I've played in systems (multiple ones I think, but I don't remember the names) in which wealth was just a stat you had, and if you wanted to buy anything that was ranked below your stat, you could, without doing anything. And if you wanted to buy something at your stat or above, you'd roll to see if you could acquire access to the funds. So, the number didn't event represent a pile of gold, it was completely abstracted as something like "financial liquidity". It's a solution for the situation where you don't want characters to have to spend time pinching pennies to buy a suit of basic armor and a weapon, but you also want there to be some scarcity at the margins, so they can't just buy the best sword in the game either. This system obviously had its own, different set of flaws compared to D&D style systems, but some advantages it had were that there was no accounting, and it played fast. If your players are sick of erasing and overwriting the numbers on the wealth section of their character sheet over and over until the paper is gray and ragged, and they are responsible enough not to intentionally try to break the game, I think that method works well.
Burning Wheel does this and I absolutely love the system. I liked how if you failed your wealth check, your score was lowered for awhile. You could also increase it like any other score with enough success of difficult tasks. The way all the various subsystems in that game interact was superb.
I do think you lose out in an abstract system though. Delving for treasure in a dangerous dungeon was most the appeal of the early RPGs. It's not quite the same rush discovering a horde that then gets abstracted away
> I liked how if you failed your wealth check, your score was lowered for awhile. You could also increase it like any other score with enough success of difficult tasks.
Put that way, it sounds like it's less a wealth check and more like a credit check where it's assumed the boring stuff is deferred until after the adventure.
that's largely how its described in the rules. It represents calling in favors, requesting credit, etc. A failure could be described as not having the funds, funds being tied up in other ventures, requests denied, that sort of thing.
The way cash works with resources in Burning Wheel is really genius design. Since you have your lifecycle maintenance cycles, and you will want to buy stuff, it ends up putting some pressure on the characters to get some cash to be able to handle those resources tests, especially since you have the Tax risks. And on top of that it makes it more likely the party will help each other to lower that risk.
But I totally agree that the abstraction loses something about finding treasure.
Burning Wheel was probably one of them, I know I played some games in that system. It's been a long time, but I remember it having a lot of clever rules (like the skill progression mechanic that required you to both succeed and fail).
I'm a bit confused by this statement. Isn't GURPS EXTREMELY mechanics based? I can figure out the penalties for shooting a guy in the left eye as I speed by on my motorcycle at night. The combat is extremely detailed relative to a system like D&D which is more abstract. I know if you buy the advantage wealth in GURPS, it gives you multipliers for your starting wealth. It's entirely up to the campaign and how it's run whether you need to account for all of that spending or not. Typically if you're a millionaire, I wouldn't bother with normal purchase accounting. There is a published rule for abstract wealth to avoid this accounting. I feel like GURPS is pure mechanics, and you bring your own settings and feel to it.
Sure. The rules on firearm damage by caliber aren't relevant in a Cave Man RPG. The super powers can't be used in a setting without super powers. Ignore the magic systems in a cyberpunk game. GURPS is pure mechanics without assuming a setting so of course it's rare you'd use all of the mechanics in the same game. GURPS gives you everything but the setting. It's a toolkit for building role playing games with very different flavors, but does this by giving you mechanics to leverage in these scenarios. Whether it's the tactical shooting or high fantasy martial arts or alien device granting super powers. There are rules and mechanics designed for it in a generic and easily expandable way.
I think we're probably in agreement and I just misread your original statement. GURPS is very much a mechanics heavy game whereas D&D married their world setting to their game mechanics and abstracted it to a degree to which they are difficult and often not worth separating. That's why it feels weird to say D&D is more mechanics based than GURPS when GURPS has mechanics for everything you could want to do regardless of setting. I'd go so far as to say GURPS is JUST mechanics, and you've got to bring everything else to make it work.
It's not exactly the same, but in owlcat's upcoming CRPG Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader, is similar. You can just get anything and everything with costs lower than your wealth level (but not above at all). I'm assuming it's similar or the same in the TTRPG it's based on.
I was coming here to reference this actually. The Tabletop version is very similar. Wealth is abstracted, you're basically at a certain level or not. Far more important though are whether or not said item or thing is available, where, and if you have the connections to get a hold of it. I rather liked this as it places an emphasis on mobility, exploration, and roleplaying/socialization than whether or not you have enough gold. Fits very well in line with the general premise of the game. You're a privateer with the power of a planetary governor/high ambassador. If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it. =P
Blades in the Dark does a hybrid model: for small things (the example given is bribing a doorman) the player rolls a fortune roll with their lifestyle quality.
