I have found, through my personal gaming experience and reading articles about the failure of CRPGs, that one of the many reasons why CRPGs fail is due to the hyper-inflation of the currency used in the CRPGs economy. One of the more useful articles I read was: Mu's Unbelievably Long and Disjointed Ramblings About RPG Design. The relavent section of the article for this posting is the: Reasonable Cash Economy section.

First, is this a true statement?

Second, what is the best way to control hyper-inflation in CRPGs? I know that there are common design patterns for "money sinks" such as Taxes, charging to learn skills in schools, buying titles of nobility, etc.

If the Taxes design pattern was implemented into a fantasy CRPG what type of taxes should be implemented?

I have come up with some examples of types of taxes:

1. Non-residental entrance fee
    Due?
        When a character and his or her party enters a town where one or more of them are not residents of that town.

    How is the tax amount determined?
        By counting number of heads in characters party including livestock, mounts, etc.

2. Income Tax
    Due?
        Hmmm ... good question. I don't really have a good answer for this one. Should it be once a in game week? month? year?
    How is the tax amount determined?
        Another good questions. Again I don't really have a good answer for this one either.

Thanks

One suggestion: Change your timescale.

One-to-one timing means that your adventurers (I'm assuming a standard fantasy environment) are going on life-threatening adventures, different ones, every couple of days. Healing up either in seconds, or at worst overnight, from crippling wounds, and then heading back out to something new and fantastically important and/or lucrative. Hmmm.

If you tried divorcing "adventuring timescale" from "town timescale" somehow, better done in a single-player CRPG (commercial sell) than in an MMORPG, then having months or years of life between adventures would make them more significant in and of themselves, and open up some interesting options (characters aging significantly, children, etc). Take a look at King Arthur Pendragon - I'm not sure about the current editions, but my First Ed book assumes that each game session will be a distinct story and that the advancement phase at the end of each session is a Winter season. That is, it assumes a default scale of one adventure per year of life.

Another thought would be to assign some kind of statistical value denoting how spendthrift/wasteful each character is, and use that to calculate their costs of living. With a high, what, Ascetic score, your cost of living and your day job or equivalent (monastic duties, painting for your patrons, hunting and gathering) probably roughly cancel out, depending on where your relevant skills are compared to the expected norm for your social class and standard of living. With a high Ascetic score (or low Indulgent), you end up keeping quite a small surplus.

Lower Ascetic scores denote most of us. You get paid tomorrow, you're hungry, McDonald's is more expensive than cooking at home but you're not much of a cook anyway. You buy CDs, T-shirts with neat pictures, gaming books. You try to keep a girlfriend happy (perhaps it's her Asceticism score you use there!). So your cost of living scales upward.

And we all know people who can't keep a coin in the bank to save their souls. Would these be the people saving up to buy plate armour? No, these would be the people maintaining that it would be too heavy anyway, they might buy some someday, but not now, they've just gone to a concert and can't afford it.

Those trying to keep in active training are, similarly, not spending that time earning their wages or their keep. That's not to say that the increased cost might not be covered, by them or someone else... that's the point of a standing army, you decide it's worth feeding these guys so the lord spends his cash doing so.

So maybe you could use a slow-time "out of adventuring mode" timescale, with seasons as the base unit of time, and work out cost of living like so:
- Base cost, based strictly on social class. Rent/upkeep, food, clothing.
- Base income, based on your profession. This, plus the above, might be near zero or even negative for many people with real (non-adventuring) jobs of a kind that the local economy will bear. (Two armoursmiths in a small town, you're probably going to have a fight on your hands.) It's pure adventurers with no day jobs who end up shorted, here. Either way, it's an additive change to your bank account, for better or for worse.
- Martial/magical training is a day job (or part of one) which doesn't bring in cash. Maybe give them a sliding scale: of your "working time," how much puts food on the table and how much is research, training, etc.?
- Multiplier, based on Asceticism/Indulgent score. This is the amount of your life savings you actually get to keep, after each season's base costs are paid out; I'd do it as a percentage. This is spent on fripperies with redeeming qualities that are social in nature; pay them back with lots of non-adventuring-relevant gewgaws that sound like they were, arguably, worth the expense, after evaporating most of the money on short-term desires with no lasting goods attached at all.

