Anything that Isn't "Easy" is Impossible

I wonder if Apple or Samsung regularly receive letters and missives from readers saying, "Hey, I really like your phone and I'd like to make one of my own.  Can you help me do that?"

When I began designing a trade system for my game world, I had one fundamental goal: that it would define different prices for different goods and services based on the origin of those things.  I had no sense of there being a "right" way to do this.  I began by accumulating a list of manufactures and resources according to their origin.  Using the real world as a model, this soon became a prodigious list, with hundreds of unique references and thousands of sources.  For a time, I was confounded on how to turn this list into a format that would produce prices, then adjust those prices according to how far said goods were shipped.  To make it work, I had to adjust my thinking process again and again; I had to throw out preconceptions for the sake of practicality.

Those preconceptions included "supply & demand," the basing of value upon labour, or upon produced food and determining a flat-rate cost of transportation for things being shipped.  I had to accept that any system I created had to function "illogically," because all the details and particulars were never going to be accounted for.  We can't account for them today, with millions of economists, strategists and other experts working on them today.  I'm just one person.  I have limitations.  Therefore, realistically, the trade system would have to be unrealistic.  And because of that, it would end up as counter-intuitive.

This evaluation and eventual manifestation took 16 years.  During that time I tried everything.   I rebuilt the system fifty different ways.  Try to imagine what it was like to organize all the data, make lists, make calculations and then run tests with the players, with pencil and paper, only to find that it produces absurd, aberrant numbers ... and then to face up to the players disparaging your system and expressing things that make you feel humiliated.  Then, doing it all again.  Fifty times.

Long before I had dedicated readers, I had dedicated players.  They tolerated this procedure for literally years, gamely giving each system a try, recognizing the value of the idea if not the idea's success.  Those players never saw a successful version.  That first gaming period of my life ended in 1997 and it took another seven years before I finally sorted out the system.

I write this to explain that whatever prejudices I had about how a working trade system would function were steadily eroded away by failure after failure.  In the end, the final result was the one that worked, not the one I wanted or the one that best reflected the real world's economic trade system (which, it must be noted, is organic and in some degree misunderstood by everyone).  My trade system, however, does do what it was meant to do: it provides different prices for different goods and services based on the origin of those things.

I've been approached by others who claimed to have a "better" system than mine ... and yet I have never seen any of these systems laid out as plainly and directly as I have on multiple blog posts; and upon further investigation, they all admit that no, they don't do what mine does, specifically what mine was designed to do: provide different prices, et al.  Meaning that they're not a trade system at all.  They're a glorified pricing system for one game world location.

I've also been approached with the general message, "Hey, I really like your trade system and I'd like to make one of my own.  Can you use your time to help me do that?"

Recently, I've been giving the answer, "No."  I've come to that because in the past, when I've tried to help, my advice is never taken.  It is assumed that while it's nice that I made the decisions I made, the new maker wants to make their own decisions.  They think the trade system they want should function differently.  It should be based somehow on supply & demand, or labour, or a gold standard, or any one of a hundred economic principles that have been thoroughly debunked in the real world for a century now.  If you want to be laughed out of a room by a group of economists, mention supply & demand.

Additionally, every once in awhile I see someone has discovered the pdf for "Grain Into Gold."  These people are always excited, because at last they've found the economic Mecca they've been searching for all these years!  This "simple and sane supplement" is an exercise in pulling economic numbers out of your ass.  I've never seen anyone write, "I've done it!  I built a trade system based on Grain Into Gold."  Because it doesn't work.  It's hot garbage.  Yet it feeds the standard belief system for most people who want to build anything for their campaign world.

It promises that this is going to be easy.

This is why people come to me and ask if I'll help them build their trade system, their way.  Because having me do it is easier than doing it themselves.  After all, I've proved I can do it.  I have the evidence.  Anyone can read it.  And in fact, anyone can copy and implement it exactly as I've done it ... only they don't.  Because it is too much work.  It isn't easy.  Which begs the mantra that titles this post.

My trade system wasn't easy.  Took 16 years to invent it.  Took another 10 to get it into a truly serviceable order.  Expanding it has been an effort I've undertaken for almost a year now, one that I'm wallowing through, because the project is immense.  Making any change is an enormous headache, because the system functions like a delicate machine.  It is adjustment-unfriendly.  Yet every instance I use it in a game, every time I need to sort out some detailed element of the game's money or economy, I am enormously grateful for the time I've taken.  No matter how awful it was to make the bloody thing, the bloody thing is bloody marvelous.  It is both unequalled and unadaptable ... and is therefore intimidating as hell for any other user, particularly those who won't break their body and mental prejudices to accept the thing as it is, and to do the necessary work to make it function in their world.

I've decided I no longer care.  I haven't any respect for those who won't work.  Nor do I have any interest in using my time to hand-hold someone who has the benefit of my work but feels that isn't enough.  And I say this while trying to raise money for a completely different project ... which I know perfectly well can't be reinvented by someone else without my help, because it required an expertise in history, culinary art, dungeon mastering and creativity to manage.

Therefore, as long as I don't explain how I did it, I hold an intellectual patent that no government can issue.  So, when I said yesterday I would offer "proof," that certainly did not include providing more examples of the product.  From my point of view, that would be enormously stupid.

Work is not just tiring.  It produces results.  Results carry knowledge in the process and knowledge is power.   Power brings independence and opportunities.

When the reader resists or refuses to work on their game world, there are no results.  Without working to make something result, knowledge isn't gained; and without knowledge, there is impotency.  Impotence offers only dependency and subjugation to others.

"Easy" has a cost.  It is time, and life, and self-respect, wasted.