The DnD campaign I am involved in right now has the characters in a big city where we can finally spend all that sweet, sweet gold that we acquired while pillaging dungeons. However, now that we are in that city trying to spend all of our gold a bunch of weirdness surrounding money has come to the fore. For example, when we walked up to the town gate the guard became convinced that we were adventurers and that we thus had gobs of cash. He demanded a 5 gold piece bribe to let us into the city. To be clear, this is probably a week's wages for him. I am trying to imagine a guard demanding a thousand dollar bribe just to let someone into a city in today's money and it is blowing my mind.
It is especially funny to imagine that somehow he knows that we have lots of money since our characters don't dress the part. One of us looks like a cleric in armour, another looks like a merchant, and the last two look like scruffy travellers, perhaps low end bodyguards. However, in this world there are lots of people who professionally wander into caves and emerge with sacks gold under their arms, and for some reason the caves never run out of gold. An economy of immensely rich murderhobos who never run out of caves to loot makes no sense whatsoever, but in that context anyone who can detect the outrageous wealth of said murderhobos is going to do very well indeed.
I do remember a passage in the old 2nd edition DnD manuals that talked about how adventurers who wander into a town with huge piles of gold are likely to upset the local economy and cause massive inflation, so this concept has been top of mind for DnD designers for decades. Despite having all that time to come up with something else they still seem determined that every underground area should have enough money in it to completely warp whole cities, no matter how little sense that makes.
Naked Man decided at the start of this campaign to prevent such world warping by reducing the money we get by 90%. We are going through a variety of published adventures and he has been giving us only 10% of the money that we are supposed to have acquired when the game listed a cash reward. This certainly has kept us from absurdities as I would have hired myself a substantial mercenary army and gone off to war if I had the amount of cash I am supposed to. As it is I can't possibly afford to do anything meaningful in terms of mercenary hiring so I have to wait until we are higher level and the cash rewards get much larger.
One side effect of this cash shortage is the fact that the costs baked into being a Wizard class make me poor compared to my compatriots. If you have 20,000 gold at level 6 then the 1,000 gold you spend on spellbooks isn't a huge problem. If you have 2,000 gold though that 1,000 gold in unavoidable class costs is punitive!
I can't decide if a campaign this gold poor is better or worse than the standard version. Both are ridiculous and money ceases to make any sense shortly into the game. The amounts of cash we have on hand compared to the cost of living makes all normal expenses irrelevant and unless there is a return to the magic shops of old there is simply nothing to buy aside from land and titles. In town we bought a couple of magic items, spending most of our cash, but I have no idea if the cost of magic items has been scaled down to match our lower income. If it has, then there is no point in lowering income since we just buy the same stuff anyway, and if it hasn't then characters in normal campaigns must buy every item in the book by level 8.
The game itself is fun, and I like the players, but the money situation in DnD games is a joke. The more I play it the more I like the abstract system in Heroes By Trade that both forgoes the bean counting and also ditches the idea that there is a professional class of 'adventurers'. Characters going into dungeons and finding riches is a fine thing for fantasy gaming to be about, but a world built around lots of these folks living off of this as a normal thing makes the world feel absurd, and more importantly it really puts a damper on immersion.
Magic item prices have not been scaled down - nothing has. There also isn't always consistency between different published adventures and I haven't done much to balance the economics because you've shown clear disdain for any treasure solution so all options will have flaws and it's not worth the effort.
ReplyDeleteI had some ideas on how to make you spend money, but you showed absolutely no interest. Your spellbook, as you mention, should be a constant drain on cash. Making copies, protecting it, etc. But that's a maintenance aspect that doesn't appeal to you, so I'm not pushing it.
You also don't know how to spend money. Your characters live like you live - buying nothing that is not essential. My cleric character in another campaign is constantly struggling for funds, and he's just beginning to spend all the money he's planning on spending. The other players keeping trying to rein my spending in! You're in a fantasy world where the money isn't real, and yet you still can't figure out how to spend it! Why are people who are so rich travelling around looking like scruffy travelers?
I'm not sure if this is comparable, but is it similar to arguing that Silicon Valley is ridiculous and makes reality a joke because there's this world where all kinds of people make millions of dollars and they don't really have things to spend it on except land and titles?
I'm not saying the economic model of fantasy games don't have big flaws, but you come into it with such a big chip on your shoulder that it blinds you. You've made a few assumptions here, not all of which are true, but I know you don't like having a good rant disrupted!