Obviously players will want a low Indulgent score - ninety percent Indulgent would mean that you found a dragon's hoard, and next season only 10% is left, and the season after that only 1% remains. And you have fancy friends and a lot of expensive hangovers to show for it. But make them balance this against their other characteristics; it costs attribute points to "buy down" your Indulgent from a default (30%?), or you can get attribute points back by buying it up instead. [Note that the money "lost to" Indulgent must be earmarked from the moment they find treasure... he's greedy, he already has things in mind for his share, no shuffling it around to the cleric so it'll get saved. Not unless you want to replicate situations like the captain hanging onto his sailors' wages for them so that they actually have any left when they get home.]

Plus the obvious advice that not every troll has sacks of gold, not every adventure ends in pelf. In fact, honestly, one could easily (more easily than the reverse?) envision the opposite case... most deeds of derring-do aren't done for profit. Most people who adventure to make their fortune end up just getting by, and only one in a hundred makes it rich.

Just some thoughts for you,

- Eric

Cool question. Welcome to The Forge.

thelopez wrote: First, is this a true statement?

Second, what is the best way to control hyper-inflation in CRPGs? I know that there are common design patterns for "money sinks" such as Taxes, charging to learn skills in schools, buying titles of nobility, etc.

Thanks for the link, it was a good read. But like Mike says, he kind of just poo-pooed closed economies with out any substance.

I think close analysis of the economy of A Tale in the Desert is in order. There is no pharaonic currency in that game -- players are able to print their own notes. Some of the resources are part of a closed economy while others are not. Sand and Grass and mud and water are infinitely plentiful, but take time. Gold ore can be panned at the shore by highly perceptive people, but like Iron and the other minerals, when mined from the ground are pseudo-closed (in that it becomes cost-prohibitive to mine after a time).

In general, I think these games all suffer from their open economy. Mu's objections to the closed economy, I think, could more easily be negated than all of the tremendous problems created by managing and open economy. It's particularly funny to me that he describes the real world (closed) economy as having "no chance of success."

Eric's ideas on indulgence as a stat are interesting, but I really like Mu's suggestion for taxation. It's all a protection racket (I mean, even still, really) with a hierarchy of levels in which the expected taxation increases...kind of like the mafia. And a wealth tax is healthier for the economy than an income tax anyway. In theory an income tax disincents earning taxable income (bad) while a wealth tax might incent spending it (good) or do nothing (ok). Whatever the tax form ends up being, Mike's idea of funding tangible stuff is fantastic. Especially if it were tied into technological growth of some kind: allowing new skills or buildings, driving further economy, deeper mining, faster or safer travel, opening new schools of magic, etc.

Chris

Mike Holmes wrote: Cool question. Welcome to The Forge.

Mike Holmes wrote: I assume the statement in question is that CRPGs tend to fail due to hyper-inflation? If so, then I'd say that it all depends on your definition of failure. Yes, I think they all suffer from somthing like this, but people continue to play. We'll assume that we're just looking to get rid of the uglyness that is hyperinflation.

Mike Holmes wrote: Yes, the closed systems of UO and the like are problematic. But they're the most realistic, and with help, they can be "semi-open" enough so that you avoid the hoarder problem. I think that this line of solution is probably overlooked.

Mike Holmes wrote: Well, the "best" way is going to depend a lot on your goals for the game. What can you tell us about what you'd want the game to be like in other regards?

Mike Holmes wrote: That is, what happens to the taxes? I think if players saw the effects that the taxes themselves would make more sense.

Christopher Weeks wrote: Thanks for the link, it was a good read. But like Mike says, he kind of just poo-pooed closed economies with out any substance.

Christopher Weeks wrote: I think close analysis of the economy of A Tale in the Desert is in order. There is no pharaonic currency in that game -- players are able to print their own notes.

Christopher Weeks wrote: Some of the resources are part of a closed economy while others are not. Sand and Grass and mud and water are infinitely plentiful, but take time. Gold ore can be panned at the shore by highly perceptive people, but like Iron and the other minerals, when mined from the ground are pseudo-closed (in that it becomes cost-prohibitive to mine after a time).

thelopez wrote: I agree with that idea but I want to handle it differently, I explain this in my reply to Mike.

Christopher Weeks wrote:

thelopez wrote: I agree with that idea but I want to handle it differently, I explain this in my reply to Mike.

