PDA

View Full Version : New player who keeps on poking holes into my world economy



Pages : [1] 2

paladinofshojo
2021-12-24, 10:22 AM
Okay so I have gotten a new player who is slowly turning into “that guy”. He isn’t much of a problem in game as he mechanically knows his role as a bard and is able to synergize well with the rest of the party.

The main problem is is that he had put a lot of points into knowledge (history and local to be exact). Now this wouldn’t be a problem seeing as I assumed he put them in to get a bonus in bardic knowledge checks…. However, this guy is apparently working on a Masters in Macroeconomics IRL so here’s what usually happens.

*Party went through a stereotypical dungeon filled with goblins and hobgoblins*

Me: After slaying the hobgoblin chieftain and his elite guards, you all search the room in the deepest part of the lair, you find a massive chest.

*Rogue searches for traps, it’s clean and they open it, party finds a small purse of 50 gold coins*

Bard: Cool, who minted these?

Me: Excuse me?

Bard: Who minted the coins? What is the name and face on them?

Me: Err, King Carolus Rex III…

Bard: Cool, so is he the reigning king or did he reign in the bygone past?

Me: He is the current King’s grandfather, so he reign ended over 80 years ago.

Bard: Cool, these should be worth more than double the current coins in circulation at least, correct?

Me: Excuse me? How?! Inflation doesn’t work like that…

Bard: You told us at the beginning of the campaign that the kingdom is going through a massive famine and is recovering from a bloody war that lasted for 13 years correct? And that even at the end of the war, the King was still paying foreign magical mercenaries right?

Me: Yes?

Bard: Well, no state can afford such a prolonged war and maintain its own economy at the same time due to sheer cost and logistics. You claimed that food prices had remained fixed by city rationing ensured that there would be no food riots during the war, correct?

Me: Yes?

Bard: All of this while using gold coins… correct?

Me: Yes?

Bard: Therefore the Kingdom must have lowered the amount of gold in mint, which allowed them to pay off their foreign mercenaries and at the same time keep their own economy intact. Unless of course, there is some other factor I am missing…

Me: *grinding my teeth annoyed*


*Party enters a new city*

Bard: I roll a knowledge check

Me: this port city is run by several merchant guilds under the stewardship of a long line of hereditary Princes hailing from a noble lineage of the city’s original founder. It is an independent city-state unaffiliated with the Empire to the North or the Caliphate to the East, as such it is a hub of trade and commerce, garrisoned by a city guard as well as an order of battlemages .

Bard: Cool, what’s the exchange rate?

Me: Excuse me?

Bard: Well this is an independent city-state right? So they should be minting their own money, which means there should be an exchange rate. Since this city has strong trade ties with the Empire AND is dependent on the Empire’s navy to patrol the seas for piracy, I am assuming that Imperial Crowns have a favorable conversion rate?

Me:…. Sure


I mean, I try to make my world as immersive as possible but this guy is taking the fun out of it…

I also don’t want to confront him about it since he genuinely is interested in the minutia of the economics, no matter how boring and dull it is for me, the guy who is basically god of the world he is asking about.

The Glyphstone
2021-12-24, 10:42 AM
Instead of fighting him, can you recruit him? Give him some basic parameters and let him go nuts on the economic worldbuilding to help you.

Lord Raziere
2021-12-24, 10:42 AM
Politely tell him that you are not as interested or good at he is at his own subject matter, that you probably never will be, and that you wordbuild details that you consider relevant primarily and any details he is curious about is secondary and probably made up on the spot and that you cannot keep up with everything he wants. you have limits, and you have to tell him that. either that honestly answer that you don't know and have to think about it when he asks you a question you don't have an answer to then move on and enough times hopefully he'll get the message that if he asks too much he'll just break the illusion for himself.

Kraynic
2021-12-24, 11:00 AM
Okay so I have gotten a new player who is slowly turning into “that guy”. He isn’t much of a problem in game as he mechanically knows his role as a bard and is able to synergize well with the rest of the party.

So he is new. Cool! To me, this seems like a good time to have a chat with the group as a whole (so you aren't just singling out this poor newbie) about how in depth you are willing to take economics. It might be worth adding to your "session zero" topics of discussion in the future, so that everyone knows where you stand on this.

For example, in my games (fantasy but not D&D), coins from different nations may be shaped differently or may be embossed differently, but they all weigh the same for various values. The only time the exact origin would be an issue would be when there is a war on, and then the merchants of the 2 different sides are likely to either not take the opposing side's coin, or will charge more to accept that other coin. Where ever the group has been adventuring will generally determine who's coinage they have. There is a market for antique coins, but that sort of thing is usually handled through brokers, and takes time to find buyers giving a higher income for the weight if the group is willing to wait for the money to trickle in. If the group wants to make money off the economy, then they need to do it the traditional way. If there is a famine, go somewhere food is plentiful and cheap, buy and transport that to where there is a famine, and sell for a much higher price. Buy things that are cheap there (because people are selling/trading things to get food) and take those somewhere that people have money that isn't tied up in a famine. These places will likely not be real close together, making plenty of opportunity for adventure in simply protecting your investment during transport.

Of course, that last might not be acceptable to you. I don't run modules, and wouldn't mind running a trading caravan game. The point is to figure out how in depth you are willing to go and making sure your players know. And to do that without running off what is hopefully just an enthusiastic newbie instead of "that guy".

Grod_The_Giant
2021-12-24, 11:08 AM
Politely tell him that you are not as interested or good at he is at his own subject matter, that you probably never will be, and that you wordbuild details that you consider relevant primarily and any details he is curious about is secondary and probably made up on the spot and that you cannot keep up with everything he wants. you have limits, and you have to tell him that.
This, very much this, but...

Judging by the kind of interactions the OP posted, I get the impression that the player is looking more for exploits than engaging with the setting. That's worth bearing in mind when you have your polite conversation.

Martin Greywolf
2021-12-24, 11:13 AM
I also don’t want to confront him about it since he genuinely is interested in the minutia of the economics, no matter how boring and dull it is for me, the guy who is basically god of the world he is asking about.

Okay, so the guy has a basic understanding of economics, the questio is, is he using it out of personal interest, or is he using it to sneak things past you? Let's see.





Bard: You told us at the beginning of the campaign that the kingdom is going through a massive famine and is recovering from a bloody war that lasted for 13 years correct? And that even at the end of the war, the King was still paying foreign magical mercenaries right?

[...]

Bard: Therefore the Kingdom must have lowered the amount of gold in mint, which allowed them to pay off their foreign mercenaries and at the same time keep their own economy intact. Unless of course, there is some other factor I am missing…

This line fo reasoning is pretty much 100% dead wrong, to a point where I'd expect anyone with education in basic money system philosophies to catch it. Gold is not a fiat currency, and while you can cause an infaltion of a specific kind of coin, this happens because it either has less gold in it or people believe so on account of rampant counterfeiting.

Problem is, this makes a lot of assumptions out of hand, without consulting you - there are enough kingdoms around that didn't see massive devaluation of currency in times of war simply on account of having a convenient gold and/or silver mines. Mercenaries not checking how much are they really paid also tends to not happen, at least not over the long term, and so on.

This is pretty clearly an example of using your knowledge to coerce a favorable outcome out of someone who isn't as much an expert as you happen to be by quietly making extremely favorbale assumptions you tell no one about.



Bard: Well this is an independent city-state right? So they should be minting their own money, which means there should be an exchange rate. Since this city has strong trade ties with the Empire AND is dependent on the Empire’s navy to patrol the seas for piracy, I am assuming that Imperial Crowns have a favorable conversion rate?

Again, 100% dead wrong. Independent city states did not always use their own currencies, and what exchange rates were depended only and solely on amount of precious metal in coins, to a point where a lot of medieval accounting uses what is essentially a weight unit for silver rather than any amount of coins.

Also, merchants are perfectly happy to scalp the officiers of friendly navies.

This is a bit less egregious of an error, I'd expect anyone stuying middle ages to catch it, but not necessarily someone who is just a student of finance.



I mean, I try to make my world as immersive as possible but this guy is taking the fun out of it…


From what I've seen, this guy is most likely trying to sneak things past you, whether deliberately or unconsciously. Unless you manage to recruit him to create your economics for you, you need to straight up tell him to stop doing that stuff, and that all monetary prices you tell them are meant to be understood as "amount of precious metal" rather than actual coins used.

Lord Raziere
2021-12-24, 11:13 AM
This, very much this, but...

Judging by the kind of interactions the OP posted, I get the impression that the player is looking more for exploits than engaging with the setting. That's worth bearing in mind when you have your polite conversation.

I mean if we're looking at it with that in mind, probably start saying he needs to keep rolling checks for more information. emphasize what his character knows, not what he knows.

King of Nowhere
2021-12-24, 11:28 AM
Instead of fighting him, can you recruit him? Give him some basic parameters and let him go nuts on the economic worldbuilding to help you.


Politely tell him that you are not as interested or good at he is at his own subject matter, that you probably never will be, and that you wordbuild details that you consider relevant primarily and any details he is curious about is secondary and probably made up on the spot and that you cannot keep up with everything he wants. you have limits, and you have to tell him that.


you need to straight up tell him to stop doing that stuff, and that all monetary prices you tell them are meant to be understood as "amount of precious metal" rather than actual coins used.

Do all those three

And don't necessarily think of this guy as disruptive. he could be a great asset, if he's willing to play this immersive in the world.
Unless he's only trying to take advantage of his superior knowledge. in which case yes, he's disruptive.

False God
2021-12-24, 11:35 AM
So, long story short, you were unprepared for someone who was really interested in the "money" angle of a game.

Been there.

Advice follows: Just say no. When someone starts asking about inflation just say "No, the kingdom has been really lucky to not have to deal with that." As mentioned above, real-material-currency systems don't really experience inflation as we do with fiat currency. Further, provided the kingdom uses the same weighting system, ie: 1 gold piece now is the same weight as 1 gold piece 80 years ago, the older piece would still be worth the same as the newer piece. It's arguably not even old enough to be a collectors item.

When they ask about "exchange rates" between countries, just tell them "No, the kingdoms worked that out, their gold is all close enough to the same weights to be valued at the same amount." Exchange rates are, by-and-large, an invention of modern banking in order to allow the bank to make money off being in the middle of large transfers of money. Your player is likely attempting to game the system and making money on margin by currency trading. That's a fairly new trick that just wouldn't work in a more traditional D&D setting.

If they object that "these things would exist!" tell that no, they don't and remind them that you determine how the setting works, and that you're not terribly interested in running a complex international market-system, because ya know, it's a lot of work for very little benefit to the game.

If he continues to object your "No" moves from "No, I'm not including this in the game." to "No, you're not included in the game, please leave."

Keep in mind while doing this: None of this is an argument. It's not a debate. You're not trying to convince him you're correct. You're in charge, end of story.

ALSO: upon re-reading, I note you never asked him why he wants to know these things. It's possible there may be some misunderstanding, but a simple "Why do you want to know?" could clear things up in either direction.

JNAProductions
2021-12-24, 11:43 AM
I'll echo the following sentiments:

1) Talk to the player. This should honestly be the first step for almost any conflict or problem at the table.
2a) If they're legitimately interested in this kind of stuff, get them to help out!
2b) If they're just trying to finagle some kind of advantage, ask them politely to stop. You give the rewards you give, and it takes more than some fast talking at the time of pickup to make it worth more.*
3) If all else fails, just let them know that you're not an economist, or hell, even if you are, you don't want to think that deeply in your magical elf game. It ain't gonna be perfect, and they'll need to accept that.

If the PCs do some kind of long-con to make their loot seem far more impressive than it really is, and therefore get 1,000 GP from 50 GP worth of rewards, that's fine. But it should require a lot more than just finding 50 GP, saying it's worth more than 50 GP, and suddenly getting 100 GP out of it.

This is all my opinion, by the way, not some kind of pure truth of D&D. But I hope it helps!

paladinofshojo
2021-12-24, 12:04 PM
This line fo reasoning is pretty much 100% dead wrong, to a point where I'd expect anyone with education in basic money system philosophies to catch it. Gold is not a fiat currency, and while you can cause an infaltion of a specific kind of coin, this happens because it either has less gold in it or people believe so on account of rampant counterfeiting.

So you’re saying is that those “valuable historic” coins that the bard is carrying may just happen to be counterfeit…tell me, what is the usual penalty for counterfeiting in the Middle Ages? Decapitation? The stocks? Losing a hand?

I want it to be “authentic” after all?


Problem is, this makes a lot of assumptions out of hand, without consulting you - there are enough kingdoms around that didn't see massive devaluation of currency in times of war simply on account of having a convenient gold and/or silver mines. Mercenaries not checking how much are they really paid also tends to not happen, at least not over the long term, and so on.

Yeah, the problem is that I didn’t think that through… I didn’t exactly flesh out the economics nor thought much of these factors.


When he joined up he had a neat folder and notepad where he asked about “which kingdoms would my character know about?” As well as asking “what are the economies of such and such locations” I just assumed he wanted to be prepared for roleplaying because his character is the disinherited son of a wealthy merchant.

So I just gave him generic answers to go off of “port town”, “agrarian”, this town makes good wine, etc.

He then kept on asking about taxation… which I was like… “ughh yes… the serfs pays a quarter of their crop to their lords… and in the cities, the freedmen and commoners have to pay around 5-10% of their yearly income to their local government… which in turn pays taxes to the king/emperor?”

Completely making it up as we went along.




This is pretty clearly an example of using your knowledge to coerce a favorable outcome out of someone who isn't as much an expert as you happen to be by quietly making extremely favorbale assumptions you tell no one about.

Isn’t that what all finance is?




Again, 100% dead wrong. Independent city states did not always use their own currencies, and what exchange rates were depended only and solely on amount of precious metal in coins, to a point where a lot of medieval accounting uses what is essentially a weight unit for silver rather than any amount of coins.

Also, merchants are perfectly happy to scalp the officiers of friendly navies.

This is a bit less egregious of an error, I'd expect anyone stuying middle ages to catch it, but not necessarily someone who is just a student of finance.

That would have been nice to have known that earlier… I will take that in consideration moving forward.

Martin Greywolf
2021-12-24, 01:26 PM
So you’re saying is that those “valuable historic” coins that the bard is carrying may just happen to be counterfeit…tell me, what is the usual penalty for counterfeiting in the Middle Ages? Decapitation? The stocks? Losing a hand?

I want it to be “authentic” after all?

Uh, horrifically tortured, for you nad relatives to the third degree, loss of titles and land for relatives to seventh degree, about on par with attempted assassination of a king. There were several incidents that were more or less full scale civil wars, massive armies armed with cannon and all, that started over people minting when they didn't have a right to. The nobles of the time were well aware that leaving this unchecked will destroy trust in their coinage, and them as rulers by extension.



Yeah, the problem is that I didn’t think that through… I didn’t exactly flesh out the economics nor thought much of these factors.

[...]

He then kept on asking about taxation… which I was like… “ughh yes… the serfs pays a quarter of their crop to their lords… and in the cities, the freedmen and commoners have to pay around 5-10% of their yearly income to their local government… which in turn pays taxes to the king/emperor?”

Completely making it up as we went along.

The problem is that economics is a very complicated subject, and medieval economics even more so, since we lack a lot of the base data. I've tried, for the past 10 years, to figure out "okay, how did life work in high medieval period in Hungary specifically", and I still have huge gaps in knowledge. I could tell you several's book worth of tales in taxation (there were several taxes, special taxes, royal taxes, noble taxes, business taxes, ...), medieval checks (you have those starting at about 1200 and they used more often than hard currency in city-to-city trade) and so on, but these are all mind-numbingly boring and extremely specific to time and place. Figuring out how these are interconnected is... probably impossible. There's a reason why you can't get a straight answer to "how much did a sword cost in medieval times, in dollars?" - I did a few calculations on that particular question, basing the price off of gold, beer, bread and land, and the costs varied by orders of magnitude.

Trying to get more stuff every time is just not a great move to pull as a player, because even attmepting it demands the amount of knowledge roughly equivalent to a Bachelor's degree at least.

And finally, an awful lot of games that track wealth, like DnD, assume there is a certain amount of inherent value to their gold pieces. A DnD gold piece is as much a function of game balance as it is of verisimilitude - screw around with it too much and you can see things fall apart. That's why I suggested the "gp is meant as a measure of precious metal" angle, it effectively shuts down edbates, and is fairly close to how business was (often) done in middle ages. Even if it does make me want to pull my hair out when sale prices of four different horses in the same year are listed in weight in silver, silver coins, foreign silver coins and gold coins, and I just want to know which horse was more expensive.

icefractal
2021-12-24, 03:46 PM
He's using knowledge to gain an edge ... but is that even wrong? When people think outside the box and do something like drop a big stalactite on a dragon instead of just fighting it normally, that's lauded and presented as "how you should play the game". Maybe not at every table, but in the D&D zeitgeist overall.

And honestly none of what he's done seems like anything to really worry about ... oh no, the party got 100 gp instead of 50 gp. Really, that doesn't seem like a big difference - if they're poor peasants, either one of those is a life-changing amount, and if they're more typical D&D adventurers then neither is a big deal. Ditto with the exchange rate thing - what's he going to do, get a 10% discount? Not going to change anything unless you have a precision-tuned economy designed to keep PCs just on the edge of poverty, which is sounds like the OP doesn't.

That said, it's fine to just say - "I don't have detailed economic info. This city is a thriving seaport which has been fairly stable for about 50 years, fill in details as appropriate to that."

And I'd second the idea of recruiting him to fill in those details. This should also prevent any exploits that rely on a really implausible economic setup, because you can ask him: "Why'd you set it up that way?" I'd expect he'll still get some reasonable advantage with cunning moves because ... that's what PCs do!

NichG
2021-12-24, 04:43 PM
Definitely play along rather than fight over it.

But don't be afraid to use the chain of logic as an opening to drop hooks that he'll feel compelled to follow up. E.g. 'while that makes sense, when you compare a new coin to an old coin you find that they have the same density. How very strange! It makes you wonder what secret the royals had in other to make to keep the coins flowing...'

Then you can throw in deals with devils, hidden treasures, sale of national historical artifacts, etc, and rather than just turning 50gp into 100gp now he has a mystery to pursue.

If you really do need to shut down something (like an infinite loop), time, contacts, and market caps are your fallbacks. Yes he can sell goods for more than he paid, but this particular city has 95% of it's trade in those goods locked in to existing supply agreements, and the remaining 5% consists of a few hundred or a few thousand gold per year worth of profit margin available. But go here sparingly and if you must, don't be afraid to have the conversation start from the ends and ask him to fill in the middle, e.g. 'you will at most be able to generate 200gp or 10% on your investments into goods whichever is lower per new town you visit by trading goods or doing currency arbitrage, so if you want to work it out, you can tell me what that implies about those town economies'

snowblizz
2021-12-24, 05:35 PM
There is one important thing to remember. All modern economics builds on the actors being rational maximisers of utility. It does not cope with magic.

Magical wizards stole some of the gold out of the old coins when you come to weigh them. The moneychanger has a magical scale that screws the customer over. And when you complain well naturally he paid off the authorities. just Wizard Did It. His textbooks does not provide answers to wizards.



Isn’t that what all finance is?


Who told you that?!? You were not supposed to know this. Keep moving, nothing to see here. Please wait while the IMF sends someone out to sort you out.

Jedaii
2021-12-24, 05:37 PM
Okay so I have gotten a new player who is slowly turning into “that guy”. He isn’t much of a problem in game as he mechanically knows his role as a bard and is able to synergize well with the rest of the party.

The main problem is is that he had put a lot of points into knowledge (history and local to be exact). Now this wouldn’t be a problem seeing as I assumed he put them in to get a bonus in bardic knowledge checks…. However, this guy is apparently working on a Masters in Macroeconomics IRL so here’s what usually happens.

