Your Gold is no Good Here: Fortune Tokens in Lost Songs of the Nibelungs (Design Post)

Time to do one of those again, I suppose. LSotN is a bit on the backburner here at Disoriented Ranger Publishing, since we aim to bring some bunkersploitation Christmas presents to your tabletop. Nonetheless, the brain goes where it goes and I just now had an idea that might solve a (minor) gripe I had with what rules already exist: the prices of wares and services. It's an interesting topic, historically speaking, but full of problems, as far as design goes. Unless ...

On the arbitrary value of money

This is not a commentary on current political events, but as it is, we need to have some basic understanding of what's happening around us and why and how that might inform the designs of our games. So bear with me here. It'll all come together in the end. Pinky promise.

We are learning right now what it means to have so called Fiat Currencies running our economies (that is, currencies that are not backed by a commodity such as gold), as the big banks all over the world flood the markets with money and you can see almost in real time how the value is diminished the further it trickles down, leading to inflation, ending in (potential) collapse.

(Good that the rich are getting richer by the minute as well as a side effect ...)

Anyway, I digress. However, it is the biggest shift of wealth since the invention of printed money (or so they say), so it's something that comes to mind. That said, the people who lived roughly 1500 years ago did not have to worry about money in the clear terms we do. I say 'clear' in the sense that we have an economy based on a virtually generated value in relation to our net worth and the available goods and services (or something like that ... I'm no economist).

Benefit of a system like that is the superficial transparency of worth and value. We have an idea what an article should cost, or at least, what we are willing to pay and what selection that assessment leaves for us to invest in. You don't expect to get something exceptionally good for a small buck, and you certainly expect something great if you spent the money to warrant it.

There is wiggle room, of course, but it's mostly (if legal) within a set of rules everybody more or less agrees upon.

But the most important thing is: most of it is arbitrary, if only for the one major reason that in a very large economy way too many pieces shift way too much and way to fast to calculate a proper in-time value of almost anything, while value itself, from an individual point of view, isn't necessarily the result of a rational or even mathematical evaluation.

Value has always been a compromise, of sorts, between quality and power (some would say 'supply and demand', but I think that falls somewhat short, at least for the design I have in mind ...). Our monetary system only manages to mask that fact, and only to some degree (which becomes obvious as soon as no one has an idea what something should be worth, for instance the work of an 'influencer').

That's quality losing vs. power, I'd say ... [source]

 All this describes more of a road map than, say, a railway system of rules, and while most stay on the road, there are still ways to sidestep the system (or leave the road, so to say). Still, it comes with a specific frame of mind, a specific idea how things work.

D&D shows a vanilla system of the above

Vanilla D&D has a mighty vanilla take on the subject of money. Gold is the standard, silver is argued to be the more 'realistic' standard, but overall you get one price system (with little variation) that applies to almost everything one would encounter in the game.

I'm not saying that is a bad thing, not at all, but it's a very specific flavor, and it changes the narrative, imo, significantly towards a very modern take on a mostly medieval setting. It is a better fit for eras that already experienced some form of industrialisation, but it works just as well for D&D if magic is understood as a driving force very similar to industrialisation (in as much as it is able to change and alter a society).

What I'm saying is, that high fantasy like that goes well with our understanding (or rather 'intuition') of how economics work. If those things move within our realm of expectation, we have an easier time to dismiss it as a necessary dimension of a gaming world. Something that has to be as it is to elevate the other parts of a world within a comfy shadow of a system everybody dreams to overcome ...

Actually, if playing D&D is categorized as a game allowing to live a fantasy of 'playing the system' by all means necessary (which certainly was a huge part of the game in the early editions*) to get rich and famous, the economy needs to be a vanilla, but ingrained part of the system to make it work.

D&D life goals in a nut shell? [source]

Fittingly, many I know play to get to a point where so much wealth is accumulated that caring about it becomes obsolete, which could be one more indicator that the early D&D economy is successfull design**.

