Storytelling with money in RPGs

Recently while browsing /r/RPGdesign I stumbled on a post describing someone's monetary system in their work-in-progress RPG. It was rather bland - "100 copper is 1 silver, 100 silver is 1 gold", plus some stuff about who gets to use what kind of coin and so on. Then I thought to myself - I have a Master of Science in Cryptocurrency, I can put some interesting ideas together from various things I've read in the past. Well, here they are - a few ideas to adding some storytelling flavour to your game with money.

Coinage and taxation as political means

Anyone can create their own currency, but governments (and similar institutions of power) have a way of also forcing that money to circulate. By simply having the government print their own currency as well as require taxes to be collected specifically in that currency you can force the entire population to work towards the government's goals without having to coordinate everything.

If you want to maintain an army, pay them in those coins. If you want to build a monument, pay those workers. If you need to store grain, pay for the grain. Whatever the government Wants is where the money enters the system. Then by that invisible hand of the market everyone has to align themselves with that Want in order to pay their taxes.

If you pay the military, you will have people that feed them, clothe them, make their weapons. Those in turn will require other people to supply grain, cloth, iron and so on.

You could then tell some stories by twisting this formula. Maybe some region doesn't have many coins so everyone is desperate to sell their wares for cheap to get their dues before the taxes are due. Maybe the priorities shift and suddenly you have masons that are out of the job once the castle is done. Maybe you have the land be recently conquered and there is a frenzy to exchange the old currency for the new and re-establish oneself - something some merchants might want to capitalise on if they still do trading with the old rulers of the land.

This one might be subtle, but it serves as a nice shandification of your world.

Shandification of Fallout

("What do they eat?")

Multiple currencies and mercantile campaigns

Something that might not be for every group, but if you're into mercantile campaigns you might dig this - put multiple currencies in your world with no fixed exchange rate. This can be especially good for a campaign that involves a lot of travelling and trading - having currencies be worth different amounts based on the location and the political situation.

Maybe you have Dwarf Silver and Elven Silver that would be worth $1 in their home countries, $0.50 in one another's kingdoms, $0.90 in the human realm, but everything would also fluctuate by ~20% each season. This could encourage the players to plan ahead before they travel as to whether they want to keep cash in coin that might not be worth as much, or buy some goods for trade that should keep their value. Again, not for everyone, but something for people that love spreadsheets.

Then you can try spicing things up by letting players try doing market speculation akin to Spice and Wolf:

Spice and Wolf - an anime about fantasy capitalism

Maybe they earned a large cache of coins from a kingdom that's down on its luck. Now they would be invested in making that kingdom prosper in order to turn their profit into a small fortune. Or maybe they would just hype up the return of a king to power to drive up the demand for that currency only to dump it. Or maybe they buy war bonds of a losing army only to turn that around - it worked for Timothy Dexter...

This could be your party, for good or ill...

Best look at Suns of Gold for a neat way to fluctuate the value of goods and so on, which can apply to currencies as well.

Fiat and political control

In Exalted the most powerful kingdom of the land, the Realm, uses money as means of political control. Their money is based on jade, one of the magical elements of that world that's useful for making artefacts, magic, etc. However, most people will never handle a jade coin - instead, they use fiat banknotes issued by the Realm that are backed by jade. It's even a crime for a non-noble to be using actual jade coins.

By doing this the Realm makes itself indispensable - all the money is backed by it, and if you rebel against it, that will make your money worth less due to the shaken confidence. If you print your own money, that will be treason, if you try using a hard currency that will be a crime, so you have to play along.

Now you can start twisting the formula - what if the government turned a bit incompetent and started printing away the banknotes without the jade to back it? That's some way to get rich for a brief before the system becomes unsustainable in the long-term with fractional reserve banking.

What if jade was a key ingredients for running all magic and magical weapons? Then suddenly the government can start rationing how much power anyone can hold. You can't start a magitech rebellion if you don't have that key raw material to build your army since it was confiscated.

