Wish Economy

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Mon May 30, 2011 7:11 am

fectin wrote:If you were designing a Dnd wealth system whole cloth, instead of rewickering the existing one via the Wish economy, what are some things you'd think about?

I thought about this very thing since the Wish Economy thing didn't sit well in my stomach. Don't get me wrong, generally players enjoyed WBL and have thus far not minded me stepping in to stop certain amounts of silly. However, at this point in time I just believe that characters shouldn't be item dependent.

Swordslinger · Post by **Swordslinger** » Mon May 30, 2011 8:10 am

Some kind of WBL guideline simply for creating characters at a higher level. You need to know how many magic items they get. Even if that wealth is in something arbitrary like Adventure Points, they need some way to represent what items they have.

K · Post by K » Mon May 30, 2011 9:29 am

Tiering WBL was always a spot fix for the WLB system. If you were doing a complete rewrite, you'd need to do an actual rewrite by concepting out magic items in an entirely different way.

Personally, I'd detach wealth from magic items entirely and create a robust system for spending wealth for social power. This way you can have treasure hordes big enough to feel big, but don't have to worry about combat balance if you decided to do an adventure in a diamond mine. I really like the idea of people carting away dragon hordes to upgrade castles or buy the favor of kings, but really hate the idea of people doing the same to make a +2 bonus item into a +4 or buying items off a shopping list.

Then, rewrite magic items so that they do cool things and aren't required for functioning as an adventurer, but instead add to the experience. The whole thing where the warriors need magic armor and weapons with the highest bonuses and/or materials and everyone needs ability-boosters and saves, skill, and AC bonuses is unworkable for a tabletop RPG (though it works great for a MMO with super-light storytelling that needs every bit of positive reinforcement it can muster).

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Mon May 30, 2011 9:18 pm

DSMatticus wrote: A tiered system works best. Create different economies the players can gradually move into.

1-7: Gold tier
8-14: Planar mumbo jumbo
15-20: Something even more epic

I like these tiers...

DSMatticus wrote: And then it's just a matter of picking the right numbers for things

...But that's where I have trouble. 15K still seems good for the upper one, but what's the right breakpoint for lower level? 10 gold? 50 gold? 100? 500?
Here's my thoughts so far:
- At 400 gold, you solve all your problems by smothering them with Quaal's feather token: trees. That's cool once, but not every time.
- 1st level wands are 15/charge. 2nd level are 90/charge. That seems pretty exploitabe, but I don't know that I care.
- CLW portion is 50 gold. I'm pretty okay with players having all the CLW potions they can carry, especially at 8th level.
That makes me think that 50 is the right breakpoint, which lets 100gp gems be the money (not bad), and is also a nice round number.

But then I see weapon prices. a 50 or 100 gold cap on the top tier says that you couldn't get a composite longbow with regular people money. And that makes me sad. Armor prices only underscore that problem.

Since I started this thread, I've been coming back more and more to the idea that the 15K breakpoint is the only really worthwhile one. That's unfortunate, because I think it is a bit too abrupt, but it's liveable.

K wrote:I really like the idea of people carting away dragon hordes to upgrade castles or buy the favor of kings, but really hate the idea of people doing the same to make a +2 bonus item into a +4 or buying items off a shopping list.

If you flip that around: is it a good idea to allow people to turn a +2 item into gold (and therefor into a spiffier castle)?

Otherwise everything you said makes sense. I've even seen it done (fantasycraft), though the results are so-so. The end result isn't bad, it's just that it looks like someone said "You know what DnD needs? More bookkeeping."

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Mon May 30, 2011 9:32 pm

Well, fectin, you're running into the problem that the currently listed values for things are unjustifiabily ridiculous. You will never find a good breakpoint, you have to start assigning new values to the stuff that currently exists and pick those new values around your desired breakpoints.

Which is just a giant mess no one wants to do, because it's a massive overhaul of multiple D&D subsystems (the economy, magic items, and certain wealth-generating spells).