Actually, unless I'm failing to read it right, you don't. You do say how you want to handle it differently, but not why. And I'd be interested in hearing why you (or Mu!) think mysteriously regenerative resources are a good idea.

Chris

I agree that closed econonmies may be getting the short end of the stick.

Here's a closed economy thought for you (LONG): The world is big, but finite. Every piece of gold is physically tracked, and came from somewhere. Ditto for everything else. Nothing "spawns" by magic except, well, actual magical spawny monster thingies like fire elementals in a volcano (but of course not treasure for them to carry!).

This includes Player Characters.

When someone signs up to play in the game, the character creation process has a main starting point: Pick Someone. Pick a town, and within that town pick a social class or type (blacksmith's apprentice, whatever) of the appropriate sort. The game then "instances" the character, probably via a process like:

Large town Zeebob (which has 2 smithies in it) has 5 blacksmith's apprentices, who merge into a seamless blob which produces instances of itself (single apprentices) when required, such as to help a PC blacksmith. Mostly, though, they're treated as single object with "Quantity: Five" as an attribute of that blob. You sign on and choose "Blacksmith's Apprentice" and, from the ensuing dialogue box, "One of the five as-yet-unplayed apprentices living in Zeebob." Or vice versa, if you care more about coming from Zeebob with your pals and end up a blacksmith's apprentice because we're out of foresters.

You click OK. Suddenly, there are only four NPC apprentices in Zeebob, and one PC. You. We know how much money our bloblike average local apprentice possesses, so you own that much. (If PC adventurers have been raising the standard of living for blacksmiths' apprentices through providing lots of custom, more power to you.) No money has been added to the economy.

(We probably use an explicit name convention, such that NPCs of "starting PC" stature have little or no name, being called "Arian's Apprentice" and the like. Having one gain a name lets you know it's been instanced and is now a PC or significant NPC.)

Same thing goes for orcs. There are not an infinite number of orcs. There are simply a very large number of them, an orcish nation perhaps. When you generate an encounter with an orcish raiding party, those orcs came from there, and are deducted from their force. They respawn only inasmuch as female orcs accomplish this through the usual methods, generally far, far away from you.

If those orcs are carrying gold pieces, they got them from raiding villages and killing merchants. Much of this can happen in the abstract... the village of Pine used to own 250 coins all told, it got raided by orcs. Villagers have a "hide 20% successfully" figure, so the orcs stole 200 coins. If this was recent enough that the specific band is still around, then that band has those coins. If it happened awhile ago, then the coins got absorbed into the collective wealth of the warband, and became subject to the usual averaged distribution of wealth among orcs (50% to the Great Goblin, 25% spread evenly-plus-a-random-factor among orcs of rank, 25% spread the same way among all other orcs), which is only actually made manifest if and when those orcs are actually instanced for use.

In terms of magic items, this would mean designing such that all of the magic items which exist (shy of PCs/NPCs making them) must exist from the start, at least in theory. Many of them may exist as placeholders, until their area gets approached, but they do already exist there in theory. This is the issue Mu is worried about most in terms of closed economies, but IMO the key here is simply to make the closed economy large, such that there are still unexplored regions if one joins six months after launch, and to make magic items particular and probably unique, such that owning one is a big deal. [Use of Hero Wars-esque "pay currency to make the magic item part of your specific myth" rules would also help. Make it such that acquiring a magic sword changes the character outright.]

Build to recycle magic items and, as Mu suggests, to make them breakable and subject to wear. PCs and NPCs alike may be engaged in the difficult tasks of creating them... but rather than ever-increasing the number of such tools in the world, these efforts more-or-less keep up with the decay rate. (See below for some other notes on how to set the decay rate.)

Same thing goes for resource generation by mining or what have you. First off this is bloody slow, making progress only because there are a whole lot of NPCs involved; second, the NPCs are already doing so at their listed rates of effort, and it makes a lot less difference if you step in and incarnate as one of the miners. In fact, odds are that with the time you take off of your job to become an adventurer, time the NPC you used to be wasn't taking, the overall mining income has dropped. Setting your downtime efforts toward mining probably gets you, as a PC, slightly better time-to-effort ratio than the NPC you were... but not enormously so, and at the expense of your other options as a PC. The impact on the economy is not "someone is mining where nobody was before," it's "this person is mining a little more dedicatedly, and keeping it for himself instead of selling it." No hyperinflation.

