Sunday, April 13, 2014

World Building 101: The Best Things In Life Are Free

This week, we're back on the general world-building tip, looking at that most beloved (and simultaneously reviled) invention of civilization: Money!

Now, in modern society, where nearly everything is run by the Capitalist Free Market principle, and the Modified Keynesian Economic Model pretty much runs the way the world-wide economies succeed or fail, money is something that we really can't get away from. In most (I'd hazard to say "all," but I know that's not actually true) Fantasy RPG's, money is the way the game runs. The economic model of most games is thus:

Step One: Characters spend their initial funds on equipment and gear.
Step Two: Characters head out to adventure.
Step Three: Characters get into fights with the Bad Guys (tm).
Step Four: Characters loot the bodies of the Bad Guys (tm).
Step Five: Characters return to town and visit the various merchants and craftsmen.
Step Six: Characters spend their loot on new equipment and gear.
Step Seven: Repeat From Step Two.

And that's pretty much it. In nearly every Fantasy RPG ever run, this is how it works. You adventure, you get loot, you spend your hard-won fortune on new gear, you adventure and get more loot. It doesn't matter if your goal is to Save The Princess or Topple The Evil Empire, this is how the economy of game world will generally work. And for the most part, this is fine.

But (and like I've said before, there's always a "but") what about how the rest of the world runs? Your characters may be swimming in Gold Pieces (more on that later) but what about the rest of the world?

What happens to the hamlet that the characters come from, after they come back to town with a cart full of treasure and proceed to commission the Finest Craftswork of the local smiths? Does it grow? Does that money go places? And how does it do so? Let's say the characters come back to town with a cart full of the armor, weapons, and wealth of the local Goblin tribe. Call it about two thousand gold pieces in total wealth value. The Goblin Chief had a suit of Half Plate Armor, which is the biggest and burliest piece of loot, but the rest of the Goblins had sufficient weapons, loose coins, and stolen goods (they'd gotten very good at raiding the local villages) that if you were to use the values given in the most popular variant of the longest running Fantasy RPG, you'd be easily able to come to that two thousand GP value from a single Goblin tribe. Now, two thousand gold pieces is a lot of weight. Fifty of them weigh one pound. Five hundred? That's ten pounds. Two thousand gold pieces? That's forty pounds of weight. Even if you distribute it evenly throughout the party, that's a lot of bulk and hassle. If the characters get their coins converted to jewelry and gems in order to move it about more easily (after all, all those bags full of money are going to be bloody heavy), where does the Jeweler even get the equivalent goods necessary to make the exchange? In most games, the "Perpetual Middle Ages" timeline would preclude the amount of common, easy long-distance travel necessary for the Jeweler to be able to afford even half that much wealth. After all, it wasn't until just few scant centuries ago (roughly the 1600's) that the bulk of the common folk in the world were able to easily move (or even conceive of moving) more than a handful of miles away from their birthplace. In the rough-and-tumble, Monsters-Behind-Every-Tree climate of the typical Perpetual Middle Ages Fantasy RPG? That jeweler is taking his life in his hands if he's going to try and go more than ten miles away from home. And if the jeweler can convert that much money readily, what the heck is the town relying on first level adventurers for in the first place?

 Most games gloss over this sort of thing, or provide rules for what kind of goods, services, and economies a settlement of Sizes A, B, C, or D might be able to provide. And this is fine. In fact, it's very, very helpful. The characters come back with two thousand GP worth of loot and want to either get rid of it, convert it, or modify it for their own use? Awesome! Too bad they can't do any of that in a hamlet of two hundred people! They'll have to go down the road a few days to the next largest town, perhaps even further, to figure out where they can get all that money handled. And while they're on the road, making their way onward to adventure, they'll have to handle bandits, more Goblins, and a few other, unknown dangers. In so doing, they'll acquire more loot, which of course will have to be handled in the next town, and the cycle starts all over.

So again, we come back to the question of "what happens to the towns this money gets offloaded in"? Where does that money go? What happens to it?

