How important self-consistent economies in your D&D experiences?

[Hygro]

Swap tabletop RPG of choice for D&D if that helps you.

Like many in the quarantine I've played a lot of D&D in zoom/discord/roll20 etc. One game has a careful worldbuild the keeps two completely. separate parties in sync with no ret-con.

The other has thicker roleplaying but the economy is getting incredulous.

By economy I mean the interplay between
NPC character levels and positions, hit points and fighting potential of factions, stats, available spells and items, gold, basically the interplay of the numbers.

We get to the town and the Rich Underdogs are paying us 50 GP each at level 1 to guard their Big Annual Event. This event is 7 days and 10 game sessions away from the initial point. Gold is hard to come by.

Oppressive Overlords have the support of the city, a 50,000 person town, with 300 guards effectively 3rd level PCs in power. They cannot directly fight the Rich Underdogs. They pay vandals 5gp each merely to vandalize property. Everyone fights to the death (??)

We end up in the Magic Items Bazaar in The Slums. We are getting cashed out on the spot 1000 gp for gems, ex-heroes of high levels are hanging around selling anything we want to buy. They are all open and there during regular business hours. They are more oppressed and politically powerless than the Rich Underdogs (who as you can see are quite poor).

The actual building plot, the battles, the roleplay, it's all pretty good. But the numbers involved in the setting is starting to pull me out of the game. I don't believe we can act freely in the world environment and not have it a) break the game or b) be arbitrarily countered relative to our power level at any given point.

 

[amadeus]

Sorry I don’t have a lengthier post to accompany your explanation, but the in-game economy consists of fixed prices but an ever-expanding money supply?

 

[Hygro]

Sorry I don’t have a lengthier post to accompany your explanation, but the in-game economy consists of fixed prices but an ever-expanding money supply?

That conveniently matches the players' situation... yes you could put it that way.

But the game economy is less GP and more HP. For example, why are we valid defense for the Rich Underdogs when 10% of the Oppressive Overlords' grunts would overwhelm us completely as they have hero stats and level 3 abilities. What spells are available to which team, etc.

 

[amadeus]

I don’t understand it, but now I want to see how Robert McNamara would play it out. It seems given the game parameters he would excel at it.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Swap tabletop RPG of choice for D&D if that helps you.

Like many in the quarantine I've played a lot of D&D in zoom/discord/roll20 etc. One game has a careful worldbuild the keeps two completely. separate parties in sync with no ret-con.

The other has thicker roleplaying but the economy is getting incredulous.

By economy I mean the interplay between
NPC character levels and positions, hit points and fighting potential of factions, stats, available spells and items, gold, basically the interplay of the numbers.

We get to the town and the Rich Underdogs are paying us 50 GP each at level 1 to guard their Big Annual Event. This event is 7 days and 10 game sessions away from the initial point. Gold is hard to come by.

Oppressive Overlords have the support of the city, a 50,000 person town, with 300 guards effectively 3rd level PCs in power. They cannot directly fight the Rich Underdogs. They pay vandals 5gp each merely to vandalize property. Everyone fights to the death (??)

We end up in the Magic Items Bazaar in The Slums. We are getting cashed out on the spot 1000 gp for gems, ex-heroes of high levels are hanging around selling anything we want to buy. They are all open and there during regular business hours. They are more oppressed and politically powerless than the Rich Underdogs (who as you can see are quite poor).

The actual building plot, the battles, the roleplay, it's all pretty good. But the numbers involved in the setting is starting to pull me out of the game. I don't believe we can act freely in the world environment and not have it a) break the game or b) be arbitrarily countered relative to our power level at any given point.

The RPG I've played the most is Fighting Fantasy, which began as a series of solo gamebooks and the only currency was the Gold Piece.

Years later someone created a multiplayer Advanced Fighting Fantasy and expanded the currency a bit to include silver.

Fast-forward to 2016 when I finally scored my first NaNoWriMo win for novelizing the Fighting Fantasy gamebook Caverns of the Snow Witch.

