Topic: An Economic RPG, anyone?
Started by: Kuma
Started on: 10/9/2002
Board: Indie Game Design
On 10/9/2002 at 5:01am, Kuma wrote:
An Economic RPG, anyone?
In the interest of full disclosure, I first posted this over on RPG.net:
One of the maxims that I've heard about game design is to 'Design the Game YOU Want to Play'. Well, I've been doing that now for about 2 years and finally I want to get other people's viewpoint on it to see what the audience is like.
The overall system (codename: Elsewhere) is this: a fast, flexible system for dealing with economics in games, be they fantasy, modern or sci-fi. The centerpiece of this system is a mini-game called simply 'Manor', in which the players all run feudal manors and feifs. There's the day-to-day operations (making sure there's enough of everything that the manor needs) and the political end where the manors are competing (and assisting) each other in the court of the king. Somewhere in there is the natural goal of lining one's pockets with as many ducats as humanly possible.
Now obviously, this is not the game for everyone. You have to have a bit of the accountant in your blood to get excited over a surplus of wheat for the year or an exceptional harvest of apples or timber.
However, the system works, models well and has certainly given me a lot of joy just watching it come to life. The system interlocks with my RPG system, working title: Chamber. I can run a manor for a dozen or so years and at any point 'zoom in' and stat out a typical family, or even typical person.
Essentially, I've created SimCity without boundaries of any sort (and much less calculation).
My question to the Congregation is this: would any of you actually be interested in playing said game? Am I shooting myself in the foot when I suggest in the material that a calculator (or even Excel) might be a good idea for running the game?
Not that this will keep me from finishing it, mind. I'm just wondering if I can sell 10 copies of it.
Thanks for the input, y'all. Poke holes in my idea, burn it, torch, set seige to the walls. I want to see if I can't refine this idea down to a razor's edge.
Woot!
On 10/9/2002 at 5:21am, Jeremy Cole wrote:
RE: An Economic RPG, anyone?
Yes I am. Every time I sit down to write source for ce, my game, I details things in an economic point of view. No, its not as boring as it sounds.
But I was just wondering how detailed you're going to get into the economics of it, from a realism point of view. Every game that ever mentions economics does in an extremely off hand manor. The kingdom prospered with the gold mine etc...
What mechanisms do you have in mind. The thing that interests me is the population, and it relation to income/capita. Marginal returns etc... Anyway, is this where you see the mechanics going?
Jeremy
On 10/9/2002 at 8:35am, contracycle wrote:
RE: An Economic RPG, anyone?
Yes, absolutely. I have considered such designs myself; it's just a bit tricky to conceptualise Actual Play - does it mean switching from one mode to another? Also, the system needs to be robust enough to handle extension over large ranges and tiome-scales, potentially. But I'd be interested in seeing anything going in this arena.
On 10/9/2002 at 9:13am, simon_hibbs wrote:
RE: An Economic RPG, anyone?
I've played in and ran games in which trading was a background activity, but I have always found that actualy gaming out or simulating it in any detail simply distracts from the roleplaying. I'm interested in economic and trading games, but prefer to abstract things out in RPGs.
How do you envision this economic model actualy being used in a campaign?
Simon Hibbs
On 10/9/2002 at 9:21am, Andrew Martin wrote:
Re: An Economic RPG, anyone?
Kuma wrote: ...would any of you actually be interested in playing said game?
I'm highly interested in it, and I've got a play group that can use it right now! :) My players are running a town in my Exalted campaign and some players want to get detailed on running the town. Our group has played three or four campaigns of Birthright (AD&D) with most PCs as rulers of realms.
On 10/9/2002 at 1:40pm, Valamir wrote:
RE: An Economic RPG, anyone?
Couple of questions, as someone whose done a bit of studying on economics, how are you intending to account for both fantasy and modern style economics. Are you assumeing that "fantasy" economics are like modern economics. I ask because most fantasy contains pseudo medieval elements and medieval economics is a vastly different beast from what we have today.
