I'm thinking of doing away with money in my next game, not in the communist utopian sense, but in the post apocalyptic if you can't eat it, kill with it, ride it or make something useful out of it, nobody wants it sense.
Do you have any suggestions on how to make this work well?
What potential problems (and solutions to the same) do you foresee?
If we're talking a D&D rules set, what do the PCs get XP for if not loot?
Quote from: misterguignol;545192If we're talking a D&D rules set, what do the PCs get XP for if not loot?
That is a good question for which I have absolutely no answer beyond assigning xp value to non monetary loot.
Quote from: Aos;545189I'm thinking of doing away with money in my next game, not in the communist utopian sense, but in the post apocalyptic if you can't eat it, kill with it, ride it or make something useful out of it, nobody wants it sense.
I'm the guy who wrote the Economics essay and rules in the Tribe 8 Companion. They were written because the post-apocalyptic Tribe 8 setting was written assuming a barter system rather than money and players who are used to things having prices for comparison were having a lot of trouble figuring out how to value things and, as a result, supplement and adventure writers were starting to put in money-like work-arounds to avoid the problem. I wanted to preserve the barter system, which I thought was cool and fit the setting well, so my goal was to make it easier to handle, and I got some positive feedback about the essay and rules that I wrote (http://gamingoutpost.com/article/reviewtribe_8_companion/).
The gist is to come up with a list of common goods that get exchanged and group them into broad value categories based on demand and utility so that players have some idea of what's equivalent, and then deal with availability and variations in barter value. You can get the Tribe 8 Companion PDF for $6 on RPGNow (http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1224/Tribe-8-Companion?it=1) if you want to see the essay and, no, I don't get any royalties if you buy it.
So the key problem I've seen is that players don't know how to assess comparative values without prices and the solution is to give them a list of goods with some sort of comparative value so they can make those assessments.
Does it have to be simpler than "items have a monetary value, same as the normal price list, it's just that there's no actual money"? I mean, I know you CAN get more involved than that, and that there's more to a barter economy, but for gaming purposes, it seems like that's a start.
In another thread I mentioned how Metal Earth would seem to be well suited for Barbarians of Lemuria. Now, I understand the lure of D&D. However, how loot is treated in Barbarians can be brought over to D&D. It’s an easy rule to adapt. Here is the rule from Barbarians.
“Vast Hoards of Treasure
Do not be stingy – describe the mountains of gold and baskets full of gems, the silver chalices and tiaras, the jewel-encrusted scepters and gold-chased bracelets, the chests overflowing with silver and the crowns that once belonged to lords, princes and kings. Tell them it is wealth beyond their imaginings; if they suggest counting up the value, just laugh at them! Have they turned into accountants all of a sudden? The thing is, they can’t take it all with them so they can only pick the choicest items. They can always come back for more!
Advancement Points
Characters get better at doing things as they complete their adventures and their fame spreads. However, they have to earn their improvements. They do this at the end of the saga they just completed or before the beginning of the next one.
Remember all that loot they picked up? Well, they have the chance to describe exactly what they did with it. They might live the high life for a few months, drinking or gambling it away. They might buy new weapons and armour (or get their old stuff repaired) or buy kroarks, or throw expensive parties, or spend it all on women. They might send expensive gifts to their friends. They might use it to buy a new galley, new land or pay off debts. This is the stuff of legends – it ensures that they are noticed and helps their fame to spread. I mean, no one was with them when they killed that great Xolth in the dark pits beneath Urceb, so how else are people going to know about it?
Once the characters have described how they lost or spent all their fortunes, they can gain Advancement Points. How many you give out depends on how they spent their loot to the best effect. Normally, you would give out 2 points. However, if their story is particularly good, amusing or inventive, you can give out an extra point; especially if the way they construct their story gives you a lead-in to the next adventure. On the other hand, if the character keeps back some of the money or is miserly with it, he gets only one Advancement Point.” Simon Washbourne, Barabarians of Lemuria 40 (Cubicle Seven 2009).
Adapting the rule to D&D would entail replacing Advancement Points with experience points. A saga could be defined as a session, adventure or even campaign, depending on how one favors experience point distribution.
Edit: Since it is Metal Earth the loot wouldn't necessarily be piles of gems, of course. Perhaps a slag heap of rusted metal or the hides from creatures slain. Whatever the loot may be in the campaign setting, it isn't tallied. It is described, and it must be all spent to gain the character's experience points.
Quote from: John Morrow;545197You can get the Tribe 8 Companion PDF for $6 on RPGNow (http://www.rpgnow.com/product/1224/Tribe-8-Companion?it=1) if you want to see the essay and, no, I don't get any royalties if you buy it.
I'll have to give it a look; it's a shame you won't get any $ for it, though.
Quote from: Kuroth;545211In another thread I mentioned how Metal Earth would seem to be well suited for Barbarians of Lemuria. Now, I understand the lure of D&D.
BOL is my very close second choice to B/X; really, it only loses out because everyone already knows how to play basic D&D and I can make up junk for it standing on my head whilst being prison raped. Anyway, I like this rule and i may port it over. Thanks for reminding me about it.