For larger things, there's coin. One coin is "A full purse of silver pieces. A week’s wages." Coin can be spent/sacrificed for significantly larger things than day-to-day expenditures.
A character banks coin in their stash which determines their lifestyle quality and, eventually, their quality of retirement.
It feels much more like a stat to me, but has some of the flexibility of a resource as well.
This is very clever, and makes a great deal of sense. Often that's how real wealth works too. I wonder why more RPGs don't follow this model.
It always seems weird to me that I'm (using GoW as an example) a God who can command thunder from the heavens, yet simultaneously am forced to loot people's forgotten stash to build my next set of armor. For a while, my son nicknamed Kratos as the God of Loot, rather apt I think.
this is how Call of Cthulhu works and it's worked out great for my group, most of whom come from D&D and were hesitant about it at first. a big part of why we found it to be so cool is that it makes purchasing stuff in-universe more of a roleplaying opportunity than merely an exercise in bookkeeping, while also discouraging "murderhobo" wealth-accumulation-seeking metagaming.
That does work pretty well. Although it does discount the occasionally entertaining trope of the player character from a wealthy family being persistently disgruntled at the low quality of food and drink and bed they can afford on their adventurer's loot
If wealth is a stat, presumably it can change. "You were raised at wealth level 7 but your adventuring only supports wealth level 3" solves that pretty immediately.
1) Do not give too much wealth to PCs. Keeping the heroes poor is a kind of dramatic tension that not many campaigns explore!
2) Give them ways to spend their money! If the PCs need to go to an island, make the waters dangerous, and drive the price of the safer boat up. The danger is not fully evaded, but perhaps now they have a crew to help in any encounters. The party of course is always free to think of more creative ways around.
Make sure you as a DM always have an idea of the goals of the PCs, that includes economically. If a PC is aiming to purchase a nice item, keep that in mind when doling out gold, but always be sure to keep dramatic tension of the economy in place.
An alternative to keeping PCs poor is to make them "rich-poor." They are effectively so rich that money does not matter, but the setting is such that there is nothing they can buy that will make them better off. When they reach a town, they can always afford to do whatever they like (when it comes to coin), but they might not be able to afford the narrative consequences of their choices.
The key aspect of "keep them poor" is really just "limit the availability of upgrades." In a desolate world, there's nothing to buy. With super-hero tier PCs, even in an abundant city, there's nothing to buy that matters that doesn't also come with knock on consequences.
This is 5E's default strategy, but I don't think it works well - it means that the PCs becoming rich will remove, rather than add, gameplay. They won't spend any time thinking about paying for necessities of life, but there won't be much else to do with gold, nor any reason to go after it.
(It's sort of like the 5E Ranger. 5E has a bunch of wilderness survival rules, spells, etc. that can be used for campaign gameplay - but one Ranger in the party makes most of them irrelevant. The Ranger player will get personal satisfaction from using those abilities for a handful of minutes per campaign, then all of it will be forgotten.)
Money in a total wasteland is completely worthless of course. But if there's people, money will at the very least let you hire people. Hirelings were a big thing in earlier editions of D&D that kinda got forgotten at some point, but there's certainly something to the idea of high-level PCs hiring people to form an army to take on the army of the evil lich-king.
I guess it kinda depends on the type of role playing the party is looking for. If you want to role play the survival then great, probably don’t use a rich-poor dynamic where survival is handled by coin. I tend to think most parties prefer to just get to the dungeoneering and not spend too much time haggling with the shopkeepers and in-keepers for affordable rates on amenities, though.
This sort of thing only works with relatively inexperienced PCs, who don't realize that 1000 GP can hire all of a typical town for a few weeks to do almost anything, no questions asked. That quantity of hirelings is a relatively effective replacement to magic items. All you have to do afterward is turn combat problems into non-combat problems, which is relatively easy if you can think outside the box.
Need to clear a dungeon? Divert the nearest river to flood it and then use some other means (magical) to clear out the water.
Need to cross a bridge guarded by trolls? The new bridge you build won't be guarded by anyone.
I like that both of your suggestions include spending money and time.
You can flood a dungeon or build a new bridge, but both will take at minimum weeks, if not months.
If the King's daughter was kidnapped by those who live in the dungeon, or if the outcome of a battle hinges on you being able to cross that bridge over a chasm, they're not going to be happy when you come to them with a three-year plan for civic improvements.
Just use a little bit of magic or a different solution if you want things to go faster. I trust a set of clever players to be able to come up with something to totally fuck up the DM's plans.
Also note that Caesar's crossing of the Rhine (a notoriously tough river to bridge) took 10 days, and several similarly amazing feats of quick river diversion have occurred in Chinese history. All without magic. If you don't care whether your works are permanent, the work can be done very quickly.