There are scenes in that book in which the protagonist is offered a sum of gold to do a task - find and kill a Yeti. I read up on the economic systems of that part of Allansia (the continent where this story takes place) and what kind of pay a caravan guide could reasonably command when employed by a wealthy merchant to head into a hazardous part of the world. And then I decided the character was going to demand hazard pay for this Yeti quest - and if he never came back, a generous sum of money would be paid to his widow and child back in Port Blacksand - and since she's a highly-skilled mage, double-crossing her would not be healthy.

The Yeti quest becomes another quest: Kill the Snow Witch and free the people she's enslaved.

Of course the game book had all sort of treasure, coins, and magic items the protagonist could find, and he ends up rich at the end. But I decided that since he was going to go on to a sequel gamebook, sending him in there with a chest of 200+ gold would make the game pointless. So I had him divvy up the Snow Queen's treasure with the friends he made, and once he got back to civilization he made arrangements to send the bulk of the treasure and magic items home to his wife (he himself isn't a mage and has no idea what to do with most of it, but since his wife runs a magic shop in a port city, she can decide what to keep and what to sell).

I introduced copper into the economy to make it more realistic in that people aren't paying for minor things with gold. Copper and silver are the everyday currencies for most of the people, and haggling and bartering is something else I introduced, since most of the time the gamebooks have a set list of prices and the player-character (PC)'s only option is either yes or no - buy or don't, no bartering or haggling allowed. That's not tenable for turning these stories into novels, so I tweaked their economy.

Sorry I don’t have a lengthier post to accompany your explanation, but the in-game economy consists of fixed prices but an ever-expanding money supply?

The DM can create an endless supply of money, gems, valuable magic items, and so forth, and the logical question becomes "what do the characters do with all this?

There are lots of ways to take away their money, but players tend to get annoyed at being taxed, robbed, having their goods confiscated, or whatever. Some higher level characters put their money into building castles, paying soldiers or henchmen or servants. My own protagonists for Caverns of the Snow Witch/Forest of Doom and the Quest for the Crown of Kings put the money/treasure/magic they gain into magical research. The protagonists of these two quests are husband and wife, and the wife's parents disappeared many years before in an accident caused by a misfiring time travel spell. The wife has been doing research for years in order to figure out how to find her parents. That's the reason for many of their quests, it's what they spend much of their income on, and it's something that takes 25+ years to achieve.


Anyone here ever read Joel Rosenberg's Guardians of the Flame series? It starts with a wizard who lives in 20th-century America, impersonating a university professor. One of his extra-curricular activities is hosting a weekly D&D game, with the purpose (unknown to his players, who are all students) of finding the precise combination of players/characters to transfer across to the game world in which they play, to carry out a quest for him.

The application of 20th century economic principles and introduction of certain kinds of technology turns this game world on its metaphorical ear as the PCs carry out their quest and decide on other courses of action... and later make their permanent home in the game world.

 

[amadeus]

The DM can create an endless supply of money, gems, valuable magic items, and so forth, and the logical question becomes "what do the characters do with all this?

Okay, because I read @Hygro’s post as a problem of resource scarcity in the face of an ever-expanding money supply. I don’t know anything about tabletop gaming, so approaching it with a 20th century real-world economics approach is the only one I can make. As you said, it kind of turns the game on its ear. But also, I think that might have been his point?

I stopped having coffee about an hour and a half ago.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Okay, because I read @Hygro’s post as a problem of resource scarcity in the face of an ever-expanding money supply. I don’t know anything about tabletop gaming, so approaching it with a 20th century real-world economics approach is the only one I can make. As you said, it kind of turns the game on its ear. But also, I think that might have been his point?

I stopped having coffee about an hour and a half ago.

A common problem with medieval fantasy-themed games is that whoever creates the bare bones of the setting tends to create it in a vacuum. So the players are presented with a series of encounters or puzzles, and sooner or later someone will wonder, "Waitaminute, this monster is far too large to have gotten into this room, and what does it eat when there aren't any adventurers around to munch on?" Or more in keeping with the economy angle, "It's one thing for a well-off PC to pay 3 gold pieces for a meal, but how could the much less-wealthy locals pay that much on an everyday basis?" The inflation in that area must be staggering.

There are other questions players tend to ask, and they all amount to trying to figure out how the setting actually functions when not in active use. NPCs should have some way to live whatever their normal existence is when the PCs aren't around, and PCs' actions should have consequences for everyone in the vicinity, not only themselves.