If the PC mines and smelts ore and passes that to his friends to make him and themselves swords, then there's a shortage of iron in the markets the NPC miner used to supply, prices rise, the NPC miners get richer, maybe mining becomes more attractive as a cash source... but there's still a fairly fixed amount of iron there, and incarnating PC miners does little to change that (and incarnating "mules" does zero, with a little careful coding they'd function the same as an un-incarnated NPC). All still closed-economy work.

If you think in terms of PC effort being a redirection of existing NPC work, not in terms of it being previously nonexistent labour, the whole thing hangs together awfully well.

If players do increase the overall "gross domestic product" of anything, here's another trick. This would be particularly interesting in terms of magic items. Tie the entropy rate to the inflow rate and/or quantity of that object. Hide this from the players, hide it hard... but if a gang of players reallocates themselves from being bowyers/lawyers/coopers to all being swordsmiths, they convince others to increase the mining industry to supply them, and swords start to flood the market... then the breakage rate and wear-and-tear rate (requiring more frequent repair which in turn risks or leads to increased breakage) of swords, quietly behind the scenes, goes up. [Or of all weapons, or whatever.] If it's all running on low- to moderate-probability curves (0.5% per hundred swords in this kingdom), the hidden variable will be all but unnoticeable as long as the economy doesn't become ridiculous in some other manner, and your closed economy will remain homeostatically stable.

Each such negative-feedback curve has an equilibrium point. It may not be what you planned (the decay rate is too slow, so the equilibrium point is still way too many swords), but this is tweakable behind the scenes, and at least the equilibrium exists to be tweaked.

This model seems really interesting to me, because I can see it motivating grand schemes in an effort to reallocate things. Ten percent of the world's wealth is in orcish hands, and we publish that stat. That sounds like a good reason (OOC) to push for an extinction campaign - and it could work, but there are many, many thousands of orcs to kill first. In exchange, having the orcs raid your village and kill off a bunch of peasants is more of a big deal - this cuts into the goods being produced by the NPC economy, and has impact which radiates outward to all those other collections of "average shopkeeper" in nearby towns. Treating the NPCs as amorphous blobs of X individuals each putting in a day's work means that PC actions are less disruptive, and also that you can build the NPC interactions as blob-on-blob rather than person-on-person, at least until the PCs come along - in which case you look at one average member of the blob, interact, and "reabsorb" it once it's well out of sight.

Creepy in concept, in a way, but nonetheless interesting...

- Eric

I would have thought it's simple, if I'm getting it correctly.

What you do is determine an amount of money per level of each character that exists in the game world. Eg, level 1 = 100, level 2 = 200

You get your program to go through ALL PC's in your game and add it up. This is the maximum amount of money you want to allow in the game world.

Then you get it to go through each character and record how much they actually have. This is how much is actually in the world.

When the latter exceeds the former, bleed points ramp up.

Eg, all items in shops increase by 10% or something for everyone, until that amount drops below the allowed amount (Then they return to normal). This money is simply destroyed. In an emergency (the total money amount just isn't dropping fast enough), they can be raised even higher.

You also ensure there are bleed points for those who don't use shops, which includes toll gates, bribes, whatever. It's all taxes, with different names.

Once the total drops to a standardised amount, the prices drop. Or has this been done before and failed?

Edit: Basically, from reading further, it looks like my idea is a pseudo closed cash economy which expands with each new PC added. It then begins destroying excess money after X amount, rather than only having X to begin with.

Another thought on closed economies. So OK, cheesegraters are the thing to have, and the first player outta the gate gets the most opportunity. What tyou end with then is presumably some interaction amongst early players and further incomers... you get a power structure, possibly involving rivalries and conflict. This especially so if only a proportion of 'graters were findable at the start condition.

I think the problem then is understanding the goals. What is the intended effect of the economic system in the game? Balance? Passive resistance? Do these games favour blocs and camps, or avoid them?

Edit: the flip side of mountains producing more sand is that then we have smaller mountains. Entropy has to be modelled to give an open system somewhere to vent. 'Ashes to ashes, dust to dust' and all that.

Isn't the "hyper inflation" simply a product of additive cash reserves? That is, when a player joins, they've got money, so the total sum of money goes up, and everything has to take this into account?

Now, to my mind, the two obvious solutions are the provision of debt services (that is to say loans) and abandoning any notion of a fixed price for goods. Though this is really venturing into deep economics, more than anything else.

