The FAO (food & agriculture) statistics have been broken into two tables:
The ICYB (industrial) statistics have also been broken into two tables:
Showing posts with label Trade System. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Trade System. Show all posts
Monday, April 23, 2018
Original United Nations Statistics (trade)
The following are production figures from the United Nations, 1988, gathered from the Industrial Commodities Year Book and the Food and Agriculture Organization. I originally used these numbers to build the amount of production of various products in my world, filling in details for products not included in these volumes by painstakingly hunting them down one by one. This, however, gives a good idea of how much raw product the reader may want to include in the trade system they are building.
The FAO (food & agriculture) statistics have been broken into two tables:
The FAO (food & agriculture) statistics have been broken into two tables:
Pricing Equipment (trade)
Once we have obtained prices for undeveloped and manufactured goods, we are ready to use weight and workmanship to create individual prices for goods that would appear on an ordinary equipment list.
This is a very easy process. For example, we have already determined that the cost for a pound of manufactured pottery is 18.685 copper pieces, or approximately 19 c.p. per lb. We need only determine how heavy a given object made of pottery weighs, multiply that against our ratio and then judge for ourselves how carefully worked the object is.
Let's take something very simple: an earthenware pot, the sort of object that might be used every day and be churned out in large numbers, for ordinary use around the house - such as would be used for flour, cookies, buttons and so on. We already know that the pot is fired, as this was part of the process that increased the cost from mere clay to being pottery. We can add that the capacity of this pot is about a pint.
Let's establish the weight of the pot at ½ a pound. Let's also establish that because the pot is very ordinary, the workmanship is 1.0. This makes the cost of our pot equal to 18.685/2*1 (in excel calculation), or 9.343 copper pieces. For the players, we will round that out to 9 c.p. That's a reasonable price; an ordinary household may have half a dozen of such pots. An orc lair might have a hundred or more.
By why limit ourselves to ordinary workmanship? There is such a thing as 'art pottery,' some of which is spectacular in design and color. We can well imagine establishing a set of perameters for pottery of greater workmanship, based on quality of clay (the best material is reserved for the best pots), additions such as handles and lids, color, sculpting, quality of sculpting and so on, so that workmanship for a given piece can be rated as x 2 (fair), x 4 (ornamental), x 8 (fancy), x 16 (artistic), x 32 (quality), x 64 (excellent) and x 128 (exquisite). Thus, a truly exquisite pot (still the same weight) can now be rated at 1,152 c.p. (or about 6 g.p.).
That's nice - but the party isn't likely to get excited about 6 g.p. (though a household of such objects might make someone take notice). Still, we can always enlarge the pot. Our one-pint pot is about 7 inches tall (23 cm); how much would it be worth if it were, say, 14 inches tall?
In such a case, we need to multiply all the dimensions by 2: height, width and thickness of the material (though the latter may not be necessarily true - it is up to us). This would mean our 14-inch tall pottery vessel would be multiplied by 8 times and be worth 48 g.p.
Now, that's something. But let's not stop there. Let's suppose the party stumbles into a big lair and finds that the chieftain sits between two massive pottery urns, each 49 inches tall (about a meter and a half, for all us moderns who aren't familiar with imperial measurements). And let's say that the workmanship is magnificent (x 256). How much would they be worth? From a usual game standard, we're just guessing - but now we don't have to guess. 49 inches in height is 7 times our original pot's size; we're increasing the size in 3 dimensions, so the urns are 343 times as large, or about 172 lbs. each in weight. The base cost, size multiplied by the value of ordinary pottery, is 3,204 c.p. The workmanship, however, increases that value to 820,346 c.p. In my game, that's 4,273 g.p. Those are pots that are very definitely treasure!
By this method, we can logically determine the precise value of any pottery object in a way that is consistent with all other pottery objects. We can do the same with metal goods, horses, leather work, ale or anything we like. We need only establish the difference in "workmanship" between an ordinary ploughhorse and a heavy warhorse to give us a range of possible prices all based on the same original price we generated for horses.
If this isn't precise enough, we only need to create another set of references for a particular kind of metal, horse, leather or beverage, running through the same system we've already built, to produce another set of numbers we can use to price things.
And always remember, the price for one market in our world always has the potential for different prices, both higher and lower. Where is the best place to sell those big pottery urns?
How heavy is something? We have the whole internet to use as a judge. In fact, we can find specific objects on the internet and say, "such and such a pottery jug, in this picture here, weighs this amount and I'm calling the workmanship this." In reverse, the player can present an object, describe its dimension and ask what the price would be and we can work it out in a few seconds, without worrying about whether or not it would 'break the system.'
For those who would be interested in going on the 'net to find the weights for objects, I have a hint: search for 'shipping weight.' Most sites will be very unclear about how much a depicted object weighs, even on sites that are selling things - but those that ship objects are always interested in specifying weight; often distinguishing the difference between shipping weight and 'actual weight.' This can save a lot of hours wandering about trying to determine how much a telescope, a ship anchor or a pair of boots weighs. For historical objects, such as swords, museum sites are often very helpful.
I have priced more than 1,300 objects in this manner; my blog has many examples of equipment tables, some of which do give the exact weights of objects. As I write this, I am upgrading my prices table, reorganizing it to make it easier to expand and to more deeply adjust for the price of an object. I do plan to make this table - in excel - available for users, but only those prepared to invest $10 per month in my patreon account.
We're not done, however. This more or less describes the skeleton of the whole system. Having described it thus far, I can now begin detailing specific elements of the system, such as how to build structures that will calculate trade distances between multiple cities, organize hundreds of different references at the same time, splitting and handling more specific references, calculating out things like different products, adding wages and performed services (from getting a shave to hiring a berth aboard a ship) and so on.
We have a lot of things yet to expand. [placeholder]
See Trade System
This is a very easy process. For example, we have already determined that the cost for a pound of manufactured pottery is 18.685 copper pieces, or approximately 19 c.p. per lb. We need only determine how heavy a given object made of pottery weighs, multiply that against our ratio and then judge for ourselves how carefully worked the object is.
Let's take something very simple: an earthenware pot, the sort of object that might be used every day and be churned out in large numbers, for ordinary use around the house - such as would be used for flour, cookies, buttons and so on. We already know that the pot is fired, as this was part of the process that increased the cost from mere clay to being pottery. We can add that the capacity of this pot is about a pint.
