MUD/RPG economics

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Original post by samoz Well, I'd like to know what you guys think about how I should implement finances in my game . . .

Perhaps instead of currency, have a barter driven market? You might have a general 'value' of a item to help make people get good trades, but in general allow people to barter as they see fit. Also a general value of items will help with bartering with NPCs, as you would need a item of equal or greater value to trade. It'll definately encourage player interaction. People would have to start up slowly, skinning a few wolves or something for hides, and trading those for a damaged scimitar at a barterer, and then in turn trading that later on to another user, etc... People wouldn't be able to 'hoard' lots of items either, if you only allow a small amount of items to be stored in a bank/storeroom and limit the amount of items they can hold/equip.

i like the idea of barter system. I think i might brainstorm on it for awhile. Thanks

This is a hard problem. If you give player money at account creation ppl may just abuse it by creating multiple accounts. It's better to give the players all the newbie items that they need to start making real money ingame. These items should not be "sellable". I.e if the player can kill stuff give them a weapon, if the player can harves stuff, give them an axe,pick, etc. Never give a player money
at the account creation.. unless you have a well define economy where the start-up money dosen't matter.I.e give the player x amount of money to buy the item which he/she needs to make money.. and the player can't do much else with that amount of money.. ie the player might have to create 200 new accounts to buy the new not "newbie" item..I don't think the bank idea is so good becouse of the above statement where player create mulptiple accounts and then quit.. more money in the "loop" which makes it harder for you as a GM to control the flow of money.. i'll follow this thread becouse i find it interesting to see other folks opinion.

Actually I had the problem of an 'Economy' System for a long time in my game as well. The bartering idea is a REALLY good one, unique and all that jazz. Though some people tend to like the idea of money rather than 'I give you my item for your item'. So alas...

Here is what I came up with long ago. Though it has it's flaws it may be able to help.

You're NPCs have a limited amount of 1: money and 2: the items they sell. The potions clerk has 1,983 Red potions for sale 364 Blue and 721 Green. She also has the funds of 12,941. And the hidesman overthere has some similar stuff for his skins. When a player kills that wolf mentioned earlier they can skin it and obtain its hide. When they come into town they can sell skins to the hidesman for a price depending on how much money he has to give and how many of said skin he already has. When you sell him 3 for 50 each his total money goes down by 150 and yours goes up. He also gains 3 skins of that wolf to his shop to sell for whatever price he deems is good.

Then you can take that money and go to the potions lady to buy your red potions and so on. You can also have it set so these NPCs buy new stock every X amount of time and depending on how much they have, how much the produce line sells them for and how many of the item the NPC has they get different amounts. People can spend money themselves on increasing this production lines capability to allow for more items to be sold cheeper to the stores for you.

You can also have some governmental system set in place so whenever a person or NPC makes a sale this government takes up a tax. Then this government can also give NPC shops a certain amount of money every so often, or take money away. or even slow down and speed up the production lines.

You can even make it so if people input more mony into these lines better things can start being made for NPCs to sell.

A good idea for people to get involved is have the ability to hunt for and make almost if not every item in your game, so they can get involved with these shops and sales.

One problem that becomes apparent is that eventually there will be a mass amount of money. so make the initial settup of this economy to be running on very small funds. So it takes people time to build it up. Eventually by the time its built up you can implement minigames, tournaments, special guilds and all kinds of things to take peoples money and never give it back.

Well that was the jist of my idea, hope it helps inspire you in some way.

~Thanks, Kain

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However this can encourage solely hunting and not so much player interaction. Also, its unrealistic . . .

I'm not sure I understand that statement.

I generally find that keeping the rewards low and the prices high is the easiest way to make a game economy that is stable, albeit draconian. Its a balance issue- after a certain point of increasing the rewards, then everything simply goes to hell.

Bartering systems could go a long way though. Say a monster dropped a weapon you don't want. You could barter that item for a weapon from a store. You would probably still need to pay some money for the store item, but the reduced price would be more than if you simply sold the monster-dropped item outright.

D

As far as I can tell theres two ways of handling economy:

The first is the faucet/drain system. This is pretty much what exists in current systems, though it should be modified so that only what has left the system will re-enter (and as new players join, allow a little more to enter, that way you won't run out of money because the system didn't think X amount of players would ever exist).

The second method is to have a truely closed economy. If you only have X resources in the game, then money is a true token of value. The resources prices should then be dictated by supply and demand. Of course, items should probably somehow return to raw material form for this to work propperly, or eventually circulation may stop. Again, I'd add new raw materials as new players join.

You may be able to mix the two approaches to get interesting results.

