Friendly reminder that you don't have to work so damn hard on your setting. You don't need to study geology or simulate plate tectonics or anything. Just play it fast and loose man. Put cool stuff in there just because you can. Because you totally can. It's your own happy little world, make it yours, and don't stress about the realism too much. It's a game of pretend, don't sweat it.
>>45299939
I treat my setting like a map from an RTS game. It's all covered in fog of war, with major points or locations revealed. Wherever the players go, I reveal that little section. They ask a question about some piece of lore or history, I fill that piece in.
I'm not going to put in 100's of hours of work just so I can make shit up on the spot when my players don't go where I expect, and I'm also not going to force them to see my 100's of hours of work.
>>45299939
Never again. I'll never play it loose again. Not since I became that gm.
>>45300066
What do you do when the characters want to move to the next city over, "Right now"? How would you try to make the next quickly visited city different from the last one? I have players that love to travel, but when they decide to go somewhere else, I feel forced to pause the session until I'm able to gather my wits as I'm already pulling things out of my ass enough as it is.
>>45299939
Thanks bruh. But I don't do it out of any obligation. I do it because I find it fun.
Hope your next session kicks ass OP.
>>45300224
Have a few generic places ready, but don't define the location or anything.
Place a few city icons on the map without labelling them (or label them if you can come up with enough names). If the players say “we want to go to X now,” you take out Port Town A or Port Town B, or Village B or whatever, pretend that this city was in that location all along, and after the campaign you create a new city to refill your reserves.
>>45299939
>don't need to study geology
>don't need to simulate plate tectonics
>TFW you have a masters in Geomorphology and a BS in Geology
>>45299939
you do when you play with autismo prime
>>45300224
Just because they want to go to a city doesn't mean there's another city right there a short distance away by well paved road. Maybe the closest city is across a desert and then across a mountain range. You should be able to come up with cool shit in a vast wilderness area other than just random encounters. If you do it right, it'll be fun for your players because they'll feel like they're really exploring things and it'll give you time to shape your next city appropriately.
>>45300224
Learn enough about the general elements of a town that you can bullshit something plausible when you need to. Really all you need is a few big elements to build around.
>This is Burghunt.
>It is a town situated on a river, and is well-known for its large yet austere temple to Hillgarion, Saint of Temperance. Despite this, the Earl of Burghunt is an infamous drunkard and pervert.
Seriously, broad strokes first, detail when it's needed.
>>45302681
That's a good point. I suppose I need to branch out on different aspects of gaming instead of keeping it to mostly political run-ins.
>>45302807
Good advice. Thanks. I find myself having to keep various towns in video games reserved for the occasion. I definitely need to get better at this, though.
>>45299939
At last, a voice of reason on this board. You rock OP.
>>45299939
I 100% agree.
But some people just find that shit interesting.Not me, though. Fuck geology.
Who else part of the landmasses-created-by-dead-gods-masterrace here?
>>45299939
OP, I understand and respect your reasoning, and I wish that I could hold to it. But I am autistic in that perfectionist sense - I need everything to work out correctly for the sake of being able to satisfy myself that it's realistic enough. I can't be happy with just throwing together everything I like and calling it a day - that's stuff for children. Surely I can do better than that?
>>45299939
You sound like a faggot
Sweat it as much as you want or don't sweat it, it's up to you
if you want to be full on autism everything is detailed go ahead, if you want to be full play pretend, you can do it again.
>>45303268
I'm going to go ahead and say that's his point.
>>45302870
>>45303116
OP stop fucking samefaging
Anyone who believes that any form of a setting is inherently superior or less stressful for GM is retarded.
I get stressed when shit is loose and I get full on autism mode where I want to detail everything
Let people do what they want you faggot
>>45303288
>Just play it fast and loose man. Put cool stuff in there just because you can. Because you totally can. It's your own happy little world, make it yours, and don't stress about the realism too much. It's a game of pretend, don't sweat it.
That's fucking hippie bullshit right here.
If I want to go full plate tectonics and atmospheric pressure and all that shit, I will do it. Don't tell me how to make my setting and how to run my game and stop pretending that making it "loose" makes it better or easier to run.
