This is something I’ve been kind of curious about for a long time, I decided to make a thread about it because hey why not.
What are all of the different ways games can handle exchanging money (or something) for goods and services? I brought this up briefly in the rpg mechanics thread but it didn’t seem to get much traction there, so why not try making it in a separate thread.
Basically, most games where you can buy things seem to follow this basic pattern that follows the plot of the game: Stuff you can buy in the beginning is weak and cheap, stuff you buy at the end of the game in the town on the edge of the spirit crater or whatever is expensive and powerful.
Skyrim (and maybe other elderscrolls games?) uses a “speech” skill to give you better haggling ability, which affects prices, and gives each shopkeeper a limited inventory and limited amount of cash they can use to buy things from you. But their inventories are also leveled, meaning certain things won’t be available at all until you reach a certain point.
What are the most effective in-game economies that aren’t totally player-centric? What about barter systems? Are there games that have interesting currencies that are not just weird names for points? (“Souls” “Blood Echoes”) Are there games that break away from the weird nonsensical trope of random animals carrying cash? (This cave bat had 50 gold coins, for some reason) Here’s the story so far:
other things that came up in the initial exchange were: Animal Crossing, Bumpy Trot. I don’t know anything about those games… should I?
Most of Animal Crossing is not actually relevant, but each town has it’s own local fruit which sells for… 100 bells or something. But if you get hold of another fruit (by swapping with visitors and such) then that sells for… 500 bells I think.
That gets trivialised pretty quickly because you can just plant that fruit and grow a tree, plant those (each tree yields three) etc. until you have an orchard, and the new games seem to make getting other fruits a lot easier.
my understanding is that Linda Cubed Again did some cool stuff with this but i dunno if the person who played it is still on sb–still waiting on that romhack translation
just wait for my game to come out tbh, my game mechanics for the economy and black market are
didn’t the original two fallout games operate on the barter system generally?
the big problem with ‘interesting’ economy systems in rpgs is they generally have nothing interesting going on beyond having more inventory to juggle. it generally works a lot better in 4x games.
eg, in 4x games where the main currency ‘spend money to build things faster’ you generally have a whole lot of different resources to juggle and weigh. in moo2 you have starbase command limits and food and transportation costs and etc etc. it’s pretty interesting until you get used to it all and then it’s kind of rote.
good systems are less about trade and more about tradeoffs, i feel.
i should really give this a go since it’s from the same dev as oreshika.
i have no idea what it is like. literally know nothing about it.
Yeah, but there’s also currency (caps) to fill in trade gaps so you’re still swapping for abstract exact values. And eventually you have so many caps you can pay for things in pure cash.
As for Skyrim having levelled merchants, I actually don’t even remember that (I haven’t played non-modded Skyrim in forever) but in Morrowind merchants definitely just got what they got and if you want fancy shit you gotta go find it in places where it would make sense to find it. That’s not really an economic system though.
Daggerfall though! In Daggerfall gold had weight, so you’d have to deposit it in a bank not to get weighed down. You could convert your deposited gold to a letter of credit for a percentage fee, which you could then use as a debit note (much like a real-life negotiable instrument).
I’m actually not sure, I’m only going based on how the professors at the not-hogwarts don’t have certain spellbooks until you have a certain amount of skill in that branch of magic. It’s really rudimentary but I assumed regular merchants followed similar rules.
Apparently Witcher 3 has different forms of currency for each state that you can exchange at a bank? I haven’t gotten far enough in that game to figure out how it works, though.
Yeah, that makes sense, but I noticed w/ skyrim there were a fair amount of things online about how you could conceivably play that game as a merchant, focusing mostly on developing thief + speech skills, even though the economy in that game is super dull. It seems like there would be an audience for an rpg game that had more of an emphasis on buying and selling stuff. There was that Recettear game that inspired a hilarious clusterfuck of a thread on Old SB, but I don’t know if anyone ever did anything else with that basic idea (protag runs an item shop in a standard jrpg world). Also that one part of DQ 4, right? Do the Torneko spinoff games actually have anything to do with running a store, or is that just window dressing for the dungeon crawling?
All shops around the world start with low to medium quality weapons and armors that cost normal RPG prices (like 1000-2000g)
The max money you can hold is 10000g
Monsters don’t drop any money.
