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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 5019305" data-attributes="member: 63">Well, I'm not sure where to go from here. Part of me is curious how to make this stuff matter in a game, so it's not just (as some have suggested) mental masturbation. I'm not talking costs or wealth tracking, but making it influence actual adventuring.For instance, my group was delighted recently when our DM ran an adventure based on mining. We all assumed the creepy guys with copper colored eyes were cultists trying to open the seal to the plane of madness that also happened to be where a copper mine was located, but it turns out they were just copper merchants, suffering from a disease caused by having too much copper in their bodies. We ultimately realized that the monsters roaming around were just random monsters that snuck through a crack in the seal, and no one was trying to open the portal, but if we wanted to keep the portal sealed, we needed to close the mine. So talked to the copper merchants, and the mine owner, and a few other folks, and eventually figured out a way to get the mine owner to hand over the deed to the copper merchant, who was quite happy to see the mine close because it would drive up his margins for his existing copper stock.Then again, this was in Eberron, which is a bit more late 1800s/early 1900s when it comes to economics. Things would have gone very differently in a traditional fantasy medieval feudal system. I once ran a game where the PCs lived in a remote village, and they loved spending time SimCity-ifying their home. They used stone shape (and a bit of manual labor) to build sturdy walls over several month. They enchanted scarecrows to act as alarm spells for non-animal intruders. They captured the essence of a nearby portal to the elemental plane of water and created a decanter to provide endless drinking water, bathing water, and a swimming pool.Eventually, when the demon hordes in the wilderness came to assault them, they put all of their developments to use defending their village. Hell, they killed the main villain with the pool.But that was all local. I wonder, if they had been closer to civilization, whether they would have wanted to trade with other villages. A lot of my friends like Real Time Strategy games and stuff like Civilization, so they dig the "develop your home base" stuff.</blockquote>

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