Second, are you familiar with Lordly Domains for Pendragon. If so, is your intention to make a sort of generic Lordly Domains book for insertion into other campaign worlds?
On 10/9/2002 at 2:59pm, damion wrote:
RE: An Economic RPG, anyone?
Sounds like a very cool idea. How difficult is it to run something in 'high level mode', only zooming in when you need to? I mean can you just stick stuff in excel, run for X time and look at the output? It would be perfect for simulationist games.
On 10/9/2002 at 4:43pm, Kuma wrote:
RE: An Economic RPG, anyone?
Valamir wrote: Couple of questions, as someone whose done a bit of studying on economics, how are you intending to account for both fantasy and modern style economics. Are you assumeing that "fantasy" economics are like modern economics. I ask because most fantasy contains pseudo medieval elements and medieval economics is a vastly different beast from what we have today.
One of the structural parts of Elsewhere is the division of the book into "Ages", starting with Ug and Og exchanging cowrie shells and moving through to the modern day. The rules start with the basics (barter - actually one of the more difficult bits to model 'behind the scenes') and then go through such things as commenda contracts, societas terra and all of that good stuff. The rules are also divided into basic/intermediate/expert categories, so if you want to play out the life and times of a feudal manor, but want to play it simple, you can announce that you're cutting out the advanced rules.
The 'Future Age' sections are still very rough, because I haven't done much work with the creation of starbases and the like. I'm just now trying to figure out how to run the game in modern mode without drowning myself in numbers.
Second, are you familiar with Lordly Domains for Pendragon. If so, is your intention to make a sort of generic Lordly Domains book for insertion into other campaign worlds?
No. I've specifically steered away from tthe Pendragon books because I didn't want to influence my design too much. I've just been going to the economic history texts and building this system from the ground up. And getting quite an education in the process.
On 10/9/2002 at 5:07pm, Valamir wrote:
RE: An Economic RPG, anyone?
Well damn Kuma if you're going to get all scholarly about it, put me down in the hell yeah category.
I once did a paper on the origins of modern banking (I cleverly managed to turn the same paper in for my Money and Banking Finance class and my Geography: Urban Development class) so yeah..."quite an education" is true enough. Fascinating stuff though.
On 10/9/2002 at 5:58pm, Kuma wrote:
RE: An Economic RPG, anyone?
damion wrote: Sounds like a very cool idea. How difficult is it to run something in 'high level mode', only zooming in when you need to? I mean can you just stick stuff in excel, run for X time and look at the output? It would be perfect for simulationist games.
The process works like this: let's say I'm running a kingdom (Yaria). Elsewhere assigns any entity a Scale Factor ranging from 1 on up ... let's say that my kingdom has a scale factor of 12. At that scale, I conduct the business of the kingdom with other kingdoms around me. Any entity in the game can interact with any other entity on any other scale factor, but for the sake of convenience, play works best when the scale factors are within 1-3 notches of each other.
During the course of play, a certain town, called Udar becomes of great interest. Maybe there's been a lot of tension in the area with a rival town over rights to the forest between them. The players decide to 'zoom in' and play out the conflict between Udar and neighboring Cathar (controlled by another player).
Udar, at the scale on which the home kingdom Yaria was working, was invested with, say 420 RUs (Resource Units), of which we know that 200 RUs are invested in timber production, but thet rest is sort of nebulous. Now we have a simple framework to flesh out Udar. With these 420 RUs we have to purchase people, buildings, land and other basic factors, along with specifics like a lumber camp, lots of tools and some specialized lumberjacks. The player spends out those 420RUs, adhering to the one condition that 200 RUs must be spent on items directly related to a timber industry. Essentially it's a character creation process, only with some idea of what the character looks like beforehand.