It's a valid concern for SF settings as well. In one of the Hulzein novels (by F.M. Busby), the protagonist is dropped off on a planet after having been bought out by a group of her ex-fellow ship's officers (everyone on Escaped Ships owns shares in the ship's economy). Since she was the Captain, she's very wealthy in comparison to the people who live on the planet, and one of the questions she's asked is what she plans to do with her money - "If you splash all that into the local economy at once, there'll be problems."

All this is why I like to write at least part of my stories from the pov of a non-main character, to get a feel for what kind of setting it actually is. In my current project I have the economies of three kingdoms to figure out, past, present, and future. The game developers just waved a hand and said "the kingdom began to prosper" but that doesn't say much. I'm looking forward to figuring it all out.

 

[Hygro]

Okay, because I read @Hygro’s post as a problem of resource scarcity in the face of an ever-expanding money supply. I don’t know anything about tabletop gaming, so approaching it with a 20th century real-world economics approach is the only one I can make. As you said, it kind of turns the game on its ear. But also, I think that might have been his point?

I stopped having coffee about an hour and a half ago.

I'm talking about the economy of game values. So if there's 300 dudes with 20 hp each that all have +4 to attack, that's an economic set of values. That the numbers in my game are getting particularly inconsistent with regards to who is in power in the city and how much gold they have to spare only shines a brighter light on the break of immersion.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I'm talking about the economy of game values. So if there's 300 dudes with 20 hp each that all have +4 to attack, that's an economic set of values. That the numbers in my game are getting particularly inconsistent with regards to who is in power in the city and how much gold they have to spare only shines a brighter light on the break of immersion.

I've never actually played a game with 300+ characters, whether PCs or NPCs.

I prefer to emphasize story over stats. The last gaming group I was part of was mostly comprised of SCA people - and we're accustomed to playing a persona. So the DM paid attention to hit points, but didn't emphasize it in terms of math and stats. The quest we had was simple: We had to escape from a citadel. We started the campaign locked in a cell, minus weapons. So when we figured out how to get out of the cell, acquiring weapons was the first priority. And since our other worldly goods (such as they were; we weren't a wealthy bunch of people) had been confiscated, we had to find them.

Anyway, we ended up raiding every room we came across (hope nobody in that place needed their pillow cases; we ran off with every single one of them). We got weapons, we found our important stuff (as the mage of the party I needed my spell book back!), and then we got to the laundry. The DM ruled that our fighter had slipped on an area of the floor that was soapy and sprained his ankle badly.

One of the non-SCA people playing with us was All About The Stats, and it was annoying to be constantly taken out of the immersive story whenever he spoke. He didn't try to get into character at all, and when the fighter's player reasoned that since he was injured to that extent and the cleric had already used up her healing spell on someone else, he - the fighter - would be unable to fight.

Whereupon the Mr. Stats Guy promptly sneered, "You still have 2 hit points, you can still fight." The guy playing the fighter disagreed, and the rest of us had to step up and put up more of an effort to get us out of there.

My point is that for me, the roleplay is more important than the rollplay. I see tabletop RPGs as opportunities for interactive, cooperative storytelling, as did most of the others in that group. The "All About the Stats" guy dropped out of the group, and while we got along fine in the Star Trek group, he didn't fit into our style of roleplaying games.

 

[amadeus]

I'm talking about the economy of game values. So if there's 300 dudes with 20 hp each that all have +4 to attack, that's an economic set of values. That the numbers in my game are getting particularly inconsistent with regards to who is in power in the city and how much gold they have to spare only shines a brighter light on the break of immersion.

I was going to see where you were going before I brought up this example, so let me know if I'm getting closer to the mark. In Monopoly, I think it's fair to say that quite often players will reach a point where they recognize their defeat (or victory) becomes all but an inevitability and that kind of ruins the game for a lot of people. Would this example be similar in spirit to what you are describing?

 

[Zardnaar]

PCs start the game reasonably well off and end up as the 1% if they survive.

The D&D economy for adventurers is more gold rush, NPCs presumably grow their own food outside the cities and make their own clothes etc.

