Renegade Merchant 6: Trade

Okay so we want "Trade" to be one of the pillars of our game. What might that actually mean? 

I think I want to stay away from a classic-style transaction-based arbitrage system. That is, the kind of game where you buy 400 bananas for 183 gold and hope to sell them in the next town for 200 gold. I have two beefs with these kinds of systems:

1. They tend to get monstrously complex very fast, prompting players to break out spreadsheets and spend twenty minutes trying to grok the subtleties of the southwestern region's bread market. 

2. After you've done that math, the system rarely produces interesting choices. Moving between established city centers is typically fairly safe and straightforward. We want an engine that promotes exploration and weird, complicated choices. 

Instead, I think the players are in the business of selling trade routes. That is, the players must find a demand, a supply, and an NPC trade ship prepared to connect the two.  (Why not a percentage of the profits? Because we don't want the PCs to have too much passive income, since that goofs up our time pressure.)

So then, let's talk about Supplies and Demands. Where do they come from? One tempting answer is to say "from the traits and statistics of the planets. Obviously a forge world has a Supply of manufactured goods and a Demand of metal, and if it has a winery on the planet, then it consumes grapes and produces wine."  This approach has two problems:

First, it places an onus on the DM as they set up their sector to carefully balance the ratio of different planet types with the trade minigame in mind. Second, and more damningly, it requires me to write a big table of all the types and traits a planet can have and what impact that has. That sounds tedious. 

Instead, I think we start from the assumption that galactic trade is almost entirely solved. The factory planet is already getting raw materials from somewhere and selling to someone. I think we're looking at 

1. Random events: There should definitely be room for the DM to roll some dice and say "The farm planet got new tractors and is overproducing now. There's a Supply of space beets... for now."
    
2. PC actions: The PCs are powerful people who have various options for altering the status quo.
   
   
3. Isolation: The places the PCs are exploring, planets far from the Federation, probably have all kinds of unmet needs and unexploited resources. That's why we're exploring! :) 
   
   
4. Nonrandom events: Stuff the DM has worked into the plot like wars, warp storms, and coups could all potentially create some opportunities within the market. 

So basically, that gives us two scenarios: 

If the PCs know about a matching Supply and Demand, the challenge comes from connecting the two. For example, there might be a dangerous minefield between Planet A and Planet B, and so the PCs have to either clear it out or build a mineproof trading ship or something. 

If the players only have one end of the equation, the challenge comes from seeking or forging the other end. For example, they might discover a planet that desperately needs Spaceship Fuel, and so the quest is to go to the Spaceship Fuel Factory Planet and convince the lords there to either drop one of their existing clients or expand their production capacity to accommodate the party. 

I don't think we necessarily need to write out specific types of trade goods for this system to work- we can say the Supply is "food" or ".42mm ball bearings" and it doesn't really matter as long as the DM puts a corresponding Demand somewhere on the map. (Or doesn't, and leaves it to the PCs to create their own Demand as we just discussed.)