After both towns are detailed, then play commences. The length of a turn also changes with scale. A turn for Yaria is 1 season (by default, it could be more). A turn for Udar is a day. We can play out up to 90 turns (a year being 360 days for sanity's sake) of the conflict between Udar and Cathar before maintenance needs to be done on the rest of Yaria.
This sort of 'drilling down', as I call it, can go right down to the individual if necessary, where the investment in skills and whatnot are translated directly into the stats that one would have in the Elsewhere RPG. In this manner I can avoid a lot of numerical headaches and housekeeping ... the only numbers you need are the ones that affect what's in front of you. Anything that has been drilled down before and is looked at later only has the stipulation that the it conform to what is still enumerated. Say 50 years from now we look at Udar again, and it has grown to 1200 RUs in size, but over the turns the timber industry has been changed out for 500 RUs of weavers. Depending on how the player wants to work it, he could leave everything in place except the timber industry (which we know is gone), and of course he or she must add in the 500 RUs of weaving industry.
If the player never again visits the hamlet of Udar, he never has to enumerate anything about it.
That's the long and short of the dirlling process ... much of it is still in the works. The actual numbers involved are a bit larger than what I've stated, but you get the idea.
On 10/9/2002 at 6:00pm, contracycle wrote:
RE: An Economic RPG, anyone?
Kuma wrote: I've just been going to the economic history texts and building this system from the ground up.
I just wanted to mention that any serious discussion on this matter is going to get "political" rather quickly in that I am going to stick my oar in with some rather unorthodox analyses of how barter economies function, and function distinctly from modern financial economies. Please take this as my disclaimer: I will be honestly advocating an economic analysis becuase I think it is correct, not because I have an ideological axe to grind. I would hope that we could engage with this on the principle of discussing all perspectives on these economic mechanisms.
On 10/9/2002 at 6:15pm, Valamir wrote:
RE: An Economic RPG, anyone?
Kuma: Your description of the drilling down process sounds tremendously like Aria and Aria Worlds (largely regarded as an enormous, wonderful, but completely unplayable RPG).
If you haven't seen them, I might suggest taking a look just to make sure you aren't reinventing the wheel.
On 10/9/2002 at 6:31pm, Kuma wrote:
RE: An Economic RPG, anyone?
contracycle wrote: Please take this as my disclaimer: I will be honestly advocating an economic analysis becuase I think it is correct, not because I have an ideological axe to grind. I would hope that we could engage with this on the principle of discussing all perspectives on these economic mechanisms.
Sounds ominous, dude. Fire away.
On 10/9/2002 at 6:34pm, Kuma wrote:
RE: An Economic RPG, anyone?
Valamir wrote: Kuma: Your description of the drilling down process sounds tremendously like Aria and Aria Worlds (largely regarded as an enormous, wonderful, but completely unplayable RPG).
If you haven't seen them, I might suggest taking a look just to make sure you aren't reinventing the wheel.
You're looking at Aria's biggest biatch. I love that game to pieces and in fact it was an attempt at bridging Aria with d20 (several years ago when there were supposed to be other Aria books) that started me on this particular journey. Aria's IH, while an inspiration to Elsewhere is just the launching point.
Believe me, I keep Aria at arm's length ... both to refer to and to keep myself aware of its pitfalls. Like Capitalization from Hell.
On 10/9/2002 at 6:42pm, Valamir wrote:
RE: An Economic RPG, anyone?
Sweet. I also love Aria. Worlds should be required reading for anyone trying to design a home brew world. Whether you use the actual numerical system or not, the encouragement to think about the effects of isolation and inheritance patterns and their effect on what your societies will look like is pure gold. The RPG should be required reading for anyone trying to publish an RPG as a lesson on how presentation can take an incredibly cool idea and make it heinously inaccessable.
Universalis has been called a free form version of Aria Worlds (which was one of the design goals) so yeah, I'm a huge fan too.