What if you still had to pay taxes in actual jade? That would mean it would have to be extracted from somewhere, bought from abroad or you'd need to go conquer some new lands to get some. Now you have a struggle for driving the big picture conflict.

So how do you rebel against someone that inflicts such control over your life? That's up for the players to tell you!

Moneyless societies

Not everyone in history used money or even barter (shocking, I know. Read Debt: The First 5000 Years to learn more). Now how would players interact with such societies?

First could be a smaller community that operates on doing favours for one another. One day I catch some fish so I give you some, other day your turnips are ready so you'll give me one, etc. The players might come into such village or town and be delighted that they don't need to pay for their food or lodging, only to find the next day the locals ask them for something of theirs - a broche, shoes, etc. Maybe they don't even realise that when someone says "that's a fine bow you have there" they mean "I would like you to give me the bow". Could be an interesting situation to throw your party into to see how they interact with a culture they might not understand.

Another one comes from our Crew Expendable campaign - what if the players found themselves on a planet that's true, functioning communism. Maybe one that uses money for trading with passing merchants, but also one where you can't bribe people because money has no meaning for them. I actually had one player try bribing a government official to let them skip a customs lockdown only for that to fail miserably since of course all the capitalist traders would try bribing them and not understanding their culture...

When you owe a bank a billion dollars...

There is another aspect to money that's not evident when you look at the small picture - money is deeply political. As the saying goes - "If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.". The same can be true in your world.

You could have a kingdom that always pays its debts to whoever runs the iron bank, and one that's constantly in debt. When they go to war, you might expect the bank to side with the kingdom that has always paid back, but in reality they stand to gain a lot more by supporting the one that's their debtor. If that kingdom falls, they lose all that money. If it wins, they can exert their power to get that money back.

Similarly, if the ruler gives the power to print the money to a bank, they might be bowing down to them soon enough ("Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws!"). Or maybe the trust in money comes from the royal lineage that's in decline so now the rich are scrambling to find a way to secure their position in the future - either by preserving the bloodline, or by changing their allegiances.

You can create a good deal of political intrigue by just focusing on who owed who how much, whether that's money or favours. After all, the creditor will want to make sure their investment gets repaid...

Choke on your gold

This one comes from a weird source. Back in the day in Poland someone released Play Dirty booklet. Then the same company released a few more booklets in the same series (but spoilet alert - John Wick did not write those, instead they were written by Ignacy Trzewiczek, a polish board game designer). In one of those books, he described a scenario for one of his Neuroshima campaigns (basically different take on Fallout): the players find a hoard of treasure that's immensely valuable (in that world old-world artefacts were valuable, so the treasure was a complete collection of Playboy magazines). The catch it - it's worth so much they will be hunted by everyone and not able to cash out their ill-gotten gains unless they find someone fabulously wealthy to buy it off of them. As soon as anyone would catch a whiff of this kind of wealth, they would be gunned down by raiders, bounty hunters, thieves, you name it.

So this is another way of storytelling with money - give players something so valuable they choke on it. Give them a priceless artefact they can't find anyone with enough gold to buy it, a shiny ship they can't pawn off,  nor crew fully, etc. and challenge them to go nuts with it.

Working poor and #iHunt

As I already touched in "The game is not about that - iHunt, money, and mechanic as a metaphor" - lack of money can also be a statement for your game. It could be that money is only important in rough income brackets like in World of Darkness, or maybe it's only useful as a resource like in Fellowship, or it could be like #iHunt. In that game, you will always be a working poor. You will be doing gigs killing monsters and bringing in some dough, but money is fickle and it never sticks - there are always more debts to pay, more expenses that keep appearing, and you will be back to being broke and in debt in no time. Some might find that stressful, but because the game never tracks your money, it's liberating - you will always be broke, so don't worry. Life will always kick you when you're down, but you will always get back on your feet. It's an interesting twist on the idea of money in games, and it's also a good statement for the game.

Conclusions

There is a lot you can bring into an RPG world or session if you look at money more than just a way of keeping track of players' coffers. It can be a volatile tool, drenched in politics, influence and greed. If those stories work for your table or game - tell them!

