Monetary system

[ivenesco]

Hm... Quite expensive, isn't it? I'd rather prefer gold / silver / bronze partition. Maybe it isn't very important aspect of a game, but standard gold system just make no sense to me.

 

The value of gold is not a constant, it depends on the availability. So a plausible explanation to abundance of gold in your generic fantasy world would be that in this said world, gold veins are more accessible and/or much more common.

 

However, I would also like there to be denominations, as it adds to my perception of in-game world being more similar to real world and therefore more realistic

 

Yeah, that was just shortcut for my point. About your example: in world, where gold is that cheap, we would pay about 10-100k for really expensive items;

"Sure, I have 45 371 coins in my pocket"

And this is really not real world alike

(Yes, sure, here came never-ending discussion about having whole armory, small farm and one troll body in your backpack. But this thread is just about currency.)

[Potemkin]

They also have to explain the relation betweeen magic and the currency. If there is magic, wouldn't a wizard then be able to conjure up as much gold as possible? They have to explain that. And if you can conjure animals and rise skeletons and stuff, how come you can't conjure up your own house with furniture etc. So they have to explain the relation between the existence of magic and currency. Why would a magican need money?

 

Perhaps as a result, coins are made of materials that a wizard is unable to replicate for some reason, such as cold iron, or tapping a coin with cold iron causes it to lose the magical charge. Alternatively, a wizard's guild controls the money supply and guarantees the monetary value through some type of arcane binding.

Yeah but why would a Wizard need currency? Why couldn't he/she just conjure up everything that he/she needs? If you are a wizard and need to eat, why don't just conjure up some food? And then they could conjure up food for the poor and that would ruin the economy. So they have to adress the relation between magic and currency somehow.

Edited September 30, 2012 by Potemkin

[Theobeau]

FNV used a system which combined different factions paper currency, coins, an atypical standard unit of currency and barter and their currency had weight.

 

It actually was fairly seamless in its integration which bodes well for what they will do for PE.

[Sensuki]

one currency, gold piece or equivalent.

 

complex monetary systems are better for MMOs and such.

Edited September 30, 2012 by Sensuki

[ivenesco]

one currency, gold piece or equivalent.

 

complex monetary systems are better for MMOs and such.

 

I may agree, that more than one currency, and complicated economic are complex solution, so there are many pros and cons (in terms of old school rpg).

But, what I was originally asked is partition, so we don't have to carry in backpack like 10-100k of 'tokens'. This system isn't complicated at all; everybody is used to dollars and cents (or their local equivalent), so this have real world feeling.

[Reddie]

Yeah, that was just shortcut for my point. About your example: in world, where gold is that cheap, we would pay about 10-100k for really expensive items;

"Sure, I have 45 371 coins in my pocket"

And this is really not real world alike

 

Agreed. If I were a game developer, I would solve this by having transactions explained in lore as using some sort of credit system. Banking was already quite developed in middle to late medieval period, there were debt papers etc. The amount of "gold" (and/or other money) presented to player is just a convenient form of having their account saldo visible. We assume that characters always have a reasonable amount of gold with them, and when they need to make a large purchase they are merely writing out a promissory note on the spot.

[sparklecat]

As I understand it, all paper money is is a bank's promissory note, saying "bring in this bit of paper and we'll exchange it for the precious metal equivalent." No reason weight has to really be an issue, and being able to write a cheque to a merchant, or how suspiciously they look at your banknotes (assuming they do at all, maybe the banks are a major employer of wizards to detect and prevent counterfeiting, maybe the world's supplies of whatever's backing the currency is quite limited and tightly controlled by them so trying to pay with significant amounts of actual gold is an awesome way to end up arrested most of the time!) depends on your reputation in the area.

 

 

 

Regarding barter systems and such, I like systems where whom you're selling to affects how much you get. So the weaponsmith may take your spare jewelry in trade, but since he has no idea how to value something of that sort and neither do you, one of you is gonna end up cheated. The jeweler, on the other hand, has absolutely no use for the spare leather armour and is going to give you very little, regardless of what sort of enchantments you're swearing it has, so if you're trying to reduce your weight, time to make some hard decisions. And nobody wants those 47 halberds you gathered up when you were killing orcs, what are they gonna do with them all?

 

But since going shop to shop can get really boring after awhile, also have a general pawnshop that buys everything (within reason) at a moderately discounted value.

[Totally Awesome]

Perhaps paper money is around?

[Sensuki]

I may agree, that more than one currency, and complicated economic are complex solution, so there are many pros and cons (in terms of old school rpg).

But, what I was originally asked is partition, so we don't have to carry in backpack like 10-100k of 'tokens'. This system isn't complicated at all; everybody is used to dollars and cents (or their local equivalent), so this have real world feeling.

 

Gold won't have weight. So essentially you're not carrying it around. I don't care if it's kind of like digital money Not really an important aspect (or focus) of the game.

[ivenesco]

I may agree, that more than one currency, and complicated economic are complex solution, so there are many pros and cons (in terms of old school rpg).

But, what I was originally asked is partition, so we don't have to carry in backpack like 10-100k of 'tokens'. This system isn't complicated at all; everybody is used to dollars and cents (or their local equivalent), so this have real world feeling.

 

Gold won't have weight. So essentially you're not carrying it around. I don't care if it's kind of like digital money Not really an important aspect (or focus) of the game.

 

I cannot agree with that. Situation, where gold don't have weight, so you can carry even millions of coins, is making game less consistent. I like idea of having some kind of bank institution (maybe handled by mages), so it would solve problem of transportation huge amount of currency.

On the other hand, having gems, or other high value items instead of tons of coins may solve it too.

 

But yes, it's not key part of this game, as I've written in first post

Edited September 30, 2012 by ivenesco

[PsychoBlonde]

 

I cannot agree with that. Situation, where gold don't have weight, so you can carry even millions of coins, is making game less consistent. I like idea of having some kind of bank institution (maybe handled by mages), so it would solve problem of transportation huge amount of currency.

On the other hand, having gems, or other high value items instead of tons of coins may solve it too.

 

But yes, it's not key part of this game, as I've written in first post

 

I enjoy it when they take a somewhat ridiculous aspect of the game like this and adopt it as part of the "physics" of the game world, such as the "Inventory scroll" in Stonekeep which was supposed to, literally, transmute items into little pictures and back so that you could carry unlimited amounts of stuff. That was kind of a neat little conceit.

[HansKrSG]

I'd like to see some barter trade in the game, so not everything is just dependent on collecting numerical value "coins."

 

"I"d like that new bow."

"500 gold."

"How about 300 gold and these two iron swords?"

"Toss in that bronze shield and you got a deal."

 

...but yes, having at least gold and copper coins, so things might cost 2g 35copper is cool/a nice touch.

 

I feel this has been done successfully in the Fallout games, so should be easy to get it to work.

[UncleBourbon]

Well, the gold coins weren't 99.99% gold in all likelihood. Probably a lower end of it, really. That said, copper/silver is probably a good idea.