Core Principle: Your Fantasy Economy is Bullshit

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mean_liar
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Post by mean_liar »

RiotGearEpsilon wrote:Just to be clear, the magical paradigm at work here is explicitly the DnD paradigm, right? Because other magical paradigms - Exalted, Earthdawn, etc - can have very different implications on how effectively magic can serve as economic capital and how high the barriers to getting that capital are.
Despite what Frank says, I believe this is the case. I'd actually say that the example is based on the book-only DnD paradigm, rather than the DnD paradigm in general. For discussion purposes, I think limiting it to DnD is fine since I believe that's the point of this thread - to rehash old points already made about DnD. If that isn't the point the discussion fails simply from the weight of its assumptions which would no longer be moored to anything discernible.

To take the book-only comment further: considering that DnD magic has no real limits on what it can do, the fact that there are few spells specifically to allow industrial-level production is more a symptom of the game's focus on individual heroics than a limitation. There is nothing preventing the invention of multiple spells to assist production, even if they are as simple as a massive area-effect Mending spell at 2nd+ level that frees up a massive amount of a farmer's time otherwise spent maintaining equipment. Fabricate is spectacular but also generic: it's easy to imagine a version which had only a single application would be lower-level, more readily-available and possibly also create more. A similar permutation would take it in the opposite direction and simply have a higher-level version with DnD's typically exponential increase in output.

So simply saying that there are limits on magicians because there are, at the most permissive level, only a few hours in a day is akin to saying that modern industrial factories are similarly limited and negligible because they, too, can only be run a certain number of hours in a day. It's a poor conclusion.
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Post by violence in the media »

Oh, another thing I'd want a fantasy economy to be able to handle, more as a regular thing and less as a DM-fiat anomaly, is a wealthy PC.

Sometimes, it's nice to be able to approach adventuring problems with the knowledge that money isn't an issue, or that you can hire people and delegate some of the tasks out to competent underlings, without the inevitability of you being betrayed or the underlings failing.

Hey, it is fantasy after all. ;)
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Post by Red_Rob »

mean_liar wrote:
violence in the media wrote:Not that I am opposed to having game economies make sense, but what goal would fixing it serve?
There is something to be said for verisimilitude, but I totally agree. Logistics and Dragons has always been boring, self-indulgent omphaloskepsis and will continue to be so for evermore.
The same reason you make anything in a fantasy roleplaying game make sense. Versimilitude. Once you realise that something in the game makes absolutely no sense at all with no explanation it pulls you out of the game and ruins the suspension of disbelief.

The problem is that everyones limits are different, and are mainly informed by how much technical knowledge of the area in question you have (See Dan Browned). I am perfectly willing to accept all sorts of bullshit scientific explanations for things as i have a relatively limited scientific knowledge, whilst a science major would roll their eyes and mutter under their breath. Just as I once played in a Star Wars game where a player said, with a straight face, that he would open the back of the turbolaser he was firing and throw in a thermal detonator, then close the hatch and fire this at an enemy ship. Just as i was about to launch into a tirade about the mind boggling insanity of this plan, the DM then congratulated him on his ingenuity and added the two damage scores together.

So, for some people the fact that a peasant economy could never sustain the kinds of purchases the DMG expects your characters to make over an average campaign can be explained away with "well adventurers bring gold into the economy and Wizards magic shit up" whilst for other people its a major deal breaker that flys in the face of everything they know about how society works.

Diffr'nt strokes and all that.
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Post by mean_liar »

The fact that magic is undefined is precisely, "magicking shit up". It's undefinable, and attempting to have a discussion about what it can do - in DnD, of all places, where it can do anything - is pointless. You can craft a setting in the place to suit any sort of economy or civilization based solely on some off-screen bullshit that may or may not have happened.

For example, what is the industrial output and effect of an 8th level spell that could exist in DnD? What effect would this unknown spell have on the game? What about Epic, the sort of spell that can be cast once to change the whole world? What about new lower-level spells with practical, non-dungeoneering/killing/sneaking uses? Why is the discussion necessarily limited to book-only-DnD?