*Party went through a stereotypical dungeon filled with goblins and hobgoblins*

Me: After slaying the hobgoblin chieftain and his elite guards, you all search the room in the deepest part of the lair, you find a massive chest.

*Rogue searches for traps, it’s clean and they open it, party finds a small purse of 50 gold coins*

Bard: Cool, who minted these?

Me: Excuse me?

Bard: Who minted the coins? What is the name and face on them?

Me: Err, King Carolus Rex III…

Bard: Cool, so is he the reigning king or did he reign in the bygone past?

Me: He is the current King’s grandfather, so he reign ended over 80 years ago.

Bard: Cool, these should be worth more than double the current coins in circulation at least, correct?

Me: Excuse me? How?! Inflation doesn’t work like that…

Bard: You told us at the beginning of the campaign that the kingdom is going through a massive famine and is recovering from a bloody war that lasted for 13 years correct? And that even at the end of the war, the King was still paying foreign magical mercenaries right?

Me: Yes?

Bard: Well, no state can afford such a prolonged war and maintain its own economy at the same time due to sheer cost and logistics. You claimed that food prices had remained fixed by city rationing ensured that there would be no food riots during the war, correct?

Me: Yes?

Bard: All of this while using gold coins… correct?

Me: Yes?

Bard: Therefore the Kingdom must have lowered the amount of gold in mint, which allowed them to pay off their foreign mercenaries and at the same time keep their own economy intact. Unless of course, there is some other factor I am missing…

Me: *grinding my teeth annoyed*


*Party enters a new city*

Bard: I roll a knowledge check

Me: this port city is run by several merchant guilds under the stewardship of a long line of hereditary Princes hailing from a noble lineage of the city’s original founder. It is an independent city-state unaffiliated with the Empire to the North or the Caliphate to the East, as such it is a hub of trade and commerce, garrisoned by a city guard as well as an order of battlemages .

Bard: Cool, what’s the exchange rate?

Me: Excuse me?

Bard: Well this is an independent city-state right? So they should be minting their own money, which means there should be an exchange rate. Since this city has strong trade ties with the Empire AND is dependent on the Empire’s navy to patrol the seas for piracy, I am assuming that Imperial Crowns have a favorable conversion rate?

Me:…. Sure


I mean, I try to make my world as immersive as possible but this guy is taking the fun out of it…

I also don’t want to confront him about it since he genuinely is interested in the minutia of the economics, no matter how boring and dull it is for me, the guy who is basically god of the world he is asking about.
You as D/GM can decide how money works. You're letting a player with a knowledge of Economics dominate your game. Why? YOU, the D/GM decide that. It's YOUR setting. The problem is your lack of control/knowledge of your own setting.Scrubbed

JNAProductions
2021-12-24, 06:44 PM
You as D/GM can decide how money works. You're letting a player with a knowledge of Economics dominate your game. Why? YOU, the D/GM decide that. It's YOUR setting. The problem is your lack of control/knowledge of your own setting. {Scrub the quote}

Generally, a DM focuses on the fun bits of the world, for them and for players. The economy, for D&D, is usually NOT that.

Plus, the DM in this case is trying to keep a consistent, sensible, and fun world. They’re not doing anything wrong-from what they’ve said, they could be former with their role, but I’d hardly call “wants to help the players have fun” laughable. It’s what a good DM should do.

Brother Oni
2021-12-24, 07:28 PM
Bard: Therefore the Kingdom must have lowered the amount of gold in mint, which allowed them to pay off their foreign mercenaries and at the same time keep their own economy intact. Unless of course, there is some other factor I am missing…

Yes, they did what the Edo era Japanese did; switched to a fiat currency AND debased their coinage from ~80% fine silver to ~20% fine silver, so a silver coin minted as a 1 monme coin was still worth 1 monme internally, but worth 1/4 of its original value to external traders who wanted payments in fine silver silver. They did this to restrict flow of external goods into Japan (I can't get into the reasons why in this forum), but as for a reason why a Kingdom would would to do it here; the mercenaries are now locked in their contracts, being paid in a currency that's worth a quarter of its face value elsewhere in the world.

They can either choose to cut their losses and pay the penalty fee for breaking their contracts, stick it out and leave at the end of of their contracts (with 25% of their original expected pay) or stay with the kingdom, buying only that kingdom's goods and hence re-circulating all that money back into the kingdom's economy.

If your bard gets it into his head to start counterfeiting coins (like melting down the purer coins and debasing them), simply have him caught, tortured and executed with the rest of the party also being strung up as fellow conspirators (as Martyn said, they took counterfeiting VERY seriously as it was a direct attack on the power of the ruling class).

Just because he's working towards a Masters in modern macroeconomics, doesn't mean he has an understanding of medieval economics and the shenanigans that they got up to (I'd be surprised if he was aware of ursury laws, for example), or their fantasy counterparts. Maybe your countries have unusual restrictions on certain business practices as veering too far into the unethical attracts the attention of the devil of money (Mammon in the FR universe)? Having a malign deity actively interfering in the economic process and/or laws to limit that deity's influence would certainly make significant chunks of his knowledge useless.

That said, I second what the others say - try talking to him and getting him to help with your world building. He may just be interested in that side of things and wants to spread his knowledge, rather than trying to pull a fast one. And if he is trying to pull a fast one, then either tell him to stop or he's going to find his character hanging from a noose after being drawn and quartered for counterfeiting or burnt at the stake as a follower of Mammon (although a more poetic death would be something along the lines of how Viserys died in a Game of Thrones, with having molten gold made from his counterfeit coins poured over his head).

KineticDiplomat
2021-12-24, 07:53 PM
It might be worth pointing out that the practical economy for the players in D&D is built creating an exponentially more expensive set of capabilities while the players gain exponentially more loot, all with the intent of keeping player power levels on a pre-designed curve.

Any attempt to understand the economy as some organic system involving the exchange of goods and services rather than a power curve is going to rapidly crash and burn in mighty, mighty, flames. So...

Yeah. It's not going to take the Chicago faculty to find some holes in the world. Trying to argue about specie is like trying to argue that HP isn't a realistic representation of being chopped with a hatchet. Sure, yes, self evidently there are gaping holes that have been lit on fire. Also, irrelevant if you want to play D&D as D&D. I

Milodiah
2021-12-24, 08:08 PM
Given a high level wizard can open a permanent gate to the Quasi-Elemental Plane of Gold or whatever, you'd best remind him that many basic real world assumptions about economics just...don't work.

And if you try to make it work, like I have in the past, you can only get so far before you realize the scope of the madness you've embarked on. Is it more or less economically viable to mine iron ore, smelt it, refine it, forge it, and temper it, or cast Wall of Iron (which explicitly creates permanent, nonmagical iron), and then either cut it with adamantine saws or cast Fabricate?

paladinofshojo
2021-12-24, 11:49 PM
You as D/GM can decide how money works. You're letting a player with a knowledge of Economics dominate your game. Why? YOU, the D/GM decide that. It's YOUR setting. The problem is your lack of control/knowledge of your own setting. {Scrub the quote}

I didn’t become a DM to have to create an economy for one player to exploit though….

Up until now, the “economy” in my world was secondary

False God
2021-12-25, 01:31 AM
I didn’t become a DM to have to create an economy for one player to exploit though….

Up until now, the “economy” in my world was secondary

And their point is that shouldn't change.

dafrca
2021-12-25, 02:37 AM
This has been a great thread to read. Some wonderful posts.

My opinion is if he is just pulling stuff, shut it down. But if he is really curious and interested, recruit him as has been suggested. It might turn into something real fun for him as well.

Several years ago, I was in a campaign as a player. The GM happen to say after one of the first sessions he wished he had not started it. I asked him why, he said he hated to track time for things like overland travel. To make a long story short, I asked if I could help. I ended up tracking for him two items. The large map and the calendar. He would feed me things he wanted to add such as "Add a few small villages along this road please". When we elected to go from one local to another I was tell the players how long it woudl take from point X to point Y. The in game the GM woudl have things happen and I woudl note them in the calendar and on the map. It was a blast helping and it made me more invested in both the game and the world. The campaign lasted just over 14 months and I still have my excel sheets and noted I took in the same folder as my character.

Did it mean I spent some out of game time with the GM to make sure I had what he wanted, yes. Did he several times say how much he appreciated the help, yes. So I say if he is honestly interested, recruit him. :smallsmile:

Brother Oni
2021-12-25, 05:32 AM
I didn’t become a DM to have to create an economy for one player to exploit though….

Up until now, the “economy” in my world was secondary

You might want to point him at the anime 'Spice and Wolf' or 'Ascendance of a Bookworm' so that he can get his late medieval/Renaissance macroeconomics fix, if you're not interested in running a medieval trade game and he's unwilling to help provide more verisimilitude on your world's economy.

erikun
2021-12-25, 10:55 AM
One method is, now that you are outside the game, come up with some explanation that you can use in future situations with the player (or other players) who start bringing up the same questions. This thread has been good for this. Saying that all coins are pure gold - and so their value won't vary - and that one coin is as good as another coin - if weighing the same - can be handy answers for other coin/money issues in the future. One gold coin being 1/50th pound of pure gold, or whatever, can be a useful explanation for future situations as well.

Other method is, as other people have mentioned, just recruiting the player. Mention that you aren't focused on the economy as they are, ask what might be changed to make it more interesting. But do point out that you won't be implementing every minor point that can come up. It does need to be a system you can manage, and the simplest system (outside "all gold coins are the same") is just going to be taxing every money exchange - which might not be that fun to play around. You could add a bit of mystery there - perhaps coins from two kingdoms don't mix frequently, so seeing a bunch of the foreign currency would stand out - but that's likely not the economics situation your player is hoping for.

Or maybe it is, and using the coin focus in the current campaign will let it be more relevant than it otherwise would be.

paladinofshojo
2021-12-25, 12:35 PM
One method is, now that you are outside the game, come up with some explanation that you can use in future situations with the player (or other players) who start bringing up the same questions. This thread has been good for this. Saying that all coins are pure gold - and so their value won't vary - and that one coin is as good as another coin - if weighing the same - can be handy answers for other coin/money issues in the future. One gold coin being 1/50th pound of pure gold, or whatever, can be a useful explanation for future situations as well.

That’s kinda what I am leaning towards since I am hesitant to “recruit” one of the players in my current game to literally write up the nitty gritty of my economic systems. Not because I am a control freak but more so I feel like that’s giving my player waaaay too much power in my world.

JNAProductions
2021-12-25, 12:37 PM
That’s kinda what I am leaning towards since I am hesitant to “recruit” one of the players in my current game to literally write up the nitty gritty of my economic systems. Not because I am a control freak but more so I feel like that’s giving my player waaaay too much power in my world.

IT's still your world. You retain veto power, and can change it as you see fit. But since they are an expert, it can help ground your world a bit.

SpyOne
2021-12-25, 12:45 PM
My advice would to be to have a heartfelt talk with this player with the following basic thesis: the economy of the campaign world does not function like historical examples from the real world. If that destroys the immersion for you then I am deeply sorry, but perhaps you can learn to embrace the fantastic nature of even the economy.

My brother had a player who was a physics major, and it wasn't long before the pile of things like "fireball should create a shockwave that would pulverize everything in the dungeon" was becoming unbearable.
My brother said to him, "in this world you don't breathe oxygen, you breathe in air elementals and then suck out their life force because you are stronger than they are. And you drown because water elementals are stronger than you and suck out your life force."
After a shocked moment the guy said "oh, okay" and it was like a switch got flipped. He got 100% that the campaign was set in a world that superficially kinda looked like physics worked there but where, just as an example, falling objects don't accelerate.
It isn't that the rules describe the game world badly, it is that the game world functions differently.

I hope he can learn to embrace a world where someone standardized the size and content of coins centuries ago and somehow nobody has tinkered with that, where nobody charges an exchange rate because everybody's coins are essentially interchangeable, and where an independent city probably doesn't even bother minting coins.

Alternatively:
Adventurers are getting screwed all the time. The price list is ridiculous. Having weird foreign coins is just a blip in how many things they are getting overcharged for.
You never get to interact with the real economy, the one merchants and peasants use.

As I often say, adventurers are all wearing a bright neon sign that says "I'm rich, overcharge me."

paladinofshojo
2021-12-25, 01:35 PM
IT's still your world. You retain veto power, and can change it as you see fit. But since they are an expert, it can help ground your world a bit.

The “expert” part is what worries me, what’s stopping them from creating financial backdoors and loopholes to exploit for their own benefit?

Milodiah
2021-12-25, 01:41 PM
I mean, unless they're masterful embezzlers on top of being economists, you should be able to pick up on when somethings obviously going in their favor. If you realize that his character suddenly has fifteen thousand more gold than everyone else's and you're not sure how it happened, you'll definitely need to retract the offer. And if the suggestions he makes are consistently ones that you can tell have ulterior motives, you'll have to retract it. But I wouldn't be too afraid of those possibilities to refuse to make the offer.

However, you're the one who's at the table, while we've only got what you've told us to go on. It sounds like you do kinda have the hunch this guy's trying to play you rather than just being enthusiastic about a chance to apply his knowledge to his hobby, so if that's the case it's time for a Talking To. Sometimes you gotta trust your gut.

False God
2021-12-25, 01:47 PM
The “expert” part is what worries me, what’s stopping them from creating financial backdoors and loopholes to exploit for their own benefit?

Nothing.

The honor system is all you have.

So IF you want to recruit them (and I don't recommend this unlike the other posters) you need to be very clear that you are trusting them to run things reasonably, understandably, and fairly for not just you, but everyone at the table. The other players need to be able to understand and participate in this guy's economic systems too.

---
I don't recommend recruiting him for this subject, on the grounds that you don't know enough about the subject to keep him in check. This isn't a case of you each having a DMG and each being able to read the same rules and come to the same conclusions to help out other players. This is an incredibly complex subject that comes drenched in IRL politics, power-dynamics, and a variety of theories on not just how it operates, but why it operates and all of that is mixed in with a number of very subjective opinions on how it ought to work.

Other players at the table may have their own varying degrees of understanding on how these sorts of economic system do work, as well as their own opinions on how it should work. If/When they start picking up on the real-world elements appearing in their game, this can produce all sorts of results.

A more robust system is not necessarily a better one. Often times simple systems with simple answers are better to prevent the table from getting bogged down on whether Eastasia is at war with Oceania and if that means the currency of Eurasia is now more valuable to one or both of them. The amount of gain in my experience in including complex economic systems is very minimal....unless you have a whole table (including you) skilled at and into that stuff.

You have, presumably, 3 players who are content with your simple system, and 1 who isn't. IMO: it's better to risk the 1 than the 3.

dafrca
2021-12-25, 03:17 PM
The “expert” part is what worries me, what’s stopping them from creating financial backdoors and loopholes to exploit for their own benefit?

I would not let them have 100% control, rather they advise and you decide then they create.

The recruit option will only work if they are really interested in the subject and really want to help add to the game world. :smallbiggrin:

Brother Oni
2021-12-25, 04:14 PM
The “expert” part is what worries me, what’s stopping them from creating financial backdoors and loopholes to exploit for their own benefit?

"They're followers of Mammon! Drown them in boiling gold!" i.e. a reflavoured version of 'rocks fall, everybody dies'. Your game world, your rules in the end.

Shpadoinkle
2021-12-25, 08:17 PM
The way I'd have handled these incidents:

For the first one, after he made his point, I'd have said: "Okay, correction: You find twenty gold coins, but due to their age, gold content, and rarity, you estimate that all together they're worth about 50 gold pieces today, MAYBE slightly more if you can find a collector." And if they sought out a collector, I'd roll 1d4-1 and add that to the 50 GP the collector is willing to offer them. Yeah, they're valuable-ish, but not especially rare.

As for the second, I'd patiently explain that D&D is not 'economy simulator.' It's abstracted, more heavily in some areas than others, and things like exchange rates are not really a thing I'm going to be dealing with. And if he doesn't like it he can find a different game.

Jedaii
2021-12-25, 08:24 PM
Bard: Cool, who minted these?

GM: Are you asking this IC or OOC?

Bard: OOC.

GM: You, the player, didn't find the coins so you have no idea.

OR

Bard: Cool, who minted these?

GM: Are you asking this IC or OOC?

Bard: IC.

GM: Make a History check.

Bard: *rolls* Made it!

GM: Err, King Carolus Rex III…

Bard: Cool, so is he the reigning king or did he reign in the bygone past?

GM: He is the current King’s grandfather, so he reign ended over 80 years ago.

Bard: Cool, these should be worth more than double the current coins in circulation at least, correct?

GM: Make an Appraisal check.

Bard: *rolls* Nailed it!

GM: Yeah these coins should be worth 5x the normal value. So what is the party doing next?


You as GM need to maintain the 4th-wall between player and character. First identify if the question is IC or OOC. If OOC the player can't know. If IC, resolve it with rolls and setting info or improvisation. Then quickly push the scene forward. Hope this helps.

paladinofshojo
2021-12-25, 10:47 PM
Bard: Cool, who minted these?

GM: Are you asking this IC or OOC?

Bard: OOC.

GM: You, the player, didn't find the coins so you have no idea.

OR

Bard: Cool, who minted these?

GM: Are you asking this IC or OOC?

Bard: IC.

GM: Make a History check.

Bard: *rolls* Made it!

GM: Err, King Carolus Rex III…

Bard: Cool, so is he the reigning king or did he reign in the bygone past?

GM: He is the current King’s grandfather, so he reign ended over 80 years ago.

Bard: Cool, these should be worth more than double the current coins in circulation at least, correct?

GM: Make an Appraisal check.

Bard: *rolls* Nailed it!

GM: Yeah these coins should be worth 5x the normal value. So what is the party doing next?


You as GM need to maintain the 4th-wall between player and character. First identify if the question is IC or OOC. If OOC the player can't know. If IC, resolve it with rolls and setting info or improvisation. Then quickly push the scene forward. Hope this helps.

Just to be clear I do expect them to make knowledge checks, but they did put 5 points into history and 3 points into local so they seem to do reasonably well in getting answers to economic questions that no one asks…

Saintheart
2021-12-25, 11:54 PM
*Rogue searches for traps, it’s clean and they open it, party finds a small purse of 50 gold coins*

Bard: Cool, who minted these?

Me: Excuse me?

Bard: Who minted the coins? What is the name and face on them?

Me: Err, King Carolus Rex III…

Bard: Cool, so is he the reigning king or did he reign in the bygone past?

Me: He is the current King’s grandfather, so he reign ended over 80 years ago.

Bard: Cool, these should be worth more than double the current coins in circulation at least, correct?

Me: Excuse me? How?! Inflation doesn’t work like that…

This last line is where you went wrong.

The correct response to Bard's speculation about the coins' value is: "You might very well think that. I guess you won't know whether you're right or wrong until you go back to a town or similar and try to use them as a mode of exchange." Then you have options, or at least breathing space, to think about it: guess what guys, your Appraise check might tell you what you think the coins are worth, but it turns out because you don't have assaying equipment here, you didn't realise the coins in fact are just gold plated and alloyed with dirt, meaning they're really only melt value ... i.e. half what you thought, i.e.e. closer to the Wealth-By-Level figure I had in mind."


Bard: You told us at the beginning of the campaign that the kingdom is going through a massive famine and is recovering from a bloody war that lasted for 13 years correct? And that even at the end of the war, the King was still paying foreign magical mercenaries right?

Me: Yes?

Bard: Well, no state can afford such a prolonged war and maintain its own economy at the same time due to sheer cost and logistics. You claimed that food prices had remained fixed by city rationing ensured that there would be no food riots during the war, correct?

