For those of you that have not got Winds of Magic, one of the new Career cards is Merchant. I am really pleased with this, as that is the way I want my character to go, and I was more than a little worried that I would have to use Burgher for a merchant career. However I see several problems which I feel shows a lack of joined up thinking at FFG:

1. Under usual trappings on the back of the card, it lists House with servants, rich clothes, warehouse, a share in a merchant ship or caravan and 300GC in funds or trade goods. Fine I know they are not the prerequisites that they would have been under 1st or 2nd edition, but even so it highlights a few glaring problems, mainly the cost of most of these items. Under the previous two editions you either had definitive prices for all this, or ways of extrapolating the costs.

2. The merchant special ability allows you to buy one item at one availability class better. That works fine if you want to buy a telescope or illuminated book, but is useless if you want to buy a suit of plate armour or a Hochland long rifle, as weapons and armour do not have seperate costs, at different availabilities.

3. Both 1st and 2nd edition had trade rules come out, not that long after the core edition, in Death on the Reik in 1st edition and Warhammer Companion in the 2nd edition. At the moment we have not even got a decent equipment list, so trading is almost impossible. We have no prices for horses and mules even, let alone carts, waggons, barges, ships, warehouses and houses. It is also difficult to extrapolate over from the Old World Armoury and Companion from 2nd edition, as the prices we do have in 3rd edition do not convert back into 2nd edition at all well. This is due I think to the economic tiers of gold, silver and brass brought into 3rd edition, which I think are great, except that there is absolutely no information on how that affects individual goods prices.

4. Without trade rules, no player is going to keep even 1% of 300GC sitting around doing nothing. It also means that the Merchant Career largely becomes an irrelevence, as there is no way to actually be a Merchant, except by roleplaying a career where there is no rules to underpin it.

I know there are other things like Hedge Wizardry and Necromancy that other people want published, but by publishing the Merchant Career without any trade rules or prices, It is the same as producing a Hedge Wizard career without producing any spells for it.

What do people think?

Hi Ragnar,

I agree that the current rules simply aren't there to support a trader doing trading. In my opinion the design philosophy in WFRP3 appears centred on Heroic roleplaying. It deliberately doesn't want to bog play down with minutiae.

WFRP3 avoids numbers when at all possible - the dice, the range increment system etc. It comes from a point-of-view that numbers kill narative flow. Heros go out on adventure, slay monsters, take the treasure back to town and then blow it all on whatever. They then need to go on another adventure. Anything that isn't about exciting adventures isn't going to get much attention.

WFRP3 doesn't appear to want you to spend time (in play) buying a selling coal. It wants you to be fighting monsters and rescuing children from them. Essentially the game design expects the GM to simply gloss over the details. You are a merchant, you're day-job involves doing lots of things that make you money - none of which the game designer wishes/expects you to focus on. The merchant career exists to create story-hooks to aid the storyteller process.

Consider that you were writing a TV screenplay. You have a merchant character, but do you write haggling scenes for every transaction he ever makes? No, all this stuff is assumed to happen off-camera, only if it connects to the story being told is it included. In which case the GM just makes up the details on the fly - and the numbers don't really matter. This is 'joined up thinking' as far as the game system is concerned.

This looks like a good quick article for the upcoming Liber Fanatica #7 fanzine, which will be devoted to WFRP3e. If anyone here would like to do a quick write-up for trade rules or alternate armour/weapon costs, please join us! (in my sig)

Jay H

@Ragnar

I'm also glad to know that Merchant has come in Winds fo Magic.

I didn't ever think about not having trade rules would affect a Merchant character gameplay. That is just me, I do not focus on rules for social interaction or interpretation. Reading your words, I do find them a great idea (I did like the 2e trade rules a lot - as I love the idea of large-scale combat rules, for instance, as it adds another possibility to get systematics for a part of a story). I think Emirikol invitation is a great idea for us to have something to feel this need, if anyone dares it!

