Core Principle: Your Fantasy Economy is Bullshit

[Gnosticism Is A Hoot]

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.

What the actual fuck?

Are you claiming that oppression is ok if the oppressor is really powerful?

[Lago PARANOIA]

I think RC2 was trying to say that the evil of feudalism wasn't inherently obvious to the people up at the top of the food chain, since they are actually superior in every way.

Of course, you only have to look at FatR's rants about Exalted to see why such a philosophy, even if strictly held by the inhabitants of the game world, has the side effect of making the heroes and kings and whatnot look like selfish monsters.

[Gnosticism Is A Hoot]

I think RC2 was trying to say that the evil of feudalism wasn't inherently obvious to the people up at the top of the food chain, since they are actually superior in every way.

Of course, you only have to look at FatR's rants about Exalted to see why such a philosophy, even if strictly held by the inhabitants of the game world, has the side effect of making the heroes and kings and whatnot look like selfish monsters.

Yeah, I misread RC2's intent there. And yes, Exalted is the prime example of why feudalism doesn't get any better under superpowered overlords.

[Danchild]

When people try and apply real world economics to a fantasy game it is amusing. Educational and thought provoking, but IMO a lighthearted distraction.

Attempting to apply real world morality to a fantasy game on the other hand is plain insanity. D&D for example a game where people role play nomadic mass-murdering home invaders, yet can still describe their character as Lawful Good. A game where good and evil are more than just abstract concepts, but give birth to seperate, tangible planes of existance and a host of inhuman entities...Who may be intelligent but by no means are they human, nor do they think or behave like a shaved fucking monkey. Sheltered modern Western values do not fucking apply.

In other words the King in a fantasy game has the god given right to oppress people. And he can still be considered 'good' by the standards set by the game.

[mean_liar]

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?

GM fiat or setting tone. There's nothing else preventing this.


...


Regarding Fuedalism, if the discussion is about a relationship between successive tiers of folks, each trading some good or service upwards in exchange for protection downwards, I think that has a real place in a fantasy setting with exponential power growth without being strictly evil or oppressive.

Every peasant in the kingdom having 1gp extra in their coffers is nice but I'm imagining that 100k gp turned into an Epic spell or kingdom-protecting magical device pays off a lot better for all involved. For discussion, consider you'd have the commoners relying on the local 3rd-5th levels to protect them from raiders and goblins, they rely on the regional 6th-10th levels to protect them from undead and ogres, and the 11-15th are the kingdom-wide elites who try and run interference against the heavies, with 16+ ruling their own slice. Everyone pays a tithe upward to keep their protectors in Lesser Vigor wands and what-not, and the middle tiers tithe up a portion of every raider loot/necromancer library/dragon horde.

I think Exalted is screwball more due to everyone of note being crazy, not because some people are inherently better or more skilled than the mundanes. The First Age pre-crazy Solars ran a tight ship in 2e, yes?

[hogarth]

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.

Considering that D&D has whole civilizations surviving on mushrooms and underground sheep, I'm forced to agree.

[RiotGearEpsilon]

I think Exalted is screwball more due to everyone of note being crazy, not because some people are inherently better or more skilled than the mundanes. The First Age pre-crazy Solars ran a tight ship in 2e, yes?

Somewhat. The First Age pre-crazy Solars ran a tight ship, a powerful meritocratic civilization with free health care, a strong economy, excellent defense, spans of peace and prosperity extending hundreds of years at a time...

...While at the same time indulging themselves in profoundly abusive, profane ways upon a very, very small minority of people who were the subject of their affections, passions, or obsessions.

The First Age was never a crapsack world, but it was always Omelas.

[Gnosticism Is A Hoot]

Attempting to apply real world morality to a fantasy game on the other hand is plain insanity. D&D for example a game where people role play nomadic mass-murdering home invaders, yet can still describe their character as Lawful Good. A game where good and evil are more than just abstract concepts, but give birth to seperate, tangible planes of existance and a host of inhuman entities...Who may be intelligent but by no means are they human, nor do they think or behave like a shaved fucking monkey. Sheltered modern Western values do not fucking apply.

In other words the King in a fantasy game has the god given right to oppress people. And he can still be considered 'good' by the standards set by the game.