Related posts:

• Ships, Shares and Startups - for an interesting way of handling a spaceship like a startup in RPGs
• The game is not about that - iHunt, money, and mechanic as a metaphor - a discussion on a game about being working poor and mechanics focusing on what's important

See also:

• Spice and Wolf - for interesting mercantile-focused anime
• Suns of Gold - best sourcebook for running a trader game
• Debt: The First 5000 Years - for exploration of how money systems worked in the past
• Money as Debt - for an interesting view of how modern money works

Godbound - "grow into your problems" Cult

When it comes to roleplaying games, I enjoy engaging with the various systems presented in the book and seeing how they can be broken or what is the optimal way to play something. After playing Godbound for awhile I stumbled upon some weird approach to engaging with a core mechanic of the system - how to build a divine Cult that will consistently provide players with a large amount of Dominion AND be a viable Faction in the late game. I call this strategy "grow into your problems".

Godbound Cult mechanics

(Check out the Godbound free edition if you want to follow along)

In Godbound, the players play a demigod. As a demigod, you have access to some divine energy called Dominion with which the PCs can shape the world. Dominion is accrued in two (main) ways - going on adventures (each session nets you some Dominion) and having a Cult. The first income is rather fixed - the whole party will roughly get the same amount of Dominion per person per session. The second can be influenced a bit.

A Cult in Godbound is a Faction - a group of people that has various Features and Problems. However, Cults also have Taboos - divine mandates that hamper their effectiveness, but give their deities more Dominion to spend. They are analogues to real-world Five Moral Precepts of Buddhism, observing Ramadan, or wearing temple garments in Mormonism.

The amount of Dominion the Godbound receives per month is proportional to the Cult's Size (from a village of Size 1 to an empire of Size 5), and to the amount of taboos it has. A Cult generates +1, +2 or +3 Dominion if it has 25%, 50%, or 75% of its "action die" (rounded up) in Trouble. An action die corresponds to the Size of the Cult - D6, D8, D10, D12 or D20 for Sizes 1 through 5.

So a Size 1 Cult with 3 points of Trouble generates 1+2=3 Dominion. A Size 5 Cult with 5 points of Trouble generates 5+1=6 Dominion and so on.

As the Cult grows in Size, you need to take on new Taboos to maintain the percentage needed to gain extra Dominion. Most players tend to keep at 25% Taboos, since it's a good place to have an effective Faction and not go crazy trying to eliminate that last bit of Trouble.

Now, let's talk about how to break this system.

Growing into one's problems

Typically, you'd start the Cult at Size 1 with 2 points of Taboos to get that extra bit of Dominion. You'd be getting 1+1=2 Dominion at a start, not too bad. As it grows, you would add some more Taboos to keep at 25% and you'd get 3, 4, 5 and finally 6 Dominion at Size 5 and 5 points of Taboos. Your final Faction will always have that little bit of Taboo left, but it can still succeed 75% of the times, not bad.

The thing is, early game Cults are weak. The amount they can accomplish in comparison to what the PCs can do is negligible. They won't have that many useful Features, and their dice rolls will be weak in comparison to anything bigger. So let's take the exact opposite approach.

We start the game with 5 points of Trouble (6*0.75=4.5, rounded up turns to 5). Our Cult can't do anything without tripping over its own legs. However, we are getting 1+3=4 Dominion - we're twice as effective as the other Cult, and 4 times as effective as a Size 1 Cult without any Taboos. Early game we only undertake actions that don't require a roll (Extend Interest mostly). Instead, we let our PC Enact Change with all that extra Dominion.

Now, late-game, we don't want the Cult to be hampered this much. We want it to be a strong, viable Faction. If we choose to remove a Taboo though, we create a schism and have more problems to deal with.