Let's establish the weight of the pot at ½ a pound. Let's also establish that because the pot is very ordinary, the workmanship is 1.0. This makes the cost of our pot equal to 18.685/2*1 (in excel calculation), or 9.343 copper pieces. For the players, we will round that out to 9 c.p. That's a reasonable price; an ordinary household may have half a dozen of such pots. An orc lair might have a hundred or more.
By why limit ourselves to ordinary workmanship? There is such a thing as 'art pottery,' some of which is spectacular in design and color. We can well imagine establishing a set of perameters for pottery of greater workmanship, based on quality of clay (the best material is reserved for the best pots), additions such as handles and lids, color, sculpting, quality of sculpting and so on, so that workmanship for a given piece can be rated as x 2 (fair), x 4 (ornamental), x 8 (fancy), x 16 (artistic), x 32 (quality), x 64 (excellent) and x 128 (exquisite). Thus, a truly exquisite pot (still the same weight) can now be rated at 1,152 c.p. (or about 6 g.p.).
That's nice - but the party isn't likely to get excited about 6 g.p. (though a household of such objects might make someone take notice). Still, we can always enlarge the pot. Our one-pint pot is about 7 inches tall (23 cm); how much would it be worth if it were, say, 14 inches tall?
In such a case, we need to multiply all the dimensions by 2: height, width and thickness of the material (though the latter may not be necessarily true - it is up to us). This would mean our 14-inch tall pottery vessel would be multiplied by 8 times and be worth 48 g.p.
Now, that's something. But let's not stop there. Let's suppose the party stumbles into a big lair and finds that the chieftain sits between two massive pottery urns, each 49 inches tall (about a meter and a half, for all us moderns who aren't familiar with imperial measurements). And let's say that the workmanship is magnificent (x 256). How much would they be worth? From a usual game standard, we're just guessing - but now we don't have to guess. 49 inches in height is 7 times our original pot's size; we're increasing the size in 3 dimensions, so the urns are 343 times as large, or about 172 lbs. each in weight. The base cost, size multiplied by the value of ordinary pottery, is 3,204 c.p. The workmanship, however, increases that value to 820,346 c.p. In my game, that's 4,273 g.p. Those are pots that are very definitely treasure!
By this method, we can logically determine the precise value of any pottery object in a way that is consistent with all other pottery objects. We can do the same with metal goods, horses, leather work, ale or anything we like. We need only establish the difference in "workmanship" between an ordinary ploughhorse and a heavy warhorse to give us a range of possible prices all based on the same original price we generated for horses.
If this isn't precise enough, we only need to create another set of references for a particular kind of metal, horse, leather or beverage, running through the same system we've already built, to produce another set of numbers we can use to price things.
And always remember, the price for one market in our world always has the potential for different prices, both higher and lower. Where is the best place to sell those big pottery urns?
How heavy is something? We have the whole internet to use as a judge. In fact, we can find specific objects on the internet and say, "such and such a pottery jug, in this picture here, weighs this amount and I'm calling the workmanship this." In reverse, the player can present an object, describe its dimension and ask what the price would be and we can work it out in a few seconds, without worrying about whether or not it would 'break the system.'
For those who would be interested in going on the 'net to find the weights for objects, I have a hint: search for 'shipping weight.' Most sites will be very unclear about how much a depicted object weighs, even on sites that are selling things - but those that ship objects are always interested in specifying weight; often distinguishing the difference between shipping weight and 'actual weight.' This can save a lot of hours wandering about trying to determine how much a telescope, a ship anchor or a pair of boots weighs. For historical objects, such as swords, museum sites are often very helpful.
I have priced more than 1,300 objects in this manner; my blog has many examples of equipment tables, some of which do give the exact weights of objects. As I write this, I am upgrading my prices table, reorganizing it to make it easier to expand and to more deeply adjust for the price of an object. I do plan to make this table - in excel - available for users, but only those prepared to invest $10 per month in my patreon account.
We're not done, however. This more or less describes the skeleton of the whole system. Having described it thus far, I can now begin detailing specific elements of the system, such as how to build structures that will calculate trade distances between multiple cities, organize hundreds of different references at the same time, splitting and handling more specific references, calculating out things like different products, adding wages and performed services (from getting a shave to hiring a berth aboard a ship) and so on.
We have a lot of things yet to expand. [placeholder]
See Trade System
Manufactured Goods (trade)
Goods that are manufactured have their prices based upon the value of the original raw material plus labour. It is less important how much of a particular product exists (chasing the supply and demand model) that it is to ascertain how much more valuable the product is to the worker after labour has been added.
The synthesis of labour and raw material cost is achieved through a formula - which we will, as with undeveloped goods, use excel to calculate. There are two processes in which this formula applies, which I shall call one-for-one and extraction. In all cases, I will continue to use Marzabol numbers, though of course the same process applies for whatever market we're calculating for.
This means that we can say, approximately, that one pound of unprocessed ore will, once labour is added, produce one pound of processed ore. Similarly, since the amount of clay that is made into pottery isn't lost in the process, we can say one pound of pottery equals one pound of clay plus labour. This isn't strictly true, of course - there is always waste. It isn't worth our accounting for it, however, so we can discount the waste as not being counted either before or after processing.
In each case, we need to determine the total cost of all unprocessed material necessary before we can determine its final price. For example, it takes 2.6 oz. of grapes (+.47 oz. of sugar) to make 1 fluid ounce of wine (the internet can provide all sorts of detail on this, with varying amounts for different wines). We don't have sugar in our system, so we're not going to overlook it for now, but if we did add sugar we would want to account for all materials.
For Marzarbol, we determined that grapes were 42.16 c.p. per lb, or 2.635 c.p. per ounce. This means to make a fluid ounce of wine our starting raw materials will cost 6.943 c.p.
Conversely, let's consider sheep. Using research from medieval times (sorry, I did not bother to save the source - I did not need to, I'm not writing a university thesis), an average sheep produced about 26.45 oz. of 'greasy' wool per year. A modern sheep produces much more, but it has the benefit of understanding genetics and careful breeding. Such things did not exist 400 years ago.
We can therefore set the initial value of wool as 1/26.45th of a sheep. After all, the sheep isn't doing anything else but producing wool so this is a fair equivalent. When we slaughter the sheep, we can use the same calculation to determine the price of its meat. Our price for a sheep in Marzarbol was 54.36 c.p., so our base price for greasy wool is 2.055 c.p. per ounce.
Let's use this last to get a price for refining wool.
