Making gold in ALFA

[ElCadaver]

I think it was Dirsa and his pawn shop idea that got me thinking.

Lets start a list of business ventures that players can accomplish NOW, as is, without making any changes to ALFA. The love of money is the root of all evil, and making money is the best way to raise the stakes and bring people/groups into RP conflict with each other. Guild wars anyone?

Here is an idea which requires a [slight] change , but it might work.

Every player is allowed a Mule version of their PC. Make it a by application process if you like. They make a duplicate of their current PC at lvl 1, have some kind of small prefix in the name which identifies them as a merchant version, and then that PC can be used to run a business in designated areas reserved for merchants. No persistent chests needed. The chr could be heavily encumbered with stock, which doesn't matter if you are standing motionless in a merchant stall in a no cvc area. Item and gold transfers between the PC and the mercchant PC are allowed, via non persistent chests or something..

Is it open for abuse. Of course! But I believe most people will honor the system, and those who abuse the privilige lose it.

[Rotku]

Eh? I don't get it

[NESchampion]

I don't know that enough PCs have enough equipment or the like to sell to make such a system useful really. It certainly seems to break the idea of IC consistency.

[Audark]

I don't know what is really intended by this notion.

If it is to have people standing around like glorified merchant stalls like you might see in the free to play korean mmorpgs then I would certainly be against this kind of idea.

Where would these PCs get their stock? Why should this kind of work not be handled by the NPCs already in place?

If it's just about selling off goods found on adventure, I doubt PCs will ever have enough stock to require a mule version or anything like that, and PCs already have the ability to sell those items to both PCs and NPCs.

I believe to fully understand what you intend you'd need to elaborate further. For now I just see mule PCs and potential abuses for a goal that is nebulous... making gold? simulating a pc being a merchant?

[ElCadaver]

It would require markets to be stimulated for trade to occur. I do know that quite a bit of custom gear does get brought into the game, so unique items are on the rise. I have gone through several iterations of custom armor with my PC for example, and these could be sold.

Hows this for an idea.... PCs who take enough skills in craft weapon or craft armor get to craft armor with the toolset, and bring it in at a discounted rate, say 20%, so long as it is not used on their character. They can sell the items for a profit, plus express their creative side and bring some great looking items into the game, which are ALFA compliant of course.

[danielmn]

Hows this for an idea.... PCs who take enough skills in craft weapon or craft armor get to craft armor with the toolset, and bring it in at a discounted rate, say 20%, so long as it is not used on their character. They can sell the items for a profit, plus express their creative side and bring some great looking items into the game, which are ALFA compliant of course.

Crafters of weapons/armour don't pay full price in material to begin with. Raw material cost for these items is 1/3 of the listed sale price. They already make a profit. I am unsure how what you are proposing differs from what is already in place on some/all servers...

[CloudDancing]

Final Fantasy the MMO used to have a little shop attached to your characters one could inspect them and buy from them.

Haven has Kemo Auction House as does Dalelands and BGSTC. It a player gold sink in the auction fees are prorated via the cost of the item. But it allows players to put their items up for auction and profit.

[t-ice]

I have gone through several iterations of custom armor with my PC

That seems to be the thing, players want their custom stuff customized to them. Not second-hand custom gear from someone else. Certainly it would make sense for new PCs to buy used gear, but pretty soon as PC wealth increases, the players want to dress their PCs their way, not what they can find from the flea market. "Far as gear is concerned, the only thing that trumps PGing is dress-up." Dressing the avatar the right way seems to be one of the most important pieces in what we call hard-core rp.

Ergo, the demand for second-hand gear will likely be small.

If one wants to stimulate the market then at least these two things come to mind

1) Create a IG and IC way to broadcast messages about gear wanted / for sale. Problem here is that it's not really IC for such channels to exists to simply bypass the established IC merchants who supposedly get their dough by being those very middlemen.

2) Lower the amount of gold things can be sold to NPCs for. If items generally can be cashed for, say, 25% of by-the-book value (or even less for very valuable things), then finding second-hand uses and selling them to PCs becomes more attractive. If the by-the-book "sells for 50%" is used, then players will certainly prefer to sell and use to gold to buy stuff customized as best they can. This problem is hugely compounded if wealth-per-level tables are adhered to as "rubber band to granting wealth", since hanging on to secondary might-be-useful-one-day stuff directly discounts from stuff you can expect to gain in the future.

[dirsa]

well, since i'm the reason, might as well chime in..

elcadaver is right. economic development, aka making gold, is an excellent driving force behind cooperation and conflict. it can certainly be implemented and operated in pw like alfa. i'm sure whatever old haziates we have left here will agree with me.

however, alfa has one tiny, tincy, weeny problem. wealth standards. they effectively kill any and all possibility of functional economy. wealth standards tie wealth of any character to their power, and abolish the possibility of characters power being tied to their wealth. what does it mean? well, it means that wealth is largely irrelevant. sure, there are richer and poorer characters, but everyone more or less follows wealth distribution guidelines by level. there are no low level characters who somehow have acquired great wealth and therefor can either equip themselves in high level gear or pay high level characters to do their dirty work. i personally think it's a pity, but why do we have wealth standards is a different discussion.

[CloudDancing]

I like to think the guidelines are so one can use the faulty wealth assessment tools and scream in horror.

Or also helps Dms who don't get my DM time to feel jealous and under loved.

I mean I remember the first time I saw Lemuel's inventor on TSM or Rathlan's. Here we were getting along on a pittance and he had EXTRA SUITS OF ARMOR and boxes of gems and stuff.

I remember Dms being mad at me prior for complaining that the scouts weren't getting paid their 20 gold for two months of IC work. We couldn't by half a healing scroll and here we were were night after night defending High-Hold from wights, mind-control, and zombies.

BUT in all seriousness it's a lay over from the old days with 10 servers and 30 Dms all running around doing whatever they pleased for friends or random players they liked.
And of course to stem jealousy which I think is one of the greatest weakness of play. Even I am prone to it.

[Brokenbone]

The DMG has wealth tables for player characters.

So does ALFA, except the amounts are much higher, to somehow reflect "people who will not always have parties may from time to time need a little extra gear / consumables to do well."

The last "survey of the vault" or whatever you'd call it, where statistics on PC wealth came up, it was startling how few player characters were "poor" (although perhaps bad tools were telling us that folks were average or high, but in reality they were poor?)

I do think there's somewhat of an economic game available, mostly in terms of crafting, but it is not all that exciting to most people (and the main people that matter in that case are the DMs who may need to vet crafted items, import them, etc.). It is a double your money scheme, and once it gets rolling, the potential of filthy rich status is well within reach.

Non-crafting, well... there are extremely insane merchant-prince type rules, I think in Power of Faerun, for how to buy low in one region, sell high in another, how to "automate" a business while a PC is away, etc. I do not fully grasp the rules. They would probably take some pretty dedicated 1 on 1 DMing to figure out, and they would require wagons and ships and mules and all kinds of cities we also do not have...

Killing things and taking their stuff is a lot easier to build for. It is also how many PnP campaigns work, not Brutus the Barbarian's side business of wool importer. Most normal "trade" (non-magic trade) would be as boring as a RL job to administer.

[johnlewismcleod]

i'm sure whatever old haziates we have left here will agree with me.

Ahhh!...*sighs*...the good old days when evil tyrannized the weak goodies and grew rich


Oh, yeah...I remember now clearly. Too much work for this miscreant

I'll leave the task of evil mogul to Dirsa; his PC's were truly gifted in the art of naughtiness