As written, D&D morality is indeed plain insanity. It's self-contradictory, it has no real philosophical basis, and it's actively detrimental to the game as a whole.

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't discuss D&D morality. On the contrary, it makes that discussion *even more important*. You just can't play D&D with any depth at all until you've decided what 'Lawful Good' or 'Chaotic Evil' mean, or until you've figured out how they interact with the 'sheltered modern Western values' your players probably hold.

[violence in the media]

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.

I agree with your last point wholeheartedly. However, even though it appears that a little bit of research is anathema to the industry, I don't see what the harm is in locating tidbits of information (or even just making them up in the case of wholly fantastic things, like underground giant mushroom farms) and using those as a basis for writing up your campaign world. Include information like the number of acres in a square mile (640), or what 1000 calories might look like (a loaf of french bread, 2 ounces of cheese, and a medium apple) and then, right or wrong, you at least have some basis for how big towns and villages should be, how many people are growing food for everyone, and so on.

Anyway, that sort of information is something that (IMHO) would be better served done on the front end, integrated with the monsters and magic of the setting, and distributed in a sourcebook, rather than having everyone individually look things like that up. Hell, even putting something like that together here would be useful.

[Surgo]

Just to point out, some of us actually enjoy Logistics and Dragons. You might not, and that's okay. But that's no reason to say "this is retarded and there's no reason to do it", because there pretty clearly is.

[crizh]

I was toying with another idea in this vein recently where creating magic items and such did not cost 'x' gold pieces but actually consumed 'x' gold pieces worth of gold.

What sort of impact would the permanent destruction of such an important finite resource have on these sort of economies?

[kzt]

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't discuss D&D morality. On the contrary, it makes that discussion *even more important*. You just can't play D&D with any depth at all until you've decided what 'Lawful Good' or 'Chaotic Evil' mean, or until you've figured out how they interact with the 'sheltered modern Western values' your players probably hold.

You mean things like "Is it wrong for the Paladin to force the Orcs to convert to the "one true way", then promptly send them to paradise (aka execute them) before they can backslide and threaten their immortal souls?"

[mean_liar]

Just to point out, some of us actually enjoy Logistics and Dragons. You might not, and that's okay. But that's no reason to say "this is retarded and there's no reason to do it", because there pretty clearly is.

My only axe to grind with L&D is that it's built on too many assumptions.

The verisimilitude is meritorious for sure - but opening up a discussion about fantasy economics with absolutist statements (subsistence farming is ubiquitous; adventurers are a net drag on the economy) rather than a series of extremely pertinent questions whose answers have already been assumed by those statements (why hasn't wish destroyed the world? what is the role of teleportation? of shrink item? of fabricate? what changes are you making to as-written spells? what interpolations and extensions are you making to the corpus of canonical spells?) is a misguided endeavor whose results are only pertinent to whatever settings are built on those same assumptions.

Those questions and their answers are much more helpful than any sort of authoritative pulpit-pounding. The answers to those questions, and revisions brought about be rethinking, are what lead to better campaigns, not religiously adhering to TGDMB dictat.

[Crissa]

What sort of impact would the permanent destruction of such an important finite resource have on these sort of economies?

Umm... What? Gold isn't important at all. We do set resources on fire to make stuff.

It would be like the real world, where whenever you made something with gold, you lost some portion of it. Or lit a lamp, you lost the oil. Or ate the food.

I have no idea what you're postulating.

-Crissa

[FatR]

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?

Presumably, they did so already. Because every DnD setting there is has standards of living considerably-to-vastly higher than those of RL Medieval Europe. This does not even require from gods to go forth and regularly zap people they don't like. Just explaining, through their clergy, how many various advancements in agriculture, crafts and whatever made throughout RL Middle Ages work.

[RandomCasualty2]

I think RC2 was trying to say that the evil of feudalism wasn't inherently obvious to the people up at the top of the food chain, since they are actually superior in every way.

Of course, you only have to look at FatR's rants about Exalted to see why such a philosophy, even if strictly held by the inhabitants of the game world, has the side effect of making the heroes and kings and whatnot look like selfish monsters.