Note that I have created this new table right underneath the old one. This way, I can have cell C23 = cell L16 - so that if I change the number of references for sheep it automatically recalculates the cost for clean wool, as shown. In time we will create a table that keeps track of all our references - but as ever, we leave that for another day.
The fewer the number of references for wool, the more expensive the labour will be. If we consider Crow's Nest, where the number of references for wool is only 0.2, the increase in the cost of labour would make the final price six times the original - and this would be the selling price in Crow's Nest, regardless of whether the cloth is produced there or brought from Marzarbol. Always assume that the price in a given market already accounts for things like demands, competition and so on! Trying to adjust further for these things will only spoil the elegance of the system.
Very well. We can now determine the cost for cloth in precisely the same way. Cloth is based on wool just as wool is based on sheep - except that we use cloth references instead of wool references. Once again, cloth has 1 reference, so the result is the same: the price of cloth is double that of clean wool:
Like the wool from sheep or the fluid ounces from the grapes above, there are various distillations that have to be tracked down one by one (if earth-like accuracy is sought for; otherwise, an individual user can make up numbers as necessary). Below is a list of prices calculated for Marzarbol based on the information accumulated thus far in the tutorial. As before, I'm including an excel table that can be downloaded so that the various calculations can be examined.
In time I will be addressing the problem of adding new data to the above table (since at the moment it would be painstaking to add new references individually), but before we get there, we want to move on to the pricing table: how to determine the price of individual items on our equipment table.
See Trade System
The synthesis of labour and raw material cost is achieved through a formula - which we will, as with undeveloped goods, use excel to calculate. There are two processes in which this formula applies, which I shall call one-for-one and extraction. In all cases, I will continue to use Marzabol numbers, though of course the same process applies for whatever market we're calculating for.
One-for-One Process
This describes a situation where end result from processing equals the amount of goods produced. For example, it may be remembered from describing the quantity of goods that I wrote that the weight of 'ore' described the metal content only - waste rock is not counted (there are ways of calculating how much of this there would be, for mining purposes, but that is not important to our purposes right now; I will address this later).This means that we can say, approximately, that one pound of unprocessed ore will, once labour is added, produce one pound of processed ore. Similarly, since the amount of clay that is made into pottery isn't lost in the process, we can say one pound of pottery equals one pound of clay plus labour. This isn't strictly true, of course - there is always waste. It isn't worth our accounting for it, however, so we can discount the waste as not being counted either before or after processing.
Extraction Process
This describes a situation where the amount of material manufactured differs from the original source. There is a great variance to how this can manifest. For example, how many sheep does it take to produce a ton of wool? How much meat exists in a cow or a sheep? How much grain does it take to produce a gallon of beer? How many grapes does it take to make a bottle of wine?In each case, we need to determine the total cost of all unprocessed material necessary before we can determine its final price. For example, it takes 2.6 oz. of grapes (+.47 oz. of sugar) to make 1 fluid ounce of wine (the internet can provide all sorts of detail on this, with varying amounts for different wines). We don't have sugar in our system, so we're not going to overlook it for now, but if we did add sugar we would want to account for all materials.
For Marzarbol, we determined that grapes were 42.16 c.p. per lb, or 2.635 c.p. per ounce. This means to make a fluid ounce of wine our starting raw materials will cost 6.943 c.p.
Conversely, let's consider sheep. Using research from medieval times (sorry, I did not bother to save the source - I did not need to, I'm not writing a university thesis), an average sheep produced about 26.45 oz. of 'greasy' wool per year. A modern sheep produces much more, but it has the benefit of understanding genetics and careful breeding. Such things did not exist 400 years ago.
We can therefore set the initial value of wool as 1/26.45th of a sheep. After all, the sheep isn't doing anything else but producing wool so this is a fair equivalent. When we slaughter the sheep, we can use the same calculation to determine the price of its meat. Our price for a sheep in Marzarbol was 54.36 c.p., so our base price for greasy wool is 2.055 c.p. per ounce.
Let's use this last to get a price for refining wool.
Making Wool Cloth
There are two steps towards making cloth, which we will later use to make garments for the players. The first is the process greasy wool cut from the sheep into clean, carded wool that is ready for the spinning wheel. The calculation for doing this is to take our cost for greasy wool obtained from sheep (2.055 c.p./oz.) and divide it by the total references in Marzarbol (1 reference). The product of this calculation is the labour cost. This cost is thus added back to the original cost for greasy wool, making clean wool worth 4.11 c.p./oz. In excel I make a small table that looks like this:
Note that I have created this new table right underneath the old one. This way, I can have cell C23 = cell L16 - so that if I change the number of references for sheep it automatically recalculates the cost for clean wool, as shown. In time we will create a table that keeps track of all our references - but as ever, we leave that for another day.
The fewer the number of references for wool, the more expensive the labour will be. If we consider Crow's Nest, where the number of references for wool is only 0.2, the increase in the cost of labour would make the final price six times the original - and this would be the selling price in Crow's Nest, regardless of whether the cloth is produced there or brought from Marzarbol. Always assume that the price in a given market already accounts for things like demands, competition and so on! Trying to adjust further for these things will only spoil the elegance of the system.
Very well. We can now determine the cost for cloth in precisely the same way. Cloth is based on wool just as wool is based on sheep - except that we use cloth references instead of wool references. Once again, cloth has 1 reference, so the result is the same: the price of cloth is double that of clean wool:
Like the wool from sheep or the fluid ounces from the grapes above, there are various distillations that have to be tracked down one by one (if earth-like accuracy is sought for; otherwise, an individual user can make up numbers as necessary). Below is a list of prices calculated for Marzarbol based on the information accumulated thus far in the tutorial. As before, I'm including an excel table that can be downloaded so that the various calculations can be examined.
In time I will be addressing the problem of adding new data to the above table (since at the moment it would be painstaking to add new references individually), but before we get there, we want to move on to the pricing table: how to determine the price of individual items on our equipment table.
See Trade System
Transport (trade)
Includes instructions for creating roads, determining shipping distances and making adjustments to references according to those distances.
As before, we begin with a map of Pon, adjusted by adding a road from the Heap in the Hills to Crow's Nest. When making up our mind where a road goes, we want to be sure and choose hexes that fit with how people would travel the distance if no road existed. In historical times, the path beaten by feet and cart tracks would always predate the eventual construction of the road; thus "the shortest distance" is always what is most convenient for travel, never the shortest distance between two places.
