Wish Economy

[hogarth]

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"

I.e., "Shut up and enjoy your kingdom, hobo!"

[Red_Rob]

Hogarth, its not a case of players wanting swords more than castles.

In any well run game it is my experience that the DM attempts to make the fights exciting. The number one way to make a fight exciting is to make the players think they could lose. Therefore a good DM always makes the players think they could lose any given fight and every battle seems like a close won thing that could have gone either way.

While this makes for great stories and a tense, exciting game it also has the side effect that the players are always looking for some advantage or bonus to minimise the (to their mind) very real risk their character could die at any time. This means that when a player is given a finite resource (i.e. gold) and told they can spend it on bonuses for their character or on "other things", whatever they may be, they feel bad if they don't spend it on character power.

So it's not that they don't want castles, its that they know that they will feel bad if they spend gold on a castle, and if they die they'll always be wondering if the extra +1 they could have had would have saved them. The Wish economy after level 8-10 effectively seperates resources into the "character power" fund and the "beer and strippers" fund. And my experience is that players prefer it that way.

[jadagul]

* 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.

As I understand it, the whole point of the wish economy is that, no, it doesn't. There's a long list of things that you can buy with super gold that you can't buy with gold. At all. In any amount. You can't buy super gold with gold. Because the sort of people who have super gold don't need gold. And the sort of people who have stuff that you need to buy with super gold don't need gold. (the first rule of the wish economy is that you can't buy super gold with gold. If you find a way to do it, you must have made a bad assumption about how things work. Either that or you're swindling someone pretty explicitly).

So since 1) all the things that give you more character power require super gold, and 2) gold can't be turned into super gold, we're free to spend gold on stuff that doesn't increase character power. And we're also free to give characters basically arbitrary amounts of gold for flavor reasons without worrying about breaking the power curve.

As an example: one of the Might and Magic games starts with the PCs getting a castle. Like, that's the first thing that happens. Basically the whole plot is driven by the fact that the PCs get a huge castle at like level 2. In RAW D&D 3.x you can't do that, because the level 2 PCs will sell the castle and use it to buy a magic sword. Or magic pants. Or hire a few hundred level 1 mercenaries. And that's bad.

Now, the wish economy doesn't quite solve that problem (which is sad), because level 2 characters aren't in the wish economy yet. But as soon as your characters hit the wish economy, and start needing super gold to buy their power upgrades, you can give them a castle, or a kingdom, or make them rulers of the world, or whatever, without breaking the wealth-based power curve. And that makes more plots possible.

[hogarth]

So it's not that they don't want castles, its that they know that they will feel bad if they spend gold on a castle, and if they die they'll always be wondering if the extra +1 they could have had would have saved them.

You still haven't explained how this isn't fixed by just making magic items really expensive in terms of regular gold (not super-gold).

Let's say that you have to trade 100,000 castles in order to improve a sword from +2 to +3. Would your players make that trade, even if they could? I doubt it.

Now let's say that you have to trade one sod hut in order to improve a sword from +2 to +3. Presumably your players would make that trade.

So in this hypothetical, we've established that the price of improving a sword is somewhere between a sod hut and 100,000 castles. No super-gold required.

As an example: one of the Might and Magic games starts with the PCs getting a castle. Like, that's the first thing that happens. Basically the whole plot is driven by the fact that the PCs get a huge castle at like level 2. In RAW D&D 3.x you can't do that, because the level 2 PCs will sell the castle and use it to buy a magic sword. Or magic pants. Or hire a few hundred level 1 mercenaries. And that's bad.

How does the Wish economy prevent you from trading a castle for a few hundred level 1 mercenaries?

[K]

So it's not that they don't want castles, its that they know that they will feel bad if they spend gold on a castle, and if they die they'll always be wondering if the extra +1 they could have had would have saved them.

You still haven't explained how this isn't fixed by just making magic items really expensive in terms of regular gold (not super-gold).

Let's say that you have to trade 100,000 castles in order to improve a sword from +2 to +3. Would your players make that trade, even if they could? I doubt it.