However, I do think that the subject of inflation is interesting in terms of game theory/design. How many games start you poor, then start to fall apart when you become rich enough to buy whatever you might need? The problem in many is providing challenge when sufficiently equipped - which raises the question of 'how much wealth is enough?'

Perhaps the biggest problem is not that the economies are hyper-inflationary because the sum total of money is ever increasing at the bottom end, but that the economy is hyper-inflationary because the primary activities in the game increase the sum total of money* and those who have been playing for a long time will earn more and more.

Ultimately, I suppose, the problem is that money comes from sources other than the players or other entities - things are accorded value before they are sold.

I think that this can be tracked back to the notion of monetary reward for killing monsters that arrives with the monster itself, rather than after some sort of processing performed upon the monster, be it the rendering of the creature for meat which must then be sold, or the removal or particular organs that a bounty might be paid.

Rambling now. I'll stop.

erithromycin wrote: Isn't the "hyper inflation" simply a product of additive cash reserves?

erithromycin wrote:
Ultimately, I suppose, the problem is that money comes from sources other than the players or other entities - things are accorded value before they are sold.

I think that this can be tracked back to the notion of monetary reward for killing monsters that arrives with the monster itself...

I would make a mild warning on the "rendering" idea... this can be very dangerous if it's made too significant. Think far-reaching cultural implications if "hunter" is considered a route to great riches. Think resources "from nowhere" without good controls over the influx. Think combat bias, again. I've had this happen to me, and it's not a pretty sight.

Two suggestions there: First, don't devote a lot of rules weight to the rendering process. A 'butcher' skill, or as a subset of 'hunter,' tops. The more rules weight you devote to it, the more it will be perceived as important. It can involve skills with other applications - perhaps proper extraction of certain components uses Medical skill, and some exotic critters invoke your Mining skill or the like - but dedicated skills which don't do anything else are a strong indicator of game focus.

Second, consider having such things possess zero or little intrinsic value to the NPC community. Apothecaries and magi may pay a few pennies, but since they'll assume you're ignorant of the true value, and they'll pretty much always have a source which is ignorant in this way, you're unlikely to get much from them. Make the true value be PC-to-PC... this would couple well with hidden lore and magic item creation or augmentation. It works especially well if the primary application is directly relevant to the adventuring profession... the feathers of the JubJub bird terrify snakes, the poison of the Rock Scorpion is particularly effective against the orcish kind, that sort of thing. (And don't be afraid to have this hidden lore change over time... the orcs discover that the wigmar blossom is a preventative for Rock Scorpion poison... once it becomes too wide-spread through the playerbase. Nor be afraid to require in-character communication of this fact; a PC who has never, IC, learned how to use the feathers of the JubJub bird merely looks silly.)

thelopez wrote:
When I say that CRPGs tend to fail due to hyper-inflation I mean that the whole concept of currency is blown out of the water and no longer has a value thus the entire carefully designed economy comes crashing down because anyone can buy anything, etc, etc.

I have been pondering how to handle this part of the design and I have been considering a semi-open system like you mentioned. Here is what I have so far:
The game is going to include for instance the ability to harvest resources.
A harvestable resource could be some type of wood, plant, ore, etc. Each resource instance in an region will have two values
1. The current available amount of that resource left that can be harvested.
2. The max amount of that resource available. The max amount of resource available is not fixed. It will go up and down depending on how many people are currently registered to play.

Over time the resource replenishes itself, the replenishment rate depends on what type of resource it is. The replenishment rate can increase or decrease depending on:
- current number of players in the game
- the current available amount of that resource. So if some players completely devastate a forest by completely deforesting it, then it will take a long time for the forest to be replenished.

Actually, I am still doing a lot of research on RPG design, current RPGs, etc. I want to finish most of this before I actually set any goals or wants for the RPG that I want to develop.

What happens to the taxes? Hmmm.... Well the city guard would have to be paid for instance. And the more people are paying taxes there would be more guards with better equipment and experience. So if you try to skip on paying the entrance taxes then you might find yourself fighting some city guards.