The road from Heap to Marzarbol swings around the edge of Pon's southern mountains, so that the distance is four hexes, not three. The terrain between Crow's Nest and Marzarbol is forest and plain, so it is easy enough to carve a road that follows more or less a straight line.
Eventually, we can create roads that will take us to other markets - Adeese, Groat, Basimar and so on - but for now we will only want to create roads that we know will be used in the trade sphere we have developed thus far. Trying to build a single system for the whole world will be impractical and will take more time than most people have - our primary goal is to get prices on the board as soon as possible. When other markets (and references) are added, it may adjust the first prices we create, but as this will be done automatically (as we shall see in good time), we needn't concern ourselves with this right now.
Consider the 2 references of cattle that we have assigned to the Heap in the Hills. We know that this represents 12,800 cattle. For the sake of the system, we can imagine that these are the cattle that exist around the Heap that are available for sale. Of course, some of these cattle can be sold more than once; so that in our system we can imagine that these cattle can represent many more cattle in terms of sales - and that the sales (and resales) in markets other than Heap are fractions of the local availability adjusted by distance.
The distance between Heap and Marzarbol is, as we've said, 4 hexes. We want to think of this in terms of 4 days travel - and to this 4 days we want to add 1 day for the actual organization of the good (in this case, cattle) in Heap. Thus, when considering the availability of cattle in Heap as compared to Marzarbol, we would divide the number of references and the number of cattle by 1 in heap and by 5 in Marzarbol.
For simplicity sake, we'll just compare references. There are thus 2 references for cattle in Heap and 0.4 references for cattle in Marzarbol.
Now we want to know how much cattle is available in Crow's Nest. Once again, 4 hexes separate Marzarbol from Crow's Nest - however, the traders in Marzarbol will want to take their cut; and there will be road costs and various other fees that will be incorporated from taking our goods through Marzarbol. Therefore, we will want to add 1 more day in adjustment for travel. This means that while it is only 8 days travel from Heap to Marzarbol, in terms of trade it counts as 10 days. This will give us 0.2 total references for cattle in Crow's Nest. The total references for all three markets is 2.6, more than what we started with (but remember, resales happen).
Now let's look at something that comes from two different places: fish. We have 1 reference for fish coming from Crow's Nest and 1 reference coming from Marzarbol. In addition to that reference, both markets import fish from the other market (the fish may be different species in each town, encouraging an exchange, or it may simply be both markets encouraging supply). We know that the distance between these two markets is 5 hexes (including the organizing day), so each exports 0.2 fish back and forth between them. That makes the total references for both Marzarbol and Crow's Nest to be 1.2.
Both, in turn, ship fish to Heap (we can presume whatever arrives in Heap has been dried just long enough to survive the length of journey or that it represents an amount of fresh fish that is caught in local ponds around Heap - either can be seen as a way of accounting for Heap's access to fish). Marzarbol ships the same amount of fish to Heap as it does to Crow's Nest, as it still counts as 5 hexes; Crow's Nest counts as 10 hexes, with the Marzarbol pause. Thus the total amount of fish references in Heap, together, is 0.3.
Using this system, we can make a new table that shows the references for each market adjusted for distance (both raw and manufactured goods), as shown on the right.
We can also compare the amount of references originating in a market and compare it to imports. Crow's Nest (as seen here) produced 8 references but it imports 4 more. Marzarbol produces 15 and imports 3.6. The Heap in the Hills produces 10 and imports 3.8. These slight differences pile up as more and more markets are added to the system.
Our next two steps will be to translate these numbers into actual general prices that can be paid by the players. First, by calculating raw material prices, thereafter by calculating manufactured prices - the steps are different, as the reader will see.
See Trade System
Creating Roads
The road from Heap to Marzarbol swings around the edge of Pon's southern mountains, so that the distance is four hexes, not three. The terrain between Crow's Nest and Marzarbol is forest and plain, so it is easy enough to carve a road that follows more or less a straight line.
Eventually, we can create roads that will take us to other markets - Adeese, Groat, Basimar and so on - but for now we will only want to create roads that we know will be used in the trade sphere we have developed thus far. Trying to build a single system for the whole world will be impractical and will take more time than most people have - our primary goal is to get prices on the board as soon as possible. When other markets (and references) are added, it may adjust the first prices we create, but as this will be done automatically (as we shall see in good time), we needn't concern ourselves with this right now.
Shipping Distances
While it may seem that the best method for determining the difference in prices from place to place would be to calculate the cost of using a wagon to transport a set weight of goods, plus time, plus cost for labor and so on, this would be needlessly fiddling in designing what can be a straightforward methodology.Consider the 2 references of cattle that we have assigned to the Heap in the Hills. We know that this represents 12,800 cattle. For the sake of the system, we can imagine that these are the cattle that exist around the Heap that are available for sale. Of course, some of these cattle can be sold more than once; so that in our system we can imagine that these cattle can represent many more cattle in terms of sales - and that the sales (and resales) in markets other than Heap are fractions of the local availability adjusted by distance.
The distance between Heap and Marzarbol is, as we've said, 4 hexes. We want to think of this in terms of 4 days travel - and to this 4 days we want to add 1 day for the actual organization of the good (in this case, cattle) in Heap. Thus, when considering the availability of cattle in Heap as compared to Marzarbol, we would divide the number of references and the number of cattle by 1 in heap and by 5 in Marzarbol.
For simplicity sake, we'll just compare references. There are thus 2 references for cattle in Heap and 0.4 references for cattle in Marzarbol.
Now we want to know how much cattle is available in Crow's Nest. Once again, 4 hexes separate Marzarbol from Crow's Nest - however, the traders in Marzarbol will want to take their cut; and there will be road costs and various other fees that will be incorporated from taking our goods through Marzarbol. Therefore, we will want to add 1 more day in adjustment for travel. This means that while it is only 8 days travel from Heap to Marzarbol, in terms of trade it counts as 10 days. This will give us 0.2 total references for cattle in Crow's Nest. The total references for all three markets is 2.6, more than what we started with (but remember, resales happen).
Now let's look at something that comes from two different places: fish. We have 1 reference for fish coming from Crow's Nest and 1 reference coming from Marzarbol. In addition to that reference, both markets import fish from the other market (the fish may be different species in each town, encouraging an exchange, or it may simply be both markets encouraging supply). We know that the distance between these two markets is 5 hexes (including the organizing day), so each exports 0.2 fish back and forth between them. That makes the total references for both Marzarbol and Crow's Nest to be 1.2.