Quote from: Aos;545219BOL is my very close second choice to B/X; really, it only loses out because everyone already knows how to play basic D&D and I can make up junk for it standing on my head whilst being prison raped. Anyway, I like this rule and i may port it over. Thanks for reminding me about it.
Very cool. I thought you probably had read Barbarians alright. I think Metal Earth is pretty cool. It all has the feel of the the place in it's presentation too. People living there wouldn't have fancy maps!
Quote from: Kuroth;545220Very cool. I thought you probably had read Barbarians alright. I think Metal Earth is pretty cool. It all has the feel of the the place in it's presentation too. People living there wouldn't have fancy maps!
That has always been my feeling. I think I even said somewhere or other that maps of any kind are a type of treasure in Metal Earth.
Anyway, I will likely make use of BOL at some point.
Quote from: Aos;545217I'll have to give it a look; it's a shame you won't get any $ for it, though.
My two essays (on population and economics) are only a part of the book (7 pages) and it was done as a work for hire and I'm fine with not getting anything for it. It's my one bit of paid and published RPG work. My main point was that I was recommending it because it was relevant to your question, not because I would get any financial gain from it.
From the Wikipedia article on Barter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barter_economy):
"Contrary to popular conception, there is no evidence of a society or economy that relied primarily on barter. Instead, non-monetary societies operated largely along the principles of gift economics and debt. When barter did in fact occur, it was usually between either complete strangers or would-be enemies."
Widespread use of barter is most common in situations where a monetary economy has collapsed.
Some pre-monetary cultures were more oriented toward gift exchange (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy) and others toward explicit debt repayment arrangements (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years).
Quote from: Yasha;545303From the Wikipedia article on Barter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barter_economy):
"Contrary to popular conception, there is no evidence of a society or economy that relied primarily on barter. Instead, non-monetary societies operated largely along the principles of gift economics and debt. When barter did in fact occur, it was usually between either complete strangers or would-be enemies."
Widespread use of barter is most common in situations where a monetary economy has collapsed.
Some pre-monetary cultures were more oriented toward gift exchange (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy) and others toward explicit debt repayment arrangements (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years).
Very true. In rural parts of my country, and I bet in other parts of Europe, you can still see it, "Hey, I brought some eggs and some potatoes, take them".
EDIT: And welcome to therpgsite! :)
It comes to this, don't make having stuff important to the system. You don't see Thundarr or Kamandi upgrading their gear or holding on to stuff.
Mechanically make it so that a character's chances of success are based primarily on his own abilities and skills and in mechanical terms the difference between using one gun or another are too trivial to be worth bothering with. All you need to know is that a gun is designed to kill people, by how much they kill people is sort of academic.
The BoL suggestion is a good one. Equipment is BoL is abstracted to the point that it doesn't get in the way but not to the point it stops making sense.
Quote from: John Morrow;545197I'm the guy who wrote the Economics essay and rules in the Tribe 8 Companion.
Everybody involved, however tangentially, in Tribe 8 has a demigod status in my eyes.
Quote from: Yasha;545303Widespread use of barter is most common in situations where a monetary economy has collapsed.
That's what I'm aiming for.
Quote from: John Morrow;545244My two essays (on population and economics) are only a part of the book (7 pages) and it was done as a work for hire and I'm fine with not getting anything for it. It's my one bit of paid and published RPG work. My main point was that I was recommending it because it was relevant to your question, not because I would get any financial gain from it.
I never played Tribe 8, but I borrowed the books from a friend and loved the flavor material (the mechanics are probably good but I was reading them mostly for the setting). Great stuff.
I went back and reread my economics essay in the Tribe 8 Companion. A big part of it was also defining the economic activity of each group in the game leading to a list of what they have and what they want, which gives players some knowledge about where they should go looking to trade for or to with things. The barter rules, themselves, dealt primarily with how long it took people to find a trade and how good the deal would be for them.
Quote from: Kuroth;545211Advancement Points
Characters get better at doing things as they complete their adventures and their fame spreads. However, they have to earn their improvements. They do this at the end of the saga they just completed or before the beginning of the next one.
[SNIP]
Adapting the rule to D&D would entail replacing Advancement Points with experience points. A saga could be defined as a session, adventure or even campaign, depending on how one favors experience point distribution.
You may be aware of this already, but Dave Arneson's "First Fantasy Campaign" has rules for exactly this (XP based on spending loot). The "Wine, Women & Song" table, IIRC.
I had to deal with exactly this problem when I was working on the economics for Other Dust. Several issues came up in the process.
The setting for Other Dust is Earth, 200 years after Stars Without Number's apocalypse. Human civilization has largely been ground down to the tribal and small community level, and there's nothing remotely resembling a monetary system. The default unit of value is a meal of uncontaminated food.
