Explaining the Wish Economy

[Sunwitch]

So I know this guy. I was just explaining the wish economy to him today as an example of how to accommodate little issues in the D&D rules like Balor Mining and Chain Binding and whatever else. Now he's dead set on this being a bad idea as it takes away a rewards system that gives people physical material goods as opposed to "abstract" systems like XP. I tried explaining how using gold as a rewards system by tying power to wealth and such is in fact a BAD thing, and breaks verisimilitude, but he countered by basically saying the wish economy breaks verisimilitude (somehow), and fading off into unrelated crap like how it affects the layout of the setting (and didn't give any reasoning as to why it was bad).

Has anyone else had weird issues like this when explaining the wish economy? I can understand preferring a sort of arbitrary ding like "it's against interplanar law", or just making a gentleman's agreement that it's not how things are going to work, just for the sake of personal tastes, but this guy absolutely abhorred the entire idea and thought it was bad for the game.

[Avoraciopoctules]

When I look for reasons to oppose the Wish Economy model (and perhaps the Tomes in general), the first thing I think of is that one could argue that its focus is depressing. It shows how many fantasy worlds and game systems fall apart the moment people start to think outside certain boxes, and for many people, this prospect is unpleasant.

Thing is, thinking about the Wish Economy and analyzing it in sufficient depth to articulate the above argument could easily cut into one's capacity to enjoy the aforementioned settings, so I can see why someone might shy away from giving straight answers.

[RandomCasualty2]

Well, the main problem with the wish economy is that it doesn't fit with published settings, and that magic item creation still breaks it, since you can get infinite gold and just use the gold to make magic items.

You're also rather screwed if you intend on playing forgotten realms or something too, because it totally breaks the plotline and makes the world make even less sense than it did.

The wish economy is really only good if you make a new campaign world to feature it and basically ban item creation (or require planar currency to make items).

[K]

The Wish economy is just a sample of the "post-wealth economy". Take away all the magic spells, and the same problem crops up if your adventurers decide to do something like strip the wall covers of the Palace of Gold or find a diamond mine or something equivalent. Any sort of concentrated effort to produce wealth will do so, and then the game breaks because any system where wealth equals magic power fails.

My personal favorite that I came up with was using the spell Flesh to Salt to turn cows into piles of salt worth thousands of gold. Another favorite was a Dungeon Magazine adventure that had a trap that cycled a room-sized pit of iron balls into a projectile device (there were millions of gp of iron in that pit).

Basically, you can't have item creation be a function of money because economies get broken all the time (see the history of any robber baron ever).

[Sunwitch]

Well, again, the problem isn't so much a matter of taste or preference; he seems to be stuck on this idea that it's actively bad for the game. I would be totally able to understand if he just didn't like the model of the wish economy out of personal preference, but the idea that it actually breaks verisimilitude or ruins a model for rewarding players that never worked particularly well in the first place is the part that bugs me.

Really, I've never run a game using the wish economy myself. In the setting I normally work with I put into effect planar laws or whatever that makes it so that manipulating chain binding or whatever ends up with a bunch of Inevitables on your ass, which definitely means you can use it as a plot point, but it's not going to help out your wealth by any significant deal. Yeah, it's totally arbitrary, but I have yet to see anyone have any major qualms with it. If the players and I wanted a wish economy, which I'd be open to, I'd basically just get rid of that deal and we'd go all out.

From a game design perspective, though, I'm not sure how anyone can make the claim that the wildly screwed up economy described in the DMG and such makes more sense than the wish economy. Which is what we were discussing.

[mean_liar]

The Wish Economy to me has been more a warning than a setting detail: it basically lays out why you need to counter it somehow if you want that level of verisimilitude outside the spotlight on the PCs.

Trying to explain it should be easy enough. The interesting part is where you either live with it or find a way to take its troubles out of the game.

[souran]

The real problem with the wish economy is that it turns every setting into Diskworld.

At least the tomes try and present the idea that if you can think of it somebody else thought of it first. So while it sounds like you are being super smart to use divinations to create a command economy that is always perfectly accurate and to use various mythical creatures in place of modern building tools and what not. Somebody else was just as smart and did that a long time ago. Or even just enough before you to render you a startup looking to face down a midevel version of wallmart.

It also means that the world is not really a fantasy world so much as a fantasy analogue of the real world.

