Traveller - Merchant Prince Question or Clarification

[Dyderich]

Greetings Fellow Space Travelers,

Decided to purchase some of the new books and see what all the new hubbub in Traveller was now.

Unfortunately, I have found that the new books leave a lot to be desired of...mainly either in editing errors/omissions/etc. or just extremely convoluted instructions/examples.

My primary question on this board will be this:

I have decided to off-hand put together a Space Company with 7 Rank 5 Personnel as its Board of Directors. So I go through all the steps for creation and notice that there are a lot of not very clear guidance involved.

I am up to the part where I have to decide on what my employees will be working on in the first quarter. Due to the lack of a lot of employees and the fairly high (Rank 6 Fab) skill I am using I am unable to utilize more than two Industry Lines (Mech Engineer & Civil Engineer).

From Page 39-40 Merchant Price, I am looking over the Profit Pool creation which is described about as clearly as the Mississippi River if you get my meaning. Nowhere is there a table or something that clearly explains the process well enough in the example utilized - Hawk Trading company.

My company is using Fabrication (Skill Level 6) - so, according to the example I should see:

Fabrication 6 x 10 x 1 = 60 employees per Industry Line (I have 131 employees in company)
So my industry lines are fully employed

So there is some sort of skill check against Fabrication I surmise according to seeing Hawk using a Shipping skill check - where this +2DM for skill level comes from is beyond me as I have not seen any sort of table/chart that describes how they got it.

I cannot apply any sort of DM check to Fabrication as I do not know what/where this is/located.

I only see that their Shipping Line has a +1DM for its type and the Workforce Management has a -1DM for its type - I see nowhere how they obtained a +2DM for Cargo Line Transit or how they obtained a +3DM for the Workforce.

Now if I read it one way, I would say that each level of Shipping/Brokerage gives the company a +1DM, however, due to the fact that Hawk Trading has a Brokerage Rank of 3 and not 4, the explanation of an Effect of 4 reduced by -1DM due to the Industry Line to 3 makes no sense then to consider the Types of Industry Ranks as being DM modifiers unless again, the editing of the book was incorrect and this should have been an Effect 3 reduced to 2 which would have given perhaps a different outcome at the end.

Hopefully someone reading this and correspondingly looking at Merchant Prince pages referenced can give me an explanation on this stuff. To me it appears that the books have glaring omissions and corrections needed, but perhaps I am missing something here and am just too tired now to see it. I doubt it, but who knows.

Anyone able to help me get the correct answers to this would be greatly appreciated.

Dyderich

 

[DivineWrath]

I had recently read the book myself and ran into some problems as well. I considered writing up a post for it asking questions, but it was maybe a month ago since I last touched the book (I'm currently trying to figure out ship building rules right now). I will probably need to do a quick review of merchant prince before I can answer. Try to keep in mind that I have my own questions that I haven't been able to figure out.

 

[Dyderich]

Post away, I would happily answer what I can from my own reading, but as before I noticed that these books have a lot of omissions or at least poor clarifications on their rules or processes even when accompanied with an example (usually because the example is too abreviated and you do not see how they derived at the ending result when its not fully explained) - like in my question...how do you find out one aspect in order to make the whole work.

I hope other folks read this and I get an answer...it would be a shame to have these books out there with so much potential but poorly written/executed rule sets. That is the whole reason for revisions hopefully we get a new editing staff to look over these books again and double check what it being printed is correct, has no missing parameters (usually see this alot with the dice - usually missing something like a multiplication sign - you usually see (for example 1d6 10,000cr but to me that is missing a mathmatical formula since by itself its incorrect - if you are asking you will have a result of between 10,000 and 60,000 the formula is 1d6 * 10,000cr and should be listed as such)), is readable to the average person and does not require a decoder ring.

 

[DivineWrath]

So there is some sort of skill check against Fabrication I surmise according to seeing Hawk using a Shipping skill check - where this +2DM for skill level comes from is beyond me as I have not seen any sort of table/chart that describes how they got it.

