As many of you know, I'm working on running a tt-variant in Sussex. The other 3 members of my ref team are extremely keen to have some kind of "economy", including for things like weapons and armour (ie. you lose your shield, you have to pay 5Sh. for a new one; you can now wear chainmail, you need to buy a suit.) I am quite reluctant to go for this, feeling it's a lot of work for low or negative gain, and that tt functions just fine without an all-encompassing economic system. I especially don't want any kind of lammies. What are people's thoughts on small-scale Larp economy? Can it work? Did CUTT start with one? Any ideas about DUTT?
- I believe CUTT might have started with the intention of one: there's something written by Bryony on the old refwiki from 2006 about it. But I've no idea how long it lasted. Salavant
Some issues to think about/resolve, not all of these are major, and most are solvable, but require you to apply more effort --Drac:
- If you have to buy weapons / armour : why not loot them from the monsters? Lets face it, adventuring parties kill lots of bandits who have perfectly functional weapons and "slightly used" armour. See insurrection, Insurrection at least has the advantage that you can take the lammie off the monster then store it in your chest in your tent.
- Yeah, it was discussed, and the idea was that "monster weapons" aren't that good for humans / mortals to use. But verges dangerously close to lammying! Similarly, there was discussion of the legality of looting (pc) corpses, and perhaps a common rite to make looted goods easily identifiable / hauntable. --Chevron
- From above: carry as much of the monsters weapons and armour as possible and sell them afterwards.
- If you have an economy, a player should be able to start with enough equipment to be viable
- This is where I go "why should we limit what players can buy at chargen, if they're spending the xp for the skills" and if we don't, what's the point in having an economy? I guess it comes down to the lots of faff for little or negative gain point.
- If you have an economy, it should be at least vaguely internally consistent (e.g. I should not be able to make some form of infinite money loop, then buy all the things)
- If you have an economy and have money, what can you spend it on? In TT you can buy potions and scrolls for linearing.
- I think at the minute it would be about the same (possibly less blowing cash on "non-mechanical" things if it's actually that useful), plus things you need. It kind of concerns me there might be a warrior who can't use their skills because someone pilfers their sword and then they have no cash / the blacksmith isn't open late on Friday. --Chevron.
- If you have an economy, money becomes transferable power.
Basically, to have a meaningful economy you need a few hundred economic actors and a large supply of low and high end goods for them to interact with and trade. Maelstrom achieved this by the fairly
simple method of having this many people. On a small interactive system, your economy either basically doesn't mean anything, or your refs need to simulate everything. This is a huge amount of work for
what I think is fundamentally a fairly minor amount of gain. --Tea
Durham has the 'monster weapons' thing. I hate it as a concept - the idea of there being an active and meaningful mechanical difference between an NPC monster and a PC is something I find really jarring. I'ts probably worth asking some of them how their economy is going - I think they're slowly going our way of making it less and less meaningful, which says it all, really. --Tea
- Oh, the monster weapons thing also forbids amazing linear concepts, like "the pcs have to get themselves into a castle unarmed, use the cosh someone hid with conceal item to knock out some guards and steal their weapons and kit, and then proceed in disguise to complete a mission" --Tea
If you have mundane armour/arms valuable then you either need the monster weapons don't count fudge or some method of tracking monster loot, (did I loot four or five daggers from the first encounter?) The alternative is that mundane/basic crafted stuff is free and you make magic/masterwork weapons a buyable resource. Skills work with basic things. Masterwork stuff gives you additional minor advantages, (cutlass of immune to a disarm, plate of immune to one through whatever.) The key thing is making it so they are useful but don't overshadow skills. --Taxellor
I don't like the mechanic of weapons cost you money, but are free to NPCs. If you're determined to do this, you could go a bit Maelstrom and make it so that PCs need decent weapons to do damage over single which at least reduces the stupidness of many of your monsters having unlootable weapons. Then there's a subgame in looting the better monsters. On higher level adventures though, it can go a bit wrong. Monster armour could be so crap it's not repairable for the most part. Demons, etc. don't drop weapons. Undead could just be super-strong even if they're hitting you with a bit of knackered steel. However, I don't feel an economy will add as much to your game as the same amount of effort spent elsewhere could do. The way forwards may be to have obvious loot and better defined cool items that aren't too brken that can be used as a money sink. --dp
- Tbh this is the thing I'm most concerned with - I find it much more realistic in a setting where we have magic that swords and armour are cheap as chips, and that's why everyone and their swog is running around with them, rather than the PCs happen to have better weapons than everyone else who comes through the door, except those people are still able to do just as much damage with them. You can fix it up a bit by saying "goblins have goblin weapons for their small hands" but it does seem much more faff than it's worth for something I think will probably improve nobody's game and a lot of people are going to hate. Certain members of my team strongly disagree, but I'm tempted to go head-ref-foot-down on this one. :P --Chevron
