Wish Economy

[RadiantPhoenix]

I wonder how many pluses you could get on a sword in trade for a baker's dozen of them...

[Kaelik]

The dragon would not make that offer in a wish economy, because +4 swords have values measured in Something Awesome, not gold...He would make that trade for +2 swords, because +2 swords are in the gold economy,

A +2 sword and a +4 sword are actually the same identical sword, and it's gold economy.

[DSMatticus]

A +2 sword and a +4 sword are actually the same identical sword

I feel like I'm missing something here... Could you explain?

[Prak]

A +2 sword and a +4 sword are actually the same identical sword

I feel like I'm missing something here... Could you explain?

Tome magic items, there are just magic weapons, and their enhancement is 1/3 your character level.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Unless they are artifacts.

[DSMatticus]

Oh. I wasn't talking about Tome magic items, that obviously changes things.

[RobbyPants]

Oh. I wasn't talking about Tome magic items, that obviously changes things.

It was probably assumed because the wish economy is a Tome thing, too.

[K]

If you can convince a dragon to take virgins as currency for magic items, I think that's not a Wish economy. It's a standard DnD economy.

The actual currency is immaterial, and that is a core conceit of the Wish economy. It breaks down like this:

Turnip Economy = things that are stupidly common and require little work.

Gold Economy = things which even 1st level characters can get, but with difficulty or a lot of work.

Wish Economy = things which are only gained and can only be retained by powerful adventurers.


So under a Wish economy, there is no amount of virgins a dragon will accept for magic items. He can just trade his gold for virgins if he actually wants to. At best, you could get a gold profit by subcontracting the work to orcs.

[RadiantPhoenix]

there is no amount of virgins a dragon will accept for virgins.

Wait, what?

[K]

there is no amount of virgins a dragon will accept for virgins.

Wait, what?

Whoops. I meant "no amount of virgins for magic items."

My point was that virgins are a Gold Economy currency.

[Archmage]

My point was that virgins are a Gold Economy currency.

Are you implying that virgins can be wished for?

[darkmaster]

If they cost less than 15,000 gold, yes.

[Red_Rob]

My point was that virgins are a Gold Economy currency.

Are you implying that virgins can be wished for?

Human life has always been cheap. See Slavery. In D&D you can just raid the nearest village and get some virgins. Vorpal swords, not so much.

[Spike]

You are fucking retarded. 5 is just 2, That's exactly what 2 is, it decouples gold wealth from power. That's the only goddam purpose of the Wish economy. The thing you are railing against is the thing you are supporting.

Stop being so stupid.

It is not the same thing. In the wish economy you are just adding a high level medium of exchange. Another poster in this thread pointed out earlier that someone, somewhere, will be exchanging big piles of gold for 'wish economy money', so its not even effective at preventing people from getting big piles of gold and turning them into 'wish level power'.

Of course, you accuse me of being stupid while simultaneously assuming that I just have +10 swords (or whatever) being traded around on the marketplace somehow, or party wizards churning them out for the lulz, and never asking HOW I would decouple wealth and power.

Offering Thor 'Wish Economy Virgin Souls' for Mjolnir is exactly the same as offering Thor 'Big Piles of Gold' for Mjolnir. Even if 'Virgin Souls' are more valuable to him than gold, he's not going to give away that fucking hammer, so no economy really exists above a certain power level, no amount of wealth will allow you to buy yourself in, whether you measure your monies in shiny metals or exotic magic substances. How fucking hard is that to grasp?!

Any you call me stupid.

The point of a Black Onyx Castle is precisely that the absurd wealth you gain from it is worth the very small amount of work, You break it into 50lb chunks and have your outsiders teleport it to different markets, and sell it for huge chunks of cash, and it takes a few days at worst, and you get a few million gp, and if you spend a few more days, you get a few more million gp. Even if the DM tries to make you play out the medium, you can actually just do it, and it takes 30 minutes, and then you have a few million gp.

Do you understand the Law of Supply and Demand?

Seriously. Once a substance is common enough that you can seriously build fucking castles out of it, it is essentially valueless. There is a reason DeBeers makes a lot of noise about conflict diamonds.

This isn't exactly rocket science.

We've traded brick for Obsidian, and you serious seemed to think I was going to object to the value of Obsidian or something so you've traded up to Black Onyx, because we KNOW that has a value in D&D land because of 'spell components, yo!'.

