Concerns over inflation

hi guys

some quick stuff for you.

Most of you should be aware that a group of us were relying on dnd as a determiner actual statistics in combat, monetary value, and skill levels of our characters. there was an issue with the original conversion rate of 1 gold piece being 1 shilling, so the rate was changed to 3 silver pieces being equal to 1 shilling. When this change was made, a couple of us who earned money through the dnd system had calculated it with the above scale, so after the rate was changed, i inflated mine and asked anyone else who earned shillings as gp to do the same.

Now, however, I've been asked to change the number back, even though it will be worth less than what was earned, so that no one else will have to adjust their gp values, the reason being that the community will have a problem with the level of wealth acquired from the hunts.

So, I've come to the community to ask what you think. Is it a problem, or may I leave things as they are?

I just don't think it's fair that people who played with DnD rules are entitled to have about 20 times more then anyone who didn't. I believe that how you develop your character is up to you, but when it comes to how your character gets items and money/other shit that some players who use certain rules and methods shouldn't have any advantage over others who don't

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When this change was made, a couple of us who earned money through the dnd system had calculated it with the above scale, so after the rate was changed, i inflated mine and asked anyone else who earned shillings as gp to do the same.

And what's to say people who were getting paid otherwise weren't getting paid in DnD values just without knowing it. The point I've been trying to make is when you go "Right, a shilling=3 silver peices" you can't go "Well these shillings over here are worth more, but those shillings, which by all rights are exactly the same aren't".

Everyone should get reasonably fair amounts through the same system.

Either have everyone's inflated the dnd way or none at all.

ViralHatred wrote:

Either have everyone's inflated the dnd way or none at all.

Exactly what I say, and at the risk of sounding lazy it makes more sense to not do anybody's at all, rather then having to make everyone do the inflation equation (easy as it may be) then have admins check all the numbers to make sure everyone did them properly and didn't cheat themselves in extra coin. (PAT)

It would be even easier to have never changed the exchange rate and kept prices as they were. From my understanding, you wanted to adopt the DnD prices because Olden currently has no pricing system. If that's the case, why not just keep things the way they were?

I personally want to rip as little directly from DnD as we can, even a slight change is better then none at all.

But everyone else who converted it DID change their values back to normal. Munroe did. (Psyche never converted.)

As far as I know, the conversion rate was to offset the problem that, when using price values from DnD, players could buy more, better stuff than in the normal olden world because of the fact that shillings were worth less than dnd gold pieces yet were being treated the same. This appears to have gone wrong in the other way, given Alec now has 25 thousand something shillings. That's more than every other character in the server (INCLUDING characters that only have shillings to act as reward dispense machines, like the clown characters or vorn) combined. Furthermore, as Ruta stated, it means that everyone that participates in a DnD style battle gets thousands of shillings more than any other work, just because of the high value of gold pieces in DnD. The issue isn't the conversion rate, it's the high value of objects being won. You could say, "Then reward players with more loot in regular olden", but that would just increase inflation overall, giving EVERYBODY thousands of shillings. Rewards would then be given in astronomical amounts, and characters would ICly be lugging around even more sacks of heavy coin than they are now.

This has inspired me to create an Olden bank.

Welcome to the lowest point in human existence.

Sigh.

Then you thought wrong. In the dnd system, buying better items is much harder. A mundane item like a plain sword or shield is not hard to acquire. It shouldn't be, at least. But if you want your item to be a quality item, or have been made of a special metal, or have magical qualities, and anything else out of the norm, the pricing gets way, way higher. If you want to know who the richest person is right now, it would be Taric. His falchion is worth 36,000 gp, and by our conversion rate, so that's around 115,000 shillings.

The weapon isn't even that fantastic compared to much more powerful weapons olden has approved to people for much cheaper prices. And mind you, psyche rolled 2 100's and a 97 for this weapon. Point being, DnD does not overvalue anything. You undervalue stuff and overvalue plain objects.

As for gaining more than others with the quests we do, that's because the battles themselves are more challenging and the creatures we fought for high rewards are tough enough to hoard those rewards, not because we use a more generous loot system. If we were fighting against goblins, we would be earning less than what Vorn pays people, because nothing of real value ever ends up in the hands of a goblin. In fact, the guns the goblins use are worth more than their rewards. Even with the new exchange rate, Vorn still pays more than a goblin is worth. The most well paying hunts have been fought against creatures that could wipe the floor with the stuff you have challenged other players with. If the same battle was fought against a group of goblins of the same level of challenge, would you still say we earned too much?