Now let's say that you have to trade one sod hut in order to improve a sword from +2 to +3. Presumably your players would make that trade.

So in this hypothetical, we've established that the price of improving a sword is somewhere between a sod hut and 100,000 castles. No super-gold required.

Diamond mines. Gold mines. Elemental Plane of Earth. Genies in a non-Wish capacity. Whatever. Billions of GP is not even unrealistic if you try.

Regardless of the price, breaking the mundane wealth game is trivially easy if that is your goal, and in the case of standard adventure write-ups you can break the wealth game accidentally.

The beautiful flaw in the "massive gold" option is that you can't cry "oh, the economy will break if you flood it with too much X commodity" because you've explicitly included in your model that massive markets and massive amounts of currency are a part of your game.

You've also introduced the setting-breaking element where the +2 club that no one wanted is sold to buy The Dread Empire or set off a Golden Age for your people.

[wotmaniac]

You still haven't explained how this isn't fixed by just making magic items really expensive in terms of regular gold (not super-gold).

because it only further encourages Greyhawking ... to the point that any plot that doesn't exclusively revolve around Greyhawking gets completely ignored (dependent, of course, on how high you jack up the price).

As to the rest of your point -- I thoroughly empathize. As a matter of fact, I'm still not able to fully wrap my mind around some of the base assumptions of the Wish Economy .... but since I've determined that it is a solution for which I have no need, I've just dropped it.

[hogarth]

Diamond mines. Gold mines. Elemental Plane of Earth. Genies in a non-Wish capacity. Whatever. Billions of GP is not even unrealistic if you try.

So? Billions of dollars is not unrealistic in real life.

At any rate, if you're trying to say "gold is not scarce", then you can't have a gold economy based on fucking scarcity. So please pick one of "gold is scarce" or "gold is not scarce" for your hypothetical Wish economy; I can't argue against both versions at the same time, since it makes no fucking sense.

[K]

Diamond mines. Gold mines. Elemental Plane of Earth. Genies in a non-Wish capacity. Whatever. Billions of GP is not even unrealistic if you try.

So? Billions of dollars is not unrealistic in real life.

At any rate, if you're trying to say "gold is not scarce", then you can't have a gold economy based on fucking scarcity. So please pick one of "gold is scarce" or "gold is not scarce" for your hypothetical Wish economy; I can't argue against both versions at the same time, since it makes no fucking sense.

You can have both.

Gold is scarce at low levels. Gold is not scarce at high levels.

The planar economy comes into play when gold is not scarce, fixing the game. Pretty simple concept.

[hogarth]

So please pick one of "gold is scarce" or "gold is not scarce" for your hypothetical Wish economy; I can't argue against both versions at the same time, since it makes no fucking sense.

You can have both.

Gold is scarce at low levels. Gold is not scarce at high levels.

High level guy gives gold to low level guy, game goes kablooey. The end.

[K]

So please pick one of "gold is scarce" or "gold is not scarce" for your hypothetical Wish economy; I can't argue against both versions at the same time, since it makes no fucking sense.

You can have both.

Gold is scarce at low levels. Gold is not scarce at high levels.

High level guy gives gold to low level guy, game goes kablooey. The end.

Ummm, that's a flaw of every wealth-by-level system. It's a huge flaw of your massive gold system.

It's less of a problem in the planar economy because the low-level guy can just pimp himself out in the best gold-economy items and then the excess gold is useless to him.

[tzor]

You can have both.

Gold is scarce at low levels. Gold is not scarce at high levels.

The planar economy comes into play when gold is not scarce, fixing the game. Pretty simple concept.

No you can't have both unless you physically isloate high levels from low levels so that high levels can never, (absolutely never) thouch the world of low level characters.

So let's make this more logical.

Gold is scarce at low levels.

Gold could easily be superabundant at high levels but since it is worthless at the high levels there is no logical reason for doing so it never happens. (The amount of gold in the world is not impacted by high level characters in the same manner that the amount of turnips are not impacted.)

More importantly, there are those in the really really fucking high levels who have a vested interest in keeping the void between low and high as it is. (Because if the gods thought they could keep their power base by having turnips fall from the sky there would be neither a low level economy, nor any reason for anyone to become high level anway so no high level economy; just the falling turnips from the sky economy.)