As said the conversation should never have happened. This is basically the player trying to write your world for you. Never give a general response about how the world operates unless you're prepared to then be bound by that rule on a continuing basis.

The simple answer to all modern economics arguments made in a D&D game is as follows: "The presence of magic, which does not obey the laws of physics, and which is an infinitely renewable resource, laughs at any economic assumptions you might care to make, and I don't see the Fantasy Post-Scarcity Economist class in your character sheet. You might think that's the way it works in the wider world; I can't comment, and neither can your character until you're back in the world and try your luck at the nearest mint. You might be right, you might not be."



Bard: Therefore the Kingdom must have lowered the amount of gold in mint, which allowed them to pay off their foreign mercenaries and at the same time keep their own economy intact. Unless of course, there is some other factor I am missing…

"Yes, the factor you're missing is more or less complete opacity about how the kingdom is making money, a subject on which I'm not going to educate you because you don't have a plausible way to know it. You don't know if there's a secret mine. You don't know if there's a captive mage producing stuff. You don't know if there's a magic item at play. You can make assumptions if you wish, but assumptions kind of have a bad relationship with reality."


*Party enters a new city*


Bard: I roll a knowledge check

Me: this port city is run by several merchant guilds under the stewardship of a long line of hereditary Princes hailing from a noble lineage of the city’s original founder. It is an independent city-state unaffiliated with the Empire to the North or the Caliphate to the East, as such it is a hub of trade and commerce, garrisoned by a city guard as well as an order of battlemages .

Bard: Cool, what’s the exchange rate?

Me: Excuse me?

Bard: Well this is an independent city-state right? So they should be minting their own money, which means there should be an exchange rate. Since this city has strong trade ties with the Empire AND is dependent on the Empire’s navy to patrol the seas for piracy, I am assuming that Imperial Crowns have a favorable conversion rate?


"The word 'should' does not mean 'is'. And again, I do not see the feat Fantasy Medieval ForEx Trader on your character sheet. Exchange rates are proprietary and indeed closely-guarded knowledge for usage between very well-heeled merchants. This is not a world where that sort of information is available to the public. So once again, your assumptions will just have to be tested via interactions with actual traders or merchants in the city."


Just to be clear I do expect them to make knowledge checks, but they did put 5 points into history and 3 points into local so they seem to do reasonably well in getting answers to economic questions that no one asks…

And this, in my opinion, is the wrong way to be using Knowledge checks, which I believe is the reason your players are Perfect-Intel'ing the game. Most forms of Knowledge you think players ought to have about a place should be just freely supplied. Knowledge skills should be used as the capacity to research something provided you have the right tools and environment. (e.g. your party could find someone willing to tell them what Imperial Crowns are going for in Taladanian Ducats because they've got a Knowledge (Local) check, but it takes a day to use that Knowledge to find the right person to ask ... and the Knowledge check reveals whether they've been able to track down that source of information, who might have been murdered since they were here, or got out of the business and is thus useless, or now requires a fat fee before he passes on what the characters want to know. Knowledge doesn't tell the party the information it seeks, it tells the party where to find that information and whether they're successful in finding said source of information ... which costs them time and possibly interactions with NPCs to find out what they want to know, and has a chance of failure.

On the plus side, and it's a very big plus:

Look at the bright side. Players like this guy aren't necessarily out to destroy your setting, they're out to see where the levers are that they can push because they have particular knowledge and they're inwardly thrilled that some of their own life experience might actually be relevant or useable in the game. This isn't automatically a bad thing because player investment in a setting is the very definition of someone who has suspended disbelief; the trick is to just get their wheels turning in the right direction. The key is knowing how to channel the player's knowledge and very clear interest in your setting into encounters, choices, and challenges that you can build.

Also consider whether to tack with this guy's knowledge of economics. He's given you a raft of ideas for villain and/or NPC motivations just by asking "How does the king make his money?" and saying "What is the exchange rate between the Taladanian Ducat and the Imperial Crown?" You can have your party run into counterfeiters. Or merchants trading on the margin between the currencies. Hell, forget the bog-standard thieves' guild, forget the evil cultists trying to resurrect Dead God #1001, a protection racket that seeks to strangle silver prices by murdering silver miners or merchants in town and thus keep a cartel in place could be just as ruthless and lethal as anybody else.

Brother Oni
2021-12-26, 04:10 AM
"Yes, the factor you're missing is more or less complete opacity about how the kingdom is making money, a subject on which I'm not going to educate you because you don't have a plausible way to know it. You don't know if there's a secret mine. You don't know if there's a captive mage producing stuff. You don't know if there's a magic item at play. You can make assumptions if you wish, but assumptions kind of have a bad relationship with reality."


"And prying into state secrets also tend to lead to a significantly shortened life expectancy once the King's spies find out about aforementioned prying."

Jedaii
2021-12-26, 10:23 AM
Just to be clear I do expect them to make knowledge checks, but they did put 5 points into history and 3 points into local so they seem to do reasonably well in getting answers to economic questions that no one asks…

The point is to keep things moving rather than having a player stop the action with questions that should be answered in a more appropriate later scene (when the party sells the coins). Otherwise the other players are doing nothing while one player and the GM are playing "20 Questions". Maintaining pace is very important.

Nymrod
2021-12-26, 10:44 AM
Adhere to wealth by level. There is little value in the conversation being made since it's entirely out of game. More importantly it's not something that you could reasonably communicate fast. If the player has theories, let him test them with an Appraise check when he tries to find a money changer. Now if you have the time and want to build on that, don't shut him down but let it become an adventure in and of itself. Maybe the coin is not considered legal tender for any number of reasons and you have to take a trip to another place to use it (and there it would be worth more; since you are forcing players to spend resources to use treasure, make it worth their while). Maybe it's worth a lot more due to rarity but the players will have to attend an auction were all kind of madness can happen.
If the players seem excited by the prospect of a more open story line where they can all give narrative input (if they want to that is) then follow with it. If the clear majority wants to follow the original plot, then you end it fast. Maybe reward it by giving a few more gp in the exchange. And slowly test to see if the player in question is just trying to be part of the storytelling or if they are monopolizing time at the table. Reward the first, disillusion the second.

Bacon Elemental
2021-12-26, 07:20 PM
I agree with the "Darths and Droids" approach of using the player's idea if it works for you (clever way to get a piece of kit they kinda need but cant quite afford) but just say "No" if it doesn't (My economics degree says all our money should be worth twice as much buying magic items here)

erikun
2021-12-26, 08:39 PM
The “expert” part is what worries me, what’s stopping them from creating financial backdoors and loopholes to exploit for their own benefit?
Perhaps I didn't state myself clearly with the "recruit" part.

What I should've said is: Bounce ideas off them. If they think that old (80-year-old) coins should be more valuable, then ask why. Why is this old King Carolus Rex coin worth more than the new King Carolus Rex coin? Would they all be worth the same, given that they are made the same way? If they mention something about the older coins being more collectable, then the problem becomes that they aren't very collectable anymore when there's 5000 of them floating around a small town. Perhaps it would be interesting to introduce a new coin-collector NPC, who can sent the PC party off on random dungeon chases to purchase some rare coins from them... or perhaps it is just too much work or effort to keep track of. If that's the case, simply mention that you are just assuming one-GP means one-GP and weren't interested in introducing collectibility or scarcity or depleted-gold-content fiat currency into the game.

The same with exchange rates. Just what do they think the exchange rates should look like? Realize that if the players can get 10% more coin in the local currency, then that means all prices will be 10% marked up in the local currency to compensate. A rope which takes 5gp effort to make still takes 5gp effort to make in the kingdom, even if that effort pays out 5gp+5sp to do; it just means the rope is 5gp, 5sp in the local currency. Again, it might not even be worth the effort to go to all this trouble, especially when a pound of gold is a pound of gold is a pound of gold, in any country.


I will admit, the concerns that some other players have had with this being a manipulation attempt are somewhat valid. I'm giving the player the benefit of the doubt here, assuming that they are interested in economics and wish the game would would reflect that. However, it is entirely possible for a player to exchange 1000gp into 1100gp "local currency" and just happen to forget the "local" party in the next town, spending all their extra cash like normal coin. Feel free to limit what you give to the player to what you can easily keep track of - and remember that the other players at the table might not be savvy at keeping track of their different local coinages either.

Jay R
2021-12-26, 08:50 PM
You don't have to disapprove in order to keep him from using this to get more than you are giving out. You do have to say, "No".

"No."

Over and over. "No."

If you have no knowledge of economics, you should say some version of:
"There is no inflation; all coins are more-or-less pure. I don't know why the economy works differently here. I don't even know why lightning bolts go where they are directed instead of seeking the greatest electric potential. But the coins you found are worth the amount I told you they are. If you want to believe that there are half as many coins, each worth twice as much, feel free to do so. Perhaps they are coins from that time that have been clipped, and now have less total weight. But the 50 gold coins worth of money you found are worth 50 gold coins. Also, your character has zero ranks in Knowledge(modern economic theory)."

If you do know some economics, you should try this:

"Yeah, I over-simplified it a little. It's actually 27 gold coins, of three different sizes. But it will spend for exactly 50 gp worth."


Bard: Therefore the Kingdom must have lowered the amount of gold in mint, which allowed them to pay off their foreign mercenaries and at the same time keep their own economy intact. Unless of course, there is some other factor I am missing…

"The factor that you are missing is that low-level wizards can tell devalued gold, so over 800 years ago, people realized that the currency must remain pure for people to use it at all. Debased coinage is just as easily detectable as alignment."


Bard: Cool, what’s the exchange rate?

Me: Excuse me?

Bard: Well this is an independent city-state right? So they should be minting their own money, which means there should be an exchange rate. Since this city has strong trade ties with the Empire AND is dependent on the Empire’s navy to patrol the seas for piracy, I am assuming that Imperial Crowns have a favorable conversion rate?

"One ounce of gold from one kingdom exchanges for exactly one ounce of gold from another kingdom. When the exact metallic content of a coin can be easily detected, then all nations use pretty much the same weight of coins."


I also don’t want to confront him about it since he genuinely is interested in the minutia of the economics, no matter how boring and dull it is for me, the guy who is basically god of the world he is asking about.

You are not the god of that world, as is clear from the fact that you are not omniscient about it. You are not even the creator of the world, merely a creator of some parts of it. You've created the parts needed to run a fun game for people. You don't have to apologize for not creating an economic structure.

I would try to set up a situation in which his knowledge can help push the quest forward. But that would be a situation set up for it. I would not let him get in the way of the plan for the session, or to claim more than the scenario gives him.

One of my Rules for DMs is :
"16. The players do not have the right to screw up the game. They do have the right to screw up your plot. Don’t confuse the two."

Look for a way that his knowledge can really help them. But don't knuckle under to whatever he says.

Draconi Redfir
2021-12-26, 09:22 PM
I'd probably just go for a simple "universal currency" thing myself. All coins in all kingdoms and all nations are identical and all have the same value everywhere. 1gp in a rich high-population city is still just 1gp in a poverty ridden famine country.

Sure the latter might give you more for that 1gp then the former, but it's still just 1gp.

Exchange rates don't exist

Value due to age don't exist

Different countries not accepting coins from one another doesn't exist

it's all just blank disks of metal that have an agreed upon value that doesn't change. Where do they come from? Doesn't matter. If they insist, it comes from a bunch of different mints in a bunch of different locations, but they all make the same coins.

A lot of the money distribution is just a case of money moving via trade.

Mutazoia
2021-12-27, 12:52 AM
Ask him how coin collecting worked in the middle ages. Hint: It didn't exist. A coin minted in France was worth the exact same amount as a coin minted in England (more or less) because merchants used a weight-based system for accounting. This is why coin shaving was a crime (and why England still calls their monetary notes the "pound" lol).

It wouldn't matter if you pulled a gold coin out of a dragon's hoard that was 1 year old or 1000 years old. They would be worth exactly the same.

Brother Oni
2021-12-27, 05:13 AM
This is why coin shaving was a crime (and why England still calls their monetary notes the "pound" lol).

We call it pound sterling and it was fixed to a historical weight and purity of silver. That's as far as I'll go as you don't want to go diving down the rabbit hole that is pounds, shillings and pence. Only madness that way lies.


Ask him how coin collecting worked in the middle ages. Hint: It didn't exist. A coin minted in France was worth the exact same amount as a coin minted in England (more or less) because merchants used a weight-based system for accounting.

Coin collecting under the broad umbrella of numismatics was a thing; the earliest confirmed collection of coins was by Petrarch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrarch) in the 14th Century, where he was approached by some vine diggers who had found some old coins and wanted him to either buy the coins or at least identify the ruler.
Suetonius records that Caesar Augustus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus) "On the Saturnalia, and at any other time when he took it into his head, he would now give gifts of clothing or gold and silver; again coins of every device, including old pieces of the kings and foreign money;".


Merchants used a weight and purity based system for payments - I already mentioned what the Japanese did earlier on in the thread.

If anything, different weight standards made things worse; a coin minted in France was not worth the same as a coin minted England as the weights and the purity were different. For the vast majority of the Middle Ages, the French only had the denier as a minted coins, with 1 Livre = 20 Sou = 240 Denier, with the livre and sou only existing as units of accounting. 1 Livre was 367.1 g in weight and 305.94 g of fine silver, making a denier ~83% fine silver or 1.27g of fine silver. Things only get worse once you get away from Paris, with all the minor duchies using far more debased coinage as they simply couldn't get any better quality silver.

Meanwhile the pound sterling was set to 350 g of 92.5% purity silver in 1158, making a penny worth 1.35 g of fine silver (ideally; quality control between the different mints were terrible). This disparity with French currency only gets worse when you start looking at different English coinage, the French standardisation (the Livre Parisis and the Livre Tournoisivre) and the 100 Years War.

Mechalich
2021-12-27, 06:47 AM
If you do know some economics, you should try this:

"Yeah, I over-simplified it a little. It's actually 27 gold coins, of three different sizes. But it will spend for exactly 50 gp worth."


I'd expand on this. "The D&D monetary setup is an extremely simplified model system. All the stuff you're talking about is baked in. Sometimes it works in your favor, sometimes it works against and it all more or less evens out in the end, so it's really not worth trying to go into all that extra detail."

If the character, not the player, has the relevant skills to haggle extensively, you can and should say that they incorporate economic knowledge into their bargaining (depending on edition, this may mean allowing them to role Knowledge: History instead of Appraise or the like sometimes), but the impact of that should be marginal.

Asmotherion
2021-12-27, 10:39 AM
He seems like genuently interested in the economy system of your world. Why not go with it, and try to enjoy how your world turns out.

Admit to him you haven't planed ahaid for such interactions, and ask him to help you plan the ecconomical aspects of the game.

Don't always go with what he says though. You could be using some aspects of his game against him (for example, the exchange rate could be very unfavorable or you say they don't accept the party's currency).

BRC
2021-12-27, 10:56 AM
This seems more like exploit-seeking behavior than anything.

Talk to him and say you don't appreciate it, or just start using different language.


"You find 50GP Worth of coins" rather than "50 Gold Coins", with the coins themselves being a mix of gold, copper, and silver pieces.

There's also the "Why isn't everybody doing this" thing. If he really wants to get into exchange rates between different currencies, say "Sure, at the gate you see a money-changer's booth willing to exchange your coins for a local currency. They charge a fee that makes it basically a wash as far as value goes. You turn 50gp of Imperial coins into 50GP of local coins".

Easy e
2021-12-27, 11:40 AM
I think TSR's Marvel Super-Heroes Judges section has one of my favorite pieces of advice on this topic.

https://previews.123rf.com/images/maryvalery/maryvalery1807/maryvalery180700055/104969850-bison-stop-ban-aurochs-no-wild-bull-admonition-buffalo-red-prohibiting-road-sign-vector-illustration.jpg


As Judge, do not let yourself get buffaloed.

Kvess
2021-12-27, 12:39 PM
I'd let him try to find a rare coin collector, and have the collector insist on having the coins appraised, since goods found in a dungeon don't tend to have certificates showing a valid chain of custody. Perfectly reasonable. Have the appraiser be out of town, then the next time they're in town have them be busy with a backlog, then have the appraiser's fees cost nearly as much as the value of the coins. Invent a new excuse every time he looks for someone to help him offload the coins. Have one of the neighbours offer to take the coins off your player's hands for 60 gold.

Every time this comes up, make a running joke out of the hassle of getting the full economic value out of dungeon rewards. Occasionally offer minor rewards to remove some of the sting.

Witty Username
2021-12-27, 01:53 PM
Gold doesn't have intrinsic value in D&d, alchemist wizards can simply print more to meet demand.

Nymrod
2021-12-27, 01:54 PM
I'd let him try to find a rare coin collector, and have the collector insist on having the coins appraised, since goods found in a dungeon don't tend to have certificates showing a valid chain of custody. Perfectly reasonable. Have the appraiser be out of town, then the next time they're in town have them be busy with a backlog, then have the appraiser's fees cost nearly as much as the value of the coins. Invent a new excuse every time he looks for someone to help him offload the coins. Have one of the neighbours offer to take the coins off your player's hands for 60 gold.

Every time this comes up, make a running joke out of the hassle of getting the full economic value out of dungeon rewards. Occasionally offer minor rewards to remove some of the sting.

I mean we have the assumption that people do collect rare coins. I could see a dragon do that maybe? Otherwise in the societies that exist in D&D people simply don't have access to the resources needed to collect rare coins. It's just not readily available. The only thing that matters is a) how much the coin weighs and b) what the coin's specific weight is. Both were calculated with appropriate instruments by appraisers because all people cared was how much gold/silver/copper they were getting out of the coins. In some of the campaign settings that have tons of information like FR there can be more complicated coin mechanics. I think both Amn and Sembia have special coins that other states do not recognize at an equal value but that actually creates an opportunity for gameplay; find the Sembian merchant who'd be willing to get those coins from you at full value.


Gold doesn't have intrinsic value in D&d, alchemist wizards can simply print more to meet demand.

Not really, it is extremely complex to do so. Philosopher stones do not grow on trees and are expended when used for transmutations. You'd end up spending more on the stone than you'd make changing lead to gold.

Milodiah
2021-12-27, 02:06 PM
Gold doesn't have intrinsic value in D&d, alchemist wizards can simply print more to meet demand.


"In financial news, The Fantastical Reserve System has authorized an additional run of gold coin conjuration. While detractors say this will result in further inflation, Fan chair Torvald the Prismatic was quick to point out that he is an epic level cleric of the god of wealth and commerce and thus is receiving instructions directly from a near-infalliable entity which is essentially the divine embodiment of economics as a concept so everyone else can shut up."


Not really, it is extremely complex to do so. Philosopher stones do not grow on trees and are expended when used for transmutations. You'd end up spending more on the stone than you'd make changing lead to gold.

Isnt there literally a Quasi-Elemental Plane of Gold though?

Saint-Just
2021-12-27, 02:18 PM
I'd let him try to find a rare coin collector, and have the collector insist on having the coins appraised, since goods found in a dungeon don't tend to have certificates showing a valid chain of custody. Perfectly reasonable. Have the appraiser be out of town, then the next time they're in town have them be busy with a backlog, then have the appraiser's fees cost nearly as much as the value of the coins. Invent a new excuse every time he looks for someone to help him offload the coins. Have one of the neighbours offer to take the coins off your player's hands for 60 gold.

Every time this comes up, make a running joke out of the hassle of getting the full economic value out of dungeon rewards. Occasionally offer minor rewards to remove some of the sting.

Ah, yes, mocking your players and wasting their time when they do something that you disagree with instead of talking with them. Classic.

paladinofshojo
2021-12-27, 02:36 PM
Gold doesn't have intrinsic value in D&d, alchemist wizards can simply print more to meet demand.

