In a setting with a multiverse where you can travel between dimensions, what would merchant trade?
What prevents them from buying as many toilet paper as they can, go to a paradisiac dimension where toilet paper is valuable as fuck, and live the rest of their days drinking cocktails on the beach?
I have an interdimentional merchant NPC in my game, and I didn't know what to answer when a player asked me this. Can you guys help me there?
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>What prevents them from buying as many toilet paper as they can, go to a paradisiac dimension where toilet paper is valuable as fuck, and live the rest of their days drinking cocktails on the beach?
Nothing except the process of acquiring the toilet paper and getting it from point a to point b. Actually, you just described the core of mercantilism right there. Find something people are willing to pay for, go get it for cheap, and bring it back to sell.
I came up with a character that does just that.
He is a tailor that makes suits of valuable and rare fabrics which are both stylish and armoured.
Heres a picture of his bodyguards.
Merchants aren't usually set for life after one transaction, though. If it was that easy you'd have mass migration to eden-like dimensions and nobody would work anymore after a shot while.
I'm looking for a reason for them to continue trading. The only one I found that was decent was that their dimension was devoid of natural ressources and so they bought some back in exchange of tech, but it's quite meh.
Sigh...
GURPS Infinite Worlds. And I don't even mean this as "GURSP for everything". This is one of their better settings (and pretty much default setting for all GURPS games), with entire chapters dedicated to economic endevours within the multiverse, including all possible fuck-ups.
I really miss times when GURPS was providing settings too and not just crunch for your own homebrews, those were always quality stuff.
>I'm looking for a reason for them to continue trading.
Obviously they haven't hit it big yet. Or frequently make bad business decisions. Or they just like their job that much.
How cheap is it to travel between dimensions? Is it safe? How reliable is it? What kind of objects can travel with you? How many dimensions are available at a given time? How long is dimensional transition? How much can the merchant carry with him?
Also how does he know what to stock?
OP, watch the opening operation of Valerian. It's pretty much this, and it's pretty interesting in how they handle it (you need special equipment to see the other dimension's stalls and even more specialized equipment to interact or transfer objects... such as a gun and your hand to shoot bad guys on the other side).
Interdimentional
The settings are still there, m8. They're still waiting for you to play with them.
Homeline's so fucked up.
Homeline was always fucked up. Reading the old materials and comparing them with 3e is pretty fun, because you see that Homeline was never intended as the "good guys", but rather (very) nominal heroes that are mostly heroic by the virtue of their enemies being into open genocide.
thanks user, I will look into it.
That's the core of my question. Which parameters would make it a profitable venture?
I need a reliable way to go back and forth between known dimensions (otherwise the merchant is fucked since he can't know what to buy and what to sell, not to mention go back to his starting point), but the rest is pretty vague for now.
Easy answer
Either dimension travel is so expensive that while he sell his wares at a high price, his net profit is still relative low. It's a living.
OR... Dimension travel is cheap and easy and the merchant can't maintain a monopoly of any given product.
He may make a good profit for a couple of weeks, but soon other merchants will discover the lucrative marked.
In a competitive marked the prices will eventually find an equilibrium.
Is there a common commodity between dimensions or bank notes that they use? If not, what does the merchant bater for? Does he trade for something used as currency in his dimension? If so what is stopping him from going to the El Dorado dimension and trading for their golden dirt?
The only thing I can think of is a common currency being the substance that makes inter-dimensional travel possible and that is equally distributed among dimensions making differences between the relative wealth of dimensions their ability to mine/refine/manufacture this material or their comparative industrial capabilities to trade for it. This also raises the question about more advanced/developed/capable dimensions invading those that lack the ability to defend their resources.
>What prevents them from buying as many toilet paper as they can, go to a paradisiac dimension where toilet paper is valuable as fuck, and live the rest of their days drinking cocktails on the beach?
They would crash the TP market and make very little money.
How about this:
1) Find new dimension with no competition inside
2) Start mining operation
3) Haul things to home
4) Profit
They would stay in the dimension where TP is valuable, not come back to theirs.
The issue is not long term profit, but people going to another dimension with a cargo so valuable that they are set for life there. And the most expensive/unreliable/limited you make travel, the more the latter becomes interesting compared to regular trade routes.
Make some time cops? Like the Q continuum but lawful neutral, they're omniscient but they only care about keeping balance.
Omniscient bureaucracy may suck the fun out of exploring the multiverse and trading stuff.
Might be the solution, though, if they only take care of big criminals, like DnD Inevitables do.
Yeah, like if someone tries to corner the TP market they get a smack in the face from the omniscients but their real concern is with the kingpins
Or you could go the lawful asshole route and have them treat every crime equally severely so they're feared by everyone
>What prevents them from buying as many toilet paper as they can, go to a paradisiac dimension where toilet paper is valuable as fuck
And how would they find such a dimension?
Let's consider a parallel scenario: what prevents an adventurer from acquiring a cartload of salt, travelling to a place where salt is extremely valuable, and becoming set for life?
It's just GM fiat.
All you have to say, in either case, is that the game isn't about being a merchant, it's about being an adventurer. Arbitrage shouldn't be the focus any more than marriage or accounting.
Same thing that prevented it IRL, I guess.
A multiverse having a lot more places than our world, theorically you could find somewhere where salt is even more valuale and the living conditions are awesome.