One of the tomes discusses that the nobility that exists either consist of adventurers, the children of adventurers trained by those adventurers, or people to marry off to adventurers who will rule.

The issue I see is that heroes cannot stop being heros or somebody will surpass them, kill them, and take their kingdom. They have to be out adventurering nearly constantly or their power is dwindling.

The real historical analogue to this is the Roman Emperors. The "good emperors" or were all the soldier emperors who spent more time with the legions than trying to run the empire. They left that to the senate. Wouldn't the wish economy, which can use wish to find a perfectly accurate popular vote of all sientient humanoids in a region be more like the middle empire?

Heroes who sit in their ruled kingdoms are considered bad terrible little despots. They interfer with day to day commerce and everybody else just getting on with their lives. However, nobody can stop them AND occasionally you need them. So its better to keep your lords out in the countryside genociding dragons and ancient evils while an elected council runs their nation-states wile they are out doing that. Occasionally somebody tries to sieze power this way but unless they are serectly level 20 wizards the nations high level wizards use divination and meta magic to long distance insta-kill them.

While this is defiantly entertaining after a fashion, it is not tolkienesque, or jordanesque, or like bakker, or even like the stuff greenwood writes.

I think that the real issue is that it makes people basically know that they live in a game world. There are to many things that are limited because of a game rules reason for it seem like a real world. If the whole world exists to take optimum advantage of game mechanics it becomes less of a game world with rules to simulate certain actions than a model world designed to show the most effective outcomes of choices.

What if your game world treated "aid another" the same way as the "wish economy" Consider helping another basic human cut down a tree. Normal humans have a 8-12 strength score. So on average everybody is +0. They would then, therefore, need to roll a 10 or better on a d20 to help somebody cut down a tree.

In "aid another world" you always need twice as many people as you think its actually going to take to get the tree cutting work done because no matter what most of them do only half of them actually manage to provide assistance. Staffing must be a total bitch! Everything is unionized in "aid another world!"

This outcome is unpleasant because it makes a mockery of expectations and desires of the game world. Many people feel the same way about the "wish economy model." It just makes them not like where their game world would have to go.

[hogarth]

Well, again, the problem isn't so much a matter of taste or preference; he seems to be stuck on this idea that it's actively bad for the game. I would be totally able to understand if he just didn't like the model of the wish economy out of personal preference, but the idea that it actually breaks verisimilitude or ruins a model for rewarding players that never worked particularly well in the first place is the part that bugs me.

The part that breaks verisimilitude is the assumption that adventurers can whip up arbitrarily large amounts of gold and yet gold is still worth something to somebody.

I agree with mean_liar; it's more like a cautionary tale.

[virgil]

I would always consider the economic model descriptions used. The people who could whip up arbitrarily large amounts of gold wouldn't, at least not do so and actually attempt to inject into the pre-Wish economy plebes; the few exceptions being short-lived inflation crazes that quickly destabilize and live on in memory as those gold-plated utopias that inexplicably vanished (usually because some crazed adventuring party rose up and destroyed civilization). This is followed by the general viewpoint frequently brought up by Frank that even the most benevolent & paladin-like of rulers don't actually believe in the idea of redistribution/investment of wealth into the lower class for long-term returns in work output and quality of life.

[Sunwitch]

The Wish Economy to me has been more a warning than a setting detail: it basically lays out why you need to counter it somehow if you want that level of verisimilitude outside the spotlight on the PCs.

Trying to explain it should be easy enough. The interesting part is where you either live with it or find a way to take its troubles out of the game.

Right, but part of the focus of the Tome series was explaining ways to live with it and use it as a workable economy. Judging by certain homebrew by Koumei and such, where items sometimes lack prices or are simply given "15,001" and classes have really obvious gateways into infinite gold past level 10, it seems to have caught on. It's pretty clearly a reasonable way of running D&D without having to toss in arbitrary DM fiat and run the game in a cohesive, if not particularly intuitive, manner, and allows people to actually put gold toward stuff other than their buttkicking fund and own castles and other cool stuff like that. It makes the setting pretty weird, but it's definitely a workable model. Though that bit about the value of gold is sort of confusing.

