Core Principle: Your Fantasy Economy is Bullshit

[Spike]

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.

Have you seen sand through an hourglass? Of course, preparing the warehouse and moving the iron from the warehouse to markets will also cost money. And again, if you have Gate spells, why are you interested in the logistical problems of moving 10 million lbs of iron balls around? Yeah, yeah... scroll, whatever. Your entire argument is based on the supposition that the GM is going to make it easy for you by not putting in a single obstacle. Seriously: heavy (trap worthy!) iron balls are FALLING through your gate into a warehouse. Most warehouses are not made to have big ass cannon balls rocketing through them! Again, every GP spent making this possible eats into your comparatively trivial profit margin.

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.

Ok, if you want to play it that way: Summon said Earth Elementals, task them to find you big piles of Gems, then send them through a portal back to to the plane of earth... one they can then return through to deliver the goods. They can and do swim through 'earth' just fine, and since 'time is nothing' the 'eight hours' per roll (searching through tunnels, rather than earth swimming) to find 10% of the time a 'Gem Vein' on the Elemental Plane of Earth is trivial. Again: Why are you wasting your time with 1 sp a lbs iron at this point?

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.

No, they are making 1 million, singular, in gold. So every 100k off of that is a full ten percent drop in your loot.

Now, lets look at adding a cart or wagon to the equation. A cart costs 15gp, and requires an animal to pull it, the cheap option is the mule for 8 gp, which brings our cost, so far, to 23gp. Unlike the laborers, who I assumed would just somehow buy food for 8 years of work from their payments, the mule requires feed, for one month thats 1.5 gp, and you still need the teamster, for another 3 sp a day (or... 9 gold a month), so we're up to, lets round off, 33 gp for one month, with an additional 10 gp a month after that...

Which means you need to move with that cart 1000 lbs of Iron every month just to break even, not counting the first month.

Now, a Mule has a strength of 16 and can pull 1150 lbs. A cart weighs 200 lbs and the Teamster weighs about 150. Being generous, you can just about break even every month (that's twice!), meaning you aren't losing money by putting it in a cart, other than the initial outlay, but no matter how long you haul the iron, you are not MAKING any money either.

You might do better with a wagon, which has two mules and still only one teamster, and you might try a stronger animal, but honestly, we then start wondering how sturdy that cart or wagon is.

At that point its just simply better to hire an assload of dwarves, build a smeltery and forge on the site and start shipping finished goods that have a higher profit to mass ratio.

But you still aren't making enough money to break the economy doing that.

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.

Are the demons selling it for you too? It doesn't matter how fast the Demons are, you are the one who has to find someone to buy it. And yes, having demons show up with a quarter million tons of iron a day is going to be obvious to people... and if Joe the Wizard shows up and starts selling millions of tons of iron, people are going to put it together quickly.

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.

At best its an argument for why people shouldn't bother to go on adventures, since there are other ways to just make money if you want to just hand wave away the time investment.

Seriously, I had one of my players start with 300 gp at 1st level in my current campaign. If instead of buying weapons and armor he decided to retire, he could live at least as well as a mercenary for at least 5 years. That's not terribly long, but since we're already in the business of selling big ass iron balls for a decade or two, he might as well just start hiring people and running trade caravans for an arbitrarily long time. As long as he can show a steady profit stream to the GM, all he has to do is wave his hands and say 'poof, enough time has passed, I will now go adventuring... but first I will buy every epic magic item I want!"

Hell, I could do this in the games I've played in. I showed how its trivially easy to 'hand wave' a few months in Traveller as an asteroid miner and wind up rich enough to buy entire worlds.

Hell, you don't even need to get stupid with it, just take a profession and the GM has to give you enough down time to make as much money as you need... presto! Heck, you don't even need to have a profession, hire yourself out as an unskilled laborer for 1sp a day at that rate! Only 5000 easily handwaved years until you can buy that +10 sword you always wanted!



Your entire argument is based on handwaving problems away, especially time. The GM is under no obligation to let you do that. Its not cock blocking to point out that your adventure should be adventuring, not spending a decade of his life moving iron balls around for (comparative) chump change. Divided by a party of four, your 700k profit, over 8 years seriously works out to less than 22k gold a year under optimal conditions. You can make more money faster by just finding a new monster to stab in the face until you have leveled enough (in less than 8 years of game time in any game I've ever played... seriously, 1st to 14th level in about six months game time in the last campaign...) to just ask for piles of gold.