>>45303292
More than one person expressing an opinion you don't like? They must be samefagging faggy faggots!
>>45303292
Nigga you missed the part where that's what I said.
>>45303302
>you don't have
>you don't need
He's not saying you can't, or that you're worse for doing it you fucking retard, he's saying you're not worse for *not* doing it (and so not better for doing it). Which is right.
>>45299939
Well, sure, but it can be fun to try to justify some things in the world as actually possible, or come up with a cool fantasy explanation as to why it's the way it is if it isn't possible. I think Arrakis is much cooler when you learn that the Shai-hulud themselves keep it a desert, rather than just "lol dessert lol". But yes, I don't think you should avoid putting something in your setting you think is cool just because you might need a little "a wizard did it", which honestly isn't nearly as bad as the cliche implies, it only really makes me mad when the DM says "lol I dunno a whizard did it maybe?".
But if people want to work out everything, that's also cool, I just personally like it when there are parts of the world that decidedly DON'T make sense, to players or people living in it.
>>45303116
>Who else part of the landmasses-created-by-dead-gods-masterrace here?
I don't typically do it myself, but I have large respect for when any large part of the world is a celestial corpse of some kind. That shit is metal as hell. Does it count if some people believe a certain continent is a corpse but it really isn't?
>>45299939
>It's your own happy little world
I like what you're saying, OP.
Doing extra effort can make a setting seem more polished, but it's important not to turn fun into work. And sometimes good shit comes out of really freeform and loose setups.
>>45303341
You Bull-Spine dude?
>>45303388
No, but I was actually thinking about that as I was typing, that idea was cool.
>>45303116
>fuck geology
Triggered
Fuck you. I spent six weeks putting my degree to use to simulate economic upheaval as well as creating regressions to model the economy of fantasy countries over time and I like it that way. I spent longer trying to puzzle out geology when map making. Then I had to learn to draw.
Then I chucked it all out and we played Dark Sun 2e instead.
My problem with fast and loose has always been 7 months into a campaign when the players are transporting stone from a mine they built to one town so they can export it to another town and I'm having to wildly bullshit the costs of labor, stone, etc.
I bullshit short adventures all the time or make it in broadstrokes but long running sandbox campaigns NEED to make some kind of basic sense from the outset.
>>45304455
Read the GM-section ofDungeon World
It really helps.
Just don't tell /tg/ you heard it from me, or there will be vigorous shitposting.
>>45304580
The problem is that for rational economic decisions to be made, there needs to be some kind of reasoning behind pricing.
I can get a approximation of it by just having different prices in different areas, but my players once they get powerful enough like to manipulate markets and whatnot.
Usually I just have a hexmap with a handful of cities and 5 or so pages of random encounters and dungeon descriptions, then I add on as I play.
But I think if players are really focused on something that requires rational decision making, then you should probably put more work into it at the outset. I've got my economic system to where I just plug shit into a spreadsheet and it shits out prices for me in different regions. Then if a war happens, an embargo is made, I can just change a variable. It was a lot of work to set up initially but now that I have the system built, it's easy as hell and gives me a fairly deep economic system.
Dungeon world is alright, it's just sorta almost opposite of how I end up having to run my games. My players always ask a lot of questions about the internal logic of things, expect shit to be "realistic" and they view it as virtual reality more than about story.
>>45299939
While I mostly agree, cool for the sake of cool is lazy and can be just as bad as turbo autism geology.
There's a happy medium called 'internal consistency'. Your setting can have rules, loose or extensive rules, ANY rules, but it must abide by those rules. Don't say a wizard did, say how and why the wizard did it. Provide internally consistent reasons, however outlandish.
I've been DMing the same campaign for just over a year now. We started with Something's Cooking as an introductory module, and the world is generic enough that I've run homebrew while plugging in D&D modules along the way.
My question is how do you keep track of multiple plot threads and story lines? I've lost and gained a number of players (the same core 6 since the beginning though), and I feel like I've done a good job integrating everyones story to the main, as well as having some overlap with the actual PC's storylines.
Now that I want to bring to light this big storyline I've been working towards since the beginning, I don't want to lose track of every decision they've made thus far, or all the side quests and stories they're a part of.
