Homebrew - Merchant Trading
Adventurers are supposed to go out and slay monsters. They are supposed to come into town, complain about high prices, and then go back out and slay more monsters. They then repeat this over, and over, until they have slain all the monsters and get to retire. But what happens when a character decides that that isn’t the path they want to follow?
Sometimes, they might turn to crime, other times they may turn to legal crime, like being a merchant where they buy at super low prices and then sell at very high prices.
You may not know how to quite handle a request for trading, but here is a system to handle that for you while attempting to be as removed as possible. The player can spend time rolling some dice, planning their mega trading company, and get so crazy that they have spreadsheets documenting every cost before requesting you to sign off on some tax documents for their imaginary company… Some players get pretty hardcore.
For those that don’t care about the nitty-gritty:
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Trading & Merchants
The basis of this is that merchants, the players, are looking to do a lot of trading and want to find the best goods to sell in future cities they are planning on heading off to. By investigating the city, they can find the best products to buy, in bulk, and then sell them off for great profits somewhere else. They probably aren’t going to get incredibly wealthy in a day doing this, as they must keep buying more cargo, but it’s good to build-up until the end of the campaign when they’ve traded tons and tons of cargo, allowing them to control fleets and take over the world… well, maybe not that much.
City Setup
To keep this simple, a city’s needs can be built in less than a minute. All you have to figure out is the size of the city, how wealthy a city is, and then decide what they need and what they have too much of.
A city’s size is based on the population, with a small village starting at 1,000 or less, and a metropolis housing over 50,000 residents. A city’s size then dictates its size modifier which will help determine the DC for selling/buying in the city, as well as how much can be bought or sold in a day.
A city’s wealth is a bit more nebulous and is ultimately up to the DM’s decision. One doesn’t think a metropolis as being squalid, but it is a possibility and dictates how much can be bought and sold in a day, as well as the maximum that can be purchased for a single category.
The last thing to determine is the supplies of a city. There are three broad categories presented here, though a DM may decide a city has a fourth or fifth category, like slavery or magical materials. Food, Minerals, and Crafted goods are the basics of trade and can be found in every settlement. The DM decides what does a settlement has a surplus of, what they have a deficit on, and what is balanced in the city. They could decide to double up, deciding that a settlement needs multiple categories, but most often a settlement has a single category in each, one in surplus, one in deficit, and one that is balanced within the settlement.
Merchants
Once the city has been built, it’s up to the player to now figure out what they want to purchase and spend their downtime days scouring the city for deals. They simply spend a day scouring the city and then roll the Trade Tons per Day dice, which determines how many tons of materials can they buy or sell that day. After that, they then roll their check against the DC of the city and decide if they are willing to purchase or sell the supplies based on the result of their check.
The Trade Tons per Day die is first determined by the wealth of the city, which can be a d4, d6, d8, d10, or d12. Then the city’s size modifier is used to determine how many of those dice will be rolled, the larger the city, the more supplies that can be bought or sold. A wealthy metropolis would have 5d12 tons that can be traded (bought or sold) per day, and a capacity of 500 tons per category that could be traded within the city. This means that a merchant could trade as little as 5 tons in a single day or up to 60 tons if they roll very well.
The merchant then rolls a Charisma (Persuasion) check against the Settlement DC, which affects the cost. If they roll very high, they could decrease the amount that goods cost them or increase the price of selling their goods. By buying low, and then selling high, they can create a tiny bit of profit for themselves each time they are successful.
Trade Goods
The basics of trade revolve around the three categories of Food, Minerals, and Crafted. When a merchant goes to buy cargo, they must roll against the DC of the settlement, which helps to act as a buffer as to how easy it is to find traders in a small vs large city and haggling over prices, with small villages less adept at haggling with great metropolises. Once the check has been rolled, it is then compared to the DC, with the higher the result, the better for the merchant.
When a merchant rolls to buy goods, they want the price to be as low as possible. Wealthier settlements are more likely to reduce their costs to sell, knowing they can make it up somewhere else, while a smaller village doesn’t have as much money and are unwilling to sell too low for fear of not having enough to feed themselves. The flip side of that is that when a merchant goes to sell, wealthier communities are more willing to spend on goods while poorer locations just can’t afford it.
Several things can influence the check. If a city has a surplus of an item, they are trying to offload it and a merchant has advantage on checks to buy it, able to command better prices as everyone is desperate to get rid of it. On the other hand, trying to buy something a city doesn’t have a lot of makes it more difficult, so the merchant has disadvantage on the check since settlements hold on tighter to their goods since they know they can get a better deal for it.
Example
A merchant visits the city of Talimeth. It is a City with a Size Modifier of 3, and a Modest wealth. A merchant can trade up to 3d8 tons per day, with a maximum capacity of 100 tons for each category. The Settlement DC is 16, and the city has a surplus of Food, a deficit of Minerals, and is balanced on Crafted.
A merchant has 20 tons of Food, 5 tons of Minerals, and 2 tons of Crafted. They are hoping to offload the Food, as it is starting to get old, but since the city is fully stocked on Food, they are going to have a harder time of it. They decide to try anyways and spend a day scouring the city looking for a buyer.
They roll 3d8 to determine how many tons of Food they can find a buyer for, getting a result of 19, meaning someone is willing to purchase 19 tons of Food from them. They then must roll their Charisma (Persuasion) check, but have disadvantage on the roll since the city has a surplus of Food. They have a +3 proficiency bonus and a +3 Charisma modifier, giving them a +6 total, versus the city’s DC of 16. They roll and get the result of 11(5+6) and 20(14+6). This total makes it so that they are 5 below the DC, and so instead of selling the Food for 100 gp, they’d only be able to sell it for 97 gp for each ton as the amount they can sell it for decreases for every 3 they miss the DC. They decide to go ahead and sell 19 tons of Food at 97 gp since they got a decent deal on it before and it’s about to rot soon, this leaves them with 1 ton of Food that they can try and sell the next day or just hold on to it.
The next day, they decide they want to sell their Mineral since the city needs it. They roll 3d8, getting a 16 total, meaning they found a buyer willing to buy 16 tons from them. Sadly, they only have 5 tons, but that’s fine, they will sell all 5, unless they make a very bad deal. They then roll their Charisma (Persuasion) check, and they have advantage on the check since the city has a deficit for Minerals. They roll and get the results of 20 (14+6) and 23 (17+6), against the DC of 16. They beat the DC by 7, meaning they went 3 over the DC two times, increasing their profit. They can sell their Minerals at 106 gp per ton, making up slightly for the poor showing from yesterday.
Now, they can start looking around for sellers, and they may decide to pick up some fresh Food and try selling it in another city, though they’ll have to check with the party to see where their next destination is, and what that destination may want in trade goods.
Closing
That’s the basics of this merchant system. The ultimate goal is to make it simple on the DM by keeping the city creation to a minimum so they aren’t forced to come up with hundreds of real-time products. With just three basic categories, and more could be added by the DM, this keeps the system abstracted out so one isn’t too worried about exactly what is being bought or sold. I hope you like this system, and if you end up using it, make sure to let me know your thoughts down below!
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