The name of the game is Dungeons and Dragons, not Markets and Accountants. The effort to verisimilitude ratio of figuring out 'realistic' economic values is nearly nil. Simulating the economy beyond 'You guys have pumped a bunch of gold into an economy based on silver - here's what's happened to the village you started in' is really not that important. There are far better ways to show that the characters are having an effect on the world than trying to 'simulate' an inevitably inaccurate economy. Adventuring is the game, and hours and hours of prep that the players aren't going to see much of isn't part of it for people who put any sort of value on their time.
I don't want to disparage Burgess; he's approaching the subject from a reasonable point of view. "An Economy" is a daunting prospect and it is very hard to reconcile the amount of work with the perceived value of that work, particularly prior to any actual evidence that there's going to be any value. This is the reason for this title: economics is the Hadron Collider of D&D.
What's interesting is that Burgess automatically supposes that, of course, a proposed economy must be founded on the sound principles of supply and demand. He has leapt ahead in the conversation to the players who bring back a big pile of gold from an adventure, producing massive inflation in the silver-based system and destroying the economy of that town.
I've heard this particular scenario many times. I wonder how this store of gold has derived from a silver-based economy? Where did the party-found gold come from? If a dungeon, I presume it came from monsters accumulating it from outside; or are the monsters digging out gold and then stamping coins for an underground economy that never, ever steps out the dungeon's front door? Or are we imagining some ancient culture where gold was common enough to make a sufficient horde for the party to find, but somehow the present-day culture failed utterly to keep that gold currency alive? Because I must say, during the absolute worst periods of human history, those periods of total decline and dark age, periods where millions perished unknown by the sword because no one took the time to write anything down that we were able to find, gold survived. Gold always survives. We have accounts of cultures that regularly sacrificed babies to the gods, but we don't have any accounts - except from Disney - of cultures that sacrificed gold.
If there is no other reason for trying to create an economy for a game world, there's this: the DM will learn something about economics.
The other half of Burgess' comment is also a quite common point: that with so many better things to concentrate on, so many more worthy things, why concentrate on this?
That brings us right back to the false dilemma again, in which we hear it argued that it is either this or that. We can create an economy for our world . . . or we can do everything else.
Naturally, "this" or "that" can be applied to anything we care to name. Why are we spending so much time with hack and slash when there are far better ways to show the characters are having an effect? Why are we spending so much time with trouble-solving scenarios? Why are we spending so much time with character creation? Why are we spending so much time with alignment? Why are we spending so much time with details like encumbrance, back stories, hit location, religion, character classes, point-system buys and munchkinism? Why are we spending so much time with something that we don't personally care about?
I agree with Burgess. Adventuring IS the game. The problem is we have a surfeit of players who have a complete misread on the subject of "adventure." For them, it is the traditional, old school campaign, the one where people gird up with swords and armor and recreate the stories of Parsifal, Roland, Hood and Arthur with terrifically focused abandon, rigidly denying that "adventure" could mean anything that happens as a result of chance, fortune, luck, surrounding events deriving from accident, circumstance or things about to happen, that are sought after or reached for, regardless of the context.
To many, "economics" seems like a piss-poor adventure. Yet it is an adventure that drives only everything in the real world. It can't in traditional, old school gaming because no one gave any thoughts whatsoever for making rules for that.
Ever play Monopoly with a transport cost rule that says you have to pay $30 before throwing the dice, even on doubles? Ever play a RISK rule where a single army left on a territory by itself has a 50% chance of rebelling and joining a random enemy, immediately increasing to four times its size as it acquires a 'citizen army'? Ever play the Game of Life where every time you pass a payday, there's a 1 in 10 chance that someone in the car will die, requiring $5,000 for funeral services? No? Pity.
D&D is the sort of game where this extra rule-making really makes sense. We used to make up those rules for those simple games because we wanted more and more. We didn't stop playing by all the old rules; we didn't drop rules, we added them. Point in fact, that's all those university students were doing when they added all that shit to Chain Mail.
This isn't a dilemma. We're working like dogs on all those "far better ways" that have gone before and then, on top of that, we're adding an economy. And whatever the hell else we can think of, because the one thing we don't want to tell our players is, "No, you can't do that because I'm not ready for it."
That is a total crap cop-out. Sorry, for those who feel put upon by the content that's already involved but the game thing is to get in and try. I'll applaud the DM who says, "I'm not ready for that so it's going to be clunky and probably awful . . . but yeah, sure, let's try it and see how it goes." A qualified yes is always better than a reproving, unqualified no.
Let's not just do the "better ways" - let's do all the ways. If the reader wants another example, I'll pose a few:
Why are we wasting all this time learning how to hit grounders and line-drives when it is so much easier to win games with home runs?
Why are we wasting all this time learning how to fight with a knife when we have guns that fire bullets?
Why are we wasting all this time learning how computers work when I just want to play video games?
Why am I taking math in school? When am I ever going to use this shit?
And so on.
Remarkable, isn't it, how a call to concentrate on just the important things sounds so much like being just too tired to learn.