Using this system, we can make a new table that shows the references for each market adjusted for distance (both raw and manufactured goods), as shown on the right.
We can also compare the amount of references originating in a market and compare it to imports. Crow's Nest (as seen here) produced 8 references but it imports 4 more. Marzarbol produces 15 and imports 3.6. The Heap in the Hills produces 10 and imports 3.8. These slight differences pile up as more and more markets are added to the system.
Our next two steps will be to translate these numbers into actual general prices that can be paid by the players. First, by calculating raw material prices, thereafter by calculating manufactured prices - the steps are different, as the reader will see.
See Trade System
Locating References (trade)
Goods that are traded must originate somewhere in the world. This requires that we make choices as to which goods will exist in given locations, and how important those goods are. We increase the importance of goods by increasing the number of references for that good; this in turn increases the quantity of goods produced, which will cause the price of that good to decrease.
To demonstrate where to place goods, we will need a map, such as the one on the right. This page will be dealing only with the region of Pon, including three centers: Crow's Nest, Marzarbol and Heap in the Hills ("the Heap" for short).
We want to use the map's details: there are five principle environments in Pon: forest (dark green), hills (dull yellow), mountains (brown), plains (dull green, featureless) and scrub (grey). Each should offer clues for where we would want to place the various goods on our list. We want to give this a much thought, as placement will do more than simply designate the origin of the good itself - it will also flesh out the culture and practices of the people living in that area.
We shouldn't assume placement is always obvious. Starting with the raw goods in our list (bricks, cattle, clay, fish, gold, grain, grapes, horses, ores, sheep, spices and timber), we can easily suppose that if there is any fish in Pon, it must be found in the big river, the Wanderer. But do we want there to be anyfish at all? At some future point we are going to certainly place fish in the Sea of Zeti, on the south edge of the map - will we want there to be local fish that conflicts with that trade? Perhaps yes - and at a certain point we may wish to make a distinction between freshwater fish (which would be caught in the river) and saltwater fish (caught in the sea).
Similarly, grapes might be grown on the plain between Marzarbol and Crow's Nest or it may be grown on the south slope of the mountains above the Heap. Wine probably wouldn't be grown on a range known as the 'Mountains of Ice' but the name might be ironic (after all, wine is grown in Swiss valleys between high, icy mountains). Where we place the grapes will make a difference as to what sort of wine is produced. Similarly, beef cattle would be raised on the hills or in the scrub, but dairy cattle would be raised in the forest or on the plain.
We're making an effort to keep this system simple as possible, so let's impose an experimental guideline (one that can be adjusted later, as we wish): let's agree to list 2 references for each raw good: sometimes placing both in one area and sometimes splitting the references up. Furthermore, I'll try to designate the most obvious placements, recognizing that later on we may want to impose changes there, too. Here's a breakdown of the five environments and their probable references:
I've listed the number of references for each good in brackets. This brings us to the next consideration.
However, some places along the Wanderer river are closer to Marzarbol than to Crow's Nest - so it makes sense that the fish caught in the forest and mountain country of the river will make its way to Crow's Nest, while the fish caught down on the plains will be collected at Marzarbol. Similarly, though we've placed all the horses in the hills, there are hills east of Marzarbol, on the edge of the kingdom, and directly south of Crow's Nest, along with the larger region of hills around the Heap.
One way to solve the problem would be to give one reference per hex where there are hills - but while this is easy for placement purposes, it tends to create sameness with regards to the cultures we're creating and unless we cut down the amount of quantity per reference, we'll produce so much product that the players won't much notice a change in price from place to place. Remember: in scarcity there is conflict. Too much of anything and players grow too content to feel any drama.
If we choose to make that small patch of hills east of Marzarbol so special that both horse references originate there, we make it a very critical hex for the Pon's military concerns, we create a patch of localized tremendous wealth and we denude the rest of the kingdom of horses. On the other hand, if we put all the horses around the Heap's hills, we spread the horse culture out somewhat and create drama in the possibility of horse raiding from The Gathering (which is a troll village in the original game this map comes from).
Similar questions arise with clay that comes from the scrubland - does it come from The Scab or from that little patch of scrub northeast of Marzarbol? Does Marzarbol control all the goods of the plains or does the Crow's nest control some of it? And what about the mountains? All three markets have access to those.
So that we can move onto the next step, I'm going to sort the references out and list them in the table below. I'm going to split both the hills and the scrub between Marzarbol and the Heap, give all the plain to Marzarbol, all the forest to Crow's Nest and split the mountains between all three - simply because this seems most obvious. Marzarbol is the capital, so it gets the lion's share. Trade shouldn't expect to balance evenly between the markets - uneven, again, creates tension.
The key first is to reason through how each of these things comes into being. Brewing is made from grains, so it would most likely be made in Marzarbol - but of course grain is shipped into both Crow's Nest and the Heap, so either of them could have developed a brewing culture. Cloth is made from wool, which is in turn made from sheep - which we know are found in both Marzarbol and the Heap. It could be that both markets make wool and that one ships wool to the other to make all the cloth in the kingdom - but we have stipulated only one reference for both. Making 'wool' is much more complicated than merely shearing it; it must be cleaned and pounded and carded - so the raw wool could be collected in Marzarbol to be shipped to the Heap, where it is made into usable wool that is then made into cloth. Or vice versa. It is up to us.
Remember that unlike our culture there was a strong tradition of destroying competition - meaning that not everywhere made the same products like we do in our present day. It takes training to make cloth - and if all the people who can do that training are stolen away and brought under the control of a guild in the Heap in the Hills, it doesn't matter if people in Marzarbol have sheep - they don't know how to properly clean wool and make cloth, and in any case the King wants the guild in the Heap to be happy, so there are actually laws againstcleaning wool in Marzarbol. However little sense that makes to our free enterprise sensibilities, this is how the world once worked - and it is favorable to us as game players - because scarcity builds conflict. So make scarcity, not sameness!
Leather goods, meat and skins come from animals. Metal goods is made from ores, pottery is made from clay and wine is made from grapes. We can make a lot of other products, too, but we're going to restrict ourselves to these, because we only need enough to explain the system.
