Spice encumbrance

By Rosco74, in Star Wars: Edge of the Empire RPG

The core rule book state that a cargo container with 100 doses of any spice is 5 enc.

In the Lords of Nal Hutta, le Ryll and the other spice has the sale container with 100 doses but with enc. 25...

Is this a mistake ? 25 seems a bit too much for a container of spice...

Some spice is bigger than other spices. In individual doses, muon gold, lesai, ji rikknit, glitterstim, and most others have encumbrance values of 0, and cases of 100 doses have 3 or 5 encumbrance.

Neutron pixie, ryll, and gunjack, which coincidentally all come from the Lords of Nal Hutta book, all have an encumbrance of 1 for individual doses and 25 for a case of 100 doses. It just takes more of this stuff to get you high than it does other stuff.

(Or it's just a misprint. Don't know.)

Different spices require different doses in different packaging.

Different items/gear can be packed differently resulting in different "packed" encs.

Maybe but I doubt it because smuggling'Ryll would be useless, a freighter like the YT1300 has 165 enc capacity. That means it can have only 6 crates of Ryll, worth 27000 credits. And the cargo hold would be full from floor to ceiling!

Noone would risk customs with that. On top of that spice is more commonly carried in smuggling compartments, were there is even less capacity. The difference seems too big (btw 5 and 25) to be real.

Really strange :/

Edited by Rosco74

Remember that not all materials are available in any given port. Avabush and glitterstim are wonderful for smuggling, but they are very limited in supply and it might be very difficult to break into any significant transport without contacts to get the stuff from the source. Gunjack and neutron pixie from my reading seem to be fairly ubiquitous. They may be worth less and bulkier, but you can still fit them in smuggling compartments and you can find them just about anywhere spice can be found. Anyone would rather take a hold of those rarer, higher-prices spices, but a compartment of gunjack is great for mitigating costs to get to a friendlier or more profitable place.

It should also be noted that some Spice, such as Ryll, has legitimate medical uses, and transporting it with the proper paperwork is perfectly legal.

I willgo for an enc of 10, more seems ridiculous. A landspeeder takes less space in the cargo than a crate of Ryll. In fact the same (25).

thanks

If you have to have a strict in-world answer, packaging and level of refinement are the likely culprits. Less refined spice is going to be bulkier and individually packaged doses are going to bulk up the product too. Note that you don't usually find those two on the same product.

1 hour ago, HappyDaze said:

If you have to have a strict in-world answer, packaging and level of refinement are the likely culprits. Less refined spice is going to be bulkier and individually packaged doses are going to bulk up the product too. Note that you don't usually find those two on the same product.

Also, a sci-fi drug could easily be packaged up with the delivery mechanisms. Think epi-pens. The dose itself is tiny, but the stuff gets shipped and sold contained in the relatively bulky pen. I could easily imagine a spice being sold and shipped with specialized delivery systems - a sensor that determines race/weight/etc. for proper dosage, injector mechanisms, sensory-input leads, and so on.

13 hours ago, RLogue177 said:

Some spice is bigger than other spices. In individual doses, muon gold, lesai, ji rikknit, glitterstim, and most others have encumbrance values of 0, and cases of 100 doses have 3 or 5 encumbrance.

Neutron pixie, ryll, and gunjack, which coincidentally all come from the Lords of Nal Hutta book, all have an encumbrance of 1 for individual doses and 25 for a case of 100 doses. It just takes more of this stuff to get you high than it does other stuff.

(Or it's just a misprint. Don't know.)

This guy right here knows entirely too much about spice. I'm suspicious.

17 hours ago, Rosco74 said:

The core rule book state that a cargo container with 100 doses of any spice is 5 enc.

In the Lords of Nal Hutta, le Ryll and the other spice has the sale container with 100 doses but with enc. 25...

Is this a mistake ? 25 seems a bit too much for a container of spice...

That's because the Hutts don't cut their S with none of that baking powder crap that you get on Ryloth. Nothing but pure, mainline bliss for you kid.

15 hours ago, Rosco74 said:

Maybe but I doubt it because smuggling'Ryll would be useless, a freighter like the YT1300 has 165 enc capacity. That means it can have only 6 crates of Ryll, worth 27000 credits. And the cargo hold would be full from floor to ceiling!

Noone would risk customs with that. On top of that spice is more commonly carried in smuggling compartments, were there is even less capacity. The difference seems too big (btw 5 and 25) to be real.

Really strange :/

There's more than one way to smuggle mate. If smuggling compartments and bribes are your only schtick you should probably stick to little twi'lek dancing girl dolls with heads that wobble and leave the real jobs to the pros.

