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

The game is not about that - iHunt, money, and mechanic as a metaphor

Recently, my group and I ran a one-shot of the iHunt RPG. It's a game about being a monster hunter in the gig economy. You're perpetually poor, and hunting monsters for cash is the preferable alternative to getting evicted. The game requires a bit of a cognitive shift from your traditional games, which is what we are here to talk about today.

This post is based on a preview version of iHunt, so final mechanics might change.

Our interview about the game with Olivia Hill

During our first session, one of the PCs got shot with a bullet and was in need of medical attention (you are playing fragile humans after all). When discussing our options, one of the players started solving the problem by trying to pin down some numbers - "how much did we earn from killing that vampire?", "what's the standard rate for a vampire? Is that even listed in the book?", "how much does a hospital visit cost?", "how much does a street doctor charge?", etc. However, as we found out, the game (at least in its current, preview state) didn't have any of those prices listed, because that's not what the game is about.

iHunt is a game about being a poor person that turns to hunting monsters to make ends meet. Money is always fickle and doesn't stick. You might earn $10k in a day, but that's cash, not wealth, it's a windfall that comes and goes. There is a reason iHunt and FATE in general doesn't have a space on your character sheet to put your gold pieces in - the game is not about that.

Now, this was frustrating for the player. The game is about playing a person that cares about the money, but the game does not care about the money. You may want to get invested in the character getting ahead and lifting themselves out of the rut they're in, but by the dint of what the game is about, your character will never get out of their hole as long as they are a character. Otherwise, they wouldn't have a motivation to go iHunting.

The mechanic of how money is handled (or the lack of said mechanic) is one of those rare "mechanics as a metaphor" moments, where a mechanic exists not only to serve a purpose, but to convey a deeper message - "money is fickle, it comes and goes". Heck, later in episode 2 we came up with something similar - when a player sold some extra stuff they stole for cash, they didn't just add some numbers to their gold coin total (since again, the game does not track that), but instead they receive a temporary bonus in form of a FATE Aspect. The character was now Flushed with Cash, which they could tap into to get a temporary roll bonus in the future, after which the Aspect would fade, just like that extra cash in your wallet.

Both of those mechanical ways of dealing with money conveyed a message that was congruent with what iHunt is about - money is fickle, it comes and goes.

Sometimes playing games like this requires one to unlearn some tropes one picked up from other games. Going from D&D into iHunt (or many other games) one might start asking "what's your alignment?", "how much can I carry?", "where is the gear list?", "what damage bonus does this weapon have?", "what's my AC?", "what are my saving throws?", "how do I level up?", etc. The answers to all of them would be "the game is not about that. Unlearn what you have learned and see the world from a new perspective".

Agree on your game's vision before you start playing

Over the years, my group has learned that it's important to nail one thing down before a game starts - its vision, an agreed vision of what the game is about, what are the core assumptions, etc. Having something like that in place can help a lot when it comes to keeping the game focused.

A game's vision can be something very simple. In our Fellowship - The Deeps it started off as "we want to play a Fellowship game about sailing the ocean". This informed the setting - an archipelago with plenty of water to go about, the characters - all having to have a reason to be on the boat together, etc. Later, as characters got fleshed out the concept evolved further - the game was also about an Heir opposing an evil ruler Overlord to dethrone them and take their place, and other characters whose goals would align with that objective.

The vision will also help you figure out what the game is not about. In the Deeps, we weren't going to turn our sailing ship into a flying ship, because that would go against our goal of sailing the ocean and having ocean adventures. In Heaven For Everyone, our goal was to:

1. Play teenage demigods in the 80s
2. Have no clue what's going on
3. Focus on family life and school life
4. Try to be good people
5. Have our actions have consequences

With such clear goals, you could fall back on them whenever you'd want to do something drastic with your character. Would it be useful for a character to run away from their family and ditch school not to be bogged down? Sure, but that goes against the game's vision, so you won't do it. Would it be easy to declare yourself a living god-king and kill all the other supernaturals? Yes, but that's not what the game is about. Should the GM introduce a character that knows what's going on and explains everything to the players? Probably not, because we're meant to not have a clue of what's going on - it's part of the fun.

