Trade and Bartering in the Pacific

[Wrageowrapper]

Hello forge members,

In between working on my main RPG I have been fiddling about with a new game set in pre-colonial Eastern Australia and Tasmania, New Zealand and the South Pacific. I have a degree in Aboriginal Studies and am an amature Pacific historian so my main goal with this game is to educate players that the pacific had a rich history, socially as well as culturally, before colonization.
It is more of an experience in being in that kind of an environment rather than doing battle with dragons and aliens (though there are supernatural elements as well). It is set on its own island that I have created somewhere off the coast of Eastern Australia and west of New Zealand. Players will see the Tongan and Yap empires, Maori war fleets, Tasmanian hunting parties, Hawaiian religious festivals  and occasionally the spirits as they trick the mortals for a laugh.
Players can chose from eight different clans which act as classes and by classes I mean in the traditional social stratification sense and not paladins and space rangers. They are also given a totem to follow which is chosen by dice roll. Characters advance in a similar way to Vampire the masquerade. Each totem and class has strict rules that they must abide by. For example the Kea Itopi class must tattoo themselves (ala Maori warriors) while the Ha Manadji can only perform their religious rites while intoxicated (ala Papuan shamanism). Each totem is given a mana (a means of generating power), an utu (revenge towards a certain spirit) and a tapu. Some of the tapu's (taboo) contradict some of the abilities a class provides adding in some extra challenges. All abilities are known as knowledges which are only learned and perfected with experience and not experience points.

Anyway one thing that I have become stuck in is working out a bartering system. I don't want any form of currency at all, instead players need to barter goods they have collected for other goods. In a system with a currency in place there is no real problem, a bastard sword always costs 100g, if you have points in commerce it might go down a few gold, if you have poor charisma it might go up a few. But there is a clear mathematical equation as to how much a bastard sword costs for a particular character. But how many spears do you need to buy one necklace? How many eggs can you get for selling one canoe? There doesn't seem to be anything clear because what is being sold and what is used for currency can be anything and everything.

My only option as I see it is bartering is purely roleplaying only and any character modifiers dealing with this are simply "acted" out.

I don't really mind that way of dealing with a barter but can anyone think of anything else that might work better?

Thanks,

Daniel.

[jag]

I think roleplaying it based on situation is most reasonable way to go about it.  The "easy" way to do it is to assign an abstract cost to items, and then say that a given bundle of goods is barterable for another bundle if their total abstract cost is roughly equivalent -- this in effect makes a monetary system that's hidden from the players.  But if the players don't know the abstract cost (which might be important for the barter feel), then it's very opaque to them, and likely unsatisfying.

In the absence of an external solution to set prices, there isn't any objective way to say if a given trade is good or not.  It depends totally on the availability of goods and the need of the individuals at that time.  If i'm from an island on which there are many brilliant conch shells on the beaches, then i probably can't get a meal for a conch shell.  But if i take this same shell to another island which only rarely sees such things, then i can probably trade it for something extravagant.  Similarly, you can get a lot for 3 spears if someone's about to go into battle unarmed, but less if the island is peaceful.  Such disparities are exactly what drives trade.

In the end, i think just roleplaying the situations as they come will save you lots of work, and be just as, if not more, plausible than developing a complicated barter system.

james

[Eero Tuovinen]

Ha ha haa, such an excellent vision for a game! I'm saying this partially because the core idea - educating people about real-world history and cultures - is something I've worked on myself on several different occasions. Here's some viewpoints:

What's with the D&D shit? The idea of doing a Polynesia game with some heavy-duty, condensed info on the milieu and its issues sounds excellent, but twisting in a D&D set-up with an adventuring party based on splats... I don't see the attraction. I want to play chiefs, traders, warriors, mothers and children of the area, not something ultimately foreign to the setting. I want to have reasonably authentic religious and cultural concerns, not character classes "based on" this or that real-world phenomenon. I want a character that gets to ride a whale, and it's a big fucking deal, because there's no high fantasy context messing with the sense of achievement. I also want to fight against the British colonialists and lose.

So OK, not very relevant for what you want, but that's my take. Onwards:

There are many ways of doing a barter system like that. The currency-based systems in roleplaying games are anyway laughably unlike anything the real world offers (a bastard sword always costs 100g, indeed...), so improving on them is no great feat. For example, you could just give all items a virtual currency value and decide that NPCs only agree to trades that benefit them according to these values. So if you consider a currency-based system feasible and good, this'll be just as much so.