Below is a breakdown for manufactured references. We don't need to note number of references (it is always 1 for now), so I'll just give a list:
I've put brewing and metal goods into the forest because the fuel from the trees makes the best opportunity for heating the grains and the forges that are necessary. These details matter. It means that although the Crow's Nest mountains produce no meaningful ore, the ore from those mountains that do (around Marzarbol and the Heap) must be hauled to the furnaces and waterwheels of the Border Forest to be processed. So what will the party find on the roads? Wagons full of stone making their way steadily north to dump their valuable loads.
This concludes the placement stage. Our next step will be making roads, determining distances and transport.
See Trade System
We want to use the map's details: there are five principle environments in Pon: forest (dark green), hills (dull yellow), mountains (brown), plains (dull green, featureless) and scrub (grey). Each should offer clues for where we would want to place the various goods on our list. We want to give this a much thought, as placement will do more than simply designate the origin of the good itself - it will also flesh out the culture and practices of the people living in that area.
We shouldn't assume placement is always obvious. Starting with the raw goods in our list (bricks, cattle, clay, fish, gold, grain, grapes, horses, ores, sheep, spices and timber), we can easily suppose that if there is any fish in Pon, it must be found in the big river, the Wanderer. But do we want there to be anyfish at all? At some future point we are going to certainly place fish in the Sea of Zeti, on the south edge of the map - will we want there to be local fish that conflicts with that trade? Perhaps yes - and at a certain point we may wish to make a distinction between freshwater fish (which would be caught in the river) and saltwater fish (caught in the sea).
Similarly, grapes might be grown on the plain between Marzarbol and Crow's Nest or it may be grown on the south slope of the mountains above the Heap. Wine probably wouldn't be grown on a range known as the 'Mountains of Ice' but the name might be ironic (after all, wine is grown in Swiss valleys between high, icy mountains). Where we place the grapes will make a difference as to what sort of wine is produced. Similarly, beef cattle would be raised on the hills or in the scrub, but dairy cattle would be raised in the forest or on the plain.
We're making an effort to keep this system simple as possible, so let's impose an experimental guideline (one that can be adjusted later, as we wish): let's agree to list 2 references for each raw good: sometimes placing both in one area and sometimes splitting the references up. Furthermore, I'll try to designate the most obvious placements, recognizing that later on we may want to impose changes there, too. Here's a breakdown of the five environments and their probable references:
- forest: fish (1), spices (2), timber (2)
- hills: cattle (1), grapes (1), horses (2), sheep (2)
- mountains: bricks (1), gold (2), ores (2)
- plain: bricks (1), fish (1), grain (2), grapes (1)
- scrub: cattle (1), clay (2)
I've listed the number of references for each good in brackets. This brings us to the next consideration.
Who Controls What?
Our next action is to decide which city controls which resource. We must assume that the herders, woodcutters, farmers and so on will have a tendency to bring their goods to specific markets - and that those markets will adapt to service particular industries. For example, since Crow's Nest is in the middle of the Border Forest, we can feel assured that Crow's Nest's market will gather together the timber and spices in Pon.However, some places along the Wanderer river are closer to Marzarbol than to Crow's Nest - so it makes sense that the fish caught in the forest and mountain country of the river will make its way to Crow's Nest, while the fish caught down on the plains will be collected at Marzarbol. Similarly, though we've placed all the horses in the hills, there are hills east of Marzarbol, on the edge of the kingdom, and directly south of Crow's Nest, along with the larger region of hills around the Heap.
One way to solve the problem would be to give one reference per hex where there are hills - but while this is easy for placement purposes, it tends to create sameness with regards to the cultures we're creating and unless we cut down the amount of quantity per reference, we'll produce so much product that the players won't much notice a change in price from place to place. Remember: in scarcity there is conflict. Too much of anything and players grow too content to feel any drama.
Similar questions arise with clay that comes from the scrubland - does it come from The Scab or from that little patch of scrub northeast of Marzarbol? Does Marzarbol control all the goods of the plains or does the Crow's nest control some of it? And what about the mountains? All three markets have access to those.
So that we can move onto the next step, I'm going to sort the references out and list them in the table below. I'm going to split both the hills and the scrub between Marzarbol and the Heap, give all the plain to Marzarbol, all the forest to Crow's Nest and split the mountains between all three - simply because this seems most obvious. Marzarbol is the capital, so it gets the lion's share. Trade shouldn't expect to balance evenly between the markets - uneven, again, creates tension.
Placing Manufactured Goods
This leaves a second group of goods: brewing, cloth, leather goods, meat, metal goods, pottery, skins, wine and wool. While some of these things could be processed in virtually any part of the kingdom, since we're talking a low technology, for simplicity's sake let's simply put each in one of the three markets. For the same reason, let's give each just one reference - again, this can, and will, be adjusted later.The key first is to reason through how each of these things comes into being. Brewing is made from grains, so it would most likely be made in Marzarbol - but of course grain is shipped into both Crow's Nest and the Heap, so either of them could have developed a brewing culture. Cloth is made from wool, which is in turn made from sheep - which we know are found in both Marzarbol and the Heap. It could be that both markets make wool and that one ships wool to the other to make all the cloth in the kingdom - but we have stipulated only one reference for both. Making 'wool' is much more complicated than merely shearing it; it must be cleaned and pounded and carded - so the raw wool could be collected in Marzarbol to be shipped to the Heap, where it is made into usable wool that is then made into cloth. Or vice versa. It is up to us.
Remember that unlike our culture there was a strong tradition of destroying competition - meaning that not everywhere made the same products like we do in our present day. It takes training to make cloth - and if all the people who can do that training are stolen away and brought under the control of a guild in the Heap in the Hills, it doesn't matter if people in Marzarbol have sheep - they don't know how to properly clean wool and make cloth, and in any case the King wants the guild in the Heap to be happy, so there are actually laws againstcleaning wool in Marzarbol. However little sense that makes to our free enterprise sensibilities, this is how the world once worked - and it is favorable to us as game players - because scarcity builds conflict. So make scarcity, not sameness!
Leather goods, meat and skins come from animals. Metal goods is made from ores, pottery is made from clay and wine is made from grapes. We can make a lot of other products, too, but we're going to restrict ourselves to these, because we only need enough to explain the system.
Below is a breakdown for manufactured references. We don't need to note number of references (it is always 1 for now), so I'll just give a list:
- Crow's Nest: brewing, metal goods
- Marzarbol: cloth, pottery, wine, wool
- Heap in the Hills: leather goods, meat, skins
I've put brewing and metal goods into the forest because the fuel from the trees makes the best opportunity for heating the grains and the forges that are necessary. These details matter. It means that although the Crow's Nest mountains produce no meaningful ore, the ore from those mountains that do (around Marzarbol and the Heap) must be hauled to the furnaces and waterwheels of the Border Forest to be processed. So what will the party find on the roads? Wagons full of stone making their way steadily north to dump their valuable loads.