[hogarth]

High level guy gives gold to low level guy, game goes kablooey. The end.

Ummm, that's a flaw of every wealth-by-level system. It's a huge flaw of your massive gold system.

No. In the massive gold system, gold is still scarce. There might be shitloads of it, but there's never unlimited quantities.

You can easily have an economic system where one guy has 10 billion quatloos and one guy has 5 quatloos without the world exploding.

[K]

High level guy gives gold to low level guy, game goes kablooey. The end.

Ummm, that's a flaw of every wealth-by-level system. It's a huge flaw of your massive gold system.

No. In the massive gold system, gold is still scarce. There might be shitloads of it, but there's never unlimited quantities.

You can easily have an economic system where one guy has 10 billion quatloos and one guy has 5 quatloos without the world exploding.

Your example is "high level guy gives gold to low-level guy." I put it in bold.

So if a guy with 10 billion quatloos gives a million to a guy who is supposed to have 5, then the game explodes. Your own example kills the massive gold option.

Under a planar economy, the high level guy gives the gold and 5 quatloo guy goes up in power slightly higher than he is supposed to have and the game is fine with a little adjustment (or no adjustment if you aren't a balance-queen).

[hogarth]

Ummm, that's a flaw of every wealth-by-level system. It's a huge flaw of your massive gold system.

No. In the massive gold system, gold is still scarce. There might be shitloads of it, but there's never unlimited quantities.

You can easily have an economic system where one guy has 10 billion quatloos and one guy has 5 quatloos without the world exploding.

Your example is "high level guy gives gold to low-level guy." I put it in bold.

So if a guy with 10 billion quatloos gives a million to a guy who is supposed to have 5, then the game explodes. Your own example kills the massive gold option.

Awesome! You won an argument by being purposefully dense!

I take that back; I think you just don't understand the meaning of the word "scarcity" in an economic context.

[K]

I take that back; I think you just don't understand the meaning of the word "scarcity" in an economic context.

Funny, I was going to accuse you of the same thing.

[DSMatticus]

No you can't have both unless you physically isloate high levels from low levels so that high levels can never, (absolutely never) thouch the world of low level characters.

No, actually, you're wrong. This would only be true if the amount of gold the high-level PC's inject into the economy is massive enough to cause hyper-inflation, which is debatable for these reasons:

1) High-level characters produce gold at a finite rate even at maximum capacity. Their ability to produce an inflation rate is going to depend on how this amount compares to the amount of gold in circulation.

2) High-level characters really have no need to buy things from the mundane world, so they produce gold at a rate well below their maximum capacity, which is finite as above. Unless they just want to do it for shits and giggles (covered below), they have no reason to make lots and lots of gold. They can directly make the things gold would give them with magic. They very rarely produce gold at all.

3) There are a limited number of high-level characters capable of doing this gold production, so... again. Not a lot going on.

4) Some high-level characters actually have mundane enterprises left over from their adventuring days that make a profit; i.e., they collect mundane wealth from the world, and put it in a vault. They can be a net loss through their negligence and inability to find things to spend gold on.

5) Gold leaves the economy at some rate. People die and get dragged off by monsters. Dragons come and steal gold. Entire cities and treasuries get overran by team monster and all that gold is lost. More gold losses.

If you can't tell, all these things put together should tell you that it isn't clear the quantity of gold in circulation is going up over time. It may in fact be going down.

Now, there are hypothetical scenarios where (mentioned above), if a high-level character really, really takes the time and dedicates themself to catastrophically destroying the value of gold, they can do that. It's not hard, but it's hand-waving time-consuming. There is absolutely no reason to believe this has not happened in D&D-land. You can point out that hypothetical example, and I can say, "yeah, that happened once a long time ago. After about ten years he got bored and quit, and the price of gold levelled off and people started using it as a currency again."

