How have you brought economic principles into your game, /tg/? Have you dabbled in new systems for your non-human races? Have you ever had local economies been ruined by murderhobos dropping hundreds of thousands of GP into it?
A lot of games revolve around "get treasure, get paid" but don't go much further than that, right? And there's a big focus on income but not outgoings - you buy gear but there's rarely taxes, you rarely have to pay to feed your family, pay your kid's school fees etc.
>>47491048
How could anybody be that fat in a post-apocalyptic setting where people are starving?
>>47491048
Something that always kind of bugged me in fantasy is the common currency thing. Like, sure, everyone recognises gold and uses that as their primary currency but not everyone uses "the gold coin" - they use dollars, francs, marks etc and those only really work in places that recognise the government that printed it. So if your adventurers delve into an ancient crypt and come out with coins minted in a pre-human civilisation, then those are valuable as HISTORICAL RELICS - but fucking worthless as coinage because the government behind them doesn't exist.
>>47491262
The game it's taken from, Red Markets, is set "mid-apocalypse" - five years after the zombies came. The people in question are Takers, who are basically mercenaries/scavengers (professional murderhobos) so they do eat well. Sometimes. If they get enough bounty on their job. That's why the other guy is going through corpses.
>>47491048
Basic supply and demand. I made a basic forex market too since I've majored in finance. Feels good to Jew my players.
>>47491048
I do it all the time. It's not that big a deal-- the problem is that most GMs don't know the first thing about economics. The other major problem is that many GMs (especially the ones who know the least) think they know all about economics.
>>47491266
Coinage in the modern age is "fiat currency" backed by the word of the government. Prior to that, coins were usually considered to be worth the value of their precious metal content. So a coin with King Snargle's face on it is essentially King Snargle's personal guarantee that the coinage has a given precious metal content.
Debasing a currency (by reducing the gold content in the alloy) is a classic way to inflate a currency, and like all inflation it's a decision by the issuing government. Usually so they can pay their debts and obligations with less gold spread over the same number of coins.
>>47491262
Anon explained, but in general, wealth inequality is a common feature in any social system. In socialist, bankrupt venezuela, who's the richest person? The daughter of the former dictator, of course, whose billions have no clear origin. Sudhir Venkatesh did an incredible study of a drug gang that found the same thing: most guys are paid below minimum wage and live in poverty, a small number make a decent if not wildly successful living. And a very few at the top are driving Lambourghinis and living in mansions.
Abolishing currency or market transactions doesn't change this, just makes it harder to measure.
Here on /tg/ most of the economics threads I see are people fucking around with currency exchange rates and different types and shapes of coinage. Or saying that this or that spell "breaks" economics in a given fantasy setting (usually not true).
>>47491266
Here's a quick and dirty solution. I'm starting from D&D, but it works anywhere.
First, convert all prices to gp. Then convert to a price per pound (or gram) of gold. For lbs, that means divide the price by 50gp.
Second, come up with a long list of coins. Work out their metal content (gold and silver; derive values for other metals from their price in gp). Silver's price is historically 1/17th that of gold per unit mass... in the modern age it's more like 1/50 but that's a new thing.
So now you have exchange rates of all goods for lbs of gold, and weight of gold per coin (remember most are alloyed-- the alloy composition can be changed by royal decree, sometimes secretly to cheat the citizens). So now you can denominate any good in terms of X coinage. More trouble than it's worth? That's why D&D handwaves this.
Yes there has been some wonky currency in world history. Stones, cattle, shells, etc. Ultimately, they have a value in gold that's set not by an issuing legal authority but by natural supply/demand interaction. So even weird currency will have a single conversion to gp and from there to normal coinage.
If you care enough, we can talk about how to make prices differ regionally due to transportation and purchasing power parity. Or what government taxes/subsidies do.
A good source for this is GURPS Traveller: Far Trader, a supplement written by an economics professor but still pretty gameable. It's written for interstellar tramp freighters, not world-building in a fantasy setting, but it's packed with good solid basic economics. Thomas Sowell's book is very, very good, especially for laymen.
