Of Copper And Prices

I once was under the impression that the single most painful, slow and least rewarding part of game design was crunching the combat math until it is workable. I was wrong. Designing equipment and price lists that go beyond the 4e “fuck it they’ll never buy anything non-magical” bare minimum and just a bit farther than the old D&D “here’s everything an adventurer will ever need to buy” is pretty painful. Trying to do so when your units of currency don’t match up to anyone else’s (not even my favorite price guide book, Grain Into Gold, which uses silver coins for everything) makes it doubly painful.

In a way I decided to pick just one thing to agonize over, and I decided to agonize over the actual prices of things. There’s a fair level of abstraction involved regardless, because it’s possible for anyone to buy things at nebulously lower or higher quality. So if a certain price for a certain item seems outrageous to the living conditions of a fantasy game people under these rules, it can still be bought at 1/2 price as a “low quality” unit. So I guess that counts.

What I decided not to agonize over is the actual content of the price lists. At first I thought I should take the approach of detailing only the costs of only things which adventurers would use. But I wanted to take a step further and detail other things that might be important to anybody, like the price of certain foods, the price of certain gems. So that there would be ready available examples if the GM wants to come up with an item and doesn’t know how to price it (say for example you have your PCs stumble upon a rare jewel exclusive to your game setting – it’d be nice to know the price of a ruby or a diamond or something to compare to).  Also so that if at all possible a group that is really into resource management, or who want to run a more mercantile game, might have a bunch of examples to utilize, or a ready-made price list for everything they might trade, sell or use.

So I’m neither making them completely expansive (some things are fairly abstract – for example I don’t divide coats by types of furs used) or really small.

There’s also hirelings by the way. Eight kinds, including a few non-combat ones. For example, the Laborer and Servant are basically dirt-poor peasant and not-as-poor peasant respectively. They’re the cheapest, and they’re good at just buying some schmuck to carry that gold-laced grandfather clock you want to steal from the Tower of the Disgruntled Conjurer or whatever. The Servant doubles as being able to take care of your properties while you’re away. The Specialist is another “non-combatant” except this one comes with any one non-combat skill at level 10, so if you ever need to take along a linguist to read some ancient language or whatever, there’s your dude. You can also make him carry stolen grandfather clocks of course. All Hirelings come armed with the Simple Weapons skill so you can give them a stick and they can swing it, but they’re not really “combatants” in the same sense that you are. They’re not that good. Then you have your basic “class analogues.” The Warrior which is a Fighter but not as good, the Scoundrel which is a Rogue but not as good – etc. These guys are more expensive, and you don’t just buy them to carry stuff. You buy them to fight, and because they can carry stuff in more dangerous situations and survive them while still carrying the stuff.

So far there’s no morale system in place by which you keep them in line. Certain retroclones have these things, but I’m not making a retroclone. I really do not like the idea that you paid money for your schmuck and he may run away after a die roll because your leadership or his morale or whichever of the two is too low to handle the appearance of a blanket ghost. While realistic, it just seems conducive to dickery against the players – and there are already plenty of very fair ways to inflict dickery in this game without up and making the players’ investments null because ghosts are frickin’ scary man.

There’s prices for renting, building and buying buildings, up to purchasing a Fortification. Stronghold building is not what I would call fully supported. I don’t have in play a system whereby all the machinations of a Fort are handled, such as its taxes, or how many people are in the fort, or what the fort comes with. Rather, I let players tick off a few zeroes from their current wealth and buy one and wooo they have a Fort! Time to decorate it with stolen grandfather clocks. I think I may add a small, probably very historically wrong “monthly upkeep” table for the money you have to pay so you don’t return to find your Fort a ratty, cob-web infested husk filled with ghouls.

The prices and such for properties are somewhat abstract in ways (small house -> average house -> great house, rather than subdividing by building materials and so on) because this isn’t GURPS or something. But again, gotta hit that middle ground, between having some depth and having too much depth. This is really the way I like things. I’m still horrified that perhaps somewhere along the way a misplaced copper has destroyed the entire edifice and created some economic exploit that renders the game utterly null. This is because I’m a paranoid nutcase. If you discover one when the thing is out, please tell me, so I can raise the price a few coppers and live peacefully.

Here’s hoping that all this pays off decently to the game economy, and adds fun to the game rather than headaches on both my end and yours.