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## Balancing wealth: No one wants to buy your crap.

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User3
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### Balancing wealth: No one wants to buy your crap.

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Post by User3 » Mon Jul 19, 2004 6:12 pm

I've been brainstorming ways to prevent DnD players from pulling the gold out of people's fillings at the end of every battle.
Idea one:
No one wants to buy your crap. In my mind, an economy is based on a elaborate weave of shared dependency. The baker only buys his flour from the flour guy, and the flour guy only gets his wheat from the wheat guy. They have long-standing relationships, and the baker is not going to buy his flour from a caravan that just came in, because he doesn't want to alienate his sole source of flour in the area, the flour guy. The modern "price shopper" isn't really going to exist in a DnD economy, because there really might only be 1-2 guys in a whole area who do that type of craft, and you are not going to buy from a far way land when you can get it locally because some caravans don't ever reach their destination.
That being said, adventurers who walk into to town with sets of fine crystal glasswear are going to have trouble breaking into the local glasswear market. The number of buyers is fixed, and the number of sellers is also fixed. They might woo new buyers with lower prices, but that should take a fixed amount of time as they set up a shop or stall, and hawk wares like anyone else.
So, my proposal is that DnD should make a clear distinction that not all items can be sold wthout this kind of process. Raw goods and goods that can be broken down into raw goods should have a limited exchange value(so a handful of gold rings should have a exchange value up to the limit that the local goldsmiths are willing to buy the rings for their gold content), and refined goods should be sold at a fixed rate. Art objects should be set on the market where they can be bought 1-6 months later by a buyer, and magic items should be part of idea 2.
People who want to sell Fabricated goods or the loot from the local evil temple you whacked should have to have a "merchant adventure" with lots of RPing skills checks and plots by rival merchants and where the only reward is the masses of gold they (might) make.
Idea 2:
Magic items should be both more and less common, and they should be sold like art objects and bought based on availability. At no point should someone say "gosh, I really need a +2 Flaming Sword of Keenness, and walk down to the local Ye Old Magick Shoppe to pick one up.
Potions and scolls might be commonish, but again might be based on availability. If the local scroll guy only know 1st level spells, then you shouldn't be able to buy more than those spells.
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Username17
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### Re: Balancing wealth: No one wants to buy your crap.

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Post by Username17 » Mon Jul 19, 2004 7:51 pm

> K wrote:No one wants to buy your crap.

Historically speaking, that's total unrelenting bullshit. Because caravans were rare, they were more in demand. The Baker gets the same flour every single damned day, so when a caravan comes into town one spring morning he jumps at the chance to buy the flour from out of town because whatever grain they are using is going to be at least a little different and that breaks the monotony.
As such, foreign traders don't even have to have competitive prices. People don't have a lot of options most of the time, so anybody from out of town basically has a monopoly on novelty. The caravan is generally a price setter, and the baker is a price taker.
There's a reason why in historical costume dramas the peddler coming to town turns into a virtual parade - the travelling merchant is a celebrity in a situation where people have profoundly limited options.
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If having a hundred million pieces of gold breaks the game, the game is broken. Period. Coming up with weird ahistorical nonsense to try to keep player characters from acquiring a hundred million crowns is a waste of your time and mine.
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User3
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### Re: Balancing wealth: No one wants to buy your crap.

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Post by User3 » Mon Jul 19, 2004 9:12 pm

Here are a few links on medieval trade, travel and guilds.
Trade
Guilds
Heres a general link.
Basically, they say that trader who traveled did so to bring back exotic goods, and common goods were subject to guilds and price fixing. If we posited the existence of magic, most likely the guilds have banded together to prevent the odd mage from ruining the local economy and their livelehood. A "mages guild" probably exists to inspect new shipments (at a nominal fee) to make sure that loads of fine goods that come in on ships or caravans are not crappy goods covered in illusions, altered items created by transmutions, or items created by conjuration spells.
I see no reason why most of the loot from adventures should be turned into money by a simple "going to the shop, talking to the merchant, and choosing the Sell Items command from the Buy/Sell/Identify list."
Exotic goods that the local economy doesn't produce (or doesn't get from usual trade) should sell well, but the furniture from the Temple of Elemental Evil shouldn't really be worth your time to hall out.
Making a million gold should be a big adventure, since that much money can have world-changing effects on a campaign. I'm not even talking about buying magical items (since you could hire wizards to make items, even if the item creation rules didn't require gold to make stuff, or you could hire adventurers to bring back items).
A million gold can buy armies, hire ships, build cities, alter the local economy, grant politcal power, and set all kinds of people on your ass for reasons as varied as marriage to thievery to assasination. Reducing it to a simple math calculation takes away from potential stories, and encourages people to bring caravans of wagons to cart off the evil knight's dinnerware and fine bed linens.
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Username17
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### Re: Balancing wealth: No one wants to buy your crap.