>>47491901
(continued)
Few governments are stable enough that they can issue paper or non-valuable coinage that can be cashed for precious metals in some central reserve, as started happening in the modern age. China managed it-- even used paper money. People prefer real gold to pinkie-promise IOUs from Prince Flapplejack that supposedly can be exchanged for gold. Governments that do this are notorious for reneging or slapping on regulations or taxes after the fact that make the coinage in practice less valuable than the IOU claims-- another way to debase the currency.
Take the % chance of the currency being worthless (as perceived by intelligent merchants-- you'd be stunned how fast and accurate these calculations are, even when the government tries to use deception to bolster the currency.
Anyway, let's call that % chance of the currency being worthless. Then take your prices, calculated in those gold-backed but not gold-containing coins, and divide by (1-%). The higher prices mean that people value the currency less and so demand more of it in their exchanges.
cont again
>>47492033
So the evolution is this:
We start by trading commodities for each other.
One commodity (let's say gold, because that's usually what it ended up being) is so convenient to store, carry, and use that everything starts being valued in terms of that one commodity. (Warning: the laws of economics work perfectly well even in straight up barter economies.)
But you have to weight the gold and verify its purity, right? So then some trusted institution steps in (usually a government, who can send soldiers to kill counterfeiters) and pre-measures fixed amounts of gold of a fixed purity. Poof! Coinage. This is the D&D-era solution.
In very stable systems, you can sometimes get away with issuing IOUs that can be cashed into gold but have no gold content themselves. Gold-backed currency. The gold is kept safe in a vault in the King's treasury, but he promises to trade it for his coins at a pre-set rate. By the late industrial period, it's how things mostly work.
BTW, when people say "the gold standard" like Ron Paul, that's what they're talking about: coins and paper bills all having a fixed value in gold.
Fiat currency is like gold-backed currency without the gold. The currency has no intrinsic value at all-- it's value is purely what people will trade it for. If you accept the king's promise to trade valueless coins for precious metals at some time in the future no matter what, then this isn't that big of a step. Most currencies are fiat, these days. Or pegged to the US dollar, which in turn is a fiat currency.
Any of these currencies can be debased (inflated). That means they're worth less, so prices denominated in those currencies are higher. Hyperinflation is when prices rise so fast that the whole economy falls apart. Usually governments choose hyperinflation to dodge other economic decisions that are even worse (at least, worse for the government). In any economy, inflation is a choice.
>>47491690
>>47491901
>>47492033
>>47492440
Sound boring?
If it's fascinating to you, then it might be worth inserting in a game.
But more likely, it's boring to you, even if you get it. Or it's a distraction from the main theme of the campaign. There's a reason most games hand-wave it. And I'm not even going into arbitrage, credit, or speculation.
Very few game developers know anything about economics. Some are actively stupid about economics issues because they're sophisticated about literature and think expertise is fungible. Or they have political opinions and think that the talking points out of some blog gives them basic competence.
GURPS is pretty good on economics issues. D20 Modern's wealth system is surprisingly solid as well. When you play within a setting's normal core assumptions, most hold up just fine. It's only when the DM goes off on his own trying to make changes to make things "more realistic" that things start breaking.
Getting away from the nature of currency, there are some basic realities of economics and finance that can be used to facilitate gaming rather than push up your spectacles and go "Well, ACTUALLY" until your players hate you.
For instance, pricing and value aren't constants. Spending power is different between currencies based on what's readily available in those areas, the strength of their respective currency, different cultures stress different values attached to different material goods etc.
How does that translate into game? Well, consider the "hobo" part of the "murderhobo" term - it implies poverty but also mobility between areas. Player characters often move between kingdoms and thus between economies, bringing goods and their services with them.
The "treasure" in an adventure might therefore become something the GM can use to provoke the players to relocate somewhere else, by making the treasure relatively low-value HERE - but super-valuable SOMEWHERE ELSE. You get your hands on some, say, relic of an ancient king who in Kingdom A is hated as a villain and therefore his relics aren't highly prized by possible buyers. However, Kingdom B fucking hates Kingdom A and therefore having a relic of that guy who made Kingdom A fucking suffer would be in higher demand. If you want to translate unlock the value in your relics and turn it into some liquidity, you better put on your travelling shoes to find a new place with new plot hooks.
A good GM might in his way trail the path to Mt. Doom with varyingly-valuable relics.