D&D gold has an incredibly low value compared to real world gold. Maybe that's because a few wizards decided they would flood the world with gold, in a misguided attempt to make it a happy, successful, fruitful place, not realizing they were just destroying its value. (Economics, it's a long way away.) This may have happened a bunch of times. It may happen again in the future. It may be something your PC's do. But that doesn't matter, because if you want to use the prices listed in the SRD all you have to do is say "it's not happening at this very instant. At this instant, the amount of gold mined and produced by high-level characters roughly equals the amount of gold lost to team monster."

[jadagul]

As an example: one of the Might and Magic games starts with the PCs getting a castle. Like, that's the first thing that happens. Basically the whole plot is driven by the fact that the PCs get a huge castle at like level 2. In RAW D&D 3.x you can't do that, because the level 2 PCs will sell the castle and use it to buy a magic sword. Or magic pants. Or hire a few hundred level 1 mercenaries. And that's bad.

How does the Wish economy prevent you from trading a castle for a few hundred level 1 mercenaries?

It doesn't, sadly. Which is the problem of systems where wealth interacts with power at all (although since mercenaries should always be hireable, it's hard to avoid doing that at all). But with the wish economy in place, once characters hit level nine or so, you can give them all the mundane wealth in the world (actually, you can do this literally) and it doesn't change the power curve.

You seem to want to lower the price of a castle so that it's nothing compared to a magic item. But there are only two (well, three) ways to do this:

1) Magic items are really expensive. I think this is what you're going for. But this just changes how the power curve breaks. Any level three adventurer has magic items, and he could sell one of these and retire for a life of middle class luxury. Or buy a castle for the hell of it. While I think it's cool to be able to give level three characters a castle, it's really dumb if all of them have one.

But worse, the real problem is that the level three character can sell his magic sword and get a few hundred level one guys to follow him around. And at level three that's still a wildly unbalancing amount of power.

2) Castles are really cheap. As are ships, and anything else you might want to give your players for flavor. This is hard on versimilitude, because why is a huge castle so cheap relative to provisions or whatever? Also, again means that any level two or three adventurer can go out and buy a castle.

Also, eventually you'll accidentally leave around some source of wealth that isn't really cheap, because you didn't notice you were putting the diamond statue in the dungeon, and your players break the power curve.

3) Things cost exactly what they need to cost to keep power balance. Which means that castles are expensive if you want to buy them and cheap if you want to sell them. The market for obsidian randomly crashes when you take the new obsidian castle so you can't sell off the walls. This is dumb.

[wotmaniac]

So? Billions of dollars is not unrealistic in real life.

FWIW, the advent of fiat currency has caused quite a paradigm shift in how economies work. (considering the context in which your statement was made, it's an important distinction to make).



Having said that, I'll go ahead and go down this same road (and I'm not sure why .... I guess as long as I keep flip-flopping on this topic, I'll just keep going until I finally form a decisive stance):

In reality, money really does (or, at least can) equal power. People use their money to gain power, and then use that power to gain more money .... while this really can be a chicken/egg issue, you get the point.
Why should this be any different in D&D?

Let's look at RL weaponry:
I can go in to just about any Wal-mart or outdoors outfitter and buy a run-of-the-mill shotgun or hunting rifle right off the rack with no problem -- no waiting, no FBI check, no questions; just give cash, receive gun.
With a couple thousand dollars, I can get a Class 3 "collector" license, and then fork over $15K-$30 for an M2 Browning -- though "normal" people can't get one, no matter how much money they have (however, the proper licensing does have a fixed and easily achievable dollar value).
With a couple more thousand dollars for permits (and building of proper storage facilities), I can upgrade my license to now allow me to purchase military-grade explosives (btw, IIRC, this is the same license used by demolition construction companies for building demos and excavations -- but I could be wrong). That's right, a few thousand dollars for a license, and I can buy military bomb-making hardware -- with the same green-backs that I use to purchase a ham sandwich.
With the proper licensing, I could even get a fucking mini-gun.For cash.As a civilian.
Anything above this is military-exclusive .... officially speaking, that is.
So, I guess we could say that anything up to this point is still analogous to being in the "gold economy" .... the heavier hardware could be considered analogous to low-level magic items.