One immediate consequence of a hardline "no money" system is that it is much harder to handle buying and selling at the table. Quite aside from any issues about barter valuation, players have to juggle the relative value of each of their possessions in this particular situation, to this particular trade partner, and decide which of them they're willing to fork over in exchange for the goods they want. Then the GM has to decide whether or not the seller likes the offered trade. This takes much more time than a simple subtraction operation on the group's total coinage.
Most players also find it deeply annoying. Barter is great for verisimilitude, but unless you're running with the kind of group that loves haggling for iron rations in the market, most players just don't want to deal with it. It's fun the first time, and then it's a fifteen-minute chunk bitten out of the session every time they want to buy something. As a compromise, Other Dust prices all objects in a default number of meals, and groups can just use total values of goods traded versus goods wanted to make the process faster. Advanced communities might actually have a monetary system based on salvaged Old Terran credit chips or local slugs.
Aside from this, however, there's a second-order effect- it is much, much harder to accumulate and hold a substantial store of liquid wealth. It doesn't matter if you've got a backpack full of Old Terran medical stims, odds are that the locals haven't got what you want to buy. And if they find out you do have a backpack full of stims, you can expect them to murder you and your pals in an eyeblink, because hey, you're strangers and their kids are dying of radiation poisoning.
You can't just carry around a purse with 2d12 5,000 gp gemstones in it. If you somehow luck into a vast supply of some valuable commodity, you need to protect it somehow, which means making friends with a local community- and if they're your friends, well, they're going to expect you to share with them.
The net result is to make wealth more a tool of negotiation and relationship-building than something to stockpile in the bank or strongroom. If you find more of something than you can carry on your back, then you either leave it behind or arrange for some friends to come and salvage the rest of it. Huge stores of wealth just aren't as important any more because you can't easily leverage them into specific desired goods. At best, you can strip them down to spare parts and then have the party's scrounger build new gear out of them or repair your damaged kit.
The key for me was to just kill the assumption that you can expect to exchange your surplus goods for specific desired items. The locals simply do not have the surplus to have large numbers of dedicated artisans, and only the largest and most powerful communities actually have shops and markets as most players would understand them. You can't barter for something the locals just don't have. If you want anything that isn't a staple of post-apocalyptic life, you've got to build it yourself, find a friend who can do it for you, or go out and adventure your way into finding it.
Thanks, scarcity is definitely something I'm thinking about.
Quote from: Aos;545499Thanks, scarcity is definitely something I'm thinking about.
I'm not heavy in the knowledge department on this, but I remember that most Inuit tribes would barter using three lists - one that had what they needed, one that had what they wanted, and one that had what they were willing to part with. A barter system should have social ramifications as well as economic ones, like the above.
Quickie idea for a system for this:
Items are rated according to a value based on their scarcity and demand.
When bartering, you decide what items you wish to offer, and what items you are attempting to barter for, and total up the values for each side, then find the difference.
If the amount you're offering is worth less than the amount requested, the difference becomes a penalty to a bartering skill roll. If it is greater, it either provides a bonus, or is simply an automatic success.
Once the penalty or bonus is determined, you make the skill roll. If you succeed, the deal closes. If not, check the margin of failure. If it's too far from a success, the other party ends negotiations. If it's not, you can attempt to sweeten the deal and try again.
If you wanted to add a little guesswork to the mix, you could also keep the item values secret from the players, and have only the GM know. A check on an appraisal skill could however provide hints as to the value of the items to the players.
I've considered this before, and here's my take on it.
Give each item a barter value - i've decided that a barter value of 1 is equal to feeding 1 person for 1 day. So, a chicken might be a BV of 1, a sword, BV of 20 (for example sake).
For scarcity, multiply the base BV of an item by that scarcity level.
In the desert, a sword might have a scarcity of x 2.5, in a community with access to a mine and skilled workers x 0.5.
In the desert, the sword has a BV of 50, in the community 10.
I run GW 1e with a lot of barter and a few domars (the default currency of GW) and I use backgrounds for characters. The only people in my GW who have a clue about economics are Merchants. Everyone else barters based on what they have vs. what they need.
An energy cell is worth how many meals? That depends on how hungry you are. In my GW, non-merchants trade based on how crucial the desired object may be versus how disposable their own object may be. In some communities, the local lords may have set trade values, aka pounds of meat vs. pounds of scrap metal vs. pounds of live animal, etc.
Of course, I can always fall back on INT rolls for PCs to feel if they are getting an okay deal or not.
As for game systems, Waste World has some good ideas on scarcity. In any post-apoc setting, scarcity is going to be the top issue in trade.
Quote from: Yasha;545303From the Wikipedia article on Barter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barter_economy):
"Contrary to popular conception, there is no evidence of a society or economy that relied primarily on barter. Instead, non-monetary societies operated largely along the principles of gift economics and debt. When barter did in fact occur, it was usually between either complete strangers or would-be enemies."
Widespread use of barter is most common in situations where a monetary economy has collapsed.
Some pre-monetary cultures were more oriented toward gift exchange (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy) and others toward explicit debt repayment arrangements (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years).
Yup. Gift reciprocity as described by Malinowski and Maus. Stone age Economics by Stalins is good as well.
I have an alternative though, just role play it.