Wish Economy

[Emerald]

Maybe I've just had a really weird and anomalous experience with this game.
In 17 years of playing, I have yet to see a group of players not use part of their resources on "character development" stuff (hence why I don't see this problem). Not just that, I've seen it done at every single level of play. Whether it be hiring body guards (for extended use -- not just one-off), raising armies, building/maintaining keeps, developing agriculture and other resources, building churches, etc., etc., etc., this kind of stuff has happened in every single game that I've ever been a part of.

What gives?

Of course, there does seem to be the issue of player-DM trust. If the DM has fostered the environment in which the players believe that they have no hope of survival/success without sinking every single copper piece in to the power of their equipment, then of course this is going to happen.
Once again, this seems to go back to the issue of setting expectations.

I've seen basically the same thing in my games, but as has been mentioned many times you are penalized for doing so in the worst cases and come out neutral in the best cases, assuming you don't have WBL gentleman's agreements or DM fiated benefits for doing so or whatever. Ideally, the rules should actually incentivize doing things like that, because many players do it anyway and you shouldn't ever punish players for doing something flavorful and reasonable that most players like to do, any more than you should take penalties for flavorfully describing your sword swings or for assuming that hitting someone from the high ground is advantageous to you.

As well, turning gold into personal power being strictly mechanically superior to turning gold into fame, lands, worldbuilding, etc. means you have to account equally for both "I want my +X super sword" characters and "I'm building an orphanage" characters with your wealth and economic rules, which is more work and can be harder to balance, whereas if you can ensure that either (A) you use different resources for both, like gold vs. souls in the wish economy, or (B) both give comparable advantages, as in the suggestion that having a keep or temple gives mechanical benefits commensurate with having a fancy sword, it makes the rules easier to design and makes players happy.

Whether you agree with the specific implementation of this in the wish economy or not, the basic ideas that, first, decoupling wealth from personal power is desirable, and second, players shouldn't be punished for doing fluffy worldbuilding stuff, are sound ones. Any rules to that effect are going to have some problems, but any such rules are going to be better than the existing system where your character might want to donate gold to the poor or hire bunches of soldiers but would be better served simply buying another +1 on his artifact sword. If players are going to do the fluffy stuff regardless, the rules should work with them rather than against them.

[wotmaniac]

The Oberoni Fallacy is not a solution to a game design problem. Note that for future reference.

Get it straight -- I was a whole lot closer to Stormwind than I was Oberoni.

Every time this thread pops up, I feel like people forget that planar currency is the raw component for high-end magic items in the Wish economy and gold is raw component for low-end ones.

except that I haven't forgotten anything -- as a matter of fact, it is this very thing that is causing me problems .....
How do you enter the planar currency market? i.e., how is that transition made? It seems to me that you would have 2 different things going on: 1) "fuck you, your gold is meaningless" ; 2) there seems that there are at least a few denominations of planar currency that actually can be solved by simply throwing gold at it.

the latter simply puts us back at square one.
the former involves favor brokering and scavenger hunts. I simply don't see how having to track down planar currency doesn't lead to this. What -- are you just supposed to find bottles of hope laying around in treasure drops? What am I missing?
this distracts from whatever other plot you might have going on at the time.


Don't get me wrong -- I'm not deliberately setting out to be a contrarian about this. Quite the opposite -- given the fact that I initially liked the idea at first look, I'm looking for reasons to fully accept it. It's just that I'm simply not able to conceptualize this whole thing without seeing all kinds of pitfalls, which is giving me a pretty shitty ROI.

knowing that the games basic assumptions don't include Greyhawking

How do you know that?

No, how do you know that? Have you ever played an early D&D adventure, like say Temple of Elemental Evil? All they were were lists of rooms and monsters with the value of every fucking thing in the room noted down. How can you say the basic assumptions of D&D don't include Greyhawking?

parties where every character has at least 1 +2 saving throw feat? 10-dex clerics wearing leather armor? these don't seem like the type to "greyhawk" for power.
Also, Gygax was a dick -- he encouraged this type of stuff through being a dick.



Actually, I'm of 2 minds about this issue.
As a player, I want to be able to do this from time-to-time. I do fully understand and appreciate the desire to build castles, etc., without cutting in to my survivability as an adventurer. however, even then, I get to the point where I'm like "screw this bullshit -- let's get back to the actual plot".
As a DM, I find there to be quite the conundrum related to the Law of Conservation of Detail. When players are always doing this kind of stuff, I'm loath to add flair to anything. It pisses me off when anything more descriptive than a flat featureless plane causes players to automatically start trying to figure out ways to whore shit out. I'm just like "it doesn't matter -- it's just fluff to make things visually interesting". You don't have to interact with every blade of grass or grain of sand on the planet. This level of minutia just seems frivolous and pointless. But if I were to strictly adhere to the Law of Conservation of Detail, then the game setting would be a very boring place. Basically, players that vehemently insist on this type of shit destroy a certain type of trust.