One of the craziest moments in any of my games occurred when I answered this question for my players. Over the course of several months of game time, they started using a particular town as their base of operations. They would venture further and further afield, and each time they'd go out, it would take them longer and longer to return. But even though they might hit up larger and better equipped towns on their way "home," they'd always return to the sleepy little fishing town on the banks of two rivers. Imagine their surprise when they came back from one of these trips to find the roads in to town had been smoothed and graded, with clear signs of engineering  at the edges - runoff channels had clearly been cut along the last two miles of road before reaching the town proper, and the road itself had been covered over in layers of sand and gravel. The main gate into the town had gone from a simple wooden fence to a stone-and-timber edifice, and the town's single central well had been replaced with an elaborate pump and fountain system. As well, the population had blossomed, seemingly overnight (in reality it had been nearly three months), to include additional merchants and services. Almost too late, they learned that the beginnings of a shady, not-so-nice underground had taken root: one that did not want to let these adventurers go about burdened by all that heavy, heavy gold.

The lesson here for the players, which they quickly took to lamenting, was that as their characters continued to pour money into this small village, the one they had taken to because it was "quiet and peaceful and away from all that adventuring hassle," that the village itself was starting to reflect the actions of the characters. The characters were directly responsible for the expansion of the town: their money built of the economy of the town, enabling the city elders to call in engineers from up the river to fix the roads, tear down and reinforce the town walls, as well as get proper sanitation, clean water, and more in place for their citizens. Moreover, as word got out that this place was the home base of the adventurers quickly becoming the darlings of the region, other fortune seekers, warriors with something to prove, and shadowy "legitimate businessmen" began to move to the town. As the town grew, so too did the very artifacts of civilization that the characters were trying to eschew by living in the village: crime, graft, corruption, and more.

In essence, the characters had become the villains of this part of their story. The players had no idea how this happened, until I took time out of the game to explain that it was the inevitable outcome of all the money they'd been pouring in to the place. Where did they think it had gone? What sorts of things did they really expect a poor fishing town to do with the mountain of money that the characters had put into the town? After all the math was said and done, it came up that the characters had dropped nearly a million GP into this town over the course of a year and a half. "What is a sleepy little fishing town supposed to do with that much gold?" I asked them. "Use it as bait?" For the first time since the game started, the characters, and I like to think the players as well, really understood that their actions were changing the world they lived in.

If I had to give you a succinct wrap-up for the first part of this week's essay, it would be that while you don't, as a GM, have to keep tabs on everything your player characters are spending, or where, you should remember that the economy of the game world does not revolve around them, or at least it shouldn't. Nor should your game world remain stagnant and unchanging. By playing with the dynamism of the economy of the world, you can treat yourself and your players to some fun stories. Your game world's money can and should move around. It should go from the hands of these humble fishermen in this sleepy river town into the hands of the merchants and engineers of the larger towns of the area, and then from there into the pockets of laborers and craftsmen. From those pockets, back into the hands of barkeeps and harbormasters, who provide meals and docking slips for the men and materiel that will be used to build the town up. Maybe one of those coins is defaced in a particular way that one of the characters will remember, ten months from now, when - as she's rifling through the pockets of a particularly foolish Goblin - it comes back into her possession. What a puzzle! How did this coin, which she specifically remembers giving to the innkeeper's son back in Sleepy Fishing Town, end up a hundred miles away and in the hands of yet another Goblin? What happened to him? Is he all right? Or did he simply give it to a carpenter in return for building all new tables for the inn?

Play with where the money comes from and where it goes, in your game. Give it a shot. It's fun.

Now, up a bit, I mentioned that I'd get to the idea of your characters "swimming in Gold Pieces," and that's just what I intend to do. No, this isn't going to be some half-thought-out rant about how you should "keep your PC's poor!" in order to prevent them from essentially buying their victories with specialized items or armies of mercenaries or the like. Far from it. If your players can figure out a way to come up with enough money to topple an empire, more power to them. I'm not here to tell you how to run your game, but I am here to tell you that you might want to consider dropping the Universal Gold Piece Standard and move yourself on to local currencies.

The Gold Piece, as used in the World's Most Popular Fantasy RPG and its progeny, is intended as a sort of catch-all currency. A nummus mundi, if you will. It's designed as the single coin of the many realms, and its value is set as a matter of course so that you can purchase anything you want from any merchant that sells it, and know what it's going to cost you. A Gold Piece in Waterdeep will have exactly as much purchasing power as a Gold Piece in Shadowdale as a Gold Piece in Calimport. Just as with the Standard Adventure/Loot Economy present in most Fantasy RPG's, there's really nothing wrong with this. It lessens book keeping, and it speeds up game play a lot. It's also pretty boring and takes away a fair bit of uncertainty when it comes to the question of "Can my character afford that?" comes up among the players.