Mike Holmes wrote: The players will hate it, but just don't have "monsters" with money running around. Or make them very rare, and/or make the number of monsters limited. But then how do you prevent the early players from killing them all? Make combat realistic. Seriously. Make character death fighting monsters very likely. Then have the monsters take the character's treasure, and Viola! You have your explanation for where the treasure comes from.

thelopez wrote: Really, where for instance, would a giant fire ant carry: 30 gold coins, a broadsword and a pair of Boots of Giant strength? I guess the giant fire ant could be wearing the boots (that would be a sight), the broadsword could be stuck in the ant and the gold coins could be in its guts.

Mike Holmes wrote: ?? You want to finish the design before you want to know what you want it to do?

This really seems to be a paradox.

We want to have money in the system, so people can enjoy earning lots of money (unlike real life, where we earn little for doing boring things. No one pays a subscription for a game of this).

On the other hand, so that money is meaningful and worth earning/having lots of, were going to make sure you can't earn/keep lots of it.

That's why I suggest having a fixed money number based on how many PC's you have in the world. This way you can ensure they can all earn a nice amount of cash, but when that total cash is higher than the fixed number, you raise prices X amount to start bleeding off money (they drop back once enough has been bled).

Actually, Callan, I meant to mention earlier that I really like that idea...especially if the players don't know how it works. You'll have fluctuating prices which is potentially really interesting. If the game permits the buying of houses/buildings, it would be possible to set yourself up as a trader even without necessarily being of a trader class, just by buying needed items cheap and storing them in your house until things get more expensive.

Its not really an accurate portrayal of inflation, but is a reasonable illusion of it. Someone kills a dragon, dumps a bunch of loot into the economy, prices go up. Its reasonable.

To really work well, however, and not be a source of grief, the pricing scheme would have to be regional in nature. You wouldn't want a situation where the price for a rusty tin sword in newby land goes through the roof because a bunch of 50th levels are camping Dragons.

By dividing the game up into regions the 50th levels would only be driving the price up in their own little corner of the world.

Even better, you could issue different currency by region...West Fallon Gold Pieces vs East Shire Gold Pieces. That way if the 50th levels tried to take their dragon gold to another location they'd carry their inflation with them...the West Fallon Gold would be considered devalued (not exactly realistic since finding a horde of Dragon Gold doesn't mean that the gold content in the Coins suddenly drops, but close enough).

You could then have an Imperial Standard...like the old Mark or Pound (which originally weren't even coins). If you take the West Fallon Gold to East Shire you'd have to convert it. You'd convert it into Marks which would always have the same fixed value price everywhere. So any item in a store would be quoted in Marks and Local Currency. So a sword that cost 15 GPs or 10 Marks in the East Shire could be bought with 15 East Shire Gold....which would be worth .67 Marks each (a number easily displayed by each merchant). When the 50ths arrive in the Shire with 500 West Fallon Gold worth .1 Marks each, they could convert into only 50 Marks. Where as 500 Shire gold would be worth 333.

Or the 50ths could horde the Fallon Gold, hope other folks exchange theirs bringing the total Fallon currency down to acceptable levels, at which point, the Fallon Gold value would go up again.

I think that would be a unique and quite interesting game feature. For most hack and slashers it would involve nothing more than a stop of at a convenient money changers to get everything converted into Marks, never to worry about it again. But for others who'd enjoy messing with the system, you could get quite a business of player run currency traders.

Imagine players willing to Trade Currency at a rate that undercuts the official exchange rate because their willing to hold it until prices move again, and profit on the spread. Some people are really into alternative ways of making money AND they'd be fulfilling a valuable service. It wouldn't break the game at all, it would just establish a new equilibrium price in a good approximation of a free market.

Another side benefit is that if their were a limited number of prime camping spots per region, it would discourage long term camping...because that would just drive the gold value in the region down to near worthless. Campers would have to move on to new ground until the local economy recovered...which in many ways would be a neat parallel to the devastating effect on the local economy a King making his royal progress through his lands (with a huge entourage) would have...only in this case its adventurer parties.

Most games have already instituted some form of devaluing XPs from repeated camps (DAoC gives bonus XPs for the length of time since the creature was killed last for instance). This idea could be implemented for XPs and GPs both, only with XPs there is no hording or conversion...XPs are just automatically "converted" as they are earned at whatever the devalueing rate is.

Or if the game required training rather than just auto leveling like DAoC does, the conversion would happen then. Meanwhile that experience would still be bloating the conversion rate for others.

Definite potential there.

Surely the point is not just that the price will vary from area to area, but from individual to individual?