How this plays out isn't even unusual, its the fucking plot to a god damn Twilight Zone Episode! The players take 'Castle Onyx' and start dismantling it into 50lb chunks to sell all over the planes. Locally, at least, Onyx becomes so common that the god damn peasants (they of 1sp a week of labor) are using it to play checkers, and even in the planes, the players quickly find that, while they made a profit at first, eventually demons (or whatever) quickly learned who provided all that fucking onyx in the first god damn place and go to HIM, getting it at a fucking discount, forcing the players to sell their supply at ever lower rates.

End of the day? They made money, even a lot of money, but they didn't break the game with millions and millions of gold, and either any necromantic spell requiring '1000 Gp of Onyx' either requires a god damn boulder or the GM crosses off the gp value of the spell entry and simply writes in 'thumb sized chunk'.

And the game moves on. Congratulations, you just fundamentally altered the economy of the universe with your awesome castle!

What's next? Castle Caviar? A Castle made of Virgin Elves? Doesn't matter, the same rules apply.

We haven't even gone into opportunity costs at length yet. Every time you cast a spell to move a few silver pieces worth of brick around (or a few gold worth of obsidian, or a lot more gold worth of Onyx) you repeatedly forget that you could just sell that spell casting straight away for X amount of gold, so those castings eat into your profit margins.

Again, not rocket science.

Its not impossible to sell the raw materials of any building for money, but given what adventurers could be doing to make money, it should be fucking pointless for them to waste their time doing it. Start there to fix your economy, not make 'Gold+' markets.

[Fuchs]

The universe is far bigger than you think.

[Kaelik]

Another poster in this thread pointed out earlier that someone, somewhere, will be exchanging big piles of gold for 'wish economy money',

That person is wrong.

Do you understand the Law of Supply and Demand?

Do you understand the law of supply and demand? When the Demand is very very large, and the supply is very very small, and the supply increases by an amount 1/100th of the supply beforehand, it does not change the price very much, if at all.

A Castle of Black Onyx is worth billions of gold, millions per day. Across the entire Prime Material Plane, that doesn't even make a dent in demand, without even considering the literally infinite demand of other planes.

Seriously. Once a substance is common enough that you can seriously build fucking castles out of it, it is essentially valueless. There is a reason DeBeers makes a lot of noise about conflict diamonds.

This isn't exactly rocket science.

No, it's economics, which is apparently something you don't understand. A Castle of Onyx does not mean that it's so common that everyone can have a castle of Onyx. People build a big old Castle to brag about it, and they do it out of expensive materials to brag more. So if you kill a Braggart and take his castle, if you can buy high level stuff with gold, you then are absurdly rich after you sack it, which makes one wonder why the guy you killed didn't just buy 47 Belt's of Battle, or a +80 Cloak of Resistance.

Which is the point. If gold can be used for stuff, then you don't get Castles made of Onyx. But if selling the Castle off doesn't result in a power gain, then rich people can still do rich people things, like make castles of expensive materials.

Locally, at least, Onyx becomes so common that the god damn peasants (they of 1sp a week of labor) are using it to play checkers,

Why would you think that it would be locally centered when the strategy revolves around Greater Teleport?

I mean, besides that you are stupid.

and either any necromantic spell requiring '1000 Gp of Onyx' either requires a god damn boulder or the GM crosses off the gp value of the spell entry and simply writes in 'thumb sized chunk'.

You are fucking stupid. Ignoring how selling the castle doesn't significantly devalue Onyx, because that's been covered, amount of X doesn't change with what people agree to, because if that was the case, every 1000gp of Diamond Dust would be created by one guy buying a diamond for 100gp, crushing it, and then selling each grain to his party members one at a time for 1000 gp each.

Every time you cast a spell to move a few silver pieces worth of brick around (or a few gold worth of obsidian, or a lot more gold worth of Onyx) you repeatedly forget that you could just sell that spell casting straight away for X amount of gold, so those castings eat into your profit margins.

A second level spell will make you less money that casting that second level spell to split out 50lb of Onyx would.

[virgil]

Do you understand the Law of Supply and Demand?

Seriously. Once a substance is common enough that you can seriously build fucking castles out of it, it is essentially valueless. There is a reason DeBeers makes a lot of noise about conflict diamonds.