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Post by Username17 » Mon Jul 19, 2004 9:42 pm

Of course, in reality every time a city or castle fell, people did come with carts to haul off everything down to the flatware and the furniture. That's not a problem, really. Looting enemy establishments has been a fact of war for as long as there has been war.
The problem is that by keeping track of every dollar and cent in a character's life you are also by necessity keeping track of every single wall hanging and fork that you loot from the evil temple.
And if you come up with bullshit that makes the wall hangings only worth 13 copper, you know what? The players are still going to make the game grind to a halt in order to drag them off on carts so long as you keep track of the exact number of coppers you have.
If you want the players to be willing to abstract the looting process and speed up play you have to abstract the money actually in their possession. That or you can constantly put the players in hostile territory with the pressing weight of time fighting back against their plans at every turn. Those are the only options, and the second one seems kind of forced if you do it all the time.
Making looting, or farming, or crafting, or any other money making scheme arbitrarily less valuable isn't going to stop people from doing it and is therefore a waste of time. Making it so that people don't have specific amounts of money would in fact make people leave your diamond architecture alone. Nothing else will, really.
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RandomCasualty
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### Re: Balancing wealth: No one wants to buy your crap.

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Post by RandomCasualty » Mon Jul 19, 2004 10:29 pm

The real solution is to just divorce gold from magic items, like 2nd edition did. You can attach a gold price to magic items, or some kind of number cost, so that when you create characters you can assign them a relatively equal amount of wealth, but as far as in game, purchasing magical items needs to go.
That way you don't have to be pissing yourself everytime the PCs come up with some new way of making money in the game, and possibly busting up the wealth guidelines, and your PCs stop caring about looting copper peice valued spoons. Even if they do, you can easily just generate abstract amounts of the value of the treasure, and nobody will care.
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User3
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### Re: Balancing wealth: No one wants to buy your crap.

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Post by User3 » Mon Jul 19, 2004 10:45 pm

Looting a castle so that you can put an actual bed in your house and holding an "evil lord auction and pie cook-off" are two seperate things.
DnD as written is not so much based on a medieval economy, but on a modern one. In our economy, its quite possible to buy anything you want or sell anything you have, and the market is vast and able to absorb any goods or services you want to offer. eBay is just one way of transferring even the most bizarre goods or services.
In a medieval economy, they didn't even always use currency. Assuming that any particular item has a base GP value and that it can be sold anywhere is pretty foolish, and it encourages the worse kind of looting. Gold and gems, however, should be something that attracts and fascinates people.
The Count of Monty Cristo found a chest of gold and jewels, not a particularly ripe piece of farmland. Leprechauns don't have a pot of mastercraft furniture at the end of the rainbow, and the golden goose didn't lay affordably priced shoes.
Abstacting wealth may be fine as a game system, but it fails as a storytelling method. If your story is the "and now I'm trying to sell pies in a little shop," just the fact you are an adventurer means that at some point a demon or something wants to horn in on your pie business and it ends in an epic battle inside an extraplanar bakery dimension.
Abstarcting wealth so that you have "some money" makes finding treasure have no appeal. It becomes another round of "Is it magical? No? Throw it in the cart."
My thesis is simply this: making money should require an adventure, regardless of the means, and the selling off and accounting of common items should not be a valid source of wealth for adventurers. Fabricate nonsense and Plane Shifting to the Elemental Plane of Earth and kicking genie ass and all that other stuff should touch off an adventure. Making common items almost unsellable is one way of making treasure like gold and jewels cool and interesting and looting the evil cultist's slightly used ceremonial silk underpants dull and valueless.
I mean, since nobles are the only ones who buy fine furniture, which noble wants to be the one that has Lord Robelwan's old red velvet couch in his parlor? How gauche. Its not like all of the other nobles can't recognize it. Letting players count out the gold they found and seeing if they have enough to swim like Scrooge McDuck is fun.
Abstract the money cost of food and inns, but let players feel excited by a dragon's hoard or a sunken trasure ship.
It makes good economic sense and good storytelling sense. It also neatly removes a rather crap mechanic.
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Username17
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### Re: Balancing wealth: No one wants to buy your crap.