Wait really? How do economies function then? If the gold isn’t worth anything then is the worth of coinage fiat and based on the strength and trust of the kingdom minting it?

At this point I am just asking so I can get some ideas on how to react to said bard and any future economic shenanigans….

I figure I should probably learn a bit about d&d economics if I am going to keep having him in my games.

BRC
2021-12-27, 02:42 PM
Wait really? How do economies function then? If the gold isn’t worth anything then is the worth of coinage fiat and based on the strength and trust of the kingdom minting it?

At this point I am just asking so I can get some ideas on how to react to said bard and any future economic shenanigans….

I figure I should probably learn a bit about d&d economics if I am going to keep having him in my games.

There's no innate "Turn things into gold" power in the rules that I can find. I can't even find anything called "Alchemist Wizard", Transmuter Wizards exist, and can temporarily turn things into Silver, which is good for a short-term scam, but they can't print gold on demand, and the silver turns back to it's original substance after an hour or if the wizard loses concentration.


High level wizards can probably do it
I'm pretty sure your player is just trying to talk their way into getting free money by sounding smart. Don't fall for it.

Saint-Just
2021-12-27, 02:44 PM
Wait really? How do economies function then? If the gold isn’t worth anything then is the worth of coinage fiat and based on the strength and trust of the kingdom minting it?

At this point I am just asking so I can get some ideas on how to react to said bard and any future economic shenanigans….

I figure I should probably learn a bit about d&d economics if I am going to keep having him in my games.

I do not think it's actually attested anywhere. It is a bit of a fridge logic where you can see how easy it would be to acquire massive amounts of gold, but canonically gold is valuable.

Milodiah
2021-12-27, 05:52 PM
I'd love to see someone sit down and pull a ****load of experts from the relevant fields who also are versed in D&D to try to make The Ultimate Setting (in terms of verisimilitude anyway). Geologists do the plate tectonics and landmasses, climatologists do the biomes, anthropologists and sociologists do the cultures, theologians do the religions, etc.

But, honestly, even if it happened it'd never be a success commercially, there'd be like 8,000 pages of supporting documents with formal citations and stuff, and you'd have to read all of it to be able to understand how to even function in such a wacky world.

There's plenty of places you can punch holes into thr settingd of D&D, like why people are building straight high middle ages castles when there's any number of arguments as to why magic would make them look very different, or even possibly obsolete.

If the guy genuinely has a hard time understanding that if you try super hard to Make It Make Sense, you're going to find more and more spiderwebbing threads of nonsense. I try to resolve them where I can, but I long ago acknowledged there's a tipping point where it becomes less about Having Fun.

Saintheart
2021-12-27, 08:02 PM
I'd love to see someone sit down and pull a ****load of experts from the relevant fields who also are versed in D&D to try to make The Ultimate Setting (in terms of verisimilitude anyway). Geologists do the plate tectonics and landmasses, climatologists do the biomes, anthropologists and sociologists do the cultures, theologians do the religions, etc.

But, honestly, even if it happened it'd never be a success commercially, there'd be like 8,000 pages of supporting documents with formal citations and stuff, and you'd have to read all of it to be able to understand how to even function in such a wacky world.

There's plenty of places you can punch holes into thr settingd of D&D, like why people are building straight high middle ages castles when there's any number of arguments as to why magic would make them look very different, or even possibly obsolete.

If the guy genuinely has a hard time understanding that if you try super hard to Make It Make Sense, you're going to find more and more spiderwebbing threads of nonsense. I try to resolve them where I can, but I long ago acknowledged there's a tipping point where it becomes less about Having Fun.

Fun footnote, the Kingdoms of Kalamar setting for third edition was touted by its authors to be precisely this: based on real world assumptions and patterns, and therefore should work more like the real world the more one plays in it. This was also probably a big reason why magic was a lot rarer in the setting than on average. The campaign setting sourcebook has virtually no mechanics at all. And according to those around at the time, the result was long forum threads on otter pelt trading rather than the mechanics of how to grapple :)

Witty Username
2021-12-27, 08:49 PM
Wait really? How do economies function then? If the gold isn’t worth anything then is the worth of coinage fiat and based on the strength and trust of the kingdom minting it?

At this point I am just asking so I can get some ideas on how to react to said bard and any future economic shenanigans….

I figure I should probably learn a bit about d&d economics if I am going to keep having him in my games.
Oh, I should be more clear and in less joking fashion.
Your economical minded player has real world concepts in mind. Like gold having inherent value (I don't think that is even true IRL but to go with it) in a d&d world there are means to produce precious metals with magic. This could make gold behave more like the US dollar instead of metal (just tell him this much and his brain might fry with some of the implications).
It short, the amount of gold in the coins likey doesn't collalate to there value very well.
As for exchange rates, a real world thing Is governments trading in the currency of a larger government so most of your coinage could be the large elf kingdom down the way, or bring up EU style situations where multiple ruling bodies share currency deliberately.

Mutazoia
2021-12-28, 01:37 AM
Coin collecting under the broad umbrella of numismatics was a thing; the earliest confirmed collection of coins was by Petrarch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrarch) in the 14th Century, where he was approached by some vine diggers who had found some old coins and wanted him to either buy the coins or at least identify the ruler.
Suetonius records that Caesar Augustus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus) "On the Saturnalia, and at any other time when he took it into his head, he would now give gifts of clothing or gold and silver; again coins of every device, including old pieces of the kings and foreign money;".

I would hardly call the middle of the Renaissance "the middle ages." The Renaissance started in the 13 century and marked the end of the Middle Ages, which began in the 5th century with the collapse of Roman civilization. By the 14th century, people were starting to place more value on historical items as education became more widely available. Those with the means to afford an education and the leisure time to pursue it (the wealthy) could also afford to take to collecting old things and assigning value to them. They made their money through business and trade, not simply taxation of the surfs. But in the middle ages, no one had time for that nonsense, not even the nobility. A medieval lord didn't have a side business importing spices from India.

D&D has traditionally been assumed to be set in a fantastical Middle Ages setting with magic and monsters. I suppose you could advance things to the 14th century and we could all be playing 7th sea.

But that's all academic and getting a bit off-topic. The main point is, the OP simply has to tell his player that coin collecting/antiquing is not a thing in the world and that 1gp minted 80 years ago is valued exactly the same as 1gp minted 80 seconds ago.

Brother Oni
2021-12-28, 04:50 AM
I would hardly call the middle of the Renaissance "the middle ages." The Renaissance started in the 13 century and marked the end of the Middle Ages, which began in the 5th century with the collapse of Roman civilization. By the 14th century, people were starting to place more value on historical items as education became more widely available. Those with the means to afford an education and the leisure time to pursue it (the wealthy) could also afford to take to collecting old things and assigning value to them. They made their money through business and trade, not simply taxation of the surfs. But in the middle ages, no one had time for that nonsense, not even the nobility. A medieval lord didn't have a side business importing spices from India.

Depends on where in Europe you are at the the time. England took a long time to catch up with the rest of Europe and I would argue that the increased investment in people (serf, townsfolk and nobility alike) didn't happen anywhere until after the middle of the 14th Century when the Black Death hadn't left many people to invest in.

As for medieval lords not having side businesses, off the top of my head, the Knights Templar were famously bankers on the side (which resulted in their downfall), while the Teutonic Knights ran what was essentially package crusade holidays up in the Baltics during the late 13th Century. Even if a medieval lord didn't directly run the side business himself, there was more than enough opportunity for him to invest in such an enterprise, either by coin or by goods.



D&D has traditionally been assumed to be set in a fantastical Middle Ages setting with magic and monsters. I suppose you could advance things to the 14th century and we could all be playing 7th sea.

But that's all academic and getting a bit off-topic. The main point is, the OP simply has to tell his player that coin collecting/antiquing is not a thing in the world and that 1gp minted 80 years ago is valued exactly the same as 1gp minted 80 seconds ago.

D&D is a weird mis-mash - you won't get the heavier forms of armour (plate harness and the like) without the presence of gunpowder and magic isn't a substitute (while there are some offensive spells which work on touch AC, I can't think of any which work off full AC) - I concede that in some settings, either the dwarves or the gnomes have steampunk style technology which mimic the effect of gunpowder technology, but that's not the norm.

That said, I agree with you - if the OP says coin collecting isn't a thing in his world, then it's not a thing. I just wanted to provide context that it's not solely a modern thing.

Sapphire Guard
2021-12-28, 07:51 AM
Something odd about this, the player should know there are many more possible variables if they really do study economics.

Given the famine, maybe those mercenaries were paid largely in food. Maybe there's no fixed exchange rate, different merchants may accept whatever coins are useful to them, or different exchanges offer different rates. Maybe the food rationing was done with ration cards or by family, not via coin.

Jay R
2021-12-28, 10:06 AM
You can take any single aspect of human or societal behavior and successfully improve the simulation with a more realistic approach to the point where the game is unplayable.

The effect of weapons on human bodies is far more complex than "hit points". We use hit points specifically to make it easy enough to play the game.

The effect of personal abilities on actions is far more complex than "+5% per 2 points of characteristic". We use +5% per 2 points of characteristic specifically to make it easy enough to play the game.

And yes, the effect of coinage on a medieval society is far more complex than "gold pieces and silver piece with a 10-1 ratio". We use gold pieces and silver pieces with a 10-1 ratio specifically to make it easy enough to play the game.

Talakeal
2021-12-28, 01:57 PM
It sounds like your player is in the "just enough knowledge to be dangerous" territory. He knows more about economics than most people, so he assumes he knows everything.

I went through a similar period in my 20s after reading a book about banking, and I imagine I was very annoying to game with for a few years as I tried to ring every copper piece out of the game.

In D&D and similar games, coinage is very clearly based on the value of the metal rather than any sort of fiat currency, so I would imagine most of what your player is trying just wouldn't work, and the small edges he would get could probably be better simulated by taking profession: trader and using it to make some extra cash (assuming the system has such a thing).



In my experience you get much bigger problems are players who insist that their characters live like bums, spend every spare moment working, commit tax fraud, haggle over everything, and steal and loot anything that isn't nailed down and insist on selling it for at least retail price. It got so bad that I just switched over to an abstract wealth system which ignores minor day to day purchases, but it still hurts my players "immersion" that they don't get extra money from pick-pocketing random people or living an acetic murder-hobo lifestyle.

Mutazoia
2021-12-28, 11:25 PM
As for medieval lords not having side businesses, off the top of my head, the Knights Templar were famously bankers on the side (which resulted in their downfall), while the Teutonic Knights ran what was essentially package crusade holidays up in the Baltics during the late 13th Century. Even if a medieval lord didn't directly run the side business himself, there was more than enough opportunity for him to invest in such an enterprise, either by coin or by goods.

A knightly order is a far cry from a landed nobleman who has to worry about managing [his bit of] an agrarian society, collecting taxes, making sure his taxes are paid, raising and training a small army, etc.


D&D is a weird mis-mash - you won't get the heavier forms of armour (plate harness and the like) without the presence of gunpowder and magic isn't a substitute (while there are some offensive spells which work on touch AC, I can't think of any which work off full AC) - I concede that in some settings, either the dwarves or the gnomes have steampunk style technology which mimic the effect of gunpowder technology, but that's not the norm.

Traditionally, it's the other way around. You won't have the heaver (plate) armor once you have gunpowder, as the development of guns is what made armor obsolete to begin with. But yes, D&D has always been a bit of a mish-mash of historical eras, but it has almost always been modeled after a medieval one, with some renaissance chunks in.

But if we want to continue this bit, we should probably move it to it's own thread lol.

Brother Oni
2021-12-29, 08:47 AM
A knightly order is a far cry from a landed nobleman who has to worry about managing [his bit of] an agrarian society, collecting taxes, making sure his taxes are paid, raising and training a small army, etc.

Given that many a landed nobleman ended up signing his lands into trust with the Knights Templar for safekeeping when they were called up for Crusades or other active service components of their duty to their lord, I wouldn't call it that much of a far cry.

The nobility were often backers of merchants; after all more merchants means more tolls and tariffs to collect for the landowner. In England under the Assize of Arms 1181, if you were a poor knight controlling a fief worth a single knight's fee (the amount of productive land capable of sustaining a single knight, which at the bottom end is between 750-1500 acres of mostly forest and uncultivated moorland), you were only expected to turn up for your 40 days annual service as a single fully kitted out knight with a mail hauberk, helmet, shield and lance.

I'm highly sceptical that even a single knight's fee fief couldn't provide sufficient spare capital or even goods for the landowner knight to not invest into something; after all he still has to maintain his arms and armour and pay taxes on top of his living expenses.


Traditionally, it's the other way around. You won't have the heaver (plate) armor once you have gunpowder, as the development of guns is what made armor obsolete to begin with. But yes, D&D has always been a bit of a mish-mash of historical eras, but it has almost always been modeled after a medieval one, with some renaissance chunks in.

But if we want to continue this bit, we should probably move it to it's own thread lol.

I disagree with this as the introduction of gunpowder weapons in the 13th Century was what led to the introduction of heavier armours (the heaviest armour in the 12th Century was mail with a shield and helmet). As the weapons started getting better, heavier rigid armours were introduced but eventually gunpowder weapons developed to the stage where no amount of armour was effective, thus they cut back to the bare essentials (Napoleonic era cuirassiers for example), before it was phased out completely except for the helmet by the middle of WW1 (flack armours aside).

There's a Real World Weapons, Armour or Tactics thread (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?619741-Got-a-Real-World-Weapon-Armour-or-Tactics-Question-Mk-XXIX) that we can carry this on if you like.

Mr Blobby
2021-12-29, 11:43 PM
Bard: Cool, who minted these?

GM: Are you asking this IC or OOC?

Bard: OOC.

GM: You, the player, didn't find the coins so you have no idea.

OR

Bard: Cool, who minted these?

GM: Are you asking this IC or OOC?

Bard: IC.

GM: Make a History check.

Bard: *rolls* Made it!

GM: Err, King Carolus Rex III…

Bard: Cool, so is he the reigning king or did he reign in the bygone past?

GM: He is the current King’s grandfather, so he reign ended over 80 years ago.

Bard: Cool, these should be worth more than double the current coins in circulation at least, correct?

GM: Make an Appraisal check.

Bard: *rolls* Nailed it!

GM: Yeah these coins should be worth 5x the normal value. So what is the party doing next?


You as GM need to maintain the 4th-wall between player and character. First identify if the question is IC or OOC. If OOC the player can't know. If IC, resolve it with rolls and setting info or improvisation. Then quickly push the scene forward. Hope this helps.

This is much better way to respond to this. You, the GM can hide behind your screen and the fact that economics does not yet exist as a discipline in your pseudo-mediaeval world. The player's character would not understand even what 'inflation' is (though a well-travelled, well-read PC might understand 'some currencies are worth more than others') for example.

But I am going to ding the OP a bit on this. A player is picking holes in your scenery. This is not inherently bad. And until proven otherwise, take their picking as genuine interest in your world, not trying to take over or make you look/feel stupid. Yes, you're doing this for fun but it's a lazy GM who basically refuses to learn anything ever to improve their craft.

See this as a challenge - to gain knowledge, to up your game. Go off and read an article or two online about the basics of the mediaeval European economy. And make sure that your world at least makes vague sense on a basic level economically.

BRC has the best general idea; that 'GP' is basically, the USD of the world. Everything is valued in it, including other currencies. The '50GP worth of old currency' might be worth a lot more metal-wise because yes, it was before mass currency debasement... which is why the pouch only has 15 coins, not 50.

If your economics player wants to peek behind the scenery economically - allow them to. State that [for example] normally you simply handwaved the 'selling of loot' bit, but for them explain how the shopkeeper does it - that it's not just one but a series [the wizard for the magic items, the blacksmith for weapons etc], flesh out the way they value items [the jeweller assays your gold/silver coins for content etc], explain that normally only large settlements have more than one seller option and if they insist, allow them to have a mini-scene where they haggle and so on.

Doing this, coupled with some basic economic/history knowledge and the occasional hiding behind your screen might work.

Lacco
2021-12-30, 04:54 AM
So, read through the replies, good stuff all around. Let's see if there is something that has not been discussed... disclaimer: I'd go with the suggestion to recruit him to do this stuff for you. But just for fun, let me put my *evil GM hat* and practice proper laughter... :smallbiggrin:

First: there is not only "yes" and "no". There is the wonderful "yes, but...".


Bard: Cool, so is he the reigning king or did he reign in the bygone past?

Me: He is the current King’s grandfather, so he reign ended over 80 years ago.

Bard: Cool, these should be worth more than double the current coins in circulation at least, correct?

EvilMe: Yes, but current king hates the memory of his grandfather so much that he actually outlawed those coins. You'll have to find someone to either buy them at lower value... or melt them for their gold content. But they are much lighter...


*Party enters a new city*

Bard: I roll a knowledge check

Me: this port city is run by several merchant guilds under the stewardship of a long line of hereditary Princes hailing from a noble lineage of the city’s original founder. It is an independent city-state unaffiliated with the Empire to the North or the Caliphate to the East, as such it is a hub of trade and commerce, garrisoned by a city guard as well as an order of battlemages .

Bard: Cool, what’s the exchange rate?

Me: Excuse me?

Bard: Well this is an independent city-state right? So they should be minting their own money, which means there should be an exchange rate. Since this city has strong trade ties with the Empire AND is dependent on the Empire’s navy to patrol the seas for piracy, I am assuming that Imperial Crowns have a favorable conversion rate?

EvilMe:…. yes, but they also impose a tax. Unfair one, as they live from the trade. Especially for unknown parties that could be. Basically, until you do few quests for them, you'll be getting the "Barbarian Horde Standard" exchange rate (which is around 25%). And don't let me get started on the bureaucracy!

OR

EvilMe: Yes, they started minting their own coin, but the other states do not use it. So basically, you get 10 ICS (independent city state) coins for 1 gp... but good luck spending it elsewhere.


Aside from the "yes, but...", you can also go for an overkill.

"So, the loot from the goblin band comes down to 5 Cormanthiri silver ducats, 12 Stahlish silver marks, 8 pieces of Arhchezi golden spires and one Archezi silver dangdisting... and two dozen copper coins that are too oxidized to recognize where they come from."

...oh, yes, I have done this.



Hat goes off.

So, my actual advice would be to talk to this player. And discuss how far he wants to go with this: if this is just to improve his enjoyment of the game because he WANTS to have these kinds of things, then tell him outright - as many suggested - that you are not so versed in medieval economics, and he can help you out. But you will not give him freebies - and he should not abuse the system. And he's the one responsible for bookkeeping (don't put this on other players' backs).

If he just wants to have these tidbits of information to help him, inform him also that he's not really versed in medieval economics: because he'd know that gold coins would be extremely rare and having one would mean he could easily starve to death as smaller villages would not have anything to trade him for it (especially if they are serfs). So you can together work out a system for this to work.

If he's in for a full-fledged game of Traders & Usurers, then ask him to come with an economic system for your NEXT game. Because you are - if I'm not mistaken - playing Dungeons & Dragons.

Again, I'm fully willing to incorporate any real world knowledge that is applicable, but there is no way his character KNOWS the exchange rates. Because there are NO exchange rates - the rowers' guild will give you a better one than the coopers' guild, and Izgabok the banker will give you an excellent one - but will most probably ask an unfair brokerage... Tankier the landlord will give you 3 for 2 but will most probably give you cut coins (shaved ones, that have been filed off a bit) and the crazy drunk will give you 10:1, but will try to run away with your money.

It's that simple: there is no internet & no overall system. The folks are just making it up as they go, trying to profit at all stations.

