I was thinking on a topic the other day - that of many fantasy RPGs and their requirements for vast sums of coinage. Whether that coinage is required for training, translates directly to XP gain, or is just used to buy cool stuff (magic items at Ye Olde Magic Shop, or whatever). And, why this economic bloat annoys me.

This was brought on by a thread of Pundit's and from reading the Treasure section in the DCC RPG (page 393). For those unfamiliar, that section stresses the importance of maintaining the verisimilitude of a feudal, medieval economy, by limiting the loot found on monsters. And it cautions that doling out a monty haul of goodies "reveals a logical disconnect to this medieval world". (paraphrased). In other words, if so much wealth abounds, why the hell would someone bother tending their flock if they take a gamble (with their life) and pull in a jackpot to set themselves up for life? Why would any member of a civilization bother?

One of my current-RPG-favorites, Chaosium RuneQuest, relies heavily upon finding fat stacks of cash - thousands of lunars which are necessary to train-up skills through guilds or cults, as well to learn spells from cults. (Skill growth is also gained through direct use of one's skills). A RQ character benefits by acquiring 10s of thousands of coinage over the course of his career to reach the peak of his abilities. There are times that I want to hack the entire RQ economy (starting wealth, armor/weapon/equipment costs, training costs, and the cost of spells) - divide every value by a factor of 10, or something - to bring it down to more sensible levels. So that there's not a need to distribute so much coinage.

I'm sure that many would answer, "it's just a dumb elf-game. why waste time thinking about this garbage?", or "that's just the way it is with [insert fantasy rpg]". It's a niggling thought for me, one that I feel compelled to 'correct'. Thoughts?

You are totally correct. someone I suspect it was one of the denners had doen the math round how much gold would have to exist in the world based on 10 GP to the pound as the standard means there are about 720 Million Gps worth of gold in the whole world today.
Enough to get 750 fighters to 12th level, in the whole world.

Anyway the training costs in AD&D are merely a sop to rid the PCs of treasure if you actually thought about it then PCs would spend all their time training folks as its far safer than adventuring. The towns where trainign occured would be like gold rush towns where everythign was 10 -20 tiems over priced due to inflation and weapons masters woudl be richer than kings.

Not just gold though if magical healing was so available the villagers would effectively had medical facilities far in advance of what we have today. A farmer who was severly injured in a threshing acident loosing 5 out of 6 hp would be back up in the field tomorrow  after a quick heal light and a night's kip. Far better than Medicare or the NHS. etc etc ....

Quote from: K Peterson;633419This was brought on by a thread of Pundit's and from reading the Treasure section in the DCC RPG (page 393). For those unfamiliar, that section stresses the importance of maintaining the verisimilitude of a feudal, medieval economy, by limiting the loot found on monsters.  

There were people in the middle ages who, were their wealth adjusted for inflation to modern dollars, would be billionaires.  Granted a whole bunch of it tied up in land.  But billionaires nonetheless.  The notion that there were not extremely wealthy people in the middle ages is wrong.

Quote from: K Peterson;633419In other words, if so much wealth abounds, why the hell would someone bother tending their flock if they take a gamble (with their life) and pull in a jackpot to set themselves up for life? Why would any member of a civilization bother?

There is easily a billion dollars in currency within a 15 minute drive from where I am sitting right now.  I could potentially become fabulously wealthy by going on a crime spree.  But yet, I still work my day job.

Part of the problem, at least so far as D&D is concerned, is that a lot of advancement concepts are tied up in wealth.

Look at pre-2e, with wealth giving you XP, and was - apparently, so I've heard - the primary means of level gain. In such a system, you have to be willing to hand out giant hoards of cash, because it's the only reasonable way for characters to gain advancement.

3e and 4e both had horrid economic systems, but that was - I think - largely related to their attempts to control magic items. It didn't work, either economically or in game balance, but that was the idea.

Honestly, I think that if you want a game to have a reasonable economic system, you'd have to (1) divorce character wealth from direct mechanical advancement, and (2) rewrite all pricing from the ground up. There's a lot more work that needs to go into it, but honestly, as a starting point, those two are necessary and already quite a bit of work.

Quote from: K Peterson;633419There are times that I want to hack the entire RQ economy (starting wealth, armor/weapon/equipment costs, training costs, and the cost of spells) - divide every value by a factor of 10, or something - to bring it down to more sensible levels. So that there's not a need to distribute so much coinage.

I'm sure that many would answer, "it's just a dumb elf-game. why waste time thinking about this garbage?", or "that's just the way it is with [insert fantasy rpg]". It's a niggling thought for me, one that I feel compelled to 'correct'. Thoughts?

Seems to me the disjunct with CRQ, as with most games, is that the economy of the game mechanics (equipment, training and spell learning for example) are built one way and the economy of the mundane (cost of living, wages for regular jobs etc) are built another way. IMHO it simply stems from the desire to present 'treasure' as shiny bullion loot and to regularly reward with same and to link that to progression, or simply ensure the game mechanics have a way of burning through PCs' winning quickly.