Swordslinger · Post by **Swordslinger** » Tue May 31, 2011 8:50 am

K wrote: Personally, I'd detach wealth from magic items entirely and create a robust system for spending wealth for social power.

The problem is that if wealth is infinite, it's no longer wealth. Nobody wants gold if it can be mass produced, unless there's some super secret alliance of wizards that's conspiring to make sure nobody floods the market and gold production is controlled. You're selling sand to the Saudis.

The new wealth becomes what magic items you have, because that's what you'll ultimately end up trading. It may be a barter system, but rich men are people with big magic item collections. So when you need an Axe of the Dwarf King, you can trade up your Orb of Ultimate Magic for it.

This way you can have treasure hordes big enough to feel big, but don't have to worry about combat balance if you decided to do an adventure in a diamond mine.

I don't even understand this. The treasure hoard isn't "big" when you devalue money. It's like the dragon is sitting on copper pieces. If gold is worth nothing then sitting on a ton of it doesn't even matter. It could be an empty chamber of rock and it wouldn't matter. It's like having some guy find an underground lake: Hey if you were living on Arrakis, you'd be super rich with all this water! Too bad this ain't Arrakis sucka!

I really like the idea of people carting away dragon hordes to upgrade castles or buy the favor of kings, but really hate the idea of people doing the same to make a +2 bonus item into a +4 or buying items off a shopping list.

Why? If you're super powerful, you don't need the favor of kings, and you can cast wish to make your own castles. Cities don't even exist because wizard almighty just has to wave his hand and destroy one for fun, and because the economy means nothing to high level people, everyone sits back and lets him do that because nobody will even care if the city goes missing.

If the economy doesn't matter, then the city doesn't matter. The king is a chump that you backhand anytime he does something you don't like. You don't even bother to wine and dine his ass, you just make him your bitch and if he's lucky you won't make him wear the gimp suit.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Tue May 31, 2011 11:58 am

Swordslinger wrote:
K wrote: Personally, I'd detach wealth from magic items entirely and create a robust system for spending wealth for social power.

The problem is that if wealth is infinite, it's no longer wealth. Nobody wants gold if it can be mass produced, unless there's some super secret alliance of wizards that's conspiring to make sure nobody floods the market and gold production is controlled. You're selling sand to the Saudis.

I've seen two responses to that criticism:

"All rich people somehow agree not to flood the world with gold, so it's okay." -- That's just stupid.

"Wait, did I say 'infinite gold'? I meant 'lots of gold'." -- That's reasonable-ish; in the real world we have multi-billionaires and people with barely any money coexisting and it doesn't seem to break verisimilitude. But that leads to the conclusion that you should be able to sell a +3 sword for a million gold pieces (or a billion or whatever) if there's still some scarcity of gold, just like if I happened to own an Apache attack helicopter I should be able to sell it to some tinpot country for a million dollars; I mean, there would be lots and lots (and lots) of obstacles in the way of selling it, but it should still be worth a great deal of money to someone.

Fuchs · Post by **Fuchs** » Tue May 31, 2011 12:05 pm

You could go all abstract with the magic items. Instead of gold you get "permament magic item tokens" and "consumable magic items tokens" per level, which you can spend on gear, which the DM then either has you find, buy, acquire, loot and so on.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue May 31, 2011 12:26 pm

Actually, yes, it's infinite gold.

You can wish for more gold whenever you want.

You have to spend spell slots, a good chunk of time, and risk being shot in the face with lazors to do it.

But you can always get more gold.

The thing to keep in mind is not all infinities are equal, and so there's an actual reason why you don't put effort into getting more infinite gold than you need, and giving it to people. Putting a lot of work and some small risk into getting slightly more gold just so you can give it to someone is fucking silly.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Tue May 31, 2011 2:06 pm

There's no reason to even try for gold. If it exists chances are PCs can just take it. Be it by force, coercion, stealth, etc if they know about it, they want it, and/or its worth getting the PCs should be engineering a way to acquire it. I'd much prefer a system where items didn't = power.