"Magic shit up" is about as accurate as you can get. Every other system is going to have it's own X-factor to define it to take it into some other wildly unpredictable direction. Taking it past, "magic shit up," is just-so reasoning to construct whatever setting or conclusions you've already reached.
Last edited by mean_liar on Thu Jun 17, 2010 6:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Username17 »

You could make a setting where magic does any particular thing. But within any particular setting, the only thing magic does is what it is shown doing. Claiming that the economy, or anything else functions because there is magic going on that isn't shown that you haven't thought of is totally lazy writing. And for a game, it's worse than that. What you've done is made a frank admission that you don't know how the setting works, and that by extension, the players can't know how he setting works either.

If you can't predict the outcome of your actions, you might as well be playing roulette. If even the setting designer and DM don't know what is going on in the world, then the outcomes of actions cannot be predicted.

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Post by RandomCasualty2 »

FrankTrollman wrote:You could make a setting where magic does any particular thing. But within any particular setting, the only thing magic does is what it is shown doing. Claiming that the economy, or anything else functions because there is magic going on that isn't shown that you haven't thought of is totally lazy writing. And for a game, it's worse than that. What you've done is made a frank admission that you don't know how the setting works, and that by extension, the players can't know how he setting works either.

If you can't predict the outcome of your actions, you might as well be playing roulette. If even the setting designer and DM don't know what is going on in the world, then the outcomes of actions cannot be predicted.
Well, not necessarily. I mean a lot of economic stuff is going to be background anyway. The important thing there is simply that you know the end result. That is, that you know society functions.

You may not know that the clerics of the nature god bless crops to get a 200% yield and every farmer does it. You may not even care. You just know if people are starving or if they're not starving. You may not know if water comes from wells or from some decanter of endless water that people water crops with. I mean you could go and write a book about that stuff, but how it merges with the populace is generally not something PCs will be super concerned about.

In the end you're going to have some arbitrary number of fantasy problems and some arbitrary number of fantasy benefits, which can range from orcs burned your fields, to a drought or magically enhanced super corn. But pretty much your adventurers probably don't care so much and getting into it may end up limiting more story ideas than it will help.

Because everytime you define what happens, you're also defining things that can't happen. In some cases this is inevitable because adventurers want to know how their world works. In other cases, it may well just be limiting when you want to come up with a quest idea. Because ultimately the game isn't an economic simulation and economic problems exist as either things for adventurers to solve or backstory.
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Post by baduin »

With Franks connections to Bohemia and interest in pre-modern economics, he probably should read Gellner's Plough, Sword and Book. It is a quite good explanation of the agrarian no-growth economic system.

http://www.amazon.com/Plough-Sword-Book ... 0226287025
http://www.thenewhumanities.net/books/B ... ews15.html

"“Agrarian societies produce food, store it, and acquire other forms of storable wealth.... The need for a labour force and defence personnel inclines them to place a high value on procreation, and consequently they display a tendency to push their population to a danger point.... [As well, they] tend to develop complex social differentiation, an elaborate division of labour. Two specialisms in particular become of paramount importance: the emergence of a specialized ruling class, and of a specialized clerisy (specialists in cognition, legitimation, salvation, ritual).... In societies which make up what we shall call Agraria, innovation does occur, but not as part of some constant, cumulative and exponential process. Agraria values stability, and generally conceives the world and its own social order as basically stable. Some agrarian social forms at least seem to be deliberately organized so as to avoid the dangers of possibly disruptive innovations. Ancestors, or past institutional forms, perhaps in idealized versions, are held up as the moral norm, the prescriptive ideal.”
(Gellner, pp.16-17)

He explains that in such a system, the limiting factor was the land. All surpluses went to the warrior class of land-owners, and the intellectual class of priests. Peasants got enough not to die. And they didn't work to capacity - in fact, they were often lazy, drunk and bored most of the time. They couldn't work more, because there was not enough extra land. Labor is cheap.

In fact, in such a land there is excess capacity, ability to export and store food etc, but it does not belong to peasants. All surpluses belong to landowners.