Fabrication isn't the only skill used to make profit. On p. 38 you should see a table listing details needed for "industry lines" ("industry" should be read very loosely). In the "Entity skill needed for production" column, you should see that the fabrication skill is used for most types of industry, but isn't the only skills used. Industry lines like "Cargo Line Transit" and "Workforce Management" do use skills other than fabrication, which are shipping and brokerage.

You should see on p. 39 that the Hawk company actually does has its skill for shipping of 2, and brokerage of 3.

Fabrication 6 x 10 x 1 = 60 employees per Industry Line (I have 131 employees in company)
So my industry lines are fully employed

Not really a question, but I would like to point out that I wonder if it is really the best move to max out a skill used for an industry line. A high skill means that an industry line needs to use a lot of employees, while a smaller skill can make do with with less. Raising characteristics like management or control would provide a bonus to such dice checks without the need for additional employees... as would investing in industry lines that offer bonuses to such checks.

 

[DivineWrath]

Some of my questions/comments:

1. One of the problems I have with the rules is the apparent lack of what exactly you are supposed to do with the rules. The book didn't explicitly point out that you need to create competition for a company to compete against (or when to fill the void), nor does it make so that competition is really a thing. I might have missed it, but there doesn't appear to be any penalties for over saturating a market with a single industry. 1, 10, 100, 1000, a million, a billion, etc industry lines makes no difference for the rules. It seems that these companies can simply spam what they are good at with no consequence, and therefore have no real reason to attack each other (economically speaking)... unless they want to improve Guile which seems to lack any other repeatable way to improve short of hostile take overs (if good alternatives exist, I haven't found it).

What I found is, that after a 10 year simulation, the last few years lead to an explosive growth as I started doing everything right and was improving my companies' characteristics. Increasing in company rank increased profits for every additional point of effect I got. It would be hard to go bankrupt after what I was doing right. If I tried this experiment again, I probably would get the explosive growth effect much sooner, starting with much less.

2. Overcome Competition, p. 43 . It lists a series of actions, the effects, and the investment costs to under take them. The way they are presented, some of them look as though you could only undertake so many of these actions per quarter (since they list time to complete), some look like they should only be allowed once per quarter, and other others looks like that many of the same could be taken in parallel (or might even require quarterly maintenance to renew them).

For instance p. 44, Initiate a Hiring Campaign, might be a once per quarter thing. Things might get broken fast if you can make multiple recruitment attempts per quarter. However, Bring new automated processes online to speed up production, looks like something you would want to be able to perform multiple times per turn. A company can grow fast enough that they can bring multiple industry lines into operation per turn, so limiting the action to once per turn is going to keep up.

3. One of the things that ended up annoying me was, it was easy to get enough industry lines that all the dice rolling would quickly get tedious. 2 to 3 industry is alright, but 20 to 30 is not. I decided that taking an average roll result (would be a 7 for a roll of 2d6) would solve dice rolling problems. Unfortunately, the book does not incorporate the idea into the rules.

 

[DickTurpin]

1. One of the problems I have with the rules is the apparent lack of what exactly you are supposed to do with the rules. The book didn't explicitly point out that you need to create competition for a company to compete against (or when to fill the void), nor does it make so that competition is really a thing. I might have missed it, but there doesn't appear to be any penalties for over saturating a market with a single industry. 1, 10, 100, 1000, a million, a billion, etc industry lines makes no difference for the rules. It seems that these companies can simply spam what they are good at with no consequence, and therefore have no real reason to attack each other (economically speaking)... unless they want to improve Guile which seems to lack any other repeatable way to improve short of hostile take overs (if good alternatives exist, I haven't found it).

What I found is, that after a 10 year simulation, the last few years lead to an explosive growth as I started doing everything right and was improving my companies' characteristics. Increasing in company rank increased profits for every additional point of effect I got. It would be hard to go bankrupt after what I was doing right. If I tried this experiment again, I probably would get the explosive growth effect much sooner, starting with much less.

There are several ways to use these rules. A) You could ignore the Commercial Entity sub-game completely. This is probably the most common. B) You can build a company and watch it grow in a vacuum, isolated from all outside influence. As you have noticed, this can get boring after a few times through the process. Or, C) You can pit your new company against several competitors, attempting to sabotage then while fending off their attacks against your company. This can be much more challenging, sometimes frustrating, and a whole lot more work.