So yes, something is needed. However, I'm just not able to buy in to the Wish Economy (at least, not yet).

[darkmaster]

Well souls can be found anywhere, and you can buy gems with gold. So, there's that.

Really though, it's just a matter of thinking about it. If the planes run on planer currency then it would make sense that there would be way to get your hands on planer currency. If that means you inserting the void stone, bottled hope, etc. into the loot you give out. So what? How is that different than putting gold into low level encounter loot? It's money, more than that; it's really, really valuable money. So of course powerful creatures are going to have some in their coffers.

[K]

I don't know what to tell you. I mean, I've never seen players spend gold on things that weren't magic items when they were allowed to buy magic items. They wouldn't even buy potions because they knew that the DM wasn't auditing their character sheets for appropriate wealth and wasn't going to compensate.

I have seen players spend gold on castles or bribes or whatever when they couldn't buy magic power.

Lots of players don't game the DnD system. They don't optimize, they play bullshit character types (like bards), and they waste potential character power "for flavor." These kinds of people really will not wear armor on their fighter because it's more flavorful

I don't know what to tell those people. They seem to have fun, and when their character dies they take it as a reason for a dramatic death scene(while everyone else is pissed off).

----------------------------------

Entering the planar economy is really easy. You do it by going on adventures.

Sometimes enemies will have planar currency on them. Sometimes people will pay you planar currency to go on quests. Sometimes you farm it on your own (killing powerful monsters for their souls). Sometimes you trade some currencies for others (favors to the other planar currency).

The item creation rules were going to fill some of the holes in the previous document. Details like "only one soul per magic item" and time-intensive and dangerous rules for finding planar pearls were going to flesh out the various reasons that people generally adventure instead of setting up a soul farm.

The rules as written in the Dungenomicon seem to be poorly read. People seem to think that when we say gems, we aren't saying magic gems like planar pearls or dragonshards (even though we explicitly are). People seem to see a GP cost that souls can be sold for, and assume that buying them is also possible (and it is.... just not the powerful souls you need to make Wish-economy items).

Now, I didn't write the magic items rules for the simply reason that once you've fixed this half of the game, you might as well just fix the other half and have your own original game that you can make money off of.

Like the Wish-economy, Gold-economy, and Turnip economy, things in the real world sell for different rates. Freely-offered game design on the web is usually a Turnip economy item because no one will pay dollars for it, it's a gold economy for a few named designers who get the three or four jobs in the industry, and it's a Wish-economy item for corporations (WotC is never going to sell it's DnD license for the simple reason that it's not worth just money, it's worth a stream of money indefinitely... they were lucky to get it because TSR went tits up due to incompetent management).

[Lokathor]

How do you enter the planar currency market? i.e., how is that transition made? It seems to me that you would have 2 different things going on: 1) "fuck you, your gold is meaningless" ; 2) there seems that there are at least a few denominations of planar currency that actually can be solved by simply throwing gold at it.

You enter it the same way you entered the gold market: go out and kill things and take their stuff. If it's things other people care about then you win, if it's not (rusty clubs and junk) then you get nothing this go-around.

Once you've got enough to trade around and things, then people will start to take you seriously.

Well souls can be found anywhere, and you can buy gems with gold. So, there's that.

Note that while mundane gems can be made from Wish, and they are useful for spell components, Magic Gems (the planar currency) cannot be made from Wish. Anything that can be made from Wish will never be a planar currency. "You can't make this by Wishing for it" is the special factor about the object that makes it valuable and count as a planar currency in the first place. After that you just have to assign a value to it based on its rarity.

the former involves favor brokering and scavenger hunts. I simply don't see how having to track down planar currency doesn't lead to this. What -- are you just supposed to find bottles of hope laying around in treasure drops? What am I missing?
this distracts from whatever other plot you might have going on at the time.

This is how players got their gold in the first place, and that's how they started out on adventures. What's the problem with getting things from adventuring like that? You say that folks should "just play the game", well go play and then you get the stuff to power up your items as you play. The plot almost for sure doesn't need you to have powered up items anyways because your numerics are auto-scaling.

[darkmaster]

Note that while mundane gems can be made from Wish, and they are useful for spell components, Magic Gems (the planar currency) cannot be made from Wish. Anything that can be made from Wish will never be a planar currency. "You can't make this by Wishing for it" is the special factor about the object that makes it valuable and count as a planar currency in the first place. After that you just have to assign a value to it based on its rarity.