For a more intricate system, consider that characters engaging in barter will want things that a) preserve their value, b) others want or c) they can use themselves. Likewise, they will want to get rid of things that a) are prone to spoil, b) they don't want or c) others don't want. Any trade satisfying all these conditions could be a "good" deal that is automatically accepted, while you could have a barter skill that could be used to override one or more categories where the trade at hand is lacking. Perhaps bundling "more" trade items could also compensate things like this, so that while a NPC could consider trading three necklaces for three spears a "bad" deal (perhaps determined by an initial barter check influenced by how the trade fulfills the above categories locally), the player could then buy a reroll for the check by offering two more spears, or whatever.

A lot about these cases depends on the general method for conflict resolution, so I think you should work on that; how do you determine whether a character manages to sail to a neighboring island safely? How do you find out whether he manages to hide from his enemies? Answer that and you have a basis for figuring out whether the character can buy enough spears to arm his whole war party.

Ultimately though, if you want to make an adventure game set in Polynesia, it's not a bad idea to skip the equipment circus altogether. That setting is far from equipment-centered, so there is little tactical consideration in trading spears for coconuts - it's just typical rpg shit that gets in the way of slaying volcano gods or whatever you imagine an adventuring party doing in that setting. You could just give the party-combine a "Influence" value for each island community they visit, which could then be used in a conflict resolution check to see if they can get whatever they need from the islanders. This could then range from helpers to spears to pretty beads usable for bribing other islanders, whatever.

[David B. Goode]

Daniel,

I think this is an excellent game idea. I've drawn a lot from real world history in my own games and players always seem to get a little thrill when they realize that what they're dealing with comes from there own world.

I think James and Jag have offered great advice on the barter system, an abstract value assigned to items can give your players at least a basis to work from, and then taking into account current events, like the commonality of an item in a place or the need for it can give variations on that value. But, being an expert yourself, do you have any historical information that might give some basis of value?

[contracycle]

I don't really mind that way of dealing with a barter but can anyone think of anything else that might work better?

Sure - there is the way it was actually done in pre-complex societies.  The value of a given good is proportional to the quantity of labour it takes to make, measured in labour time.  This makes for a very equitable exchange in intimate communities, because people know roughly how long and how much effort it takes to create a given thing by seeing the people around them do so.  Both parties to the trade are well informed as to the relative "value" of a given good and can thus negotiate a fair exchange of embodied labour.  They are unlikely to be highly specialised producers anyway, and liable to produce for need rather than for trade as such.

This breaks down when the individual has no ability to view the productive process of a good.  So long distance trade between two separated cultures creates a special case in which one or both parties has literally no idea how valuable a good is, that is, the amount of labour embodied in its creation.  In such cases the only information available is the other party's estimate of its relative value, and it is this inequitable trade which creates the circumstances in which, say, cheap glass beads can be traded for valuable furs.

To make this work, you still need a schedule of "prices", but the price is the aggregate amount of labour embodied in a given good.  You can then allow players to make some sort of creative task which determines the actual amount of labour time required depending on skill, which will output a value that varies around the aggregate.  Skilled producers therefore produce more goods more quickly than unskilled producers, but seeing as the exchange value of a good is equivalent to the AGGREGATE quantity of embodied labour, skilled producers are therefore also producing greater value per unit time.  Thus, if the aggregate time to produce a spear is say 10 hours, and you can do it in 8, you are making a "profit", because your spear still has a trade value equivalent to 10 hours.  And if you are poor producer and require 12 hours to make a spear, you are making a loss because you cannot trade it for a product embodying 12 hours of labour time, but only the aggregate value of 10.

This message was brought to you by Karl Marx and the Labour Theory of Value.

[Alfryd]

My only option as I see it is bartering is purely roleplaying only and any character modifiers dealing with this are simply "acted" out.

Personally, I'd learn toward a 'virtual currency system', PLUS a rough guide to exchange rates based on specific items for the players to familiarise themselves with, PLUS a listing of notable rarities or surpluses by major island or island group (there's only so many locations, right?) PLUS making sure that trade or barter is reasonably important to player advancment or the overall plot.

Trading commodities might not be important for individual players, but might be important for raising status within the clan, and thus accessing better services/spells or what have you.
Make a list of major commodities, 'default' prices, and whether they're abundant, common, valued, rare or absent on a given island or island group.  Then you can set up price multipliers and other situational pros/cons to configure whether the players can expect a given barter to go well.  Even isolated islands indulge in trade on occasion and know what to expect in terms of exchange ratio, so it wouldn't be entirely down to role-play.  Most would have a fair idea if they're being fleeced.

I would also like to chip in that the setting sounds intriguing.