Quantumboost · Post by **Quantumboost** » Tue May 31, 2011 4:10 pm

Terminology complaint @Kaelik, Hogarth, Swordslinger, whoever else used the term "infinite" before them: I think the word you mean is "unlimited". At no point do characters have actually infinite gold; any single wish gives you finite gold and takes nonzero time, so having actually infinite gold would require infinite time.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Tue May 31, 2011 4:35 pm

hogarth wrote: ... if I happened to own an Apache attack helicopter I should be able to sell it to some tinpot country for a million dollars; I mean, there would be lots and lots (and lots) of obstacles in the way of selling it, but it should still be worth a great deal of money to someone.

This is a really good example. You can relatively easily turn an Apache into money. It is very hard to turn money into an Apache. (Probably not actually impossible, there is a civilian-owned harrier, but there's also only one of those.)

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Tue May 31, 2011 4:39 pm

fectin wrote:
hogarth wrote: ... if I happened to own an Apache attack helicopter I should be able to sell it to some tinpot country for a million dollars; I mean, there would be lots and lots (and lots) of obstacles in the way of selling it, but it should still be worth a great deal of money to someone.
This is a really good example. You can relatively easily turn an Apache into money. It is very hard to turn money into an Apache. (Probably not actually impossible, there is a civilian-owned harrier, but there's also only one of those.)

Exactly -- hard and maybe extremely outrageously expensive (e.g. I have to spend a huge amount of time and money setting up my own factory reverse-engineering it in some foreign country), but not actually impossible.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue May 31, 2011 4:47 pm

Quantumboost wrote:Terminology complaint @Kaelik, Hogarth, Swordslinger, whoever else used the term "infinite" before them: I think the word you mean is "unlimited". At no point do characters have actually infinite gold; any single wish gives you finite gold and takes nonzero time, so having actually infinite gold would require infinite time.

Actually, That was specifically my point. They do have infinite gold, because they do have infinite time (barring murder). They do not have unlimited gold, because their gold supply is limited by their production method, and transportation.

Quantumboost · Post by **Quantumboost** » Tue May 31, 2011 5:03 pm

>_<

Infinite gold doesn't require merely infinite potential time, it requires infinite actual time to have passed in which they have been actually spending wishes. At any actual point in time, a character has only spent a finite amount of time wishing for gold.

If you can describe to me in concrete terms a single point in time where a D&D character has previously spent an infinite (not very large, actually infinite) number of actions on gold wishes, with the "no wishing for more wishes" fix as per Tome, I'll cede the point. Otherwise you're just stringing characters in a sequence that doesn't correspond with the actual state of things.

Otherwise, would you prefer "uncapped"? "Interminable"? Anything that corresponds to "arbitrarily large finite"?

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Tue May 31, 2011 5:16 pm

"for characters in the wish economy, gold is no longer a scarce resource". That means it has literally zero intrinsic value to those characters. By extension, anything they can buy with gold also has zero intrinsic value.

Your other terms need to be defined before you use them, because they're too general now. How you define them will (obviously) determine what statements that use those terms are correct.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Tue May 31, 2011 8:06 pm

quantumboost wrote:If you can describe to me in concrete terms a single point in time where a D&D character has previously spent an infinite (not very large, actually infinite) number of actions on gold wishes

Psion 15/Metamind 10 (possible much earlier, of course)
Affinity field + synchronicity loop + infinite power points

Technically, we still haven't fulfilled the requirement of infinite actions, because the round stops at some point (when the character chooses) and the next round begins, and the last round wasn't technically an infinite number, just an arbitrarily high number. But it's close!

More seriously, quantumboost is completely technically right. At no point do you have infinite gold, ever, except at the end of infinite time (emphasis on end). Your production rate of gold is very much finite, and an integral over a finite quantity will only lead to infinity only over {0,infinity}. Well, from any integer x: {x,infinity}, but nevermind that.

You do, however, have a metric fuckton of gold, which for the purposes of this discussion is completely sufficient.

