this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2024
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I never liked how utterly inflated gold as a currency always was in Dungeons and Dragons. I have had a long established house rule that reduced all gold outputs (and all gold costs) significantly enough where it was no longer a thing where you could almost make a house out of gold for the price of buying that house in the rules as written.
Also, in a fantasy setting with magic and the like, it's absurd to try to pretend that magic items would remain as super rare after centuries or even millennia of adventurers rummaging around and eventually putting them on the market.
The bullshit about how peasants would have to work all day for a silver piece but somehow a +1 sword costs roughly a lifetime of their labor was always silly.
Don't even get me started about how bullshit "Forgotten Realms" is as written where (the older books at least) claim that most people have never seen a spell being cast before and are in absolute awe of magic-users yet magic-users rule basically everything and it's hard to find an official town map without some magic bullshit somewhere.
The Elder Scrolls series, flaws and all, is generally better about applying magic to its world-building.
For the most part its worldbuilding is like the one thing The Elder Scrolls actually did really well (that and Morrowind's aesthetic/art direction), at least in terms of the lore. Where it fails is translating that intricate, weird, well-thought-out worldbuilding into gameplay and storytelling.
And the Elder Scrolls series still has a gold inflation problem where gold itself is basically a non-precious metal and it's like everyone's carrying massive piles of pennies in their pockets if currency counts are taken literally.
Also you go into the dwemer ruins or nord burials untouched by men and mer for thousands of years and find tons of septim coins, with face of dude born thousands of years after those ruins become sealed. I mean Tiber did dragon break but using it to put money with his face everywhere would be kinda petty even for him.
I can't help remembering finding edible produce in such ancient ruins too.
My only headcanon around that is the ruins get rummaged around in constantly and Mount Everest style trash piles add up there.
They clearly are not though, it's most likely just Akatosh and/or Sheogorath putting things in to confuse adventurers and archeologists.
But how can we be so sure they're totally unexplored until our character shows up when the ruins are typically right there? Do people really live their entire lives within walking distance of big brass hatches and stuff and never peek in?
I mean there is shitton of artifacts and treasures left from the original owners of ruins, often lying just plainly in sight. You think someone go into the ruins and not only don't take the jewels and incredibly expensive looking shiny weapons and armor but also leave their own food and money? And repair the very aggressive centurions or reraise draugr they would need to destroy to get into the place first time?
The true answer is that the actual set pieces are bullshit because they very easy to access for the most part yet are supposed to be completely unexplored and have a lot of anachronisms laying around.
As i said, dragon breaks. Second Era had millions of adventurers being the same person adventuring all at the same time. What is some food and cash in dungeons compared to this.
Yes I know all about dragon breaks. My point is that dragon breaks are the writing equivalent of "I give up" even if they're conceptually funny.
Yeah, quite useful actually, somehow it sounds way better than when for example Games Workshop have to explain 143523425 hole in the lore with "it's chaos i don't have to explain things" or just do a retcon. Despite being basically just the equivalent of "it's chaos i don't have to explain things".
I think with video games you have to have a suspension of disbelief. Skyrim, for example, is tiny. It's only a couple of square miles (if that). Most people live in cities with more area. Daggerfall is the largest and it's the size of Great Britain.
While it would be cool to play in something actually to scale, you wouldn't be able to play the game. It would be terabytes of information. Your processor and graphics card would explode trying to render the full distance of the horizon. Unless you're okay with having load screens every block, you're not going to fit a bunch of NPCs doing day to day stuff.
So something that's a far off ruin seems a lot closer than it is. I think if these places were to scale, it'd be more like traveling to a ruined castle in Scotland from England. Or perhaps an even larger distance, like if civilization was in Mexico and all the dwarves lived in Alaska where they died out.
It literally doesn't even seem like it would be a challenge to implement a basic system to handle this, there's a lot of different people/organizations who would be interested in antique valuables and who might even send you out on quests to retrieve them given that it's already supposed to be one of your main occupations and sources of income, and its natural player behavior to automatically go to shops to exchange trash loot for fungible currency.
Just have 1-2 diegetic pach*nko prize exchanges per significant settlement where you can put in all those piles of antique gold coins and crappy armor and get real money for it.
Just do what New Vegas did and have multiple currencies that everyone just let you trade in
But the places they are getting sold into are from time to time invaded and turned into rubble by monsters, eldritch horrors etc for no reason other than to ~~destroy the capitals and allow imperialism to grow again~~ make new ruins for heroes to plunder. See, the invisible claw of magic market regulate itself!
It's just another form of capitalist realism to think that a magical feudal society would have a well developed money economy like a capitalist society to the point where everything is a commodity with a price tag that can be sold on a market that's always nearby. In an actual magical feudal society, stuff like magical swords would simply have no monetary value but be weapons that could only be wielded by certain strata of society (nobility, knights, wizards). Serfs, tradesmen, traders, and so on would be forbidden from touching let alone wielding a magical weapon on pain of death. There will still be an exchange value of the item based on the labor hours that was used to create the item, but it wouldn't be something that you would buy or sell in a store.
I agree with you, actually, which is in large part why the rules as written with gold as a standardized currency are wonky but are expected by most players. I'd rather have a magic sword be given in return for a good deed to someone that'd been holding onto it, or the like.
It might be a situation similar to that of diamonds irl. They're not terribly uncommon, especially not uncommon enough to warrant the exhorbitant prices they supposedly cost (as in, a blood diamond, not a lab one), and new diamonds are added every day to the economy, but prices are kept high.
I'm imagining a bunch of superstores on a zoom meeting fixing prices across the region. hm, I might have a plot for a campaign.