But, to deal with the problem as you present it:

Even though having lists of cost for a lot of materials do enhance our roleplay experience, one could enjoy dealing with RPG comerce without being so specific about numbers. The trappings list for a Merchant, for instance, could be achieved through continuous play between the player and the GM, in which they discuss how the PC is dealing with his trade, what movements he is making as a professional, what connections he is achieving, and also involving some dice rolls and troublesome situations. Some of them could even serve as history hooks for the entire group (an old city Merchant suddenly starts having a lot of success in trade, generating a lot of trouble to the Merchant - or Merchant-apiring PC. He talks about it with his Smuggler / Thief / Ratcatcher ??? friend and this other PC goes asking people, and come back with the word on the street: there is a new Burgher that came from Marienburg and he is helping the old Merchant in some way. Could they be enganging in some illegal - or even treacherous - activity?).

Playing trade like that would lead to subjective, narrative achievements: "this month you finally gets sufficient money and credit to buy a big house in Altdorf's Burgher block, but to do that you will have to sell one of your three warehouses near the port, and that will mean that your regular income will decrease if you do not come with new ideas. Will you do it?"

Regarding giving a player a lot of money to spend - possibly without some number pointing how much it is exactly, which could lead to the feeling that PCs can buy anything -, having money does not necessarily give you the freedom to spend it. The Merchant Trade is a risky business, with floating prices and varying availability of a lot of materials. To keep on trade, a character would have to leave a lot of money safe to deal with this inconstances. The best regulator I can think to this is: the story! The GM determines, basing his judgement on what is best for the story (and also on the decisions the Merchant PC is making and his rolls - but reality does have a lot of unexpected turns, such as having a paranoid Witch Hunter accusing one of the Merchant's ship Captain's of being a Chaos worshipper and keeping the ship to inspection for a month!), can let the players spend more or less money - or even have to come up with some emergency idea to adquire extra cash to pay some instant debt!

Finally, the Merchant's Special Ability that you described is focused on the availability of itens, not exactly their prices. Ok, a lot of itens become cheaper when their availabilty is higher, and that makes a lot of sense (as it makes sense for a well connected Merchant to get itens directly from distributors, or with some free taxes and such). It also makes sense that some itens and materials doesn't become cheaper, as you gave the example of the Hochland Long Rifle. But it would become more available, and that could mean starting being available where it wasn't available at all!

Imagnie having a group of PCs that deal with hunting Chaos worsphippers throughout the Empire. They track some clues about a group of cultists in some backwater village. I can imagine a lot of situations where they would benefit greatly if they had a some specific hard-to-find itens (one of them being a Hochland Long Rifle to prevent the cultists from escaping a moutain through the fields that surround it, or even pieces to repair an already adcquired rifle). If there is no Merchant on the group, maybe they won't be able to get these itens at all. If there is a Merchant, he can contact the owner of the small Village's shop and make a special order using his guild sigil (and a Messenger on a fast horse), or at the river dock.

Just some thoughts to make a Merchant career interesting to gameplay right now.

Nice ideas guys, thanks.

I'm not trying to get into the minutiae of trade, but I would like to have some framework to work around. Most of the minutiae can be worked out outside gametime by email, as we do it. And having a merchant in the party does give a lot of ready made excuses for going somewhere.

However just gifting a merchant 300 GC when he becomes a merchant as well as a house and warhouse seems to be just daft. Consequently there needs to be some form of rules for acquiring such items.

It also seems daft to me that FFG have got a table for buying things, if you want to buy things cheaply, but not a table if you want to sell things, like loot or trade goods.

I've often found its what characters get up to, between game time, that makes them interesting. In the second edition, we found that what characters got up to, in the downtime between adventures, provided a lot of scope for adventures outside what is published.