As an archetype of such a system, imagine the traditional India, with super-rich nabobs, educated brahmins, and uncountable starving peasants. There is excess capacity to build Taj-Mahal and fund endless adventurers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taj_Mahal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranjit_Singh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_Di_Avitabile

In D&D land, there is free land, but it is inaccessible. If you kill off the monsters, you become a landowner and immediately can attract as many peasants as you need by offering them long-term freedom from taxation,
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Post by Username17 »

baduin wrote:Peasants got enough not to die. And they didn't work to capacity - in fact, they were often lazy, drunk and bored most of the time. They couldn't work more, because there was not enough extra land. Labor is cheap.
A note about "capacity" seems called for here. Working to capacity doesn't mean that you are working 80 hours a week or 40 hours a week or any other number. Working to capacity simply means that you've maximized the output of your system.

The weaver is working to capacity when all the wool gets spun. If there isn't very much wool, the weaver may have a lot of time on their hands and still work to capacity. A farmer is working to capacity when there is no more land to plant on or no more wheat to harvest or whatever. If there are a lot of peasants and not very much land to go around (as will probably be the case if you can't drain the swamp because there's an actual hydra in it), then there probably isn't much for the peasants to do. They will work to capacity of course, but mostly they will be lying on the porch waiting for grass to grow.

In the modern era, we associate working to capacity as everyone being busy. But in earlier societies with a lot less capital and resources at their finger tips, working to capacity could be achieved with very little actual labor and production.

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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

FrankTrollman wrote:But in earlier societies with a lot less capital and resources at their finger tips, working to capacity could be achieved with very little actual labor and production.
Assuming that the production is being artificially depressed by war / ignorance / class conflict / religion (all fair bets when you assume a medieval Europe pastiche), what's stopping the people of the 'good' nations from removing these barriers? Why won't Carl Glittergold or Gond or whoever at least tell his 30 hr/week peasants to get off their ass and learn a second trade or skill or art that isn't so resource-intensive? What is stopping some paladin or wizard from, Ruronin Kenshin style, swinging by to murder all of the aristocrats until they wise up to the fact (or at least allow for the time being out of fear of getting assassinated, then realize the benefits later) that they could get more profit out of letting resources filter down to the lower classes rather than live as kings of the dump heap?

A lot of people make a convincing argument that as awful as the Black Death was it was good for Europe in the long run because it uprooted the backwards class structure and allowed something more civilized to take place so they were allowed to move out of a barter economy. But D&D is a more idealistic and enlightened place while also having actual gods and superheroes with the good of their country in mind. So while it doesn't need to resort to something that drastic, what the hell is the holdup?
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Post by mean_liar »

FrankTrollman wrote:You could make a setting where magic does any particular thing. But within any particular setting, the only thing magic does is what it is shown doing. Claiming that the economy, or anything else functions because there is magic going on that isn't shown that you haven't thought of is totally lazy writing. And for a game, it's worse than that. What you've done is made a frank admission that you don't know how the setting works, and that by extension, the players can't know how he setting works either.

If you can't predict the outcome of your actions, you might as well be playing roulette. If even the setting designer and DM don't know what is going on in the world, then the outcomes of actions cannot be predicted.
You're missing the point, or intentionally obfuscating.

What you wrote is all true, which is why making blanket statements about Fantasy Economies is bullshit in the sense that it's all just bullshit. Where you fail is that you can basically arbitrarily assign magic to do anything you want to do in order to create the setting you want. You're not saying, "I don't know"; rather, you're saying "I absolutely know" and you can use that to justify anything. Making blanket discussions about Fantasy Economies which necessarily have to be based on a lengthy series of assumptions about magic which will probably not hold from campaign to campaign, much less setting to setting and even less so system to system or GM to GM.

The point of this thread should not be, "Fantasy Economics is Bullshit", but rather, "Think About Economics a Little in Your Setting".

Going so far as to talk about subsistence farmers, or crop yields, or assumptions about formal market systems is just built on a mountain of arbitrariness.
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Post by spasheridan »

I see this piece as "here's how it works in the real world boys and girls. If you want your fantasy setting to NOT be 90% shit eating peasants than you need to introduce some fucking reason WHY they don't all eat shit"

Then we break down a few stupid ideas like "sure, the adventurers killed the monster and brought back 10,000 gp. The crops are still burnt and everyone starves - money doesn't solve this on it's own"
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Post by Crissa »

Look, a book saying there's a limited output because peasants are lazy is stupid and lazy writing.