This concludes the placement stage. Our next step will be making roads, determining distances and transport.
See Trade System
Saturday, April 21, 2018
Quantity of Goods (trade)
The mass of goods produced that is used, with references, to determine the cost per material quantity of the good in question. We need to know how much beer exists in the system, what weight of bricks, how many head of cattle, how many yards of cloth and so on, before we can begin to assign a price to a glass of ale, a block of stone, a pound of meat, a cloak or anything else.
We have three methods of determining how much gold that would be.
Method 1: relying on my numbers. I began by taking the total amount of gold produced in the world in the present day and dividing that number by 500, as an approximate ratio to reflect both population change and industrialization, giving me a number for world gold production for 1650 (the date of my world): 311,529 oz. This is then compared by the total number of times I have found 'gold' associated with places and geographical regions in my source material (an encyclopedia, examined page by page): the number of gold references being 236. This gives us a total of around 1,320 oz. of gold produced per reference, per year.
Method 2: use an historical example. I found myself frustrated in attempting this method. There are no good numbers for gold mining prior to the last thirty years, where the amount of gold produced in a given mine is accomplished with cyanide heap leaching, dredging, hydraulic mining and very heavy equipment, along with massive smelting processes that can wrest gold from a mass of rock that would be impossible even a century ago. Discovering how much gold was produced at a single mine at, say, the height of the California gold rush is impractical since we don't know how many mines were in existence. Modern estimates say that 12 million ounces of gold were likely removed during the first five years of the gold rush, but how to divide this up into specific places and mining operations is anyone's guess (the number would be for the whole of central California, an area about the size of England). Still, with intense research someone might produce a usable number.
Method 3: make a number up. This is easiest; just set an amount of gold per reference that works for the world being built - remembering that the number can be adjusted, at will, later on.
Whatever method is settled on, remember that ad hoc adjustment after the fact will make the number used - and the system - meaningless. It is recommended that once settling on a number that the reader should resist changing it; the trade system will eventually return numbers that will seem "too high" or "too low," causing the user to think something about the system must be broken. It should be remembered that in any system, some things, even things that we perceive are absolutely certain, won't be available! This system is designed to reflect a medieval world, where shipping is very difficult and manufacture numbers are small - and where players are encouraged to do without.
The solidus, the Roman gold coin issued by Constantine, had a weight of 4.5 grams, which is generally assessed to be about 95.8% pure at the time of its issuing (this declined over time). Comparing that with troy ounces (which are 31.103 grams), this means that an ounce of gold could be used to make 7.215 gold coins. In my game, I used some source for purity (long lost) that caused me to settle on 8.715 coins per ounce of gold (with a larger, 8 gram gold coin that's less than half pure).
If we presume that 100% of the gold mined is used to make coins (a convenient number), then we can find a number for how many gold coins are created each year. This lets us compare that production figure with the production figure of every other good in the world, meaning we only have to account for one year of production and not the total accumulated quantity of that good. This makes things easier. Gold for any other reason (jewelry, gilt, etc.) can then be assigned as waste against the coin supply (which doesn't matter right now, but is worth noting for later). Our primary concern just now is the coin supply.
But what is that weight of bricks? We could attempt again to try one of the three methods listed above, but we have at hand an easier method that can be applied to any of the raw products above. I caution the user from employing this method with manufactured products, as doing so will considerably reduce the trade system's incorporation of geographical concerns where it comes to raw materials vs. the processing of those raw materials, which may take place hundreds of miles apart.
Therefore, let us set aside brewing, cloth, leather goods, meat, metal goods, pottery, skins, wine and wool. This leaves us wanting a quantity for bricks, cattle, clay, fish, grain, gold, grapes, horses, ores, salt, sheep, spices and timber.
If the reader has been a DM for some time, then probably there will already exist a price for each of these things in your world. If not, some thought should be given right now for what a rock bottom price for any quantity of the above should be. For example, the original Players' Handbook gives a price of 10 g.p. for one cow and 2 g.p. for one sheep. We can use these values to reverse engineer the number of cows or sheep that are accounted for by one reference very easily.
If a reference for gold = 11,504 pieces of gold, and 10 g.p. equals one cow, then the number of cows per reference is 1,150 (ignoring the fraction). However, we can assume that the price we started with is an average, and postulate that a rock bottom price would be 5 g.p., giving us a total of 2,301 cows per reference (never mind about bulls right now, we will address that later). Likewise, we can use the same reasoning to give us 11,504 sheep per reference.
The same Players' Handbook gives us a cost of 1 s.p. for grain, horse meal, per day. A horse eats 2.0 - 2.5 pounds of air-dry feed daily per 100 lbs. of weight. A light horse weighs between 800 to 1200 lbs., so from this we can pick our numbers and do our math: I'll calculate 2 pounds x 10 for a thousand pound horse per day, so that 1 s.p. in the Players' Handbook buys 20 lbs. of grain. If we again look for a rock bottom price for grain, 1 s.p. buys us 40 lbs. of grain. A reference is worth 184,061 s.p., so 1 reference equals 7,362,440 oz. of grain, or 3,681 tons.
We must remember that for each reference we add, we're making it possible for more people to live in the kingdom (but we will again address that later).
Here are some numbers I've pulled together for the list of raw goods that we're using (skipping gold), based not on the Players' Handbook but on my own research. I will be using these numbers for later discussion of the trade system, but feel free to plug and play whatever numbers work for your game.
Bricks, as I've said elsewhere, describes all cut stone and masonry, so it is in some ways both raw material and manufactured, but we can split those two things apart at a later time. Clay describes only earths that are useful in making pottery. Ores describes the metal content of the material (the rock is extraneous and not worth tracking). All products are non-specific for now (there are obviously many types of fish, grain, spices or timber than we don't need to concern ourselves with just now). For those unfamiliar with the Imperial system (metric doesn't work for me as a medieval measurement), 16 pounds makes a stone and 2000 pounds makes a ton.
Note that the total amount per reference can be reduced by any factor if the reader wants to simply multiply the number of references by the same factor - and of course no one has to use my numbers at all.
This satisfies this step in the trade system process. Next we will want to address the problem of physically locating references in our game world.