>>47491317
>>47491690
She doesn't look like a professional hunter-killer-scavenger or a top-of-the-heap gang lord. She looks like a sedentary modern American.
>>47493652
She also has a pack robot she looted from Google, so you're probably right. Cannibal, maybe?
>>47493652
Takers are, for the most part, working schmucks, not apex predators or like raider kings.
>>47493898
Well, the "Latent" on her back means she's infected with the zombie virus but hasn't turned - but is still infectious (hence "don't shoot" - don't spray infected blood everywhere). So people probably call her "cannibal".
bumping for genuine interest
>>47491048
NOPE
not even DF has economics
>>47491048
>you rarely have to pay to feed your family, pay your kid's school fees etc.
Shadowrun has a "lifestyle" mechanic, which is used to somewhat represent your non-Running expenditures. Stuff like your apartment, your food bills and other general day to day stuff.
>>47492578
>Sound boring?
>If it's fascinating to you, then it might be worth inserting in a game.
I think the important distinction is between economic SYSTEMS and economic CONCEPTS. Like, economics is about hugely complicated systems that aren't entirely rational and you can't make a game that models those while remaining a fun, playable game. What you can do is introduce a few relatively simple concepts around economics and work them into the game's theme, narrative and even mechanics. For instance, post apocalypse games commonly revolve around the economic concept of scarcity, object value and skilled labour. By changing the definitions of what a valuable object is (shifting the focus from, say, business plans and priceless art to fucking water and basic food staples) or what valuable skillsets are (from financial analysts to farmers and hunters), this provokes thought about those concepts. What really has value? What skills are actually important?
Post apocalypse games are also often about economic fantasy; they're about breaking into the mall and putting on the mink coat, or storming the mansion and turning it into your Fort Kickass. It's about personal independence even in the face of a crumbling global market and being as MURKAN as you can. That's the post apoc power fantasy; even as those snivelling politicians and white collar betas ruin the world, the blue collar alpha labourer rises up to become the new king.
I'm designing a HRE lookalike emporer-making setting, and am implementing gold and silver specie currencies for the majority of empires.
However I run into the problem of how to set the value of gold to silver exchange.
Say for example, One Silvermark is worth Twelve small gold Thalers. I would have to set the weights of the coins appropriately. I made the assumption, based on an average of some prices I found, that gold is sixteen times more valuable than silver. That is to say, a pound of silver is worth an ounce of gold. But then it gets to the point where high purity coinage doesn't make sense for the weight.
Obv, this will be at the beginning of the game, and the exchange value of pure metals to goods will follow CPI. I'm assuming that the real value of coinage in terms of goods and services will follow, possibly lagging slightly behind, raw metals values.
So I guess my question is, are alloy coins possible in gold specie economies?
>>47491048
>economic principles
Oh look, it's shekelfag again. /tg/ wouldn't be the same without faggots insisting that what RPGs need is MORE book-keeping and micromanagement chores.
Never change, you poor, OCD bastard.
>>47496981
Actually, from what we've seen of Red Markets so far it's pretty light since it's a D10 system. While you are keeping track of things like weapon condition, everything is abstracted a fair amount. Like, all guns have "charges" you spend when shooting and it's the same amount for all weapons, not an exact ammo count and damage value for every possible calibre handgun.
But then why should I expect someone on 4chan to know about what they're calling shit.
I'm interested in economics; please continue if you feel like it.
>>47496856
Pure gold is actually very soft so it was common to mix them with other metals so as to make them less fragile. Silver coins were more likely to stay purer on average when compared to gold.
The gold alloys to help keep the gold 'safe' was also very useful excuse when debasing currency. The merchants are smart though and aren't that easy to trick.
So keep that mind.
>>47491048
In one long running 3.5 game, me and the rest of the party incorporated along with the town we were staying in. It was a scheme borne out of the GM mentioning that there was no way we could dump all of our loot on one town and expect to make the money the stuff was worth, so we hired the townsfolk to carry the loot to multiple cities.
It turned into, while not the focus of the campaign, a major sideplot. One player (not the wizard, oddly enough) built a school for the town, one built a castle. We dumped about half of our wealth into the city we were in, and the GM described the population booming and had us more or less take over from the fuedal lords.
I still wonder how bad the recession was when the campaign ended and the bubble burst after our characters stopped investing in the town.