Yeah, pretty much you're gonna look like a dick when you spend like 50,000 gold outfitting one dude with magical gear instead of handing out longswords and chain shirts to a bunch of minions, but in the long run, that 50,000 is going to be more useful in the hands of the one high level guy, because D&D isn't a game of armies. Further, by letting him fight your battles, you're actually saving lives. I mean how many low level warriors do you have to throw at a red dragon before it dies? Even if you get lucky and kill it at all, you're going to have lots and lots of bodies.

Having guys at the top with more wealth isn't unfair. It's actually the best strategic set up for everyone to survive.

Contrast this with the real-world feudalism model, where the lord basically lets his peasants starve and be totally incapable of defending themselves, when most of them could be effective soldiers (as effective as the lord) with proper food, equipment and training. There it just doesn't make sense to hoard the wealth.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I know what you mean, RandomCasualty2, in that spending that 500,000 gold pieces to upgrade Killfuck Soulshitter's sword from a +10 to a +11 will probably save more lives in the long run than using it to kickstart the Green Revolution 1000 years early. Because the D&D-verse is really that shitty of a place.

But still, it makes the heroes look really bad. I wish the game didn't have that kind of dichotomy where a paladin can either choose to let 50 orphans starve so she can upgrade her armor or feed the orphans and then have the entire village get wiped out (along with himself) because she couldn't grab some Fire Resistance armor. Because that stuff sucks snail bait; it's appropriate for GRIMDARK settings like Exalted and Warhammer but not so much for D&D.

Decoupling magical items from the current economy as much as possible will go a long way towards solving this problem. Allowing people to buy magical items, or at least charging such ridiculous prices, has caused no end of problems.

[violence in the media]

What if we went the other way with magic items, and massively discounted them? Say, 1/100th of their actual cost? Your +2 sword enchantment is 80 gold, plus whatever you charge for the sword. A 1st level potion of cure light wounds is 5 silver. Your Tome of various stat adjustment comes in at a whopping 1,375 gold. On top of this, knock WBL (if you choose to keep it) down to 1/10th of what it is. Maybe you could justify the price depression by having various monsters be willing to enchant items for esoteric bullshit like maiden's tears, first kisses, and dreams of peace--whatever works for you.

You can then go through and give mundane things more sane values, rather than pricing them according to what an adventurer might do with it, and actually wind up having characters buy businesses, homes, and livestock because they've already afforded their important gear. Sure, you'll have 5th level characters with +5 swords, but so what? It'll also be easier to equip NPCs as you won't be bankrupting nations to do so.

Thoughts?

[Meikle641]

That sounds like a pretty interesting idea, actually. But it'd still require casters of whatever level for item bonuses and shit. "Cheap" or not, your +5 vorpal sword is still gonna need, what lvl 15 minimum caster to make?

I don't know it that really helps or hinders it, but lower costs wouldn't change the requirements for getting them, I'd think. Or whatever.

[Lokathor]

If the equipment bonuses are the Tome style scaling bonuses, sure. Otherwise, you're just putting high level gear into lower level hands for no particular reason. Even if things are cheaper, people will still divert resources into hero power instead of peasant power.

[The Lunatic Fringe]

What if we went the other way with magic items, and massively discounted them? Say, 1/100th of their actual cost? Your +2 sword enchantment is 80 gold, plus whatever you charge for the sword. A 1st level potion of cure light wounds is 5 silver. Your Tome of various stat adjustment comes in at a whopping 1,375 gold. On top of this, knock WBL (if you choose to keep it) down to 1/10th of what it is. Maybe you could justify the price depression by having various monsters be willing to enchant items for esoteric bullshit like maiden's tears, first kisses, and dreams of peace--whatever works for you.

You can then go through and give mundane things more sane values, rather than pricing them according to what an adventurer might do with it, and actually wind up having characters buy businesses, homes, and livestock because they've already afforded their important gear. Sure, you'll have 5th level characters with +5 swords, but so what? It'll also be easier to equip NPCs as you won't be bankrupting nations to do so.

Thoughts?