So far as cracking the relationship between realistic (ancient style in my case) economics and game worlds I had a crack at that with an article for Legend/MRQ2 that you can find here:

http://draconianpress.net/ageoftreason/?p=224

The work I did there was the basis for the economics chapter in my setting books (for Legend), and you can find The Iron Companion on Drivethru in PDF. The reason I mention is not as a pitch but because in there I have related that to a rewrite of the game mechanics for training costs, henchman wages etc. However if you are an RQ fan, I'm doing a setting book for RQ6 right now which will be out later this year - same world as my Legend books, different civilisation in focus, and with an economics chapter.

As it happens I also like people to feel that a stash of 12SP is a good find (you can live off that for best part of a month!) rather than get into massive treasure/price inflation. Parking SPs as your main currency (as CRQ did with Lunars) is a good start.

Quote from: Old One Eye;633432There is easily a billion dollars in currency within a 15 minute drive from where I am sitting right now.  I could potentially become fabulously wealthy by going on a crime spree.  But yet, I still work my day job.

Yeah but it's no good to you with nowhere to spend it. Not without living the rest of your probably short life on the run anyway. Dungeons on the other hand, well why not raid a dungeon, your community will even applaud you for it.

Quote from: GnomeWorks;633446Honestly, I think that if you want a game to have a reasonable economic system, you'd have to (1) divorce character wealth from direct mechanical advancement

Like the dungeon complaint above, if you do that we get not-D&D. Better off to just accept it's a shit system that lots of people have great fun with and leave it at that.

Quote from: GnomeWorks;633446Part of the problem, at least so far as D&D is concerned, is that a lot of advancement concepts are tied up in wealth.

Look at pre-2e, with wealth giving you XP, and was - apparently, so I've heard - the primary means of level gain. In such a system, you have to be willing to hand out giant hoards of cash, because it's the only reasonable way for characters to gain advancement.

3e and 4e both had horrid economic systems, but that was - I think - largely related to their attempts to control magic items. It didn't work, either economically or in game balance, but that was the idea.

Honestly, I think that if you want a game to have a reasonable economic system, you'd have to (1) divorce character wealth from direct mechanical advancement, and (2) rewrite all pricing from the ground up. There's a lot more work that needs to go into it, but honestly, as a starting point, those two are necessary and already quite a bit of work.

For basic economics i just use relative prices now. So generally 1sp = 1 GPB (Uk pound) .
then the Players immediately know what is a reasonable price a reasonable wage etc. How much should my PC get for a day's dangerous work.... hmm... well £300 sounds like a good start so if we say 10sp = 1gp (we can adjust the weights of those by the way so that a gold coin is small say nickle size comparted to a SP being a quarter) then 30gp is a wage for a dangerous day's work. a meal with a beer will cost 1gp etc etc
If you want to make the values more "medieval" then swap out sp for copper piece or put 20sp to the gp etc etc So a days dangerous work might be 300 cp = 30 sp or 1 1/2 gp .The point is you don't need a price guide because you already know how much things cost.
Magic you use like high tech stuff but 10 times as rare. So a Crystal ball in a world where such things are D&D levels of commonality is like a top end 3d Plasma TV so £1000 x 10 = 10,000 GP

It really works out much easier for everyone especialy dealing with the mundane items and means players know what to ask to kill a guy or guard a wagon train or rob a merchant or rescue a princess.

Quote from: The Traveller;633450Like the dungeon complaint above, if you do that we get not-D&D. Better off to just accept it's a shit system that lots of people have great fun with and leave it at that.

That's certainly one way to look at it.

However, when the economics start getting in the way of believability or even plausibility, that's where it starts to become a concern. Most of my group was willing to move away from D&D partially because of it's insane economics.

Quote from: GnomeWorks;633455However, when the economics start getting in the way of believability or even plausibility, that's where it starts to become a concern. Most of my group was willing to move away from D&D partially because of it's insane economics.

That's what I'm saying, when it comes to D&D you pretty much just have to wince and look the other way. I haven't played D&D for many years and have no intention of ever playing it again for this reason. Other systems give me what I want in a better way.

The mad economic questions, the invincible superheroes, the money as personal and spiritual progression, the labyrinths containing room by room individual monsters that in reality would need a range of hundreds of miles to support themselves and somehow have accumulated sacks of bullion, wizards unable to don a shirt of chainmail, and endless list of suspension of disbelief busting "features" - no thanks. It can't be fixed because fixing it makes it something different rather than a better version of itself.

Well, the thread title is about the fantasy economy, not just the D&D one.

And one thing I agree with is that magic often makes this difficult, as well as the related concept of political/social power being tied to being 'level-capable'.

One thing to remember about adventurers is that in classic (OD&D, B/X, BECMI, RC) is that they start off with 30-180 GP. So it's not like any schmuck off a farm is going and doing this, they are probably disinherited second or third sons in a family with primogeniture or something like that.