Multiverses with infinite dimensions are like that; if you are too lazy to do the dishes, you can always switch to a similar dimension where you've already done the dishes (and you're married with twin lingerie models, while youre at it.
>A multiverse having a lot more places than our world
Having "more places" means it's harder to find the exact place you want to find, not easier.
If there's an infinity of choice, it becomes infinitely impossible within your lifespan.
Again, GM fiat.
If there's an infinity of choices, you can't go back to your starting point. You must have some way to choose your destination in order to have commercial ventures.
(I think this was the topic of a short sci-fi story, btw. Some boy working in a bar where most of the partons were interdimentional travellers. Don't remember the author)
>Nothing except the process of acquiring the toilet paper and getting it from point a to point b.
Whihc of course means that only really large entities who could carry more stuff between worlds could really make money selling toilet paper and thus giantesses would be the basis for all interdimensional mega corporations.
OP here. Thanks for all your replies, guys, however I'm beginning to think I should have chosen another innocuous item instead of toilet paper in my example/
Thats assuming you managed to acquire information for the scheme. Not to mention the cost related to the process of acquiring and transfering. Billion of planets among universes among billion of multiverse. Even more if you have competitors.
But what if the cost of travelling increases due to the mass being transfered?
Then it would make much more sense to use shortstacks as information couriers, since a patentable advanced manufacturing process would give you an advantage through quality and efficiency compared to the local methods (if any!).
Having an infinite number of easily accessible worlds is the wrong way to go about multiverse building. Either cut that shit down to a small number of worlds that you can more easily fit into a coherent setting, make it harder or take longer to get between worlds, or some other limiter.
Honestly there'd be a break even point at which the volume of goods sold at any, even small, gross profit would provide enough to pay for the costs of travel while also providing a net profit - below that shortstacks would be best, and above it giantesses.
So two kinds of multiversal trade megacorporations: Giantess Inc. and Shortstack Ltd.
Some basic economic logic here:
Possibility 1:
Travel through the multiverse is common. This means that all of the obvious get rich quick schemes have already been taken by someone else.
You will be forced to find a more dangerous option that is less likely to have already been taken. This means a lot of exploring dangerous worlds that no one else has in hopes of finding one you can profit off of.
Possibility 2:
Travel through the multiverse is uncommon. Option 2 requires a force to prevent people from traveling the multiverse. If multiverse travel is available the number and variety of worlds will mean plenty of people are able to do it. The only way for it to remain uncommon is for it to actively be suppressed.
If travel is illegal and an multiverse police force prevents people from traveling, they are most likely to focus on the 'main worlds' and the ones most likely to be profitable. This will force you to either be subtle and smuggle goods past embargo (and likely do so consistently to be able to retire) or to search out dangerous and un-patrolled worlds and hope they are profitable.
Either way, once you find a world to profit off of then you have another problem. You are probably unfamiliar with the language, culture, and laws of this new world and have no valid form of paperwork for operating in that world. This means you have to network and learn how that world works so that you can properly function in society.
But you still have a third problem. Whatever world you have found to profit off of already has an entrenched society. Whatever you want to sell will disrupt the currently established order (or at least it will if it's worth enough for you to retire off of). This is a special interest group with power and connections that will try and stop the entrance of your goods (if your dealing in raw goods) or steal your idea (if you are working more with a technology). Figure out a way to deal with them and you're all set.
>What prevents them from buying as many toilet paper as they can, go to a paradisiac dimension where toilet paper is valuable as fuck, and live the rest of their days drinking cocktails on the beach?
The fact that paradisiac dimension didn't suddenly pop out of nowhere, so everyone and their dog are already selling TP to them, and TP was devalued there.
Moreover, if TP is so eggspensive, what idiot would be selling it to you for cheap if he can hire a transportation company and sell it for a high price directly to the client and just pay a transportation fee? If anything you are wiping your ass with used newspapers because TP is expensive AF for personal use, and there's a multiversal TP rush with megacorps destroying whole ecosystems and displacing native populations to make way for TP manufacturing.
In a stable market all prices are already adjusted accordingly.
If your dimensional travelers can think up whatever criteria or description for a universe they want, punch it into their machine, and pop over to a universe matching those criteria, then they're basically gods. Sort of like time travelers, there may be conflict and society among themselves (probably trading information? Technologies, good dimensional coordinates, and news/gossip/warnings about other dimensional travelers), but they won't really need anything from non-dimension travelers.
If not, then it's entirely based around finding a universe. If 99% of universes are uninhabitable, 99% of what's remaining aren't inhabited, 99% of what's remaining don't have sapients, and 99% of what's remaining are worlds fairly like our own (even if they have magic or whatnot, it's not a free-for-all post-scarcity utopia), you're left having to send probes out or whatever to a pretty huge number of universes before finding one that's perfect for gaming the system. It's probably easier and less of a gamble to just keep an index of the plentiful resources and needs between different universes and do commerce in a normal way.
But to answer the OP question, I imagine the most frequent trade would be raw resources from uninhabited universes (where there's no one to object to mining) to worlds that need said resources.
>What prevents them from buying as many toilet paper as they can, go to a paradisiac dimension where toilet paper is valuable as fuck, and live the rest of their days drinking cocktails on the beach?
Why not skip the TP and go to a paradise where drinks are free.
>Make it into Planet of Hats
Seriously, why people are still doing this shit? That's the worst imaginable world-building.