Do you understand that when you have access to teleportation and planar travel, the entire mass of Castle Onyx isn't enough to lower the market value of onyx as far as the players are concerned? Seriously, the players have access to a market that spans dimensions, so the demand is essentially bottomless.

[DSMatticus]

Another poster in this thread pointed out earlier that someone, somewhere, will be exchanging big piles of gold for 'wish economy money

No, that's not true. Nobody makes that exchange. That is not a standard exchange, because it is ripping yourself off. It may happen once in a blue moon, but it is does not occur reliably enough that you could ever hope to find someone willing to make that trade unless you were in the right place at the right time. It is NOT a part of the economy.

Seriously. Once a substance is common enough that you can seriously build fucking castles out of it, it is essentially valueless. There is a reason DeBeers makes a lot of noise about conflict diamonds.

If I were to find a million dollars worth of gold buried by pirates, I would become wealthy. The effect on the price of gold would be pathetically negligible.

If the adventurers stumble across an old, forgotten castle from a dead empire in a land where men dare not walk (or whatever fluff you've got going on), and it happens to be built of obsidian, they will get ridiculously fucking wealthy and their effect on the obsidian market will be negligible.

Alo, you're having a massive temporal fuckup with this part of your argument: just because at some point someone gathered enough obsidian to be significant, does not mean people are routinely gathering that much obsidian. Hell, the fucking fact that an obsidian castle exists suggests there is actually a (negligibly) HIGHER demand for obsidian, because that castle has removed that obsidian from the market. And if people still want obsidian, you can break down that castle, sell it to them, and make a shit ton of money.

Of course, you accuse me of being stupid while simultaneously assuming that I just have +10 swords (or whatever) being traded around on the marketplace somehow

A man with a +9 sword and a +10 sword has more swords than he cares for. We would propose an economy powerful enough to support people trading around +9 swords, so that person can take the +9 sword they don't want and trade it for +9 armor they do want.

You would propose that it is impossible to trade a +9 sword for +9 armor because those things cannot have values measured in anything. That's stupid. It should be obviously stupid.

[fectin]

ECONOMCS! *hand wave*

Watch this then: "The price elasticity of demand for Black Onyx is extremely high." Look, all your objections went away!

[tzor]

Because seriously, the second some DM thinks it would be cool to describe a diamond-studded chandelier for coolness factor, it will get fucking looted the second no one's looking and turned into better stabbing sticks.

Seriously, WTF? Go ahead and steal it ... see if I care. Literally.

For a moment, let's use the 1E DMG because that was the first book I could find. Base cost for a diamond is 5K. But who uses base values in the making of a chandelier? Just randomly finding diamonds there is a 10% chance the gem could be worth 10-40% less and a 10% chance it is the next lower base level which is 1K gp. Yes, it might have a lot of these diamonds, but how many? 100? 200? Note that max value for Jewlery (pg 26) is 640K.

And really, you should generate the worth first and then describe it based on the worth.

And coolness sake? Give me a break. I've seen the great crystal things used at the met opera. From a distance they are cool, up close, they look like shit. And those use the power of light bulbs, candle powered ones have less light to go through the crystals. Leave the diamonds for the boblets, rings and everything you can look at up close and in direct sunlight.

[MGuy]

Before this slips into an economic tangent I'd like to just pose this question: Players will invent ways to get whatever they want and nothing short of DM dickery will keep them from doing so. True/False?

[RadiantPhoenix]

Regardless of whether that is true, if you can arrange for what they want to be something or done some way other than "tear this imaginary world into little tiny shreds," you don't need to stop them.

[MGuy]

If I mentioned earlier how I think that power should be decoupled from wealth but since people seem to enjoy arguing about it I figure I'd pose the question.

[K]

Before this slips into an economic tangent I'd like to just pose this question: Players will invent ways to get whatever they want and nothing short of DM dickery will keep them from doing so. True/False?

You question is a strawman for the argument.

More accurately, it works like this:

Players have expectations for how they expect the world to work. They ask, "hey, why can't we just sell this thing we've taken, even if it's not traditional loot?"

When the DM responds by putting problem after problem in their way in defiance of reason and doesn't have the balls to just tell them "hey guys, the economic part of this game is woefully inadequate and I can't let you sell those things because it'll fuck the game," then that DM is a dick.

Passive-aggressively dealing with problems in your campaign is high dickery.

[fectin]

It's more whether you consider emergent behaviors a feature of rolplaying games or a distraction from your storytelling.