Non-coin economy in fantasy settings?

Ravenswing · April 04, 2015, 06:28:40 AM

In a hobby where quite a few players consider the mere premise of encumbrance a fascist imposition of power-mad GMs (let alone keeping track of it) -- by way of example -- while a number of us can come up with citations, who out there really thinks that as many as one in a hundred campaigns does anything like this beyond a one-off?

Tedster · April 04, 2015, 08:42:58 AM

The One Ring has wealth ranks (e.g., poor, martial, prosperous, etc.) and treasure ranks (e.g., 5=princely gift, 10=goblin hoard, 500=silver and gold enough to last a middle age hobbit a lifetime).

Copper, silver, gold pieces exist, but all of that is purely descriptive text and non-mechanical.

Omega · April 06, 2015, 05:13:57 AM

One high magic city campaign I ran for about a year had magic as the currency.

Pretty much every citizen had at least one magic wand, staff, etc and you payed for stuff either by transferring spell slots into a wand, or from one device to the other as charges. Non-casters could use the charged devices either as the equivalent of a coin purse, or spend the stored charges for various household utility spells, healing, or recreation.

Rincewind1 · April 06, 2015, 06:51:36 AM

Quote from: JeremyR;823635There's a reason money was invented.

Oh sure, you could play a game without it, but you could also play a game where you couldn't talk, you had to grunt or use gestures

The fact that you consider either some great sin of Bad Fun only speaks unkindly of your own imagination, on a forum dedicated to games of inventiveness.

One Horse Town · April 06, 2015, 07:20:45 AM

I've used a barter system before. I boiled it down to Barter Units. 1 BU was equivalent to the value of the food required to feed a family of 4 for 1 day. So, once you've figured out the monetary cost of feeding 4 people for 1 day, you can determine the BU cost of anything in the equipment list that has a monetary value. It can lead to some interesting trades if you're into that sort of thing. Hmm, i need this length of rope and it's worth 6 BU. I've got some glass beads worth 1/2 BU, 2 chickens worth 1 BU each and a copper necklace worth 3 BU. Good enough? Sure.

Bedrockbrendan · April 06, 2015, 08:42:22 AM

Quote from: RPGPundit;823579Have you ever run (or played in) a setting where the economy doesn't generally run on gp, sp, or cp, but on some totally different system (be it barter, or something weirder)?

What was it? How did it go?

While I almost always include some kind of base coin value in my games, I generally assume that no everyone is conducting trade with coinage. So when players make deals with NPCs, where they are and who they are dealing with will matter a lot. They might get offers of bolts of silk in exchange for goods or services, or they may find themselves paying for things in pigs, for example. In order to wrap my head around this though I like having the base coin system to work off of.

Bedrockbrendan · April 06, 2015, 08:44:13 AM

Quote from: One Horse Town;824245I've used a barter system before. I boiled it down to Barter Units. 1 BU was equivalent to the value of the food required to feed a family of 4 for 1 day. So, once you've figured out the monetary cost of feeding 4 people for 1 day, you can determine the BU cost of anything in the equipment list that has a monetary value. It can lead to some interesting trades if you're into that sort of thing. Hmm, i need this length of rope and it's worth 6 BU. I've got some glass beads worth 1/2 BU, 2 chickens worth 1 BU each and a copper necklace worth 3 BU. Good enough? Sure.

One thing I did in my last campaign was tie the base unit of coin to a handful of rice grain. Between those two things I could easily gauge barter exchanges.

tuypo1 · April 06, 2015, 08:58:54 AM

im not entirely sure how barter system implies abstracted wealth but i will never touch abstracted wealth with a 10 foot pole.

to be clear im not saying ohts barter unit idea is abstracted wealth the barter unit is fine i was refering to eariler in the thread

Skyrock · April 06, 2015, 09:57:04 AM

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;824250One thing I did in my last campaign was tie the base unit of coin to a handful of rice grain. Between those two things I could easily gauge barter exchanges.

Rice as a basic unit for wealth was actually an RL thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koku

It fits also well with the measurable and homogenous basic trading good I spoke about earlier.

Bedrockbrendan · April 06, 2015, 10:10:48 AM

Quote from: Skyrock;824261Rice as a basic unit for wealth was actually an RL thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koku

It fits also well with the measurable and homogenous basic trading good I spoke about earlier.

Yeah I got it from some stuff I was reading about Imperial China. It is pretty easy method to grasp because if you've ever made rice you know what a handful of it means in real terms.

Nexus · April 06, 2015, 10:21:45 AM

Quote from: RPGPundit;823579Have you ever run (or played in) a setting where the economy doesn't generally run on gp, sp, or cp, but on some totally different system (be it barter, or something weirder)?

What was it? How did it go?

One GM runs their setting with explicit assumption that references to coinage are abstractions with the actual exchange taking place in other ways like barter and haggling unless specific coinage is referred during the role playing and narration ("You search the bandits and collect a total of 130 silver Royals"). it seems to work well for them but I'm not sure that's close to what you were thinking.

Bren · April 06, 2015, 10:32:18 AM

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;824249While I almost always include some kind of base coin value in my games, I generally assume that no everyone is conducting trade with coinage. So when players make deals with NPCs, where they are and who they are dealing with will matter a lot. They might get offers of bolts of silk in exchange for goods or services, or they may find themselves paying for things in pigs, for example. In order to wrap my head around this though I like having the base coin system to work off of.

This expresses my view and practice perfectly.

tuypo1 · April 06, 2015, 10:58:26 AM

Quote from: Nexus;824268One GM runs their setting with explicit assumption that references to coinage are abstractions with the actual exchange taking place in other ways like barter and haggling unless specific coinage is referred during the role playing and narration ("You search the bandits and collect a total of 130 silver Royals"). it seems to work well for them but I'm not sure that's close to what you were thinking.

well probably mostly what he was thinking i doubt the pundit was expecting so much abstraction of barter

i dont see the point of having barter if your just going to abstract it with gold but as long as you have a well defined amount of barter resources it should work fine

like i said though if you try and abstract it without a system to work on it just does not work which is a shame because d20 modern was promising until i noticed how money was handled tomorrow im going to see if they ever published a variant that has actual money

Nexus · April 06, 2015, 12:24:01 PM

Quote from: tuypo1;824273well probably mostly what he was thinking i doubt the pundit was expecting so much abstraction of barter

i dont see the point of having barter if your just going to abstract it with gold but as long as you have a well defined amount of barter resources it should work fine

Mainly for flavor and a sense of verisimilitude.

tuypo1 · April 06, 2015, 06:43:43 PM

fair enough if i was going to do barter i would do it with detail but nothing wrong with doing it that way