The more 'historic' your game attempts to be, though, the more problematic will the D&D approach turns out to be for the flow of the game.

It's all about expectations!

If you want something to happen in the game, it needs to be reflected in the rules. The more you want something, the more consequential need the rules to be for the game. You want character death? Have a system for that. You want them crippled as well? Have a system for that. You want people to use the rules at the table? Make them essential.

A good example for what I'm trying to say here would be Skills in Lost Songs. If the players want to evoke an ability asociated with Rank, they need to describe how they do it. No roll necessary (for the special abilities like 'earning one's keep'), but the player needs to describe how the character uses their skill to benefit from it. This simple necessity helps enriching the narrative with little stories how the characters use their skills and how society respects that, both help creating the feel of a more grounded and 'historical' game.

Ø2\\'3|| (that dysopian sf rpg I wrote) might be another good example for the argument I'm aiming for. The game features a credit system that strongly links what you are able to buy to your social status. Not only that, it also considers what the player does on social media as well as uncontrollable spending a character would do if exposed to advertisement 24/7 (something citizens with a lower socialt status have to content with ... higher up ads can be regulated or even ignored).

Regardless of what players want to do, then, this (far more oppressive) system will rear its ugly head regularly and sidetrack them as they fall in debt or try to get more famous or fall from grace or hit a lucky streak with a system they can't entirely controll themselves. That way, tropes become part of the narrative that are necessary to manifest a feel of dystopian science fiction by exposing the characters to it, not by having them come up or interact with it themselves (which they'll do as well, just with a different set of motivations, which is just as important!).

You see? Systems can give impulses that manipualte a narrative on different levels and with different directions of impact to achieve a certain feel a game needs to manifest, for instance, a genre or a historical mindset just by making them natural occurences of playing the game. Side effects, basically. DMs and players will bring this to the table to some extrent, but it is important to understand the power that is in a system that produces an ambient noise floor lie that to begin with. Something to carry the game and keep its themes present.

It's something like that I'm aiming for here as well (seems to be something I like to have in my designs). Oh, yeah, so systems actually do matter, btw. Because if you design elements of a game on purpose or not, they will have an impact just by using them. It's better to have a firm controll on what exactly those elements do, then, right?

Anyway, a different historical frame of mind, right?

The Dark Ages are not known for being a 'global village'. Not by a long shot. Still, the Roman Empire was no more at around 500 AC, and there was lots of movement at least on most of the Eurasian continent to get an interesting mix of people and values.

In a sense, though, that would have devalued lots of things people would cherish in their culture, for (1) the simple reason that those values don't translate well over thousands of kilometers and (2) hardship brings its own, very basic set of values as a priority. Considering this, many had to start from scratch to formulate valid worth as new communities formed across Europe, while fighting to keep what they accumulated.

As far as desings go, this is actually pretty nifty, as characters can take part in creating those values, individualize them, in a way. Of course one would have something like the Roman Coin and valuable items from the Old Age that would be recognized by many. Naturally you'll have legendary smiths, and in Lost Songs you may add magic or holy items of renown. But all this would have to find a place in an organically growing value system of a community.

Visigoth coins, 568-586 [source]

Furthermore, we'd have to let go of the idea that a piece of paper carries a certain 'fixed' value, or that currency is the end-all-be-all of every imaginable bargain. It'd be an exchange of wares to some extent or another. I'd also wager that travelling merchants would have been a rare occurance during the Dark Ages, as it'd have to be quite dangerous to travel with goods through unstable regions (people would still do that, of course, just heavily protected or connected, and not everyone could do that).

Sure enough, the Romans (Antiquity in general) had travelling merchants and you will have local trade, even import and export. Just not to the extent we'd see before the fall of the Roman Empire or in the Middle Ages. Between 500 and, say, 900 AD you'll most likely have a ever-changing patchwork of arrangements, with some stable regions or market places developing over time in cities, near castles and with monasteries (here's the Wikipedia entry, with nothing specifically about the Dark Ages, hah!).