>>45304455
Things like that is why I am (currently not) working on a simple system and a small set of formulæ for calculating fluctuating prices of goods. It's going to require input of a few factors like idealised supply/demand for a given town, distance to the nearest town/site that produces the good, and a few other things.
There's a couple of things you need to define about the setting and its surroundings, optional modifiers for things like droughts, war, or banditry/piracy along trade routes, but I'm trying to generalise whatever I can so that there's only a few variables a GM would have to fill in by hand.
Currently writing exams though, so that project is on hold until I'm done with them.
>>45301713
Your allowed to and it might give your game a pleasant sense of realism but it's not as absolutely neasecary as some of us needs often think it is. I'm in a game at the moment we're the gm worried so much about how much currency was worth that he told us just to write 'caps' and a blank space for starting money till he could figure it out
>>45305074
From what I can tell, demand and supply aren't as important as you'd think in a pre-modern setting. Demand is always unmet for virtually any good you can think of and supply of everything is inelastic compared to anything 1800's onward. If demand goes up, a factory isn't going to be plopped down to meet that demand and changes in supply always lagged far behind changes in demand in the pre modern world.
I sorta rolled supply and demand into general "availability" since it makes more sense to me with pre-modern economics as the main determinant of price. As far as distance goes, I roll in things like banditry and piracy into it. So a town may be 5 trade distance from another town but I bump it up to 7 because of bandits along that trade route.
All I really need to figure out a decent economic system is to plop down "production centers" where there's enough produced to affect the international economy and then have distances to determine how much of that good makes it to different regions. So a drought would lower the amount of production, hazards increase trade distance etc.
Of course, I have this all affect a list of "base prices" since you can work without having your system affect a list of base prices, but then it becomes 100 times more complicated to work out without much benefit.
>>45304803
>I've got my economic system to where I just plug shit into a spreadsheet and it shits out prices for me in different regions. Then if a war happens, an embargo is made, I can just change a variable. It was a lot of work to set up initially but now that I have the system built, it's easy as hell and gives me a fairly deep economic system.
>>45305074 here, can we keep in touch so we could exchange some ideas? My e-mail's [email protected]
My current unfinished system doesn't handle quantities of goods, it just adjusts the price to reflect scarcity.
The base price of a product is, first, the price of its raw material(s) (iron ore for iron, iron for steel, steel for tools/weapons/etc.; I might simplify a lot of things, for example ignoring charcoal for steel production). You then add the time it roughly takes to manufacture the good (in hours), multiplied by the universal (for simplicity's sake) standard wage for an hour of unskilled labour; and then you add 10% of the sum to reflect maintenance costs or plain profit.
This sum is multiplied by the local demand, which itself would be calculated from a simple division of supply/demand (standardised for village/city size) modified by local prosperity.
If the demand is greater then the supply, you'd have to add transportation costs as well, which I've already worked out a decent formula for.
I'm still trying to simplify and standardise thing even further, and it'll take some research of mediæval economics and crafts to fine-tune the production and transportation costs with some fixed variables, but hopefully I'll end up with a decent Excel sheet I can put up for download then.
>>45304455
They do not need geology to do that, though.
You can always make up the relevant geology when it actually becomes relevant.
>>45305300
>I sorta rolled supply and demand into general "availability" since it makes more sense to me with pre-modern economics as the main determinant of price. As far as distance goes, I roll in things like banditry and piracy into it. So a town may be 5 trade distance from another town but I bump it up to 7 because of bandits along that trade route.
Yeah, I'm taking a similar approach. Intensity of bandit/pirate infestation of a trade route is represented by a modifier of something like x1.25–2 slapped on to the end of the formula.
My draft is:
(Distance * Terrain Modifier) * Standard Wage * Transportation * ( # customs offices along the route * 10%) * Banditry modifier * 110% profit for the trader
Terrain Modifier would be something like x1 for plains, x1.25 for hills, x2 for rugged mountains. I added that because drawing a straight line between two places and then adding a modifier to represent curving roads and meandering rivers is better than having to calculate or guess any exact distance.
“Transportation” serves to make transport by boat/river or ship/sea a lot cheaper.
