Fwurg

[The Lifebringer Clans]

So, first completely offtopic post. I hope nobody minds.

Here's the thing. Me and a couple of friends have the idea of starting a trade-based roleplaying campaign, in which the characters are a group of merchants. They will start by operating a small trading caravan, and progress to setting up a large trading empire over the course of the game. This campaign consists of two main elements:

• There will be an adventure-of-the-week related to the characters' current location, contacts, plans, etc. The system for this will likely be D&D 3.5.
• Next to that, there will be a trading game component, in which players decide to haul goods from a to b, buy cheap things, sell them where they're more expensive, and so on. Eventually, this will have to incorporate power bases, headquarters, trade routes, multiple caravans, etc. The system for this is yet to be developed.

My question to everyone: Do you know of any nice trade caravan based game type things that we could borrow ideas from?

My question to brend and the admin: The trade system will likely be a (web-based) application. I'm trying to pick a development technology. How is development in dokuwiki working out for you?

It doesn't have to be pretty, the main factors we're concerned with are development time and effort. I guess the alternatives we're currently looking at are bare PHP/MySQL, bare Java, or Java with a stack of technologies on top (I suppose I could use this project to learn Tapestry...)

[Veolian Commonwealth]

First off I would seperate the game form the technologies used; technology is always a bit off when trying to match a concept (the game mechanics in this case) to reality (the implementation in whatever you choose).

DokuWiki was chosen because it is designed from the ground up instead of 'evolved' into what it is now. Sure it started out as a simply wiki engine, but most features are thoroughly thought out (and well-documented to boot). It has a nice plugin structure, but most plugins focus mainly on actual wiki-ish things like integration with google maps, image viewing scripts or blog-like stuff. This might lead to some heavy developing on your side of the deal.

I think dokuwiki would be a good starting place due to the minimal amount of effort to get it off the ground, and it allows players to edit their data, having less load on admins/DMs.

For the interactive things (tax collector, map) I stick with html/javascript (backed by jQuery to do the heavy lifting.)

I would love to discuss this further, but mostly I find these things better done in person than in a lengthy back-and-forth posting.

EDIT: Clarification: drop me a PM if you want to set up a meeting somewhere.

[Mercury]

There is a series called the Traveller's Tales, by Mongoose Publishing. Its primary book 'Seas of Blood' lists ship mechanics for D&D (though for 3.0 - that shouldn't be too much of an issue though).

It also includes details of ship-based trade listing prices of almost a hundred different types of goods and how prices are affected by economy, distance, etc. They also give good idea's of fair prices to pay to be able to haul certain amounts of goods and they list systems for hiring mercenaries to protect caravans / ships. Definitely worth checking out.

Application wise, Brend does more development on those than myself. I merely provided the basic platform and integrated the Wiki and forum. Brend provided the icons, did a lot of work on the Wiki, and almost everything on the data management capabilities. He also improved on the map (or rather, rewrote from scratch).

Java is my native programming language, but currently we don't use it (I use it to do some basic arithmetic checks on turn reports but there is no actual coupling with the site - its all manual).

My tip:

Make the game cooperative.

[Veolian Commonwealth]

You might want to look into the Mandate of Heaven system in Exalted. You can find the system itself in the Storyteller's Companion appendix. The system deals with the modelling of power bases, influence on other factions and abstracts away some forms of bookkeeping in a (in my opinion) elegant way.

(You can find a somewhat changed version of the Mandate of Heave at my own wiki; it's for a campaign I play.)