Stu's Rusty Bucket

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

The Economy and Wear and Tear

I was reading a great article on Single Player Economies at moogle.net and it made me bust out my old spreadsheet and touch it up.

Richard made some good points in the article and its hard not to think of all the classic RPG’s I’ve played and how they did the economy… I think it was a consensus that they all did id badly. Remember Pool of Radiance and that they forced copper, silver, electrum, gold and platinum on you.. oh and jewelery and gems. Thats seven different types, and everything but gold or platinum (since it was worth more than gold) was useless. Worse, it all counted as weight that reduced your movement points so why would anyone carry large amounts of copper around?

I don’t even remember any use in the game for copper, silver or electrum. What shop made you pay in electrum?

How important will shopping and the economy be to my game?
At what point in the game does it go from being a struggle to buy basic items to not even needing/wanting to go to the shop ever again?

I guess its a bell curve that the price of gold rides opon or a straight line going continually upward. One of my aims is to make money still valuable right up to the end game.

Towns will all offer different prices for whatever goods they sell but they all sell similar stuff (but some shops only sell certain things you cant find elsewhere!).

One of my driving economic factors in the game was an early decision to make gold scarce.

• Gold drops will be limited
• Eliminate or limit grinding / farming

By having monsters drop a tonne of useless junk (long swords, leather armour) it encourages farming items to sell (which would still yield litte return due to inventory capacity), but by not dropping you miss out on things (i remember about the only thing I’d loot from combat drops in Gold Box games was arrows if I was low).

One thought I had for combat loot is to not drop items lower ranked than what the player has, eg: if the player has a long sword, drop put any short swords into the loot pile, unless it had some special flag (eg: +1 bonus vs trolls or something), and never drop more than number of characters in the party -1 of any item, so when fighting that hoard of orcs in Sokol Keep and being rewarded with 1,000 short swords, we would only drop 3 short swords for a 4 character party.

The disproportion of loot vs enemies can always be explained away with a message like “After looking over all the loot this is the best of what they had” or something similar.

To help drive my economy, I’m going to borrow the ‘wear and tear’ factor for arms and armour from Magic Candle. This will drive players to either repair items or replace them, giving more usage to gold or trying new and different items out. If you want to keep using that named “Flail ‘Ghost Smasher’ +2 vs undead” all through the game, you will have to look after it.

I was thinking the basic mechanics for the wear and tear function will be,

arms : each successful attack (blocked or not) will reduce by 1
armour :  each blocked attack of less than its Armour Value, reduce by 1, each attack over its armour rating (where player takes damage), reduce by 2.

Your standard Long Sword might have 20 W+T points fresh out of the shop. Each repair in the shop will return it to its max - 1. So you could repair it the first time to 20 points. The second repair will give you 19 points, the third 18 etc.
Better made/graded weapons and armour will have higher W+T maximums. Armour would have more, a standard shield may have 40, a wooden shield may have 15…

This gets us into the grading system (crude, basic, well made, exceptional, master crafted).

This also opens the door for extra NPC’s in towns and castles, as it allows me to place Master Craftsmen in certain places to do weapon upgrades or create you special items.

Wear and Tear will also affect wizard staves and such. Each time you recharge that staff or wand you will incur W+T and incur one less spell. Custom wand charging may only last for as many spells are chaged in that wand (one offs!).

Its easy to put things into the spreadsheet and check the bell curves, but playtesting will be the big revealer of how well it all scales.

I need to go off and play with the spreadsheet some more…