[tzor]

I will start by saying that I absolutely hate the “wish” economy. I understand the wish economy and I understand it is one way to solve the problem but I’ve always had a 1E mindset and my biggest problem is the EZ wish model that has developed under the various revisions; resulting in literally something for nothing.

You could radically house rule the wish back to eliminate the “something for nothing” problem, or you could also house rule the wish back so that while in the singular it appears to be benign, in the long run repeated abuses cause some serious shit to happen.

My personal favorite that I came up with was using the spell Flesh to Salt to turn cows into piles of salt worth thousands of gold.

Remember, once you push the game beyond the basic parameters, it is reasonable to insist on a modicum of supply and demand laws. Salt is a good example of this, the demand is simple but the supply has been a problem until the 20th century. Wars have been fought over this only edible mineral. (There is an argument that the South lost the Civil War in part due to its reliance on dehydration ponds on the coastal areas which got destroyed by the Union naval fleet. The North got most of its salt through salt mines. The result was the inability to preserve meat which lead to a food crisis during the war.) Once technology allowed for easy production, the price collapsed and today no one would think of a war for salt.

Simply put, the price of salt will drop to less than the price of flesh. Problem solved.

Anyway, to understand my 1E mind set, (not a wish lawyer per se but one who always has a fine print in every wish) the musical “Into the woods” reflects my general attitude towards wishes in general. This has always been the classical view towards wishes and its removal really killed the game.

[hogarth]

I would always consider the economic model descriptions used. The people who could whip up arbitrarily large amounts of gold wouldn't, at least not do so and actually attempt to inject into the pre-Wish economy plebes; the few exceptions being short-lived inflation crazes that quickly destabilize and live on in memory as those gold-plated utopias that inexplicably vanished (usually because some crazed adventuring party rose up and destroyed civilization).

Frank's economic theories range between obvious and half-baked. "Powerful folks don't destabilize economies because they just don't." Do you really find that persuasive?

[RandomCasualty2]

At least the tomes try and present the idea that if you can think of it somebody else thought of it first. So while it sounds like you are being super smart to use divinations to create a command economy that is always perfectly accurate and to use various mythical creatures in place of modern building tools and what not. Somebody else was just as smart and did that a long time ago. Or even just enough before you to render you a startup looking to face down a midevel version of wallmart.

No, that's good.

People who cast powerful spells have above genius level intellects. It's actually really insulting if some nerd playing the game in his free time thought of something before all the wizards who spend pretty much 24/7 thinking of this stuff. I mean, that alone breaks suspension of disbelief for me.

One of the tomes discusses that the nobility that exists either consist of adventurers, the children of adventurers trained by those adventurers, or people to marry off to adventurers who will rule.

The issue I see is that heroes cannot stop being heros or somebody will surpass them, kill them, and take their kingdom. They have to be out adventurering nearly constantly or their power is dwindling.

Well that's the way D&D works with the exponential power growth. You literally can't rely on being a king to be worth anything, because nobody gives a shit about armies. It's all up to you to hold onto power. Of course, actually having the kingdom isn't really worth much either.

While this is defiantly entertaining after a fashion, it is not tolkienesque, or jordanesque, or like bakker, or even like the stuff greenwood writes.

Yeah, that tends to be a major complaint about mid to high level D&D in general. D&D is a game whose flavor text and novels encourage something vastly different from what the actual mechanics encourage. It's a major schism that makes a lot of people unhappy.

Most people want pseudo-medieval worlds like Forgotten Realms or Middle Earth but are sad to see that the rules as written basically render those worlds totally unfeasable. And it's not really just a handful of spells, it's the whole concept that armies are meaningless in general and that the world is based more off a superhero defense system than any kind of basic police force.

[Kaelik]

D&D is a game whose rules encourage something vastly different from what the actual mechanics encourage. It's a major schism that makes a lot of people unhappy.

No RC. Still wrong.

The rules do encourage the same thing as the mechanics.

And you are the only one upset about it.

Most people don't mind playing D&D as D&D instead of shitty LotR game number seven.

[souran]

D&D is a game whose rules encourage something vastly different from what the actual mechanics encourage. It's a major schism that makes a lot of people unhappy.

No RC. Still wrong.

The rules do encourage the same thing as the mechanics.

And you are the only one upset about it.

Most people don't mind playing D&D as D&D instead of shitty LotR game number seven.