My biggest concern right now is guilds and their artificial manipulation of the market and of prices, but I'll look into that after my exams.
>>45305360
I've wanted to run a campaign centered around making lots of money and general happy merchant shenanigans for some time, but quickly realized I would need to systematize price calculations to really fulfill the simulationist boner that would inevitably end up driving everyone involved. You're doing God's work.
>æ
heh
>>45305074
>æ
heh
>>45305541
>ðe year № 2016
>not having a cuſtom keyboard layout wiþ which to ſatisfy all of your typography needsexcept ligatures ;_;
>>45305639
>have a mac
>can easily type many unusual characters, ł, ß, o, etc.
>no alt code equivalent, so can't do things like thorn or eth at all
Torment.
>>45305360
Yeah, I can email some of the documents I've worked out for the system.
I've been struggling with the base prices a good deal. For now, I'm using price lists from harn as a list of base prices. The problem I keep running into is the sheer complexity of a million different goods to work out.
Yeah, terrain is something that's neat to work out. What have you been using as your standar wage? I made a fictional currency so exchanges between coin types wouldn't be easier for the players. 1 gp=20 sp=20 cp and they all weigh a little bit different but around as much as a quarter.
As far as market manipulation, I haven't done anything to model manipulation inside a city, but I do have where say if a city has .4 availability, they can take .2 availability from another city. The "stolen" availability is affected by trade distance. So overall availability is eaten up by transport costs but a city can give or take availability to manipulate prices. A city producing a lot of a good may want to "give" availability to other cities to drive up the prices they sell at. While a city lacking an essential item may "steal" availability to lower their prices.
Though with that idea, I'm trying to simulate a more mercantilism than middle ages economy since my setting is early modern, at that transition between feudalism and capitalism.
>>45305360
Yeah, I can email some of the documents I've worked out for the system.
I've been struggling with the base prices a good deal. For now, I'm using price lists from harn as a list of base prices. The problem I keep running into is the sheer complexity of a million different goods to work out.
Yeah, terrain is something that's neat to work out. What have you been using as your standard wage? I made a fictional currency so exchanges between coin types would be easier for the players. 1 gp=20 sp=20 cp and they all weigh a little bit different but around as much as a quarter. For full realism I could go multiple currency types but I'm waiting a bit before I focus on that. And kinda unsure how much fun that would add to the game.
As far as market manipulation, I haven't done anything to model manipulation inside a city, but I do have where say if a city has .4 availability, they can take .2 availability from another city. The "stolen" availability is affected by trade distance. So overall availability is eaten up by transport costs but a city can give or take availability to manipulate prices. A city producing a lot of a good may want to "give" availability to other cities to drive up the prices they sell at. While a city lacking an essential item may "steal" availability to lower their prices.
Though with that idea, I'm trying to simulate a more mercantilism than middle ages economy since my setting is early modern, at that transition between feudalism and capitalism. So I'm focusing more on trade deals and restrictions on trade than I am guild systems.
>>45306021
>Yeah, I can email some of the documents I've worked out for the system.
Thanks m8.
>I've been struggling with the base prices a good deal. For now, I'm using price lists from harn as a list of base prices. The problem I keep running into is the sheer complexity of a million different goods to work out.
That's why my base price for completely unrefined raw materials (grain, ores, wool) is simply zero, plus the cost of the unskilled labour required to produce [yet undefined amount] of the good (plus 10%).
Setting a universal wage like that works out for better-paid and -trained professions too, I think. The total cost for the relative raw material is added to the price of the refined product, which also affects the +10% profit at the end of the formula. So a farmer would earn just his base wage+10%, but the baker would—in addition to his own base wage—also earn 10% of the cumulative revenues of the farmer and the miller before him.
(desu I haven't run any example calculations for any production chains yet; I'll have to compare the resulting prices with historical ones to see if they aren't completely off.)
Gotta figure out a price for animals and land though; maybe just a multiple of what their “harvest” (like a cow's milk and meat) would earn.
>What have you been using as your standar wage? I made a fictional currency so exchanges between coin types wouldn't be easier for the players. 1 gp=20 sp=20 cp and they all weigh a little bit different but around as much as a quarter.