One final thought. If FFG are hoping to bring in people who have never played Warhammer before, or even never roleplayed before, then they need to put more flesh on the bones of Classes like merchant, or they will not make sense. Such new players will not have access to Death on the Reik or the WarhammerFRP Companion, so how are they going to play a Merchant. Is every character who wants to, going to be a Merchant, even though they may have less than a GP to their name, and no way of acquiring it, except by gift of the GM. Lets face it, the loot so far from the published scenarios, wouldn't set up a charlatan, let alone a merchant, or the pay either.

If FFG's idea is that characters just go on adventures, loot the location (minimal, with no rules for selling it) or take the pay (again minimal), and just blow it before the next adventure, seems to me, to be going back to early DnD, not Warhammer. If thats the case then I will be seriously disappointed.

I don't think of the trappings list of 3e as necessary itens for the given career, just the common itens characters of that career usually have. To me there was a huge change in trappings design from 2e to 3e that now trappings are just common itens. You already cleared out that trappings are no longer a necessity to get to a career, but I don't think they are a necessity when you are already at that career either.

That being said, I do agree with you that we are now experiencing a whole in WHFR 3e. And you make a fair argument that I think FFG should read.

Getting back to "how we can handle it right now as opportunity" theme, I think what we are seeing is a great way between a character that wants to be a Merchant and an accomplished Merchant, that would have the regular possessions described in the trappings list. That is ok, it is a difficult think to be a Merchant in a Warhammer-like scenario, to have so many possession, deal with so much money. But I thik what you are saying is that we are not being given a way to get to an accomplished Merchant as a PC with the materials FFG has released so far.

This perception of not having good options with the materials released worries me, and I think would worry me A LOT more if I worked at FFG. :] Unfortunately, I'm too far behind in getting to read (or even own) the current releases, so I'm not in a good position to give alternative ideas about them.

What strikes me is that for a character to begin being a Merchant, he has to find a way to start - just as we would do if we wanted to get to a new business, and one involving trade and a network of connections is tricky in the sense that it is not only what you already have, it is more like entering a new world.

So, if the things that are in current released materials seem not to be enough for a character to start being a Merchant, I suggest to start small. This has to be something the GM works at least as much as the player, because it is necessary for the GM to come up with opportunity: maybe one of the commoner houses the PCs enter has a couple of utensils made with some rare mineral (or some painting from a famous artist that the commoner took from the abandoned house of a late noble). The character spots it, but the commoner who owns them doesn't have any idea about how much it is worth and is happy to sell for what the PC has. Then, when the PC tryes to sell it, he gets an amazing offer as two months rent in a large warehouse and a large quantity of a foreign grain that is very good and nutritious, but his owner, being a foreign sailor, doesn't have the contacts to sell it as people are not interested in what they doesn't know how to cook. So now the PC has an amazing opportunity if he can convince the right people that the grain is amazing quality, and he also has a large space to use to accomodate further aquisitions for free for two months, and he would be a fool to waste it (so he can enter the grain business, or any business near the port, or just re-rent the warehouse, getting more connections for future deals, or, or, or...).

I'm a little confused.

There are PLENTY of rules for a merchant character to work. What you have to figure out is what you want to do with it. Are you playing a merchant as a starter class that leads to something more adventuring? Are you the mobile story hook for the game?

I highly recommend watching the anime 'Spice and Wolf' because the main character is a merchant, and deals with many mercantile problems in a very warhammerish setting (powerful sigmarite church, superstitious fear, ruinous powers and the like).

To lay down some ideas for you - the fact is that all the rules you need to make a merchant work are in the book.

HAGGLING (p. 73) allows you to bargain for stuff in-character, and the 'Miscelaneous Items Rarity' chart in the back is all you need to make a merchant work.

Allow me to demonstrate:

Merchant Character starts with the 'Wealthy' background. This gives him the nice clothes and 5g to play with. After buying some basic equipment, lets say he has 4g left to spend. The character speaks to the GM about the local markets. GM makes you roll Charm (or Folklore, or Guile). Lets say you get 2 successes, and 2 boons.