> Need to clear a dungeon? Divert the nearest river to flood it and then use some other means (magical) to clear out the water.
In a future setting (Eclipse Phase), the party was sent out to investigate rumors of a downed spaceship.
We bought a rover, bought a wagon to go behind the rover. Filled it up with the setting's equivalent of C4. The GM tried to stop us on route, we planned very far and ended up hauling the trailer by hand (the rover got destroyed by a landmine, we specified a 10m rope between the rover and the wagon full of explosives just for such an occasion, the GM had forgotten about that, we didn't, we wrote it down).
We kept lobbing explosives into the ship (low G) until bits of alien started flying out. The GM looked... a bit sad.
High lethality games encourage creative problem solving.
Best story I've heard about clearing a dungeon was a group that drove a flock of sheep into the dungeon. Later, while exploring the dungeon, they'd find tons of traps with dead sheep in them.
In practice I've found this strategy to be pretty frustrating as a player. If treasure is going to be part of the campaign, give me something to spend it on. If it isn't, don't bother -- but in a system like D&D, you need to then provide an alternate method for obtaining equipment and upgrades.
This unfortunately can kill a great deal of incentive for the player. If there's nothing to look forward to, there's no dopamine hit. While too many dopamine hits are clearly bad, the absence of a reward can lead to a very boring game. There's a balance there somewhere.
I'm thinking about a system where you slowly accumulate stress and money, and you need to spend the money (on carousing, helping the poor, or other expensive habits) to get rid of the stress.
My goal would be to have lots of money moving through their hands without them being able to hold onto it for long.
I also remember an article from the 1980s that recommended having thieves steal their money if they got too rich. That sounds a bit unfair to me, although maybe it could work as part of a system there they stay at increasingly more expensive lodgings in order to keep their accumulating wealth safe.
> an article from the 1980s that recommended having thieves steal their money if they got too rich. That sounds a bit unfair to me, although maybe it could work as part of a system there they stay at increasingly more expensive lodgings in order to keep their accumulating wealth safe.
IIRC this was a frustration of mine with Rimworld. It was annoying and made wealth very toxic. The more you had, the more frequently (and more powerful) thieves showed up and wrecked your shit.
I didn't even have nice things, I just polished the floors so colonists wouldn't be so miserable with bunker life but apparently that raised collective wealth to the point of inviting raids.
I've played Blades in the Dark, and while you accumulate stress, you roll to get rid of it. I don't think it costs actual money, although they do call it vices. My plan was to really tie it into the excessive accumulation of money in D&D-style games, which is a problem BitD wouldn't have even if it didn't have the stress mechanic.
Money in BitD is very abstract, and a single coin represents a serious amount of money. And you don't buy stuff with it because you can only take so much stuff with you, and what that is depends on your character. Instead you use it to upgrade your lair or bribe people, I think.
So it's not quite what I was thinking of, although it certainly has some of the elements. Maybe it has shaped how I'm thinking about it now.
I remember how longer ago, I was thinking of a Robin Hood game where character progression depended on how much money you gave to the poor. That way you can still buy stuff for yourself and not level up, or give to the poor and level up.
For the games I've DM'd there's almost always been too much Stress and not enough Downtime Actions. The players would spend a good chunk of their Payout on downtime actions for stress reduction/healing. I don't know if I ever saw a player actually put a coin into their retirement stash.
A game centered around moving money, but not acquiring it, could be very interesting. You could tease out a few interesting scenarios and have meta-progression where helping others can create a network of skills. (i.e. you helped the baker pay her debts, now she will bake bread for you at cost.)
Can you get extra downtime actions for coin? I don't think I've ever done it. If I start spending it on that, I'll never accumulate any coin. Because to be honest, that stress mechanic is giving me stress. It really felt to me like a game that you're always going to lose. But maybe spending coin on it helps.
> A PC can make time for more than two activities, at a cost. Each additional activity from the list costs 1 coin or 1 rep. This reflects the time and resulting resource drain while you’re “off the clock” and not earning from a score. When you complete a new score, you reset and get two “free” activities again.
Spending coin on stress reduction certainly helps. If a player gets a 2-coin reward for a score, I'd hope they stashed one and burned one on something.
>having thieves steal their money if they got too rich
Money attracts that kind of thing, even in the real world. There's a reason rich people have guards. Also bodyguards - I was just listening to a podcast about how a fairly rich (and flashy) drug dealer got kidnapped and ransomed because he didn't think about what a target he was. Obviously more challenging when you're talking about heroes who are personally formidable, but think about friends, family members, retainers, etc.