Also, one personal word of advice:


Bard: I roll a knowledge check

Me: this port city is run by several merchant guilds under the stewardship of a long line of hereditary Princes hailing from a noble lineage of the city’s original founder. It is an independent city-state unaffiliated with the Empire to the North or the Caliphate to the East, as such it is a hub of trade and commerce, garrisoned by a city guard as well as an order of battlemages .


This should not happen. I understand if this is just simplified version, but you should do it differently.

Bard: I roll a knowledge check.

Me: What for...? What do you want to know?

Bard: I want to know the exchange rate.

Me: That's not a knowledge check. That's 'gather information' check. To find out who gives the best rates...I'd assume. And the best rate is 1:1 (that includes taxes, brokerage and bribes). Do you want to roleplay the whole thing?

...because you can make an adventure of finding a broker in a fantasy city! :smallsmile: Or clothes shopping! Anything is an adventure if the opposition is there!

Glorthindel
2022-01-04, 08:15 AM
So, read through the replies, good stuff all around. Let's see if there is something that has not been discussed... disclaimer: I'd go with the suggestion to recruit him to do this stuff for you. But just for fun, let me put my *evil GM hat* and practice proper laughter... :smallbiggrin:

First: there is not only "yes" and "no". There is the wonderful "yes, but...".


Bard: Cool, so is he the reigning king or did he reign in the bygone past?

Me: He is the current King’s grandfather, so he reign ended over 80 years ago.

Bard: Cool, these should be worth more than double the current coins in circulation at least, correct?

EvilMe: Yes, but current king hates the memory of his grandfather so much that he actually outlawed those coins. You'll have to find someone to either buy them at lower value... or melt them for their gold content. But they are much lighter...


*Party enters a new city*

Bard: I roll a knowledge check

Me: this port city is run by several merchant guilds under the stewardship of a long line of hereditary Princes hailing from a noble lineage of the city’s original founder. It is an independent city-state unaffiliated with the Empire to the North or the Caliphate to the East, as such it is a hub of trade and commerce, garrisoned by a city guard as well as an order of battlemages .

Bard: Cool, what’s the exchange rate?

Me: Excuse me?

Bard: Well this is an independent city-state right? So they should be minting their own money, which means there should be an exchange rate. Since this city has strong trade ties with the Empire AND is dependent on the Empire’s navy to patrol the seas for piracy, I am assuming that Imperial Crowns have a favorable conversion rate?

EvilMe:…. yes, but they also impose a tax. Unfair one, as they live from the trade. Especially for unknown parties that could be. Basically, until you do few quests for them, you'll be getting the "Barbarian Horde Standard" exchange rate (which is around 25%). And don't let me get started on the bureaucracy!

OR

EvilMe: Yes, they started minting their own coin, but the other states do not use it. So basically, you get 10 ICS (independent city state) coins for 1 gp... but good luck spending it elsewhere.


Aside from the "yes, but...", you can also go for an overkill.

"So, the loot from the goblin band comes down to 5 Cormanthiri silver ducats, 12 Stahlish silver marks, 8 pieces of Arhchezi golden spires and one Archezi silver dangdisting... and two dozen copper coins that are too oxidized to recognize where they come from."

...oh, yes, I have done this.


Absolutely; you have to remember, as the DM, you control the system. All of it. So, one of your players has found one lever that he thinks he can use to leverage an advantage, but you have a dozen other levers that you can pull to turn that advantage firmly on its head if you so wish.

But do you want to?

Ideally, the best way is to figure out a middle ground, let his knowledge of the subject leverage an occasional advantage, but don't let him dominate the conversation. Give him an inch, so he can enjoy his feeling of being smart, and if he tries to take the whole yard, roll him back 100 meters. Find the middle ground between him essentially making things up because you don't know the minutae of what he is discussing, and having rocks fall, everyone gets poor.

martixy
2022-01-05, 09:26 AM
Instead of fighting him, can you recruit him? Give him some basic parameters and let him go nuts on the economic worldbuilding to help you.

OP, why did you dismiss this?

Do not ignore this.

A thousand, million times this.

Best advice in this thread, in the very first response and everyone just quietly passed it over.

Wintermoot
2022-01-05, 09:56 AM
OP, why did you dismiss this?

Do not ignore this.

A thousand, million times this.

Best advice in this thread, in the very first response and everyone just quietly passed it over.

I'm not 100% convinced. Because there is more people at the table than just the one problem player.

let's say he has five players and only ONE of them wants to play economics: the tradewars. The other four are fine as is.

So next week, the problem player brings in a 30 page document on his new economic system, a complex and complicated pastiche of the eco 101 half-understood scrabblings that the problem player has hinted at already while thinking he's the ultimate crypto-bro.

Do the other four players have to read and follow it? Does the DM? Will the game that the other four love have to bog down now so that the problem player can spent four hours negotiating a 5% discount on the longsword +2 he wants and so they can go through the last treasure horde coin by coin, going to several different numismatist in order to turn 10,000 gp into 10,376 gp?

There's a point where one person's fun doesn't get to trump the fun of everyone else playing the game.

That being said, it COULD work out gangbusters, so it doesn't hurt to give it a try. Just be prepared, if the guy shows up with a too complicated unfun system, to shut him down and hurt his feelings. Make sure he understands that going in and be willing to work some hours with him to make something usable.

Max_Killjoy
2022-01-05, 10:19 AM
If I had a player like this, I'd tell them to write up their observations and send me a document with backing sources between sessions.

During the sessions, I don't want it taking up the other players' time.

Outside of the sessions, the "expert economist" can decide if it's worth their time to present their argument to the level of academic detail and rigor they're claiming to possess, and if they're willing to demonstrate that their knowledge extends beyond the present day and into actual historical economics.

dafrca
2022-01-05, 12:55 PM
OP, why did you dismiss this?

Do not ignore this.

A thousand, million times this.

Best advice in this thread, in the very first response and everyone just quietly passed it over.

No, some of us did agree with the idea. But sadly it was shot down because too many people went to the extreme and claimed this means you have to let him do what ever he wants and the GM/other players are stuck with what he does.

IME if the player if asked to help, not GM or write rules, but rather advise and cooperate with the GM it can be a positive thing for the game.

BRC
2022-01-05, 01:33 PM
Joint-worldbuilding with somebody who is passionate CAN be fun, but you gotta be careful.

There are two questions at play here. 1) Is this player's behavior the result of genuine passion for economic worldbuilding (Something often neglected in D&D), or are they just trying to use academic razzle-dazzle to their advantage.

I obviously don't know them, but I'm inclined to the latter. They make a LOT of assumptions, which usually end up in a simple Benefit for the PC's. "The current king is having financial troubles, therefore the current currency must be debased and the old coins are more valuable. Give us more money".

Like, yes, debasement of coinage was something that Kings did in times of financial trouble, but it doesn't necessarily follow that old coins will be worth more than new ones, just because the state is currently in financial trouble.
Generally speaking, this sort of jumping to conclusions is a sign that the player in question is more motivated by the advantage than by the worldbuilding, or is just showing off.


2) Assuming the passion is genuine, would Indulging that passion for economic worldbuilding make the game better?

If you have one player who is really interested in exploring the economics of pseudo-medieval fantasy societies, to the point that they actually want to deal with those economics in-game with stuff like exchanging currency and dealing with coin debasement, but the rest of the players do not share that interest, then letting the one interested player go wild with worldbuilding can be a pitfall.


Because what you've done is introduced considerable depth to the game world that only one player (The one who you let design it) is actually interested in engaging with. More depth is not always better.

Now, when they go to a new town they can't just Spend Their Gold, they need to deal with whatever economic situation Passionate Economist Player has built around that town. They have to do Paperwork, which is mostly going to consist of PEP sitting down and explaining whatever is going on here.


To give another example, lets say you have one player who is really, really into swords. They know a lot about medieval swordsmithing techniques, and what, exactly, it took to get a new Sword in a pre-industrial setting.


Now, one of your PC's is like "I would like to buy a sword". So they try to follow generic RPG logic and go to the local blacksmith to buy a sword.

Only for Blacksmithing Player to be like "Hold on, this guy is a small-town blacksmith, he's good for farming tools and horseshoes, but you'd need a specialist Swordsmith to make a sword". So now you need to go to the local Noble or whoever to get the name of their Sword Guy, and go to him and wait a few in-game weeks while the Swordsmith makes the sword, because a good sword is hard to make and he might need to source some quality steel and ect ect ect.

And I'm sure your Blacksmith Player is having a GREAT time showing off their knowledge of what it took to Make A Sword in medieval Europe, but everybody else just wanted to turn some gold coins into a new sword so they can get back to their Questing.

KorvinStarmast
2022-01-05, 02:09 PM
So you’re saying is that those “valuable historic” coins that the bard is carrying may just happen to be counterfeit…tell me, what is the usual penalty for counterfeiting in the Middle Ages? Decapitation? The stocks? Losing a hand?

I want it to be “authentic” after all? Then decide, but all of the above makes sense; depending on the bribe offered by the bard's party mates, maybe it's the stocks, maybe it's losing a hand, maybe it's decapitation. How much do they love their bard friend? :smallcool:

Yeah, the problem is that I didn’t think that through… I didn’t exactly flesh out the economics nor thought much of these factors. You are not required to. In D&D, gold pieces are a token, a way of keeping score, that have only a mild relationship to real world coins.
D&D is not an economic simulator.
Don't drive your self crazy, you have better things to spend your time on.


When he joined up he had a neat folder and notepad where he asked about “which kingdoms would my character know about?” As well as asking “what are the economies of such and such locations” I just assumed he wanted to be prepared for roleplaying because his character is the disinherited son of a wealthy merchant. The simple answer is "this isn't a game of economics, it's a game of adventuring"


So I just gave him generic answers to go off of “port town”, “agrarian”, this town makes good wine, etc.
And that's all you have to do. It is then the next player's turn to engage with the DM. Do not let one player hog the spotlight.

There were several incidents that were more or less full scale civil wars, massive armies armed with cannon and all, that started over people minting when they didn't have a right to. The nobles of the time were well aware that leaving this unchecked will destroy trust in their coinage, and them as rulers by extension. Yes.

The problem is that economics is a very complicated subject, and medieval economics even more so, since we lack a lot of the base data. Yes. Economists are no better than meteorologists in their predictions working, and arguably worse.

A DnD gold piece is as much a function of game balance as it is of verisimilitude - screw around with it too much and you can see things fall apart. Also true.

I didn’t become a DM to have to create an economy for one player to exploit though
Up until now, the “economy” in my world was secondary
Then tell him that. Explicitly.

The “expert” part is what worries me, what’s stopping them from creating financial backdoors and loopholes to exploit for their own benefit? You are, if you decide to be a DM who can make a decision.

As for the second, I'd patiently explain that D&D is not 'economy simulator.' It's abstracted, more heavily in some areas than others, and things like exchange rates are not really a thing I'm going to be dealing with. And if he doesn't like it he can find a different game.
This is great advice.

As said the conversation should never have happened. This is basically the player trying to write your world for you. Also true.

"Yes, the factor you're missing is more or less complete opacity about how the kingdom is making money, a subject on which I'm not going to educate you because you don't have a plausible way to know it. You don't know if there's a secret mine. You don't know if there's a captive mage producing stuff. You don't know if there's a magic item at play. You can make assumptions if you wish, but assumptions kind of have a bad relationship with reality." That's the better line.

"The word 'should' does not mean 'is'. And again, I do not see the feat Fantasy Medieval ForEx Trader on your character sheet. Exchange rates are proprietary and indeed closely-guarded knowledge for usage between very well-heeled merchants. This is not a world where that sort of information is available to the public. So once again, your assumptions will just have to be tested via interactions with actual traders or merchants in the city." That made me chuckle. :smallsmile:

But even simpler is "Play and Find Out" -

Hell, forget the bog-standard thieves' guild, forget the evil cultists trying to resurrect Dead God #1001, a protection racket that seeks to strangle silver prices by murdering silver miners or merchants in town and thus keep a cartel in place could be just as ruthless and lethal as anybody else. That's a fine adventure hook/premise.

You do have to say, "No". That works.
But I do like this point:

"One ounce of gold from one kingdom exchanges for exactly one ounce of gold from another kingdom. When the exact metallic content of a coin can be easily detected, then all nations use pretty much the same weight of coins."
And 100x this.

You don't have to apologize for not creating an economic structure.

pwykersotz
2022-01-05, 08:53 PM
You could always just do what D&D is good at and abstract it.

"Sure, it might be more valuable. Or maybe less. You don't necessarily know all the economic factors. When you get back to town, you get to make a knowledge check on each source of treasure when you try to spend it. If you succeed, you can count your currency as being x% more valuable, like haggling but with your unique skills. Maybe in some cases, failure means you have misunderstood the economics and it's less valuable. And in the meantime, if you have any thoughts on how I could improve economics in my game in general without it being too much for me to casually introduce, then let's talk about that outside of game."

Mr Blobby
2022-01-06, 10:56 AM
Though the part of the problem is that it's not lessons in economics which are 'required', but economic history.

Most economics courses don't cover this, at least not more than occasionally in passing.

This is where I think the OP can trump the player.


...To give another example, lets say you have one player who is really, really into swords. They know a lot about medieval swordsmithing techniques, and what, exactly, it took to get a new Sword in a pre-industrial setting.

Now, one of your PC's is like "I would like to buy a sword". So they try to follow generic RPG logic and go to the local blacksmith to buy a sword.

Only for Blacksmithing Player to be like "Hold on, this guy is a small-town blacksmith, he's good for farming tools and horseshoes, but you'd need a specialist Swordsmith to make a sword". So now you need to go to the local Noble or whoever to get the name of their Sword Guy, and go to him and wait a few in-game weeks while the Swordsmith makes the sword, because a good sword is hard to make and he might need to source some quality steel and ect ect ect.

And I'm sure your Blacksmith Player is having a GREAT time showing off their knowledge of what it took to Make A Sword in medieval Europe, but everybody else just wanted to turn some gold coins into a new sword so they can get back to their Questing.

It's not a binary choice, here. You can - as GM - accept that a village wouldn't have enough 'economic activity' to support a bunch of mid-tier PCs offload a ton of loot and lack the 'capabilities' to support their needs and *instead have them fast-travel to a location which would*. Or, to use your example...

Player: "Hold on, this guy is a small-town blacksmith, he's good for farming tools and horseshoes, but you'd need a specialist Swordsmith to make a sword"
Me: '[SmallTown] has a militia. Who do you think repairs the weapons and armour? Plus, [GameLand] has long suffered from disorder, war and so on. Most blacksmiths have picked up at least some blade-making skill, often serving local lords, the military or mercenary bands.'

Now, our blacksmith might already have some part-finished blades there. Or one in stock for some reason(s) ['damn customer never paid for it!'] If they're hawking their own wares and swords are always popular, they may have a couple of generic ones on-hand. Perhaps a previous adventuring party brought back a load of old salvaged blades our blacksmith treated / sharpened for a bit of money?

In short: use common sense. Just like you wouldn't expect a little corner shop to stock kokum, vintage calvados and a range of caviars, you wouldn't expect a generic-y small-town smithy to have a stock of Infinity+1 blades for sale or be able to produce one from scratch overnight.

You don't need an economics degree to realise that.

KorvinStarmast
2022-01-06, 10:59 AM
You don't need an economics degree to realise that. necessity is the mother of innovation, to rephrase an old adage. (Nice post, +1)

BRC
2022-01-06, 11:05 AM
Though the part of the problem is that it's not lessons in economics which are 'required', but economic history.

Most economics courses don't cover this, at least not more than occasionally in passing.

This is where I think the OP can trump the player.



It's not a binary choice, here. You can - as GM - accept that a village wouldn't have enough 'economic activity' to support a bunch of mid-tier PCs offload a ton of loot and lack the 'capabilities' to support their needs and *instead have them fast-travel to a location which would*. Or, to use your example...

Player: "Hold on, this guy is a small-town blacksmith, he's good for farming tools and horseshoes, but you'd need a specialist Swordsmith to make a sword"
Me: '[SmallTown] has a militia. Who do you think repairs the weapons and armour? Plus, [GameLand] has long suffered from disorder, war and so on. Most blacksmiths have picked up at least some blade-making skill, often serving local lords, the military or mercenary bands.'

Now, our blacksmith might already have some part-finished blades there. Or one in stock for some reason(s) ['damn customer never paid for it!'] If they're hawking their own wares and swords are always popular, they may have a couple of generic ones on-hand. Perhaps a previous adventuring party brought back a load of old salvaged blades our blacksmith treated / sharpened for a bit of money?

In short: use common sense. Just like you wouldn't expect a little corner shop to stock kokum, vintage calvados and a range of caviars, you wouldn't expect a generic-y small-town smithy to have a stock of Infinity+1 blades for sale or be able to produce one from scratch overnight.

You don't need an economics degree to realise that.

You're correct, but I was talking about the context of letting the player in question have control over the worldbuilding (as people were discussing with OP's player).

If you let Blacksmithing-Pendant guy dictate the rules for Blacksmithing in the setting, then Village Blacksmith won't have any swords for sale. which is fine if that's the sort of realism people want, but not if your other players just want to be able to buy a sword without going through a lot of effort.

My point was that adherence to historical realism doesn't always improve the game, so even if a player has genuine passion for some relevant topic, letting them build that bit of the world isn't necessarily a good thing.

Mr Blobby
2022-01-06, 11:32 AM
But on the other side, I'm willing to listen to Blacksmithing-Pendant to if they've spotted any howlers I've made as GM on the topic. Over the years, I've both spotted howlers and had mine spotted. And to be honest, in the world of internet searches etc a GM has way less excuse to making such howlers - it took me about 60 secs to get from a search engine to a suitable Quora page about 'times/cost to make a mediaeval sword'.

Which leads to my main belief - the GM needs to know their world better than any player.

I personally don't really hold with letting players worldbuild*. At best, I'd let them suggest fixes to obvious problems as/when they come up, that's it. Worldbuilding requires showing the player 'under the bonnet' which a GM simply should not do, period.

* The only exception I grant is for things directly to do with the PC. And even then, I shall not consider it sacrosanct either. And vice-versa.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-01-06, 11:40 AM
My point was that adherence to historical realism doesn't always improve the game, so even if a player has genuine passion for some relevant topic, letting them build that bit of the world isn't necessarily a good thing.

Another related note:

Fantasy worlds are not Earth. Much of what we call "historical realism" isn't set by inalterable laws of nature[1], but rather by the actual order of events that happened. In fact, much of what we call "economic law" or "historical law" is just an expression of path dependence. It happened that way on Earth, because of Earth's history, culture, and situations. That's no guarantee[2] that identical conditions will prevail in <fantasy world>. And since it's all quite sensitive to initial conditions (and not just initial ones, but the conditions all the way along), historical realism is actually one of the less verisimilitude-preserving options.

And yes, this goes for a lot of things. Technologies[3], social structures, religious conventions, fighting styles, etc. Techniques that were developed for Earth, by Earthlings, will not necessarily be the same in a different universe, by different peoples with different conditions and needs.

[1] and even the laws of nature are not guaranteed to be (and are almost certainly not) the same, at least if you want a consistent, well-thought-out universe.
[2] in fact, if I saw a fantasy universe where everything followed the same paths as it did on Earth, but just with dragons and magic, I'd be even more inclined to call bad worldbuilding. Fundamental changes are fundamental; stapling magic on top of real history without accounting for it is lazy. It may be different in a "hidden world/masquerade" or "magic comes back" scenario where the magic and magic things are hidden away or only just appeared, but if there's been magic all along, things will be extremely different. And just forcing things to stay the same is a recipe for total setting incoherence.
[3] people complain about D&D's anachronisms and things like "there wasn't studded leather armor!!1!" or "longswords aren't right!!1!". To which I say "fie on thee." It's not the real world. Different conditions mean different solutions to different problems. Different ores and alloys (heck, different fundamental physical laws) mean different solutions to different problems. Etc. The history of technology is mostly accidental path dependence, not some video game tech tree. Sorry Civilization.

