I've been trying to think up an alternative way to implement economy in a RL. I think the classic RPG trope of "collecting all the gold you can, and buying stuff at fixed prices" can become boring, and even slightly offensive ("Kill'em all! Take their stuff!") For my own game, I wanted something different, so I made a choice to leave money out of the picture, but I would also like some sort of economy, to implement encounters like peddlars, toll bridges, and so on. Besides, collecting treasure
can of course be made fun.
Discuss. You don't even have to read the rest of my drivelling post, but I'll begin anyway:
A simple idea would be to implement some kind of barter economy. You give people gifts, with a special command, or by dropping stuff next to them. This pleases them, and they might do favours in return (which then displease them back towards a neutral bias). I'm sure this could be used for some interesting effects. Different critters like different loot (knights are happy to get weapons and armor, but not impressed with low-level stuff; farmers like food, tools, clothing), and might do different favours and give different gifts. Critters like shop keepers should be coded to haggle in a meaningful way. For instance, the player picks up what s/he wants, and starts dropping stuff s/he wants to pay with. When there's enough loot on the ground to satisfy the shop keeper, the player is allowed to leave the shop.
A different idea I had was to try and operate with a "wealth" trait (in my system, it would probably be a skill). This would be tested whenever you need to perform a transaction, like buying something or paying a tribute to the local temple. If you botch the skill roll, your "wealth" skill value is bumped down, and/or you don't get the benefits you wanted to pay for. ("Sorry, you don't have enough money to buy the foo.", "Is that supposed to be protection money? Get him, guys!") Great rolls would result in getting the benefits without a decrease in wealth (because the required prize is just small change to you). The idea was that wealth could be increased by recovering treasure from the depths. If you come out of the dungeon with a gold crown and four books, this might be taken as a representation of the loot you bring back. Wealth could be increased, and the stuff might as well even stay in the player's inventory. That way, you can furnish your house with the bounty you have from your adventures.
There are some loop holes in this "wealth skill" idea, however. First of all, you need limited inventory space, so that it's annoying to lug around useless stuff like sculptures. And it would only work with nonpersistant or semipersistant dungeons. If the player can just keep a stash at level 1 of every new dungeon, and carry out everything bit by bit, it's just pure grind. I thought about having perishable dungeons, that you can only enter one time. They would behave as persistant dungeons, but once you return to the surface, the staircase/portal disappears. Your adventure in that dungeon would be over; you failed or succeeded, and brought back no more than you could carry, but at least you survived, and there's bound to be another dungeon entry around here somewhere. This could be an interesting system, but of course it's a decision that affects the whole game in a big way.
And there are other issues I haven't really found a solution to: How do you avoid that the player just tries to buy the same sword one million times, until he lucks out on the skill roll? You might let shop keepers close their shops after the player has (tried to) buy anything. This kind of fits in with the time horizon implicit in "perishable dungeons". Buying would be a betting game, where you assess how much you can afford, and you get one shot at paying. The shop keepers would then reopen once the player ascends from the next dungeon. But this might lead to a kind of stairhopping, unless the player is punished for not completing a dungeon, or something like that. And besides, it strikes me as a "feature" that could easily just be annoying. Failing to buy healing remedies for your next expedition, just because of an unlucky die roll, would probably not be so pleasurable. But if it's perfectly balanced, the player should always think, "Ok, I got too greedy, and now I'm being punished for it."
Rambling as always,
Minotauros
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