[Username17]

Dude, 10 million pounds of iron is like an 8 meter cube. It's not even especially large. Moving it around isn't really that difficult. Wanking about how hard it is to move such an object is a waste of time.

-Username17

[K]

Your entire argument is based on handwaving problems away, especially time. The GM is under no obligation to let you do that. Its not cock blocking to point out that your adventure should be adventuring, not spending a decade of his life moving iron balls around for (comparative) chump change. Divided by a party of four, your 700k profit, over 8 years seriously works out to less than 22k gold a year under optimal conditions. You can make more money faster by just finding a new monster to stab in the face until you have leveled enough (in less than 8 years of game time in any game I've ever played... seriously, 1st to 14th level in about six months game time in the last campaign...) to just ask for piles of gold.

I was going to feed the troll and address all his errors, but at this point I don't think I even need to address points like "spheres move differently than irregularly shaped grains of sand and can move through openings much faster" or "if you hire more than one laborer and use more efficient modes of transport like oxen and bigger carts, the 8 years can be cut to several months."

The real issue is: if players can get wealth by doing things like this, what can the DM do to stop it?

These are the options:

1. Try to come up with situation-dependent problems. This fails, as I've shown above in stupid detail. Clever players will always have clever solutions to problems and just telling people that all their ideas won't work is going to make them leave your game out of frustration because they feel railroaded.

2. Come up with a reasonable reason why monetary wealth doesn't work the same way in DnD Land than it does in our modern economy.

3. Try to make the players play out the months or years of out-of-game time. Literally, the DM can try to hold the game hostage and hope the players don't just get up and leave the game in frustration because you are being a dick.

Now, of all the options only #2 is playable. There is a reason why this thread is titled "Your fantasy economy is bullshit."

Making money work like in does in modern society means that at some point the players are going break the game by doing something dumb like robbing the diamond mine they were tasked to clear of goblins.

[mean_liar]

My experience in construction tells me that Spike is closer to the truth on the iron than K. Shit is always more difficult than you think it should be.

That said, I figure K still has the meta-analysis correct. #2 is the best response to all the wanking, unless you want to make the game about caravaning or whatever.

[virgil]

Isn't the trade contacts issue just another hurdle akin to transporting the iron? Through a combination of disguises, illusions, mind-control, divination, & info gathering, you can just find an already established/trusted merchant you can use as your funnel into the market at large to sell all of your loot.

[K]

Isn't the trade contacts issue just another hurdle akin to transporting the iron? Through a combination of disguises, illusions, mind-control, divination, & info gathering, you can just find an already established/trusted merchant you can use as your funnel into the market at large to sell all of your loot.

Well, impersonation is easy. Creating demand is not.

I mean, the carpenter makes X amount of chairs a week. He sells those chairs to a merchant who ships them somewhere. They have a relationship where each month a certain amount of chairs is going to to the merchant according to orders made.

Month after month, that's the way it works. A fixed amount of demand is met.

So how is a adventurer going to sell off the couches from the Lich King's tower? Even if he finds the carpenter and shapechanges into him, the merchant is going to say "hey, I am here to pick up those oak chairs.... wtf is up with these lacquered boned chair-things?"

[Gaius Octavius]

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

If what you were saying was actually true, we could never have had a gold standard because everything has always been much more valuable than anything. That's a truism. Yet, we had one for thousands of years, including a period of more than a 100 years in which economic growth was higher than it has ever been, before or after (that'd be 1820-1930 or so) . You are making all sorts of assumptions here that simply don't hold water. For example you don't need to have a money supply so large that it's worth as much as the entire economy(or even close). That's a load of crock and isn't even true with the fiat money system we have now. You also don't need an expanding money supply because money can increase in value as productivity increases, causing prices to fall. So the same amount of money would buy more services/goods and thus service a larger economy. As for not having enough gold, well, if you were going to take those trillion dollars in circulation you'd only have to price the ounce at 200ish dollars to fully convert.(158k metric tons of gold have been mined). That's far below natural market price of gold today so realistically you'd need about 10% of the world's gold for america to go on a gold standard if the numbers you are claiming are correct. Seeing as how the US GDP is about 25% of the world's GDP it seems that we have more than enough gold for a gold standard.

The real reason the world went off the gold standard was so that governments around the world could default on their debts without serious repercussions. This is also the major reason for why no one is adopting one today.

[Lago PARANOIA]

You also don't need an expanding money supply because money can increase in value as productivity increases, causing prices to fall.