I'm personally working on a "mostly" closed economy system for a MUD I'm developing at the moment.

Interesting reads on the topic are Mu's Unbelievably Long and Disjointed Ramblings About RPG Design (In your case this section) and Richard Bartle's book, "Designing Virtual Worlds". I believe both to be must reads if you are developing a MUD or any Online RPG-style game in general, regardless of format.

Good luck! :-)

Economy in MUDs is a wonky thing. On the one hand, everyone wants to get good money from their adventuring -- on the other hand, if everyone got what they wanted, the value of the currency would diminish noticably.

If you do create money spontaneously -- like through monsters, it is a good idea to have money also cease to exist -- like through stores.

As you said before, the challenge lies in getting people to actually drop their money into these holes. If the players have the option, they'll keep their money and implicitly, devalue it in the process --- screwing up the economy.

In order for the value of the gold coin to persist, it must leave a player's hand at a rate proportionate to the rate it enters. The player must spend his money -- preferrably into a money-abolishing place like a store or somesuch.

Some conventional and reasonable ideas are:

1) Force players to rest while their wounds heal --- paying for a room at an inn or something. That way, the overhead cost of killing monsters helps alleviate the amount of currency that gets blipped into reality without the consent of some kind of national treasury or mint.

2) Although not as popular and arguably, not as fun from a gameplay perspective, forcing the player to buy supplies: food, water, first aid supplies, and so forth.

My personal favorite idea is just to not have monsters drop money in the first place -- so killing actually costs money (in healing or whatever) but rewards in experience. That adds value to other, non-combat skills that the player may want to invest in because he actually NEEDS a craft skill of some kind to help make ends meet.

But I'm crazy that way.

As far as I know, the Bartering system is the basics of a real functionning system.

For a start, you should NOT allow money to appear out of thin air in the trouser pockets of Wolves, Rats and Spiders. For a start, those wear no trousers, and therefore have no pockets. Same thing for crafted objects.

What you SHOULD do, on the other hand, is make a bunch of different skills for harvesting goods on your deceased preys. You can skin them, you can pluck them, you can get their claws and jaws and fangs and horns and stuff, as trophies. And you can butcher them if the fancy takes you. On the other hand, if food plays a role in your system, then having the food come from the hunters gatherers, and the objects used to gather and hunt come from those who need food, the system DOES turn round.

Having such objects also BEGS for a sound crafting system. Every object in the game must come from somewhere, and it is just as well they come from other players: crafters.

But the bartering system, for the start is a must. Unless you plan to create crafters with a fixed amount of money at the start, money should NOT appaear anywhere in the game. Or maybe crafters have a possibility to Mint coins?

Weather it is Gold Coins, Wolf Pelts, Food, etc, all of these act as money, weather you barter for the items or exchange colins (and exchangeing coins is realy just bartering too).

I think a good system is a barter system, but have your merchants, keep an "eye" on what players are barting for and adjust their strategies/priceing accordingly.

To reduce the effects of Hording, you could charge a fee for holding large amouns of items in a "bank vault" and limit the amount that they can carry.

A varient of the bank vault could be that the players can buy/rent houses and they cna then store their items in there. If you limit item storage to container objects and limit the amount that can be put in a container object it also increases the costs of hording.

If the players have to pay an upkeep on the house then it forces them to keep paying (and thus a drain) to maintain their hordes. This makes Hording less viable in the long term on little used accounts and provides a way that the player's horde can be recycled.

If a house must have regular payments (and you can pay a short time in advance) then it keeps the account :live" and the player activly using their wealth (horde).

In any system where items can be gathered (skinning animals, mineing, etc) then it will act as an income source for wealth. If you don't have a matching way for those items to be removed, then you will get an accumulation of those items which will lead to unwanted effects (inflation, etc).

Wow . . . thanks for all the responses!

I forgot another idea I had until just a minute ago . . .

I was going to have bartering and money, with harvested things (hides, venoms, etc) being pretty common, but less valuable, where as money would be rarer and much more valuable than harvestable items.

To balance that, it would be possible for stores to buy packages of less valuable items, like say 10 hides for 5 gold or whatever, and then let players do the same in reverse, buy larger quantities with gold.

I also really like the whole tax idea too, because then I could modify the economy by riching up store keepers and stuff to speed the economy some, or just hang on to it to keep the economy a little bit slower. I like how its not so much a faucet/drain concept as it is a faucet/reservoir kinda thing.

Another interesting bit with the whole bartering thing is to have different people give different valuations for trades based on their profession and their inventory, like a blacksmith would obviously trade more for a load of ore than he would for a magic potion, and he would trade less away if he already had more ore than he needed, aka supply and demand.

