NWN2: Trade bars vs Gems

[yavanion]

hope fully we will have silver coins in NwN2, if we dont id like to see that the gold was changed to silver, ie we change every thing with a factor ten. this will allow us to use a more proper coinage, and there be a stackable item thats gold coins...

Also there should be alot of armours, weapons etc. that is dropped as broken and scrap metal, and should only yield a wery small sum. But this is for the global economics of alfa2...

/H

[MorbidKate]

hope fully we will have silver coins in NwN2, if we dont id like to see that the gold was changed to silver, ie we change every thing with a factor ten. this will allow us to use a more proper coinage, and there be a stackable item thats gold coins...

Also there should be alot of armours, weapons etc. that is dropped as broken and scrap metal, and should only yield a wery small sum. But this is for the global economics of alfa2...

/H

We don't need silver coins. Players are Adventures... travellers so they need the ability to carry wealth that is light. To address the ooc weight issue with an IC solution like gems is the way to go. Silver just adds more weight to the problem.

The only way to make gems work is to have them be like trade bars in terms of 5% for converstion and equally priced by all merchants. The control comes from setting the available gold any merchant can pay for an item. For example, TPI has merchants that can't afford to buy some items off players so they need to go elsewhere. Works great and it makes IC sense.

At the end of the day, any system we spend time developing must be truly useful to the player. If players don't make use of it or avoid it altogether then it's a huge waste of time and resources.

Kate

[yavanion]

Well i do think we do need Silver coins, most mundane things in DnD cost silver coins, ewen less, paying a gold for a beer is like paying 1000 dollars for a beer, kinda stupid if you ask me , but i guess in the end it all comes down to what we want alfa to be ?

/H

[Mulu]

hope fully we will have silver coins in NwN2, if we dont id like to see that the gold was changed to silver, ie we change every thing with a factor ten. this will allow us to use a more proper coinage, and there be a stackable item thats gold coins...

Also there should be alot of armours, weapons etc. that is dropped as broken and scrap metal, and should only yield a wery small sum. But this is for the global economics of alfa2...

/H

We don't need silver coins. Players are Adventures... travellers so they need the ability to carry wealth that is light. To address the ooc weight issue with an IC solution like gems is the way to go. Silver just adds more weight to the problem.

Not if you rescale the economy, so a horse costs a silver piece.

You'll never have a "realistic" economy if you use D&D numbers.

[MorbidKate]

hope fully we will have silver coins in NwN2, if we dont id like to see that the gold was changed to silver, ie we change every thing with a factor ten. this will allow us to use a more proper coinage, and there be a stackable item thats gold coins...

Also there should be alot of armours, weapons etc. that is dropped as broken and scrap metal, and should only yield a wery small sum. But this is for the global economics of alfa2...

/H

We don't need silver coins. Players are Adventures... travellers so they need the ability to carry wealth that is light. To address the ooc weight issue with an IC solution like gems is the way to go. Silver just adds more weight to the problem.

Not if you rescale the economy, so a horse costs a silver piece.

You'll never have a "realistic" economy if you use D&D numbers.

I'm not talking about an economy. I'm talking about currency systems that are truly useful to a player that also solve the big concern over weight. If gems effectively become the $100 bill then you have a system where players can carry their wealth in an IC fashion where like gold, they'll know what it's worth (5%) after conversion and like $100 bills, they'll find that not all merchants accept it. On the flipside, setting merchants like that is also an IC solution on their end as well.

Since this is for NWN2 then there is no need to go back and adjust spawn drops to compensate for the greater resale value of gems.

Kate

[Creslyn]

Spawn drops for gems are already supposed to be balanced to the higher allowed limit of 75-80% for gem buyback. As such, an additional 15-20% return on gems isn't likely to see any major spikes in wealth (unless Bital sells her collection).

[MorbidKate]

Spawn drops for gems are already supposed to be balanced to the higher allowed limit of 75-80% for gem buyback. As such, an additional 15-20% return on gems isn't likely to see any major spikes in wealth (unless Bital sells her collection).

If it can be play-tested in ALFA before NWN2 then all the better. If gems are bumped to 95% to equal trade bars and merchants are limited on what they will buy, do you believe players would use gems and/or trade bars to keep their weight down and make their choice of what is IC for them? Is there anything missing from this thought process?

Kate

[Brokenbone]

I think gems as portable wealth, awesome. Their values should fluctuate pretty wildly though, and I like Kate's theme relating to some merchants just being undercapitalized to buy a whole handful of jewels.

Tradebars would make more sense if they were dressed up a little. Right now they seem very OOC... what merchant house stamped these? A fellow across the continent will honour any tradebar, no questions asked? Can you have a counterfeit tradebar (either you're the counterfeiter, or one in ten times, a vendor pawns one off on you for good hard currency)? What happens if you get caught moving some merchant concern's tradebars across a border in time of war? What if you try to pass a tradebar from house which has gone bankrupt, become defunct, or has had its leadership indicted for some crime or other in their homeland, or worse, where you're trying to pass the bar?

Yeah, anyhow, gems seem pretty IC to have as a form of wealth, and can be found in a 10,000 year old horde, tradebars just seem too simple for now. At that rate, you might as well be handing out paper-based negotiable instruments (0.0 weight, but hold up to the elements poorly), thought the same issues of forgery, whether or not one should honour them, etc. could reasonably come into play.