And your math is off. Assuming a "perfect" x4 run without manipulation of Black Market Contacts or other talents a 27,000 credit load of Ryll should sell for around 81,000 on a 3 success Streetwise, giving you a net of 54 k. Pretty good considering Ryll is a Rarity 4/5 spice, making it fairly easy to find and move on your own.

And that's using street-to-street pricing. Your Hutt boss gets wholesale, making the same load cost him around 18,000, and that's probably including the chump change he paid you to deliver it. So conservatively, he probably got the spice for 8,000, paid you 10,000, and netted 63,000. Slave girls and gamorrean thugs don't pay for themselves.

Ok guyz I have read the rules again for trading illegal or legal stuff but it is very confusing. First the Negociation skill says you get 5% more profit per success and then in the trade section it says that you net one quarter the value for one success, one half for two success and three-quarters with three success ...

Then there is on top of that the rules from Fly Casual for illegal goods. So we have 3 different ruling... Now I will explain how I would manage that, please tell me what do you think about it, what would you do, thanks a lot.

In my exemple above, my players are on Ryloth and they want to buy some crates of Ryll, they are on New Meen actually. The price for Ryll is given as 4500 credits per crate and rarity 5. As the Ryll is extracted where they are, I consider its rarity as 3, I didn't request a Streetwise check to find it and I skip to the Negociation check for the price.

For buying stuff there is nothing in the rules except the description of the Negociation skill, and one sentence in the trade section :"...the item may cost far more than the listed price, depending on their scarcity on a particular world." In that case I will go for the standard price of 4500 credits. The player roll 2 success, wich means 10% lower price, then I round to 4000 credits. The players have enough cash for 3 crates of Ryll, worth 12,000credits, then they fly to Naar Shada.

Once on the smuggler moon, they want to sell the 3 crates. What's the rarity of their Ryll crates here? I consider the basic 5, +2 for Outer Rim World as stated in the trade section of CrB. So 7. In that same section of the CrB, it says if difference in rarity is 2, then consider basic price of stuff as x2. So the basic value of the 3 crates is 27,000 credits. Now I have to decide if I use the rules from Fly Casual or from the CrB. LEt's go for Fly Casual as it is more up to date.

First the player need to succeed in a Streetwise check Hard to find a buyer because now the rarity is 7 (CrB). If I would use the CrB then the result would determine the selling price (1/4, 1/2 or 3/4 of the 27,000) and they would need at least 3 success to make some margin...

Ok they succeed on the Streetwise check, find a buyer and roll for a Negociation opposed check. 2 success and 2 threats. So it is 10% payout bonus and the threats are used for something else. According the payout table of Fly Casual, for rarity 7 the basic payout is 25%. That's a total of 35% of 27,000 credits. The buyer offer 9,450 credits for the 3 crates... a net loss of 2,550 credits for the players...

Even with the basic rules in CrB, if they succeed in the Hard Streetwise check with 2 success, they sell the crates for 1/2 the value of 27,000, so exactly what they paid, they would loose money doing the trip for free from Ryloth to Naar Shada.

Edited by Rosco74
6 hours ago, Rosco74 said:

Ok guyz I have read the rules again for trading illegal or legal stuff but it is very confusing. First the Negociation skill says you get 5% more profit per success and then in the trade section it says that you net one quarter the value for one success, one half for two success and three-quarters with three success ...

It is confusing, as FFG is trying to cover a lot of ground. Personal sales, bulk sales, charter jobs, quick rolls, long rolls. It's a mess.

So let me see if I can help you out. I'm not sure if I'm 100% right, but I think I'm closer.

The payout charts in FC are for jobs, not trade. So if Jabba wants the player to move a load of Rarity 5 Ryll, they can expect a payment of 10% of the total value of the cargo, and can negotiate with Jabba for more money and or get bonuses and penalties for things like early or late delivery. But the players don't find dealers, buy, or sell the cargo. They just move it.

So if the players are buying and selling thier own cargo, don't use the payout charts in FC.

The negotiate skill long description can apply, but generally speaking it's talking more about specific story driven discussion with a solidified NPC merchant and not faceless buys and sells of cargo loads. It's that Watto argument over if you should win the woman and her kid, or just the kid. However in the long run parts of it CAN come into play here too.

So now that that's clear let's do a run through without modifiers or adjustments.

1) Players buy cargo. They roll Negotiate or Streetwise, vs the rarity. Success and they find the item for the listed price.