GM: "You spend some time talking at the local taverns frequented by merchants and merchant guard. Although the prices are common talk amongst the merchants, you hear that a small skirmish is starting with some border lord keeps several weeks to the northeast. One in particular (a Baron named VonLiebermann) has been turning the skies above his keep black with the work on the forges making castle-forged weapons and armor for the mercenaries hired for this skirmish."

Now weapons and armor direct are probably very pricey, but as a canny merchant you know that he'll probably need some high grade iron to forge good steel out of, or possibly coal. Looking at the 'Miscelanous Items' you can talk to your GM and decide that X-pounds of iron count as a Common rarity Trade item for Blacksmithing. Checking the chart, you find that this amounts to 10 silver. Now you have to find a source.

"After some Guile/Charm (use that barter table! Go you merchant go!) you manage to find a Dwarf Merchant who has the bulk you need, and is eager to make it back to Azgaraz before the winter months. You agree on a 7.5 silver price per pound."

Now the player chooses risk. You have 4g to start with. That's 400 silver. Do you dump it all into the iron ore? or do you only risk half? Choose several ventures? Find out what else is good in that keep? How's that stance meter of yours working? Feeling Reclkess punk?

Lets say you put in 3 of your 4g (or maybe the dwarf only has so much iron left). That means that you have 40 units to sell, at a profit of 2.5 silver each. You're looking at a net of 100 silver profit (a full gold crown) if you can move the goods from Altdorf to this VonLiebermann's keep. And the GM may very well decide that if you can beat other merchants there by pushing, you might make a 'bonus' for timelyness. But there are overheads. Maybe your merchant guild (you are part of a merchant guild, aren't you?) will rent you the carts and horses at 10 silver a month (so you have to return them! or be charged fees). Maybe you need the help of that local Bright Order wizard looking to get to VonLiebermann's for a copy of a rare book in the lords library. And that Dwarf Troll Slayer who wants to get closer to the mountains, or is looking to hire out as a merc himself (Introducing PCs 1 and 2 as an example).

Clearly now you have your caravan guards, and maybe a passenger willing to provide some silver you have a 'party'. On the way you have to fight off beastmen, negotiate with some wood elves for safe passage, and skirt around a haunted battlefield that may have undead. This is the 'adventure' part of the story.

When you GET there you find out if the rumors were true, how much you actually get (125 silver, timely bonus! Now ... what do you buy here and take where else to make a profit? Or what do you bring back that can pay for at least your cart and horse rental. Or to replace that cart that the Greenskins broke when crossing that pass?).

Eventually you could possibly buy your own horse and cart, or invest in a boat (risky!), hear rumors of caches of goods. Be hired by your mercantile guild to investigate a village whose source of goods is missing, find out there's cultists in the upper ranks of your merchant house (slaanesh anyone?).

The fact is, most of what you need, whether its the nitty-gritty or the flavor is (as far as I can tell) in the books. Just gotta think outside of the box! (or inside the Core box as the case may be!)

Let me know what you guys think!

Totally agree, Pedro.

My character started out very small, completely broke in fact. He managed to raise a stake by fair means and foul, including larceny, and with that bought half a small transport business. We got the prices and encumbrance capacities from an early entry in the forums on horses and waggons etc. He will become a Merchant in his next career. His present career is a plausible entry into the Merchant career. I used one of the waggons to transport coal to Stromdorf in the Gathering Storm. That was relatively simple from the information in the Core Ruleset and the Gathering Storm fluff. However trying to come up with details for the commodities that Stromdorf exports is next to impossible, not least because of some bad proof reading or design by FFG:

In the scenario, Thunderwater Ale is listed as 4bp per half pint or 15bp for a small keg of four pints. There is also an equipment card for a barrel of Thunderwater Ale which lists its encumbrance as 6. Unfortunately none of the blurb on the card lists its capacity or price, which is a major oversight to my mind. With a bit of research we worked out that that kind of barrel should hold 72 pints, but how much that size of barrel would sell for we are not sure. But that is the kind of simple information that does not seem to have entered the minds of FFG, which I am now finding both very annoying and saddening. By taking out just one illustration from the Gathering Storm Rulebook, they could probably have had enough space to have provided detailed prices for the leatherwork, smoked eels and Thunderwater Ale that Stromdorf exports, and the prices in Ubersreik for the same items.