Making the vision does not mean you have to reveal everything the game is about. For our Conspiracy at Krezk game, we as players decided to be in the dark as to what would be the mystery of the game, so the GM kept us in the dark about those things. We still agreed what some other constraints about the game were (something along the lines of "you live in Krezk, you want what's best for the town, you're 'adventurers', so you'll put yourself in trouble because it needs to be done, etc."), but we had fun experiencing the mysteries slowly revealing themselves over time.

Of course, your game's vision is not set in stone - over time you ought to revisit it and maybe change it as it suits your game. Maybe some assumptions didn't make sense, or maybe you've gotten all the fun you could've had out of these ideas. For example, after a dozen episodes of Heaven for Everyone, we're pretty much done with our characters doing bits of school life, and we'll probably be transitioning that into some other scenarios, like internships or what have you. Your visions are your game's guiding compass, but it's okay to change course if that's what you want to do consciously.

Our group also has a few good examples of when we didn't nail down a vision in mind and things went a bit awry.

For our Fellowship of Cybertron game the GM wanted us "to be Autobots that fought in the Great War", but didn't state that clearly enough, so our party consisted of two Decepticons, an unaligned character and one Autobot. One character slept through most of the war, one was on a colony for the entirety of it, one was made not so long ago, and only one had some deeper connection with the war. We still had fun in the game and the GM still ran it, but for the follow-up season he made sure to clearly state and enforce the vision.

In our Godbound: Living Years game, we had two characters that were nobles. One of them wanted to restore the land of Ancalia that has been devastated by a zombie plague and give ownership of it back to the mortal nobles, while the other wanted to rule the land himself and do away with a lot of the old ways. The two character concepts were often at odds with one another through the entire game since neither of those goals were clearly stated before the game started, and both character concepts were very focused on bending the setting to their vision. It caused a lot of tension in the party and was very stressful to play through.

So if you are starting a game, consider sitting down together and deciding on what your game's vision will be. Once everyone has agreed on what it is through whatever means, it might be easier to keep the game focused and have something to point to when deciding if a character or story idea fits with the game.

Hopefully this will help you avoid having that one loner evil character in a game where you're all supposed to be heroic good people ;).

Related posts:

• The Doylist choices in role play games

Pointless labour multipliers and time as a resource

My group and I have played a lot of Godbound in the past, and I've always saw one Gift standing out as at the same time particularly useful and useless at the same time - Ten Thousand Tools. It's a "labour multiplier" type of power, where the work put out by your character counts as 1000 labourers per character level. I've come across similar powers in other RPGs, but this one is by far the highest multiplier:

Godbound

Exalted vs World of Darkness Companion

Chronicles of Darkness

On one hand, you can see these kinds of powers as pretty good - you are able to accomplish much more than a normal person could. Having this kind of power in real life would be really cool! However, there are a few problems here as well.

First of all, how do you compare the performance of a normal person to someone that is already supernaturally good at their craft? Do you multiply your supernatural output by 1000, or is your output equivalent to 1000 normal people?

Secondly, what can you do with that labour? Are there some time tables of how much effort it would take to construct a building? A palace? Make a ship? Not really, since generally you don't care about such minutia. Generally, you won't be playing Traveller where you can track how fast you can load cargo into your freighter down to an hour:

Traveller's cargo loading time

Thirdly, even if you had the breakdown, you mostly wouldn't care. I personally find the concept of time in most RPGs to be a bit distorted - what does it mean for our session that a character can finish their day's work in 2 hours if it's still one character out of a party of four? Does it change anything if instead of a month to do something it takes the PC a week? Even with Godbound's 1000+ times multiplier, you are already dealing with demigods working physical labour. A lot of things are generally hand-wave-y, since we usually don't play in a game where a strict deadline matters.

Time as a resource

If such kind of powers are to be useful, time needs to be somehow quantifiable in the game. For example, if a character only has 8 hours to pilfer a library they just broke into in the dead of night and each of their rolls takes an hour, that is a very solid use for the labour multipliers. Maybe every session counts as a week of time passing with something bound to happen in X months unless the characters finish their project. Or it could be as simple as "everyone gets a time slot for their projects, and if you have this power you can take two time slots".

At the same time, most of such scenarios are usually quite specific. I am yet to play in a game where such things would come up on regular basis.

Conclusions

Labour-multiplying powers, while at first glance very useful, end up only really applicable when paired with in-game time being a precious resource, and only for actions that already take a fixed amount of time to perform. Unless a system has both of these, such powers often end up being too nebulous to be useful.