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:

"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 and others toward explicit debt repayment arrangements.

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.