I know that FFG want to have as few rules in the books, with most of everything on the cards, but these aren't combat rules, but things that are used once or twice every few months, but add a level of depth that the game sorely lacks at the moment. This is particularly true with the new Merchant card. I can't imagine FFG would have provided combat careers without a list, however small, of weapons and armour, and magical careers without spells, so why have a Merchant career without trade rules. It doesn't make any sense at all.

Shinma,

Merchant is an advanced career, not a basic one. Also how were you planning to transport your iron? I think you will need that horse and cart before you start, as most merchants with excess capacity would be trying to beat you there. The fact is that so far we have been making up as we go along, and it has been fun, but I must admit that even my GM doesn't want to spend ages, either during gametime, or online later, haggling over prices and capacities, and we are experienced gamers. How an inexperienced gamer is supposed to sort this out I am not sure, particularly if the gamer and GM have wildly different views about the costs and availability of said items. This is where Death on the Reik and the Warhammer Companion were so useful. They made sorting this out so much easier and with less capacity for disagreement.

shinma: your proposed approach would work if the Merchant has a specific client in mind when he acquires his goods. In my experience though, Merchant PCs usually acquire their goods first and then shop around for offers during their travels. Once they're wealthy enough to run a merchant company and employ sales agents, then they might have the luxury of dealing only in large orders with pre-arranged clients while sipping brandy in their drawing rooms and embarking on foolish adventures with their rich friends.

man, all this talk is sure making me very interested in running some merchant mini-campaing...

Herr Arnulfe, tell us about yours!

Pedro Lunaris said:

I can't spoil too much because it's being published as a v2 fan supplement next year, but I can tell you it goes from 0 to 2,500 XP and takes place in the southern Empire (3-4 cities) 2 years after the Storm of Chaos. The PCs start off as south Talabecland villagers with greater aspirations, and are quickly caught up in religious strife, underworld dealings and lots of Chaos plots, against a backdrop of looming civil war. There's a special Barge Wars rules appendix, trade caspules for each settlement visited, and special PC options (e.g. customized career tables, layman prayer mechanics, and a new Roster System for party management).

I suspect that this is the sort of thing that will be included in the Slannish book next Fall. I would imagine a few actions cards would suffice and some hints for using the tracking tokens. I doubt that any new systems will be introduced. (I of course could be wrong )

Personally until than I would setup a tracking system which the merchant could advance with tradecraft, guile, and charm rolls, and perhaps an opposition track from a rival merchant. I found the core mechanics very robust at handling any situation.

I think you guys are spending alot of time working on minutae that may or may not be relevant to the merchant experience.

If a player wants to run through extensive charts randomly rolling up availability and price adjustments for goods, you may have a GM that doesn't care for that, or may not be able to generate them on the fly, but this does sort of bypass the point of the game as I see it.

Honestly there doesn't seem to be much need for the knowledge of the price of Thunderbrew Ale by the big cask. Whether there is 40 ounces, 10 ounces, or a tun in the unit, what you have to figure out is the unit price and the adjustment for it, and roughly what you can expect for maintenance (is it perishable? How long do you have to offload it?) and profit.

If PCs don't want to play the buy-low-sell-high merchant game, and just want to pick up something profitable in the local town, and sell it as they go along, its fairly simple to roll some white and black dice, and assign 5% to successes or boons and just simulate a random market in a city at the GMs discretion for reason (well its food, and this town has had a famine, so I'll add about 3-4 extra fortune dice to the roll - with a set of 3-misfortune 3-fortune as base say).

Ultimately to me this game is about player choices (risk/reward) and less about scouring charts the gm has to produce weekly to find a good bargain.