I think Durham shoehorned an economy in about 5 or so years ago. To an uniformed observer it all seemed a bit circular. They put in some crafting skills which let you craft things that PCs needed to have crafted weaponry/armour. Then they made it so you needed crafted weaponry/armour. So the net result to me looks like some people had to ditch some XP in previously unnecessary skills. I don't know if it was due to what I'll uncharacteristically diplomatically call an attack of having a huge boner for Maelstrom or something else. I'm sure they had good reasons at the time and were trying to do something cool. In any case, running a TT economy is a pain, you get issues where people try to 'exploit the economy' but really they're exploiting the holes in your lack of a decent model. The other problem with that is that moneymaking schemes in downtime tended to make you way more than buying income if you were smart. So the last refteam I was on simply said the only way you reliably get income with no consequences is by buying the Income skill - this worked really well for us because anybody who wanted to do a moneymaking thing was just told 'that's fine, buy income if you want any mechanical effect' but weren't stopped from being IC rich by having a nice house/clothes but low disposable income. A good example was some people wanting to make vodka to make money - we said you can sell it IC if you want since drink is free in the bar anyway therefore all you're doing is conning people into giving you money for no reason but if you want an income, you buy Income. --dp
The way I'd suggest you think of the economy is that you have thousands of economic actors doing stuff and PC make up about 0.1% of this. If they try and mess with the economy, they're going up against a load of inertia so they can't. All they can do is buy stuff at list price. On that basis, you need to say there's an infinite supply of everything but that shouldn't be an issue. Plot could obviously mess with this. --dp
My general thought is "don't do it". For all the reasons stated above- there is nothing new I can say on this point as we have had this conversation over and over again over the years and concluded that you have to pick at least one of too much work or meaningless. Or both. And you're talking to someone who loved interacting with the Maelstrom economy. CUTT, by the way, tried to start with prices for weapons and armour but I don't recall it lasting more than a few weeks --Pufferfish
I wonder how well it would work to have a more handwavey kind of economy that some tabletop games have. Where you spend xp on being poor/not-poor/rich and then you are just assumed to be able to buy things that are cheap/medium/expensive. It gives a sort of economy without tracking lots of numbers (hopefully). I don't know how well this would work when PCs want to pay each other. --Joey
- My gut instinct is that this breaks down in flames as soon as the PCs aren't in one coherent party and may want to do economic things with each other, rather than NPCs. --MC
- I can see two reasons a game might want an "economy" - to provide a subgame in its own right, and as a way to provide motivations for players to do things, and to induce one another to do things. I think the former is probably only viable on a large scale, and even then will only appeal to a subset of players. I'm not sure how well the latter could work in a small game, but I'm not sure it's impossible. If I were trying it I'd go with a "two-layer" economy, with the cost of things like weapons, armour, accommodation etc all being paid in "silver", and have a flanginium-based actual economy, with no amount of silver being sufficient to buy any flanginium. Flanginium would occupy a prominent role in the setting mythology (c.f. Warpstone, Ghost Rock etc). I'd put in as many mechanical uses for it (powering spells, making magic items etc) as possible, and have some cap on the amount of transferable power you could gain per time period - either the dull "you can only use this much per week" or the interesting "the more you use, the more likely you are to mutate horribly, and if you mutate too far you become unplayable". --Jacob
Mostly based on my thoughts for weekend long events so may not be completely relevant. But I seem to have concluded that to have a vaguely interesting economy you need
- ) Money sinks with tangible benefits - Players need to have things they want to spend money on. (While sacrificing to gods is cool, buying a magic item that actually has an effect seems likely to win in 99% of choice situations)
- ) Different things to do with money available to different people. Or a larger set of resources which have different amounts of usefulness to different people (i.e. exotic ingredients useful for alchemists, ritual stuff useful to mages) -Players need to have reasons to exchange money/ things between themselves.
- Item 1 leads to problems when one person shows up with an insane amount of money and wants to know what they can do with it.
- Item 2 leads to complexity and pain when on a small scale.
For TT type things anything beyond ‘insert money -> receive potions/scrolls’ seems to have more pain than it needs. --Malselene
More generally, it has just occurred to me that needing to buy weapons so that you can use your skills in a TT type game is giving players an excuse to have a crap time. --dp
- And without creating game to go with it. In maelstrom, the advanced weapon crafting game and limited access to such tended to create game for groups who had weapon shortages, and for groups who had weapon crafters. All it'll do in a TT type game is create people who sit there going "well, I could do single, but I can't afford a sword, this is shit" --Tea
When I started TT I was playing a PC (Orrin) with the goal of "Make money out of everything I possibly can". Unfortunately this approach falls down a bit when most players have no idea what a shilling is worth other than "1/10 of a CURE 1 Elixir". I think the best thing you could do if you wanted a more "real" economy is to work out what mundane, everyday goods 10 Shillings buys you. That way your PC knows what something is worth in a more IC-relevant way than merely "opportunity cost of not buying Elixirs". For example if a drink in your IC pub cost a shilling before whatever Thing made it free, then a shilling's probably the equivalent of about three quid. PCs can still be assumed to scrounge up rope, shovels and 10 foot poles for their DT shenanigans from living expenses, whereas Income is spent on stuff with mechanical or RP effects. Your other refs can then have a fun time working out the effect of PC plot on the price of potatoes. --Jim
Thanks everyone, the issues raised pretty much mirror exactly my own concerns, but now I can back them up with research. --Chevron
A slightly related thing ahdok and myself once discussed was that to be a proper (recognised, landed and titled) noble you should have to buy levels of income to back it up. And income should also represent perhaps represent a general wealthiness. --dp
- I'm not entirely sold on that. The penniless noble trope is quite a fun one to have in existence, be it because your lands are shit/full of undead/you can't extract money from them/your habit of throwing weekly parties means you don't actually have any disposable income for uptime. My inclination if people wanted an XP buy-in for this would be to put in a Status skill that gave you a title. --Tea