2) Players move the cargo to another location, with the change in rarity adjusting the base cost.

3) Roll a Negotiate/Streetwise check to make the sale. Sale price starts as 25% base value and is increased up to 75% with successes. This is why you want to get that golden x4 modifier, doing that guarantees that at worst you'll break even, and with 2 success or more you're turning serious profit .

Now, yes this isn't a very robust system, as it is easy to get boned and turn a loss, and the system is really big on not just running material from point a to point b, but also seeing how good you are at actually finding a buyer. After all, it's probably assumed the buying and selling of cargo and contraband will be collateral to a more structured adventure of some kind. You are already hired to rescue the princess, might as well run a load of lumber while you are at it as both cover and to score some extra walking around money.

This is also why running spice for Jabba (and using the payout charts from FC) becomes a better deal; you get a job, you do it, you get paid. No fretting if Steve the Scoundrel will be able to land a buyer when you hit Nar Shadda.

Moving on you start talking other shenanigans with talents and other elements.

Spending advantage or Triumph to establish a contact can provide an avenue for more options on both sides of the table. The players might go to a known dealer to make the check opposed instead of against some nasty Rarity or remove certain penalties when doing the initial buy or final sale, increasing odds of successes. The GM might have the contact be useful for other things, or apply certain modfiers based on the players history with that contact, so on.

Also careful evaluations of something like black market contacts opens up opportunity as well. While the +50% cost is a turnoff up front, manipulating the rarity to sell can help bump up that sale modifier to x4, which would be able to offset the extra expense especially when talking about low rarity contraband.

A "dose" of marijuana takes up much more space then a "dose" of meth, crack, heroin, or cocaine. A typical personal use baggy of marijuana is much larger then a personal use baggy of meth, for example (from my experience, which is NOT user experience).

Edited by Sturn
36 minutes ago, Sturn said:

(from my experience, which is NOT user experience).

;) RIGHT

Thanks for your comments! I understand the FC charts are used for remote jobs now. I must admit the basic rules are really short and should be developped. I found better rules in the old "Tramp Freighter" supplement from West End Games, wich is now open source apparently.

Thanks

1 hour ago, Rosco74 said:

Thanks for your comments! I understand the FC charts are used for remote jobs now. I must admit the basic rules are really short and should be developped. I found better rules in the old "Tramp Freighter" supplement from West End Games, wich is now open source apparently.

Thanks

Less open source and more abandoned...

3 hours ago, Sturn said:

A "dose" of marijuana takes up much more space then a "dose" of meth, crack, heroin, or cocaine. A typical personal use baggy of marijuana is much larger then a personal use baggy of meth, for example (from my experience, which is NOT user experience).

Technically true, but consider the scale involved: Encumbrance seems to scale nonlinearly. The largest piece of "gear" (and I'm using the term loosely here) that I could find on the fly is the Bacta Tank for Enc 12. That may or may not be its disassembled state, but we're still talking about a tank an entire person fits into. And 100 doses of a drug is supposed to be far bulkier than that when ordinary cargo crates are usually supposed to be enc 5. What do you do with that stuff? Clobber someone with it to make them see stars?

25 minutes ago, Cifer said:

Technically true, but consider the scale involved: Encumbrance seems to scale nonlinearly. The largest piece of "gear" (and I'm using the term loosely here) that I could find on the fly is the Bacta Tank for Enc 12. That may or may not be its disassembled state, but we're still talking about a tank an entire person fits into. And 100 doses of a drug is supposed to be far bulkier than that when ordinary cargo crates are usually supposed to be enc 5. What do you do with that stuff? Clobber someone with it to make them see stars?

I would say a lot of that volume is taken up with packing material as well as the doses themselves. Drugs are often fragile, and need to be specially packaged in order to prevent damage that could ruin the drug. This adds a not to insignificant amount of volume.

Edited by Tramp Graphics

In "Platt's starport guide", another West End Game supplement the Ryll is given as exemple, one crate is 100kg, they don't say how many doses there is inside. But they say it can be purchased for 5.000 to 10.000 credits and you can sell it for 10.000 to 25.000 credits (page 151). It seems pretty heavy but the price is around the same so I will assume the enc 25 is correct, 100kg.

http://www.starwarstimeline.net/.../Platts Starport Guide WEG40107.pdf

Edited by Rosco74
On ‎08‎.‎08‎.‎2017 at 2:20 AM, RLogue177 said:

Some spice is bigger than others [...].

And some spices' mothers are bigger than other spices' mothers.

I do apologise, but you made me catch a tune.