Hence, what we'll need is a system that allows ballparking values of everything one living back then would value to the degree they'd value it and why, at best while generating a little story about an item and without having tons of tables with varying values of items in different cultures over time ... because that'd be never complete enough to be satisfying (the game would feature examples, of course, which would come in tables, of course).

The abstract for the arbitrary ...

Okay, we have our parameters, we know what we want this to achieve. The trick to make this work is to go as abstract and basic as possible so that every possible scenario a group would come up with could apply the rules to the same effect.

It helps that a lot of this is arbitrary to begin with and the basic axis we formulated in the beginning, quality versus power, should help producing a dynamic that is consistent and somewhat within the historical context.

So here are the basic rules (preliminary version, naturally):

The smallest Narrative Unit (NU) of a thing is worth 1 Fortune Token (FT) and Honor Points (HP) spent multiply the value of FT needed for the next transaction. 20 HP spent will give a character what they desire. Skill value act as multiplier for the NU from Master Rank upwards if the creator is known or present (if several high rank skills are necessary, the values stack). If a thing is connected to layers above normal level, they also function as multipliers.

So one could say, a horse is worth 1 TF, and there should be situations where this is true. That said, a horse, if you think about it, is composed of more than one narrative unit, isn't it? Ancestry can play a huge part, the trainer might be a master or grandmaster even (both act as multipliers), it might have won prizes (another NU) or have a famous owner (NU), maybe even magical properties (more NU)!

So a horse (1 NU) with famous breeds as parents (2 NU) that is bred and trained by a Master (at least 2 skills, let's say a multiplier of 12, the least possible) and owned by a king (1 NU, Epic Layer = 500) would be worth 24.000 FT. A truely royal price for a horse!

That's what a 1 FT horse looks like ... [source]

There is a lot one can do with this, and most importantly, all of it tells a story. A copper piece from the legendary Roman Empire might be worth more than a gold piece from an unknown source, unless an alchemist can be quoted that verifies that gold's purity, for instance.

One sure can lie and cheat to add NU or multipliers to a thing, but it might come back to haunt a character. One might, for instance, swear upon the gods that it is true, and the gods don't take kindly to lying in their name (and something like hat woud be common place with bargains, so cheating would be dangerous). Again, it creates narratives that fit the setting and make value something that is elevated by the stories defining it. Connecting this with Honor is only fitting, as it might be an honor to give a king something for only a small price (or as a gift, even).

My guess is that it'd shift a group's drive to loot somewhat towards following up on legends, actually caring about the items they won. Another welcome effect, of course.

And that's it, so what do you guys think?

This will need to connect with several sub systems the game features, so I might have a little bit of work ahead of me to make it fit, but my guess is it'll fit quite nicely and maybe even help figuring out a couple of kinks of the other systems (lower levels of random encounters will need another dimension now, for instance, but that's a good thing!).

This post about gold and honor will need an update as well (quick fix would be to just exchange gold with FT, but I'd have to see if the values I go with in 2015 match with what the system produces ... it might, given that characters can spend HP as multipliers, still seems steep, though).

It's all still very much a WIP, but piece by piece I'm inching towards  finished game. I'll keep you guys updated, of course, as I get to work on LSotN.

Anyway, I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on this.

[source]

* Nowadays, with the characters already starting rather mighty, it's more like living a power fantasy, which is a significant shift in narrative focus, but of no interest here in this post, I'd say.

**  It is not without faults, I think, as there need to be rules for characters flooding an economy with the loot they gained, but that's neither here nor there. I wrote my thoughts on this here, though, if you are interested.

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In other news,  you can check out a free preview of the Ø2\\'3|| (that rpg I published) right here (or go and check out the first reviews here). This will be with the general populace for a little while now, but we will do some sales in the future, of course.

If you need more convincing, maybe this post might get you there. If you already checked it out, please know that I appreciate you :) It'll certainly help to keep the lights on here ...