I've always wanted to run a campaign that does the opposite: give them an obscene amount of wealth.
First problem would be how do they even transport, store, and guard it without being jumped, ripped off and robbed? Did they think millions of coins would fit in a few sacks?
Maybe a "No Country For Old Men" type situation? Sure they're rich as kings but there are more powerful beings that know about their wealth and they are coming.
I am not a big fan of D&D because the "high stakes" of character development mean players take what happens to their characters way too seriously. As the Paranoia manual puts it "... other games are not fun" where "D&D" is most certainly the "other" game.
I would never run a D&D game but instead I would run Paranoia or Call of Cthulhu or Toon. All of those games are fast paced, the first two are definitely unfair against the player so that a lot of problems of "game balance" just don't happen. If I found some people who wanted to play Paranoia right now I could make up enough random dangerous events to deplete their clones before they ever get to the briefing rooms. (A folder full of prerolls is a big help of course) And in CoC it doesn't matter how much money you make because it can't buy you sanity and there isn't anything you can buy that is going to "break" the game.
I know there's lots of different ways to have fun, so please don't take this as a criticism of how you enjoy role-playing - but for me, the character investment in D&D is one of the reasons I love it so much.
I care about what happens to Alfonso Derecho Izquierda Quijano, the Kobold Paladin who's in love with a dragon. I want him to have an arc, I want him to grow as a person, and eventually I want his story to end - either in death on the battlefield, or having achieved his dream of wedding a dragon, or coming to the realization that he wasn't chosen by a dragon but that it simply coughed up some armor from a guy it had eaten while flying overhead.
Having said that, I also want to play some games where characters are disposable, including Paranoia. That's fun too!
I get that. I have a coworker who is involved in a campaign that is not really about combat and growth but rather just enjoying the world which is a legitimate goal.
Part of the issue with this is that people get attached to their characters, but 5e doesn't actually have a rule set that works super well with that, in the world it has.
It's moved over the years from the meat grinders of the early editions to the much more character focused ones now, but some things haven't really kept up.
The big one being character death becoming trivial midway through, and the combat kinda being centered around that. Death doesn't mean much when you just keep reviving them, and it's left up to the DM to figure out how to balance that (since the 5e economy is a mess).
5e long ago should've adopted a downed/injured system like much of the competition, with death being much more rare. Then again there's about 100 other things they should've done, and it's pretty clear they won't, so meh. Guess it just sits on the DM's
fwiw, in the games I run, nobody is high level enough to have any way to bring someone back from the dead, and I won't pull any special strings to keep characters alive.
If a player really wants their character, I'd offer them the chance to do a spin-off campaign where they're in an afterlife, but if someone dies, that's it.
I play a lot of different RPGs, and honestly I think D&D is one of the worst ones. Even games that are difficult and you can die, something like Runequest or Warhammer Fantasy, or the OSRs like Adventuer Conquer King, or Lamentations of the Flame Princess, or Mork Borg. They are just more fun and do a better job at doing what D&D tries to be. If you want something more narrative focused plenty of games like Blades in the Dark or Apocalypse World or many others can do again a better job.
There's a backlash to this called Old School Renaissance (or Revival, short: OSR) that tries to bring back high-mortality, "you play the world, not the characters" type of gaming to D&D. The character based and scripted story driven D&D was not always a thing. Some argue it started with second edition (which came 15 years later). Some good examples of such can be seen in the Judges Guild published material from 1975-1979 which focuses on procedural world generation and emergent storytelling rather than scripted characters with backstories and plotlines.
I think it's a lot of how you interpret the phrase "role playing game". To be clear, none of what I'm about to say is to declare one or another side wrong or right, different people find different enjoyment in different ways, and that's okay as long as you're playing with those of a similar stripe.
If you emphasize the "role playing" part, you become a character within a larger play, perhaps even the main character. So of course you don't want to die and roll a new character, just as it would be strange for a character to die in a play, but then the actor come back as a new character in the same play halfway through. The fighting and action become just flavor around playing the role, not necessarily the point in and of itself.
If you emphasize the "game" part of this, the former sounds a bit strange. What's the point of a game where you can't lose? For some, what's the point of a game where you're not fighting much? Of course you die, this is just a paper and pencil version of Rogue (the game, not the class).
And of course there's shades in the middle. 5E's strength is also its biggest weakness. You can do any of these things, however none of them are as good as a system that specializes in those. It's a swiss army knife, and a lot of people have gotten into it because of its popularity and versatility. Which ends up having a feedback effect: people play 5E because other people play 5E. And the people who want to learn a new rules system are exceedingly rare in my experience outside of the die hards.