I'm going to stop you right here. In the real world, this never happened due to a phenomenon known as price stickiness. Yes, it is true that prices would deflate after awhile but that's only after prolonged periods of depression. And if we're talking about heroic fantasy economies, this would go from decades of depression like in the real world to centuries.

In fact the gold standard is THE main (though not the only one) reason as to why economies were so fucked up for so long. There was absolutely no reason why West Europe had to rape and kill their way across the Americas for gold but they grew anyway because their economies were so backwards that the catastrophically unprofitable adventures from the 15th to 19th century caused them to grow to ridiculous heights.

Or to put it into perspective, imagine if the only lifestyle change you make is that you eat nothing but twinkies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for a year and your health improves. That is not a victory for twinkies. That's just a testament to how screwy your previous diet was.

[Sashi]

The more I read K's stuff the more I'm convinced this thread is cross-polinating - philisophically - with "the numbers" thread.

If people can turn santa-sacks full of diamonds into extra spell slots and strength bonuses, then robbing diamond mines and prying fist-sized rubies out of statue eye sockets breaks "the numbers".

On the other side, if players can break "the numbers" by stripping the Lost Castle bare and flooding the antique market, or not bothering with the Lich Viscount because the statue in front of his castle is made of ten tons of onyx, then the game is incentivizing a very specific brand of kleptomania.

The easiest way to fix this is, like K is saying, to just make it so the combat minigame doesn't interface with any economy, except possibly on some low. As long as people can't buy themselves off the RNG the amount of money they have won't really affect the combat minigame.

I really like this because it lets roleplaying decisions like vows of poverty or unrelenting avarice be pure roleplaying decisions. No more "is it better for the paladin to spend 12k gp on feeding the orphans, or upgrading her sword so she's level appropriate to kill the manticore that's threatening the orphans?" questions.

That doesn't mean people will suddenly stop chasing after wealth; being rich is boss. It's just that a fistfull of rubies will only let you do things that money could reasonably let you do: buy armies of tiny men, build great monuments to yourself, buy a cushy lifestyle. It won't let you buy a Holy Avenger.

[Surgo]

Sashi certainly has the right idea here. When that happens, it doesn't really matter how well fool's gold works or whether or not the players could make tons of money Red River style -- because, hey, that was an adventure, and adventuring is what you're playing to do.

[K]

Basically, yeh. Fat stacks of cash are fine if having them doesn't ruin the adventuring part.

Frank and I wrote extensively in the Tomes. The problem is that fixing the magic item system requires rewriting the whole damned thing.

I mean, making people believe that you can't buy good magic items is really hard. It's just easier to have it harder to get rich.

[Gaius Octavius]

I'm going to stop you right here. In the real world, this never happened due to a phenomenon known as price stickiness. Yes, it is true that prices would deflate after awhile but that's only after prolonged periods of depression. And if we're talking about heroic fantasy economies, this would go from decades of depression like in the real world to centuries.

You are demonstrably wrong here Lago. We see prices falling all the time in new industries where innovation is still lowering production costs by leaps and bounds every year(e.g nowadays everyone has a cellphone because they are much cheaper, the first laptop was like 1800$ whereas nowadays you can get a serviceable one for 500$ etc.). The only thing that prevents us from seeing a generally falling price level is the fact that the US(and indeed, most of the world) has massive inflation. Manufacturing costs drop with time as production becomes more efficient. This, combined with good old fashioned competition, will ensure that because the profit margin stays the same a lower production cost becomes a lower price. It's just that most of the time in old industries like cotton and stuff, innovation can't keep up with inflation because most of the basic stuff's already been done.
What you say about deflation only following depressions, well, again you are wrong. While it is true that deflation was a part of pretty much all depressions before the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 this was because of a shrinking money supply as banks, who had expanded credit and thus caused an artificial boom, were forced to consolidate their positions and cut credit. Smaller money supply=>Lower prices. Quite natural. Now the part where you are wrong is where you claim that this *only* happened in depressions.
Enter 1875-1900. In 1873 you have a classic example of expansion of credit gone wrong with over-investment in the railroad industry. This leads to a "panic" and a depression that lasts until 1875 or so. So at that point the economy is basically healthy. In this period, widely claimed as a long depression, real production grew immensely(e.g iron production more than doubled) or at about a rate of 6.8% annually while prices fell drastically(the price of rice in 1890 was about a third of what is was in 1867, the price of iron halved, the price of cotton halved etc.). In fact prices in general were falling at a rate of 3.8% per annum or so. Nominal wages even increased and if you couple that with a generally falling price level it becomes patently obvious that this was not, as has been claimed, a depression. It was in fact prosperity. The standard of living was raised immensely for the common man and the US experienced faster real growth than at any other time in history.