This requires a specific sort of setting - one in which the power difference between adventurers and "the population" (or, at least, "the merchants") is on average smaller than in what I would term "mythical" fantasy. This setting could be cool. You could totally run around playing detective in a world with all sorts of crazy stuff in it and still be more badass than others (just less so). That's ok, but the setting would also require a lot of thought, and it could totally turn out like Eberron. And no-one wants that.

Also, it would mean that you couldn't make King Arthur, because Excalibur would be just another sword. And while you could make a special class of uber-swords, you would just be defeating your original purpose by doing so.

Frankly, I would prefer it if magic items were rare, cool, and an ability. So the party death knight might take "has zombie minions" or "Has the bonesword" or "Can make people exhausted by touching them". And if he picks the the bonesword then his player can write some nifty little story about finding it in the decaying arms of a long-forgotten necromancer or forging it from the skeletons of his foes or whatever, and then he can run around stabbing people with it and when other people talk about him they'll say things like "Oh yeah, he's that guy who has the bonesword, right?"

Also, they would probably scale.

[Grek]

Idea: Make those +N sword bonuses not come from magic. It's just a better sword in a non-magical way. Better steel, or something.

Magic swords do something that isn't "gives me +N to stabbing".

[Username17]

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?

Presumably, they did so already. Because every DnD setting there is has standards of living considerably-to-vastly higher than those of RL Medieval Europe.

I'm not sure that's true. The D&D Laborer earns 1 silver piece a week - one fiftieth of a pound of silver. The English Peasant Laborer earned one shilling per week - worth one twentieth of a Pound of silver. In terms of actual precious metal, the low end of payment appears to be about 2.5 times higher under the royally decreed fixed wages of England than they are in the basic D&D lists.

Certainly the average standard of living is going to be thrown off by the rare adventurer who makes mad bank. In 1412, the English royal income was £52,400. That's 52,400 pounds of silver. It would take two million, six hundred and twenty thousand silver pieces to make that up. Or about two hundred and sixty thousand gold pieces if we used D&D exchange rates and weights. Every year. That's about the entire expected wealth by level of a 16th level character every year.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty2]

You can then go through and give mundane things more sane values, rather than pricing them according to what an adventurer might do with it, and actually wind up having characters buy businesses, homes, and livestock because they've already afforded their important gear. Sure, you'll have 5th level characters with +5 swords, but so what? It'll also be easier to equip NPCs as you won't be bankrupting nations to do so.

Well basically the main issue is that you'd be giving people all they could ever want at low levels and it removes the whole treasure gathering aspect of D&D.

I mean at that point, why have treasure at all?

[FatR]

I'm not sure that's true. The D&D Laborer earns 1 silver piece a week - one fiftieth of a pound of silver.

You just said yourself, that the amount of precious metals in circulation isn't that important. And I don't even care about PHB prices for mundane stuff, if only because editions come and go (never mind that no one put much thought in them).
But we know for a fact, that hunger due to poor harvests is practically unknown in DnDland, that relatively small plots of non-monsterinfested land can feed huge metropolises, that many states maintain massive standing armies of professional soldiers (too expensive for RL medieval states), that standards of healthcare at least include epidemic prevention. And that nearly all settlements of any size maintain contantly operating inns, which means that people with surplus wealth they can spend on ale and wenches are commonplace .
As this is the part of what makes DnD recognizably DnD, rules, particularly rules no one ever cared about, such as wages for mundane laborers, should be bent to accomodate this, not vice versa. And moreover, mildly creative (without campaign-breaking stuff, like chainbinding or traps with beneficial effects) applications of DnD magic can already account for much of this. Middle-level (12 and below) casters that seriously put their thought into impoving the standards of living can easily make perpetual motion engines and magic factories, by crafting magic items with unlimited use or commanding their bodyguard constructs to run an appropriately-sized threadmill, or something. Ideas of various technical and social improvements can be disseminated way faster, because, as mentioned, we have actively communicating gods and so on in DnDland. Divinations can be used to predict and mitigate natural disasters. Better social order can be maintained due to the superior travel and communications available for upper tiers of society (also, better social order is necessary for a stable society, because you want to integrate upstart young superhumans, not make them decide they need to break the system to get anywhere). Tools and reasons for improvement over RL are all there. Published settings just do not care to make them cause of their effect.