So here is the trick - each time the Cult increases in Size, we keep the Taboos fixed. Normally at Size 2 we would need to have 6 points of Taboos in order to get the +3 Dominion, but that's not what we're aiming for. Instead, we go for +2 Dominion, while still having 5 points of Taboos, instead of the 4 required. We're still generating 4 Dominion, but this time it's 2+2.

At Size 3, we need 5 Taboos to be at 50%, so we're now earning 3+2=5 Dominion. At Size 4, we would need 6 Taboos to get to 50%, so we drop into the lower bracket, again paying more than needed. We get 4+1=5 Dominion. At Size 5, we have 5 Taboos, so we get 5+1=6 Dominion.

So by sticking to 5 Taboos, we are earning 4, 4, 5, 5 and 6 Dominion for each Size our Cult is at. In comparison, the Cult that stayed at +1 Dominion was earning 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 and still ended up at the same amount of Trouble in the end.

Conclusions

The approach of "growing into your problems" for a Godbound Cult gives the players both early access to higher Dominion income as well as a late-game Faction that is very competent in its actions.

At the same time, trying to optimise a game that's all about just doing cool things and focusing more about an enjoyable narrative might be missing the point a bit ;).

Godbound's Dominion economy part 2 - how the players break Factions

Continued from Godbound's Dominion economy part 1 - Factions and Artefacts

Last time we gave an overview of how the Godbound game uses the Dominion system to allow players to enact large-scale changes in the world. Today, I would like to talk about how those changes will often break another core component of the game - the Faction system.

If you'd like to read the sourcebook for yourself, there is a free edition of Godbound available that contains about 95% of the full release's content in it.

The Faction System

The Faction System is a way for the players and the GM to simulate how various cities, nations and organisations would interact with one another and with the Godbounds as a whole.

Each Faction is defined by their Size (from a village to an empire), Cohesion (essentially, health points), Trouble (a gaige of how bad things are), Features (what the Faction can offer - "an abundant farmland", or "The Witch-Queens have mighty magics") and Trouble (various problems the Faction has - "Their lord taxes them cruelly", or "Neighbours fear and hate them").

Each month every Faction can undertake various actions as a part of their Faction Turn - building up resources, try to fix some problems, attacking someone, etc. Overall, it can take a few Turns before a major change takes place, and wars can drag on for even longer.

Overall, the system is very simplified. There are no elements of a grand strategy here - you don't move units on a hex map, you don't have to balance an economy or the like. The system is more about giving players an overall sense of the place and some clear goals for them to work towards - "let's cure this plague that is haunting the city", or "I want to build a mighty citadel to protect the civilians" and so on.

How PCs break the Factions

As the demigods they are, PCs in Godbound will hold sway on a number of factions and be able to influence many more. From their cults, to the villages they come by, up to the nations that they will conquer sooner or later, they have the power to mould them as they see fit. However, this comes at a cost.

When a Godbound of weapons will start arming the populace, those freshly minted warriors might get a bit cocky and start strong arming other villagers. Or maybe the local lord will become less than pleased with the peasant revolt waiting to happen. Or perhaps there will be a food shortage as there weren't enough farmhands to tend to the fields. When large-scale change is happening really fast, something will have to give.

As mentioned in the previous article, Godbound can spend Dominion to "Enact Change" - Change Facts, Solve Problems, or Create Features.

The first one is more aesthetic than anything, so it doesn't have an impact on the game mechanically.

The second is beneficial to a faction - the Godbound uses their divine powers to cure a disease, or stop famine, or bring peace and so on. This Change removes a Problem from a Faction, thus decreasing Trouble.

The third one is the crux of the problem. The Godbound creates something new to impose onto the Faction - they add a new, beneficial Feature, like creating a garrison of warrior monks, or a perpetual forge, or a fountain of gold. However, each time a new Feature is created this way, it also generates a Problem and increases Trouble.

The same also happens when a Godbound uses Influence in lieu of Dominion. Rallying a small army up just in time for battle will cause internal strife, but unlike a Dominion expenditure, once the PCs leave the area, the new Feature they pumped up will fizzle away, while the Problem and Trouble will remain!