Anything other than using coins of the realm should have a chance of not working out how one planned. Well, actually, pardon the "should" above... it'd just be interesting to have the occasional merchant spit on the floor when you offer them a tradebar you picked up in Immurk's Hold or something. "This bar's made of gilded tin! What ledgermain did you think you'd get away with here? Guards, guards!"

...

I'm also speaking in ideals here though, it could be the devil to script, and keeping "shopping and wealth" interesting may not be a day one priority.

[MorbidKate]

I think gems as portable wealth, awesome. Their values should fluctuate pretty wildly though, and I like Kate's theme relating to some merchants just being undercapitalized to buy a whole handful of jewels.

The value of gems needs to stay fixed just as it is with gold for it to be used by players. If the value of gold fluctuated wildly from server to server players would be upset and probably only play on the servers where the value is highest. Using the 5% conversion bleeds wealth just as trade bars do.

Ideally I'd like to see merchants accept both gems AND trade bars within the cash limits set on the merchant. It's all IC, solves the weight issue and stops low strength players from ooc dragging their weighed down character across town or into a remore area just to buy a pricey item off a merchant.

Kate

[Brokenbone]

I think gems as portable wealth, awesome. Their values should fluctuate pretty wildly though, and I like Kate's theme relating to some merchants just being undercapitalized to buy a whole handful of jewels.

The value of gems needs to stay fixed just as it is with gold for it to be used by players. If the value of gold fluctuated wildly from server to server players would be upset and probably only play on the servers where the value is highest. Using the 5% conversion bleeds wealth just as trade bars do.

Ideally I'd like to see merchants accept both gems AND trade bars within the cash limits set on the merchant. It's all IC, solves the weight issue and stops low strength players from ooc dragging their weighed down character across town or into a remore area just to buy a pricey item off a merchant.

Kate

I wasn't proposing anything in the way of having currency conversion rates (i.e., oh, you'll have to pay 100 Cormyrean gold lions if you want to buy this 80 fivestar Sembian finery).

Just the idea that different merchants are going to appraise the same jewel at different rates is realistic. For anyone who has gotten stones appraised in RL, you know that no two reputable appraisers will appraise alike. No two disreputable appraisers, either, come to think.

If however the issue being predicted is that folks will seek out, and eventually find, the most generous jeweller in the realms, ok, point noted (i.e. the one guy who is at 95% when his closest competition is at 80%, for instance). Still, if he only has enough spare coin to purchase $X per week, that's the issue combatted in part. That merchant subtly lowering their buyback rate over a course of weeks while his competition raises theirs, hey, it could happen. If your PC gets told in a low whisper at a tavern "See Crazy Vaclav in Waterdeep, 500 miles West, if you wish sell those diamonds", maybe by the time you get there Crazy Vaclav has dropped his buyback rate to 70%, but you take your PC's associate's word for it.

I don't know, I just like the idea that cold, hard currency should be the only constant. Jewels, art objects, any crafted goods (magical or nonmagical) might elicit a different offer from every merchant one meets. The market, local tastes, local taboos, and other forces that an adventurer isn't expected to comprehend (unless they withdraw from that life and become accountants) help keep life unpredictable. "Fixed values" are OOC, I'm not sure if players are desperate to know that a diamond will always be worth 4000gp at a good merchant... never 3500 to a skinflint, never 4500 to a diamond fetishist, and never 2gp to a straw-in-shoes fishmonger who believes it might make a pretty lure.

Off the variable/fixed point though, I do like the idea of cash limits. The idea of merchants with an infinite amount of gold should make a large percent of PCs stop hunting dragons and instead, stake out these uber merchants who presumably, are highly, highly encumbered with their billion gold pieces.

[Dorn]

Never had a problem with trade bars.
Only saw problems with gems due to bad pricing, bad drops from spawns etc.
Never saw a need for silver apart from complicating matters

I say stick to tradebars. Reduces chances of screw ups in gem merchants and drops.

[dergon darkhelm]

+1

[Mulu]

I did see a very cool coin system where coins became stackable 1x1 inventory items, and they had different facings depending on where they were minted, but a system like that would only work if you scaled down the economy so a gold coin *is* the $100.00 bill, as it was historically.

If you're not going for realism, why not leave gold weightless in NWN2, which is the simplest system of all. Anything above that in-game system is going to be a complication and introduce more tedium. Put another way, the lack of realism in D&D isn't due to being able to carry the weight of 10,000 gold coins, it's that you *have* 10,000 gold coins. It's a system made of pennies.

[Swift]

If you're not going for realism, why not leave gold weightless in NWN2, which is the simplest system of all. Anything above that in-game system is going to be a complication and introduce more tedium. Put another way, the lack of realism in D&D isn't due to being able to carry the weight of 10,000 gold coins, it's that you *have* 10,000 gold coins. It's a system made of pennies.

Hear hear. Adding weight to gold for ALFA was, IMO, one of the most braindead decisions we made.

[Dorn]

I disagree. I love the weight of gold thing in alfa!!
Makes you get tradebars, makes you lose a littel thorugh this trade, makes it so you cant carry 10, 000 round with you at a time which is bollocks.

Please make str worth something in ALFA!!

I guess we could just make it reduce dext by 1 for every 1000 goins you carry seeing all the bags of gold strapped to you