Max_Killjoy
2022-01-06, 12:01 PM
I do have some pushback on that.

1) If a real-world term is being used, then use it accurately, don't just slap a different / wrong meaning on it and then say "But it's a different world". If it's a different thing, use a different term. See also, movies or stories that claim to be set in and use a real time and place, and real people, but are really just random fiction using those names for marketing reasons. (This IS NOT Sparta, guys.) Don't call something a longsword if it's not a longsword, call it something else.

2) Sometimes things don't work for very basic practical reasons. Studded leather never being a thing isn't "because historical circumstance", it's because sticking some metal studs in soft leather doesn't make it any more protective than soft leather without the studs (which is very nearly no protection to begin with). Even if the setting has some special source or process that makes soft leather more protective, sticking a few metal studs in it won't make it better armor.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-01-06, 12:10 PM
I do have some pushback on that.

1) If a real-world term is being used, then use it accurately, don't just slap a different / wrong meaning on it and then say "But it's a different world". If it's a different thing, use a different term. See also, movies or stories that claim to be set in and use a real time and place, and real people, but are really just random fiction using those names for marketing reasons. (This IS NOT Sparta, guys.) Don't call something a longsword if it's not a longsword, call it something else.

2) Sometimes things don't work for very basic practical reasons. Studded leather never being a thing isn't "because historical circumstance", it's because sticking some metal studs in soft leather doesn't make it any more protective than soft leather without the studs (which is very nearly no protection to begin with). Even if the setting has some special source or process that makes soft leather more protective, sticking a few metal studs in it won't make it better armor.

1) So we should call it a asdofdapsidy instead? I'd say made-up names are worse that re-using terms that, in one particular technical (and not historical, actually) vocabulary connote the (slightly) wrong category of things that really weren't categorized well, despite being a perfectly descriptive term (it's a sword, it's longer than a short sword but shorter than a great sword)?

Note--the idea that words only can have one meaning, dictated by the most technically specific use, is bad linguistics. Natural languages are polysemic. Words have radically different meanings in different contexts. That's normal. Natural languages are not computer languages. And the term used in universe for these things is not the english term. Which makes it a translation issue, entirely for game purposes. And the game is not marketed at technical historians of arms and armor. Nor should it be. Because it's not using those terms in their earth-historical context! And thus they should have different meanings. Context defines meaning.

Edit: not to mention that there have been a whole pile of different things called by names that basically translate to "long sword" across history. The idea that there is one unique "long sword" is entirely a-historical, an invention of modern scholars who love to put things in little boxes, even if those boxes don't actually reflect real use.

2) Or maybe what you're thinking of as studded leather armor isn't really what the universe is using for that term? Especially since that's not what (at least 5e) D&D denotes by studded leather armor? ("Made from tough but flexible leather, studded leather is reinforced with close-set rivets or spikes", building on leather armor as "The breastplate and shoulder protectors of this armor are made of leather that has been stiffened by being boiled in oil. The rest of the armor is made of softer and more flexible materials"), so you're looking at some form of boiled leather cuirass, not soft leather.

Mr Blobby
2022-01-06, 12:20 PM
Well, we're stuck [generally] with the terminology used by the game in question...

But I think the important thing is that fantasy or not, the 'internal logic' does need to hang together. That somehow, you've got to answer those questions like 'if gold is valuable, why don't wizards simply magic it up?' and similar. As long as your world can hang together like that, you're more able to fend off the more nitpicky questions.

Max_Killjoy
2022-01-06, 12:35 PM
1) So we should call it a asdofdapsidy instead? I'd say made-up names are worse that re-using terms that, in one particular technical (and not historical, actually) vocabulary connote the (slightly) wrong category of things that really weren't categorized well, despite being a perfectly descriptive term (it's a sword, it's longer than a short sword but shorter than a great sword)?


Problem is, what D&D called a "longsword" until 5e -- a single-handed sword between "short" and "b*st*rd" -- is an inaccurate usage in any naming scheme, period or retronymic, and makes a hash of things.

The least confusing retronym for a larger one-handed sword with a straight blade and two edges would be something like "arming sword" (see also, "Viking sword", or some other period-specific terms that would fit some settings), while a "longsword" would be a full-size two-handed weapon also useable one-handed and smaller than a "great sword" (or other regional specific names), and a "hand-and-a-half" / "b*st*rd" sword would sit between the "longsword" and the "arming sword" and more suited to one-handed use than a full "longsword". If there's a category that's not needed, it's that intermediate sword, which can be treated as a small "longsword" with no real mechanical difference in system.

The most functional breakpoint for "longsword" would be "can be used two-handed, does not HAVE to be used two-handed" -- with a different weapon at the "one handed" and "two handed" ends.

The broken usage of "longsword" was unfortunately popularized by D&D, so it still sees a lot of use in common discussion and in other games. :smallfrown:




2) Or maybe what you're thinking of as studded leather armor isn't really what the universe is using for that term? Especially since that's not what (at least 5e) D&D denotes by studded leather armor? ("Made from tough but flexible leather, studded leather is reinforced with close-set rivets or spikes", building on leather armor as "The breastplate and shoulder protectors of this armor are made of leather that has been stiffened by being boiled in oil. The rest of the armor is made of softer and more flexible materials"), so you're looking at some form of boiled leather cuirass, not soft leather.


Someone should tell the artists that, in D&D and elsewhere (such as costume designers) -- it's almost always depicted as soft leather.

And the period art that was and is interpreted to be "studded leather" by bad scholarship is probably a misunderstanding of artwork showing brigandine that had visible rivets.

Tests show that the metal studs/rivets don't add any protective value to soft or hardened leather.

The reasonable conclusion is that it's an entirely contrived idea that doesn't represent a real thing at all, just a concept that never existed because it didn't work.

BRC
2022-01-06, 12:37 PM
I do have some pushback on that.

1) If a real-world term is being used, then use it accurately, don't just slap a different / wrong meaning on it and then say "But it's a different world". If it's a different thing, use a different term. See also, movies or stories that claim to be set in and use a real time and place, and real people, but are really just random fiction using those names for marketing reasons. (This IS NOT Sparta, guys.) Don't call something a longsword if it's not a longsword, call it something else.
This is where things can get a bit confusing in Nerdspace, and requiring accuracy might be more trouble than it's worth.
Historically speaking, a "longsword" can refer to any number of weapons, but generally refers to weapons intended to be wielded in two-hands.
In D&D, and most heroic fantasy, a "Longsword" Is your generic Sword to be paired with a shield. 5e has rules for 2-handing a longsword, but most two-handed fighters will use a Greatsword.

If we want to be more accurate, the D&D "Greatsword", a large weapon intended for use in two hands, should be called the "Longsword", and the "Longsword", a weapon balanced for use in one or two hands should be called a "Hand-and-a-Half" sword.

But, to do that you have to swim against the current as it were, fighting against a ton of cultural background noise defining the generic Cool One-Handed Sword as a Longsword, plus what the books themselves say, and is that a fight worth winning?

(If it helps, my brief research says that "Longsword" as a classification is kind of new anyway. The term shows up a lot historically, but mostly just to refer to "A sword that is long", which, yeah, most 2-handed swords were. Just say "in this setting, Longsword means "A longer one-handed sword", two-handed swords are Greatswords).


2) Sometimes things don't work for very basic practical reasons. Studded leather never being a thing isn't "because historical circumstance", it's because sticking some metal studs in soft leather doesn't make it any more protective than soft leather without the studs (which is very nearly no protection to begin with). Even if the setting has some special source or process that makes soft leather more protective, sticking a few metal studs in it won't make it better armor.

I usually hold Studded Leather armor as just, like "Well-made leather armor" rather than specifically "Leather armor with some studs in it". Like, if you took a piece of leather armor, you don't get +1 AC just by putting some metal studs through it.

As for practicality, well, this is where we get back into "Fantasy" and "What makes the game more fun".

The Village Blacksmith probably cannot make swords for very practical reasons. Swords are hard to make, and are expensive, specialist tools, even among soldiers. He'd have no reason to learn how to make swords, and even if he is equipping a local militia or whatever, it would be easier to teach them to use Spears than Swords, and it would be easier for our blacksmith to make such things. But the PC's want a sword, and inserting the practicalities of swordsmithing into the game doesn't really make things more fun.


Similarly, D&D doesn't have rules for, say, trying to swing a greataxe in a tight corridor. A few seconds of thinking about it tells me that doing so would probably be quite awkward and difficult, for very practical reasons. This is because we don't want to penalize characters who use Greataxes in a dungeon, because it's more fun that way.

You could implement rules where two-handed weapons are hard to use in tight spaces, so characters should switch to backup weapons, and if that's something your party would like, go ahead. It might be a cool tactical puzzle (Lure the greataxe-wielding enemy into a tight space to give them disadvantage while you go at them with shortswords!)

PhoenixPhyre
2022-01-06, 12:38 PM
The most functional breakpoint for "longsword" would be "can be used two-handed, does not HAVE to be used two-handed" -- with a different weapon at the "one handed" and "two handed" ends.


Oh wait, you mean exactly what 5e has it as?

Short sword: 1h only
Long sword: versatile (does more damage in 2h, can be used 1h)
Greatsword: 2h only.



Someone should tell the artists that, in D&D and elsewhere (such as costume designers) -- it's almost always depicted as soft leather.


Artists are always wrong. News at 11. The game itself uses the right descriptors.

And you're still arguing from earth history. Which is the whole point--that doesn't work in a universe that isn't earth.

Max_Killjoy
2022-01-06, 12:55 PM
Oh wait, you mean exactly what 5e has it as?

Short sword: 1h only
Long sword: versatile (does more damage in 2h, can be used 1h)
Greatsword: 2h only.

Yes, it was more of an issue before 5e, as I said, in the post you just quoted, but cut that part out.

[QUOTE=Max_Killjoy;25324906]
Problem is, what D&D called a "longsword" until 5e


And that still doesn't address the gap between that and a short sword. Either short swords like a gladius are represented as daggers, or larger one-handed weapons such as "arming swords" are poorly grouped with weapons like the gladius.




Artists are always wrong. News at 11. The game itself uses the right descriptors.


Then get better artists who understand what they're depicting and follow the written text -- instead of artists who just ape the existing bad depictions.




And you're still arguing from earth history. Which is the whole point--that doesn't work in a universe that isn't earth.

The studs won't work in a fictional setting for the same reason they didn't work historically. As I said in the previous post.

"But this isn't real historical earth" isn't a sufficient explanation for things that just don't work -- it's just an excuse along the lines of the "But Dragons!" fallacy.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-01-06, 01:03 PM
And that still doesn't address the gap between that and a short sword. Either short swords like a gladius are represented as daggers, or larger one-handed weapons such as "arming swords" are poorly grouped with weapons like the gladius.


Is there a reason in the game rules to make this distinction? Because the game rules are not the underlying fiction. They're a game UI presented so we can access it. It's entirely an abstraction; the in-universe fiction has (probably) a whole range of weapons inside each game-level weapon.




Then get better artists who understand what they're depicting and follow the written text -- instead of artists who just ape the existing bad depictions.


Good luck with that. The idea of artistic license is older than dirt. And most of it is for effect, rather than literal.



The studs won't work in a fictional setting for the same reason they didn't work historically. As I said in the previous post.

"But this isn't real historical earth" isn't a sufficient explanation for things that just don't work -- it's just an excuse along the lines of the "But Dragons!" fallacy.

"But Dragons" isn't an actual fallacy. The laws of the fictional universe, to support dragons existing, must be different. How much depends on the details. Arguing from earth history and earth tests is just flat out bad science.

Plus, (and this is the whole point), you're invoking specialist knowledge for something that isn't aimed at specialists or written by specialists, where the specialist knowledge is entirely irrelevant. Truth (or more particularly "accuracy according to historians and reproductions of earth knowledge") isn't even a factor here at all. And would, in fact, detract from the game (either by adding complications for no benefit except the moral purity of nerds or by harming the adherence to built-up expectations). I know you don't like tropes, but tropes are what D&D runs on, not history. Nothing in D&D is really designed to be realistic[1]--instead it's designed to evoke particular images from popular culture and zeitgeist, while remaining playable in the intended way.

[1] heck, reality is highly unrealistic. What nerds[2] call realistic usually isn't actually, it's a cramped viewpoint added on top of the very messy reality to make them feel like they know what's going on.
[2] calling out my own tribe here, I'm very much a nerd.

Max_Killjoy
2022-01-06, 01:32 PM
Is there a reason in the game rules to make this distinction? Because the game rules are not the underlying fiction. They're a game UI presented so we can access it. It's entirely an abstraction; the in-universe fiction has (probably) a whole range of weapons inside each game-level weapon.


A gladius or similar, an arming/viking/etc sword, a longsword, and a greatsword, are each used differently.




Good luck with that. The idea of artistic license is older than dirt. And most of it is for effect, rather than literal.


Most of it exists to "look cool" and help sell the book. :smallfrown:




"But Dragons" isn't an actual fallacy. The laws of the fictional universe, to support dragons existing, must be different. How much depends on the details. Arguing from earth history and earth tests is just flat out bad science.


Of course it's a fallacy -- "But Dragons!" is the assertion that once any single break from reality exists in a setting, any break is justified and that a single dragon or other break means that the entire setting instead follows faerie-tale "just so" rules in which each thing is true because it's said to be true, full stop.

Asserting that the existence of magic, or dragons, or the simple fact that it's not real Earth history, makes studded leather a workable concept, is right in the wheelhouse of "But Dragons!" No change from our world has been presented that can even be said to imply that the metal studs would be any less useless in the secondary world than it is in our world.




Plus, (and this is the whole point), you're invoking specialist knowledge for something that isn't aimed at specialists or written by specialists, where the specialist knowledge is entirely irrelevant. Truth (or more particularly "accuracy according to historians and reproductions of earth knowledge") isn't even a factor here at all. And would, in fact, detract from the game (either by adding complications for no benefit except the moral purity of nerds or by harming the adherence to built-up expectations). I know you don't like tropes, but tropes are what D&D runs on, not history. Nothing in D&D is really designed to be realistic[1]--instead it's designed to evoke particular images from popular culture and zeitgeist, while remaining playable in the intended way.

[1] heck, reality is highly unrealistic. What nerds[2] call realistic usually isn't actually, it's a cramped viewpoint added on top of the very messy reality to make them feel like they know what's going on.
[2] calling out my own tribe here, I'm very much a nerd.


First, we're never going to agree on this purely philosophical assertion that reality itself isn't realistic. (And yes, it is purely a subjective and personal philosophical stance.)

Second, what many of those "nerds" are citing isn't accuracy or reality, it's authenticity -- they're looking for that very same built-up set of expectations and surface "facts" that you're citing as tropes. It's expecting a car to blow up when the gas tank is shot because that's what happens in movies, or expecting the past to be universally a filthy stinking muddy unhygienic mess because that's what media shows them. See, the shades-of-brown, blue-filter, always cloudy depiction of "medieval" Europe, or Arthurian "knights" wearing full plate harness and wielding greatswords (both of which are closer to the early modern period than the migration era setting of a semi-grounded Arthurian story).

If reality isn't "realistic", it's not reality that's the issue, it's that people have horrible expectations of what's realistic based on years of rotten self-repeating depictions in fiction. People expecting cars to blow up when the gas tank is shot doesn't make reality itself unrealistic, it means that people have silly ideas of what's "realistic", and demand authenticity, not accuracy.

KorvinStarmast
2022-01-06, 01:55 PM
My point was that adherence to historical realism doesn't always improve the game, so even if a player has genuine passion for some relevant topic, letting them build that bit of the world isn't necessarily a good thing. D&D has had baggage inherited from Chainmail passed down from edition to edition as regards to the myriad of approaches to the alleged historical accuracy. (See also Poul Anderson's article "On Thud and Blunder (https://www.sfwa.org/2005/01/04/on-thud-and-blunder/)" for funsies - I first read it in the Swords Against the Darkness III anthology).

Chainmail was based (roughly) on historical stuff as best as it could be for a battle level simulation of medieval/feudal combat between armies. (And not a bad rule set for that purpose, all said and done).

It's fantasy supplement was a rider on top of that. You already get a bad approximation of artillery from the magic using figure's default skills of lightning bolt and fireball. Magic swords and dragons and giants were swags for game purposes taken from literature, not history.

The transition to a single figure being one combatant rather than a group of them, and the whole host of other 'importing of swords and sorcery' tropes into the exploration and treasure hunting game, and combat, was built on 'as much authenticity as we can get away with to make the game playable' - just as the table top battlefield combat had done.
(See Tim Kask's description of "twitchers" in historical table top gaming circles for an entertaining nerd versus nerd critique of an overly obsessive approach to historical realism among table top gamers).
Chainmail used dice and point values to approximate the fog of war, troop morale, elite versus regular versus levy troops, and so on.
So did all of the Napoleonics table top games I played.
So did all of the mircoarmor games I played.

"close" enough is the standard of what works for turning it into a playable game.

Does anyone want to address the term broadsword now?
(which did 2d4 in AD&D ...)

Mr Blobby
2022-01-06, 02:12 PM
....As for practicality, well, this is where we get back into "Fantasy" and "What makes the game more fun".

The Village Blacksmith probably cannot make swords for very practical reasons. Swords are hard to make, and are expensive, specialist tools, even among soldiers. He'd have no reason to learn how to make swords, and even if he is equipping a local militia or whatever, it would be easier to teach them to use Spears than Swords, and it would be easier for our blacksmith to make such things. But the PC's want a sword, and inserting the practicalities of swordsmithing into the game doesn't really make things more fun. ...

RL history can help here. One thing is clear; in pre-modern societies manufactures are expensive. Things hold value to a level we can barely imagine now. A decently-made sword from quality-ish materials, if maintained can last for a century-plus. Our village blacksmith may not know how to make swords, but they're much more likely to know how to maintain/renovate old ones - this is more likely if they're in a village with a ruling knight/noble (who'd need their arms/armour maintained]. And the principles of sharpening/de-rusting an axe or pair of shears will also apply to a blade. And as pointed out, a lot of person-hours alone go into a new weapon and require special skills - so 'world output' is likely to be pretty low.

If we extrapolate this to a D&D world, it can be assumed/stated that the majority of metal weapons/armour 'for sale' are not new - but 'refurbished' items [perhaps part of the loot other adventurers etc sold to the smith a while back]. However, this matters little because there's little technical innovation; meaning that old doesn't mean rubbish.

KorvinStarmast
2022-01-06, 02:23 PM
If we extrapolate this to a D&D world, it can be assumed/stated that the majority of metal weapons/armour 'for sale' are not new - but 'refurbished' items [perhaps part of the loot other adventurers etc sold to the smith a while back]. However, this matters little because there's little technical innovation; meaning that old doesn't mean rubbish. I like this take on the matter. :smallsmile: (And me being old has nothing to do with it).

Mr Blobby
2022-01-06, 02:27 PM
Feel free to use it as a plot for a game session: the 'friendly blacksmith' who tells the party about a loot-filled dungeon... which kills them, allowing them to recover said weapons and sell them to the next party, during which he tells them about this 'loot-filled dungeon' nearby... *smirks*

After all, when in a land of adventurers, sell weapons!

truemane
2022-01-06, 02:35 PM
I didn't read every post, so some of this might have been covered already, but I've been through this a number of times in various situations (and even been on the other side of a little bit).

You can spend forever arguing about how much fantasy is too much realism and how much simulation is too little narrative and every possible iteration of vice versa, and none of it will solve your actual problem.

Your actual problem is: your table has a social contract, and this guy is breaking it.