2. Overcome Competition, p. 43 . It lists a series of actions, the effects, and the investment costs to under take them. The way they are presented, some of them look as though you could only undertake so many of these actions per quarter (since they list time to complete), some look like they should only be allowed once per quarter, and other others looks like that many of the same could be taken in parallel (or might even require quarterly maintenance to renew them).

For instance p. 44, Initiate a Hiring Campaign, might be a once per quarter thing. Things might get broken fast if you can make multiple recruitment attempts per quarter. However, Bring new automated processes online to speed up production, looks like something you would want to be able to perform multiple times per turn. A company can grow fast enough that they can bring multiple industry lines into operation per turn, so limiting the action to once per turn is going to keep up.

These are open to interpretation but my take on them is that they are only allowed once per quarter each. When competing against other companies there is seldom an opportunity to stack multiple instances anyway because you never have enough resources to everything you need to in order to fend off your competitors as it is.

3. One of the things that ended up annoying me was, it was easy to get enough industry lines that all the dice rolling would quickly get tedious. 2 to 3 industry is alright, but 20 to 30 is not. I decided that taking an average roll result (would be a 7 for a roll of 2d6) would solve dice rolling problems. Unfortunately, the book does not incorporate the idea into the rules.

Very true. However it is pretty easy to create a macro in Excel that can handle the dice rolling. Once you have the macro, you can slowly build the spreadsheet to handle each new line as your company grows. The whole process takes a bit of time to complete, but the tedium is greatly reduced. And once you have the basic setup, you can easily copy the starting configuration to new worksheets so that it is ready when you want to start over.

With a little more work you can have your competitors set up on their own worksheets and have another macro randomly select their actions in Step Eight to make things easier and more interesting.

 

[Dyderich]

On my end I wanted a solid company with a very experienced Board of Directors (hence they are all R5 individuals). So I chose to employ the numbers I did thinking that better scores would ensure better results - when in fact it means just more employees utilized for the same result - which to me should almost be backwards in that sense. I would imagine that the more experienced your skills in fabrication are, then the less personnel you need due to better equipment/more streamlined processes, automated systems, etc. It seems whoever came up with this concept took it oppositely in direction to what you would figure should be the correct path - the way it looks now is that as you gain experience you have to hire more and more employees to cope with the ever increasing requirement for the same production/services. The idea makes no sense really, especially if you look at real life companies and their work force. If you expand, I can see adding, but if you stay with what you are running, then you can actually upgrade/update and usually get rid of some of the workforce (we know about robotic replacement of human workers, automating the processes, etc. - in real life now).

Personally I am going to look at this issue more closely and since I am such a nerd, I will most likely come up with a totally new system and try to ensure it makes more sense than the current one being utilized. Who knows, I can always try to submit it to Mongoose and see if they like it as well...hopefully mine will be simpler to understand with more explanations of the processes.

 

[Dyderich]

So there is some sort of skill check against Fabrication I surmise according to seeing Hawk using a Shipping skill check - where this +2DM for skill level comes from is beyond me as I have not seen any sort of table/chart that describes how they got it.

Fabrication isn't the only skill used to make profit. On p. 38 you should see a table listing details needed for "industry lines" ("industry" should be read very loosely). In the "Entity skill needed for production" column, you should see that the fabrication skill is used for most types of industry, but isn't the only skills used. Industry lines like "Cargo Line Transit" and "Workforce Management" do use skills other than fabrication, which are shipping and brokerage.

You should see on p. 39 that the Hawk company actually does has its skill for shipping of 2, and brokerage of 3.

Fabrication 6 x 10 x 1 = 60 employees per Industry Line (I have 131 employees in company)
So my industry lines are fully employed

Not really a question, but I would like to point out that I wonder if it is really the best move to max out a skill used for an industry line. A high skill means that an industry line needs to use a lot of employees, while a smaller skill can make do with with less. Raising characteristics like management or control would provide a bonus to such dice checks without the need for additional employees... as would investing in industry lines that offer bonuses to such checks.