If a peasant can't keep or increase their standard of living by working, they have no reason to work beyond subsistence levels, because it will be stolen by the bully class.

Frank's saying the variance from books to book and GM to GM is meaningless because they handwave where all the food and market comes from. Maybe some players don't care, certainly many don't; but it makes for poor stories when you don't know these details.

If bandits come through and steal your extra grain, then perhaps there's no reason to produce much extra grain, or selling it for new tools or materials from adventurers is a great idea instead of raising your prices because the end result is the same.

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Post by Prak »

well hell, maybe some of those bored, more physically able peasants go out and become bandits while their crops are growing back home. Maybe they take up farm implements serviceable as weapons, and use some of their physical labour muscles and go beat up the peasants in the next village over, or the goblins that have taken down something large and edible, and the village just accepts that part of their survival comes from banditry
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Prak_Anima wrote:Maybe they take up farm implements serviceable as weapons, and use some of their physical labour muscles and go beat up the peasants in the next village over, or the goblins that have taken down something large and edible, and the village just accepts that part of their survival comes from banditry
They live on 1000 calories a day. They don't have 'physical labor muscles,' they have a catabolic train wreck.
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Post by Danchild »

To assume that magic has no influence on fantasy economy is ridiculous. The extent on which it has an influence is of course open to debate. However, I do not think that asanine examples of characters such as Popeye the tree-punching cottage builder are a fair argument. To suggest that a magical character has an arbitrary narrow specialisation and has an imposed limit on the use of those abilities, is a gross exaggeration of the capabilities of spellcasters and magical items in a system such as D&D.

The 3.x DMG chapter on worldbuilding has a short and vague section on demographics. Basically it states that in every community of a certain size, there will be NPC representations of certain playable classes. The example presented of a hamlet of 200 people has a representative of every class. Druid, clreic, bard, wizard, sorcerer and adept are the spellcasters of note. All of these NPC's live in the community and there for it can be assumed that they will be making some kind of contribution to that community. Granted, the scope of the magic in a hamlet will be limited, but the amount of magic available to a small town, city or metropolis increases exponentially. That is going to have a much more noticable effect on a campaign world than simply punching out one house a day.[/i]
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Post by crizh »

I enjoyed the OP, I'm not sure I agree with all of it but then it deserves more than just a cursory read through before drawing conclusions.

I have of late been considering what sort of economic impact free labour might have on a LE society. I had in mind designing a penal system where capital crimes also condemned ones soul to indefinite servitude as a mindless Undead.

I imagined scores of skeletons working the fields, doing all the menial shitty jobs and otherwise propping up the machinery of the state. I didn't yet give much consideration to such a group of state owned slaves as capitol and how that might effect the larger economy.
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Post by RandomCasualty2 »

Really the big question here isn't about crop yields and that crap. That's just a bunch of bullshit you honestly shouldn't be caring about unless you want to totally go all Tolkien on the setting. Hell, I don't even think Tolkien did that.

As far as your PCs are concerned, your farmers fields are arbitrarily large and they do produce a totally arbitrary amount. There's plenty of crap that can affect crop yields, droughts, bad soil, animals eating crops, insects... seriously. You don't want to get into that shit.

The main thing you want to get into is to not have your world not make sense with the spells you have available and your given rules set. That is, if you've got crap like wish or fabricate, you do have to explain why it hasn't conquered the world.
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Post by TheFlatline »

Danchild wrote:To assume that magic has no influence on fantasy economy is ridiculous. The extent on which it has an influence is of course open to debate. However, I do not think that asanine examples of characters such as Popeye the tree-punching cottage builder are a fair argument. To suggest that a magical character has an arbitrary narrow specialisation and has an imposed limit on the use of those abilities, is a gross exaggeration of the capabilities of spellcasters and magical items in a system such as D&D.

