Shipping Prices?

First up, welcome to the forums!

Second up, while I didn't find anything in 2e talking to the price of transporting cargo, and didn't find anything specific to it in 3E either, I did find the price of passage as a person. To ride coach, which is often where cargo is also held, it is 3 cp per mile to ride coach. Quick math with assumptions - average person weighs in at 100 lb, and you want to take a trip of 250 miles, that would come in at a mere 7.5 gp. General passage on a ship is said to be 1 sp per mile, so the same trip would come in at 25 gp. The rules also state to double the price for large or unusual creatures, and I think that could easily apply to cargo as well.

You can create whatever simple math you want from those to. The nuance you could add would be how much or little of the overall cargo a person is taking up as to how much to charge. Then of course if it is rare or unusual, needs more protection, and so on. Hopefully some of this helps you go forward!

With shipping, size is a important a factor as weight. If you're shipping thousands of rolls of toilet paper, you'd still have to charge for the space, because it would take up space that could be used for something else. Plus, you couldn't stack anything on top of it. This is also the reason for the difference in passenger price. Bigger room = more expensive.

I know that's not an answer, but just something to consider.

My solution would be to try to guess how much the PC would be happy paying, then charge 10% more. ?

Thanks for the welcome, Joat, and all the ideas.

I too had seen the 1sp/mile for transportation of a person, and there is the conversion on all ships that a ship can carry as many people as they can tons of cargoe, so I was debating doing along with that, but as Whipstache pointed out, there are variables. the weight, the size, the fact that people consume food, and that would more than likely be included in the transportation, or maybe not. Then again, a person can't take up a full ton of space with just themselves, so are they reducing what they can carry by taking people over just plain spice, or cloth, or etc.

The problem I'm really having is that my players are all brand new to the game. And are having a hard time getting into the Role playing mindset - but as a person living in a very, very small town out in the sticks, I'm trynig to enjoy as much as I can. Asking them to figure it out would not work, as they have no clue at all, and while I played for years...there's a reason i'm introducing them to 2e, it's all I know, and I haven't been able to game since anything newer came out...so I'm a little rusty end myself.

Part of it was me thinking it would make for a nice income as they gained levels, to offset their keep costs, but I was introducing them to the idea now (about lvl4ish) so that they can build up their business to be profitable enough for that.

Anyways...thanks again, everyone, for your input. I appreciate it. I'll be sticking around to lend my outdated input from time to time, thanks for the venue to chat with other gamers, and DMs. Cheers.

RW Shipping (last I checked anyway) tends to be priced by volume and weight. You have a palette of stuff that needs to go from point A to point B so the palette gets weighed and the freight company charges you based on one of their complex tables. I would expect those tables to be hard to locate since these companies tend to be very competitive. By the time it gets to the actual boat it's stopped being measured in palettes and been piled together into shipping containers. In the modern day, shipping by sea is by far the cheapest route (often cheaper than ground depending on distance/volume/weight). It's also the slowest.

Real world example from my experience: Someone in Montreal can send a package to Vancouver (about 3,000 miles) for about ~$10CA and it'll reliably get here in 5 days. If that same package then heads to Hawaii (2700 miles) by International Surface it'll probably run about ~$14CA and arrive in 3-6 weeks. If there's any delay on the way (which happens occasionally) then it could take as much as 12 weeks.

But that's all real-world stuff and I'm not sure if it should necessarily correlate to a fantasy setting. Your PCs probably don't have access to trains or automobiles so ships are probably their only practical option. There probably isn't an international standard for shipping containers so there's a need for longshoremen to load and unload cargo manually at each dock. All of this means the relative rates are going to be higher. It might also be more detail than your players are interested in.

This is might be one of those cases where it's better to hand wave it and make up a number you feel would be mechanically appropriate than to try to figure out a narrative formula. Personally I would avoid the formula unless there were going to be a recurring need to figure out a cargo cost and that cost needed to be consistent/predictable. Even if they're shipping items regularly, those items might not always go through the same company so some fluctuation could be expected. If I were going to design the formula anyway I'd probably use something like this:

Class 1 = Small items (anything the size of a footlocker or smaller)
(D*1cp+1sp)+S

Class 2 = Moderate items (anything up to the size of a horse)
(D*3cp+1sp)+S

Class 3 = Large items (Big bits of furniture, vehicles, large collections of equipment, etc)
(D*7cp+2gp)+S

D = Distance
S = Special Charges
- Feed (for animals, 7cp per day (or ~60 miles of D)
- Fragile (+5 gp for Class 1, +10gp for Class 2, +30gp for Class 3)

You could also add special charges if the Captain is likely to find a particular cargo particularly annoying or if it's illegal. Weight isn't figured in since it isn't always available and doesn't seem like it'd be that big a consideration on an old sailing vessel. If you have an idea of how big something is and how far it has to go, this should be a relatively simple way to figure out how much it'd cost to get there.