Page 39 Hawk Transport Co. (HTC) Entity Skills: Shipping: 2, Brokerage: 3
Page 40 HTC is going for 2 Industry Lines
#1 Cargo Line Transit (Shipping Skill using 2x10x1 personnel = 20)
#2 Workforce Mngt (Brokerage Skill using 3x10x1 personnel = 30)

Somewhere it gives HTC a +2DM for shipping skill (only thing that is related to 2 is the actual skill in shipping - since they are fully loaded with personnel on the job this could be what they are referring to) - there was no DM modifier for Shipping Skill to adjust.

Somewhere it gives HTC a +4DM for brokerage skill (this skill is 3 so if it follows the above example, it would be a +3DM) - there is a -1DM for brokerage on the Workforce Mgt line so it should be actually +2DM not +3DM as is stated.

Now if this convoluted solution is working the path I am following then I would assume that this Imaginery Profit Pool would be: +2DM Shipping added to +2DM Workforce Mgt to give a sum of 4 which would be your now Profit Pool number if I am getting the information correct.

Now if this is correct, then the proper/corrected information should be:

HTC does its 5 Wealth market scheme - the investment skill check has no modifiers since the GLE of the company gives +0DM. So they roll 1d6 (I am hoping since its not explained AT ALL) and get 3 since they are saying they received a +25% gain which comes out to the 2 points of wealth at the end of this.

As for the company profit, they now have the following:

Rank 0 Company; Profit Pool of 4 which gives them a profit gain of 4 wealth instead of the 5 it got originally.

 

[Dyderich]

Some of my questions/comments:

1. One of the problems I have with the rules is the apparent lack of what exactly you are supposed to do with the rules. The book didn't explicitly point out that you need to create competition for a company to compete against (or when to fill the void), nor does it make so that competition is really a thing. I might have missed it, but there doesn't appear to be any penalties for over saturating a market with a single industry. 1, 10, 100, 1000, a million, a billion, etc industry lines makes no difference for the rules. It seems that these companies can simply spam what they are good at with no consequence, and therefore have no real reason to attack each other (economically speaking)... unless they want to improve Guile which seems to lack any other repeatable way to improve short of hostile take overs (if good alternatives exist, I haven't found it).

What I found is, that after a 10 year simulation, the last few years lead to an explosive growth as I started doing everything right and was improving my companies' characteristics. Increasing in company rank increased profits for every additional point of effect I got. It would be hard to go bankrupt after what I was doing right. If I tried this experiment again, I probably would get the explosive growth effect much sooner, starting with much less.

2. Overcome Competition, p. 43 . It lists a series of actions, the effects, and the investment costs to under take them. The way they are presented, some of them look as though you could only undertake so many of these actions per quarter (since they list time to complete), some look like they should only be allowed once per quarter, and other others looks like that many of the same could be taken in parallel (or might even require quarterly maintenance to renew them).

For instance p. 44, Initiate a Hiring Campaign, might be a once per quarter thing. Things might get broken fast if you can make multiple recruitment attempts per quarter. However, Bring new automated processes online to speed up production, looks like something you would want to be able to perform multiple times per turn. A company can grow fast enough that they can bring multiple industry lines into operation per turn, so limiting the action to once per turn is going to keep up.

3. One of the things that ended up annoying me was, it was easy to get enough industry lines that all the dice rolling would quickly get tedious. 2 to 3 industry is alright, but 20 to 30 is not. I decided that taking an average roll result (would be a 7 for a roll of 2d6) would solve dice rolling problems. Unfortunately, the book does not incorporate the idea into the rules.

Personally the thing I would look at is this: The company should have a limiting factor (and in my other email where I stated that having a LOW skill should affect you in proportion to the number of employees required in the industry line)...

ABC Co. with low skills should be required to use MORE employees to work those Industry Line(s) then XYZ Co. which has double the skills and doing the same Industry Line(s) - this would be the first part that makes more sense.

Then to add to this, I would place restrictions on oversaturation on the market - have some sort of formula that limits your dumping of the same product lines over and over...whereas the something like transportation should be affected by random availability and other factors (similar to the Event Tables in Character creation - strikes for instance - nobody moving goods/passengers, imminent catastrophes (natural/otherwise) - limited movement of goods/persons, etc. Allow bonuses as well - tourism boom, etc.