> If you emphasize the "role playing" part, you become a character within a larger play, perhaps even the main character. So of course you don't want to die and roll a new character, just as it would be strange for a character to die in a play, but then the actor come back as a new character in the same play halfway through. The fighting and action become just flavor around playing the role, not necessarily the point in and of itself.
This is one of the things that I don't like about Critical Role. Heavy, heavy on the role-playing aspects, but you as a listener (and, one assumes, the other characters) don't know any of the characters' backstory except what's revealed bit by bit. It's more than a little challenging to follow, especially if (like me) you have podcasts on in the background while driving, etc. I'm not ignoring it, but my mind isn't always 100% on following the details.
They're very good actors, and it's a great show if that's what you are looking for. It's just not what I want.
If you’re like me, and you haven’t yet discovered it, try Not Another D&D Podcast. The actors are all former College Humor writers and don’t take it too seriously.
Depends on the player whether or not they take what happens to their character to seriously. I know some myself included have a folder full of character sheets/builds they want to play so if one dies they just pull out the next. And if the character dies before I want to be done with them their is enough game mechanics and means of having a character resurrected that it really is more of a statuses condition than a end of the line
Burning Wheel has an interesting approach to wealth. You do not really have "money". You instead have a Resources stat, which you roll for skill tests to gather resources to pay for things. As it is roughly feudal that makes more sense. You can get "cash" but that is used as additional dice to your resources rolls (and is used up on the test). And you can further abstract certain things as "funds" which act as a bonus to resources, ie your estate is a 3d fund which can be depleted.
In Baldur's Gate 2 the first plot arc is basically "raise 20,000g somehow to save your sister" and as you wander the city you're asking everyone "hey... any idea how I can make some money?". I always liked that. Games where you end up inconceivably wealthy always feel stupid to me, in the same way that games where you end up invincible feel stupid.
I just finished BG3 with 50k gold and nothing to spend it on. It made me feel dumb for obsessively looking in every container and looting every corpse for the previous 200 hours.
If 50k gold was the cost of a new heart for Karlach I would feel completely different about it.
I'm a hoarder too. I remember the original Fallout games where eventually I'd own most of the money in that part of the world. It's not a fair economic system.
I'd really like a game where eventually the shopkeeper tells you: "Look, you've already sold me 10 of these +1 magic swords. We've got only 8 capable warriors of fighting age in this village, and none of them have the kind of money to buy these swords. I'm afraid I can't justify buying even more from you."
Another way to model that is for each shopkeeper to have limited amount of cash-on-hand and inventory, so after a certain point they can't offer you anything for yet-another Magic Sword except junk-items or store-credit for said junk items.
Skyrim kinda-sorta did this, but the campaign didn't have any hard limits of "world ends in X days" to stop people from just waiting for an economic reset, and there were some other ways to glitch things.
Yeah, that's what Fallout did, so at some point I had all the money in the world. And even exchanging them for the rest of their inventory becomes silly. Does the shopkeeper really prefer a stock of looted crap over his more useful potions?
I think it would be interesting to see some actual supply and demand: if you're flooding the market with crap you looted from goblins, at some point they become worthless. Even +1 magic swords can become worthless if you sell enough of them.
Whatever studio comes up with the solution to "you should really use those consumables/spend that gold" without the solution inducing anxiety will be a complete hero in my books.
The latest DOOM games avoid this problem, but with ammo. There's no reason to save ammo for later because you have a very limited pool and can constantly get more with the chainsaw. It prevents hoarding for later.
So that's what I'd suggest for consumables. Give a limited number so the player can't hoard and aren't too powerful, but make getting more of them easy and frequent.
That's a hallmark of Doom in general, not just the recent one. They keep ammo limited so you have to switch weapons frequently and vary your gameplay.
However, one nice thing with Doom is its commitment to the "fps chess" system. Chainsaw ammo might be scarce but the decision to use it is intuitive and requires no second thoughts. With BG3 every opportunity to use a limited item tries to awaken my latent save scummer and it feels like you can never make a good decision without first knowing how the story will play out.
The latest Cyberpunk update changes health items from collectable, consumable items to an item with [2] rechargeable uses that gets stronger as you play.
The original Resident Evil games required consumable ink ribbons to save the game at a typewriter and also limited gun ammo availability to great effect. It does introduce anxiety, but that fits the game’s atmosphere perfectly. By the end of my playthroughs, I have usually used most of the items in my inventory due to their scarcity and limited nature.
agreed. That’s one time anxiety is fitting. You know what also induces anxiety? When I rented this game as a kid but forgot that I didn’t have a memory card that weekend.
