but in fact, item multiplication is a bad idea, cos it'll affect world's economics too much making items like minigun n battle armor absolutely on everyone.
but multiplying some limited amount of caps would sound better immo.
for example there can be three types of caravan : small one witch cost 5000caps and some waterbags. It's unnoticable on wordmap, but can be detected by anyone with 220+ outdoorsman, has short route (for example from NR to BH or from SF to NR).medium one costs 20000caps n many waterbags. can be detected by anyone with 160+ outdorsman n have medium routes (from gecko to ncr or something)big one cost 50k n loots of waterbags, can be detected by 100+ outdorsman chars n have long range routes (sf to vc or gecko)after moving caravan to destination point your caps get multiplied depending on ur barter skill.
for more roleplaying purposes caps in chart can be converted into some sort of goods, depending on the city u start caravan from, wich some sort of npcs can turn back into caps after u get to the destination point. Or even deeper, each town get some goods, n trade between other towns n players are involved in these process. If u bring the needed goods from needed city u'll get more reward.
n ofcourse such trips should have kinda big cooldown, n requirements.
I see someone revived my old suggestion As I said, this suggestion was written... Long ago, really. It needs more work, and you're on the good tracks for that, so thanks for your interest. However, I don't think this suggestion is valuable anymore, because the whole problem of powerbuilds/zerg swarm/kill-for-lulz has to be solved before. When gangs that play the raiders will have the drawbacks of raiders, and when the gangs that play the Rangers will have the advantages of Rangers (that's a raw sum up, of course), then I think we will be able to talk about this suggestion again. ;p
1. You start a caravan with maximum of 5 people, without of any NPC guards. If you want to have some kind of militia inside, then you should travel with a caravan to the closest city and hire a guards there. This travel takes 6 minutes and give no loot multiplication, but it still could be attacked by anyone (As an optional point, that city should belong to the faction, which started a caravan to be able to hire a guards - this will make a connection between TC and caravans)
3. You can only enter to the caravan once with one character (this is to resist those bluesuits, which are always entering caravans to waste an ammo of people inside)
4. I see, that almost everyone here are scared of that "miniguns multiplication". Here is the decision - weapons are not multiplied when the travel are finished, but armors and ammo still should be multiplicated.