While I am all about letting games just be the games they are (small caveat they must actually be playable)

To say that "Most people don't mind playing D&D as D&D (meaning wish economy crazy fest) instead of shitty LOTR game number seven." is just obviously wrong.

Most people pick up D&D expecting to get a game that recreates the trip through the mines of moria. That is what they want, what they want is a game about going into the DUNGEON and killing the DRAGON and they want elves to shit in the woods and dwarves to talk with bad scottish accents.

Most people are fine with stock genre stuff because they don't use it enough to get beyond where those tropes become boring. They exist in the sweet spot of gaming, like how when you first started reading fantasy novels and you thought that Terry Goodkind could both write and was profound.

Most people are fine with a farily stock world, with pretty stock badguys. They are fine with this because they don't get to play that much, and they probably only have 1 guy who knows the game well enough to abuse the crap out of it and most people DO think that they are really smart to summon a demon and basically turn him into a factory machine because they have never read or seen anything that has explored that concept before.

Superusers find all this stuff pedantic and tired. We have seen every possible combination of a party of a human ranger named arigorn, a wizard who is bookish, a half-elf thief whose parents were murdered, and a dwarf who mostly likes to drink. Superusers want things that are new and inovative for the fantasy genre, not just for this game.

There is no reason D&D shouldn't support both groups. Really it can. However, even super users are going to fight combats. They are also going to explore things that might be called dungeons even if they are actually a castle made of starlight that has traps more devious than those in saw and the goal is larger than just take their treasure.

This is reaching outside this thread a little but, D&D should be the best combat game and the best exploration game. Thats what the design premise should be that is what they should be shooting for. What is fun to fight and explore. Everything else can be built later and tailored to fit. HOwever, when you have the in market name recognition that D&D does you SHOULD be producing the game that is best at these core activities.

[RandomCasualty2]

The rules do encourage the same thing as the mechanics.

I mean to actually write flavor there, not rules. Let me fix that.

What I meant is that when you read the settings that were made for D&D, even something modern for specifically 3E, like Eberron, and it's totally different from what the actual mechanics do.

And you are the only one upset about it.

Most people don't mind playing D&D as D&D instead of shitty LotR game number seven.

Um no. I'm certainly not alone.

There are in fact a lot of people who dislike the idea of how powerful characters get in 3E. While most people want a world with more magic than Middle Earth, the D&D level of magic is often too much.

Really the people who want crazy go nuts DBZ style RPGs are the minority here. There's a reason most 3E games start at level 1 and never get past level 5. Seriously. Take a look at online games that are recruiting. Most of them start at low levels. Sure sounds to me like people want the LotR feel more so than DBZ.

When WotC playtests editions of D&D, they stick almost exclusively to the low level for a reason. This is the range that most people actually play. Like souran said, most people are playing this game to dungeon crawl and kill stuff. They don't care about breaking economies, raising necromantic hordes, or chainbinding demons.

You have to accept that you're in the minority Kaelik. Your playstyle isn't what most people want.

Don't even try to pretend that if you told the average gamer about one of your characters that he wouldn't be walking off saying "Damn, what a munchkin, glad that guy isn't in my game."

[K]

Again, people are focusing on one spell and not the "post-wealth economy".

It's not the spell. It's a state that any hero will reach after X adventures. Robert Jordans books are even a classic example as it takes his heroes just a few books before each individually has the wealth of a nation to command and anything that could be bought with wealth has been.

Buying magic items is retarded, and unless you do some pretty heavy handed crap your economy is going to break within a fixed number of adventures. Even computer games based on DnD can't avoid infinite wealth loops and those are closed systems with hardcoded rules (cookie for anyone who can name the many exploits in the various versions of Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights). It's no coincidence that Neverwinter Nights moves to a wish economy where magic items are made with player-gained items as arbitrary as the things we suggested in the Tomes; doing otherwise is unworkable.

The things we talked about in the Tomes are not just "and take the rules to the natural conclusion". They are "and all it takes is one player to use the actual rules to break the suggested setting." The Tomes are spot fixes for what we considered the most egregious flaws in the system and the fact that your milage with those flaws has varied does not mean they don't exist.


Ps. Tzor, the price of salt is not going to drop because the adventurers can literally travel to infinite markets. Heck, just through arbitrage a planar traveller and teleporter can do infinite wealth loops by just taking a good that is cheap in one place and selling it for more somewhere else.