Which is cool. It happens all the time. Every table, every game, every session, every combination of players, all build together a unique social contract, the vast majority of which is unstated, assumed, and based on the equally unstated and assumed pre-conceived beliefs of those involved.

I think you need to talk to your player about two things:
-Genre conventions
-Conflict resolution

So first, as clearly as you can, let him know that your game, your story, your style, your table, your campaign, neither wants nor needs in-depth system of prevailing economic conditions. It's just not the game you're playing. In the same way that an X-men movie neither wants nor needs an in-depth discussion about the physics of running really fast, or a teen romantic comedy needs an in-depth discussion about how unlikely it is that a super hot girl is ignored until she takes her glasses off, or Mulan needs an in-depth treatment of tactical warfare, or the Marvel Comics Universe needs a single unwavering timeline such that every hero's age is meticulously tracked and reflected in the comics, etc etc.

Note that this discussion is not about value judgements. It's about conventions. It's not about what ought to be. It's about what is. Maybe he'd prefer a super-hero movie that spends a lot of time talking about friction coefficients and air resistance, and that's cool. But that movie would no longer be an X-men movie. It would be something else. And maybe he prefers his sword and sorcery to have a robust simulation of medieval economic conditions underpinning the action, but that game is not your game. If he wants that game, he has to go somewhere else to get it. So don't get dragged into a discussion about his immersion or suspension of disbelief or whether his way is better or worse or whether anything makes sense or not. None of that matters. In your game, the smoking hot girl is completely overlooked until those glasses come off, and then she's the homecoming queen. It might not make any logical sense, but that's what we're doing. If you don't want that, go see a different movie.

And second, in line with the 'recruit him' line of thought, tell him that if he does have a real issue, or a great idea, or if there's something significant happening that wouldn't happen because something-something grain futures, to talk to you about after the session. No interrupting the session to talk about what the story is or isn't, or should or shouldn't be. Period. And when he (or anyone) does it, say, "Cool story, talk to me after the session."

And don't be afraid to answer his questions with 'it doesn't matter' or 'I don't know because it doesn't matter' or 'whatever you think makes sense' or 'let's talk about that after the session.'

KorvinStarmast
2022-01-06, 02:35 PM
Feel free to use it as a plot for a game session: the 'friendly blacksmith' who tells the party about a loot-filled dungeon... which kills them, allowing them to recover said weapons and sell them to the next party, during which he tells them about this 'loot-filled dungeon' nearby... *smirks*

After all, when in a land of adventurers, sell weapons! This sounds like an adventurer's guild was actually the Grub Hub equivalent for a local den of owl bears ...

Fiery Diamond
2022-01-06, 07:48 PM
Is there a reason in the game rules to make this distinction? Because the game rules are not the underlying fiction. They're a game UI presented so we can access it. It's entirely an abstraction; the in-universe fiction has (probably) a whole range of weapons inside each game-level weapon.




Good luck with that. The idea of artistic license is older than dirt. And most of it is for effect, rather than literal.



"But Dragons" isn't an actual fallacy. The laws of the fictional universe, to support dragons existing, must be different. How much depends on the details. Arguing from earth history and earth tests is just flat out bad science.

Plus, (and this is the whole point), you're invoking specialist knowledge for something that isn't aimed at specialists or written by specialists, where the specialist knowledge is entirely irrelevant. Truth (or more particularly "accuracy according to historians and reproductions of earth knowledge") isn't even a factor here at all. And would, in fact, detract from the game (either by adding complications for no benefit except the moral purity of nerds or by harming the adherence to built-up expectations). I know you don't like tropes, but tropes are what D&D runs on, not history. Nothing in D&D is really designed to be realistic[1]--instead it's designed to evoke particular images from popular culture and zeitgeist, while remaining playable in the intended way.

[1] heck, reality is highly unrealistic. What nerds[2] call realistic usually isn't actually, it's a cramped viewpoint added on top of the very messy reality to make them feel like they know what's going on.
[2] calling out my own tribe here, I'm very much a nerd.

Agreed.


A gladius or similar, an arming/viking/etc sword, a longsword, and a greatsword, are each used differently.




Most of it exists to "look cool" and help sell the book. :smallfrown:




Of course it's a fallacy -- "But Dragons!" is the assertion that once any single break from reality exists in a setting, any break is justified and that a single dragon or other break means that the entire setting instead follows faerie-tale "just so" rules in which each thing is true because it's said to be true, full stop.

Asserting that the existence of magic, or dragons, or the simple fact that it's not real Earth history, makes studded leather a workable concept, is right in the wheelhouse of "But Dragons!" No change from our world has been presented that can even be said to imply that the metal studs would be any less useless in the secondary world than it is in our world.




First, we're never going to agree on this purely philosophical assertion that reality itself isn't realistic. (And yes, it is purely a subjective and personal philosophical stance.)

Second, what many of those "nerds" are citing isn't accuracy or reality, it's authenticity -- they're looking for that very same built-up set of expectations and surface "facts" that you're citing as tropes. It's expecting a car to blow up when the gas tank is shot because that's what happens in movies, or expecting the past to be universally a filthy stinking muddy unhygienic mess because that's what media shows them. See, the shades-of-brown, blue-filter, always cloudy depiction of "medieval" Europe, or Arthurian "knights" wearing full plate harness and wielding greatswords (both of which are closer to the early modern period than the migration era setting of a semi-grounded Arthurian story).

If reality isn't "realistic", it's not reality that's the issue, it's that people have horrible expectations of what's realistic based on years of rotten self-repeating depictions in fiction. People expecting cars to blow up when the gas tank is shot doesn't make reality itself unrealistic, it means that people have silly ideas of what's "realistic", and demand authenticity, not accuracy.

Um.

Even if we use your definition of "But Dragons," that's still not a fallacy. A MASSIVE break from reality either A) has cascading effects that need to be extrapolated, or B) is proof positive that reality isn't the baseline, and what you call fallacy is the accurate assumption to make (or rather, the setting is therefore allowed as many breaks from reality for whatever reasons it wants and nobody who didn't object to the first break has any right to complain.)

In short: it's not a fallacy, and you're just plain wrong.

Secondly, to use your terminology, for something that's not intended to be educational or aimed at specialists/historians/those with extensive knowledge in some area, "authenticity" is far superior to "accuracy" or "realistic." That's kind of the point PhoenixPhyre was trying to make. Why are you even arguing against that?

Also: soft leather IS protective in reality. As is cloth armor. They aren't going to be protecting you from a hammer blow or a greatsword swing, but they can help mitigate minor damage. I know I would rather have a thick leather jacket rather than just a T-shirt if somebody was threatening me with a switchblade. And cloth armor has been used historically to protect against arrows and knives.

Max_Killjoy
2022-01-06, 09:51 PM
In short: it's not a fallacy, and you're just plain wrong.


That's nice.

If that's your approach to "discussion", then go on ignore.

"Authenticity" is trash.

The rest of your "points" aren't worth engaging, you're clearly not bothering to read what I've posted.

martixy
2022-01-06, 10:53 PM
No, some of us did agree with the idea. But sadly it was shot down because too many people went to the extreme and claimed this means you have to let him do what ever he wants and the GM/other players are stuck with what he does.

IME if the player if asked to help, not GM or write rules, but rather advise and cooperate with the GM it can be a positive thing for the game.

Ok, cool. Well don't do that extremism.

This whole thread is trying to fight him on his turf. Stop trying to out-economy the economist and act like a DM instead, by resolving this in a manner that is healthy for the group. Get him to cooperate, maybe make an economy mini-game for him to manage, with his help. And do your job as DM by making sure his economy mini-game doesn't ruin the other players fun.

Fiery Diamond
2022-01-06, 11:48 PM
That's nice.

If that's your approach to "discussion", then go on ignore.

"Authenticity" is trash.

The rest of your "points" aren't worth engaging, you're clearly not bothering to read what I've posted.

You... really don't come off any better than me, here. My post consisted of four things:

1. Agreeing with a post by PhoenixPhyre
2. Explaining to you why I believe that you are wrong about "But Dragons" with a TLDR reiterating that you are incorrect.
3. Trying to point out what PhoenixPhyre's other point (besides telling you that But Dragons isn't a fallacy) is, and expressing genuine perplexity that you disagreed with that other point
4. Pointing out that an earlier statement you had made (that soft leather wasn't protective - which was part of a two-part thing you said earlier: soft leather isn't protective, adding metal to it won't help) wasn't actually factual. I additionally pointed out that even cloth can serve the purpose of armor. I wasn't debating anything else you said about leather armor and adding metal.

You reply to this by...

1. Cutting out my actual explanation in #2, framing it as though I simply called you wrong without saying anything else.
2. Deciding that being told you are wrong is so horribly insulting that I deserve to be ignored for it. (To be fair, that's your prerogative to do.)
3. Responding to the bit about authenticity by using language at least as potentially insulting as anything I said, without actually having any supporting comments like I did. I called you wrong on one subject, you called a perfectly valid opinion and belief on another not only wrong, but "trash."
4. Stating that I clearly hadn't read what you posted with respect to leather armor and that what I said wasn't even worth engaging with.

If you were genuinely insulted by me calling you wrong, then I apologize for causing offense. I still believe you're wrong, mind you, but I'm willing to apologize for upsetting you by stating it bluntly in my TLDR.

Kraynic
2022-01-07, 12:37 AM
4. Pointing out that an earlier statement you had made (that soft leather wasn't protective - which was part of a two-part thing you said earlier: soft leather isn't protective, adding metal to it won't help) wasn't actually factual.

I think part of the problem is that you are (deliberately or not) taking some comments out of context. Studded leather as it is portrayed in D&D is basically worthless (as far as being an upgrade to leather). I find it somewhat funny that Palladium Books published their original fantasy game with studded leather as an item, presumably because people coming from D&D would be used to that label. But, if you checked out their illustrated supplements on armor, "studded leather" was actually bezainted, which is a real thing and not at all a worthless as an upgrade over leather. Adding a bunch of rivets/studs would be of very limited value. Adding a bunch of rings/washers is a bit more useful.

As far as the protectiveness of soft leather goes, as someone that spent some time as a cowboy in the American southwest, there are plants that grow thorns that go through leather. You aren't going to protect against much in the way of weaponry with regular/soft leather. While I haven't made armor, I have done a fair amount of leatherwork over my life and have (or at least believe I have) a pretty good handle on how durable leather is.

Or maybe my experience isn't factual.

I don't think Max would mind counter points on statements made, but simply coming in and saying basically the entire post is wrong, simply isn't going to go over well with most people. Especially since some of what is being discussed is opinion. You may not agree with an opinion given, but that doesn't make it wrong.

Fiery Diamond
2022-01-07, 01:24 AM
I think part of the problem is that you are (deliberately or not) taking some comments out of context. Studded leather as it is portrayed in D&D is basically worthless (as far as being an upgrade to leather). I find it somewhat funny that Palladium Books published their original fantasy game with studded leather as an item, presumably because people coming from D&D would be used to that label. But, if you checked out their illustrated supplements on armor, "studded leather" was actually bezainted, which is a real thing and not at all a worthless as an upgrade over leather. Adding a bunch of rivets/studs would be of very limited value. Adding a bunch of rings/washers is a bit more useful.

As far as the protectiveness of soft leather goes, as someone that spent some time as a cowboy in the American southwest, there are plants that grow thorns that go through leather. You aren't going to protect against much in the way of weaponry with regular/soft leather. While I haven't made armor, I have done a fair amount of leatherwork over my life and have (or at least believe I have) a pretty good handle on how durable leather is.

Or maybe my experience isn't factual.

I don't think Max would mind counter points on statements made, but simply coming in and saying basically the entire post is wrong, simply isn't going to go over well with most people. Especially since some of what is being discussed is opinion. You may not agree with an opinion given, but that doesn't make it wrong.

"Leather" - even "soft leather" - covers a rather large swath of things. I'm certainly not imagining something made of snakeskin when I picture being protected by leather. Though now that I think about it, certain cloth armors are probably actually better than most soft leather on its own would be, simply because of the layering. Also, some thorns are basically nature's tiny little swords anyway. Leather probably isn't going to actually stop anything, but it will lessen how much damage you take from relatively minor cuts from small blades, by which I mean knives and the like, not swords. Soft leather is also more protection against abrasions than cuts or stabs, but it still is better than most other single-layer clothes. Soft leather wouldn't make very good armor, most likely, but it is better than, say, cotton.

I never intended to argue that studded leather was really a reasonable thing, just that the blanket statement "leather isn't protective" wasn't true.

Genuine question: would lining regular clothes with little metal strips provide any benefit in reality? I have no idea. It seems like it might provide a very minor one in aiding the deflection of blades, but of course I have no knowledge of whether that's actually true.

As to the other part: claiming someone is using a fallacy is a pretty serious accusation; in my opinion, when it is used wrongfully it's as hostile as any flaming is. I think we should reserve pointing out fallacies for things that are genuine fallacies, not for something where there is even room for disagreement on whether it's a fallacy. I did, in fact, provide my counterpoint - it just got completely ignored because I had the audacity to say "you're wrong." To reiterate: massive departures from what is real on Earth result in either A) a cascading series of changes based on the changes necessary to accommodate the stated one, or B) are evidence that "reality" isn't actually the baseline. If B is the case, someone who has no issue with the first stated change (the trope-naming Dragons, for example) really doesn't have any leg to stand on when it comes to other departures from reality - at least not insofar as "that's not how it works in reality!" goes. And that's the essence of "Because Dragons," as far as I understand it. Stating that that line of reasoning is a fallacy is factually wrong. You can argue that you disagree with that line of reasoning, but you cannot truthfully call it a fallacy. That is flat out incorrect, no ifs ands or buts.

Kraynic
2022-01-07, 03:12 AM
"Leather" - even "soft leather" - covers a rather large swath of things. I'm certainly not imagining something made of snakeskin when I picture being protected by leather.

I've never used anything nearly as thin as snakeskin in a protective manner anyway. That is definitely not something that is used in the creation of "shotgun" chaps. At least, not for any that will actually get used in an environment where they are actually needed for protection.

I merely pointed out a possibility of why you got a sharp response. What you do with it (or not), is not my affair.

Satinavian
2022-01-07, 03:40 AM
To reiterate: massive departures from what is real on Earth result in either A) a cascading series of changes based on the changes necessary to accommodate the stated one, or B) are evidence that "reality" isn't actually the baseline. If B is the case, someone who has no issue with the first stated change (the trope-naming Dragons, for example) really doesn't have any leg to stand on when it comes to other departures from reality - at least not insofar as "that's not how it works in reality!" goes. And that's the essence of "Because Dragons," as far as I understand it.

Well, I think all of that is wrong.

But I'll provide reasoning.

For A) you actually would have to go through the cascade. You can't just claim that whatever you want to change just happens to be part of the cascade and everything you want to conserve just happens to be not. And if you go successfully through the cascade, you can hand out a list of everything that is affected and people can build their expectation on this.

For B) "As reality but with one thing changed" is basically the most common form of what-if-storytelling. It is also the basis of most of the harder sci-fi. To beasically tell people who want to explore any of that that this is not how fiction works, that one departure from reality always justifies an arbitrary number of others, is rightfully called a fallacy.


Now there is no need to create a new "but dragons" fallacy. It seems nothing more than a special case of "non sequitur" anyway.

Brother Oni
2022-01-07, 07:47 AM
Also: soft leather IS protective in reality. As is cloth armor. They aren't going to be protecting you from a hammer blow or a greatsword swing, but they can help mitigate minor damage. I know I would rather have a thick leather jacket rather than just a T-shirt if somebody was threatening me with a switchblade. And cloth armor has been used historically to protect against arrows and knives.

I too would prefer a thick leather jacket if somebody was threatening me with a switchblade, but only so I could take it off and use it to help me disarm an attacker. If a leather jacket was thick enough to be of use in a knife fight, then it's possibly restrictive enough to not be worth the protection it offers.

That said, biker leathers have reinforcing plates which would definitely be more worthwhile, and I've known bikers to reinforce them with patches of mail links.

Cloth and textile armours are usually measured in inches thickness (for padded wool) or in multiple layers for linen and the like (I've see values from 'several' to 18 to 30 layers). A couple of t-shirts isn't going to be protective.


Genuine question: would lining regular clothes with little metal strips provide any benefit in reality? I have no idea. It seems like it might provide a very minor one in aiding the deflection of blades, but of course I have no knowledge of whether that's actually true.

More detail required. How thick are the metal strips, are they overlapping (if so, by how much and the pattern), what's the carrier textile material made of, etc.

At one extreme, you've got brigandine, which is overlapping metal plates riveted and covered by a textile layer:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Brigandine%2C_Italian%2C_c1470%2C_Royal_Armoury%2C _Leeds_%28internal_view%29.JPG

You've also got jack of plates, which follows the same principle of a textile layer over metal plates, but the plates are smaller and may not be overlapping, much like a modern plate carrier ballistics vest (or at least the old military ones that don't fit what is essentially a cuirass front and back plate).

The easiest method is to just wear mail - a small link size vest under a coat is virtually undetectable (and in the Renaissance era, contributed to the greeting of strangers by hugging or gripping the forearm, to check that they weren't wearing armour under their clothes), and while they're not officially rated as stab proof, given that butchers and other folks in professions with accidental dismemberment as occupational hazards wear them, I'm sure that a stainless steel welded link mail shirt would provide some good protection in a knife fight.

Max_Killjoy
2022-01-07, 12:33 PM
Well, I think all of that is wrong.

But I'll provide reasoning.

For A) you actually would have to go through the cascade. You can't just claim that whatever you want to change just happens to be part of the cascade and everything you want to conserve just happens to be not. And if you go successfully through the cascade, you can hand out a list of everything that is affected and people can build their expectation on this.

For B) "As reality but with one thing changed" is basically the most common form of what-if-storytelling. It is also the basis of most of the harder sci-fi. To basically tell people who want to explore any of that that this is not how fiction works, that one departure from reality always justifies an arbitrary number of others, is rightfully called a fallacy.


Now there is no need to create a new "but dragons" fallacy. It seems nothing more than a special case of "non sequitur" anyway.

Exactly. The fallacy is an assertion that Departure X automatically justifies Departure Y, Z, etc, that once there's the slightest departure from reality, anything and everything goes, and any limits would be hypocritical. It has nothing to do with a fictional setting in which the further departures derive from each other.

There is a huge difference between a "just-so" world with a stack of unrelated fantastical elements, and a world in which the elements are interconnected -- and it's always telling when someone's argument involves conflating the two.

The specific fallacy (or sub-set) got the name "But Dragons!" because it usually takes the form of "But this setting has dragons, you can't deny me spaceships and lasers!" or "But his character can cast spells, why can't my character do wuxia moves?"

KorvinStarmast
2022-01-07, 01:47 PM
This whole thread is trying to fight him on his turf. Stop trying to out-economy the economist and act like a DM instead, by resolving this in a manner that is healthy for the group. This.

Exactly. The fallacy is an assertion that Departure X automatically justifies Departure Y, Z, etc, The primary / secondary world approach helps to alleviate this; the primary world elements allow the reader/player to enter the world easily, and the secondary world elements are 'just enough to create the feel of wonder or fantasy' as is necessary to tell the story.

LecternOfJasper
2022-01-07, 03:07 PM
There is a huge difference between a "just-so" world with a stack of unrelated fantastical elements, and a world in which the elements are interconnected -- and it's always telling when someone's argument involves conflating the two.


I take it this argument happens a lot, then? :tongue:

BRC
2022-01-07, 03:33 PM
The specific fallacy (or sub-set) got the name "But Dragons!" because it usually takes the form of "But this setting has dragons, you can't deny me spaceships and lasers!" or "But his character can cast spells, why can't my character do wuxia moves?"

