[TML] First Session CT Questions - long

[Keith Grant]

Warning, long post ahead.

--- Eris Reddoch <erisred at bellsouth.net> wrote:
<<snip>>
> 
> How do you decide this?
> 
> Keith, could you expand on these points?  I don't
> recall
> Pop, Tech, or Port levels being tied directly to the
> types of
> _shops_ available on worlds.
> 
> Are you using house rules for this?  Would you tell
> us more
> about them?
> 
> Eris

This is basically house rules stuff.

Tech level will affect only what goods are available
locally.  Where possible, shopkeepers will generally
prefer to stock locally made goods - its cheaper. 
Transport costs less if its locally produced, plus you
don't have to bother getting it cleared through
customs.

Now, there will always be some people who want goods
better than what can be made locally.  On worlds with
a large population, there will be enough of them to
support niche shops that bring in off-world imports
and sell them at a markup.  On a lower population
world, the customer base needed to make those shops
viable is less likely to be there.  On a world with a
population of only a few thousand people, how many of
them need high-tech military grade firearms?  How long
will those people's business pay a shopkeepers
expenses?  Not for very long.  Now, there will still
be enough demand that if someone did want a gauss
rifle, one shopkeep or another would be able to order
it in from offworld, if you don't mind waiting at
least three weeks and paying a large markup.  But no
shopkeeper is going to import and stock gauss rifles
if he's only going to sell one every other year.

Next, where the starport comes into it.  I see a
starport as being rather like an airport.  You've got
everything from the dinky little ones in small towns
with maybe two runways and no facilities that aren't
needed for maintaining the very limited number of
aircraft that come there.  Large, A class starports on
high pop worlds, however, are more than that.  They
have all the stuff listed in the rulebooks, of course,
but think of the other things that would logically be
built there.  Hotels to stay in while you wait for
your connecting flight.  Gift shops, where businessmen
buy useless souvenirs for the wife and kids.  Duty
free shops - the first stores you run into on the far
side of the extrality line.  Stores where, SPA regs
permitting, you can get all sorts of stuff that would
be illegal anywhere else on the planet.  Banned books,
alcohol, firearms, you name it, and as long as you
don't try to take it back through customs, you're all
set.


You asked what rules I'm using.  The answer is that
I'm not using hard rules.  When a player asks "can I
buy X here?"  The question I have to answer as a
referee is "Would someone selling X here be able to
turn a profit?"  When there's no profit, there's no
store.

YMMV,

Keith Grant

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