[RandomCasualty2]

Ps. Tzor, the price of salt is not going to drop because the adventurers can literally travel to infinite markets. Heck, just through arbitrage a planar traveller and teleporter can do infinite wealth loops by just taking a good that is cheap in one place and selling it for more somewhere else.

Well the only thing is that you have to assume that this stuff already happened pretty much and the economy has stabilized. If you have wall of iron, then the price of iron should be dirt cheap. If you can create salt with magic, then salt is also virtually valueless, to the point that you're making only moderate money by creating it in vast quantities. So maybe under the new price, you can spend a day creating iron and get like 50 gp only or something, to the point that it's really not worth it. You just have to accept that anything you can make easily with magic is basically valueless in this economy. The guy who invented wall of iron is probably one of your world's robber barons, but eventually the iron market dried up as he got too greedy and oversaturated the world. By that point he ended up selling the spell to other wizards, spreading it around the world, and basically making iron nearly worthless. Naturally this guy's mega wealth eventually got spread around, or maybe a group of dragons got together and took him out and spread it among dragonkind (It'd account for those hoards dragons tend to have). But in any case, wall of iron no longer is really a problem in your world. And you can do similar stuff for every other problematic spell.

Also, I really advocate just getting rid of the idea of infinite planes of gems and all that bullshit. Seriously, do those things do anything good for the game?

Another way to handle castles of gold is simply a localized magic spell keeping those things intact. So the moment you take anything out of the castle, it turns back into iron or whatever. It's all some kind of illusion spell for showmanship and it only functions in that specific area. And that's generally the way things work in fantasy. Kill the wizard who made the crystal fortress and the whole thing cracks and crumbles to dust.

[tzor]

Again, people are focusing on one spell and not the "post-wealth economy".

It's not the spell. It's a state that any hero will reach after X adventures. Robert Jordans books are even a classic example as it takes his heroes just a few books before each individually has the wealth of a nation to command and anything that could be bought with wealth has been.

Yes this is true to some extent, the spell just amplifies the effect significantly.

Buying magic items is retarded, and unless you do some pretty heavy handed crap your economy is going to break within a fixed number of adventures.

To an extent I agree.

Ps. Tzor, the price of salt is not going to drop because the adventurers can literally travel to infinite markets. Heck, just through arbitrage a planar traveller and teleporter can do infinite wealth loops by just taking a good that is cheap in one place and selling it for more somewhere else.

No it does. Unlimited Access also breaks the price fix; too many merchants chasing too few customers. Once the “cost” for delivering the goods to an area decreases, the supply will increase and the price will drop. Teleportation is only another way of activating the “global economy” which in turn guarantees price wars.

[RandomCasualty2]

Buying magic items is retarded, and unless you do some pretty heavy handed crap your economy is going to break within a fixed number of adventures.

I'm not really sure how you'd prevent people from buying items. The Tome solution doesn't really seem to prevent it, it just invents Planar currency (aka SuperGold) which can't be made with magic. And that's just not a huge difference that you now happen to be buying stuff with SuperGold instead of gold. It still holds to the same principles as any other currency.

The main thing is that you can't easily create the currency. After that, the market generally takes care of itself.

I'm not sure if the solution isn't just saying that magic can't create gold and then just using that as the currency.

You can have silver and copper be your peasant currencies that magic can reproduce, and have little or no gold value. While gold and platinum are your adventurer currencies that magic can't make.

[violence in the media]

Buying magic items is retarded, and unless you do some pretty heavy handed crap your economy is going to break within a fixed number of adventures.

I'm not really sure how you'd prevent people from buying items. The Tome solution doesn't really seem to prevent it, it just invents Planar currency (aka SuperGold) which can't be made with magic. And that's just not a huge difference that you now happen to be buying stuff with SuperGold instead of gold. It still holds to the same principles as any other currency.

The main thing is that you can't easily create the currency. After that, the market generally takes care of itself.

I'm not sure if the solution isn't just saying that magic can't create gold and then just using that as the currency.

You can have silver and copper be your peasant currencies that magic can reproduce, and have little or no gold value. While gold and platinum are your adventurer currencies that magic can't make.

