This is part of my larger review of Traveller. While writing it I found I had too much to say on trade, so I thought I should separate it out. For context, my game ended up having a lot of trade in it. My players found it was a good way to make money (it is) and generally enjoyed it, but I found that it led to balancing issues down the line, because making a profit is too easy.

Freight plus speculative cargo is perhaps one of the most powerful money makers for any party, provided they have access to a ship and someone with Broker.

What a Ship Costs

We can break down the core loop of most sandbox play in Traveller around the cost of the ship the players are using. Provided you are not running a merchant prince style campaign, the mortgage on your ship will be the biggest expense you have. You could go for being pirates, but depending on the environment, being a paying citizen is worth the cash.

This means that priority number one for many groups is their monthly mortgage and maintenance. Back of the envelope, a Class A Far Trader has a monthly mortgage of around 188k, plus 3.7k a month in maintenance and, assuming max jumps every week, around 80k of premium fuel. For simplicity, let's say it costs 270k a month to run the ship. It has 64 tonnes of cargo space and J-2. Let's see what you can make.

Freight

Freight is the easiest. Assuming your Broker check is +2, you would expect on average 14 lots of incidental cargo to be available, which should be just under 50 tonnes of freight. Let's say you manage to fit one minor lot as well, to take it to 15 lots total on your ship.

Now we can look at what that pays by distance. The monthly figures assume a J-2 ship chaining jumps at a week each, so J-3 and J-4 trips take two jumps and J-5 and J-6 trips take three.

Distance	J-1	J-2	J-3	J-4	J-5	J-6
Trips per month	4	4	2	2	1.33	1.33
Per trip	50k	80k	150k	350k	385k	4300k
Per month	200k	320k	300k	700k	513k	5733k

So by doing 4 J-2 routes we can cover the cost of the ship with around 50k credits left each month. This of course is based on having a reasonably average route, which isn't always possible, but it means that as a Traveller, ship costs are covered by freight hauling.

Low Berths

Of course there are also low berths on a Far Trader (I'm assuming you are using the staterooms for something). Again assuming a +2 Steward, you should be able to fill your 6 low berths, for additional income of:

Distance	J-1	J-2	J-3	J-4	J-5	J-6
Per trip	4k	8k	13k	26k	78k	576k
Per month	17k	31k	26k	52k	104k	768k

This means that over a month, a Class A Far Trader can make a tidy 80k profit doing a set of J-2 routes of freight and passengers.

What This Means for Your Game

The obvious implication is that, as written, the mortgage on your group's ship will be lower than the potential income from running simple freight. If you want to rely on the need to pay for your ship to drive riskier choices, you need to come up with reasons not to rely on running freight. The simplest option is to have jobs that pay out more than you would get from freight. As an example, let's say a job takes a month to complete and has a reasonable amount of risk, e.g. combat or criminality. Then you would need to be giving them at least 350k, plus the job's own expenses, for start of game jobs.

Speculative Cargo

So far it seems fine, provided the party has limited funds to begin with. Let's assume the GM is giving out slightly more than freight pays, so on average your group makes about 400k a month before costs, or around 130k in profit once you deduct running costs. Eventually though, the pains of capitalism and the need to make more will come into effect.

The next obvious thing is speculative cargo. I won't get too into the weeds on this, but we can assume that a well charted course can get you a +2 DM on sale and purchase. With a Broker of +2 that totals +4, so on 3D you will on average be rolling around 14, which means you purchase at 70% and sell at 115%. That means for each credit you spend, you can expect to get back 1.64 credits.

After 6 months (a reasonable amount of time for a few sessions of a globe-trotting game), assuming no other big expenses, the party would have about 780k credits to bankroll. Assuming they purchase as much as they can and plot a reasonable course, we would expect a profit of about 500k on the first route. Of course, unlike freight, speculative cargo stacks with the amount you have. Every time they plot one of these courses the profits get bigger, and two trips more than doubles your money. Eventually the 64 tonne hold and the goods available will cap this, and every tonne of speculative cargo is a tonne you aren't hauling as freight, but by then the party has plenty of money.

This tells us that unless we use large taxes and fees, speculative cargo will just outscale any other income source. So if your party is profit motivated, why would they do anything different? Obviously you can go and do the mercantile campaign, but if you want to hold on to the grittier, scrappy play style it just won't work. As the party's capital balloons, you as the GM are forced to either make the problem worse by offering higher and higher paying jobs, or find ways to sink that cash into something that can't grow as easily.

What I'd Do About It

OK, so what do I think you as a GM should do if you want to incentivise other ways of play?

• Tax sales of speculative cargo by around 40-45%. On its own, this means an average roll of 14 loses a little money and only 15 and above makes cash. That's roughly a coin flip even with +4, so it can't be relied on unless you really know what you are doing. Of course you would ignore this for smuggled goods.
• Charge a 5% brokerage fee on both the purchase and the sale of legal speculative cargo. The figures above don't include any transaction costs, but there should be some kind of cost to trading through a port. On top of a 40% tax, a roll of 14 gets back about 0.86 credits per credit spent, a 15 also loses money, and only 16 and above makes cash, which is only about 37.5% of rolls with +4. At a 45% tax, even a 16 only about breaks even. Again, you would ignore this for smuggled goods.
• Define "on time" as 1 week for freight. This stops the super easy J-6 route profit.
• Consider some kind of insurance for freight and low berths, maybe 2k per tonne of cargo capacity and 2k per low berth per month. On a Far Trader that's 128k for cargo, about 40% of the 320k J-2 freight income, and 12k for berths, about 38% of the 31k berth income. The 140k total takes J-2 hauling from an 80k profit to a loss of about 60k a month once ship costs are paid. Obviously you could ignore this for smuggling, but a Far Trader isn't your normal ship and anyone using it would want to know you are insured for damages.

With these kinds of changes, good profit making looks more like smuggling or being a very good broker, which forces players to consider other ways of making money than just running cargo about.