A Word or Two about Tradeskills
[In which Scrappy ruminates on economics and the trades.]

Why do people want tradeskills?
Character breadth, unique items, the thrill of creation, profit, busy
work, experience. Any of these motivations can drive a player to spend
time on a trade. Some of the role-playing aspects are difficult to
quantify, but we can probably summarize by saying the trades should be
fun. There has to be some fun things to do with trades and the products
they deliver if the role-players are to be happy.

The economic aspects of trades are what I want to spend more time on.
For a trade to be economically viable, it must provide tangible
benefits.

Motivating a Tradesman

Trades are an investment. A character invests experience, time, and
money to work with a trade and develop the necessary skills. So what is
the expected return on investment?

In some RPGs, the experience component is provided by practicing the
skill. The more time you invest in making things, the better you
become. On Rubi-Ka however, technology gives us a much more flexible
system for genetic evolution. Experience gained from all activities is
pooled (IPs) and may be applied toward the advancement of any skill.
What this means to every citizen is that IPs must be carefully allocated
from the pool; a point spent toward one skill means some other skill
will have to wait. As a part of deciding how to use IPs, a person will
have to ask the question "will improving this skill help me?" If
increasing a skill can lead to enhanced experience gain, increased
income, or saves time, it has benefit.

When improving any non-trade skills, the justification is clear. Combat
and defensive skills are used extensively in the game, and all will
contribute to a character's ability to gain experience via combat.

Trade skills are more difficult to justify. We need to look at the
value of a trade and compare it to the cost of the required skills.
There are 2 economy types for trades; 'Service' trades and 'Inventory'
trades.

Service trades are demand oriented. Characters can utilize trade
skills to create new items from ingredients provided by customers.
There is therefore no need to keep stock on hand, though there must be
a ready supply of customers. For example, a character can develop Nano
Programming, which allows one to assemble implants. The benefit would
be some experience gain, and providing assembly as a service can create
income. The cost for this is player time. If the experience and income
are sufficient, the player may see this as a viable tradeskill.

Inventory trades are supply oriented. The idea is to create a supply of
unique goods and hope that other players will buy them. This type of
trade usually involves several steps in the creation process and is not
well suited as a service business. The list of ingredients is typically
too large and specialized to expect a large number of players to collect
and submit them for assembly. Likewise, the list of required trade
skills may be too large to allow for a casual tradesman to be
successful at the craft. For success, the ingredients must be
stockpiled and assembled in batches. The market for a particular
product may not exist at the time of manufacture, and will have to be
created when there is inventory. Products that are likely to be
profitable must be chosen over those that would just collect dust in
inventory. Once the tradesman has accumulated sufficient stock,
products can be auctioned to the public for prices that cover the cost
of manufacturing, labor, and intangibles. The player has gained
experience and income at the cost of time. Again, if the rewards have
been sufficient the player may find the trade to be a worthwhile use of
resources.

The application of trade skills to create a product gives the player
experience points. Is the experience gain sufficient to motivate a
player to pursue the trade? Service trades have no inventory
investment and the experience gain is virtually a side-effect of
performing the service for cash. Clearly Service trades can be viable.

Inventory trades require up-front investment for ingredients. If some
ingredients are only found in the wild, then additional time must be
invested to find or buy those items. Factory equipment must be
purchased and maintained (gem cutters, ore extractors, etc.) Blueprints
and recipes must be discovered and tested. New products must be
advertised to create a market. If products cannot be sold for a price
that recovers the cost of doing business, then the trade is not viable.

To date, Inventory trades on Rubi-Ka are not viable. If a tradesman
creates a product, it cannot be sold for anywhere near cost to a shop.
This effectively means that crafting simple goods for experience is not
viable, since the cost of materials is a constant cash drain and likely
exceeds the cost of gaining experience from combat. This leaves
players as the only potential customers. To convince a
player to buy a handmade product, it must have clear value. An item
that can be purchased in a shop must be sold for a lower price if made
by a tradesman or the tradesman will not be able to sell it. Unique
items have no baseline shop price, and so can sell for an arbitrary
amount. However, the customer must see a value to the product and the
price must suit the value. If you make a Silky Monogrammed Pillow, will
anyone come to sit on it?

Summary

The point of the preceding discussion is to provide some background for
a careful economic analysis of trades on Rubi-Ka. The Inventory trades
are seriously lacking and need to be evaluated for feasibility.

As an example, take a look at Nano Formula (NF) creation. It is a
complicated multi-step process. Ingredients are difficult to find.
Products are costly to manufacture (consumable ingredients.) Several
skills are required for manufacturing. Most of the products created are
available in stores. A tradesman will be motivated to create NFs only if
they can be sold at a price that exceeds the cost of materials. For
ordinary nanos this price exceeds the price requested by shops for the
same product, therefore making those products obsolete. Some NFs may
only be made by this trade, so there is a potential market for them.
However, the ingredients are hard to find. This has the effect of
raising the price in a very small market. Not a bad thing really, but
the limited availability of components makes these special NFs too rare.
The market potential is so small that only the hardiest of tradesmen
would dare to try and make a regular profit at it. This kind of
niche-market trade should be possible, but not by any means the only way
of capitalizing on an Inventory trade.

Products should be saleable to shops for just under the manufacture
cost. This would allow the tradesman to recover from bad inventory
decisions or experiment with new products and only incur a small loss.
It would also encourage the more retail-minded players to try opening up
shop and gaining their experience mainly from their craft.

The materials sold in shops should sell for less, in particular when
those materials are used to make common items sold by those same shops.
This would open a market for common products, though it will have a
narrow profit margin compared to rarer specialty items.

Materials required for trade-only products should be more common. Not
as commonn as Monster Parts, but certainly more common than they are
now. Perhaps some things should be found in specific locations
(Instruction Discs in Jobe??), in addition to the current totally random
placement.

As mentioned before, the trades are a considerable investment. When the
mechanics of manufacturing don't function (due to bugs), players can get
very upset about the loss of time and money. If certain trades are not
functional (as has been the case with several so far), it is essential
to prevent their use until implemented correctly.

Developing trade skills seems to have a lot of potential on Rub-Ka. I
look forward to the day when I'll actually stop and think when
allocating IPs:

"Hmm, SMG or Quantum Field Theory?"