Mine are currently on 200gp/month retainers living the Bible lifestyle for "free" vs cash in hand.

They're essentially like artists in Italy, nobles pay them for protection instead.

 

[AmazonQueen]

Its always been a bugbear of mine that a lot of fantasy writers and referees seem to believe that since its fantasy internal consistency and believability don't matter.
My favourite RPG system is Runequest and setting is Glorantha.
Runequest is a fairly deadly system. There are no levels, hit points are fairly low, a single blow can kill the toughest character. Player characters and referees are encouraged to think about the consequences of combat. Intelligent enemies will often negotiate rather than fight and retreat or surrender if things go against them.
Glorantha is a developed world that tries to ensure player characters have a place in their society and their actions have consequences. Murder hobos have a difficult time of it.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Swap tabletop RPG of choice for D&D if that helps you.

Like many in the quarantine I've played a lot of D&D in zoom/discord/roll20 etc. One game has a careful worldbuild the keeps two completely. separate parties in sync with no ret-con.

The other has thicker roleplaying but the economy is getting incredulous.

By economy I mean the interplay between
NPC character levels and positions, hit points and fighting potential of factions, stats, available spells and items, gold, basically the interplay of the numbers.

We get to the town and the Rich Underdogs are paying us 50 GP each at level 1 to guard their Big Annual Event. This event is 7 days and 10 game sessions away from the initial point. Gold is hard to come by.

Oppressive Overlords have the support of the city, a 50,000 person town, with 300 guards effectively 3rd level PCs in power. They cannot directly fight the Rich Underdogs. They pay vandals 5gp each merely to vandalize property. Everyone fights to the death (??)

We end up in the Magic Items Bazaar in The Slums. We are getting cashed out on the spot 1000 gp for gems, ex-heroes of high levels are hanging around selling anything we want to buy. They are all open and there during regular business hours. They are more oppressed and politically powerless than the Rich Underdogs (who as you can see are quite poor).

The actual building plot, the battles, the roleplay, it's all pretty good. But the numbers involved in the setting is starting to pull me out of the game. I don't believe we can act freely in the world environment and not have it a) break the game or b) be arbitrarily countered relative to our power level at any given point.

I think part of the problem is that the game started with the players as mercenaries. When I was DM'ing D&D games, I preferred to have some theme, concept or goal for the group that would both bind them together and give them a purpose, in a general sense. There are a number of reasons for this, but being mercenaries sets the entire game around just earning wealth. 50GP for guarding a Big Annual Event sounds like a lot to me, but that's almost beside the point; what's more important to me is that your character is doing it because they're getting paid to do it. I would think this starting point contributes to the problem that's giving you a headache. The DM has also revealed numbers to you that may not have been necessary. The fact that you know how many people live in the town, for example, and how many guards there are, may not be things you needed to know or things your character would know. You're looking at the campaign setting from a top-down perspective, like an RTS. If your character is a noble/gang-leader/wizard who runs the town, or is trying to take it over, then great; otherwise, it may not be important information.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I think part of the problem is that the game started with the players as mercenaries. When I was DM'ing D&D games, I preferred to have some theme, concept or goal for the group that would both bind them together and give them a purpose, in a general sense. There are a number of reasons for this, but being mercenaries sets the entire game around just earning wealth. 50GP for guarding a Big Annual Event sounds like a lot to me, but that's almost beside the point; what's more important to me is that your character is doing it because they're getting paid to do it. I would think this starting point contributes to the problem that's giving you a headache. The DM has also revealed numbers to you that may not have been necessary. The fact that you know how many people live in the town, for example, and how many guards there are, may not be things you needed to know or things your character would know. You're looking at the campaign setting from a top-down perspective, like an RTS. If your character is a noble/gang-leader/wizard who runs the town, or is trying to take it over, then great; otherwise, it may not be important information.

This is a good point. The players/PCs don't need to know everything. Therefore when I designed a campaign based on a couple of modules I changed some of the monsters, altered the overall goal of the campaign, and redesigned about half of the castle so it would make sense*.

*Make sense in the way that the castle would function when not overrun by the enemy the PCs have to fight. It makes sense that if a castle was attacked the only way from the dining room to the kitchen might be a trap door in the ceiling, but not for daily life.

