My PC Buys a Ferret Just Because He Can
by jachilli
Why on earth would low-level PCs care about finding 456 cp?
Low level PCs have already been through character creation, where they’ve spend a better quantity of resources on simple, worldly things that are going to help them in their adventurous exploits. Aside from that first of many magic items, there’s not a lot you can give a PCs that have a game-function value in an economic model. There’s tons of cool story stuff you can give them — “The orcs have manacles among their belongings. They must have been raiding for slaves!” or “Among the heretics’ belongings are alchemical substances. Perhaps they believe they can transmute common substances to gold.” — but unless those are followed up on or have weight in the game world, they’re not likely to be seen as rewards.
Has a PC ever bought a nice rocking horse for his kid, just in case the changelings show up?
The problem is, the money sinks in many modern tabletop games aren’t valid extensions of the larger activity. In Vampire, you either have the Resources to make your purchase or you don’t. There’s no mugging people at the bus stop to get money for a limo to take to the Prince’s mansion. Certainly, some Vampire stories center around finances, but those are usually MacGuffins — cripple the assets of a rival Kindred to lay him low and reduce his power, not heist a bunch of money to buy Aaron’s Feeding Razors for the whole coterie. In the rules and setting, collecting money just isn’t that big of a deal for vampires.
Many older games seemingly have a better grasp of the money-harvest mechanics by having sinks for the money gathered. Older versions of D&D, for example, assume that the character is socking away money for a stronghold, which is really expensive and which he’ll ultimately do endgamey (or at least property-ownery) type stuff once that stronghold is built: magical research, training fighters, fence loot, etc. that’s different from the core adventure-driven exercises
An element of personal style is great for a character money sink, but does it have an effect on the game, or is it a detail that's not really a player reward?
I don’t necessarily care about realism here, I care about the mechanics of a system with extrinsic rewards undermining the intrinsic fun of play. In D&D, fighting monsters and overcoming traps is the fun part (now; again, the economic model used to have a more focused assumed end goal). Now that the setting gives me my power-ups in the form of level achievement and the magical-item treasure I need to continue facing the scaling challenges, why should a player care about collecting GP at all? Especially at lower levels when the rewards are so meager as to literally not be worth the effort. Four hundred and fifty-six copper pieces isn’t even half a GP, and it weighs either 45 pounds or around 10 pounds, depending on your ruleset. Who in their right mind would encumber themselves for such a hardscrabble reward?
This works, I suppose, for settings in which life is hard, money is rare and thus more valuable, etc., but the common assumption is that money is easy to find for bold adventurers and even more so the higher your level rises. There’s no increasing cost of living for higher-level characters.
There’s some acknowledgement of value in the various “trade goods” tables that show up in game setting source material, but those rarely solve the problem. I’m a second-level cleric. What am I going to do with a cow, a goose, or a pound of salt? The implication is that I’m going to take it where I can get a premium for it, but:
- That’s what NPC merchant caravans are for, and if they’re not,
- “Ferry trade goods back and forth” is a fine campaign model, but not really one in the spirit of most adventure games, and
- I’m a goddamned cleric, or sorcerer, or thief, or fighter. Why the hell am I trucking groceries back and forth?
At least in Traveller, when I cared about my cargo, I was either going to rip it off and spend the money on a better ship, or I was going to legitimately take it from A to B (probably get in some adventures along the way) and use the proceeds to buy a better ship. There’s the money sink model at work, and there’s a basis for a merchant-caravan campaign that’s more exciting than chasing a flock of geese from Swampton to Mucklesborough.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, both in terms of my recent Vampire work, and for the Pagan Lands project I’m working on. What’s a reasonable reward — one that fits into the intrinsic-fun play model rather than being an abstracted, extrinsic “score” like GP I can’t possibly spend all of? In Vampire, the goal is exceedingly rarely the resource I’m gathering. In Pagan Lands, I’m assuming the old-school D&D model of wanting to build a frontier stronghold somewhere. But for Pathfinder and 4E campaigns, seriously: What am I supposed to do with my money? Conan and Fafhrd and the Mouser used to spend a lot of their money on, um, “lifestyle,” and I’ve seen neat rules for that in various swords & sorcery themed games, but in general, where does my money go?
If my days of playing Vampire were anything to go by then the only real money sink is guns and bullets. We never bought them we just check the resource points and contacts and said it was ok (or go requisition them from the local police force…..)
On the other hand our cars/RVs/Bikes and flats/safe houses/havens seemed to get raided/blown up on a regular occassion too and I dont think we had “attack from rival faction” insurance
That sounds like really expensive insurance to have, anyway ;)
I use personal rules on my WoD chronicles, one in particular is using Resources to improve existing Influences or even one-time-uses. Let’s say one of the players have Medicine 3 (influence) and Resources 4, he can combine his 3 dots of Resources and his 3 dots of Medicine to perform an action that would take Medicine (influence) 4 to accomplish.