Haven't decided on a standard wage yet, I'll look up historical sources and experiment a bit so the result comes out right. A pre-modern setting with a universal gold standard at least makes currency value a non-issue.
1/2, character limit reached
>>45303116
>>45303341
I've got a setting where literally the entire planet is composed of the piled-up corpses of slain gods. Old-school Aristotelian-style cosmology where heavy shit sinks to the center of the universe, while light stuff floats out toward the firmament. The universe started out just full of countless gods beating the shit out of each other, and when they died their bodies fell to the center of the cosmos and their souls floated up to lodge in the firmament as stars.
And eventually life sprang up from the residual divine energy left in the massive pile of god-corpses that is the Earth.
Meteorites are scary-ass shit because they're literally falling stars -- ie, god-souls dislodged from the firmament -- and if that god-soul makes contact with the Earth -- dead god-flesh -- it'll fuse with it and then you have a warlike and disoriented twisted zombie-god running around like a bull in a china shop until someone puts it down or it just runs out of steam and falls apart.
>>45306074
>>45306429
2/2
>As far as market manipulation, I haven't done anything to model manipulation inside a city, but I do have where say if a city has .4 availability, they can take .2 availability from another city. The "stolen" availability is affected by trade distance. So overall availability is eaten up by transport costs but a city can give or take availability to manipulate prices. A city producing a lot of a good may want to "give" availability to other cities to drive up the prices they sell at. While a city lacking an essential item may "steal" availability to lower their prices.
Good idea! I've also been working with demand/availability on a town-by-town basis. Say a village always (unless ravaged by war or natural disaster) has a demand/availability ratio of various foodstuffs of ~75/100, while cities always produce less than they consume (100/50), so they always need to draw on surrounding villages.
Various towns and cities would specialise in one industry each though (like one city with a lot of potters), those would generate oversupply of more sophisticated goods to export to the rest of the region.
In either case I wouldn't be working with exact quantities though, just percentages (and effectively infinite resources) to avoid having to write algorithms to simulate things like competition.
I never considered cities deliberately exporting goods (even if there's more demand than supply) in order to drive up local prices though. Maybe I'll steal that idea!
On the other hand, keeping these things inflexible (i.e. there will always be oversupply in one town, and always demand in another, even though the prices in the consuming town would indicate imports from the productive one) would allow the players to exploit them by trading goods themselves or setting up manufactures close to the consumers.
>>45304803
Are you GMing for Touhouguy or something?
>>45299939
>You don't need to study geology or simulate plate tectonics or anything
SO WHAT THE HELL DID I GET THIS DEGREE FOR
>>45306429
That sounds like it would work pretty well for figuring out production chains. One site that I've found fairly useful is tao of d&d. He's hyper autismal simulations d&d so it's good for our purposes. It's a lot to wade through but there's some explanations of his base price system and links to data he uses that are useful. The data is fairly useful since his whole approach is "if you compile 900 pages of raw data, patterns will begin to emerge"
It makes sense to work on wage with production chains but are you factoring in time? As far as using it to determine wages though, it works well that people further up the production chain have higher wages. It reminds me of labor theory of value in classical or marxist economics. I've leaned on that austrian/chicago economics I learned in econ 101 for my ideas but aside from treating labor as a tradeable commodity, it hasn't given me really good tools for figuring out labor cost.
>>45306738
I like that. One thing that's been of real use to me is having large cities "steal" labor from villages. Since scientific agriculture is going on, it fits with the historical period of peasants moving to urban areas and available labor rising. So the village would have demand/availability of foodstuffs but it seems like you'd want to base the availability in the city on the amount of villages. So a city surrounded by fertile land with tons of agriculture for shitloads of miles would have more villages to draw on. And therefore a higher food availability than a city in the desert.
I kinda like the idea of when I start applying the economic system outside of experiments, I can have unexpected results and just roll with it. Since the oddities of the economy in different areas would be organic outcomes of a logical system.
And yeah, I think percentages work better. It's not many situations where if 200,000 barrels of wheat are imported to a city yearly is an exact figure you need.