So let's move up a notch ....
No amount of civilian licensing will ever let me pay cash for a Hind-D, a Paladin, or cruise missile -- this stuff is only traded between governments. However, autonomous rogue groups end up with this stuff all the time ... by simply paying cash to the right people. One would think that these things wouldn't be obtainable with simple cash to whoever offered it up ... but it happens. Hell, Pakistan has been parceling out tidbits of nuclear technology for years to whoever had the right amount of cash.
And this is nothing more than the black market at work.
The point is this: what is to keep planar currency from being exchanged for gold in the "black market", so to speak? If it can be found in a treasure hoard, it can be exchanged for gold.

Thoughts?

[fectin]

So let's move up a notch ....
No amount of civilian licensing will ever let me pay cash for a Hind-D, a Paladin, or cruise missile -- this stuff is only traded between governments. However, autonomous rogue groups end up with this stuff all the time ... by simply paying cash to the right people. One would think that these things wouldn't be obtainable with simple cash to whoever offered it up ... but it happens. Hell, Pakistan has been parceling out tidbits of nuclear technology for years to whoever had the right amount of cash.
And this is nothing more than the black market at work.
The point is this: what is to keep planar currency from being exchanged for gold in the "black market", so to speak? If it can be found in a treasure hoard, it can be exchanged for gold.

Nothing about the wish economy prevents you from simply stealing someone else's wish economy items. Nothing prevents you from selling wish economy items for cash. It just says that you are basically only going to be able to buy non-wish economy items with cash.
So, nothing prevents the Croatobaltoslovenians from simply stealing a Hind, and nothing prevents the Pakistanis from deciding that they are so hard-up for cash that they will sell priceless items at firesale costs.

[wotmaniac]

Nothing about the wish economy prevents you from simply stealing someone else's wish economy items. Nothing prevents you from selling wish economy items for cash. It just says that you are basically only going to be able to buy non-wish economy items with cash.
So, nothing prevents the Croatobaltoslovenians from simply stealing a Hind, and nothing prevents the Pakistanis from deciding that they are so hard-up for cash that they will sell priceless items at firesale costs.

Right. So how exactly does Wish Economy actually divorce gold from character power/uber-gear? It just seems to add extra steps ... which just seems needlessly punctilious.

[fectin]

Because dnd does not include anyone as foolish as the Pakistanis, and stealing Bracers of Armor +8 has the same problem as stealing a Hind: the original owners would prefer you not do that, and will probably want to recover them.

[wotmaniac]

Because dnd does not include anyone as foolish as the Pakistanis, and stealing Bracers of Armor +8 has the same problem as stealing a Hind: the original owners would prefer you not do that, and will probably want to recover them.

except that during the collapse of the Soviet Union, there wasn't a field-grade officer in the ranks that wasn't selling off his unit's stuff to random 3rd-world warlords .... and since everything was in such chaos, noone ever really noticed.

and the list goes on.

[jadagul]

D&D has less of an agency problem. As in, the Soviet Union had the power to collect nukes, and mid-level security officers were selling them out from under the Soviet Union's nose (Or its carcass). And that works because the Soviet Union was a massive country that had millions of people exercising some of its power. And so you can't give the Soviet Union enough cash to part with a nuke, but you can give some individual enough cash for him to help steal the nuke.

In D&D, rather than having a nuke belonging to a large government, we have a +8 sword belonging to an individual person. Like, it's attached to his belt. And you can't suborn one of his toes to help you steal the thing from him.

(As an aside: you totally could, in theory, persuade the Soviet Union to part with a nuke. You just can't do it with cash. But possibly with strategic favors or diplomatic realignment. Which would be the equivalent of trapped souls or bottled chaos or bartering your +7 armor).

[DSMatticus]

And you can't suborn one of his toes to help you steal the thing from him.

This should be a spell.

[Chamomile]

Keep in mind that in the Wish Economy, the Pakistani government (which is six high-level heroes who used to adventure together and have since semi-retired) can wish up as much mundane cash as they want. They will never have a shortage of gold unless they seriously screw up the economy by causing hyper-inflation.