[Gods_Trick]

When I came on this thread, I thought I might pic up a few tips on a more realistic D&D economy. Now heres a question from an anthropological perspective.

Commodities are a bad currency, you're taking the commodity out of the economy by trying to make it do double duty.

However in primitive times soft attractive metals were attractive as decoratives. Which became status indicators since the individual or group must have primary needs covered to be able to invest in aesthetic items.

Gold was a notable malleable metal that does not rust, and was scarce, the factors that made it represent currency. So why not? Theres not much use to it other than as fripperies and money.

In third world countries today, if you paid the 'modern day' peasant with a Western world currency, 90% of them accept it with pleasure, even if converting it themselves would be impossible. They recognise its value, and presumably make plans to trade it in a beneficial way. Its a short term loss, a currency they can't use, but a long term gain.

If D&D is played realistic accurate, yeah, the short term loss might just kill them; they are living on a bare minimum, but why postulate Iron Age economics? The rules and the literature based on the game suggest a pastoral fairly advanced agrarian setting. A lot like the Shire in fact.

[Spike]

I was going to feed the troll and address all his errors, but at this point I don't think I even need to address points like "spheres move differently than irregularly shaped grains of sand and can move through openings much faster" or "if you hire more than one laborer and use more efficient modes of transport like oxen and bigger carts, the 8 years can be cut to several months."

The shape of an object matters less than its volume compared with the diameter of the opening. A proper rebuttal of point would be to show how much volume 10M lbs of Iron has, how much can pass through a 20 foot diameter hole at a free fall acceleration of 9.8 meters per second.

But seriously trying to claim the SHAPE of the 'granules' in our 'hourglass' debate is important? Protip:the same sort of restrictions work for gasses and liquids as well as solids in a granular form.

Secondly: 8 years was for 1000 laborers, which is seriously an army in D&D land. 10,000, which is the population of a small city, was ALSO cited in my math, and still takes 10 months. Likewise, I address your cart pretty throughly. With Math even. Dispute the math if you like, but don't try to claim I ignored the possibility. That makes you a fucking liar.

The real issue is: if players can get wealth by doing things like this, what can the DM do to stop it?

These are the options:

1. Try to come up with situation-dependent problems. This fails, as I've shown above in stupid detail. Clever players will always have clever solutions to problems and just telling people that all their ideas won't work is going to make them leave your game out of frustration because they feel railroaded.

Actually, I'm all for players coming up with clever solutions. I'm against hand waving away the problems that do exist (like time, like a source for 10,000 laborers) that seriously do exist.

2. Come up with a reasonable reason why monetary wealth doesn't work the same way in DnD Land than it does in our modern economy.

I seriously try to keep immersion high in my games. Clockwork universes and sandboxes and all that shit, so forcing them to wear a PC Team Jersey that makes them unable to interact with the pieces of that clockwork universe is anathema to me, and subsequently to my players.

Thus this solution is the worst of all possible solutions. For me. I really don't care what you do in your games, but when you present this as the universal solution it gets patently offensive.

3. Try to make the players play out the months or years of out-of-game time. Literally, the DM can try to hold the game hostage and hope the players don't just get up and leave the game in frustration because you are being a dick.

Make them run through each leg of the trip a week at a time, make them hire 10,000 laborers or actually summon up a dozen teleporting demons and actually bind them.

Because if you hand wave everything, anything is possible. Might as well look at their character sheets and hand wave away the adventure.

"Oh... lets see, you guys are 15th level and have a cleric with some serious undead turning firepower here... Yeah, the Lich King's only a CR 14... yup, you guys beat the adventure just fine, here's your XP and treasure.."

Is seriously the exact same thing as 'you guys hire two armies worth of laborers and spend a year moving iron balls to market, here, have a million gold.'

Now, of all the options only #2 is playable. There is a reason why this thread is titled "Your fantasy economy is bullshit."

First, there are more than three solutions to the problem. Second, if you only see one of those three as viable, there is your reason I'm wasting my time telling you you're wrong.

Making money work like in does in modern society means that at some point the players are going break the game by doing something dumb like robbing the diamond mine they were tasked to clear of goblins.