>>45306952
I've been unsatisfied with most games economics for years. But after running a 5e sandbox for 8 months, I was looking at price tables in the dmg when something broke inside me. And then when discussing it with a player, I was told that the whole party knew the pricing and economics didn't really make sense but they accepted it out of quiet resignation.
>>45307014
Uber Dorf Fortress tactics
>>45307014
>frogposter
>education beyond highschool
I remind skeptical
>>45304455
what you just described sounds like one of the most boring possible things to play, let alone work out the math.
>>45303781
I laughed a lot more than I should have
>>45307352
>The data is fairly useful since his whole approach is "if you compile 900 pages of raw data, patterns will begin to emerge"
Sounds like my kinda guy; I'll take a look at his site, thanks.
>It makes sense to work on wage with production chains but are you factoring in time?
Yeah, time would be the multiplier of the base wage. If a job requires multiple people working together, I'd just add up the time they spend working and multiply that by the base wage.
Essentially the base wage would just be a measure of the time spent on producing something.
>As far as using it to determine wages though, it works well that people further up the production chain have higher wages.
I'm trying to work around that (since that would necessitate defining wages for each kind—or at least tier—of profession) by saying that they all make minimum wage, but the additional profit from selling a highly refined product makes up for that; see above.
>So the village would have demand/availability of foodstuffs but it seems like you'd want to base the availability in the city on the amount of villages. So a city surrounded by fertile land with tons of agriculture for shitloads of miles would have more villages to draw on. And therefore a higher food availability than a city in the desert.
Ooh, that's a great idea. It completely eliminates having to calculate trade routes from village to city (and then on to another city); all the trade would be between cities only.
It's realistic for earlier periods too, since goods were only really sold on markets or in artisan workshops (both found only in larger towns or cities), while on the countryside people produced their own needs and relied on peddlers for anything else. Thanks, this helped me a lot!
>>45307369
>you will never be part of a worldwide cartel of shopkeepers who buy everything at half price and sell it with a 100% profit margin
>>45307369
... what caused the break inside of you?
>>45308059
The pure amount of arbitrary bullshit and lack of any real reasoning behind the pricing in it. Also no system at all for different prices in different areas even though that's vital for the players to make serious decisions with money.
especially if they travel a lot as adventurers do, it makes sense to make side money as a traveling merchant.
>>45308059
Specifically I think it was "founding a village requires 500 gp"
Regardless of what kind of land the village is founded in, the cost of materials, the cost of labor, what reasons for people to move to the village, anything really.
RAW a village in a desert in a 1600's economy costs just as much to found as a village in the mountains based on mining as a village 4 miles from a city wall in fertile woodland.
It really depends on the setting and relevance. DnD doesn't need amateur fantasy about every village but Shadowrun does benefit from having halfway correct physical and network security.
>>45307962
I remember with tao of d&d, he's simulating a sort of 1600'ish setting but his advice on earlier periods is to pretty much get rid of new world goods and reduce the amount of certain goods to get something approximating earlier periods. Though he's okay with "my price of this one good is 1gp off from its historical price" because his ideas are focused more on internal consistency than being 1:1 the same as 1650 europe.
Ah I see, so wage is determined by time and labor and all of that, then the base wage determines the price of raw goods? I like that, each step in production instead of working them separately; you just apply that 10% bonus for each step in the production chain?
I need to figure out a way to represent those villages into the city. I have "zones" sorta where say a grain producing region would have cheaper grain than in the city but the cities only interact with other cities.
>>45308123
>>45308230
you're missing the point by an entire continent here. DnD is not about trade routes, it is about dungeons and dragons
>>45303308
You're trying too hard.
>>45299939
How can players make characters if the world isn't fleshed out enough? I've had this problem time and time again where GMs fail to flesh out the world and then expect the players to make characters with good backstories despite the settings lack of detail. If you run a inside out campaign then don't expect the players to be able to come up with meaningful or realistic characters.
>>45300113
Unburden yourself my son
>>45308316
This.