Also, they can use double Resources to perform an action of an Influence they don’t have. The same character can use his 4 dots of Resources (and some role play) to perform something that would need Police 2 (influence), one-time-only. If he wants to do it again, he will need to spend 4 points (and role play) again. After all, money makes the world goes round.
Great house rule! It creates a sink, it makes for interesting choice, and it fuels the intrinsic play reward.
Now, that’s a great house rule! Thank you man, you solved a rules puzzle i had in running a LARP. :)
At some point, your character is supposed to be a person. An abstraction of one without some of the detail of an actual person (I can’t remember a campaign where a character got the flu, or diarrhea, or twisted their ankle, or met someone kinda cute but was already in a relationship themselves so the whole thing is just a passing interest that doesn’t actually matter but might have been an interesting thought for an hour or a day).
So spending money on that character tends to go in one of two areas in my experience… either stuff that makes their numbers work better like a magic sword or a better car so they’ll do better in that next car chase, or the money is spent in an attempt at giving depth to that abstraction. My character buys some bits of food and pots and pans in an attempt to learn to cook so we can stop eating that same pile of “Iron Rations, 2 weeks” that’s been in the bottom of my backpack for the whole campaign. It’s not going to give me any benefit in my ability to smack orcs but it makes me feel like my character is a bit more real. Or as you put it, my character buys a ferret.
That being said, my gut feeling is that there are spending opportunities to give depth to that abstraction without having to deal with every little detail of your character’s life. If the setting is on the frontier, it’s a big deal when a trade caravan comes into town with goods from the civilized areas of the world and they can get some new clothes that aren’t roughly made. Perhaps perfume or some soap that isn’t lye. Then there’s always the character’s dwelling or lack thereof. Having a place to settle-down some time, even if it’s well into the future and all the reward consists of is an undeveloped acre of land. Or there’s my favorite: my group and I have just gone to the deserted castle outside of town and killed off everything with two or more legs and have prepared to cart it off… or should we just keep said castle and fix it up?
Sure, this is true, but is fueling the abstraction part of the game proper? In some games, yes, in other games, no, and the ones that don’t have customization of the imaginary avatar as a focal point are really the ones where money is just “score,” you know? I mean, really, I don’t actually even have to have money to make that character a person. Maybe part of my look is taking trophies in combat or street chic from a life spent scrounging. So the money’s not really fulfilling a game purpose.
Those lists of trade goods and oddball items for sale were some kind of implicit challenge to us playing D&D as kids. “What can you do with a pound of salt?” the list asked. “What would you train a ferret to do?” They were creative prompts. I mean, at that age, the Taco Bell menu seemed like one big dare (“Can you eat it all?”), so of course a list of fantastical or exotic goods had the same effect.
To that end, money was admission to that amusement park. Yes, of course, we’d leave heaping piles of copper pieces behind (pennies gathered by gelatinous cubes or hoarded by frugal dragons, I guess) if the encumbrance rules were in effect… or we’d just gloss over the part where we drag huge sacks of loot out and come back to finish the dungeon later. (In between encounters, we’d sometimes enact schemes to drag money out—it only took a few sentences, after all!) That was because the equipment list was another toy to play with.
That toy lost its mystique when 1) we started playing games that glossed over equipment buying and 2) we started learning more about actual spending in real life, I think. At some point, the equipment list went from being a prize to being a hassle. When exactly did that happen?
Good observation. There’s a point a gamer’s life where all of the random stuff that’s available to buy seems wonderfully interesting. I still like to equip 4e characters with a Bottle of Wine because, hey, it’s on the list, and you never know when you might need to ply someone with a drink, have an impromptu celebration, or perhaps try to light something on fire (though I’d prefer high-proof rum over wine for that purpose). I think most people who’ve been gaming for a long time are past that point, and thus the money becomes more of a hassle.
I love the comment about trucking groceries around, by the way – I laughed.
I know, I’m right there with you. I have to manage money every day in real life. It’s not frequently a pleasurable part of my escapism entertainment. Unless I’m buying a castle or a spaceship.
Part of the problem is that “throw money at” isn’t a current D&D verb. The magic trinkets and the players’ god-given ability to murder take care of nearly every challenge the system has left. Unless a money-test mechanic is added to the core gameplay, any rewarding use of money should be something that improves the experience without changing the core verbs.
Say the evil Baron of Schlossbaron is a few levels beyond what the party can handle, but needs to die before Murder Monday. Throw a few bags of delicious cash money at the Baron’s bodyguard, and at the final confrontation the party has a new best friend who can help make the Baron defeatable, plus a potentially interesting betrayal scene.