Making potions infinite with a cooldown usually does the trick. After that, it's a space scarcity and balancing act - how many potions can I have on hand? How powerful are they for my character at their current level of progress?
I think WoW's move also kinda works. It's a question of economics and you should mostly always be using them.
WoW totally compromised its economy over time because they never solved inflation, but in vanilla before everyone had tons of money (and I guess in each expansion I played also), the fact that mounts and epic mounts took legitimately hard-to-obtain amounts of money was very fun and made them very rewarding to finally obtain.
I'm currently running a Shadowrun game where equipment and especially cyberware is a neverending money sink. High-end cyberware and vehicles can easily cost hundreds of thousands of nuyen. Not to mention that you've got monthly cost of living depending on your lifestyle.
Of course you could save a lot of money by choosing a poor or squatter lifestyle, but I tend to make that matter. Eventually they all settled on a medium lifestyle for $5000/month.
Of course this does mean tons of bookkeeping. I've also played and loved games that abstract wealth away. And I certainly think some games should abstract it away a bit more. But for Shadowrun, this makes sense. They're criminals for hire, so they're in it for the money. (Although they're currently doing the most dangerous run ever for free, so I'll reward them with extra karma.)
The fantasy setting I GM in has a god of taxes, so whenever the party accumulates more than a few thousand gold and aren't spending it, I start sending paladins of the tax god after them at random.
Got to a point where the party stumbled across a dragon lair and instead of fighting or bypassing it, the party wanted to go in and ask it for financial management advice. "They have hoards and there aren't any tax collectors here, so dragons must have figured it out!"
So I made the dragon be a tax collector. Very motivated fight (they lost).
I have a whole story setting idea where a city requires permits for everything, including dying. You didn't fill out your death certificate? Sorry, you don't get to die.
I'm just not sure what the PCs would do in that setting, what "problem" there would be for them to solve.
I don't think I've ever had them pay taxes, except for the occasional toll in WFRP, or berthing costs in Traveller (now there's a game that could really turn into a spreadsheet; though we never got that far).
Traveller can be like that. I never got that far into it, unfortunately.
In games like that (or maybe in all games) it's important that all players are happy with the level of crunch. It's fine if everybody engages with the Spreadsheets in Space, it's also fine if everybody prefers to handwave it. But if some engage and some don't, you've got a problem.
I was afraid my players would consider Shadowrun too heavy and too much bookkeeping, but everybody was willing to commit to it and make it work. And I still handwave a lot because the Shadowrun rules are a mess.
The core "Free Trader" trope is very difficult from many levels.
It starts with this "small band and their ship" meme. The problem is that the ship is worth $40M. Traveller economics are basically based on 1980 prices, so $40M is, you know, "worth something". Sure, the ship is mortgaged over 40 years, but that's part of the problem.
Outside of the "milk run" markets (there are some trades, where if played straight by the rules, are just instant, large profits), it's simply the matter that folks are running around in a ship worth millions of dollars (Traveller uses credits, but we'll stick with dollars), that takes millions of dollars to repair and maintain.
You'd think that the crew should be on the brink of disaster all the time. $400,000 annually just to maintain the ship. Pile on the mortgage payment, and you need an annual revenue of $2-3M. Show of hands who here would be content with a "small business" that's pulling in $2-3M a year?
Encounter with a Pirate? Did they take out your turret as you raced to the jump zone? $4M in damage.
The fundamental point being that if you were in this business, and had the $4M in the bank to handle these kind of repairs (well, better bump it to $10M), at some point you look and say "You know, I have $10M in equity in my ship, I have $10M in the bank just in case, what the heck am I doing jetting around the universe in the dangerous dark? Why am I not on the beaches of Gamma Hydra VI sipping margaritas?"
If the cargoes are more mundane ("mundane"), say worth $200K, then a) is a pirate willing to risk millions of dollars of damage for $200K? b) is the captain willing to risk that? Why would a pirate bother with $200K of cargo when there's several million dollars worth of drives, weapons, computers, etc. on the ship. Heck, why not take both? Combat is very expensive, so make it worth while and worth the risk.
The whole trading campaign is badly skewed by the economics and, perhaps, the lack of the players putting themselves in the position of the actual people, and just focusing on numbers.
It would make more sense, in an advance technological and economic society, to lease the ship, insure it against damages, hire the crew, etc. But, boy, the ruins the adventure. "We're going to the lost planet to check out the ancient ruin for artifacts, you in?" "Yea gee, that sounds well, but I have to meet with the insurance inspector to renew the certificate on my ship."
