The Only Winning Move
I like drawing little diagrams in my notebook. Over the weekend I tried to make one for dungeon design that would make it possible to easily improvise the sorts of things I was just talking about with “acceptable losses” in a dungeon.
I looked back at B/X and 2e Dungeons & Dragons to try and figure out what kind of ratio there ought to be when determining risk-in to reward-out. It meant figuring out why adventurers take risks at all. I tried to answer this question…
Adventuring is a good source of experience, but “growing more powerful” is a difficult motivation to quantify in game terms. How does a PC know that doing just about anything will garner them experience points toward character advancement? It’s just so abstract as to be almost ridiculous.
How about adventuring for treasure? I think comic books have taught us that the stuff heroes invent is almost always worth more than whatever they get out of fighting crime — see also: “adventuring.” I’ve seen tons of players recognize this and set up businesses instead of adventuring — it’s more profitable.
One of the answers I’ve made the most progress with is the idea that most PCs are thrill-seekers or have a death wish, however cognizant they may be of that trait. Yeah, the dungeon is a dangerous place, and the rewards are almost never worth the risk, especially when you have a whole gang to divide loot between.
So, I basically failed to answer the question. I decided to take another approach.
What does adventuring represent, regardless of the reason for undertaking the adventure? What do you do every time you adventure, no matter who you are? Well, I figured, “you enter the dungeon.” That initial risk is at the core.
You open the door. You explore the passageway. You take the challenge.
It doesn’t matter who you are, or why you do it — whatever your reason, you decided to risk everything to see what was behind the door. So on my little diagram, I wrote the word “door” at the top. It’s basically that binary choice between “hitting or staying.” Will you ever make up your losses? Who knows?
Part of the point of adventuring, I figure, is to acquire the means to continue adventuring. Everyone adventures “at a loss,” because no matter how much they get out of a venture, it’s really only enough to continue adventuring — unless of course you die. That would be the uh, “ultimate loss.”
Could it be then, that the fun is in losing?
I think this sort of delves into the idea of adventuring as a lifestyle-choice. It’s like being an intransigent vagrant, but being able to buy yourself nice things. It would often be a feast-or-famine lifestyle; I imagine something like Slayers, where, anytime they finally landed a big score, they’d squander it in a few weeks on extravagancies, fine foods and creature comforts, only to be forced to go adventuring again, if for no other reason that they could not longer afford the roof over their heads. In some ways, it would average itself out when weighed against having some kind of steady work, but if adventurers actually wisely invested all of that treasure they hauled up from the underdark, they could pose serious threats to the stability of the economy all Spice & Wolf style.
If the treasure originally came out of the economy the adventurers are paying it back into, what then? Inflation? It seems contrary somehow, since the idea that monsters taking resources out of the economy is equivalent to the uh, “broken window fallacy?”
The fallacy is that breaking a window, in effect, creates work for both the glassmaker and the repairman — one might arrive at the conclusion that breaking things is good for the economy.
What it doesn’t account for are the materials and labor removed from the economy to repair the window — materials that could have been more effectively put toward creating something new.
But uh, you’re an accountant if I remember correctly — you probably already know that. :P Adventurers then… good for the economy or bad? Lol. I think they’d be “venture capitalists,” amiright? xD
It largely depends on where the treasure came from. If it’s in a ruin, guarded by a dragon, undead, etc., chances are, it’s been out of the economy for some time. If it’s been recently stolen by bandits or demi-humans, that’s another story completely.
Adventurers dumping a dragon’s hoard onto an unsuspecting small agrarian economy could cause gold prices to collapse. Returning stolen specie to a fragile agrarian economy would restore liquidity which it had been deprived of.
And no, not an accountant, though i do work on software that tracks healthcare accounts.
I guess it’s sort of like how no one complains about how sunken Spanish galleons have taken gold out of the world economy, but if too many sunken treasures get brought up in a short period of time, the value of the treasures drop proportionally.
If you get a minute, you should look up Mansa Musa. In fact, he just made his way into my post today.
I had some complicated thoughts that spilled over into several posts. I read your “Fantastic Economics” post and a lot of what I wanted to say spilled over into my “When Economies Collide” post from this afternoon.
I think it would be cool if creating a town or settlement or city were as fun and easy as rolling up a character. It seems like it should be possible — I mean, if elves and dwarves can have lifespans of X hundred years, with backstories and stuff, why can’t cities be made to function like characters?
Cool, can’t wait to check them out.
There was a rudimentary spreadsheet program called “Box Full of Flumph” or something like that that was a D&D Town Generator of sorts; it would randomly create character names, occupations, and alignments. I don’t remember how in depth it went (probably not very), but it might be something worth looking at to get some ideas of where to start.
Also, I cannot for the life of me remember where, and would not be surprised if it were a Campaign Mastery post, but somewhere a long time ago, someone did a post about the average number and types of artisans a typical medieval community could support based on population. It involved a good deal of raw numbers. That would be another place to start looking for how to roll up towns. Total population : Peasantry : Artisans : Breakdown of Artisans. Larger populations support a more diversified economic base.