Actually, that sounds like a perfectly good hook for further adventures to me. If someone tasked them to clear the mine, then that someone presumably owns the mine and will not be happy to have it looted (speaking of... how are players who are expected to fight goblins seriously going to 'clear' a diamond mine? I mean, sure, pick up a few lose diamonds... but seriously rob it? Mines tend to play out over generations...). You can't simultaneously hold that the PCs are the only bad asses in the world AND that your bullshit trade system powered by high level magics and shit like tamed griffons exist at the same time. And if there are other high level character types, they can seriously be used to make life... interesting... for players who regularly shaft the status quo. As adventures.

Wait. I'm guessing you don't like consequences for actions either. Goes along with not caring at all about niggling things like years of time...

[K]

Secondly: 8 years was for 1000 laborers, which is seriously an army in D&D land. 10,000, which is the population of a small city, was ALSO cited in my math, and still takes 10 months. Likewise, I address your cart pretty throughly. With Math even. Dispute the math if you like, but don't try to claim I ignored the possibility. That makes you a fucking liar.

Troll harder. You assume the most inefficient methods possible and try to claim that people should try to roleplay that as punishment. Your knowledge of basic physics is also laughable and I think you must be wasting your time here because you revel in your own humiliation for sexual gratification.

I do have one question. How are you going to make someone roleplay months of repetitive journeys by laborers they aren't even playing? Are you going to make them sit in your house and make chit-chat with the laborers for several hours until they give up? Are you going to toss monsters at every single run until they quit out of frustration?

You see, it's a dick move and you are a dick because you can't see it.

People in RPGs handwave the boring bits and play the exciting bits because its a game. You don't make people roleplay a two month journey because two months sitting in your house a few hours a week is ten years of real life.

Are you one of those people who actually live in your fantasy world and have forgotten that it's not real and that when in doubt you should always choose the fun option for the players? Or do you get people into your house because you enjoy their frustration and pain?

Now you are going on ignore, troll.

[Spike]

ah, well... there goes any conceivable response I could hope to make.

And I was going to point out that further conversation was pointless because we obviously are approaching the game from radically different angles. Guess that makes me a dick...


Though I do have to admit a certain perverse pride in having attained that dreaded 'you are going on ignore' status for the first time.


For those that care: Letting players hand wave away the difficulties of moving 10 million lbs of iron in return for fat loot RIGHT NOW is just as broken and unfun a dick move as just saying 'no, you can't do that'... which is apparently what I'm accused of saying. Its just a dick move from the other side of the screen, which apparently makes it alright.

[mean_liar]

For those that care: Letting players hand wave away the difficulties of moving 10 million lbs of iron in return for fat loot RIGHT NOW is just as broken and unfun a dick move as just saying 'no, you can't do that'... which is apparently what I'm accused of saying. Its just a dick move from the other side of the screen, which apparently makes it alright.

This is entirely true, but cutting the Gordian knot is still the best overall response: fuck the economy, it doesn't have a place at the table, its not rolling dice and telling me about its last weekend. If a player wants to roleplay out an economic empire, then to give it legs it necessarily needs to be complex and not positively solvable in a "POOF three years pass" method, and it needs the rest of the group's interest as well (again necessitating complexity).

[Spike]

I can point out that one of the oldest non-D&D games out there does have you play 'economic empire', see also:Traveller.

The fact is different players want different things out of the game. Some really just want to stab shit in the face, and don't need other motivations. Others seriously want to try and take over the world. I've had a player whose big motivation was, near as I can tell, to get married and have kids... in game.

Takes all kinds.

[Sashi]

The problem isn't that playing "economic empire" is bad. It's that the ability for PCs to turn GP into strength bonuses means that coming up with clever ways of gaining wealth is counterproductive because it either breaks or derails the game.

PC's shouldn't encounter 20% more monsters on their trip from The Orient just because they figured out they could take a chest of silks with them and make some cash on the side basically for free.

The answer is to just make it so that the basic assumption of the game is that players can't turn fat stacks of cash into a 10% better chance to stab dudes in the face.

This actually leaves "money" interacting with the rest of the world the same way every other quest reward does. The combat minigame doesn't directly interface with "Saved The Princess", "Knows a Cockatrice's Favorite Food", "Can Exorcise Demons", or "Got Married", and there's no real reason it should interface with "Became Wealthy", either.

