure, that’s correct, although we’re dealing with a rule I wrote up here in the forum so I’m certainly open to being persuaded otherwise.
My thinking is that no one is likely to solicit for equipment, mercenaries, and spells that they don’t intend to hire, whereas people (both PCs and in-world NPCs) presumably do attempt to suss out the market, negotiate, and so on without necessarily buying. Also wholesales/middlemen/distributors tend to be much harder to gain access to than retailers.
But this is just based on my own experiences in real-world business: When I post a job ad, I get hundreds of applications; if I ask for bids on new PCs in the office, I get dozens of bids; but if I try to buy or sell advertising space it’s a huge painful process!
- It is worth re-asking whether the “One guy can only find 5%” also applies to non-ventures though. Can me and my eight henches descend on a class I market and hire 36d100 light infantry?
APM: No, it does not. No, they cannot. Those are the maximum available in the market.
While the Availability tables DO have some “slack” in them, this slack is addressed through the Commissioning system. That is, I assume (as was historically the case) that most equipment is made on commission rather than created in advance and sold at retail. (For mercenaries or specialists, commissioning actually means that the mercenaries or specialists travels to the market from other markets based on notice received from, e.g., a guild).
Please see this forum post for some update rules on commissioning: http://www.autarch.co/forum/specialists-and-commissioning-0
- Also while we’re at it, can one multitask and, say, look for interested merchants for a mercantile venture while recruiting henches, trying to sell a magic sword, and trying to buy a boat?
Unless the Judge has reason to rule otherwise, I would say “yes”.
I think I would be inclined to make this an or, rather than an and.
I have trouble believing that I would not be taken seriously as a merchant if I showed up in a class 1 market with 100 loads each of gems, precious metals, spices, and ivory (total value: 520,000 gp, total weight: 1400 stone), regardless of whether or not I have enough empty wagons/ship space to carry the full 20,000 stone.
With that kind of money, I could clearly buy or build the space if I needed it.
That last sentence made me think of another way. Perhaps it is normally an and requirement. However, if you have double or more the requirement for money, you can ignore the cargo space requirement. (I don’t think this works in the other direction because you’re not going to pay them in cargo space.)
A simpler method might be to simply remind us that the Judge is free to use their own discretion and that the table is a guideline. That’s probably better. So in the end I talked myself out of actually thinking the rule should be changed at all. Corner cases will be corner cases and that’s why we have a human running the game.
I suspect the judge is best served ignoring this rule until they sense the would-be merchant prince PC is looking to abuse the system. As long as the PC is generally working in markets appropriate to the size of their mercantile empire, it’s easier to just ignore. Only if a PC with a single wagon to their name and a +3 charisma is going around spamming requests to buy cheap gems would I think a judge should need to pull this requirement out.
What have your costs been, compared to your income? Wagons, drivers, guards, (ships, sailors, captains) or whatever?
I’ve been mussing around with deconstructing the Merchant Ships & Caravans table and the wages for the guards, sergeants, and leaders is killing the numbers - none of that seems to be accounted for in the “costs” column - unless those guys are all working at much less than they’d expect for their hit dice.
I’ve only done two runs so far- On one of them, I was moving goods between two port cities, so I just paid the shipping fee of 1 gp per 10 stone to have someone else haul the cargo and give me free passage, so my costs for that run came to something like 80 gp for a 6000 gp profit. (I bought armor at 30% and sold at 110%, just about tripling my 3000 gp investment after taxes)
On the other, I just bought a big sack of gems, put them on my horse, and rode with a handful of loyal mercenaries that I borrowed from a PC’s garrison, since he didn’t need them at the moment and he was getting a share of the profits. With investments from everyone else, the party as a whole managed to turn roughly 16k into something like 22k, for a 47% profit. My personal slice of that was 6k that turned into 11k.
So in answer to your question, so far my costs have been near zero, and I’ve made around 5k both times.
Well, you don’t need to deconstruct it. I can just email it to you…
Yes. I actually made that assumption in building some of the background economics - that you’d have 40-wagon caravans and large ships in Class I/II routes, but smaller boats and caravans plying the smaller routes.
Thanks!
Amusingly, over the weekend I read a book on Interior Decoration in Ancient Rome so that the furnishings in the Auran forts of an upcoming ACKS module would be appropriately furnished and decorated. As I was paging through the 1st c AD equivalent of Better Housekeeping I did have an “am I over-thinking this?” moment.
Fortunately it passed quickly and I was able to get back to taking notes on the size of wall-paintings typically found in peristyle galleries.
But even once I buy that light saililng ship and am paying ~400 a month in wages and supplies, 400 is still far, far less than the 5000+ I’ve been making. (A number which will go up even more as a ship opens new possibilities, and I accumulate wealth to reinvest)
Ha!
That would be great, actually. This one in particular is eluding me somehow.
Thanks!
I spent 4 hours this weekend looking at average river speeds to find out what works best for against-the-current boat trade, and when you’d be better off just running wagons during inundation season.
There’s nothing I like better than a system that supports one wanting to learn about something completely random in order to play bigger.