Hi there
Good question.  Occupied at least a bus journey home for thought.
(That's a good thing... I commute two hours a day and sometimes want a
change from reading)

> On 22 Apr 2014, at 17:28, Freelance Traveller <xxxxxx@freelancetraveller.com> wrote:
>
> Somehow, most published adventures seem to be designed for a mixed
> party,

Hmmm, might have to argue with that as regards my own efforts:
TravCon12 Into the Unknown (was Portents and Signs) - 6 scouts
TravCon13 Second Scions' Society - 6 dilettantes
TravCon14 Ashfall - 6 Darrian scientists
Freelance Traveller #52 - Getting There is Half the Fun - 6 Imperial scientists

> with most characters having military backgrounds. Even the

And not a military type amongst them.

(Part of my fun with those PC choices was to see whether I could come
up with six sufficiently different characters of the same type.  I'll
let others decide if I was successful or not)

I'm not considering Back to a Future (FT 29/30) or The Edge of
Humanity (JTAS, 16.7.13) as being for the slightly different settings
of 2300AD and Orbital respectively.

I think Three Blind Mice was the first thing I've done which did have
a mixed crew although even there there was the linking of the
'blindness'.  But Nestine and Bretton were ex-military.  (Two other
adventures didn't actually specify PCs).

> canonical merchant career seems to have a not-insignificant amount of
> combat-related skills. I would think, however, that a merchant's
> mindset, even if he has combat skills, would be significantly different
> from that of an ex-military character's, and a merchant would evaluate a
> patron contract with a different mental model for risk/reward balancing.

I'd agree with that, but perhaps the different mental model is in the
authoring of the adventure.  Such that the adventures mentioned above
have very little combat and are more designed for other forms of
role-playing.  That then leads to players picking (at a convention
with choice) 'that' kind of adventure and then playing their PCs in
that kind of mindset.  For example, in Into the Unknown I wasn't sure
that the first NPC the players met wouldn't be immediately killed
because of the way she behaved and the circumstances.  But in fact I
needn't have worried and the *players* acted in reasonable ways.

>
> Given that, and staying with the fundamental "problem" that Traveller
> economics don't work UNLESS the merchant goes adventuring...
>
> What sort of adventures would, in fact, 'appeal' to a merchant mindset?

Well, I've yet to attempt what I would think of as a properly merchant
adventure (as it happens I'm beginning to sketch out a Zhodani one for
Rouven right now), but I'd have thought they (the merchant PC not the
player) would be most interested in something that offered profit.
But that could be defined in a lot of ways:
- immediate profit of buying low and selling high. A
- longer term profit of developing a contact/market/trade route that
is beneficial. B
- abstract or indirect profit such as  a charitable pursuit (think
Joseph Rowntree the chocolate maker and philanthropist) or personal
(marry daughter to most eligible partner). C

That then gives you room for all sorts of adventure:
A. Purely mercantile - but with interesting problems/obstacles/side
trips to stop it being number crunching.  Or larger scale versions of
the same with the PCs managing whole shipping lines and/or perhaps
dealing with stock markets.
B. More 'scouting' type adventures looking for the bigger picture on
worlds or trade routes, or alternatively more 'investigative' - why is
such and such happening, how is X making that profit, who is Y dealing
with
C. And more 'role playing' games for the abstract things - I'm
thinking here of the excellent Steve Ellis type games with virtually
no 'plot' but very detailed characters and goals: wind up the players
and watch them run!  This is what Getting There is Half the Fun was
attempting in a small way (but not with merchants)

Of course any of them *could* have combat along the way, and there's
always privateering...

Don't know if that helps as a way of thinking about it?

>
> (The best sort of responses would be actual adventures or seeds, that I
> could pull into Active Measures and Getting Off the Ground, but ordinary
> discussion is good, too.)

Will have a think and see if I can come up with one of each for you.

tc