DnD is shlock generic fantasy. Spending weeks building a DnD setting is like spending ten hours making a ham sandwich. It's wasted effort because there's only so much that can be done with the base material.I make an honourable exception for Tippyverse type settings that earnestly try to explore and innovate more than the average "muh princesses and orcs" setting
Shadowrun may have its share of bullshit and theme park cultures, but the core of it - pulling off complicated heists, infiltrations, ambushes, etc - really does benefit from complex set-ups based on the detailed setting. The same would apply to a pure fantasy equivalent (some kind of magitech setting maybe, or clockpunk/steampunk, or hybrid).
But either way, if some shitty DM has just shat out a cookie-cutter setting, or worse, a tryhard "check out my Aztec-themed Elves!!" abomination, I'm not going to get invested in it at all. I might still be able to enjoy the campaign on purely gamist grounds, but that's about it. It's an excuse to test out some min-maxing or try a weird build.
>>45308570
Friendly reminder that you don't have to work so damn hard on your characters. You don't need to study sociology or simulate an entire lifetime or anything. Just play it fast and loose man. Put cool stuff in there just because you can. Because you totally can. They're your own happy little person, make them yours, and don't stress about the realism too much. It's a game of pretend, don't sweat it.
>>45308395
If the players want to start businesses or travel a lot, then they're going to need a reasonable system for pricing and economics. If players want to start a blacksmithing business, hire mercenaries to take over a village, run for mayor, or start a farming village to house refugees of a war, I'm not going to put my fucking thumb on their imaginations and say "No, this game is about dungeons and dragons."
>>45308570
Anytime I've done loosely built improv games, I always built the setting around the players characters. "You're a dwarf monk who was exiled to the surface and was banished by his lord after defending his monastery in a duel? Tell me more about these dwarves. I think they'd have a low caste who farms things on the surface." and kinda collaboratively build a loose setting with the players.
>tfw one of my GMs world is literally earth, except the landmasses and the oceans are inverted.
>tfw even the countries are expys of the countries that should be close in the real world
...why?
>>45308717
I understand sometimes for beer and pretzels games that works pretty solidly. I'm a real fan of those when they're done right, and when the GM actually shapes the setting around the players like what >>45308761 suggests. In my experience that rarely happens and the GMs just never actually create a world.
I'm a fan of games that involve deeply engaging diplomacy and economics though and in a setting that's only being built as the players move through it the GM cannot possibly create the same depth and breadth that one with preparation can. Not to say that one can't have fun games with the improve approach, to reiterate a couple of my favorite campaigns were based on that, just that it's impossible to create the same complexity and create the realistic and engaging stories games with preparation create.
>>45308392
>Ah I see, so wage is determined by time and labor and all of that, then the base wage determines the price of raw goods? I like that, each step in production instead of working them separately; you just apply that 10% bonus for each step in the production chain?
Exactly. So a tailor's 10% is made up of his time*Base Wage plus 110% of the weaver's raw material costs and time*Base Wage, and so on.
Mind that I haven't tested this yet to see what kinds of prices this results in, but it works in theory at least. But like you said:
>Though he's okay with "my price of this one good is 1gp off from its historical price" because his ideas are focused more on internal consistency than being 1:1 the same as 1650 europe.
I need sleep though, it's quite late over here. It was nice and productive talking to you; hope to see ya again some time, and good luck with your system.
>>45308989
Good luck to you too. I might steal that idea since my system seems to work well for the macro level but when it comes to wages I don't have an answer and I took the lazy route for figuring out base prices.
I might email you some of my raw notes tonight but I have a test this week so probably thursday or friday, I'll write up an explanation of it since the notes are written for me; they don't have a lot of explanation.
>>45308807
Metacontextual reflection.
Bring some luggage for the trip but buy new clothes when you get there too.
>>45299939
I love different weird cultures. So, even if i won't go all the way up from geology, i will always flesh out how different nations live.
>>45305138
I don't mind people drawing maps with goofy mountain ranges or unexplained quakes because 99% of the time it's "fuck you, magic, don't have to explain shit".
It's just how geology has become the posterboy, in this thread, for a DM that overcomplicates the setting.
I'm not so autistic that I don't realize most people couldn't give two shits about my bizzaro major.
>>45307935
Laugh and then realize some hiker was there and took photos of that failure while chest sized rocks careened past his head.
Friendly reminder that you cannot have a meaningful campaign if strict records of time are not kept.
