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Initiate
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| Hello everyone! I'm trying to make a realistic economic system and mechanisms for a LARP, and wanted to ask - how does economy work at your game? what makes it run?
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Wag
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alenros (9/26/2007)
I'm trying to make a realistic economic system and mechanisms for a LARP, and wanted to ask- how does economy work at your game? what makes it run?
I help run a game that has a functioning economy (I'm never found the word realistic to be of any use in LRP), so I could offer some insights. I assume you mean a market economy, one in which supply and demand have effects, I suspect you don't mean a planned economy. Both of course, are economies and the second is much easier to run... So two obvious questions spring to mind first of all.
1) Why do you want to run an economy for your LARP game?
LRP economies are hard work, it'd be useful to know what you think the benefits are going to be and why you're interested in the idea in terms of working out what to suggest on the subject. Running an economy often brings complexity to a game which many players find unappealing.
2) How many independent active economic agents do you expect to have in your LRP game?
An economic agent is something that produces, uses, buys or sells things in your game. In our game 90% of these are players and we have a total of around a thousand agents at any given time. I think the number of agents you are basing the economy on affects the way it will operate hence the question.
3) How many economic objects do you envisage having?
An object is something you can buy, sell, produce or use. Obvious examples in most LRP games are things like a potion of healing. I've used the word object, but anything can be an object, a character's time or spells might be an object of commerce. If you have money (coins or notes) these are also an object of commerce and so on. The more objects you have, and the more different kinds of object you have, then the more complex an economy you can build, hence the question.
History is an important source for LRP. Along with other works of fiction.
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Champion
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Also have a think about money Sources and Sinks, i.e. where do players get their cash from to start with and where does it leave the system. The economy will be all the money that's in the hand of the players and persistent NPC's, money comes into the system via starting cash and any advantages like 'wealth' or the like. It can leave the system from people buying things from 'outsiders' or be converted into
If you don't get this balance right then you end up with inflation, where players money is worthless or everything is so expensive that it becomes impossible to buy anything with the cash players have.
There's a lot written about these concepts for MMO's that might prove useful if you search around on the subject, while bearing in mind that most LRP games won't have the problem of too many Money Sources being too easily convertible into cash causing inflation. But you can mine some useful ideas from them. Try http://www.devmaster.net/articles/mmo-economy/part1.php and http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/09/07/agc-mmo-economies/ as a starting point and then google around the subject.
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I do talk a good fight
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We keep it realistic by black-boxing it entirely. Adventurers are either rich 'cos they've just scored big (in which case, they don't need to adventure anyway, so that situation doesn't concern us), or broke 'cose they've just squandered the last big score on wine, women, & song. If they're broke, they tend to either have the kit they stand up in (armour, weapons, etc.), or nothing at all due to having been enslaved / imprisoned / captured etc.
What I'm trying to get at here is that for the purposes of our particular game (short-ish, sharp-ish, heroic adventures), money is largely irrelevant (despite being a prime motivator for many adventurers) & the game economy thus very simple -- almost dualistic, in fact. The economic system of your game will also depend enormously, if not entirely, on the purposes of your own particular game. Take a look at General Tso's "The Ten Points of Game Design" for a good starting point on classical game design theory:
http://chimeramag.com/features/tenpoints.html
If in our gritty fantasy game we were to attempt to write rules for a detailed game economy, we would be like Yu-Wen bogging down his strategic space conquest game with the minutiae of the population phase calculations. The game would rapidly come to revolve around carpenters' workshops and farming and trout fishing, and we would lose our focus on the rending of foes and the treachery of beautiful sorceresses. Other games, with more of a focus on large-scale player downtime interaction in a fully realised gameworld, might benefit greatly from a detailed game economy. But without knowing the first principles of your game setting & stories, asking us to for advice with your game design is like asking us to help you choose a new helmet without first informing us whether it is to protect you from the hazards of motorcycling, abseiling, construction work, medieval combat, go-karting or bicycling -- an exercise in futility at worst, and danger at best; in this case, only the danger of either boring or failing to sufficiently engage your player base, but a significant danger nonetheless.
http://www.hyboriantales.com
PD: Ghostdance ("The most irritating curse I've ever encountered" -- NPC played by H.)
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Hyborian Tales: Crew, cook, dogsbody, general labourer, toilet cleaner ("Dangerously overoptimistic ref" -- Tom Nowell)
Otherwise usually crew ("Quite spry & fit, & willing to wear a big costume & run around a lot" -- various event organisers)
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