I have not tried to go beyond where I got stuck so I cannot speak more on that yet until I try some simulations myself.

 

[DivineWrath]

Personally I am going to look at this issue more closely and since I am such a nerd, I will most likely come up with a totally new system and try to ensure it makes more sense than the current one being utilized. Who knows, I can always try to submit it to Mongoose and see if they like it as well...hopefully mine will be simpler to understand with more explanations of the processes.

Have fun with that. I'm tempted to do the same with ship design rules. The gear is scattered over many books, and some of the rules are not clear enough for my tastes.

Somewhere it gives HTC a +4DM for brokerage skill (this skill is 3 so if it follows the above example, it would be a +3DM) - there is a -1DM for brokerage on the Workforce Mgt line so it should be actually +2DM not +3DM as is stated.

Read it again. It doesn't say +4 DM, it says an effect of 4 (as in they have already rolled the dice), then it applies the -1 DM (they must have forgot to add it into the dice roll) for the industry line type (its a badly worded example, I know).

Personally the thing I would look at is this: The company should have a limiting factor (and in my other email where I stated that having a LOW skill should affect you in proportion to the number of employees required in the industry line)...

ABC Co. with low skills should be required to use MORE employees to work those Industry Line(s) then XYZ Co. which has double the skills and doing the same Industry Line(s) - this would be the first part that makes more sense.

Then to add to this, I would place restrictions on oversaturation on the market - have some sort of formula that limits your dumping of the same product lines over and over...whereas the something like transportation should be affected by random availability and other factors (similar to the Event Tables in Character creation - strikes for instance - nobody moving goods/passengers, imminent catastrophes (natural/otherwise) - limited movement of goods/persons, etc. Allow bonuses as well - tourism boom, etc.

I do agree with much of this. At this time, each company exists in their own vacuum with few reasons to ever want to consider getting rid of other companies (its not like they are competition after all... literally).

As I said, there is no limit as to how many goods you can dump into a market (any market). There is no bonuses for there being few goods being sold in a market. There is no penalties for over-saturating a market with goods. There are no problems caused by other companies trying to exist in the same market as you. There is no way to determine the demand of the market.

There is no mention of trying to do business on multiple worlds, and the possible management problems that might come with it. There is no mention of management problems if the characters decide to be away from the office frequently, possibly doing adventures who knows where.

A company should be able to do more with less. This includes employees. A higher skill level should improve profits, not cut into it.

Product quality should play a factor, and what factor it should have on the price, but I don't have ideas for that right now...

Perhaps setting up new industry lines and shutting down unproductive ones should cost some wealth (wealth you don't get back).

I have not tried to go beyond where I got stuck so I cannot speak more on that yet until I try some simulations myself.

Fortunately I have... with eyes of rule lawyers and munchkins. Generally speaking, investing more employees and more wealth offers more financial security (protects against bad rolls), but reduces the profit you could be getting under ideal circumstances. Early on, you want financial security since bad rolls hurt more than good rolls help. Early on, the best way to protect against bad rolls is to get as many bonuses as possible. A negative profit pool at step 7 (p. 41) will hurt twice as much as a positive profit pool (a rank 0 entity with a profit pool of -1 will lose 2 wealth but with a profit pool of +1 will gain 1 wealth).

After you get many industry lines running, then the chance for bad rolls becomes less important than the average dice roll result. If you can get a good average result (aim for higher than 8 ), then you should be getting more good dice rolls than bad. This will get you a profit pool with positive numbers, which is what you want, with a large enough profit margin to pay for all your employees... with some wealth left over for growth.

A good industry line to maximize profits is one that you have a skill of 1 (+1 DM, 10 employees), invested wealth of 10 (which provides a -1 DM), and you want to max out the applicable characteristic (for a +3 DM). Do this and create as many industry lines like it as possible to maximize profits. A single industry line of that type would yield an average effect of 2 (assuming an average roll of 7). Having 10 such industry lines like that give you a profit pool of 20 per quarter, and would only need 100 employees and 100 wealth invested.