The 3.x DMG chapter on worldbuilding has a short and vague section on demographics. Basically it states that in every community of a certain size, there will be NPC representations of certain playable classes. The example presented of a hamlet of 200 people has a representative of every class. Druid, clreic, bard, wizard, sorcerer and adept are the spellcasters of note. All of these NPC's live in the community and there for it can be assumed that they will be making some kind of contribution to that community. Granted, the scope of the magic in a hamlet will be limited, but the amount of magic available to a small town, city or metropolis increases exponentially. That is going to have a much more noticable effect on a campaign world than simply punching out one house a day.[/i]
Magic in 3.x is still a limited resource. In fact, magic is generally intended for blasting more than for utility.

Take streetlamps for example. In a small town let's say there's 20 streetlamps. You're probably going to need 4-5 magic users who devote each day's ability to cast *strictly* to casting light on streetlamps, and they have to come out once or twice a night to relight each lamp depending on the level of caster. In a 200 person village, you've just accounted for every magic user in the village. And all they do is light streetlamps.

Making a wand of light is an option, but it's expensive, both in terms of materials to make the wand and XP. You can only make so many wands as a lamplighter before you drop a level and become a less effective lamplighter. If you actually want charges of light that will last the entire night, you're looking at an 8th level casting wand, which is thousands of gold pieces and weeks of time to create 50 charges, which you'll burn through every 2 and a half nights.

So magic isn't even a reasonable replacement for a torch in D&D on anything larger than a party scale.
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Post by Kaelik »

Or you know, Continual Flame 400 flint rocks.

Or make 400 Glowing Orb things that also do the same thing.
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Post by the_taken »

Or make a trap that casts light five times a day at regular intervals. Hell of a lot cheaper in terms of XP.
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Post by Kaelik »

the_taken wrote:Or make a trap that casts light five times a day at regular intervals. Hell of a lot cheaper in terms of XP.
Neither Continual Flame nor Glowing Orb costs any XP at all, so no, a trap that casts five times a day and costs more than zero XP does not cost less than 0 XP.
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Post by Username17 »

Lago wrote:Assuming that the production is being artificially depressed by war / ignorance / class conflict / religion (all fair bets when you assume a medieval Europe pastiche), what's stopping the people of the 'good' nations from removing these barriers? Why won't Carl Glittergold or Gond or whoever at least tell his 30 hr/week peasants to get off their ass and learn a second trade or skill or art that isn't so resource-intensive? What is stopping some paladin or wizard from, Ruronin Kenshin style, swinging by to murder all of the aristocrats until they wise up to the fact (or at least allow for the time being out of fear of getting assassinated, then realize the benefits later) that they could get more profit out of letting resources filter down to the lower classes rather than live as kings of the dump heap?
Again, this really belongs in a discussion of alignments or social structure. But basically you just back ended into the problem of evil. Feudalism is really awful, and anything recognizable as medieval would be an incredibly shitty place to live. So if you have "good gods" and you still have a recognizably medieval European socioeconomic structure, you have three options:
  • The "good" gods are total dicks who support a system with massive poverty and oppression for everyone.
  • The good "gods" are powerless to affect or improve the social order.
  • The good "gods" are fucking idiots who cannot imagine a way of life better than poking mud with a stick while you wait for manticores to eat you.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

FrankTrollman wrote: Again, this really belongs in a discussion of alignments or social structure.
Well, why don't we have this discussion in another thread then? You're coy about this, but you KNOW that your rants on these things gives TGD uncontrollable priapism to the point of necrosis. Even the ladies. :nuts:
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by RandomCasualty2 »

I don't know about the feudalism being evil thing. I mean seriously, in D&D, that sort of is the way of life. It's not just a delusion that the king is better than you. He seriously is better in every conceivable way. He's higher in level, he's got more skills, he can fuck up armies of peasants singlehandedly...

Anyone claiming that wealth get distributed to the masses instead of the adventurers that keep the cities running would be pretty damn crazy.
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Post by Koumei »

Lago PARANOIA wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote: Again, this really belongs in a discussion of alignments or social structure.
Well, why don't we have this discussion in another thread then? You're coy about this, but you KNOW that your rants on these things gives TGD uncontrollable priapism to the point of necrosis. Even the ladies. :nuts:
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