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Abstracting money in an RPG
Jul. 13th, 2010 09:26 pmI'm pondering a way to deal with wealth in an RPG system.
The simplest method is, to have an amount of Pounds, Dhillings and Pence, or Dollars and Cents, Credits, gold and silver coins, Galleons, Sickles and Knuts, Florins, Marks, Credits, Drogna or Triganic Pus.
This is a very flexible and intuitive system. Sadly it can get complicated.
What if you have a game where you can play a trader or a pirate? One climbing the financial ladder matters. You buy yourself a ship. Suddenly you have a capital asset that's making you money. It gets you commissions. It allows you to trade. It gets damaged. It has running costs. Suddenly you're in a world of trouble because you need to balance all this stuff. Too much income and there's no challenge. You just keep getting bigger better ships and end up with runaway profits. Too little and the ship doesn't even pay for itself. You don't really want to worry so much about supply and demand, cost benefit analyses, and spreadsheets. Well,some people do, but I don't.
So ideally you want to abstract a lot of that away. But then it gets too simple.
You want to haggle for parts and bribe customs officials to decide not to look in one of the crates. You want damage to matter and you want to get those juicy commissions. But not only that, the system has to work for other characters as well. A lower class character might decide to buy someone a drink or twelve to get them talking. An independently wealthy character might want to commission a vessel or hire an assassin. A conman might want to invest in some expensive clothes to fit in with the wealthy marks.
There has to be a balance between abstract and detailed. I can't work it out though.
The simplest method is, to have an amount of Pounds, Dhillings and Pence, or Dollars and Cents, Credits, gold and silver coins, Galleons, Sickles and Knuts, Florins, Marks, Credits, Drogna or Triganic Pus.
This is a very flexible and intuitive system. Sadly it can get complicated.
What if you have a game where you can play a trader or a pirate? One climbing the financial ladder matters. You buy yourself a ship. Suddenly you have a capital asset that's making you money. It gets you commissions. It allows you to trade. It gets damaged. It has running costs. Suddenly you're in a world of trouble because you need to balance all this stuff. Too much income and there's no challenge. You just keep getting bigger better ships and end up with runaway profits. Too little and the ship doesn't even pay for itself. You don't really want to worry so much about supply and demand, cost benefit analyses, and spreadsheets. Well,some people do, but I don't.
So ideally you want to abstract a lot of that away. But then it gets too simple.
You want to haggle for parts and bribe customs officials to decide not to look in one of the crates. You want damage to matter and you want to get those juicy commissions. But not only that, the system has to work for other characters as well. A lower class character might decide to buy someone a drink or twelve to get them talking. An independently wealthy character might want to commission a vessel or hire an assassin. A conman might want to invest in some expensive clothes to fit in with the wealthy marks.
There has to be a balance between abstract and detailed. I can't work it out though.
