quote:Original post by Iron Chef Carnage Don''t forget supply and demand. There can''t possible be a market for imps'' ears when even a noob is slaying a dozen a day.
That kinda raises problems.
What happens when high-levellers start increasing in number and start slaying stronger stuff? A shop keeper buying 25,000 dragon scales will eventually start lowering his prices because of supply and demand. Conscequently, the now-ignored snail droppings will rise in value and noobs will be rich prematurely.
The laws of supply and demand are tricky. Afterall Everyone starts off killing rats and selling rat tails, the value of the rat tails is going to keep dropping until you get to the point where you are actually losing money by killings rats, if you count wear and tear on equipment and the occisonal healing potion used.
Thats why monster goods needs some applications inorder to make them value able. If rat tails are the key ingrident in healing potions then having a large supply of rat tails means that the supply of healing potions increaseses making healing potions cheaper allowing people to buy more and start adventuring further. Which in turn allows them to bring back rarer goods. Also since there is high demand of healing potions there is an increased demand for rat tails offsetting the value of rat tails making them profitable to sell again, and the cycle of profit continues.
It would be good infact to have commodites market, any player who owns a warehouse can access it. This commodities market allows them to buy and sell goods in bulk, it also shows the current market price of goods and the current market supply, as well as the change in supply and demand. So If you want to go into potion making buisness you could use the commodities market to purchase 100,000 rat tails at 7.2 gold a piece. Which you could then use in your factory to produce 50,000 light healing potions and sell to the market for 15.9 gold a piece.
----------------------------------------------------- "Fate and Destiny only give you the opportunity the rest you have to do on your own." Current Design project: Ambitions Slave
Enemies early on drop a host of interesting but ultimately next to worthless "parts" (à-la rat-tail-goes-in-healing-potion). As the game progresses, stronger enemies drop less and less "parts" (though we could suppose more worthwhile parts are still dropped, though at a much lower rate to avoid saturating the market and reducing their value) but they also drop more and more equipment. For instance, a demon knight could drop an expensive sword, or the player could find a dragon''s hoard (at which point the actual monster-drops-gold system sorta kicks in).
This would mean that the "part" economy would center around low-level monsters, providing newbies with a way to make cash. However, later on, a second branch of the economy opens up (equipment) and the supply and demand for parts isn''t affected. Seems to me both newbies and veterans would still be able to progress in a (arbitrairely) balanced economy that way, as both aspects could be made mutually exclusive.
The problem I see with this is that, ultimately, high-level equipment could end up seeing a major price drop. Hey, if a bunch of high-levellers can hunt Necrophiliac Hamsterlords and get a Sword of Spoon-Cutting ($20,000!), a bunch of them will find their way to the stores. After the shop-keeper ends up flooded with a few dozen Swords of Spoon-Cutting, he''ll probably be eager to drop his prices, seeing as no-one will buy a $40,000 sword and paying $20,000 for a weapon that doesn''t sell is just stupid. After all, high-levellers get them from monsters, so the only market would be lower-levelled characters. So Mr. Merchant drops the price to, say, $30,000. Sales are being made but a bunch more come in, as players with a Sword of Spoon-Cutting are now just strong enough to kill Necrophiliac Hamsterlords. So same problem as before, price drops, and so forth until any n00b can get one.
Basically, supply and demand, yeah. I guess the way this could be solved is to have a limited supply of Swords of Spoon-Cutting. Say, the sword was made by High Elven mages (Oooooh! o.O) and, and... the king ordered all swords to be destroyed because uh... the name sucked! :D However eight survived the destruction, and are still in circulation! Among the hands of Necrophiliac Hamsterlords! :D
Realistically, though, I think it would start being a little difficult to keep track of all items in the gameworld. But it would make for a cool system.
Make players choose between money-intensive prey and XP-intensive prey. That way, you can choose to either track the elusive ironhide to procure the metals that it uses for its shell and claws, or you can go attack the many-armed mandrill and its burning hands.
The ironhide will yield a saleable commodity, but since most of the fight is you chasing it, you don''t get any real combat experience. The mandrill requires you to employ your most sophisticated techniques, and you get the practice and experience equivalent to fighting six armored knights, but all you have after the fact is a smelly, worthless corpse that''s quickly burned to a crisp by post-mortem superpower convulsions.
You can then scale the monsters by difficulty, so that noobs can get serviceable experience from monsters that yield hides or magical ingredients, and either use them or sell them. If a player could actually be self-sufficient, using his alchemy skill to make his own potions and tinctures and maintaining his own badass gear for months at a time, he''d be disinclined to take part in the economy at all.
Being able to "graduate" from the money system would help the hard-core monster slayers stick to the task at hand and let the noobs, who are going into town every few hours to hit the Inn anyway, a good reason to swing by the shop or haggle amonst themselves.
Or just make it impossible to get richer fighting beasts than by being a businessman. Let players make a living trading items. You wander around the world collecting surplus items either from high-level players or from corpses they didn''t bother to loot, and then you make a tidy profit selling them either to other tough guys who are short on that particular item or to noobs who will take what they can get. Regionalizing items can help keep the marketplace dynamic. There''s no ore in the forest, no water in the desert, and no wood in the caves? Looks like it''s time for a system of trade to develop.
Player-made items, of course, would help. Four rat tails and a sprig of magimint aren''t worth a walk into town, but a decent alchemy skill can help you turn them into a potion or salve that will be worth a chunk of gold to the next guy who runs into the lousy mudvipers by the gem caves.
The idea in an RPG, as far I remember when playing them, was that some monsters have a passion for collecting shiny bits from the things they eat. In most role playing games there were tables to lookup if a random encouter had any loot. In the case of a werewolf a good DM would probably not have any loot on his body, but maybe nearby is his layer where he had dragged unfortunate victims to eat and they had some loot on them.
What is really needed is an intelligent CGM that can make realistic decisions about random encounters and perhaps even plot nearby secret layers to find these loots.
BUt an intelligent creature would probably have some loot as it has the intelligence to realize it has some value. So like an Ogre Magi type of creature would most likely have magical items and jewels and things on them.
What I am saying is it is the type of encounter that determines if loot should be involved or not. That is what a GM decides on the fly in a game. If you just get money for every monster you kill than the game is an arcade game, not really an RPG at all.