Your mileage of course may vary.

But I strongly suggest you figure out what makes playing a merchant fun for you, and talk to your GM about providing that in-game.

Ragnar63: Sorry, don't have my Winds of Magic box set yet - thanks for the heads up! And as an aside - I'm a very experienced gamer, but VERY new to WFRP in general, and 3rd edition in specific. I assume if you're puzzled you do much like yourself and hit up the forums for some friendly discussion and possibly good ideas!

shinma said:

Yes, rolling on charts is not the v3 style, but on the other hand v3 combat does place a lot of focus on recharge tokens, Stress, Fatigue, action cards etc., so there is a precendent for introducing some rules structure to trading as well. The tools would obviously be different from those used in the v1 (calculator and multipliers) or v2 (tables and matrices) trading rules.

Action cards are effectively their own charts.

If you could present stuff on a basic trade Action card, and then some enhanced trade Action cards for specialists it would be squarely a v3 system.

monkeylite said:

I agree, v3 players roll on charts dozens of times every session but everyone knows that charts in a book are for grognards.

Oho! Any suggestions for some examples of these cards?

shinma said:

There are some cards on the Core Box that could apply to a haggling situation, or help in a haggling situation, but are not based on Haggle. I'm thinking about Honeyed Words, I Thought We Were Friends, Winning Smile, Formal Diplomacy, Scrutinise and Staring Contest. But really none of them are about haggling itself (they can support the Haggle test).

I'm also interested in how this Haggle Action Cards could be. :]

Pedro Lunaris said:

Haggling is just the final step before closing a deal. If you don't have any structure to the actual trading process (i.e. assessing markets, finding buyers or sellers) then there's nothing to prevent Merchants from just staying in town making repeated Haggle tests to earn imaginary money.

You might be able to simulate the "merchant experience" by having separate Trading cards for different sizes of settlements. For each Trading Action, the settlement's card would require a recharge period measured in days rather than rounds. Merchants could have specialized Trading Actions like Guild Manipulator, Bargain Hunter or Visionary Prospector which affect Trade card recharge rates or the availability of buyers/sellers. New Haggle actions would probably be more along the lines of Bait-and-Switch, Lowball and Upsell.

Of course, this is all theoretical. I'm sure most GMs would love to have a simple trade mechanic that also keeps their Merchant players happy, but without breaking the game's economy. It's one of the holy grails of game design.

I've handled trading in various systems, including WFRP1 and GURPS Traveller, and it always amounts to more bookkeeping than story. You need to decide how much your story is going to focus on trading, and, more importantly, on what aspect of trading: finding buyers or sellers, travelling through hazardous territory, smuggling and avoiding authorities, conflict with rivaling merchants, or maybe it really takes a backseat to more interesting stories that have nothing to do with trading.

The most interesting trading system I've ever seen was in Diaspora. It assumes you've got a spaceship, the spaceship needs regular maintainance, and your funding that through trade. And it handles all of that in a single roll. One per month, I think. That roll uses the ship's Trade value (I think), but uses tons and tons of modifiers. Trade in illegal goods gets you +2, not really trading all that much gets you -2, etc. The end result is how much your Assets track is hit.

In WFRP3, what I'd probably do is: roleplay out all the stuff with finding buyers, sellers, haggling, travelling, smuggling, and whatever. Don't involve any money in those results, just count how many rolls are good and how many are bad. Or even just how many cool stuff they did, how much time they spent trading, etc. These will be bonuses and penalties for the final roll. Then, every once in a while, you make your trading roll. Add all the bonuses and penalties, and out comes a result. You did really well, or you did very badly.

Exactly what to do with the roll, I'm not entirely sure. Depends at least partly on the situation and the story, I guess. Boons might gain you valuable trading partners, footholds in a new market, etc. Banes might mean you lose access to some markets, perhaps. A net success probably means your organisation runs well and makes some profit, whereas failure means you lose money. How much? No idea. Some small percentage of the total value, perhaps?