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Post by Username17 » Mon Jul 19, 2004 11:35 pm

> K wrote:I mean, since nobles are the only ones who buy fine furniture, which noble wants to be the one that has Lord Robelwan's old red velvet couch in his parlor? How gauche. Its not like all of the other nobles can't recognize it. Letting players count out the gold they found and seeing if they have enough to swim like Scrooge McDuck is fun.
> Abstract the money cost of food and inns, but let players feel excited by a dragon's hoard or a sunken trasure ship.

You can't have it both ways. If you abstract costs, you have abstracted assets by defintition. There is no point in even counting the exact number of gold pieces you earn if you are not going to count the exact number you spend. Remember the magic of significant figures - as soon as any part of your equation has no confidence your result has no confidence.
And no, telling players that they arbitrarily get zero dollars for the silk wall hangings is retarded, not "good storytelling". Real things have real value, and if people gain access to real things they have by definition gained access to real value.
Ironically, by coming up with a cockamamey story about how players usually can't get full price for their stuff, you set up a situation in which people spend more time obsessing about their loot. See, once you usually can't get much money for the silk, you end up carrying it around on a huge list and waiting for the perfect moment when you can barter your silk away at full price.
Indeed, dicking with player character treasure value in any way forces players to adopt the "Logistics and Dragons" methodology of Greyhawking everything and then keeping it until they can find a place to sell high in story. It's a pain in the fvcking ass is what it is.
If you are going to bother to keep track of every gold piece the players take in, you pretty much have to assume that everything can just sort of magically be sold for full price or you'll go insane. If you aren't going to count all the gold pieces they take in, then it doesn't really matter.
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Keeping track of individual gold pieces ends up with stupid crap happening. Namely, characters all become ascetics covered in extremely expensive ninja equipment. After all, eating pheasant is expensive, and doesn't directly benefit the player in any way. However, eating millet cakes every day is cheap and doesn't penalize the player in any way.
In short, by having specific gold piece values for your character, living a higher lifestyle becomes a waste that will haunt your character forever (since of course a penny saved is a penny earned, one more copper spent on food and lodging is one less copper you will ever have over the entire life of your character). By having abstract character wealth, character's having hobbies, living expenses, retainers, and dependents becomes a flavor thing - it becomes a viable character option.
Keeping track of individual gold is very bad for the game, and always has been. And dicking with the price system slows the game down considerably. It can be fun sometimes, but always keep in mind that by doing so you are taking up an enormous amount of play time with people bartering and money changing. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it isn't a "fix" to anything - it's just a playstyle choice where you have a lot of roleplaying sessions based around haggling.
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RandomCasualty
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### Re: Balancing wealth: No one wants to buy your crap.

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Post by RandomCasualty » Tue Jul 20, 2004 1:26 am

> FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1090280129[/unixtime]]
> Keeping track of individual gold pieces ends up with stupid crap happening. Namely, characters all become ascetics covered in extremely expensive ninja equipment. After all, eating pheasant is expensive, and doesn't directly benefit the player in any way. However, eating millet cakes every day is cheap and doesn't penalize the player in any way.
> In short, by having specific gold piece values for your character, living a higher lifestyle becomes a waste that will haunt your character forever (since of course a penny saved is a penny earned, one more copper spent on food and lodging is one less copper you will ever have over the entire life of your character). By having abstract character wealth, character's having hobbies, living expenses, retainers, and dependents becomes a flavor thing - it becomes a viable character option.

You don't even need to abstract it, you just need to make it so that nobody really cares much about it from a power standpoint, like in 2nd edition. If you can't buy magical items with gold, and gold is basically just used for stuff so you can buy castles or whatever, it lets some people live it up with their new gold and not care, and it lets others be the monk with a vow of poverty who gives all his wealth away, and mechanically those characters stay even.
You simply cannot have ninja gear that people have to buy at all.
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