[Fuchs]

The problem isn't that playing "economic empire" is bad. It's that the ability for PCs to turn GP into strength bonuses means that coming up with clever ways of gaining wealth is counterproductive because it either breaks or derails the game.

PC's shouldn't encounter 20% more monsters on their trip from The Orient just because they figured out they could take a chest of silks with them and make some cash on the side basically for free.

The answer is to just make it so that the basic assumption of the game is that players can't turn fat stacks of cash into a 10% better chance to stab dudes in the face.

This actually leaves "money" interacting with the rest of the world the same way every other quest reward does. The combat minigame doesn't directly interface with "Saved The Princess", "Knows a Cockatrice's Favorite Food", "Can Exorcise Demons", or "Got Married", and there's no real reason it should interface with "Became Wealthy", either.

That's how we do it. We basically don't count gold coins, at least not past the low levels. Once you reach high priest/baron/guild leader/etc. (which is usually done through a few adventures each) you can pick what lifestyle you want, and the trappings of it are free. People still work on creating trade networks in game, as priests do work on converting NPCs, but either results in rather broad changes (more influence, more status, more information sources), not "you up your income by 101 gp per week".

Minor magic items fall under "free with your lifestyle, within reason" - meaning, the party gets a (generous) number of free healing potions for their adventure, and free trinkets.

Major magic items are dealt out by DM fiat/group consensus, and the fluff for their acquisition ranges from meditating to unlock more powers of your ancestral sword to having a new weapon commissioned by the mages beholden to your church, and of course the classic "quest to recover a lost artifact" and "get a boon from your god".

[K]

The answer is to just make it so that the basic assumption of the game is that players can't turn fat stacks of cash into a 10% better chance to stab dudes in the face.

The problem is not just the "10% better chance to stab dudes in the face", but buying potions, hiring spellcasters, and all the other things people assume that money will do. Even when you aren't breaking the RNG, you need to have a reason why there isn't a Flying Carpet in every household.

I'm actually more comfortable with the idea that powerful wizards live in a tower they made themselves and sitting on a pile of djinn-created cushions and laugh at anyone trying to buy their services with shiny bits of metal.

I'm equally comfortable with powerful fighters being like rock stars where their rooms, meals, and bitches are comped because having someone hanging around who could can kill a hydra with a rusty bit of metal is worth the ale spent.

[Fuchs]

The problem is not just the "10% better chance to stab dudes in the face", but buying potions, hiring spellcasters, and all the other things people assume that money will do. Even when you aren't breaking the RNG, you need to have a reason why there isn't a Flying Carpet in every household.

I'm actually more comfortable with the idea that powerful wizards live in a tower they made themselves and sitting on a pile of djinn-created cushions and laugh at anyone trying to buy their services with shiny bits of metal.

I'm equally comfortable with powerful fighters being like rock stars where their rooms, meals, and bitches are comped because having someone hanging around who could can kill a hydra with a rusty bit of metal is worth the ale spent.

Both work well together in my opinion.

[Judging__Eagle]

The real issue is: if players can get wealth by doing things like this, what can the DM do to stop it?

These are the options:

1. Try to come up with situation-dependent problems. This fails, as I've shown above in stupid detail. Clever players will always have clever solutions to problems and just telling people that all their ideas won't work is going to make them leave your game out of frustration because they feel railroaded.

Actually, I'm all for players coming up with clever solutions. I'm against hand waving away the problems that do exist (like time, like a source for 10,000 laborers) that seriously do exist.

2. Come up with a reasonable reason why monetary wealth doesn't work the same way in DnD Land than it does in our modern economy.

I seriously try to keep immersion high in my games. Clockwork universes and sandboxes and all that shit, so forcing them to wear a PC Team Jersey that makes them unable to interact with the pieces of that clockwork universe is anathema to me, and subsequently to my players.

Thus this solution is the worst of all possible solutions. For me. I really don't care what you do in your games, but when you present this as the universal solution it gets patently offensive.

So.... people can buy a +5 Sword, if they have .... a few hundred pounds in gold?

Very immersive right there. A wagon of gold, and the +4 sword traded in for it, for a +5 sword.

Seperating mortal/mundane economies from magic economies is actually pretty reasonable. There are interactions between the Gold and Magic economy, sure, no one is debating that. Magic can't be traded for straight food (although it can sometimes create food), so people will sell magic at some rate in order to engage in the gold economy, you know, for stuff like food, and clean water grog and tea.

The thing is.... no one is going to accept anything except for magic for things that are solely within the purview of magic.