Trouble as a general concept measures how dysfunctional a Faction is. The higher it is, the more often the Faction will fail at some important tasks. A Faction might try to collect money, but fail because raiders would steal the payment, or people would be too sick to pay, or the broken economy would make that money worthless. Or it might try raising an army with those funds but fail because someone would pocket too much for themselves, or the population is too afraid to volunteer.

All in all, you don't want this to raise too much. So the players would learn to balance Creating Features with Solving Problems. However, this usually means some of the following - either you focus mainly on Solving Problems and try leaving once you put everything in order, or you spend Dominion to both Create a Feature and Solve a Problem, basically paying double, or you Create a Feature and do a quest to Solve a Problem, making you spend more game time babysitting a faction essentially.

Moreover, the players are often driven to Create Features rather than Solve Problem since it's frankly more fun and cool. You want to build something new and exciting - raise armies, do great works and so on. It's much more fun to be the god that created an academy of wizards, than the god that made sure people weren't embezzling the taxes.

Finally, the players are every now and then forced to dump their Dominion into something in order to level up. This usually isn't an issue for diligent players that engage with the Factions on a regular basis, but if you have a few PCs that have done nothing in the last few sessions suddenly having to dump enough Dominion to jumpstart a medieval society into the modern age, you can be in for a lot of trouble.

How does this work in a real game?

I've played in two somewhat long games that used the Faction / Dominion system - Princes of the Universe and The Living Years. The first one only switched to Godbound midway through, meaning a lot of the mechanics were glossed over, but the second one used the system from the beginning.

In my experience, you will run into a few problems with the Faction / Dominion system.

First, you will be playing a game of wack-a-mole with the Problems. You will come into a town, fix a few key issues up, then proceed to make it better, creating more Problems than you originally started with. You will then have to solve them again and so on. A session's worth of Dominion will often be able to create more Problems than you'll be able to solve in a session by questing, especially if the problems get diverse in scope and causes.

Secondly, you will either have to create random Problems, or risk running into the same issue over and over. We had an order of knights that got buffed to be veterans. They got bossy and started strong arming the local population. After dealing with that, we decided to give them superhuman strength, and make them charismatic and commanding. It would be very easy to just make the initial Problem come back since it's a natural fit for what was going on... In the end, when we couldn't think of smart Problem ideas we resorted to using news headlines and tweaking them a bit.

Thirdly, you will run into some players that will tend to dump their Dominion in large chunks right as they need to level and that will be a wave of new Problems to deal with. You often are starved for Shards, so you won't be able to just dump that Dominion into Artefacts, and Solving Problems usually is more creatively demanding than just Creating Features.

Fourthly, it's often hard to increase Faction's Scope (making it bigger), which will often be a limiting factor as to what you can do with it. You can't just toss Dominion at a small town to make it bloom into a densely populated megacity so you can have more worshippers. Creating projects larger than the Factions you have at your disposal will be tempting, but it will also be tricky at the same time.

Lastly, the players will want to create their little walled gardens of a Faction. They will want to make their Cult great, or they will have a favourite Faction to build up. This might make it a little bit more hard how to give then Problems that wouldn't ruin things on one hand or be too blase on the other hand.

Conclusions

The Godbound Dominion and Faction systems create an interesting intertwined mechanic. It is, however, not without its own problems. The system might feel too shallow for people that want to have a system with strategic depth. It also falls too easily into a wack-a-mole cycle of PCs creating Features that generate Problems only to spend time and resources dealing with the Problems before being able to "get to the real game" and subsequently dumping more Dominion into the problem afterwards. At the same time it's a very thematic mechanic that allows the PCs to do large-scale changes to the world in a very approachable way.

Godbound's Dominion economy part 1 - Factions and Artefacts

Godbound is a game about playing demigods created by Kevin Crawford. It has a number of attractive features - high-power game setting, simplified game mechanics, robust power sets, compatibility with other OSR books, etc. However, today I would like to talk about a few interesting, intertwined mechanics that I first came across while reading the book - the Dominion system, its economy, Influence, Factions and Artefacts.

