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August 11, 2004
Renfair Fantasy Game Economics
Today's Irregular Webcomic! hits one of my pet peeves about generic pseudomedieval fantasy games. Be sure to read the annotations for a short, but worthwhile, rant on the topic.
If you're not reading Irregular Webcomic!, you should be. In addition to the fantasy theme, it also has an Indiana Jones theme, a Star Wars theme, a Harry Potter theme, a space opera theme, and other themes that will be highly amusing to gamer geeks.
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Comments
To be honest, it's something that never worried me that much. Indeed, when I first built a fantasy world (back when AD&D still had non-decimal money), I declared that the gods themselves had put copper, silver, gold and platinum in proportions almost perfectly portional in powers of ten.
Fact is, most RPGers, even the most simulationist, really aren't interested in biting every copper piece, or looking to see if it's been shaved, nor with (except as broad plot issues) worries about inflation or devaluation or the like. The most they are interested in having that sort of thing impact their planning is in whether they can carry the umpteen hundred pounds of silver back with them, or if they should just go for the gems in the eyes of the idol instead.
Or maybe I'm just projecting.
Posted by: *** Dave at Aug 12, 2004 12:14:10 AM
I am almost embarassingly interested in economics (one of my characters in Exalted is trying to construct a futures market in prayers), but I don't really care if the economics are historical. In my fantasy games, gold is used as currency, because it doesn't tarnish and is otherwise useless (except for jewelry), but it's less valuable than in real life because it's much more common -- after all, there are small hills of gold coins for dragons to sleep on, right?
Posted by: Neel Krishnaswami at Aug 12, 2004 12:47:50 AM
I don't care if the economics are perfectly historically accurate either, but I do care that the society is functional and makes sense. A perfectly pseudo-medieval society with a huge gold influx that has no effect whatsoever on the rest of the economy makes no sense. It breaks my suspension of disbelief.
Another regular topic in Irregular Webcomic! is the bad physics of Star Wars. I think I'd like gaming with the author.
Posted by: Ginger Stampley at Aug 12, 2004 7:46:45 AM
If the current PC group has suddenly dumped the small hill of gold from under the local ex-dragon into an economy that was otherwise identical to that of medieval France, sure, society should implode. But most settings for D&D (and its vast array of descendents and imitators) seem to assume that there are lots of adventurers pillaging lots of dungeons all the time, so shouldn't things settle into some sort of rough equilibrium where buying and selling go on as normal but precious metals just aren't worth that much? Which is what we see in most such settings: You can go down to the tavern and buy a beer whenever you like, you just have to fork over a few grams of silver for it.
Posted by: Trip at Aug 12, 2004 12:43:19 PM
