How to do a barter system

[EisenKreutzer]

I'm currently working on an ice age setting that does not use currency. Instead, I wanted to do a barter system. However, I'm hitting a wall here because I don't know how to implement a barter system that is easy to use (as in, I'll know how much to "charge" for supplies, tools and equipment) and easy to get into for my players.

Where do I start when designing this barter system?

[avr]

By ice age do you mean stone age, probably no organisation larger than Dunbar's number, subsistence hunter-gatherers only?

If so you can simplify it by leaving out anything essential to survival. There isn't sufficient organisation that anyone would depend on being able to trade for essentials and you probably don't care about like-for-like trades of dried fish for smoked meat. High quality stone, ornaments/religious items, pigments and booze will get traded considerable distances though.

You might assign each of these a nominal value and multiply it by a factor for the distance from the source. Deception about how far away the source is might be possible.

You might also try posting in the world-building or homebrew forums.

[EisenKreutzer]

Thanks, I'll do that!

As for the setting, it's a bit more complex than a stone age society actually. It's a proto-norse/germanic hunter-gatherer society, the remnants of a medieval world that disintegrated when a supernatural ice age turned the world into an ice cube. They exist at an intersection between stone age and super-early bronze age. Since there is no subsitence farming, there are no crops and thus nothing to base a currency on. So in that sense they are a stone age society.

[Red Fel]

I never really thought of barter as a "system." That is, I didn't think that bartered goods had a fixed, exchangeable value (e.g. 1 wagon = 2 cows = 7 chickens, etc.). Once you've started fixing values, you basically have a currency economy, minus the actual currency.

Instead, I'd suggest you wing it - which is probably what people in a barter economy do. There's more haggling, and it's based more on supply and demand than a currency system. For example, you offer to sell a dead boar for five chickens, the farmer responds by offering three, and you point out that there's a farmer on the other side of town who'd offer six, but you like this guy's honest face, and he responds that there are tons of boars in those woods out there, boar meat isn't fetching the price it used to... Back and forth. Basically, just ask yourself three questions: How uncommon is the item being sold? (The supply.) How much does the buyer want/need it? (The demand.) How good is the rapport between buyer and seller? (The haggle/diplomacy.)Then wing whether the NPC decides the exchange is worthwhile.

At least, that's how I'd play it. By ear.

[EisenKreutzer]

The "by ear" approach does resonate with my "seat of my pants" approach to GMing.

[Trasilor]

I never really thought of barter as a "system." That is, I didn't think that bartered goods had a fixed, exchangeable value (e.g. 1 wagon = 2 cows = 7 chickens, etc.). Once you've started fixing values, you basically have a currency economy, minus the actual currency.

Instead, I'd suggest you wing it - which is probably what people in a barter economy do. There's more haggling, and it's based more on supply and demand than a currency system. For example, you offer to sell a dead boar for five chickens, the farmer responds by offering three, and you point out that there's a farmer on the other side of town who'd offer six, but you like this guy's honest face, and he responds that there are tons of boars in those woods out there, boar meat isn't fetching the price it used to... Back and forth. Basically, just ask yourself three questions: How uncommon is the item being sold? (The supply.) How much does the buyer want/need it? (The demand.) How good is the rapport between buyer and seller? (The haggle/diplomacy.)Then wing whether the NPC decides the exchange is worthwhile.

At least, that's how I'd play it. By ear.

+1 to this :smallamused:

IIRC from my economics classes - currency is simply the medium by which barter happens. Countries/people do not produce money, they produce goods/services. Bartering comes back down to utility and time. Players should be rewarded for finding the right buyer for their goods. A plow would be worth more to a farmer than a blacksmith for instance.

Also, a barter system is great for plot hooks :smallamused: