Core Principle: Your Fantasy Economy is Bullshit

[tzor]

When will this magical inflation show up?

When Bernanke gets high enough level to enter into the Wish Economy.

[tzor]

The point is that you won't be playing it out at all. Adventurers walk into Greyhawk City with couches and tables from the lich-king's tower and no one wants to buy their stuff.

Well I can't speak for Greyhawk but I can babble on about Lankhmar.

Did you know that someone bought the oldest map made in the United States for really big bucks ($1.8 million) and then lent it to the LIbrary of Congress. Washington Post article.

This is an important point of adventuring that often is ignored. The adventurers have all the fun that anchient explorers had before governments decided that anchient treasures actually belonged to them and not to the people who found and plundered them. There is actually a big market for really interesting historical stuff. Rich dudes will pay tons of money for historically interesting crap.

And that's before you consider the bizzarly magically interesting crap that the wizards are interested in because of ... well bizzare wizzardly things.

So the furnature of the liche-king (it's like two thousand years old and in mint condition ... oh yea it's also infused with negative energy and will probably suck your life if you sit on it for more than two months) is BIG NEWS to that anchient history obsessed noble three blocks down from House Tepes. Getting to him directly may be extreemely difficult, but I know a fence around the block who can act as an intemediary for a modest 25% commission.

And those crappy swords? The guards at the South Tower might be interested in them. They can really be handy to drop after they run through someone who they thought was smuggling ... see ... he had a goblin sword ... he must be in league with the goblins. I could have been killed you know sarge, I think bonus pay is in order.

I forget if it is mentioned specifically, but the whole 1E AD&D pricing system is based on the "gold rush" mentality. Adventurer's come in with gold and looking for adventurer items. These items (and not the items they do not want) are raised in price significantly because the adventurer's are too STUPID to look for alternatives or even haggle. Back in the Califorina Gold rush, all sorts of odd things were created. For example they took the two most expensive things on the menu and combined them into "oyster stuffed steak" because the gold miners had the gold and wanted to spend it on the best they could!

[Spike]

The point is that you won't be playing it out at all. Adventurers walk into Greyhawk City with couches and tables from the lich-king's tower and no one wants to buy their stuff.

Currency and commodities are the things you can mini-game, but the thing where people even want to buy the dirty swords you took from the bandits is gone.

Should I point out that Pawnbrokers have existed for 3000 years, at least? If anything, durable used goods have more value in a society where making shit is hard. There is a guy making Bronze swords as a hobby business, with modern tools and fuels it takes him about 2-3 days from pouring to selling. He sells them for about 300 bucks a pop, which is a decent return on investment of time.

Three and four thousand years ago, it would have taken him a couple of weeks because he lacks power tools and good steel implements for cutting off the excess metal, for polishing, for lathing the wood (or horn, or bone...) for the hilt. All of a sudden that 300 bucks is NOT a good return for his time. Making shit the old fashioned way is HARD. So, a good used sword is suddenly a worthy investment. Those things were valuable like cars, man. There is a reason a lot of broken swords found a new lease on life as shorter swords or daggers... its a lot less work to recycle.

The same logic holds for couches and end tables. Maybe not your run of the mill shield... that shit gets torn up hard by fights and battles and most can't be repaired any easier than they can be replaced (for leather and wood, thought the FITTINGS, bosses and metal rims and shit, might).

This pretty much holds true all the way until the industrial age, when mass production becomes possible... and I can STILL go find a good used end table at the local pawn shop... or, yes, for free on the side of the road.

The problem is that Joe Dirt Farmer in Bumfuckistan doesn't have any disposable income to BUY used swords or end tables. The local lord might, but that gets into the social politics of having a heavily armed band of murderous hoboes running around your local fiefdom...

[K]

Ok, I'll explain this is detail.

This is a world of fantasy. Anything you buy might be conjured crap that vanishes overnight, or pure illusion covering worthless items. The furniture you sell off might be an army of mimics. The rusty sword you sell off might be cursed and turn you into a vampire or be covered in ghoul fever juices and potentially able to set off an event that destroys your whole village.

So while goods have value in any economy, in a fantasy economy transactions have to be guaranteed by someone you trust. This means that even when something as simple as a new turnip farmer shows up, you need to know where those turnips come from and who farms them because you might be setting off a plague because zombie laborers were used to pick them or a extraplanar war because enslaved djinn were used to conjure them.

This is why it's reasonable to assume that people would want to only buy goods and even services from people that they can vouch for, meaning the dirty adventurer who is covered in giant beetle juice from his recent adventure and is trying to sell you some dung-covered crates of flatware is out of luck.

I mean, would you rather get a deal on some table napkins found in a haunted mansion or would you rather deal with the guy whose goods don't have a chance of carrying vengeful ghosts who murder all your customers and ruining your business for generations?

[Spike]

By that same standard, no one would actually make anything either, because the carpenter has to worry about the wood he's carving suddenly becoming an angry miniature treant and eating his face off... all the damn time.. and the potter has to worry about mud men taking over his shop every time he takes a smoke break.

The world you postulate is not just incredibly silly with its overwrought melodrama, but also incredibly bleak and primative, where essentially NO TRADE EVER happens beyond tiny enclaves of untanned skin wearing savages who only trust their immediate kin.


If some dirt covered hobo arrives at the local Lombard Bank with a pile of battered but servicable swords he's willing to sell cheap, and he says he took them off the bandits that have been preying only the local trade caravans, the guy behind the counter isn't going to worry about setting off some sort of zombie plague...because he's probably HEARD about those damned bandits, and may have even heard they were killed.

On the off chance your dirty hobo decides to travel a hundred miles before he unloads his bandit swords, the pawnbroker THERE is still not going to worry overly much about fucking zombie plagues. Because even if that shit is possible it isn't very likely... just like its POSSIBLE that I could catch small pox off of some blanket I got at St. Vincent de Paul's... but I wouldn't exactly stay awake at night worrying about it.

[K]

By that same standard, no one would actually make anything either, because the carpenter has to worry about the wood he's carving suddenly becoming an angry miniature treant and eating his face off... all the damn time.. and the potter has to worry about mud men taking over his shop every time he takes a smoke break.

The world you postulate is not just incredibly silly with its overwrought melodrama, but also incredibly bleak and primative, where essentially NO TRADE EVER happens beyond tiny enclaves of untanned skin wearing savages who only trust their immediate kin.

Wrong.

The local carpenter knows the forester who gets the wood because he's lived in the same community with him his whole life. The forester knows that the trees he chops are safe because his family and community have been taking wood from the same forest for years.

And trade is still possible. The carpenter sells his chairs in the big city to a merchant because his father and the his father before him sold chairs to the merchant's family.

It's incredibly insular, but it's actually a good model for pre-industrial economies. People did whatever their parents did and starting up new trade was incredibly risky.

The very idea that you could sell goods wherever and to whomever you want is actually a really modern idea. Local guilds would stop people from selling goods from people outside the guild and they controlled who was allowed to enter that guild to control pricing and quality. The weaponsmith who buys swords on the cheap can easily get tossed out of the guild because he is undercutting the other smiths.

In a fantasy world, it's actually a good thing. They don't want the swords you bring in even if you say they are from bandits because you could be lying, and they have no reason to trust you. They don't know that those swords are bandit swords and not covered in ghoul fever because you raided a tomb.

With the consequences of trusting anyone being so high, I don't expect new relationships to be too easy to form unless the payoff is worth the gamble. Even adventurers who once lived in the community will be treated with distrust because they might have been replaced or corrupted when they left the community to adventure.

[Lago PARANOIA]

If K's model is too pessimistic and xenophobic for you, you have three options.

1) Get rid of Points of Light and implement Points of Darkness. This way people on the whole are willing to allow trade from the goblin woodsmen as long as they were within the boundaries of known civilization. In this model, dwarves are willing to accept goods from the orcs they have on-and-off wars with but they're NOT going to accept anything from Icewind Dale unless they feel like taking a huge risk. This of course only widens the network of acceptable trading partners, but if you get it wide enough so that people don't ask you questions about that stack of +4 swords you got from a cavern it'll be outside the bounds of most games.

2) Make magical identification a hell of a lot easier and more reliable. And I mean a hell of a lot easier. Identify and Legend Lore is too much of a hurdle in this model. Identify should be a cantrip you can learn in a couple of months, Legend Lore should be a 1st level spell and is so easy to cast that the local guild will identify a mansion's worth of items in about 30 minutes for 5 gold pieces.

3) Restrict all trading of goods more complicated than a +1 sword to some ridiculous hub city like Sigil. That way, no one cares whether the necklace you otherwise legally acquired is actually the phylactery of a dracolich, because if they come and start shit the Sons of Mercy will rip him limb from limb. If Hades decreed that anyone who picked up a sword would suffer the curse of destructions for their entire family line, then the Mary Sue of Pain turns him into a goose egg and steps on him. And so on.

[tzor]

This is a world of fantasy. Anything you buy might be conjured crap that vanishes overnight, or pure illusion covering worthless items.

The basic argument is that for every ying you need a yang. Thus for magic you need "anti-magic."

In classic 1E foold gold was easy to dispell if you knew how and all merchants knew how.

Back at R.P.I. (*) we came up with this idea called "cold iron." Basically (in what appears to be the exact opposite of every common fantasy source) metal from the sky was extreemely non magical and soaked up the magic around it. When left in one place for a small period of time it would create an anti-magic field around it.

A coin of cold iron would be somewhat expensive and mostly useless because it had to remain in one spot for a while and would only create a small radius, but it would be enough to scan items for conjurations or illusions.

In other cases you can come up with ideas, promoted by the various guilds of wizards themselves in order to dispell magic, even if that required having a junior assistant from the wizard's guild.

The key is having a viable chance of getting caught coupled with a major guild/government that has the means to punish you severely should you in fact get caught. This can be done in a variety of ways with a wizard's guild who will do really nasty things to anyoe who tries to destroy the guild system through magic, to an Assassin guild that will seek out the idiot who tried to pull that shit and kill him.


(*) Note it has been a few decades since 1983, the produt was never published. I don't think I am violating any promises I made back then about this subject matter.

[K]

This is a world of fantasy. Anything you buy might be conjured crap that vanishes overnight, or pure illusion covering worthless items.

The basic argument is that for every ying you need a yang. Thus for magic you need "anti-magic."

In classic 1E foold gold was easy to dispell if you knew how and all merchants knew how.

Back at R.P.I. (*) we came up with this idea called "cold iron." Basically (in what appears to be the exact opposite of every common fantasy source) metal from the sky was extreemely non magical and soaked up the magic around it. When left in one place for a small period of time it would create an anti-magic field around it.

A coin of cold iron would be somewhat expensive and mostly useless because it had to remain in one spot for a while and would only create a small radius, but it would be enough to scan items for conjurations or illusions.

In other cases you can come up with ideas, promoted by the various guilds of wizards themselves in order to dispell magic, even if that required having a junior assistant from the wizard's guild.

The key is having a viable chance of getting caught coupled with a major guild/government that has the means to punish you severely should you in fact get caught. This can be done in a variety of ways with a wizard's guild who will do really nasty things to anyoe who tries to destroy the guild system through magic, to an Assassin guild that will seek out the idiot who tried to pull that shit and kill him.

But at that point, what is the use of having illusion magic or conjuration magic that can create wealth-like items at all?

I mean, there is a balance point between letting people get the benefits of their abilities and keeping those abilities from breaking the setting. If you make it wicked easy to detect Fools Gold, then you might as well not have the spell at all.

[MGuy]

Then add a extra rule where too many magic items kept in one place cause magical mishaps and spawn monsters. That keeps people from building Batcaves or collecting every Acid Dagger held in the cold, dead hands of the serpent cultists whose temple you just sacked.

Awesome! I'm tempted to do something like that just for fun. You could have a wizard's tomb that's just a dungeon with traps, but is then inadvertently populated by scary beasts just because of the loot inside!

It's kind of an old trope, and I am honestly surprised that it didn't survive the evolution of DnD ideas. I mean, Mud Men used to be creatures created whenever there was a high concentration of magic and mud like when a stream erodes a magical building.

So the idea of uncontrolled magic causing creatures and/or weird effects can be used to solve a lot of problems in the fantasy universe.

I've always enjoyed this idea as its an acceptable way for a lot of strange creatures to exist. I was planning on fully implementing it into a custom campaign setting of some sort.

[Spike]

3) Restrict all trading of goods more complicated than a +1 sword to some ridiculous hub city like Sigil. That way, no one cares whether the necklace you otherwise legally acquired is actually the phylactery of a dracolich, because if they come and start shit the Sons of Mercy will rip him limb from limb. If Hades decreed that anyone who picked up a sword would suffer the curse of destructions for their entire family line, then the Mary Sue of Pain turns him into a goose egg and steps on him. And so on.

But we aren't even talking about the trade of magic goods at this point, we're still talking about ordinary swords and shit, with the 'most high end' thing we are talking about being that couch taken from the Lich King.


K is still talking about communities limited to roughly a 100 people or so... counting the entire trade network. No more spice trade with China... travel times are so long that you can't have a personal relationship with the merchants on the other end, no innovation because no one takes risks...

But at that point, what is the use of having illusion magic or conjuration magic that can create wealth-like items at all?

I mean, there is a balance point between letting people get the benefits of their abilities and keeping those abilities from breaking the setting. If you make it wicked easy to detect Fools Gold, then you might as well not have the spell at all.

What is the point of counterfeiting 20 dollar bills today, since every store has a simple pen that can detect them? If you want a world where everyone is a paranoid idiot who... rather than come up with a solution to a serious problem (fake money that can't even be passed on to some other idiot!)... basically stop trading, thats your business. But the end result is the same: The players can't actually buy or sell anything because no one trusts them, or anyone else really. So the ability to conjure up fake (or real) gold is fucking useless because there is no trade!

All because some idiot invented illusionary gold that one time.




If the idea of some sort of limited anti-magic solution to illusionary money is too hard to swallow, imagine this instead; In order to make any serious purchase you have to store your money in a locked box at the merchants overnight (or however long is necessary to run through the common illusion's duration), essentially a primative escrow. Oh...wow... a solution that actually doesn't require handwavium and apparently renders the spell useless!

Oh, wait, Its not actually useless, it just assumes that people who handle large sums of money regularly are not idiots and require a bit more work to rip off than some crappy low level illusion.

[K]

3) Restrict all trading of goods more complicated than a +1 sword to some ridiculous hub city like Sigil. That way, no one cares whether the necklace you otherwise legally acquired is actually the phylactery of a dracolich, because if they come and start shit the Sons of Mercy will rip him limb from limb. If Hades decreed that anyone who picked up a sword would suffer the curse of destructions for their entire family line, then the Mary Sue of Pain turns him into a goose egg and steps on him. And so on.

But we aren't even talking about the trade of magic goods at this point, we're still talking about ordinary swords and shit, with the 'most high end' thing we are talking about being that couch taken from the Lich King.


K is still talking about communities limited to roughly a 100 people or so... counting the entire trade network. No more spice trade with China... travel times are so long that you can't have a personal relationship with the merchants on the other end, no innovation because no one takes risks...

Distance isn't an issue when we have flying mounts, teleportation, and the like. While any one network might be small in number, it can be vast in distance.

That also means that networks can be connected. The merchant that buys the carpenter's chairs can also buy the spice merchant's pepper because that guy has a flying horse and keeps an apartment in town.

But at that point, what is the use of having illusion magic or conjuration magic that can create wealth-like items at all?

I mean, there is a balance point between letting people get the benefits of their abilities and keeping those abilities from breaking the setting. If you make it wicked easy to detect Fools Gold, then you might as well not have the spell at all.

What is the point of counterfeiting 20 dollar bills today, since every store has a simple pen that can detect them? If you want a world where everyone is a paranoid idiot who... rather than come up with a solution to a serious problem (fake money that can't even be passed on to some other idiot!)... basically stop trading, thats your business. But the end result is the same: The players can't actually buy or sell anything because no one trusts them, or anyone else really. So the ability to conjure up fake (or real) gold is fucking useless because there is no trade!

All because some idiot invented illusionary gold that one time.




If the idea of some sort of limited anti-magic solution to illusionary money is too hard to swallow, imagine this instead; In order to make any serious purchase you have to store your money in a locked box at the merchants overnight (or however long is necessary to run through the common illusion's duration), essentially a primative escrow. Oh...wow... a solution that actually doesn't require handwavium and apparently renders the spell useless!

Oh, wait, Its not actually useless, it just assumes that people who handle large sums of money regularly are not idiots and require a bit more work to rip off than some crappy low level illusion.

I'm not sure of your point. In fact, I'm not even sure that you know your point.

I'll reiterate my point and you can try again.

If there is a way to easily beat the spell, then you might as well not have the spell in the game.

Powerful characters will always have ways to make money and nerfing fool's gold is the same as nerfing teleport. That's the way of 4e and we know what the result is: every power is a boring damage calculation. The instant you don't let a player make money by making illusionary money you have to also not let them make money by arbitrage by buying goods cheap in one place and selling them dear in another.

My option is simply to remove the players from the economy. This means that the reason you can't buy silks cheap in your Asia-clone and sell them dear in your Europe-clone is because you don't have the necessary trade contacts. Getting and maintaining those contacts is an adventure that nets you gold and XP just like any other adventure.

If you don't do that, then people will make money by selling things you never intended them to sell. For example, there was a famous Dungeon Magazine adventure where a trap tossed iron balls that fell into a pit afterward and got recycled back into the trap; this was considering a cool and fun trap until someone realized that the amount and size of iron balls meant that the trap was worth millions of GP in iron.

There's actually a term for this behavior: Greyhawking. It comes from the RPGA Greyhawk campaign where players would literally walk away with the furnishings to get more gold.

The only other option is to handwave the whole problem and that's really unsatisfying. People don't like 4e's treasure packets or 3e's "sell for half" model which is why we are having this discussion.

If you can come up with a simpler or more elegant solution, I am listening.

[Spike]

First of all a countermeasure is not a nerf. Fools Gold would still objectively exist and would still objectively make totally believable illusions of big piles of shiny, shiny gold.

That illusion still has all utility it always had, and you can totally fool people with it.

However, that does not mean that it is the unbeatable solution to all your money problems to the extent that it causes world wide disruption of trade, just like adding base metals to coins, or shaving or any of a thousand real life versions of counterfeiting don't. People find ways around those that are a hell of a lot less disruptive than just throwing up their hands and saying 'fuck it, man, I'm only gonna trade with Frank.'

Cause no matter how cool Frank is, trading with just him isn't really an economic system.


Which brings me to your question. Removing the players from the economy is, if anything, a massively bigger nerf than even out and out eliminating Fools Gold type spells. You are actually saying that players can not actually DO anything that allows them to interact with the world EXCEPT stab monsters in the face... because it is too disruptive to the world.

Railroad much?

Now, lets look at your 'problem' of players looting a cool iron ball trap worth 1 million GP.

According to the PHB, Iron is valued, as a trade good, at the rate of 1 SP per lb, which means you are moving 10 million lbs of iron balls. Just think about that for a moment.

The quick answer is always some sort of magical solution. "We'll put it in a bag of holding!" or "I can teleport it from the dungeon to the market!" or even 'I summon up a horde of elementals to haul it away'. If I've missed something, let me know...

Now. The biggest bag of holding only holds 1500 lbs, which means that for the economical price of 10K gold, you can move...150 gold in big ass iron balls. Woo... really making the money now! Only 60 odd trips to pay off your bag(s). Maybe stabbing another monster in the face would actually be easier.

Teleportation? A wizard can teleport up to 50lbs per level, so 1000 lbs of iron, four times a day for a twentieth level wizard. Yeah... I'm sure at that point he's so into making 400 gold a day teleporting iron balls around that he's willing to spend the rest of his life doing it... Of course, arguably he's got better options at that point too... but seriously? By the standards of this own board's Wish Economy, by the time he has the power to actually attempt to fuckign solve the problem of moving all that around he NO LONGER CARES. 1 million gold? He's trading in fucking Hope, what does he care about gold?

That's pretty much true of almost every 'we loot the dungeon'. If the GM essentially ignores the practical difficulties of actually moving the Lich Kings sofa around, of course its worth stealing his fucking sofa for the comparatively tiny handful of shinies it actually provides. If the Sofa is actually worth thousands of Gold than its fucking 'Artwork', and thus treasure and you should damn well expect murderous hobos to come and steal it.

Edited to fix simple math error.

[Spike]

Distance isn't an issue when we have flying mounts, teleportation, and the like. While any one network might be small in number, it can be vast in distance.

That also means that networks can be connected. The merchant that buys the carpenter's chairs can also buy the spice merchant's pepper because that guy has a flying horse and keeps an apartment in town.

I pulled this separetly because this is an entirely unrelated bit of retardation.

Teleportation is seriously limited in how much can be moved. Great for high value/low weight items (Pepper can qualify), if you don't mind trading in small amounts at a time. Flying mounts, as the infrastructure support for a trade network is just... I'm not sure I have the word for how idiotic that actually is.

Seriously, you can move more stuff faster with the teleportation, and I just pointed out how limited THAT is. A flying mount can carry its rider and a wickedly small amount of cargo, and will still take days of travel to get anywhere far enough to justify using it, and it doesn't solve those other problems... you know, monsters and bandits and shit. Some monsters fly and you still have to land every night to sleep unless you are going to claim that flying mounts are extra cool and just totally fly through the night without food, sleep or rest of any kind. And they still do it while carrying something on the order of a hundred or two of cargo (and no practical way of having 'pack griffons' or what have you...). If you want more cargo, you have to bring more people, which costs money (above and beyond the cost of actually raising and maintaining those flying mounts...).

Flying mounts are cool and have a lot of uses, but realistic trade isn't one of them.

[Username17]

That's bullshit. Money can be any commodity with such a high demand that it becomes the general medium of exchange, usually characterized by it's exchange value far exceeding the direct use value. You are making ridiculous artificial distinctions between trading with say, gold coins, or buying with fiat currencies. There is no difference between the two if we exclude the fact that gold is sound money and fiat money is not.

Wow. We have a genuine bona-fide Austrian paleomonetarist on our hands. That's fantastic. OK, let's take a look at the commodities with the highest demand, as measured by the ones with the highest price increase over the last year:

Oh look, it's Cotton, Iron Ore, and Rubber. That's fantastic. Why are those in demand? Because people are using them. To make stuff. In the real world. Adding value.

But the real issue is that cotton, while certainly the most demanded commodity on the planet, is produced to the tune of about 100 million bales in a year. And they go for less than 50 dollars apiece. So the sum total of cotton produced in a year is about 5 billion dollars worth. Now, taking that out of factories and into use as a hoarded reserve currency would severely damage my ability to wear pants. Also it would be extremely inconvenient, because we're basically talking about a one pound dime.

But most importantly of all: there just isn't enough cotton. There are nearly a trillion actual dollars in circulation, and all the bales of cotton in th world aren't worth one percent of that. We just can't do a modern economy with that, even if we issued paper money that was redeemable for cotton.

The GDP of the United States alone is almost three times the value of all the gold ever mined. We can't go on a gold standard. Or any commodity standard. Because in a modern diversified economy, everything is simply worth too much more than anything.

-Username17

[K]

First of all a countermeasure is not a nerf. Fools Gold would still objectively exist and would still objectively make totally believable illusions of big piles of shiny, shiny gold.

That illusion still has all utility it always had, and you can totally fool people with it.

What utility? Fake gold that can't spent as gold is of no use at all.

I mean, maybe you can come up with some nearly unique situation where having fake gold can be used as a lure or something, but that still won't make useful enough to actually know as a spell.

However, that does not mean that it is the unbeatable solution to all your money problems to the extent that it causes world wide disruption of trade, just like adding base metals to coins, or shaving or any of a thousand real life versions of counterfeiting don't. People find ways around those that are a hell of a lot less disruptive than just throwing up their hands and saying 'fuck it, man, I'm only gonna trade with Frank.'

Cause no matter how cool Frank is, trading with just him isn't really an economic system.

So that's a strawman and I really don't need to address it.

Which brings me to your question. Removing the players from the economy is, if anything, a massively bigger nerf than even out and out eliminating Fools Gold type spells. You are actually saying that players can not actually DO anything that allows them to interact with the world EXCEPT stab monsters in the face... because it is too disruptive to the world.

Railroad much?

It's like you tried to strawman me but didn't actually read enough to believably exaggerate my argument. This is the opposite of what I am saying.

Now, lets look at your 'problem' of players looting a cool iron ball trap worth 1 million GP.

According to the PHB, Iron is valued, as a trade good, at the rate of 1 SP per lb, which means you are moving 10 million lbs of iron balls. Just think about that for a moment.

The quick answer is always some sort of magical solution. "We'll put it in a bag of holding!" or "I can teleport it from the dungeon to the market!" or even 'I summon up a horde of elementals to haul it away'. If I've missed something, let me know...

Sure. Here are a few:

1. Get a scroll of Gate, and cast it so the balls roll into it.

2. Summon a demon who can teleport at will. You should be able to move 216,000 lbs per day (in 4320 round trips to market per day). Summon more demons to speed the process as needed.

3. Hire 1 sp a day laborers to simply carry it to market. Sure, it may take months and tens of thousands of gold but it's more than worth it for millions in gold.

[K]

Distance isn't an issue when we have flying mounts, teleportation, and the like. While any one network might be small in number, it can be vast in distance.

That also means that networks can be connected. The merchant that buys the carpenter's chairs can also buy the spice merchant's pepper because that guy has a flying horse and keeps an apartment in town.

I pulled this separetly because this is an entirely unrelated bit of retardation.

Teleportation is seriously limited in how much can be moved. Great for high value/low weight items (Pepper can qualify), if you don't mind trading in small amounts at a time. Flying mounts, as the infrastructure support for a trade network is just... I'm not sure I have the word for how idiotic that actually is.

For someone who's not that smart, you sure call people "idiotic" a lot. How amusing.

Ever hear of Teleport Circle? You can make it permanent, meaning you can transport hundreds of thousands of pounds of material each day along fixed routes. Once set up, you don't even need mages any more to do it.

Flying creatures are used for shorter distances, but if you really wanted to you could have zombies that can fly all night and don't need food or rest.

But all of that is a moot point since you can still have trade groups even without all of it. I can see families and merchant groups sending representatives to nearby areas to extend their network like they do in real life. It's not like people won't trade with new people; it's that the time it takes to gain their trust keeps out anyone not willing to make a life out of trading goods.

[tzor]

If you make it wicked easy to detect Fools Gold, then you might as well not have the spell at all.

If the gold is struck hard with an object of cold-wrought iron, there is a slight chance it will revert to its natural state, depending on the material component used to create the "gold": if a 50 g.p. citrine is powdered and sprinkled over the metal to be changed, the chance that the cold iron will return it to its true nature is 30%; if a 100 g.p. amber stone is powdered, there is a 25% chance that iron will dispell the dweomer; if a 500 g.p. topaz is powdered, the chance drops to 10% and if a 1,000 gp oriental (corundum) is powdered, there is only a 1% chance that the cold iron will reveal that it is fools gold.

Note that under the 2nd level magic user's spell, the spell converted 4,000 coins per level of the caster. The spell lasted one hour per caster level (6 turns where a turn is 10 rounds and a round is one minute). A name wizard can only have his gold last for 11 hours. So unless the caster is going to spend 1,000 g.p. on the spell (and everyone in my RPI group played enough role master to know one percent is like almost guarenteed when you absolutely don't want it to happen .. Murphy hates us roll players) any merchant worth his salt is going to bash and wait on any major coin transaction.

Stupid monsters, on the other hand, are fair game. As long as you are no where near the area when the time limit expires. He might even hide the gold and never notice it turned back to copper.

Remember the collorary to the "ease" of fools gold. If you make it really easy to give it, there is a good chance you will eventually receive it back, only to have it revert in your pockets while you are in the dungeon. Then when you trudge back from a near TPK and pull out the gold to pay for the resurrections you find you have trump change.

[fectin]

The GDP of the United States alone is almost three times the value of all the gold ever mined. We can't go on a gold standard. Or any commodity standard. Because in a modern diversified economy, everything is simply worth too much more than anything.

-Username17

Bad comparison; you need to compare to the size of the money supply, not to the size of the GDP. There are still good arguements against the gold standard, but this isn't one of them.

[tzor]

Ever hear of Teleport Circle? You can make it permanent, meaning you can transport hundreds of thousands of pounds of material each day along fixed routes. Once set up, you don't even need mages any more to do it.

That's 9th level spell; you need to be 17th level to make it permanent. It is a one way portal. It transports "creatures" not objects so you can't shove a crate over it, something has to carry it. And since the radius is a 5' radius circle, that limits the traffic through it.

I'm not sure how this is a practical method of large cargo transportation. There are, if I did my math right 14,400 rounds in a 24 hour day assuming you could push one mule in to the circle per round and assuming that you can stack the mule to max heavy load of 690# you could have a good one way system in place. But you run out of mules and the effort to pack all those mules in the first place is massive.

[K]

Ever hear of Teleport Circle? You can make it permanent, meaning you can transport hundreds of thousands of pounds of material each day along fixed routes. Once set up, you don't even need mages any more to do it.

That's 9th level spell; you need to be 17th level to make it permanent. It is a one way portal. It transports "creatures" not objects so you can't shove a crate over it, something has to carry it. And since the radius is a 5' radius circle, that limits the traffic through it.

I'm not sure how this is a practical method of large cargo transportation. There are, if I did my math right 14,400 rounds in a 24 hour day assuming you could push one mule in to the circle per round and assuming that you can stack the mule to max heavy load of 690# you could have a good one way system in place. But you run out of mules and the effort to pack all those mules in the first place is massive.

You are missing the point.

The original issue was: "people will never conduct trade if they only trade with people they have close relationships because of geographic barriers."

My answers, which I'll admit went off point when I got trolled, is: "there are lots of ways to have a personal relationship with people who are far away in a fantasy universe considering all the ways that people can travel."

That being said, two TTeleport Circles should be able to move more than enough cargo between two cities. The work involved is actually less than loading up normal caravans and cheaper in the long run than paying people and occasionally losing caravans to bandits and the like.

[Spike]

Sure. Here are a few:

1. Get a scroll of Gate, and cast it so the balls roll into it.

I'm assuming you are talking about gating it to some extradimensional trade hub? Not that it matters, you are still talking about a spell with a duration of rounds per caster level at best. You have to move 90,000 pounds of iron in 2 minutes... and good luck finding a merchant willing to let you open the gate into his shop directly! On the off chance you can move 90,000 lbs of iron in two minutes? Congratulations, you just made 1750 gp in profit! Whee!!!

2. Summon a demon who can teleport at will. You should be able to move 216,000 lbs per day (in 4320 round trips to market per day). Summon more demons to speed the process as needed.

Sure. That'll work. Of course, as I already pointed out earlier, by the time you have this much power you can already just summon up, say, earth elementals and just have them bring you gems from the elemental plane of earth or some shit.

3. Hire 1 sp a day laborers to simply carry it to market. Sure, it may take months and tens of thousands of gold but it's more than worth it for millions in gold.

Sure, that will work too. Now, lets run some numbers on that. First, how far from the nearest town or village are you? 1 day? 2 days? Better yet, how far from the nearest major metropolitan area, because your nearest village seriously has neither the required number of peasants, nor the required amount of gold to even consider buying your entire 10 million fucking pounds of Iron.

Lets be nice and say 'one week', which gives us a turn around of two weeks travel. In one month each laborer can make two trips, and he can seriously carry 50lbs or so. So right there you are now making 70% profit, which is a major assload of money, right? I mean, assuming the GM isn't a dick and forces you to spread it around to various markets and stuff, and seriously reduces the value of Iron because of saturation... which he could totally do... but! We aren't going there, because that's on a case by case basis.

Now, in order to move 10 million pounds of iron you have to take 200,000 trips, which for 1 laborer is 100,000 months. So 1000 laborers is 100 months, or 8 years. 10,000 laborers? 10 months, or a year. Of course, we've long since entered 'army size' here. If you are employing 1000 people, the local king is seriously going to be up in your shit at this point. If you deplopulate all the local farms for a year (10,000 laborers) you are causing a major disruption to the area, famine and so forth... Seriously, you just took every able bodied adult (male AND female) out of a small city to hump your iron across the countryside for a whopping 5 gold a trip.

Thats not counting loss of peasants (and their iron) to wandering monsters and the like...

Yeah, you know, if you totally handwave away the actual difficulties if moving 10 million pounds of shit around, players can totally take apart the local castle and sell the bricks for real money!

But at some point, spending 8 years of your character's life watching peasants hump big iron balls around, you're going to realize that it is faster and more fun to just find another monster to stab in the face for fucking gold.

*note that a similar level of argument could be made for using the demon summoning, though less drastically. Assuming perfect efficency, the demon can teleport a quarter million pounds of iron a day, which means that, once you've jumped through the various hoops to convince the demon (Actually, using just the MM one, the Devil, unless you want to wait until 12th instead of 10th level... yadda yadda scroll, whatever), to actually hump your iron around... it would still take him almost a month and a half to move it all, and again, the GM is totally justified to make you find markets for that shit first, and then the problems with being a known demon summoner, etc... Its just easier not to argue about what GMs should and should not do if you totally want to loot 10 million lbs of iron...

EDIT::: had to pull quotes/responses to get the post to format correctly.

[K]

Sure. Here are a few:

1. Get a scroll of Gate, and cast it so the balls roll into it.

I'm assuming you are talking about gating it to some extradimensional trade hub? Not that it matters, you are still talking about a spell with a duration of rounds per caster level at best. You have to move 90,000 pounds of iron in 2 minutes... and good luck finding a merchant willing to let you open the gate into his shop directly! On the off chance you can move 90,000 lbs of iron in two minutes? Congratulations, you just made 1750 gp in profit! Whee!!!

It shouldn't take more than 20-30 seconds for the balls to roll in under their own power. As an experiment, get a box and fill it with marbles; then tear a hole in the bottom and see how long it takes for the box to empty.

And you have them roll into a warehouse prepared to accept tons of metal balls.

2. Summon a demon who can teleport at will. You should be able to move 216,000 lbs per day (in 4320 round trips to market per day). Summon more demons to speed the process as needed.

Sure. That'll work. Of course, as I already pointed out earlier, by the time you have this much power you can already just summon up, say, earth elementals and just have them bring you gems from the elemental plane of earth or some shit.

Earth elementals can't travel to the Plane of Earth, have no ability to find gems and can't travel back under their own power.

3. Hire 1 sp a day laborers to simply carry it to market. Sure, it may take months and tens of thousands of gold but it's more than worth it for millions in gold.

Sure, that will work too. Now, lets run some numbers on that. First, how far from the nearest town or village are you? 1 day? 2 days? Better yet, how far from the nearest major metropolitan area, because your nearest village seriously has neither the required number of peasants, nor the required amount of gold to even consider buying your entire 10 million fucking pounds of Iron.

Lets be nice and say 'one week', which gives us a turn around of two weeks travel. In one month each laborer can make two trips, and he can seriously carry 50lbs or so.

Why would they carry 50lbs? They'll use carts and sleds and crap, so all of your calculations are wasted.

And sure, it might cost several hundred thousands in gold. Good thing they are making millions in gold.

*note that a similar level of argument could be made for using the demon summoning, though less drastically. Assuming perfect efficency, the demon can teleport a quarter million pounds of iron a day, which means that, once you've jumped through the various hoops to convince the demon (Actually, using just the MM one, the Devil, unless you want to wait until 12th instead of 10th level... yadda yadda scroll, whatever), to actually hump your iron around... it would still take him almost a month and a half to move it all, and again, the GM is totally justified to make you find markets for that shit first, and then the problems with being a known demon summoner, etc... Its just easier not to argue about what GMs should and should not do if you totally want to loot 10 million lbs of iron...

Umm, what? Why would it taking over a month matter? How are people going to find out you are a demon summoner? Why is finding markets an issue when using demons who can travel hundreds of miles a second.

Basically, none of these arguments are obstacles to people doing it, or will stop the argument with the DM who tries to stop you.

The fact that it can be done at all is an argument for why adventurers shouldn't be involved in the economy. It's far easier to say "it would take several years of work to build up the trade network necessary to sell the iron" than to come up with flimsy and solvable problems involving logistics that will only upset players and DMs.

I mean, you've provided the examples of the flimsy-ass problems that people will use and how ineffective they are to someone with basic problem solving skills.

[Surgo]

But at some point, spending 8 years of your character's life watching peasants hump big iron balls around, you're going to realize that it is faster and more fun to just find another monster to stab in the face for fucking gold.

Er, isn't this the point? You're sitting down to play adventurers, not the caravan from Red River.

[K]

But at some point, spending 8 years of your character's life watching peasants hump big iron balls around, you're going to realize that it is faster and more fun to just find another monster to stab in the face for fucking gold.

Er, isn't this the point? You're sitting down to play adventurers, not the caravan from Red River.

You can handwave any amount of time, so that's no real obstacle. Just say "and eight years pass and you are several million gold richer."

That's why you need a reason hard-coded into the system as to why people can't enter the economy.