Money Issues

[Mattachine]

If the game isn't going to have an expected wealth-by-level, then DMs will be free to give the amount of gold that makes sense in their individual campaigns.

Please let DDN work that way.

 

[LostSoul]

Yep. Can't XP yet. My answer is my preferred answer, after many idle musings, on how to address that very problem. But whatever is done, it needs to fix the hole in the reward cycle where gold is concerned.

My answer was to throw GP into the cycle in a few different ways: character resources & effectiveness (hirelings, Rituals, making magic items & tech, research, training) and positioning - how you relate to the setting - by spending GP in a town you change how its inhabitants feel about you and cause the town to grow. Most of these also rely on time so that larger reward cycles can be seen in play (towns growing, NPC agendas).

Or in other words, it's ok from a design perspective for personal power to have some "gold sinks"--to shave off a certain amount of wealth and put the pinch on adventurers to go get some more. But if that is the only reward cycle where gold matters, then you get a breakdown in the design eventually, compared to how people envision playing.

Could you go into how you think the design eventually breaks down in that model?

 

[Estlor]

I (obviously) don't have any hard math to support this, but I get the feeling it all works itself off if you maintain the old D&D gold standard pricing, but basically convert all the treasure down a notch (so platinum in loot becomes gold, gold becomes silver, and silver becomes copper).

It feels a little like this in the playtest packet. If you consider for a moment that the fighter only has chain mail despite 1) being proficient in all and 2) being a dwarf (so there's no reason to avoid plate), you're left assuming it's because a Level 1 PC can't afford gear, a weapon, and the best armor.

Check out the price of plate (1,000 gp, IIRC) and it's obvious between masterwork weapons and the better armors, a good portion of your low-level adventuring loot will be spent upgrading the fighter.

 

[the Jester]

Also- scribing costs for spells?

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Could you go into how you think the design eventually breaks down in that model?

It varies, and I don't think I have a complete handle on how it happens. Probably not anything you don't already know well, but these are the stress points that I see:

• If gold and XP are kept in sync (because of both being tied to level advancement, for example), then the in-world expectations of gold and XP start to chafe against each other. Wealth by level guidelines are one example of this, but any system that has rigid ties between personal power and wealth will exhibit the strain somewhere (I think), because of trying to measure one thing with two different scales.
• The AD&D "XP for treasure" model is a very clever attempt to circumvent this problem (whether intentionally so or not), because it reverses the implicit order through the abstraction of what "XP for treasure" represents. Instead of getting treasure and buying power, the act of getting treasure gains you power (i.e. XP). In effect, the gold becomes the standard that feeds XP, but then leaves the gold in the hands of the players to spend as they please. So the "gold sinks" are all optional. The problem here is that the abstraction depends upon certain playstyles to really work. You see the chafing as soon as you move out of those playstyles.
• You can get the WoW effects, where if all gold is poured into gold sinks, gold starts to be a grind requirement instead of a reward--it's all stick and no carrot.
• Related to the previous one, excessive focus on gold sinks can perversly undermine the useful story purposes of the sinks, because enforcing them becomes so punitive that they get watered down.

I intuitively don't have much faith in systems designed to produced behavior, which don't invoke both carrot and stick. For example, let's say that you've got a system where there are modest but real training and resourse gold cost, but also the chance to buy optional influence and land. When you back out of too many dungeons or have bad luck, you can start to feel the pinch of not having enough to sustain your "adventuring overhead." When you are successful or lucky, in constrast, you get to use the excess to explore the optional carrot stuff. Prudent characters (or players) can have fun saving some of it for later lean periods. More aggressive ones can have fun taking advantage of the boost they have now. Either way, your choices matter, and they are as cautious or reckless as you want to be.

If you change that system to all carrot, it becomes meaningless or Monte Haul. If you change that system to all stick, every time you come up short, you move into extreme grit very rapidly. A character died because you couldn't afford a healing potion, after that last bad adventure. But mainly, the DM has to exercise tight control over wealth to make such a one-sided system only sort of work. It's brittle design.

 

[LostSoul]

Thanks CJ, that was a good post (can't XP yet!).

 

[Agamon]

I like how ACKS makes gold meaningful in a way that isn't necessarily tied to mechanical power. Ideas from that and CJ's investment post are giving me a lot to think about....

 

[1of3]

Retire. Once you sucessfully carried away the dragon horde, retire. That's the point in the first place.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

It should also be said that besides all the mechanical bits, gamist and simulation concerns, etc. of gold, there is also a player psychology aspect that has to be considered.

By analogy, think of someone who likes horror films. They probably enjoy some atmosphere. They don't want to watch a film out in the sunshine on a great day, while eating ice cream. OTOH, you can take it too far. They don't want a stranger outside their window on a stormy night, wearing a hockey mask and running a chainsaw. More fine tuned, it's the difference between someone grabbing your arm at a critical moment and making you jump versus someone jumping out from behind the door as you come out of the kitchen, causing you to dump the dip and chips over all your friends and your new couch.

Some people enjoy playing an adventurer that really might starve in rare, bad circumstances. I doubt many of those same people enjoy a game where money is so tight that avoiding starvation is what the game becomes about, or one where everyone pretends that the characters are woebegone, but find bags of gold beside every orc and his tasty, filling pie.

You might note in the playtest that the design team has addressed the player psychology bit of undead life draining in their most refined mechanics yet. Losing hit points off your maximum makes it a temporary but real problem. That's very slightly nastier in its implications (and more subtle) than the 4E surge drain, when you consider the increased number of monsters that could be dishing it out, but not quite so punishing as the 3E/3.5 mechanics. Slight variations in gold treatment can produce similar shifts.

 

[ComradeGnull]

Off the cuff, I'd say it goes the other way. The fame and reputation is some simple bit outside all the other mechanics, representing indirect power and influence, which your Background may very well interact with, but not drive.

For example, if you are noble, it's easier for you to lend money to other nobles (depending on the social aspects in the campaign). But getting the money in the first place is something that any adventurer can do.

Fame and reputation are like equipment. They are part of your character in one sense, but not another. There are times and places where they matter more or less, and they can change or even be lost without really changing your skills, spells, etc.

Some of you may have seen posts for Moniker's Zweihander game in the general forum- his game has a feature called 'Story Traits' which are rules-light characteristics that a character might gain or lose during the course of the game- things like social status, owning a business, membership of a guild, etc. They can track things that happen to a PC that are more narrative than mechanical in nature- if you buy yourself a noble title, that might change how people respond to you, but not necessarily in a straightforward mechanical way. It can act like a reminder to a player or DM to incorporate something into the game that might be obvious to an in-game NPC, but might get overlooked because it doesn't have a directly associated mechanical effect.