Well guys, there's my two cents and thanks a lot for all the suggestions! Keep 'em coming!

Here are a few of my ideas.

Have the NPCs capable of building pretty much all craftable items. Though they would be a bit more expensive than crafters would usually make. This way, people will always find a reason to shop and NPC stores where their money could then leave the system... or be returned when the NPC buys things.

For example, the swordsmith might always have a finite amount of items in stock. He always makes sure to keep some ordinary swords on hand that new players would find afordable, but if he gets good business and buys enough of the right materials he will make some of the better swords that crafters can make. He always prices a bit high so crafters would have a chance but a rich player who wants the sword quick can buy it off the NPC and the money leaves the system.


Also, have the currency itself a consumable item. For example, you could take 100 gold pieces and melt it down to make a gold bar. Then use the gold bar to craft jewelry or something. Though gold ore would have to be sent to the government to have the coins printed out.


Some spells could require sacrifices depending on the spell. In DnD, the spell to raise dead requires you sacrifice some diamonds to revive the character. Your game could have something similar. Sacrifice certain hides or fruit to cast low level spells while higher level ones need gold and pearls and such.


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Other ideas:

A 'day job' that a players character has when the player isn't playing. For example a coal miner, baker, or town guard. When not playing the player gets a little amount of money per hour and the character trains in the skills used for their job. This could provide a way to both add money into the system and let casual players keep up a bit with more hardcore players.


Investments. Let players take out loans to get enough money to buy decent gear near the beginning and then pay it back using the boost they got. Also, wealthy players could set up a savings account or a CD where they keep money stored up and collect interest from it. Change the interest rate to regulate the economy.

Lots of good ideas in this thread already :).

I would recommend adding a little 'money' (whether simply in the form of more currency in circulation, or spawning a few resource sites out in the world) for each new player that joins. New accounts should start with just some newbie, non-sellable items, though, so you can't do the traditional 'start new account, send cash to main account, repeat' trick. If you detect a player has 'left' (either through deleting their account or inactivity), you can gradually 'wear' the resources in the world to remove the amount the account added.

An important way of making the economy work is that money drops and sinks (NPCs, assuming you don't go for unrealistic monster drops) are related to the market. Choose a portfolio of mid-level, commonly traded items (potions and food are good, because they are used up and therefore always need buying; similarly if combat items break or need repair, weapons and repair equipment are good) to calculate an inflation index, and scale the price of NPC items accordingly. You could also have an individual supply and demand price adjustment for each store.

An option for direct trade between players is good as well, particularly if money is a physical item that must be made somewhere (and is therefore rare), as it means people can play the game without having to have much money.

Another good trick is date-stamping batches of currency items. Edit - effectively treating each batch of 'coins' as separate item types.

This allows an economic governor (human or otherwise) to withdraw currency from circulation or to devalue it in place - this can be used to curb hyper-inflation (too much currency in circulation), which is basically the bane of the drop-and-sink economic paradigm.

On bartering : I don't think it fundamentally changes the dynamics of your economy, it just means you have to cart about N items instead of X gold. A money economy is nothing but a barter economy with one 'universal' item that everyone agrees they will trade for. What you should instead do is look at what the suggested barter economies have that's different from what a money economy has, and implement that in a money economy. It seems to me that the main difference that's been suggested is that monsters should not act as gold sources, which indeed is an excellent idea. But you don't need a barter system for that; you just need monsters to not drop gold as loot.

Bartering maybe a good idea but without a standard form of currency how do you hire standard services when dealing with NPCs like repairing your weapons and armor?

In a worst case scenario, you may create a bartering system like Diablo 2 where items (Stone of Jordan) replaces gold to become a standard form of currency when players trade items. This will only make players farm for these items and hoard them for trading bringing the problem back to square one.

Just my 2 cents.

what if you did it like this: You would have at character creation the player pick one major trade (i.e. tanner) and two secondary skills that relate to the trade (skinning, hunting). They would start the game as an "apprentice" in said skill and the only way to "make" money is by plying their trade. They can still lvl up their attack and such by killing things but they would require money to buy new equipment. They could advance in skill: apprentice, journeyman, master. and they would use and make items with differing durability (ie quality) based on their lvl. Also the materials used would be different. Basically if your an apprentice you'd want to use cheap material and a master would use better. Also, since your an apprentice you could go to the resident master npc for your trade ( bob the tanner) and "work for him" he'd keep the product of your work, and you'd have to supply the raw materials but thats the only way to improve your skill