Swordslinger wrote:You're selling sand to the Saudis.

Wrong. You're the Saudis, and you're not selling or buying sand.

Your argument is roughly, "high level characters have access to ridiculous amounts of gold, so this will devalue gold." But it only does that if those high level characters go out, get that gold, and then spend it into the economy. And this is just obviously not going to happen, because by the time the character is in the wish economy it's pretty god damn hard to think of one thing a wizard could be bothered to buy instead of wish up or get some other way completely for free without having to leave the comfort of his own home.

Gold is valueless and 'potentially abundant' to people in the wish economy, but the overlap between the wish economy and the gold economy is so small that gold's value in one economy does not effect its value in the other.

Swordslinger · Post by **Swordslinger** » Tue May 31, 2011 9:32 pm

DSMatticus wrote: Your argument is roughly, "high level characters have access to ridiculous amounts of gold, so this will devalue gold." But it only does that if those high level characters go out, get that gold, and then spend it into the economy. And this is just obviously not going to happen, because by the time the character is in the wish economy it's pretty god damn hard to think of one thing a wizard could be bothered to buy instead of wish up or get some other way completely for free without having to leave the comfort of his own home.

Gold is valueless and 'potentially abundant' to people in the wish economy, but the overlap between the wish economy and the gold economy is so small that gold's value in one economy does not effect its value in the other.

You spend gold to buy materials to craft magical items. They're materials so arbitrary that literally the only thing we know about them is how much they cost. You actually can't even describe magic item components without referring to their value in gold, it's the only unit of measure you have.

Second, K is talking about people blowing money to buy castles and crap. When you do that, you are dumping tons of gold into the economy.

And more to the point, if nothing you can buy with gold even matters, then gold is valueless.

Quantumboost · Post by **Quantumboost** » Tue May 31, 2011 9:59 pm

The part of Tome of Fiends' wish (i.e. the one that doesn't let you wish for more wishes) that lets you wish up gold specifies "Wealth: A character can wish for mundane wealth whose total value is 25,000 gp or less.", not gold specifically. The same goes for 3.5 base wish apart from having to phrase it so those items are in a single chunk.

Your wizard, who would otherwise be going out and buying whatever valuable components are used to make a cloak of invisibility, knows what those things he would otherwise buy are (hence his ability to exchange gold for those items) and can thus wish those components up directly.

The player, and character, can just wish for "the components to make a cloak of invisibility", which have a specific value measured in hypothetical gold pieces without having to barter actual shiny yellow pieces of metal for them first.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Tue May 31, 2011 10:11 pm

Swordslinger wrote:You spend gold to buy materials to craft magical items.

A more accurate depiction of this you magic into existence the material necessary to craft magical items, as Quantum says.

Swordslinger wrote:Second, K is talking about people blowing money to buy castles and crap.

This is a formality - most of this process can, too, be wished for. Or done in some other way.

But overall, both of those examples are bad because they are drops in the bucket. The D&D world is huge, and its economies are huge, and the amount of inflation caused by wizards "throwing some gold at their problems" is seriously negligible. And then gold disappears because dragons steal and hoard it. And tons of other things.

Imagine one guy who could will gold into existence, and he buys himself a playboy mansion and a life of luxury. Do you really think his individual actions are going to contribute to a significant shift in the value of gold? Now, imagine half the time he just wills what he wants into existence directly. Even if there are a handful of these people, they just aren't contributing significantly to the economy in a significant way. They totally have the potential to take a few weeks and dedicate their time to fucking up the economy for shits and giggles, and they could probably do that, but these people can also probably just flat out destroy cities with fire from the sky, so it's not even cool to them to fuck up economies for fun.

Swordslinger wrote:if nothing you can buy with gold even matters, then gold is valueless.

No, no, no. The economic perspective of one individual does not effect the economic perspective of another individual if they aren't dealing with eachother in some meaningful way. Gold is valueless to high level wizards, because they can't use gold for anything and they can generate it 'at will.' But commoners cannot generate gold at will, and as long as that's true and there isn't some wizard going around dumping gold into the economy 'for the lulz' the commoner can presumably use gold to buy things (or more likely, copper and silver).