The Stone Sword is something no one can ever really buy. Neither is Aladdin's Ring or Aladdin's Lamp. They can be, perhaps, traded, stolen, donated, bestowed, inherited, gifted, and dozens of other options; however they should never be bought or sold.

A really good way to think about actually valuable magic items, is to think about relics in a museum. If someone would conceivably put an object into a museum; then no one will sell it. At least not for something as worthless, as filthy lucre.

One of the best things that K personally did for me was show me a way to have players see a dragon's hoard and get really offended that there was 10,000,000~ (give or take a few million) GP in a large dragon's sleeping lair. For them, gold was worthless.

Honestly, nothing is more indicative of power gain than a level of boredom with things that previously gained you power. Shifting from "steal all golds" to "pick up the magic items" to "only grab the actually valuable shit" is something that helps the game more than any amount of Mister Cavern dick-waving and forcing players to strip the Jade Temple of its valuable jade facade by making gold the only way to reliably increase character power.

Auto-Scaling "Magic Swords" and "Magic Breastplates" are a good way to also help mitigate that issue (playing D&D pre-Races of War, post-Races of War; and post Book of Gears, is always going to be full of some of the most important lessons I've learned as an MC).

3. Try to make the players play out the months or years of out-of-game time. Literally, the DM can try to hold the game hostage and hope the players don't just get up and leave the game in frustration because you are being a dick.

Make them run through each leg of the trip a week at a time, make them hire 10,000 laborers or actually summon up a dozen teleporting demons and actually bind them.

Because if you hand wave everything, anything is possible. Might as well look at their character sheets and hand wave away the adventure.

"Oh... lets see, you guys are 15th level and have a cleric with some serious undead turning firepower here... Yeah, the Lich King's only a CR 14... yup, you guys beat the adventure just fine, here's your XP and treasure.."

Is seriously the exact same thing as 'you guys hire two armies worth of laborers and spend a year moving iron balls to market, here, have a million gold.'

More bad strawmanning.

You only roll for things where failure can happen that you actually care about.

Do you seriously roll when the Invisible Bugbear Assassin 10 walks into a Demodand controlled Orb of Carceri [Let's say.... 4th layer of Carceri, since we want to be specific: Colothys

The fourth layer, Colothys, consists of jagged, unforgiving mountains and sudden chasms with little flat ground to find refuge. Crius' Temple, dedicated to the Titan of the same name, can be found here; furthermore, Ellaniath, the realm of the drow deity Vhaeraun, and The Land of the Hunt, realm of the god Malar, are located on Colothys.

]. So, you're 10th level, and specced for stealth. Out of the box, that's +13 in ranks; +20/+40 from Invisibility (move/still); then dex (a +5 mod by level 10 is completely within reason, really it's sub-par). So, we're looking at a good +38 to Hide; while moving, and +58 when standing still.

Of course, you obviously make the spot checks for the CR 5 Lycanthropes that populate Colothys all the time. Since you "refuse to handwave".

No, you don't. You only actually care if the PC does something that will actually risk them being spotted; like they see a CR 10 Hill Giant Wereboar; and now have to worry about a creature that has a somewhat possible chance of spotting them (ranks + higher wisdom; it might happen).

I refuse to even discuss the fact that these enemies have Scent, since we can mask scent in the mundane mortal world with mundane mortal things; you know, like oil with spices in it; or deer piss. I'm only caring if the enemies can spot Invisible PCs; if they can't, then I'm seriously going to just fucking handwave it away when they make faces at the guards who can't even see them.

Of course, if the PC begins to slather themselves in paint or hot-and-sour sauce; then they'll be a lot easier to see, you know, not being completely invisible and all.

The very idea that an MC would "make" the players play out the actual caravanning of stuff is bogus and insane.

Actual "Living" campaigns where PCs can play across dozens of games and DMs don't even do that sort of bullshit. If the PCs can seriously tool down the enemies, the DMs seriously do handwave that shit away. Once my wizard established the fact that they would simply "win" every encounter with a dumb melee enemy (by dint of casting Enlarge Person on the lvl 4 Barbarian in a group of level 1's and 2's); the DM seriously didn't care and handwaved encounters.

Now, of all the options only #2 is playable. There is a reason why this thread is titled "Your fantasy economy is bullshit."

First, there are more than three solutions to the problem. Second, if you only see one of those three as viable, there is your reason I'm wasting my time telling you you're wrong.