I do currency by rough equivalence and weight. Being interested in ancient numismatics, I just can't bring myself to run a game where PCs actually are running around with coins weighing 45.4 grams. I use a standard of 1/100 of a pound, so a gold piece weighs the same as the solidus in the late Roman empire and a silver piece weighs the same as a classic denarius. These coins weren't contemporary to one another, but I typically just excuse it by giving the amount by rough weight.

There was a note in GAZ1 The Grand Duchy of Karameikos that there's way more gold in the D&D world than in the real world. So there's that as well. But I prefer to do it by dividing gold weights by 10.

Quote from: Old One Eye;633432There is easily a billion dollars in currency within a 15 minute drive from where I am sitting right now.  I could potentially become fabulously wealthy by going on a crime spree.  But yet, I still work my day job.

Yes, but that's a bit of a weird analogy compared to what DCC suggests. That's akin to a peasant/townsfolk sneaking into a lord's castle, thieving some valuables, and then fleeing to another land. (And facing the consequences when the lord's knights catch up with him). I'm talking about a situation like this:

Let's say you drive in to your job at McDonald's (or other minimum wage job), and Bob, your coworker, tells you about an 'adventure' he recently had. He snuck into the extensive steam tunnels under a local university and found a 'treasure' - a 5 grand wad of bills - and he shows you the proof, flashing the cash in your face. He's certain that there's more down there. But he barely made it out of there, because some gang members hang out down there who won't hesitate to murder or maim trespassers on their turf. (This analogy's getting a bit silly but you get where I'm going with this).

Bob shares this information with you and some other coworkers. How long would it take before someone took a gamble to get some of that treasure, himself? If that 5 grand represented 6 months of your regular salary at Mickey-D's. If the only obstacle to that 'treasure' were the 'monsters' that resided in the tunnels.

Quote from: Iron Simulacrum;633448Seems to me the disjunct with CRQ, as with most games, is that the economy of the game mechanics (equipment, training and spell learning for example) are built one way and the economy of the mundane (cost of living, wages for regular jobs etc) are built another way. IMHO it simply stems from the desire to present 'treasure' as shiny bullion loot and to regularly reward with same and to link that to progression, or simply ensure the game mechanics have a way of burning through PCs' winning quickly.

I totally agree. And thanks for the link to the article and the PDF release.

Quote from: The Traveller;633457That's what I'm saying, when it comes to D&D you pretty much just have to wince and look the other way. I haven't played D&D for many years and have no intention of ever playing it again for this reason. Other systems give me what I want in a better way.

Yeah, I'm not picking on D&D specifically here. There are many published fantasy systems that have this divide between "the economy of the game mechanics" and the "economy of the mundane." I'm just making examples of D&D and RuneQuest because that's what I'm most familiar with.

Quote from: K Peterson;633505Yeah, I'm not picking on D&D specifically here. There are many published fantasy systems that have this divide between "the economy of the game mechanics" and the "economy of the mundane." I'm just making examples of D&D and RuneQuest because that's what I'm most familiar with.

Oh yeah sure I was responding to one particular post there, if people want to play D&D more power to them.

For myself I just don't hand out so much fungible currency, financial rewards might be coinage but more often might be bales of semi precious cloth, statues valuable only to a particular noble house (after you've explained why they should pay for something rightfully theirs), well preserved books (worth a bit prior to the invention of the printing press), livestock and so on.

Currency and gems etc are there but they wouldn't be lying about at the bottom of your average abandoned mine. This creates opportunity for adventure and limitations on the actual amount of wealth the group can haul about at any given point simultaneously, while allowing the emulation of a reasonable pre-industrial economy.

"Treasure" in the D&D sense would reputedly exist more in remote and very dangerous locations, usually needing quite an expedition to claim, as per The Hobbit, or more readily in some nobleman's house under heavy guard as per Conan. Looting settlements is also a time honoured method of gaining lots of jingly coins in a hurry, well-off human ones anyway, much like the real world - a good rule of thumb is if you want riches, go rob some rich people, see also the crusades and that little jaunt which took place prior to the Battle of Agincourt. Starveling goblin camps aren't good for much more than nicking your blade.

Of course in my game system (ARR) skills are advanced by using them, and less tangible advancements come about by completing character, group, or campaign goals. Puzzling out the normalisation of an economy where the currency is also the means of advancement in every sense, phew, well.

Commenting in Pundit's other thread. Yes, it never made any sense even back then, but I do remember some houserules from back then such a 1gp = 10xp rather than one to one ratio that some people used to get around PC having to deal with tons of coins.  

I was working on something similar for a Pathfinder campaign for a more Warhammery where coinage doesn't just become a medium for buying and selling magic items.

https://workspaces.acrobat.com/?d=p65p*prITvg50ZfhR7EiRQ

It does require one to tweak encounters, but you are usually doing that anyways. I could take two groups with the same characters in a purely RAW game - one set of players are much more casual and the other set of players are much more savvy. An challenging encounter for the first set of players will be cake walk for the second.