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I'm imagining something like this.
You copy the airship or mammoths that exist today. You turn Crossing into the central hub. Each airship takes 5 minutes regardless of destination, 10 minutes for a round trip, 1 minute stops. You can make the ones that travel to the islands larger and more elegant to explain the speed and price differences. This means that traders insure you are never more than 11 minutes from crossing > somewhere centralized. It would greatly help with getting people together for festivals or events or even just traveling for the sake of traveling when you don't have all day to wait for barges and boats.
It costs a decent amount of platinum to ride these, and they connect each of the guilds and a few outposts to make a decent network. All connections are made in the crossings. Ratha -> Aesry is really Ratha -> Crossing -> Aesery, paying for each leg.
Initial prices are exorbitant. 500 platinum for a trip from crossing to Aesry. 100 platinum for a trip from crossing to shard. Charisma can reduce up to 20% of this cost (0-100 points, 1% per 5 ranks). Trading can reduce up to 80% (0-1750 ranks). Linear progression. A trader with 1750 trading and 100 charisma gets on for free, with a comment about how their very presence will be good for business. Price doubles if you include a caravan, after the reductions. If a trader leads a group, then everyone pays based on the leader's charisma and skill.
As a potential future improvement, while on the airship, you can "bribe captain" to have him push his slaves...er respected workers... into going faster. It decreases travel time to one trip, and the airship waits at that destination. As another future improvement, you could allow traders to buy ticket books they would stamp. It would cost them 15x their ticket price, and they could buy one once a month. They could then sell this in their stores for a small markup. Each book would contain 10 tickets, and a caravan would need it's own slip. It would use the same technology as the arena slips.
Yes, this would improve inter-provincial trading, but not to a point where it outpaces hunting.
While I'm not opposed to the idea of players owning airships in general, I do feel that one of the last things DR needs is for the world to feel even smaller due to even faster travel. On foot I can already get halfway across the continent in a matter of minutes. For me this is a look-and-feel, aesthetic, immersion issue. I understand the desire for convenience, but regular travel is already very fast (much too fast, imo) and we already have things like moongates for even faster travel.
I still cringe a little whenever barge/gondola/etc times are reduced rather than the trip/travel-mechanics made more interesting. I guess I just like the world to feel large and for travel to be a meaningful endeavor. Better to make travel more interesting than faster.
I still cringe a little whenever barge/gondola/etc times are reduced rather than the trip/travel-mechanics made more interesting. I guess I just like the world to feel large and for travel to be a meaningful endeavor. Better to make travel more interesting than faster.
That's right. Not player-owned, just player used with a major perk to traders. The expense would be a major deterant to most people, so traveling the old fashioned way would still be incentivized. It also wouldn't want to do too much unless you were rolling in platinum, but it just gives an alternative and increases the utility value of the class.