Gold is post-scarcity for super-wizards, but they've stopped giving a shit about gold and don't spend it anyway, so gold is still pre-scarcity for everyone else.

Draco_Argentum · Post by **Draco_Argentum** » Wed Jun 01, 2011 8:13 am

hogarth wrote:"All rich people somehow agree not to flood the world with gold, so it's okay." -- That's just stupid.

This is breathtakingly simple. A wizard can create 15000gp every 6 seconds. They can trivially make 1,000,000gp a day and still have time to party like a rock star. If you want to buy all of that wizard's time for a month to have even a rather modest magic item made you need to pay 30,000,000gp plus the cost of him having to avoid strenuous effort, like rockstar partying, for a whole month.

Only a total moron of a wizard would agree to make a powerful item for gold. That being the case only a total moron would sell a powerful item that they somehow acquired for gold.

Swordslinger · Post by **Swordslinger** » Wed Jun 01, 2011 9:43 am

DSMatticus wrote:A more accurate depiction of this you magic into existence the material necessary to craft magical items, as Quantum says.

Then at that point all wizards have infinite magic items. That's seriously bad, because there's now no reason for them to do anything. It's also a total kick in the nuts to any fighters because now they have nothing to trade to wizards to get magic items themselves.

That's a terrible non-economy that breaks the game. Because at that point planar currency can't even exist. Wizards need absolutely nothing. Now I realize that everyone at the Den wants to play Elminster, the undefeatable mage who can jerk off on any part of the game universe with impunity with infinite wealth and infinite magic items and 100 different cheat codes to give himself god mode whenever he wants, but come on.. This is a horrible horrible idea for a game, and one of the reasons the wish economy just does not work.

The very idea that you'll have planar currency is bullshit, because wizards do not need to trade with anyone. Any materials actually worth anything can just be magicked into existence.

Imagine one guy who could will gold into existence, and he buys himself a playboy mansion and a life of luxury. Do you really think his individual actions are going to contribute to a significant shift in the value of gold? Now, imagine half the time he just wills what he wants into existence directly. Even if there are a handful of these people, they just aren't contributing significantly to the economy in a significant way. They totally have the potential to take a few weeks and dedicate their time to fucking up the economy for shits and giggles, and they could probably do that, but these people can also probably just flat out destroy cities with fire from the sky, so it's not even cool to them to fuck up economies for fun.

Wizards maybe but not deities. Deities want worshippers and what better way than to go Santa clause style tossing around limitless gold?

Gold is post-scarcity for super-wizards, but they've stopped giving a shit about gold and don't spend it anyway, so gold is still pre-scarcity for everyone else.

But so what? It doesn't change the fact that it's useless. A dragon could be sitting on a pile of gold or he could be sitting on sand, from the player's perspective it doesn't fucking matter, because it's a non-reward. It just seems stupid to me.

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Wed Jun 01, 2011 10:04 am

What is your solution Swordslinger?

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Wed Jun 01, 2011 12:37 pm

hogarth wrote:"All rich people somehow agree not to flood the world with gold, so it's okay." -- That's just stupid.

Well, it seems for the most part, wizards can get all the mundane things they want without interacting with the gold economy. They can simply just Wish up all the necessary components. They can probably even get most of the labor done without having to pay real people to do it directly. So, they can do X by maintaining the status quo or by not. It seems like they'd probably rather do X and not cause some crazy social upheaval in the surrounding lands, all other things being equal.

Although, this seems like it could be the basis for a mid-high level plot: some evil wizard now has the ability to create unlimited gold, and he's decided to flood the economy with it just for the evulz. What are you gonna do about it?

K · Post by K » Wed Jun 01, 2011 1:53 pm

Leress wrote:What is your solution Swordslinger?

You do realize that he's just been trolling you? He's been arguing for AND against the gold economy the whole time.