See Trade System
Gold Production
The cost of everything in the system is based, first and foremost, on the value of gold. Gold is measured in both pure ounces and in coins, the latter being a metal alloy (added nickel, manganese and silver) that gives it hardness and durability. Our first task is to assign an amount of gold equal to one reference - that is, the amount of gold produced in an average location over the course of a year.We have three methods of determining how much gold that would be.
Method 1: relying on my numbers. I began by taking the total amount of gold produced in the world in the present day and dividing that number by 500, as an approximate ratio to reflect both population change and industrialization, giving me a number for world gold production for 1650 (the date of my world): 311,529 oz. This is then compared by the total number of times I have found 'gold' associated with places and geographical regions in my source material (an encyclopedia, examined page by page): the number of gold references being 236. This gives us a total of around 1,320 oz. of gold produced per reference, per year.
Method 2: use an historical example. I found myself frustrated in attempting this method. There are no good numbers for gold mining prior to the last thirty years, where the amount of gold produced in a given mine is accomplished with cyanide heap leaching, dredging, hydraulic mining and very heavy equipment, along with massive smelting processes that can wrest gold from a mass of rock that would be impossible even a century ago. Discovering how much gold was produced at a single mine at, say, the height of the California gold rush is impractical since we don't know how many mines were in existence. Modern estimates say that 12 million ounces of gold were likely removed during the first five years of the gold rush, but how to divide this up into specific places and mining operations is anyone's guess (the number would be for the whole of central California, an area about the size of England). Still, with intense research someone might produce a usable number.
Method 3: make a number up. This is easiest; just set an amount of gold per reference that works for the world being built - remembering that the number can be adjusted, at will, later on.
Whatever method is settled on, remember that ad hoc adjustment after the fact will make the number used - and the system - meaningless. It is recommended that once settling on a number that the reader should resist changing it; the trade system will eventually return numbers that will seem "too high" or "too low," causing the user to think something about the system must be broken. It should be remembered that in any system, some things, even things that we perceive are absolutely certain, won't be available! This system is designed to reflect a medieval world, where shipping is very difficult and manufacture numbers are small - and where players are encouraged to do without.
Coinage
Whatever particular exchange system between gold, silver, copper and other coins may exist, we must first determine how many gold coins we want to exist in the system. Silver and copper metals exist in such plentiful amounts that it can usually be assumed that there is enough of either in the world to sustain the amount of less valuable coinage that exists (always remembering that coins are not pure gold, silver or copper, but always an alloy of some kind), so it is the amount of gold that matters.The solidus, the Roman gold coin issued by Constantine, had a weight of 4.5 grams, which is generally assessed to be about 95.8% pure at the time of its issuing (this declined over time). Comparing that with troy ounces (which are 31.103 grams), this means that an ounce of gold could be used to make 7.215 gold coins. In my game, I used some source for purity (long lost) that caused me to settle on 8.715 coins per ounce of gold (with a larger, 8 gram gold coin that's less than half pure).
If we presume that 100% of the gold mined is used to make coins (a convenient number), then we can find a number for how many gold coins are created each year. This lets us compare that production figure with the production figure of every other good in the world, meaning we only have to account for one year of production and not the total accumulated quantity of that good. This makes things easier. Gold for any other reason (jewelry, gilt, etc.) can then be assigned as waste against the coin supply (which doesn't matter right now, but is worth noting for later). Our primary concern just now is the coin supply.
Assigning Quantities for Other Goods
Having determined the value for gold references, we can now apply ourselves to the value of other goods in our system. Before doing this, however, is must be understood that every reference in the system has the same value. This is what makes calculation possible. The key is in realizing that a reference of bricks contains a far greater weight in bricks than the weight of gold it represents. The weight in bricks may be hundreds of tons - but what we are attempting to express here is that those hundreds of tons of bricks are exactly equal to 1320 ounces of gold. The price is then assigned according to that difference.But what is that weight of bricks? We could attempt again to try one of the three methods listed above, but we have at hand an easier method that can be applied to any of the raw products above. I caution the user from employing this method with manufactured products, as doing so will considerably reduce the trade system's incorporation of geographical concerns where it comes to raw materials vs. the processing of those raw materials, which may take place hundreds of miles apart.
Therefore, let us set aside brewing, cloth, leather goods, meat, metal goods, pottery, skins, wine and wool. This leaves us wanting a quantity for bricks, cattle, clay, fish, grain, gold, grapes, horses, ores, salt, sheep, spices and timber.
If the reader has been a DM for some time, then probably there will already exist a price for each of these things in your world. If not, some thought should be given right now for what a rock bottom price for any quantity of the above should be. For example, the original Players' Handbook gives a price of 10 g.p. for one cow and 2 g.p. for one sheep. We can use these values to reverse engineer the number of cows or sheep that are accounted for by one reference very easily.
If a reference for gold = 11,504 pieces of gold, and 10 g.p. equals one cow, then the number of cows per reference is 1,150 (ignoring the fraction). However, we can assume that the price we started with is an average, and postulate that a rock bottom price would be 5 g.p., giving us a total of 2,301 cows per reference (never mind about bulls right now, we will address that later). Likewise, we can use the same reasoning to give us 11,504 sheep per reference.
The same Players' Handbook gives us a cost of 1 s.p. for grain, horse meal, per day. A horse eats 2.0 - 2.5 pounds of air-dry feed daily per 100 lbs. of weight. A light horse weighs between 800 to 1200 lbs., so from this we can pick our numbers and do our math: I'll calculate 2 pounds x 10 for a thousand pound horse per day, so that 1 s.p. in the Players' Handbook buys 20 lbs. of grain. If we again look for a rock bottom price for grain, 1 s.p. buys us 40 lbs. of grain. A reference is worth 184,061 s.p., so 1 reference equals 7,362,440 oz. of grain, or 3,681 tons.
We must remember that for each reference we add, we're making it possible for more people to live in the kingdom (but we will again address that later).
Here are some numbers I've pulled together for the list of raw goods that we're using (skipping gold), based not on the Players' Handbook but on my own research. I will be using these numbers for later discussion of the trade system, but feel free to plug and play whatever numbers work for your game.
Note that the total amount per reference can be reduced by any factor if the reader wants to simply multiply the number of references by the same factor - and of course no one has to use my numbers at all.
This satisfies this step in the trade system process. Next we will want to address the problem of physically locating references in our game world.
See Trade System
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