No man, I mean that you can wish up never ending gems which can then be used to bind the same number of souls, which can then be used as planar currency,

[jadagul]

Right. But the souls are planar currency only if they're expensive enough that you can't wish for them (which means, what, CR four or above, something like that?). And while you can wish up the gems, you have to actually go collect the souls. Which is, presumably, a thing you can do. You can go kill things with valuable souls. But that's not that much different from killing things with valuable possessions.

[Lokathor]

You can't ever Wish for a soul, even small souls. However, the intent is that, as K said, only 1 soul would be allowed to be counted towards the creation of any one item, so that you need big souls to make big items. People probably won't accept souls that are too small, but some might.

[darkmaster]

Well yeah, you have to go kill the fuck out of something. But seeing as we're talking about D&D you were going to do that anyway. So picking up the souls of the things you just stabbed in the face doesn't seem like too much of a brain teaser.

[fectin]

Well yeah, you have to go kill the fuck out of something. But seeing as we're talking about D&D you were going to do that anyway. So picking up the souls of the things you just stabbed in the face doesn't seem like too much of a brain teaser.

Sure makes a lot more sense than a giant snake carting a bunch of gold around.

[hogarth]

I don't know what to tell you. I mean, I've never seen players spend gold on things that weren't magic items when they were allowed to buy magic items.

Right, so you're switching to a system where instead you get "super-gold" that the players will only spend on magic items. What a colossal improvement!

I have seen PCs acquiring castles and whatnot, but not by paying for them with gold.

[wotmaniac]

okay, I think I finally see what's going on now ...
I just had this image in my head of:
"well, Thog needs to upgrade his sword .... I guess we got to put everything on hold while we go back to Bytopia to mine some courage, so that we can take that to the Styx boatman to trade for the soul of a wrongly-damned person, just so we can take that to the Friendly Fiend so that he will give us the name of someone who give us what we need in exchange for this bottle of hope we got when we recharged Swizzleblitz's staff. Anybody got anything else they want while we're out?"
And that whole thing just seemed a little ridiculous to go through every time you simply wanted to upgrade your gear.

And yes, every group I've DMed or played with has ended up spending some of their hard-earned resources on stuff like castles or mercenary companies or whatever, despite being free to buy uber-gear. Often times, this has been done when they/we have figured out a way to achieve some plot element en lieu of brute-forcing it -- but then they/we hold on to it and make the plot come to them/us. Being able to have your actions dictate the plot, instead of having the plot dictate your actions, is hard to put a price on.
So, in other words, it seems that the Wish Economy is intended to solve a problem that I might not necessarily be experiencing (at least, not as conceived by the target audience).

Well, thanks for the break-down.

[RobbyPants]

I have seen PCs acquiring castles and whatnot, but not by paying for them with gold.

That can work, so long as they can't turn around and sell the castle for gold and then buy items.

[Dr_Noface]

hogarth, isn't that a massive improvement?

[hogarth]

I have seen PCs acquiring castles and whatnot, but not by paying for them with gold.

That can work, so long as they can't turn around and sell the castle for gold and then buy items.

In that case, I would ask: "Why are you giving your PCs castles in the first place when they obviously don't give a shit about having one?"

[violence in the media]

I have seen PCs acquiring castles and whatnot, but not by paying for them with gold.

That can work, so long as they can't turn around and sell the castle for gold and then buy items.

In that case, I would ask: "Why are you giving your PCs castles in the first place when they obviously don't give a shit about having one?"

You're not "giving" it to them. They're laying claim to it for purposes of salvage.

[sabs]

And the Local Baron didn't swing by with an army to take it?

[violence in the media]

Are you kidding? He's probably the one they killed to get it in the first place.

[sabs]

What about his neighbors?
It's not like adventurers can HOLD a Castle for very long. Not without troops. They have to sleep, the Wizard only has so many spells.

[hogarth]

You're not "giving" it to them. They're laying claim to it for purposes of salvage.

I hate repeating myself. Please see my comment about Bill Gates collecting aluminum cans on the side of the road.

[violence in the media]

You're not "giving" it to them. They're laying claim to it for purposes of salvage.

I hate repeating myself. Please see my comment about Bill Gates collecting aluminum cans on the side of the road.

Ok, the problem with your analogy is that Bill Gates, should he want to collect cans for the spare change, would need to go out and accumulate them himself. Assuming he had no access to free help, this would take actual time and tangible effort from Mr. Gates that he may not be willing to spend.

On the other hand, adventurers are tireless, focused machines that exist in a wierd temporal flux. They could have a million gold pieces in Santa sacks already but, because it takes no effort to handwave collecting cans on the king's highway for an extra thousand gold, they'll do it. And they potentially have access to several varieties of free help.