BUT you are also an empire/empress and your people are paying taxes. Your treasury is amassing money. IIRC it gets a fixed amount of 5000g at the end of every regular battle at the beginning of the game, and even more as you conquer parts of the world (by finishing particular quests) Right now my treasury gets 25000g per fight.
Since you are the fucking ruler of the empire you can just go whenever you want to your treasury and there will be a guy asking:
"Do you want to fill your wallet with money from the treasury?
-> Yes
No"
This is very important. The game could have just given you cash directly after every battle with no difference to gameplay. But it instead chooses to have both a wallet and a treasury for the sheer joy of going back to your castle to fill your wallet with taxpayer cash.
This does mean that any regular thing you can buy is dirt cheap. But it doesn’t - feel- dirt cheap. It just feels like you’re an obscenely rich person in a regular RPG instead.
The economy isn’t completely ruined as you’d expect, because you can invest in a lot of things in your castle that cost a lot of cash. For example I have the option to build an university in my castle for 2000000g.
Crucially the only way to get new powerful weapons/armor is to invest in R&D at your blacksmith. Your blacksmith needs loads of $$$, but once a piece of equipment is researched, shops around the world start to have it in their stocks and you can buy it for cheap. (Plus you get one for free)
Money in treasure chests scale up with all that so you also hilariously get hundreds of thousands of gold everytime you find a small treasure.
Technically, TES Morrowind and on. You just harvest whatever scale or hide or whatever from a dead critter and sell that, or incorporate it into a potion that could also be sold. And Morrowind’s broken alchemy system applies here as well, as the super potions you can create not only buff you extremely but also sell for a extremely high price.
Though Morrowind also had the fact that merchants had a set level of gold that resets every day and can only be temporarily increased by you giving them gold by buying stuff (and maybe bribes but I forget) and that level for most is relatively low, so even many high value items found in the game like ebony and daedric items take some doing to actually sell at a price relative to their actual worth, since nobody can really afford to pay you that by default.
Mount and Blade lets you basically merchant it up as a means of profit, buying various items cheap in one place and selling high elsewhere, and IIRC the prices are constantly fluctuating. Of course you could also just go into banditry and attack towns and merchants for goods to be sold elsewhere.
Etrian Odyssey actually does away with the whole ‘monster dropping gold’ thing. Monsters drop salvage loot, like pelts or eyeballs or whatever, and you can sell them at the store. Shop items unlock by having varied salvage items sold to it, unlocking either infinite amounts or just limited quantities.
This also serves the purpose of telling you to go home once you’ve filled up your inventory slots.
In Final Fantasy 8, monsters didn’t drop money. Instead, as a member of an elite military school/mercenary force, you got paid a salary every so often in gametime, and your salary increased as your rank in the organization rose.
Well, here’s another thread where I can just post about King of Dragon Pass
In KoDP you have two currency types, cattle and goods (in the original pc version goods were broken up into general goods and silver but the current version doesn’t bother with that distinction anymore)
cattle can be stolen in cattle raids and give birth to more cattle and die as the game goes on so your economy kind of fluctuates around that. Your tribe also subsists primarily on cattle and grain so you have soft limit of how much surplus cattle you can use before endangering your clan/tribe.
You can also send trading caravans to trade cattle for goods, barter cattle for treasures or alliances, or just make some kind of profit.
You can haggle, and different clans react in different ways to haggling attempts, and you can increase the bargaining ability of members of your clan by sacrificing to Issaries, the god of trade and travel.
On the subject of currency, Darklands follows the medieval german monetary system with three denominations,
The florin are the most valuable coins, used for expensive purchases, then you have the groschen and finally the pfenniges as small change. To make it more historically accurate (?), these denominations aren’t divided decimally like modern/convenient currency. Instead the equivalence is like 12 pfenniges to a groschen, and 20 groschen to a florin.
The game has no UI affordance whatsoever to help you calculate the value of your money in a simplified way.
Also, I may be wrong about this, but each type of coin works as its own object (as opposed to a re-calculable, abstract value) and to change between denominations, your only options are to buy/sell in shops or go to the bank, where you can also exchange your heavy coins for a banknote
Well, because you buy/sell from shops, the different denominations don’t noticeably impact gameplay. Another neat thing Darklands did was that if you wanted to, you could just keep your party at an inn and they could ply their trade(s) to make a small profit. This is useful if you can make enough money that you don’t lose anything while one of your party members is being tutored in something important like religion or alchemy.