Or, to take a movie example, Pvt Kelly needs to cross the German line in order to get to bank filled with gold bullion. He throws a gold bar at Mulligan to mortar the line when Kelly wants to cross. This doesn’t negate the crossing scene. It does change it from sneaking through a dark town with a high risk of getting gunned down to driving through awesome explosions. To put it back into game terms, spending money allowed Kelly to change the parameters of the encounter in a way that his verbs of drive/sneak/shoot wouldn’t normally let him do.
Good point, Chris. Older D&D editions had a sink for this, too: They assumed your adventuring party would be hiring a bunch of retainers, hirelings, and burden-bearers. Pathfinder and 4E have this, too, only it’s much less prevalent.
But I like the idea of using money as the catch-all thing-maker-happener. Not to be a shill, but the single-player Assassin’s Creed campaign has a bit of this, in hiring thugs and courtesans or just scattering money into the crowd to make a diversion.
I suspect part of the attraction of money in early D&D was checking attention to detail. The same thing you got from encumbrance rules and spell components: do you really have enough resources to do what you want? This likely appealed to us geeky future computer programmers who appreciated attention to detail.
But, the audience grows older and things change. As pointed out, balancing your fantasy checkbook isn’t quite as fun when you have to do the same thing in your “real” life. Computer games still track money, because the computer can do so easier than someone keeping tally on a sheet of paper.
What’s the modern use for money? There’s probably no real gameplay use at this point; it’s just tradition from the way it’s always been done.
I think this is true. Last time, you mentioned the Midnight setting, and that was one of the settings I had in mind for one that makes good use of economy. Characters don’t necessarily find heaps of treasure as rewards in Midnight — sometimes their reward is food or shelter or some other such “survival luxury” in the harsh setting. So there’s the intrinsic reward: Setting-wise they get to keep playing.
Yeah, Midnight does do the economy aspect well. It pretty much states that all trade is barter since commerce is so tightly controlled, so you’ll rarely find coins as meaningful treasure. However, that type of brutal setting is of niche interest.
This is a great design point that’s had me thinking about it all day. As an MMO designer, I’ve always had to worry about the economy to make sure it stays somewhat balanced, but I’ve never given it as much careful consideration in my paper RPG campaigns.
With regards to money & adventures:
In general, adventurers seem to be exactly the kind of people who can’t hold on to money. Like someone in the real world who never learned how to manage his money and always is on the brink of ruin, no matter how much he makes.
Someone who goes out into an insanely lethal wilderness to seek their fortune doesn’t strike me as the type who carefully manages their money, you know. They’d be the type who find a treasure chest full of gold and somehow manage to spend it all in a few weeks.
Where I see players sink money into things, they frequently sink it into carving out a place in the environment for themselves. Even if there’s no official stronghold phase in D&Ds 3 and up, many players still want to set down roots. Give them the ability to purchase a tower, a mansion, a sailing ship and they may do it — give them a tower, a mansion or a sailing ship as a reward, and they will sink money into making that thing shine. It’s awfully rewarding to see players looking at things like old tapestries not with the feeling of “Hm, that could get some fair coin,” but with a sense of “oh hell yes the study needs that.”
There are some video games that play to that itch as well. The Suikoden series rewarded you for recruiting more followers by expanding your awesome hidden outlaw fortress. The Elder Scrolls lets you buy houses, and then some of the stuff you loot in dungeons may be things you want to keep and show off — heck, in Oblivion you got empty trophy cases, which is a total dare to fill. Even in Assassin’s Creed II/Brotherhood there was the possibility of buying art just to dress up the villa or your headquarters. This itch can surface in tabletop RPGs, too. Just as the itch to buy different outfits, or to have unusual masterwork gear, or even odd little gewgaws, is a reward system that can transfer.
But that depends on the campaign style you want to encourage. Pathfinder and 4e frequently encourage the idea of PCs being open to any adventure, anywhere, any plane, any time. It’s one of my hangups with 4e that you’re expected to be running around other planes for half of your career and then some; I’d much rather play from levels 1-15 and have a home freakin’ base that I can trick out. There’s a certain appeal to taking that 5000 gold you got in the last adventure and saying “Okay, this will now allow me to get a proper inn in my town with a tricked-out wine cellar.” (That more than anything is why I dislike the magic shop approach: I don’t like it when gold is expected to fuel your ongoing competence upgrades, because then there’s never room in the budget to get the cool elective stuff that binds you to a setting.)
One of the most interesting things I’ve seen in an nWoD book was in, I think, The Blood, in which the discussion was about different levels of campaigns. There was a description of a setting in which vampires are poor, uninfluential, struggling to get by night to night- you can probably do okay mugging people with your supernatural powers, but it’s damned risky and unreliable.
I always thought that sort of zero-Resources campaign sounded like a lot of fun.