You can't simultaneously hold that the PCs are the only bad asses in the world AND that your bullshit trade system powered by high level magics and shit like tamed griffons exist at the same time. And if there are other high level character types, they can seriously be used to make life... interesting... for players who regularly shaft the status quo. As adventures.

Wait. I'm guessing you don't like consequences for actions either. Goes along with not caring at all about niggling things like years of time...

High level is defined as not caring about previous levels. When something is beneath you, then you're finally higher than it.

High level adventurers are adventuring in Heaven and Hell; or in the Inner Planes; not mucking around and building up an NFL League's worth of lvl 20 idiotically built characters, like they do in say, Faerun.

If people still care about gold; then they're still mortal level characters dealing with mundane problems.

That's okay; but that's not D&D. Especially not level 5+ D&D.

In a credible D&D campaign, by levels 5-10+ PCs will stop caring about bullshit early-game economies; get into more powerful mid-game economies; and begin to learn about and possibly dabble in end-game economies. You know, like Raw Chaos, Pure Hope, Distilled Pain, or Souls.

Really, in games that have fully mature magical economies.... they're run mostly as recruitment methods; and possibly even at a loss by the organizations that run them.

If you can muster 10 CR 6 PCs whenever you want; you seriously don't care that you lose 25,000 gp a year running the Hippogriff, or Pegasus ranches and outposts. You seriously ambush a bunch of Efreeti, and get them to hand over more shinies; to the tune of 75,000 gp per Efreeti. Since Efreeti don't have things like constant non-detection all the time; they can't retaliate against the powerful adventurers that organize raids; and going after the lower CR adventurers is fruitless, since there are so many; and if you make a big enough mess, a half-dozen actually powerful adventurers will show up and just kill any Efreet trying to de-stabilize their training schools.

Seriously, magic economies could be run at a loss; and not fail. Simply because of who owns and runs said economies. Powerful Adventurers.

[Spike]

JE:

I'm going to assume the quote block a the bottom is a mistake and the bulk of the quoted text is yours, because I don't recognize it from earlier in the conversation.

That said, let me point out that you are essentially strawmanning me. I pointed out earlier that yes, high level magic can solve the time problem. I did point out that BUYING high level magic will present other profit related problems, but I fully agree that there are high level solutions to the problem.

The relevant part is that I ALSO agreed, even referenced the whole wish economy, is that at that point the players don't fucking care about how much money iron balls are worth! I even said 'Trading in Hope'.

I GET THAT PART.

So, I'm even going so far as to point out that taking your adventurer out of 'the business' for an arbitrarily long point of time may make him super cheesy rich, but it doesn't really matter. He can spend 8 years humping iron around, or he can spend a couple months stabbing faces until he can summon a wall of iron every time his booze and whores fund runs low.

As for the rest: I get that, I do. My point is that the number of high level characters, and their investment into the material world is not fixed. You can seriously have the PCs be the only guys running around past lvl 10 or so... aside from the occasional villain... and your world will work one way, or you can have an assload of high level NPCs with character classes and the world will work another way... but you can't do both at the same time. I said that stunningly obvious statement because I was seriously getting the vibe from K that he wanted a world full of dirt merchants taking advantage of high level adventurer shit but was also helplessly mundane in the face of various threats that it was seriously more paranoid and 'bunker mentality' than any time in human history short of the stone ages... implying that the characters are pretty much IT.

Pick one and run with it.

My take is that the High Level adventurers tend to leave the 'Prime Material' behind and take their shit out to places like Sigil or what have you. They may have vacation homes or whatever 'back home'... but they don't run around stabbing minotaurs or building teleport networks for the rubes... who by popular concencus around here (including me) can't actually pay them in anything they care about.

But that's my take.

Personally, I think that being able to turn money directly into personal power (rather than impersonal power like private armies and the like) is a dumb idea. I didn't like it in Shadowrun before 3E came out, and I don't really like it now in 3E. Having to chose between being better able to stab faces or build a personal keep and stock it with oceans of booze is aggrivating. In Shadowrun you have to explain why this guy (your shadowrunner) has seriously not retired at some point rather than spend another million nuyen on another wizbang upgrade.... or just keep people dirt poor, and gimped.

[hogarth]

That said, I figure K still has the meta-analysis correct. #2 is the best response to all the wanking, unless you want to make the game about caravaning or whatever.

Who is "you" in that sentence? If the players "want to make the game about caravanning or whatever", then they're not going to be happy with an answer of "you can't" (i.e. #2), will they?