"I don't care what you say, Wish Economy doesn't work.&

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Wed Aug 25, 2010 1:28 pm

Maybe that's why high level dudes always want to kill each other. It's not due to idealogical or alignment differences. It's because they're sick of other people spamming Wishes and devaluing theirs.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Wed Aug 25, 2010 1:47 pm

The effects of the Wish Economy on the lower-rung people are completely at the whim/mercy of the big boys. Unless it's for the lulz, peasants offer nothing of value to those in the Wish Economy. Anything they produce, Aladdin can skip over them and just have Genie make it for him. Economically, there is no interaction between tiers.

Because the peasants have nothing to trade, the only way this wealth will 'trickle down' is by Aladdin deciding to be Santa Claus.

Fuchs · Post by **Fuchs** » Wed Aug 25, 2010 2:23 pm

A bit like some MMOGs. At the start every copper is worth something, as are loot drops, but after a year or so, inflation has taken roots, and only the very best items matter anymore, the rest is "vendor trash".

mean_liar · Post by **mean_liar** » Wed Aug 25, 2010 3:11 pm

virgil wrote:Economically, there is no interaction between tiers.

Because the peasants have nothing to trade, the only way this wealth will 'trickle down' is by Aladdin deciding to be Santa Claus.

Not entirely correct. The dissemination is not "high level caster to peasant", it's more like, "high level caster to mid-level gank squad to ambush predator to slightly-lower-level adventurers to hookers to peasant".

It doesn't take Santa Claus (though that would be the easy route and there's little to prevent it from happening), all it takes is time. Eventually that limitless wealth gets hard to track/store/keep, due to violence/burglary/patience, and it WILL (re)enter the economy.

JigokuBosatsu · Post by **JigokuBosatsu** » Wed Aug 25, 2010 3:54 pm

I love you guys. No, seriously. This is fascinating.

I'll definitely be applying... if not specific facts, certainly this method of looking at it, in the next two books I'm doing. My world isn't straight D&D, obviously, so there's no wish economy. There is something similar in that there are almost no wizardry in the world at large (only industrialized alchemy), so anything that comes out the cloistered wizard nation is highly valuable, and potentially destabilizing. Case in point, in book 2 I will be having self-assembling constructs spam the labor market, and meet heavy opposition from the craft guilds.

Anyway, this discussion is great, including the snarking.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Wed Aug 25, 2010 4:04 pm

mean_liar wrote:Not entirely correct. The dissemination is not "high level caster to peasant", it's more like, "high level caster to mid-level gank squad to ambush predator to slightly-lower-level adventurers to hookers to peasant".

It doesn't take Santa Claus (though that would be the easy route and there's little to prevent it from happening), all it takes is time. Eventually that limitless wealth gets hard to track/store/keep, due to violence/burglary/patience, and it WILL (re)enter the economy.

From what I've seen, a single efreet going full Santa-mode can meet the material needs for a single city, which isn't something that will destroy the world economy as you've essentially got an isolated dictator city-state with that model. I suspect most of us are OK with this, because it's both cool to see for that power level and sufficiently uncommon for it to happen.

As for that wealth reentering the economy by Aladdin hiring thugs, that's getting sufficiently detailed to start needing socio-economic theory. The assumed setting is incredibly unstable. Dragons and failed adventurers take wealth out of the system all the time. Marauding owlbears make travel more hazardous, so the world is more isolated, preventing new wealth from reaching very far. Orc raids and rogue fire elementals take resources out of the system all the time through murder and destruction.

D&D settings are so vague and have such a difference in circumstances, I feel modelling that level of detail to be essentially intractable. Broader details I'm fine with and like to see worked on.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Wed Aug 25, 2010 4:06 pm

Why are we even bothering to apply real-world economic models to D&D? It just doesn't work.

Murtak · Post by **Murtak** » Wed Aug 25, 2010 4:13 pm

Psychic Robot wrote:Why are we even bothering to apply real-world economic models to D&D? It just doesn't work.

We are not, which is good, because those models do not work or work badly.

We are applying common sense and the rule of cool. Common sense tells us a wish economy will be violently unstable. The rule of cool tells us where to suspend disbelief and maybe tweak the system a little to make it work out the way we want to. The goal is to be believable enough and mechanically sound enough that the world does not come tumbling down the very second entrepreneurship meets the spell section of the players' handbook.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Aug 25, 2010 4:35 pm

Red_Rob wrote: So one high level person can 'only' create 20% of the wealth of a modern nation each year? That seems like plenty to destabilise a dark age economy.

No. One high level person can spend 365 of their five minute workdays to create 20% of the gold of a modern province. Gold isn't wealth, it's just a commodity. Producing that wouldn't produce 20% of the economy of Alaska, it would just produce a 3/4 of a short ton of gold a day.

And yes, that's enough gold to buy up every single thing in town that can be traded for gold. But using just one wish on that already got you there. Five hundred pounds of gold is kind of a lot of gold, and anything that can be bartered for gold can be bartered for some fraction of that. Which means that characters don't sit around chaining wishes for gold, because the second wish is pointless. 95% of cities in the DMG can't absorb more than 15,000 gp.

If you want something better than that, you have to deal with people that are not bullshit crap covered farmers. But the reality there is that the people who can make the kind of exquisite iron work you might actually trade hundreds and hundreds of pounds of gold for don't even want your hundreds an hundreds of pounds of gold. Because they are Wizards with fabricate, and they make iron work 9000 pounds at a time.

-Username17

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Thu Aug 26, 2010 12:15 am

Psychic Robot wrote:Why are we even bothering to apply real-world economic models to D&D? It just doesn't work.

As I said, what's interesting is not "how does this economy work", but rather, "How does this economy interact with the rest of the world at large".

And the answer, even for D&D, gratifyingly seems to be "It's ambiguous enough that you can think of cool shit to explain it."

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Thu Aug 26, 2010 10:52 am

Psychic Robot wrote: Why are we even bothering to apply real-world economic models to D&D? It just doesn't work.

That's in of itself enough reason to apply real-world economic models to D&D. Because in D&D money is directly tied to character power and D&D uses a 'like reality except where note' approach to its economy.

If this was 2E where there was a hard ceiling to the amount of power that you could reasonably buy then we could probably ignore it. But someone thought that the shit from Final Fantasy and Wizardry where you could buy magical swag with gameworld currency was a good idea for 3E and beyond. So we're stuck with this crap.

If you don't want to go the 4E route and have its deeply contrived 'because I said so!' economic model, you need to realize what part of the economic chain is fucking up and fix it.

Draco_Argentum · Post by **Draco_Argentum** » Sat Aug 28, 2010 11:14 am

Its pretty simple.

High level can create shitloads of gold. But they all can so its o no value as a medium of exchange between them.

Low level people can't so gold is a medium of exchange.

The two groups don't affect each other because the low levels have nothing the high levels want.

Since the high levels can't actually do anything with the gold they can in theory create they don't create it.

Problem solved, there is no immense gold supply.

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Sat Aug 28, 2010 1:43 pm

Alternately, the gold is consumed in paying for outsiders to do tasks for them. A bunch of Dretches can be hired from a higher up Fiend for merely gold.

Also, high level wizards use and buy gold in their personal Iron Wall businesses.

For the most part, any gold usually "wished" for, is wished for as decorations, structures, furniture. Which can be sold, but isn't easily liquid resources the way that a pile of miniature golden doggies, or tiny replica axe heads, is.