Given how many systems have made vain attempts at including barter or thrift (though some, like D20 Modern, have produced interesting effects with their endeavours) I'd have thought that this would still be a goal.

Then, of course, one has to remember that there may be a near infinite quantity of wealth around, but with fixed cash reserves, there can be a position reached where liquid money is worth more than it's face value because it's mroe transportable - after all, which is safer? A big pile of gems and gold coins inside a castle, or an even bigger castle?

Anyway, by the time players have accumulated vast quantities of wealth prices should not only be fixed according to location (when lots of rich folk are in town, average prices paid will go up), but according to the buyer (when lots of rich folks are in town, the locals gouge them, raise prices amongst themselves a little, but not too much, because the rich folks will leave) - think of it as an approximation of tourist season in small seaside towns - it's all well and good charging a kajillion gold coins for a sword when there's a seamonster about, but the rest of the the year the only folks who'll be needing them are the local guard, and they only get seven farthings a year, and one of them's wooden and they have to share it.

Ahem.

So perhaps a system of pricing that was related to individual wealth (the mythical 'what the market will bear', for various values of market) would solve this local issue.

Or you could just find more ways to slow the spread of cash, which is the problem with hyperinflation - the signifier was not that it took a wheelbarrow full of money to buy a loaf of bread, but that someone could accumulate a wheelbarrow full of money.

Primitive economies were notoriously illiquid - that's largely because things like gold were often stolen or given to the church to be stolen by viking, so other entities were used as currency - though a limited supply of banks might also serve to rein this in. Then, of course, you've got the pacific tribe who used giant stone wheels as currency, because each represented a unit that could be exchanged for fishing rights or farming rights or the like - that's a special case of a closed economy, really, because it had a relatively stable population.

I suggest Adam Smith's 'The Wealth Of Nations', anyway. That'll give you more information on the subject than you'd want.

As for game design, there are any number of mechanisms by which it could be avoided - the trick, however, as in government, is avoiding special cases of reward or punishment.

I think as I'm again crawling far outwith the realms of rpg theory, I'll stop, once more.

I love reading this kind of lay-economics discussion. I think that the situation Ralph describes can be simplified -- removing the different (formal) regions and their currencies by: having multiple resources that are value dense, eliminating the de rigueur NPC currency, and making the world really freaking big by removing the ubiquitous teleportation mechanisms. And if you're going to have a strong NPC presense in the game, you can algorithmically shuffle wealth from one town (where it's concentrated) to adjacent towns over time. Various places (towns or not) could be resource sinks (manufactories, etc.) that collect the resources for conversion, but don't generally spill them out to the neighbors.

This seems like it invests the players with more of the economy while still simulating reality in a more interesting way.

I favor the idea of letting the players deal with producing currency if they decide it has merit. As the various schemes to back it (or not) get buy in and collapse, it adds a whole layer of friction and motive to the game that is lacking in most MMORPGs.

Chris

Noon wrote: This really seems to be a paradox.

We want to have money in the system, so people can enjoy earning lots of money (unlike real life, where we earn little for doing boring things. No one pays a subscription for a game of this).

On the other hand, so that money is meaningful and worth earning/having lots of, were going to make sure you can't earn/keep lots of it.

I agree in principle, Gareth, hence my original request for goals. My point was that, without knowing what the goals are, you can't really design a system to fit.

That said, I think that MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer, that is) do have enough players to make a more "ground up" model work if well designed. To whit, people actually trade in-game items for real cash on eBay. Wherupon we discover the true player value of the items. :-)

Mike

Valamir wrote: Actually, Callan, I meant to mention earlier that I really like that idea...especially if the players don't know how it works.

You'll have fluctuating prices which is potentially really interesting. If the game permits the buying of houses/buildings, it would be possible to set yourself up as a trader even without necessarily being of a trader class, just by buying needed items cheap and storing them in your house until things get more expensive.

Its not really an accurate portrayal of inflation, but is a reasonable illusion of it. Someone kills a dragon, dumps a bunch of loot into the economy, prices go up. Its reasonable.

To really work well, however, and not be a source of grief, the pricing scheme would have to be regional in nature. You wouldn't want a situation where the price for a rusty tin sword in newby land goes through the roof because a bunch of 50th levels are camping Dragons.

By dividing the game up into regions the 50th levels would only be driving the price up in their own little corner of the world.

