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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5057093" data-attributes="member: 82106">I don't think in general that economy is something most RPGs can really simulate. PCs are supposed to be extraordinary. Wealth is an aspect of life where being really wealthy is the extraordinary condition. The problem is money can solve a lot of problems and if PCs in any game can basically command vast amounts of society's resources then they stop really being adventurers and turn into something else.Its easy enough in literature to just ignore this kind of problem. The characters are the author's creations and march to whatever tune the writer wants. PCs aren't exactly under the control of the creator of the plot and setting. Give them lots of wealth and they're likely to use it in ways that aren't in keeping with the plot. 4e, like many systems, tends to get around this by making adventuring an absurdly expensive proposition where you have to spend preposterous sums of money to equip yourself. The PCs can now be absurdly wealthy but yet at the same time chained to a constrained budget. As long as you don't examine the whole thing TOO closely it holds together. OTOH it is pretty easy for players who are determined to derail that system to do so. They could hire large numbers of underlings or buy entire towns for instance. Sure they can no longer afford that top notch magic item and may suffer significantly in their dungeon crawling capacity but they can easily attain all the things that realistically people would want. They can be wealthy and powerful and they can even achieve all sorts of good ends that are mostly not really realistically all that dependent on cleaning out some dungeon. Practically speaking only the agreement of the players and DM to stick to the adventuring theme keeps things on track.Its possible to imagine wealth systems that you would think WOULD work, but the problem is they basically work by making the PCs impoverished. This can work OK in modernistic settings where even people of fairly ordinary wealth can do a lot with their little money if, like PCs, they don't have the ordinary cares of life to worry about. It doesn't work so well in more fantastic settings. Keeping the PCs fairly impoverished in a 4e faux medieval kind of setting would pretty much mean they will never see more than a few 100 gp at one time and will have expenses that constantly drain all of that away pretty quickly. Gone is the big dragon horde. Now you also have the problem of how to deal with things like magic items. You can get rid of them or make them so rare and wonderful that you would never even consider disposing of one but that does mean no PCs making their own items or buying anything magical beyond maybe the very occasional potion. Its also hard to enforce. What happens when a PC dies and his comrades get his stuff? They probably can't use it all and realistically it has to represent a pretty substantial amount of wealth regardless of how you deal with that. Even if there is no magic then even mundane equipment becomes a considerable source of excess money. How do you really keep the PCs from using their great prowess to get money either? They can pretty well take what they want and again even mundane stuff they can loot from opponents becomes a pretty significant source of wealth in this kind of situation.I don't think its IMPOSSIBLE to invent a setting where you could have a fairly realistic economy. The question is whether or not it would be a fun setting to play in. Beyond that would it be the particular kind of game you WANT to play? Its an option but not one that any FRPG I've seen yet has aimed for deliberately. I find it pretty hard to say that 4e has a fault here as its really just a shortcoming of the entire genre. FRPG and realistic economy are just oil and water, you can mix them if you really work at it, but they don't tend to mix well and tend to not stay mixed for long.</blockquote>

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