But isn't that the point of Traveller? You don't actually have $10M, you've got $40M debt, and you'd better start making some money to make those payments. And if you get behind, well, maybe take some risk, like smuggling stuff past some pirates for much higher profit, but at much higher risk. Or maybe check out that mysterious derelict ship to see if there's anything worth salvaging that can put you back on track to paying down your ship.
Piracy is a bigger mystery; I guess the only explanation is that they stole those ships, rather than buying them legitimately, because piracy is a poor investment. Or is it? Piracy was rampant in the Caribbean some centuries ago, and it still exists in some places. And privateering could be a profitable business.
One thing that helped, is that neither side really wanted to fight. Often pirates would let the crew live and keep the ship as long as they handed over the cargo without a fight, and that would be a better deal for both sides than a fight to the death where one ship sinks and the other is badly damaged.
But I also feel like the cargo has to be worth more. It's been ages since I've seen those rules, but if the merchant is making $200k on a trip, that doesn't mean the cargo is worth $200k, it means the cargo is worth $200k more at the destination than it was at the source, and the real value could be a lot more.
And if the ship is insured (which means piracy is probably rare enough), it might not even hurt the crew much to surrender their cargo. Except of course that rag-tag band of former military people that's behind on paying down the mortgage on their ship and cutting costs where they can, but somehow also in possession of more weaponry than your average merchant.
Taking prices out of the DMG's magic item table was one of D&D's worst moves between 3.5 and 5e. That made it really easy for DMs to set up ways for PCs to spend lavishly because the ceiling on those prices was so high, and the prices were relatively fair.
3.5 also had extensions with rules for stronghold building.
If you want to stick with D&D I highly recommend MCDM's "Stronghold & Followers" and "Kingdoms & Warfare". They bring back all the old stronghold play which is a great gold sink.
FantasyCraft has a neat system where one of the stats is "Prudence" and at the end of each adventure, the character will spend a fraction of the wealth they earned, on a scale from 85%-25%. This doesn't necessarily solve the late-game wealth problem, but it does add a lot of flavor; treasures can be larger and the characters then spend most of it on living it up (or whatever).
It’s easy to create gold sinks for heroes by giving them opportunities to spend large amounts of money to improve various villages, towns, etc. They could fund the construction of wells or ships and forts to improve quality of life, making them a different type of hero.
There is even opportunity to craft new conflicts solely revolving around how that money is being spent, and presenting tough choices between various options.
Perhaps they can even return some of that looted money back to the people from which it was looted, after all, the monsters and enemies that horde it likely didn’t acquire it fairly.
And after all that spending they’ll probably end up somewhat poor again, continuing the cycle.
The reason this is an issue in D&D is that by default the PCs don’t have a job. They’re freelance mercenaries, so the game needs to give them a reason to adventure, and by default that’s making money.
The way out of this is to have the PCs do a job, or at least have a core activity the players and their characters sign up for. Jane’s Bond is a civil servant, Indiana Jones is a professional archaeologist, the crew of the Starship Enterprise work for Star Fleet, Jason Bourne isn’t employed, but he has no choice, they really are out to get him, etc.
What this goes is make the game about something other than just personal advancement. Either the kinds of problems you’re solving can’t be solved with money. In Call of Cthulhu it’s usually less formal, but you’re not in it for the money, you’re in it to save humanity. Alternatively the game builds in an economy into the core activity itself. Upgrading your starship and buying cargo. In Blades in the Dark you’re a gang of criminals with ongoing expenses. There’s a default core activity and objective you all share.
In the examples in the article of games that solve this in various ways we can see this at work. In Stonetop you’re in it for the community, it’s about survival. In Impulse Drive and Traveller you’re trying to make a living.
So the problem with D&D is the default murder hobo setup in which there really isn’t actually a setup. In practice a lot of D&D GMs and campaigns do build in a driver for adventure. A job, or an imperative threat, or an assumed objective everyone agrees to buy into.
I like the idea of starting players off in massive debt. Any money they get they have to choose between spending it on their characters (new gear or whatever) vs paying down debt. If they spend it on themselves, they'll be in short term danger (creditors come after them to try and collect, with interest!), but if they pay their creditors now they forgo new gear.
I was happy to see Impulse Drive in this article because that debt system is great. Built-in ramifications and story hooks for ignoring the debt, clearly tracked on a shared party sheet.
I got back into World of Warcraft (Classic) after like 15 years and found the economy to be completely broken. Apparently there's a ton of bots that aren't being banned, creating a massive wealth source. As a consequence there is steep, steep inflation (but I'm not sure how the one causes the other... it's as if high-level characters have a ton of gold) To any who remember the classic economy: Swiftthistle is 6g each and people are given 150g just to participate in a dungeon.
