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 |
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 |
Some issues to think about/resolve, not all of these are major, and most are solvable, but require you to apply more effort --Drac:
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
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
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
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
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
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