As for lugging around vast amounts of coin, it can be solved by having more than one unit of currency, so that's not an IC issue that holds up. Realistically, there would be more than one unit to represent currency anyway Besides, it's not like every person will carry around their life savings with them.

Stop making excuses.

Just revert to a lower amount of shillings and value the rewards in line with other olden artifacts/weapons/items.

You're causing a problem when there doesn't need to be one. You don't need multiple figures for currency, you don't need massive rewards.

Olden is built around using as little content as possible to maximum effect with the use of a lore-heavy roleplay and the power of imagination.

I'll just throw this out, any quest you do, the average reward should be no more than a hundred shillings. I mean, that much money alone could buy you food the whole week. Go kill a monster and you could get 25 bottles of wine with that 100 shillings. Jeez, just don't think so high in numbers. Of course if it's a higher quest, you'd get a better reward. But I believe even 1,000 as a quest reward is just way too much, utterly ridiculous.

The point Kain was trying to make was while the numbers do get bigger using the conversion, so do the prices of objects. Yeah, we may have 20,000+ shillings, but if we wanted even a somewhat above average sword it would cost 30,000 or more. When items are that expensive, the monetary rewards have to go higher to compensate, or else we wouldn't be able to fund our expeditions at all.

However, these outlandishly large numbers can all be fixed by just saying 1 DnD gp = 1 shilling. From there, convert it however you like. I've already adjusted Terri's money accordingly.

Reager wrote:

I'll just throw this out, any quest you do, the average reward should be no more than a hundred shillings. I mean, that much money alone could buy you food the whole week. Go kill a monster and you could get 25 bottles of wine with that 100 shillings. Jeez, just don't think so high in numbers. Of course if it's a higher quest, you'd get a better reward. But I believe even 1,000 as a quest reward is just way too much, utterly ridiculous.

It isn't that much when you think about it. Remember, an Olden character is not like the average person, because the average person doesn't hunt giant monsters for a living. No, the average person will probably be stuck in some crappy job, as an uneducated peasant, working for just enough money to buy food and drink every day. The thought of seeing a monster, let alone trying to kill one, will make the average person require a change of pants.

Now, if you go out and kill a big scary monster, risking your character's life (yes, you can get PKed on a proper DnD monster hunt), why shouldn't you get a reward that's calculated based on the difficulty? And mind you, even though it is calculated based on the difficulty, one bad roll could mean you get nothing for your efforts.

Lastly, if we got paid only 100 shillings per nasty monster we hunted, we'd all end up dead. You know why? Because like I said before, shit's expensive. If you can't afford to buy better equipment, then you're going into a battle sorely unprepared, which means you're going to get killed.

Wait, I thought for the price of 5k you could get a decent sized home. When did this sudden change happen, so confused right now. How does 5k go to getting a house, and suddenly after the skip it's 30k just to even get a good weapon.

Because a magic weapon of that level is rarer than a small home. It takes more resources, effort, even time, to craft that weapon, than to make a home. For your average crafter, it would take 36 days if he worked alone whereas a house can be put together in less time with less difficulty or required knowledge. And even the small advantages the weapon provides are highly valuable, because they can mean the difference between life and death.

Do it through scripts so everyone gets the same. It's the fairest choice.

I mean, if you know the formulas used in DnD, why not use them?

Although my opinion still stands that money should be entirely roleplayed and therefore inane due to the simple reason that establishing an actual economy has been tried and tested to fail just cause there's not enough people.

All I really have to say is, okay. You say a magical sword supposedly costs 30k. In a few days Kain already has 25k, which is enough to buy a good house. So basically if he earns money on that scale constantly, in a year he could have more than fifty nice houses.

Munroe wrote:

The point Kain was trying to make was while the numbers do get bigger using the conversion, so do the prices of objects. Yeah, we may have 20,000+ shillings, but if we wanted even a somewhat above average sword it would cost 30,000 or more. When items are that expensive, the monetary rewards have to go higher to compensate, or else we wouldn't be able to fund our expeditions at all.

I'm sure everyone wants an above average, magical sword that costs 30k. Only those types of items are expensive, so yes you would need a higher compensation. But the thing is you're aiming too high. Magical weapons are expensive and are meant to be, so you shouldn't be getting a higher compensation just because you want above average weapons. And basically the way I read the last sentence is ''If I want powerful expensive items, I need more money in my rewards, or else I can't kill monsters without powerful weapons.'' I'm sure you can fund an operation on a low budget while using average weapons.

You're mixing up prices. The 5k is in the gp system and in the gp system, Alec has 7,618.

Secondly, no, you can't. You can't do anything you're under-equipped for. If you were asking me to nerf myself because it's just too easy, sure, I'd be willing to do that, but that's not the case. You're asking us to get less than what we deserve, way way less.

If this is how it's going to be, I'm just going to go back to the old system.

From a logical standpoint, it makes sense that a powerful monster would have either a high bounty on its head, or a lot of loot lying around in its lair, because of how many lives it's claimed. Accumulated loot from travellers / adventurers it's killed, and reward money, would add up to a fair amount.

Not to mention the fact that you can still get a shitty loot roll and wind up with nothing.

I never said that you should get less than you deserve, I merely said you shouldn't set your bar to getting very expensive magical items, and by achieving that goal, making very high compensations. Munroe said "or else we wouldn't be able to fund our expeditions at all." and I merely was saying that you could fund an expedition on a low budget and normal weapons. It's not like you need some big abundance of supplies and top notch weapons.

Reager wrote:

I never said that you should get less than you deserve, I merely said you shouldn't set your bar to getting very expensive magical items, and by achieving that goal, making very high compensations. Munroe said "or else we wouldn't be able to fund our expeditions at all." and I merely was saying that you could fund an expedition on a low budget and normal weapons. It's not like you need some big abundance of supplies and top notch weapons.

Getting powerful magical items actually requires a copious amount of luck and a few rolls that border on being a statistical anomaly.

Also, taking out increasingly tough monsters do require increasingly good dear. For example, a troll is un-killable unless it has been taking fire or acid damage, and since magic users are very rare in modern Aeria, that makes trolls incredibly dangerous without the right equipment.

Dama Oscura wrote:

Although my opinion still stands that money should be entirely roleplayed and therefore inane due to the simple reason that establishing an actual economy has been tried and tested to fail just cause there's not enough people.

Because it's a well known fact that people asspull money more then anything else and those that don't often find themselves wondering how they should properly rp their money.

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because of how many lives it's claimed. Accumulated loot from travellers / adventurers it's killed, and reward money, would add up to a fair amount.

I'd also to throw out there that there's no reason a stronger monster should= more loot. Maybe a troll (or something) goes about killing people and just leaves the victim's gear in whichever random spot he died. Why would a troll collect gold, or human sized gear what's it gonna do with it?

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, a troll is un-killable unless it has been taking fire or acid damage,

The loot was found in its cave, and its stomach. The troll either ate the people, or killed those unfortunate enough to wander into its lair, and left their stuff where it lay. Really, it's not that much of a stretch.

There's also the possibility that trolls just like shiny objects, similar to how dragons tend to hoard useless treasure.

With what I'm seeing the main problem is that there are currently two values of currency.

Olden standard, which is high value scarce by rarity currency. 10 shillings is a lot of money, relatively, and that means that the averaged spread of the money is less, but worth a lot.

and

Olden Greyhawk Standard, which is Low value common currency, which means that characters using this system acquire massive amounts of low value shillings. the spread of currency is a lot, a character might have 5000 gold, but that's not a lot at all when things cost so much

There are three solutions to this.

You can go with Olden standard and convert all greyhawk standard currencies downward into high value high rarity coins, whereas you find out the adverage worth between them is, and offer an exchange. An example is that say 1000 OGS is worth only one OS "Shilling" all currency delegations from then on would be given out as OS "Shilling" standard.

You can stick with Olden Greyhawk Standard and convert the existing high value high rarity currency into low value common currency. the same as the previous one, but instead you take say 1 OS "shilling" and convert it up into 1000 OSG. all currency delegations from then on would be given out as OSG standard.

The third way is to take both currencies, and add them together, and get the average, setting it somewhere midrange. and creating a mid value mid rarity currency.


My input

Midrange is probably best. Cause it's always been roleplayed that food and drinks are averaged around 3-5 shillings. Midrange makes it seem more modern, which can help you get an idea of how much some things cost.

The main appeal to low rarity low value is that people see "Holy shit I have 10000000 gold" and think they're rich, even when they're not. The appeal to high value high rarity is that it's easy to manage, but it makes people feel poor.