All the fixed price items (mounts, vendor items, skills, etc.) are basically free, which has an interesting effect on the economy in some ways: bags, for example, sell for a lot, as an upper-bound for what the user-crafted bags should sell for. Now they're by far the cheapest option, so nobody crafts bags anymore. This kind of reminds me of a government price-controlled good and the chilling effect it can have.
Dis/enchanting is still a big gold source at high levels, so once you reach max level and especially if you're in a guild, you have access to lots more ways to make money. Which you either spend on raid supplies or to kit out lower-level toons.
And there are always the whales who just buy a shit ton of gold and put it in a guild bank.
I’ve always enjoyed the system used in Dark Souls games where you collect souls as a currency and can use souls to buy items, improve weapons, or level up. This makes it so souls always carry value and makes it fun having to weigh the benefits of buying a desired item or leveling up.
The game furthers the concept by making souls an attribute you always carry on you and can lose entirely when you die unless you recover them from your dead body before dying again. You can go from very wealthy to very poor quite quickly by trying to push a bit longer to obtain more souls to level up. Or you can cash out if you feel like the risk of continuing your adventure is too great. This concept combines well with reusable health potions that only refill after resting at the site where you can spend your souls.
Im not all the way through the article but it raises an interesting problem. To rephrase it: gold increases exponentially but the rewards and challenges do not.
Gold gives you rewards, rewards are fun because they make challenges smaller, challenges require that you get more gold.
It almost requires the game to change as you get stronger. Im not sure you can just make weapons/enemy strength exponential. That seems more like it needs to scale linearly otherwise you either gut utterly crushed or you utterly crush it and skill isnt involved.
I'm making a survival game inspired on Universal Paperclips and factory games in which being wealthy works against you, as you restart the factories that killed your world the environment becomes increasingly dangerous with mutated beings and other stuff.
Encumbrance record keeping was annoying pre-PCs but did any well known RPGs ever implement the D&D encumbrance system and thus steer players to carry lighter weight currencies (gems etc)?
Or was it too annoying even with the record keeping automated?
It was common in Everquest. Certain races or classes had lower weight limits. Encumberence would get you killed. There was a certain gemstone (peridot) which could be carried in stacks of 20 and had essentially no weight (0.1 stone per stack) compared to 1 stone per 20 coins.
. Peridot was worth ~10 platinum and retained most its value at merchants. So at higher levels people just carried around stacks of them.
Well, sure, computers eat that sort of bookkeeping for breakfast. Even now they'd "rather" track the location and weight of a million items than try to have one realistic conversation with an NPC that the player takes off the rails (which games don't even permit generally since the computer is so incapable of handling it). How many human DMs obsessed about it is an interesting question, though given the diversity of player and playstyles I'm sure the answer is quite non-zero. (And then there's the "cheat the DM/game either accidentally or on purpose" metagame that emerges has its own intricacies. "Hey, guys, I didn't notice this, but it turns out I've been hauling around a literal ton of copper in my small leather wallet for the last several months... whoopsiedoodles.")
I know in pencil and paper D&D my go to move durring character creation has been to buy a mule and cart so I can pretty much ignore encumbrance rules until the early mid game at which point buying bags of holding portable holes and other extra dimensional storage is easily affordable.
As I recall, Mouseguard has a physical space on the character sheet for items, and items are small bits of paper that take up that physical space. I haven't played it myself, but I like that idea.
I believe that some computer RPGs also took a similar approach - I think in the original Diablo, you had to tetris your stuff in your inventory, which itself could be upgraded to be larger.
Maybe in another campaign, I'll try this out, with weapons & items having interesting shapes that must be accounted for when storing in a backpack. After all, running around with twelve recovered goblin swords, five spears, and three shields is just not particularly plausible.
If you've played mouse guard, you may have also played Torchbearer which is a dungeon delving game that entirely focuses on your inventory basically. You have physical slots for items, like Diablo (potion takes 1 slot, rope takes 2, etc.) so you have this balance between trying to survive and get the most money.
There was another game I looked at where even spells took inventory slots - no more mucking about with "Oh, I have three 2nd level spells..." What you have in your inventory is what you have, period.
In TES II: Daggerfall, gold pieces have a weight which is not trivial if you're reasonably wealthy. To avoid carrying them around, you can open an account at a local bank, or you can have a bank sign you a letter of credit (for a fee) that can be converted to gold at other banks, IIRC.
In ADOM, gold pieces also have nontrivial weight. There is an item, the girdle of greed, that increases your carrying capacity according to the amount of gold you have, and lets you carry insane amounts of gold.