Now, regarding the "castle" argument. Castle is just a stand-in for any structure that might house an adventure location. It can be an actual castle, a manor house, a cave complex, a forgotten temple, a ruined city, or what-the-fuck-ever. Maybe there's someone else that can lay claim to the site after the adventurers killed everyone in it, maybe there isn't, and maybe the adventurers don't care.

PCs don't even need to liquidate the entire thing for maximum value, or hold it for any significant length of time, so long as the group feels like they've been able to squeeze more value out of it than was originally intended. An MC could have placed appropriate treasure all over the adventure, but forgot about an NPC (that the player's remember) that's willing to pay a premium for ancient elven candlesticks or gnomish tapestries. If this location had value as a home base for some entity, it probably has some value that you as a PC can capitalize on. Greyhawking doesn't even need to mean scraping extra GPs out of abandoned flatware. It can encompass any situation that develops where the PCs see an opportunity for profit that the MC missed. Given that MCs are not all-knowing, this is inevitible.

I mean, I guess you could set all your adventures in barren badlands and have treasure disintigrate as the PCs figure out how to swindle pennies from the peasantry.

[hogarth]

On the other hand, adventurers are tireless, focused machines that exist in a wierd temporal flux. They could have a million gold pieces in Santa sacks already but, because it takes no effort to handwave collecting cans on the king's highway for an extra thousand gold, they'll do it. And they potentially have access to several varieties of free help.

Wait -- didn't you say that the PCs are getting castles (or whatever) by killing the owners? So you're just handwaving that part, too?

Is there any part of your game that you don't handwave, or do your games last, like, 5 minutes from beginning to end?

[Red_Rob]

Wat? He said they can handwave activities that take only time and effort, then went on a seperate tangent about being able to use locations as an unusual source of treasure.

I don't know what you're bitching about. The Wish economy fulfils all of its basic design requirements:
* Stop players from translating lots of small wealth into big purchases.
* Force players to do dangerous activities (i.e. something the DM can base an adventure around) in order to obtain powerful items.
* Allow players to spend money on things other than direct power increases and not feel retarded

Complaining about "Super Gold" and DM handwaving seems to miss the point somewhat. Are you disputing that these are worthy design goals, or that the Wish economy provides answers to them?

[hogarth]

Wat? He said they can handwave activities that take only time and effort, then went on a seperate tangent about being able to use locations as an unusual source of treasure.

I really hate repeating myself, but here goes again: There's no problem that the Wish "economy" solves that just jacking up the price of magic items doesn't solve, too. Yes, you could "Greyhawk" a castle after you have killed the owners, but that would provide a relatively small amount of money, like Bill Gates picking up a nickel on the street. Yes, if you do that a zillion times, then you start making real money, but only a moron would handwave the "kill the owners" part of the adventure, so the point is moot.

I don't know what you're bitching about. The Wish economy fulfils all of its basic design requirements:
* Stop players from translating lots of small wealth into big purchases.
* Force players to do dangerous activities (i.e. something the DM can base an adventure around) in order to obtain powerful items.
* Allow players to spend money on things other than direct power increases and not feel retarded

Complaining about "Super Gold" and DM handwaving seems to miss the point somewhat. Are you disputing that these are worthy design goals, or that the Wish economy provides answers to them?

To address each point:

* There's nothing wrong with allowing for the same currency to purchase cheap and expensive things; by definition, the Wish "economy" allows that too (ie. something could cost 1 super-gold piece or 1000 super-gold pieces, presumably). The specific complaint that I've heard is that carting around 100,000 actual physical gold coins with you to buy something is extremely awkward; I can't disagree with that, but presumably you could swap using some more expensive (but still non-magical) trade good.

* Handwaving "you earn a million gold pieces" is exactly as stupid as handwaving "you earn a hundred super-gold pieces", notwithstanding the fact that you can bind efreeti to get the former but not the latter. I'd much rather change the rules to discourage "free wishes" rather than bend over backwards (and fail) to justify a system where gold is simultaneously scarce and non-scarce.

* I don't know what to tell you; if your players are selling castles (or whatever) in order to buy magic swords, that means that they don't really give a shit about castles and they really like magic swords. There's a number of reasons why that might be the case: maybe they think the game is too hard and they want to make it easier, or maybe they think the enemies they're fighting are boring and they want to fight tougher, more interesting monsters. In either case, saying "shut up and enjoy your castle" isn't going to make them any happier.

[RadiantPhoenix]

The point is that by separating the character resources of "money you can use to buy magic items you care about personally" and "money you can use to buy cool stuff that doesn't help you be a better murdering hobo" you remove (some of) the conflict between "kill the next lich king" and "rule your kingdom well until then"