So this will be out by christmas right? ;-)
On 10/9/2002 at 6:50pm, Mike Holmes wrote:
RE: An Economic RPG, anyone?
Ever play Realms of the Unknown(ROTU)? It was a game all about economy, etc, but didn't have your scaling factors, etc. There was also another game available online called (IIRC) Evoluton (or Evolve?). In that game you started out with very few rules about populace, etc, and then made up rules each turn as the game progressed.
These games have some of the same sort of vibe I'm getting. I've always been very interested in this sort of stuff, and have been lately thinking about them a lot. What I'd like to see is a game where not only economic factors were considered, but all manner of political factors. Still your game may be a model for what I'm looking for, or be adjustable to fit.
Mike
On 10/9/2002 at 7:35pm, Kuma wrote:
RE: An Economic RPG, anyone?
Mike Holmes wrote: There was also another game available online called (IIRC) Evoluton (or Evolve?). In that game you started out with very few rules about populace, etc, and then made up rules each turn as the game progressed.
I'm working on a more narrative version of this system which uses "Eternal Verities" for actions. (Player: The Tuatara pursue Beauty this turn by investing their energies into massive hanging gardens in the city of Kadesh.) If you have a link for the game, I'd appreciate it. At one crazy interval when I was researching like a madman, I was thinking of tinkering with cellular automata in paper RPGs.
I'm better now.
What I'd like to see is a game where not only economic factors were considered, but all manner of political factors. Still your game may be a model for what I'm looking for, or be adjustable to fit.
Wait for the Lord expansion to Elsewhere, coming in 200*cough*.
:^)
On 10/9/2002 at 8:03pm, Mike Holmes wrote:
RE: An Economic RPG, anyone?
Kuma wrote: If you have a link for the game, I'd appreciate it.
Wish I could help you. But I lost the url, and doing a search is like looking for a needle in a haystack (lots of games titled like this).
Mike
On 10/9/2002 at 8:11pm, contracycle wrote:
RE: An Economic RPG, anyone?
Justv a thought on scaling as outlined above, which is to mention my fondness for systems which convert from Fortune to Karma. The scaling system - say over the 3-point convenient range - can be structure such that certain major disparities result in automatic resolutions. A 4-point difference might be automatically resolved, or automatically resolved with a cost, something like that. In may experience with modelling systems to date, the numbers go exponential very quickly and becomc, in tabletop terms, unusable.
Lastly, I will mention that one "barter" economy I am familiar with in ssome detail is the celtic cattle economy; I like this one because the one-cow "currency" is big n grainy and arguably quite suitable for such a systemic structure. It's also quite suitable to independant zooming without too much concern for large fixed land areas, given the "microclimate" nature of these structures. In a similar vein, it might be more useful to target similar semi-independant entities such as the city-state rather than heading straight for large, territorial states.
Oh yes: another source for these emchnaics is board games, of cousre, notably History Of The World and its ilk. Some cunning mechanical conventions in these.
On 10/9/2002 at 8:50pm, Nick Pagnucco wrote:
RE: An Economic RPG, anyone?
Kuma wrote:
I'm working on a more narrative version of this system which uses "Eternal Verities" for actions. (Player: The Tuatara pursue Beauty this turn by investing their energies into massive hanging gardens in the city of Kadesh.) If you have a link for the game, I'd appreciate it. At one crazy interval when I was researching like a madman, I was thinking of tinkering with cellular automata in paper RPGs.
Now I'm even more curious, though I'm a little hazy on how this is narrative. When I read this part of your post I thought of the explicit allocation of resources on things like monuments, etc... which is something that a lot of societies (if not virtually all) do.
Could you explain further? I'm interested either way, i'm just desiring detail :)
On 10/10/2002 at 4:30am, Kuma wrote:
RE: An Economic RPG, anyone?