If you'd like to read the sourcebook for yourself, there is a free edition of Godbound available that contains about 95% of the full release's content in it.

Dominion, Influence and Shards

In Godbound, the players take on the role of the titular Godbound, mortals that ascended into a proto-divinity status. Think Gandalf, or Marvel's Thor or Vision. The PCs are gifted with a variety of superhuman powers for handling their day-to-day problems, but they also possess the power to affect the game setting on the larger scale through Dominion.

Dominion is an expression of Godbound powers to alter the world. The characters accrue the Dominion Points over time with worship and adventuring. They can spend those Points to make large changes to the world - Changing Facts, Solving Problems, Creating Features and building Artefacts.

Changing Facts relates to altering the setting in general manner. Erecting a mountain, shrouding a valley with eternal night, creating a race of flying humans, etc.

Solving Problems and Creating Features relate to the Faction System. Basically, every major group, town, nation is represented as a Faction that has beneficial Features ("The city has a prosperous mine", "Nation ruled by a great philosopher-king"), and negative Problems ("The city is plagued with disease", "Nobles are waging a secret war with one another"). The characters, basically through sheer force of their will, can change those. They can Solve a Problem, eliminating it entirely (for example, Gandalf removing Saruman's influence over Théoden), and they can also Create new, beneficial Feature (Tony Stark building the Ultron Program to help with global peacekeeping would've been a new Feature, save for Ultron himself...).

Lastly, the same Dominion can be spent to Create powerful Artefacts. We're not talking about +1 swords, but something more akin to The One Ring, Mjölnir or Yaka Arrow. Each of the Artefacts would be a significant boon to the already powerful Godbound, rather than being "just a piece of gear".

Godbound also features Influence, a more temporary form of Dominion the characters can invest into temporary changes. It allows the players to quickly train up an army, fortify defences, create stopgap solutions for some problems and so on, as long as their characters keep maintaining those measures. When the PCs leave, the changes revert back to the original state.

The game also features Celestial Shards, basically glorified scrap that is required for creating Artefacts and making really impossible changes happen (for example, creating a floating city, starting an entirely new species of humans, or building a network of teleporters). This generally means that the players have a limit to how outlandishly they can affect the setting at any given time - you get only so many Shards at a time and there are always multiple projects that could use them.

The Dominion Economy

Godbound creates an interesting dynamic with its Dominion Economy. It's a shared currency the players can spend on many disparate things. In the same game you could basically have a swordsmith forging a blade Artefact that will cut down an entire army with one swing, a tinkerer creating a mechanical angel that will be their herald, a warlord making his winged hussars actually fly, a merchant prince that would bring new riches to his old mines, a king quelling a rebellion with the power of his will and a fire god erecting a volcano as his new seat of power, all using Dominion in different ways.

Moreover, because Dominion is a universal resource, it will never go to waste - a character will always have something to spend it on. They are even required to spend it in order to progress - a Godbound character can only level if they get enough experience AND they had spend a certain amount of Dominion.

Lastly, Dominion costs can vary depending on the power portfolio of a given Godbound and the Points are non-transferable. This encourages the players to work together and trade favours. A mighty warrior might make his army very strong, but he would have problems giving them power armour. It would be trivial for an artificer however. So now the characters need to figure out what would be an equitable trade for such services...

In the actual play however, you can expect varied level of engagement from players. In the two campaigns my group ran, we had some players that were diligently spending their Dominion on regular basis, and we also had some that would let theirs pile on until they had to spend it to level up. It really depends on the party you have.

Conclusion

All in all, Godbound's Dominion system is an interesting take on creating a robust system for godly powers acting on a macro level. It is so universally applicable as to be useful for most styles of gaming, while still remaining simple and easy to use.

That is not to say it's without fault. But for that, a separate blog entry will be required to delve deeper into how the Dominion system and the Faction system don't gel all that great in the long run...

Continued in "Godbound's Dominion economy part 2 - how the players break Factions".