Post:Commodities/Contracts Rewrite - 08/19/2011 - 18:57

Re: Commodities/Contracts Rewrite · on 08/19/2011 06:57 PM CDT	1182
>>But what about illegal goods?! I'm glad you asked! Illegal goods are, well, illegal. This will likely be a post-initial-release thing, but I plan to implement a system that allows restriction of goods in certain justice areas (Crossing, Clans, etc). For instance, let's say that Rissan Cigars are illegal in Zoluren. If you take a caravan that has Rissan Cigars on it through any place in P1 that has guards, they may search your caravan and find your illegal goods. There will be a new crime associated with this, etc. Now, the flip side is, despite (or even because of) the illegality of these cigars, people will pay drastically more for illegal goods. There might be a shady merchant that travels around P1 and is willing to buy up to 4 crates of Rissan Cigars at an exorbitant price. However, you'll need to somehow GET your cigars to him, which will put you at risk, etc. A trader will be able to OBSCURE [ILLEGAL GOOD] WITH [OTHER GOOD]. This will perform a skill check against the illegal good, augmented by the value of the other good. The result of that skill check will somehow factor into the guards trying to search your caravan. The more expensive the good you use to obscure your smuggled cargo with, the higher your chance is to slip past the guard. There may be player interaction as well - They may be able to search your caravan and be able to accuse you of smuggling if they are successful in finding goods that are illegal in your current justice area. Just an idea but I kind of like it. In doing this, you sacrifice the other good entirely. The work you're doing to obscure your illegal good costs you the value of one unit of your other good, so you have to make the value estimation there. I'm also mulling the notion of making guards a little more unique and giving some of them a predilection toward searching caravans, but I'm not sure that's worth it. Maybe? Also, thieves might be able to help you obscure your goods, with your permission. This is totally just an idea, but we could use this system to allow people to, say, smuggle goods to some enemy camp through some checkpoint. Some really cool mini-quest or task ideas come out of this :). Just to be clear, this is an idea for something that I want to do AFTER the system has stabilized and I've managed to balance things. But, this is the way that a smuggling system could go.
This message was originally posted in The Traders \ General Discussions -- Traders, by DR-SOCHARIS on the play.net forums.