Nevermet wrote: Now I'm even more curious, though I'm a little hazy on how this is narrative. When I read this part of your post I thought of the explicit allocation of resources on things like monuments, etc... which is something that a lot of societies (if not virtually all) do.
Could you explain further? I'm interested either way, i'm just desiring detail :)
Actually, I epiphed on the way home, and I have the scrawled bus-notes to prove it. I'll post the thing tomorrow, as I'm waaaay too tired to do it tonight.
Suffice it to say, I think I've got something interesting ... and spun off quite a bit more from Elsewhere
On 10/10/2002 at 12:22pm, Ferry Bazelmans wrote:
RE: An Economic RPG, anyone?
Kuma, I would love to play a game like this. I was sorely disappointed in the Simcity CCG since it failed to capture the feel that made the PC game so damn addictive. A "roleplaying" variant would be very interesting (and adaptable to turn-based online play?).
Fer (Crayne)
On 10/12/2002 at 9:42am, contracycle wrote:
RE: An Economic RPG, anyone?
This partly by way of a bump, but also a real question. Both here and RPG net produced a "yes please" from a number of people. I've tinkered with plans like this myself, and yet there always seems to be one problem: the scale is so large as to be impersonal.
How do we retain close personal identification while simultaneously keeping an eye on large-scale factors? Do we require ALL players to be engaged in the large economic activities?How do we prevent play breaking down into a group of 1-on-1 microgames?
Essentially, can we develop an idea of what actual play would look like for which a mechanic may be deisgned? What does everyone think would work as a mode of actual play - what interactions would you expect to see at the table?
On 10/13/2002 at 7:23am, Kuma wrote:
RE: An Economic RPG, anyone?
contracycle wrote: How do we retain close personal identification while simultaneously keeping an eye on large-scale factors? Do we require ALL players to be engaged in the large economic activities?How do we prevent play breaking down into a group of 1-on-1 microgames?
I'm not 100% sure about all of your terminology (mainly what the 1:1 microgames you're refering to are), but here's my take on it:
Elsewhere was originally conceived of as a GMs tool for managing their campaign worlds (and doing things like develop histories) in a coherent fashion. Only about halfway through did I get the hankering to actually *play* Elsewhere as a game in and of itself.
While there is a lot of play and concentration in the rules on the non-roleplaying aspects of the game, there are certainly roleplay possibilities in even the largest-scale games. Meetings between two sovereigns, their forces poised for imminent battle ... a confrontation between two master spies who happen into the same town on the same turn.
Elewhere, like any other RPG, takes a certain amount of "looking past the numbers", and with the ability to move from the national to the personal scale with the flip of a switch (well, almost) - the players should definitely take the opportunities created by the large-scale forces to take a look at particularly interesting parts of history. An Exploration action taken by a nation could be scaled-down and taken as an old-fashioned naval adventure with a ship full of interesting characters, whose actions then enter into the greater scheme of history.
Essentially, can we develop an idea of what actual play would look like for which a mechanic may be deisgned? What does everyone think would work as a mode of actual play - what interactions would you expect to see at the table?
Well, yes. :)
Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt. (Hint: Think Birthright only with infinite possibilities and the granularity of your choice.)
Just haven't pumped out the PDF yet. (BTW: Also working on the Narrative system outline ... I should have a document by Sunday at the latest.)
On 10/13/2002 at 3:33pm, Andy Kitkowski wrote:
RE: An Economic RPG, anyone?
I've done some economic consulting with the same small firm that Steffan O'Sullivan (FUDGE) works for- Basically an economic model game, where the "chits" in the game can represent anything: Manufactured toys, drugs, soldiers, "resources", etc etc. It was a simple but deep game, and could be tailored to just about anything.
In short, I'd love to make it into the mechanics of an economic-themed RPG. But I'd get sued, and I also just don't want to step on toes.
But your proposition sounds great! I can't wait to see it. And if you're looking for any advice on this kind of engine, let me know. (PM me)
-Andy