Even better, you could issue different currency by region...West Fallon Gold Pieces vs East Shire Gold Pieces. That way if the 50th levels tried to take their dragon gold to another location they'd carry their inflation with them...the West Fallon Gold would be considered devalued (not exactly realistic since finding a horde of Dragon Gold doesn't mean that the gold content in the Coins suddenly drops, but close enough).

*snip to shorten my reply here*

Imagine players willing to Trade Currency at a rate that undercuts the official exchange rate because their willing to hold it until prices move again, and profit on the spread. Some people are really into alternative ways of making money AND they'd be fulfilling a valuable service. It wouldn't break the game at all, it would just establish a new equilibrium price in a good approximation of a free market.

Another side benefit is that if their were a limited number of prime camping spots per region, it would discourage long term camping...because that would just drive the gold value in the region down to near worthless. Campers would have to move on to new ground until the local economy recovered...which in many ways would be a neat parallel to the devastating effect on the local economy a King making his royal progress through his lands (with a huge entourage) would have...only in this case its adventurer parties.

Most games have already instituted some form of devaluing XPs from repeated camps (DAoC gives bonus XPs for the length of time since the creature was killed last for instance). This idea could be implemented for XPs and GPs both, only with XPs there is no hording or conversion...XPs are just automatically "converted" as they are earned at whatever the devalueing rate is.

Or if the game required training rather than just auto leveling like DAoC does, the conversion would happen then. Meanwhile that experience would still be bloating the conversion rate for others.

Definite potential there.

I really like Ralph's ideas; let me suggest a modification that might work well in a MORPG setup.

Divide the world into regions, and attach wealth to the individual characters and to the region itself. Let all prices track to the amount of cash in player character hands within the region; have it do so on a current basis, so that total wealth in the region is calculated when someone asks for a price of something; if someone particularly wealthy enters the region, his wealth will raise prices immediately--thus he can't benefit as much from low prices, because he forces them up. He could, in theory, hire people to buy on his behalf, which expands the economic possibilities significantly. PC-owned goods are also calculated as part of their wealth; thus expendables will gradually be used up but items of relatively fixed worth will keep the value level high.

Money spent in a region vanishes into a sinkhole of sorts, and as the net worth of PCs drops the money finds its way back into treasure troves, to the degree that the sheet remains balanced--that is, expendables must be burned up before cash can return to the treasure troves.

Set a total value per character in play; split it into an amount given to the character in starting resources and an amount added to the economy in treasure troves. Don't let it be excessive; there should be a degree to which player characters are competing for the same treasure.

Also, create an inactive character tracker--if a character does nothing for an extended period of time, he drops out of the calculations, neither adding to the wealth nor counting toward the ceiling. This prevents players from flooding the world with dummy characters to increase the available wealth. Similarly, player character death should decrease the total available wealth in the world, reducing treasure troves accordingly.

These are rather disjointed, I'm afraid, but I think there's something interesting here.

--M. J. Young

Here's another idea/issue to throw into the fray.

First the issue. For some reason NPC shops in most MMORPGs and MORPGS seem to have an endless supply of money and items in their shop. Meaning if 1000 players decided to go to a shop and they all decided to sell a sword for 1gp a piece all of those players would be able to get their 1gp each.

What if instead NPC shops had a finite amount of money and items in their shop. They could only buy equipment from NPCs if they have the money. And only sell the items they have in their shop. But if they do buy something, they can turn around and sell that item in their shop, with a markup of course.


What do you all think?

thelopez wrote:
What if instead NPC shops had a finite amount of money and items in their shop. They could only buy equipment from NPCs if they have the money. And only sell the items they have in their shop. But if they do buy something, they can turn around and sell that item in their shop, with a markup of course. What do you all think?

contracycle wrote: I think... thats pretty much the only real way to do a ground up model, but then your engine has to track every single coin that what was ever minted as a distinct object. Which I seriously doubt is do-able or cost effective. And every single commodity. And how every single commodity gets turned into other commodities at what degree of entropic loss.

What Christopher said. That's also part of why I suggested handling the NPC community as averaged gestalts when nobody is looking... town A exchanges X many coins with town B, over a month's time. Just make sure you don't cause them to appear from thin air and it's not too brutal, it's just [type:] and [quantity:] variables for each commodity which might pile up, plus percentaged distributions for when you "crack something out" of the averaged state.

- Eric