Giving away too much information means the players have more scope to foil the DM's plans and take the campaign in a direction it was never intended to go.

 

[Hygro]

If your character is a noble/gang-leader/wizard who runs the town, or is trying to take it over, then great;.

Literally 100% of my characters.

In 1st and 2nd edition, at 9th level the fighter and cleric each attract an army. No one thing inspired me more as a kid making a D&D character than the fighter follower table in the 2nd edition player's handbook.

But even if you're not trying to take over, it's frustrating when none of your actions matter because the DM is level scaling the world in a box around the players no matter what they do.

 

[Zardnaar]

Literally 100% of my characters.

In 1st and 2nd edition, at 9th level the fighter and cleric each attract an army. No one thing inspired me more as a kid making a D&D character than the fighter follower table in the 2nd edition player's handbook.

But even if you're not trying to take over, it's frustrating when none of your actions matter because the DM is level scaling the world in a box around the players no matter what they do.

View attachment 567289

Raise troops, invade Thyatis. Win.

 

[Lohrenswald]

Answer to thread title is 0 %

 

[Zardnaar]

The economy of D&D is simple.

Dwarves, Kobolds and Gnomes mine it. It teleports to dragon lairs until it gets rereleased into the economy by adventurers.

It's spent on booze and hiring mercenaries or other adventurers to go get more gold in another dragons lair.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Literally 100% of my characters.

In 1st and 2nd edition, at 9th level the fighter and cleric each attract an army. No one thing inspired me more as a kid making a D&D character than the fighter follower table in the 2nd edition player's handbook.

But even if you're not trying to take over, it's frustrating when none of your actions matter because the DM is level scaling the world in a box around the players no matter what they do.

View attachment 567289

It sounds like you and/or your DM and/or your gaming group aren't all on the same page. I can relate. I think that's one of the toughest parts of running a tabletop game, and one that a lot of people don't think about. Some groups just naturally fall into a shared notion and rhythm; others seem to be rowing in opposite directions all the time. And I've been on both sides of the table, as DM and player.

One of the challenging things is trying to blend playstyles. For instance, I've always enjoyed playing stealthy characters, but stealth is mutually-exclusive of other types of characters. That is, if you have a group of characters and one of them is a walking WWI tank, the entire group cannot be stealthy. It's all-or-none. Alternatively, stealthy characters in a non-stealthy group can separate themselves from the group for long stretches (e.g. "Shadow and Panther will sneak through the abandoned tunnels under the fort while the rest of us breach the front gate"), forcing the DM to either run two encounters simultaneously or reduce one of them to a dice roll or two (that is, instead of playing out Shadow and Panther's route through the tunnels, you just have them roll some dice and then have them rejoin their comrades for the brawl - but then all you've done is remove the stealth gameplay that Shadow and Panther wanted). Again, I've been on both sides of the table for that, and it's a pain in the [neck].

If the clash is between your character and the other characters (like my sneaky-mongoose-guy creeping stealthily along beside Metallica) and not with the DM, one compromise I can think of, off the top of my head, is to do some "strategic level" gaming with your character and the DM. This could be done outside of the normal gaming sessions, even by email. Basically, I'm imagining you and your DM roleplaying the organizing of your character's stronghold and followers, as you prepare for your party's next at-the-table adventure. If you've played any Total War games, I'm envisioning something like the split between the strategic map and the tactical map.

This approach could also be helpful if the issue is between your character and the DM. Provided he or she is willing to let you take on some of the world-building, they could let you do some of the "grunt work" of reorganizing the world's economy, as much as it needs to, to allow for your character to run a fort or a small town or whatever. If the reason their game-world's economy is inconsistent is simply because they don't want to do all that work (something to which I can relate ) they might be happy to let you do it.

 

[Hygro]

I would say it’s overall not worth it to try to manage too much in lieu of the DM. Now they’ve already failed in building and making self consistent their own world, adding to it is just going to be an ill fitting chunk that further exposes the inconsistencies.

For me the most appropriate solution is to go mad and attack the big bad guys the most head on. Working through the complex puzzle of a campaign is only rewarding if there’s comprehensive verisimilitude so if there isn’t, achieving maximal short term glory and overcoming such risk is what remains.