The simple fact of the matter is that there is not, and has never been, a common coin that all nations of any world - real or fictional - will ever accept with a guaranteed 1:1 exchange rate and a smiling face. While the willful suspension of disbelief has to come in to play for the Gold Piece to work (something easy enough to do in games with things like Gods That Work and Real Magic), I want to espouse to you this one simple truth:

Different types of currency from different regions of your game world will add depth to and increase the immersion level of your game.

Consider the following:

Your characters are out hunting down Goblins. They come across an unlucky band of the greenskins, and they put them to the sword. In the backpack of one of the dead creatures, they find a pouch of coins: a handful of copper bits and a silver mark - all common coins from the characters' homeland, all minted within the last ten years - and a gold coin they've never seen before. The coin is half the size of the local gold coins - surely a forgery! But looking closer at it, it seems to be real, it's just... not any kind of coin they've seen before. Where does it come from? Who is the strange, hawk-nosed king pressed into its face? Why does the back bear a rampant bull instead of a swan? What does it mean?

Now, replay that using standard terms. In the backpack of one of the dead creatures, they find a dozen copper pieces, a silver piece, and a gold piece that doesn't look right. It's half the size of a normal gold piece and has an unusual face on one side, with a bull on the other. What does it mean?

Either of those options works in game, but as you can plainly see, the first - where the coins have their own names, their own histories, and their own "character," if you will - provides a good deal more impetus for description and investigation. I've personally used both of those methods, with the same group of players. In the first case, the Designated Note Taker wrote down "unusually small gold coin, possibly from another country?" In the second case, the DNT simply wrote "small gold coin." Now, perhaps that's got nothing to do with the differences in description, but I like to think it doesn't.

When you give each coin a name, value, and history unique to the region it comes from, you easily add a layer of depth to your game that it didn't have before. More, when you then consider the concept that perhaps not every region will be happy sustaining the 1:1 exchange rate so common to Fantasy Economies, you can easily set up yet another layer of depth. Perhaps it's true that within Waterdeep, you can always find someone willing to take coins from not-so-friendly nations and convert them at their face value, that might not be true in Suzail, where you'll be lucky to get half your value for that Thayan gold. If you wanted to buy goods with Red Wizard blood money, you should have gone back to Eltabbar!

Consider also that in many nations right here on Earth, some forms of currencies are created to be, or become, so extremely specialized as to only be useful in certain situations. The Guinea, for instance, despite starting as a standard coin of the realm has evolved to the point where it is a somewhat abstract currency almost exclusively used in livestock auctions and purchases. Imagine the surprise on your characters (and players!) faces when they open the treasure chest of the Goblin King and find that it's half full of coins that can only be used for purchasing land within their home kingdom. What do they do now? I suppose the Paladin always did want to be a horse rancher, right?

Now, as always, none of these suggestions or topics are things that I'm suggesting that you run out and do right away. I do think they're worth considering, however, especially as most of the GM's I speak to about such things often tell me that they want "something simple and easy" that they can do to increase the depth and immersion in their games. All of them are amazing word smiths and are quite handy at generating great plots and stories, but they're always looking for that "one little thing" that they can do to turn the dial up a notch. Something as simple as changing up the names of coins and how they're traded, as well as remembering that all that money has to go somewhere when the characters are done with it, can be that "one little thing," if you let it.

1 comment:

  1. Even from one kingdom to the next, the size, weight, and purity of various coins comes into play when calculating exchange rates.
    Example: The Kingdom of Blevin has a corrupt administration that started twenty years ago and they alloyed the gold with cheaper metals. Sure, they look the same at first glance, but anyone with the sense Ghu gave a cow knows that Blevish gold from twenty years ago or newer is worth half that of older Blevish gold. And the merchants of Riversmeet, three weeks ride from Blevin treat all Blevish gold as debased, no matter how old it is. Meanwhile, King Garloc of Adelaire has maintained strict control over the size and purity of Adelairan currency, so merchants all over the known world consider Adelairan gold worth more despite its smaller size.

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