Are you suggesting that there is nothing that can be bought with silver that can be sold for gold? What's the advantage in using gold-plated latinum to purchase magic items over having people trade in hopes, dreams, and souls?

[K]

Buying magic items is retarded, and unless you do some pretty heavy handed crap your economy is going to break within a fixed number of adventures.

I'm not really sure how you'd prevent people from buying items. The Tome solution doesn't really seem to prevent it, it just invents Planar currency (aka SuperGold) which can't be made with magic. And that's just not a huge difference that you now happen to be buying stuff with SuperGold instead of gold. It still holds to the same principles as any other currency.

Well, the Tome solution is just a spot fix so that we did not have to rewrite the whole game, and the key is not just that the currency can't be made, it can't be found as a natural resource and it has no uses. Gold will always be valuable because it's beautiful, rare, and can be used in a variety of ways as one of the few metals that does not oxidize (and Dragonlance is just lame for not figuring that out).

I mean, there is no economy in a super-currency. People don't exchange it for beers at the tavern because if you hand some to the barmaid she'll throw it back at you and ask for coins. You shouldn't be able to find a mine of planar currency and when the guy who runs the pawn shop looks at it his response should be "I'm no wizard, what am I going to do with that? Heck, I can't even try to trade it to some wizard without him just taking it from me. Even storing it here is stupid."

I mean, the basics of an economy involves the free exchange of your currency for goods, and a single coin will get exchanged a million times (heck, check out Whereisgeorge, a website to track money). Planar currency shouldn't do that. It should pop up in spurts and be destroyed in item creation.

Personally, I'd use a different means of fantasy treasure allocation, but the Tome solution was the easiest and quickest fix that could be cobbled together. A different solution would be better, but the Tomes work.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Everyone in this thread is showing an ignorance of money.

Once again, gold by itself is worthless for currency. It's just an arbitrary number people fix the value of money to. If someone mines the elemental planes for gold then what will happen is that there's super-inflation and then people use some other sort of base for the money.

Secondly, if you don't want a magic item economy then you need to make magic items completely untradeable for some reason or another. In all editions of D&D it's possible to trade resources (whether experience, gold coins, souls, whatever) for a good that people want. Even if the resources themselves can't be purchased people will be wanting to trade their castles, booze, ass-kicking, and cattle for your invisibility cloak and some people will actually want to make the trade.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Personally, I think the magic item economy is just something that people are going to have to just toughen up and get it over with.

Things like women adventurers having periods at inconvenient times, people needing to take shits, and everyone having hairy armpits are also things that hurt the 'feel' of heroic fantasy but you just can't get rid of. So what do you do? You just ignore it and move on with your life. Purchasing magic items is only a big deal because people insist on making it a big deal. Flaming swords and whatnot should just be assumed that it's something you do off-screen, like taking a shit or washing your pubes.

[RandomCasualty2]

I mean, there is no economy in a super-currency. People don't exchange it for beers at the tavern because if you hand some to the barmaid she'll throw it back at you and ask for coins. You shouldn't be able to find a mine of planar currency and when the guy who runs the pawn shop looks at it his response should be "I'm no wizard, what am I going to do with that? Heck, I can't even try to trade it to some wizard without him just taking it from me. Even storing it here is stupid."

Well, I'm sure someone would take the SuperCurrency if you offered it to them. It's much like someone offering a bartender the Mona Lisa to buy a beer. You're going to take that deal in a second. I mean seriously... yes you'll open yourself up to thievery, and you may not get a great deal for it, but you'll be able to get a fucking fortune. Even if all you care about is getting standard currency, you can easily trade it to someone for enough standard currency to live your life care free.

Though I mean these trades would rarely happen because there's no need to buy a beer off someone with SuperCurrency when you can just take it by force.

I mean Supercurrency may actually have some outrageously large standard currency value. Maybe it's just like a "million dollar bill" or something. So long as standard currency is just ridiculously large and not truly infinite. Keep in mind that so called "infinite" wealth loops usually aren't. While you can generate infinite iron, the amount you can sell isn't infinite, so at some point there's no more demand for iron and you've just got a shitload of ingots on your shelves. So magic items become more like expensive military hardware like tanks and jets. They have dollar values, but they're so high, that you're really dealing with a higher level of spending than normal goods.

About all you'd have to do is prevent wishes from actually creating gold and I think you could implement that.