I think it depends a lot on which argument is being made. "But Dragons" is neither proof for nor against other fantastical elements.

"But Dragons!" This setting has Dragons, therefore it MUST have, I don't know, Magic Kung Fu and Skywhales is bad logic.

On the other hand, you can't really complain that Magic Kung Fu Skywhales are "Unrealistic" if you accept Dragons as a fantasy matter-of-course.

It really depends if the one says "but Dragons" is the one trying to change the setting, or defend it against accusations of being overly fantastical.

Fiery Diamond
2022-01-07, 03:34 PM
My argument wasn't conflating the two at all: they are two separate possibilities. In the case of A (cascading changes), the author needs to actually have the additional changes existing in the setting and have them be clearly related to the initial change. In the case of B, I'm saying "But I (the person complaining, not the author) say the setting is Like reality but X! I have the right to complain about Y! It's not reality or X, so it's fair game for me to complain about!" is WRONG. It's not fair game for you to complain about, at least not on the grounds that it's not like reality. You can dislike Y for whatever reason you want, but "but it's not realistic! I'm only allowing X to be unrealistic!" doesn't give you the high ground. Claiming that it does and that nobody else is allowed to say "The setting has X already, what are you complaining about? It's not reality, so any breaks from reality are acceptable" and that anyone who says that is using fallacious argumentation and is wrong, is hypocritical, or at least wrongheadedly self-righteous.

Also, I stand by what I said about "authenticity" having more value than "realistic" in works of fantasy not aimed at experts in whatever field. I have no idea why you're so hostile to that mindset.

I'm willing to admit I may have overestimated how much soft leather can mitigate damage (though it's still great against abrasions, albeit at the cost of destroying the leather), though.

Edit: to reply to the person who posted while I was typing


I think it depends a lot on which argument is being made. "But Dragons" is neither proof for nor against other fantastical elements.

"But Dragons!" This setting has Dragons, therefore it MUST have, I don't know, Magic Kung Fu and Skywhales is bad logic.

On the other hand, you can't really complain that Magic Kung Fu Skywhales are "Unrealistic" if you accept Dragons as a fantasy matter-of-course.

It really depends if the one says "but Dragons" is the one trying to change the setting, or defend it against accusations of being overly fantastical.

Exactly. The bolded statement is what I have been saying. Calling the bolded statement a fallacy is factually incorrect, not to mention insulting.

Max_Killjoy
2022-01-08, 01:05 PM
I think it depends a lot on which argument is being made. "But Dragons" is neither proof for nor against other fantastical elements.

"But Dragons!" This setting has Dragons, therefore it MUST have, I don't know, Magic Kung Fu and Skywhales is bad logic.

On the other hand, you can't really complain that Magic Kung Fu Skywhales are "Unrealistic" if you accept Dragons as a fantasy matter-of-course.

It really depends if the one says "but Dragons" is the one trying to change the setting, or defend it against accusations of being overly fantastical.

I just see it as any use of "Break from reality A means any break from reality B through Z cannot be denied, criticized, or rejected".

TexAvery
2022-01-08, 08:03 PM
I just see it as any use of "Break from reality A means any break from reality B through Z cannot be denied, criticized, or rejected".

Unless it is stated as "this is our reality except for break A", "break A exists, therefor others may" is entirely reasonable.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-01-08, 08:09 PM
Unless it is stated as "this is our reality except for break A", "break A exists, therefor others may" is entirely reasonable.

And generally, the "But Dragon's" "fallacy" is trotted out whenever anyone suggests that maybe the fictional universe doesn't conform strictly to Earth's history, physical laws, etc. Basically, it's used as a strawman. D&D does not claim to be our reality. And in fact is highly incompatible at first principles with our reality. As such, conformance with our reality should never be assumed unless specified.

You can't fault something for not being realistic when it doesn't ever pretend it wants to be realistic. Any resemblance to reality is entirely accidental. Sure, if you have a game that strictly defines its connection to reality (by claiming to be, say, historically accurate), it's perfectly ok to judge it on its accuracy. D&D does not claim that mantle or that burden. So saying "that's not realistic" is non-responsive and irrelevant. Of course it's not--it never tried to be.

InvisibleBison
2022-01-08, 09:04 PM
As such, conformance with our reality should never be assumed unless specified.

Do you actually follow this principle? Do you, when you sit down to play D&D, really not assume that the myriad mundane aspects of reality that aren't specified in the rules are not the case until the DM says they are? I'm talking about things like water being wet or flowing downhill, injuries being painful, spices making food taste better, rain coming from clouds, humans typically having two parents, etc. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, because the playstyle you seem to be describing strikes me as being kind of crazy and not at all like anything I've ever seen or heard of.

Mr Beer
2022-01-08, 09:16 PM
These are the type of responses I would make:


Bard: Therefore the Kingdom must have lowered the amount of gold in mint, which allowed them to pay off their foreign mercenaries and at the same time keep their own economy intact. Unless of course, there is some other factor I am missing…

Me: *grinding my teeth annoyed*



"Sure they may have less gold available to mint with, that doesn't automatically mean that they are debasing the currency or creating smaller coins though. They may just be minting fewer coins."

~ further argument ~

"Yeah I don't really care mate. I'm just telling you that these are standard D&D value gold coins, if you think it's implausible, you're free to work out a reason if you like."




*Party enters a new city*

Bard: I roll a knowledge check

Me: this port city is run by several merchant guilds under the stewardship of a long line of hereditary Princes hailing from a noble lineage of the city’s original founder. It is an independent city-state unaffiliated with the Empire to the North or the Caliphate to the East, as such it is a hub of trade and commerce, garrisoned by a city guard as well as an order of battlemages .

Bard: Cool, what’s the exchange rate?

Me: Excuse me?

Bard: Well this is an independent city-state right? So they should be minting their own money, which means there should be an exchange rate. Since this city has strong trade ties with the Empire AND is dependent on the Empire’s navy to patrol the seas for piracy, I am assuming that Imperial Crowns have a favorable conversion rate?

"D&D generally abstracts matters like exchange rates or coin rarity etc. in order to simplify inventory management. I'm not writing an exchange rate into this setting for that reason. If you like you can imagine one but there's no in-game effect."

PhoenixPhyre
2022-01-08, 10:44 PM
Do you actually follow this principle? Do you, when you sit down to play D&D, really not assume that the myriad mundane aspects of reality that aren't specified in the rules are not the case until the DM says they are? I'm talking about things like water being wet or flowing downhill, injuries being painful, spices making food taste better, rain coming from clouds, humans typically having two parents, etc. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, because the playstyle you seem to be describing strikes me as being kind of crazy and not at all like anything I've ever seen or heard of.

I'm the setting designer. So I've intentionally set certain pieces to match reality...on the surface. But I also have intentionally set the underlying physics to be different.

And when I play in someone else's setting, I expect what the setting says happens. So if the setting describes things as generally Earth-like, I assume that the surface is similar. That does not mean that the underlying underpinnings and all the details are the same. I am not surprised by water running up hill or floating rocks, etc. I expect significant deviations from reality. And none of those cause me any issues as long as it's all coherent within itself. I don't care at all if it matches reality, I care if it matches itself.

TexAvery
2022-01-09, 11:02 AM
Do you actually follow this principle? Do you, when you sit down to play D&D, really not assume that the myriad mundane aspects of reality that aren't specified in the rules are not the case until the DM says they are? I'm talking about things like water being wet or flowing downhill, injuries being painful, spices making food taste better, rain coming from clouds, humans typically having two parents, etc. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, because the playstyle you seem to be describing strikes me as being kind of crazy and not at all like anything I've ever seen or heard of.

We know, from numerous illustrations and descriptions in settings and modules, that water is wet and flows downhill. We also know that human (and non-human, but that only proves my point further) is highly different. We know things that would appear to us as folksy superstition are stone-cold-sober sensibility in many settings. Where the rules say "this is different from reality", this is different from reality. This includes hit points, the mechanical effects of which are described in detail. Complaining that you do not like HP because they're unrealistic is no different from complaining that dragons fly despite being way too heavy for their wings, or that many castle maps would never stand as constructed, or any of a million other acceptable breaks from reality.

By contrast, the rules do not indicate that water flows uphill or floats in the air. Spices are, I believe, rarely addressed, so if you'd prefer they could easily not exist. Congratulations, you're starting to understand.

Talakeal
2022-01-09, 02:03 PM
D&D has had baggage inherited from Chainmail passed down from edition to edition as regards to the myriad of approaches to the alleged historical accuracy. (See also Poul Anderson's article "On Thud and Blunder (https://www.sfwa.org/2005/01/04/on-thud-and-blunder/)" for funsies - I first read it in the Swords Against the Darkness III anthology).


Man, that was an unpleasant read. So much outdated information presented in such a condescending manner. It was like being lectured to by the neck-beardiest of grognards.


Do you actually follow this principle? Do you, when you sit down to play D&D, really not assume that the myriad mundane aspects of reality that aren't specified in the rules are not the case until the DM says they are? I'm talking about things like water being wet or flowing downhill, injuries being painful, spices making food taste better, rain coming from clouds, humans typically having two parents, etc. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, because the playstyle you seem to be describing strikes me as being kind of crazy and not at all like anything I've ever seen or heard of.

Nobody has the skill or time to make a wholly fictional world, let alone on that players will understand and / or care about.

At the same time, nobody has the skill or knowledge to make a perfect simulation of the real world, let alone one that people would care to read / play in.

In my experiance, the "But Dragons!" fallacy, and it absolutely is a logical fallacy, is only used to cover the author's ass when their audience outsmarts them, be it in pointing out an inconsistency / plot hole, or when a player comes up with a clever plan and the DM wants to shoot it down (for example, off the cuff deciding you can't just smoke the monsters out of the dungeon because in my world combustion doesn't exist, camp fires just conjure rifts to the elemental plane of fire).


In general, breaks from reality occur in one of three ways:

1: Fantastic elements that are impossible and nobody knows how exactly they work. Dragons, demons, gods, wizards, outer planes, etc.

2: Fiction tropes that we know do not work: Studded leather, dual wielding, cleanly knocking people out, flesh wounds to the shoulder, small women and children beating up grown men, swords cutting through plate, car doors stopping bullets, shocking people back to life, martial artists defeating armed men, etc. We know they are impossible, and we know why they are impossible, and few if any fictional settings even try and put a fig-leaf over them other than rule of cool.

3: Abstractions for the sake of the game, like hit points, or character levels, or falling damage, or five-foot squares. We know these are unrealistic, but we generally ignore them as abstractions to make for a game that is fast, fun, and fair and assume that they don't perfectly mirror the fluff.

In my experiance all of these are fine on their own, but we get into trouble when we start combining them; for example insisting that this is a setting where the human body can contain 300 liters of blood because of a high level fighter's HP total.

Max_Killjoy
2022-01-09, 02:06 PM
Do you actually follow this principle? Do you, when you sit down to play D&D, really not assume that the myriad mundane aspects of reality that aren't specified in the rules are not the case until the DM says they are? I'm talking about things like water being wet or flowing downhill, injuries being painful, spices making food taste better, rain coming from clouds, humans typically having two parents, etc. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, because the playstyle you seem to be describing strikes me as being kind of crazy and not at all like anything I've ever seen or heard of.

Indeed, and this is one of the cracks that starts to show in the "but it's not Earth or our reality, so anything goes, no limits, no cause, no effect" fig leaf.



And generally, the "But Dragon's" "fallacy" is trotted out whenever anyone suggests that maybe the fictional universe doesn't conform strictly to Earth's history, physical laws, etc. Basically, it's used as a strawman. D&D does not claim to be our reality. And in fact is highly incompatible at first principles with our reality. As such, conformance with our reality should never be assumed unless specified.

You can't fault something for not being realistic when it doesn't ever pretend it wants to be realistic. Any resemblance to reality is entirely accidental. Sure, if you have a game that strictly defines its connection to reality (by claiming to be, say, historically accurate), it's perfectly ok to judge it on its accuracy. D&D does not claim that mantle or that burden. So saying "that's not realistic" is non-responsive and irrelevant. Of course it's not--it never tried to be.

If there's a strawman here, it's this thing you keep saying. The criticism here isn't "but it's not realistic" -- the criticism is "it's incoherent, inconsistent, and a shambles, don't use 'but it's not our reality' as an excuse."

"But Dragons!" isn't calling out "this breaks from reality in ways I've chosen", it's calling out "Once you've broken from reality in even the slightest way, you're a hypocrite for restricting or avoiding any other break from reality".

And more broadly, the problem in worldbuilding that succumbs to that fallacy is not that it breaks from reality in 1 or 100 ways, but that it does so in a just-so, faerie-tale way, in which breaks don't need to be coherent, consistent, or connected, there is no cause or effect, they're just there, and the only reasoning ever given is "but it's not our reality".




In my experiance, the "But Dragons!" fallacy, and it absolutely is a logical fallacy, is only used to cover the author's ass when their audience outsmarts them, be it in pointing out an inconsistency / plot hole, or when a player comes up with a clever plan and the DM wants to shoot it down (for example, off the cuff deciding you can't just smoke the monsters out of the dungeon because in my world combustion doesn't exist, camp fires just conjure rifts to the elemental plane of fire).


The other place I see it used is when a GM has a specific setting in mind and presented to the players, and one or more of the players wants to play something that is grossly outside the context and bounds of that setting.

This especially happens with D&D and similar systems, because the game is presented both as game-first, and the way in which the class-and-"race" system creates an implicit setting. "How dare you not let me play a Druid in your world without Druids!"

* Arguments that D&D is or has ever been fiction-first need not bother here, I've read the books and the authors' commentary, I don't need anyone to selectively quote them at me with cherry-picked "yeah buts!" that supposedly show otherwise.

Duff
2022-01-09, 05:10 PM
I didn’t become a DM to have to create an economy for one player to exploit though….

Up until now, the “economy” in my world was secondary

This is really what you need to tell your player.
maybe with words like "I don't know enough about economics to properly GM a character using your level of knowledge. So any time you want to do that sort of thing, I'm just going to ask you to make a couple of rolls based on your character's skills and adjudicate based on that"

PhoenixPhyre
2022-01-09, 05:57 PM
You have a few choices in a fictional world.

1. Keep everything literally identical to the real world. No fantastical elements at all, no advanced sci-fi elements either. Nothing that suggests that world X is different from our world.

2. Add any fantastical element or advanced sci-fi element. Completely rebuild the world from the ground up to account for this change, being willing to throw out all preconceptions.

3. As #2, but don't rebuild things. Just staple the element on top. This is the "real world except for X" choice.

#1 and #2 are doable and (can) create coherent worlds, but take effort. #3 is the easiest and most common choice, and is inherently incapable of creating a coherent world.

Yes, adding dragons (or magic, or any other fantastic element) requires that the entire foundation of the world change, at least if you want coherence. The baseline is no longer reality. Because reality is a harsh mistress--it's all tightly coupled. Any change that would allow dragons to exist also violates all the fundamental principles and symmetries on which the rest of the edifice rests.

It's not that any deviation from reality needs to be explained--every choice needs to be explained. Even hewing to reality is a choice--it doesn't come for free. And that explanation can be as simple as aesthetics. Whatever the new laws of reality are (in this fictional world), they're ones where (insert element of your choosing) work. It's effectively working backward--it's a fact on the ground in a D&D setting that studded leather armor is more protective than regular leather armor (which is a boiled cuirass and shoulder protections, coupled with lighter sleeves). That's not something contestable, it's fact. Just like the fact that all sorts of creatures exist that are flat out impossible in real life, in ways that implicate all the basic laws of reality. Now the question is "what else needs to change to make those elements work."

Of course you can take the lazy way out and not do the leg work. And for people content to simply play in a cardboard world, where the setting is just a set on a stage, that's fine. But if you care about consistency, any fantastic element requires the rewriting of reality and a willingness to follow where that leads, even if it means throwing out deeply held ideas about what's realistic.

Talakeal
2022-01-09, 07:02 PM
snip.

I would say you aren't taking this nearly far enough.

Nobody has the knowledge or the patience to create a totally realistic work of fiction. For example, even the most mundane and grounded of stories will require completely rewriting all of human history to account for the lineages of the characters.

Further, nobody knows what the limits of our reality are, and nobody can say with absolute certainty whether any given "fantastical" element might be impossible, or what changes would be required to account for it.

To me, this argument comes across as a sort of nirvana fallacy, where the DM who just makes things up as they go along is actually somehow *more* correct than the one who tries to create a world with a feeling of predictability or consistency.

Max_Killjoy
2022-01-09, 07:51 PM
I would say you aren't taking this nearly far enough.

Nobody has the knowledge or the patience to create a totally realistic work of fiction. For example, even the most mundane and grounded of stories will require completely rewriting all of human history to account for the lineages of the characters.

Further, nobody knows what the limits of our reality are, and nobody can say with absolute certainty whether any given "fantastical" element might be impossible, or what changes would be required to account for it.

To me, this argument comes across as a sort of nirvana fallacy, where the DM who just makes things up as they go along is actually somehow *more* correct than the one who tries to create a world with a feeling of predictability or consistency.


PP has a strict-to-the-point-of-silly concept of "realistic" that at this point is pretty obviously just a strawman standard against which all fictional settings are intended to fail. Something similar to "How can you claim to be free, when no matter how much you want to you can't fly by flapping your arms? Obviously, because you are not free to fly away by flapping your arms, you are not free at all." -- "If you can't rework physics from the ground up and make it work, then your setting is no better than something just made up randomly."


Your standard here, however, that "nobody knows what the limits of our reality are, and nobody can say with absolute certainty whether any given "fantastical" element might be impossible"... yeah, sure, magic and dragons are possible in our world, we just can't figured it out yet?


But, even if I were to run a game using D&D, I'd throw out studded leather, so... that would not be a "fact on the ground".

InvisibleBison
2022-01-09, 08:52 PM
You have a few choices in a fictional world.

1. Keep everything literally identical to the real world. No fantastical elements at all, no advanced sci-fi elements either. Nothing that suggests that world X is different from our world.

2. Add any fantastical element or advanced sci-fi element. Completely rebuild the world from the ground up to account for this change, being willing to throw out all preconceptions.

3. As #2, but don't rebuild things. Just staple the element on top. This is the "real world except for X" choice.

#1 and #2 are doable and (can) create coherent worlds, but take effort. #3 is the easiest and most common choice, and is inherently incapable of creating a coherent world.

Coherence is a spectrum, not a binary. It's perfectly possible to have a world that is coherent enough for the purpose it's being used without providing a complete explanation of how its laws of physics work, or whatever you actually mean by "rebuild the world from the ground up".

Talakeal
2022-01-09, 08:56 PM
Your standard here, however, that "nobody knows what the limits of our reality are, and nobody can say with absolute certainty whether any given "fantastical" element might be impossible"... yeah, sure, magic and dragons are possible in our world, we just can't figured it out yet?

Depends on how you define magic and dragons.

This all goes back to Clarke's laws, but I would say that any given application of "magic" or "fantasy" can theoretically be recreated in our universe using technology and materials we haven't even dreamed of yet, but I would never presume to be so arrogant I could say for sure which is which.

I mean, what is really so impossible about dragons? Every aspect of a dragon has occurred somewhere in nature before, and I can't see why I hyper advanced society with access to medical and material knowledge far beyond our own couldn't create something we would recognize as a dragon. The only challenge is the sheer size of some of the bigger dragons, especially if they are to fly, but I am not going to presume it is flat-out impossible for an organism to ever do what our machines do every day.

KorvinStarmast
2022-01-09, 10:22 PM
Man, that was an unpleasant read. So much outdated information presented in such a condescending manner. It was like being lectured to by the neck-beardiest of grognards. Given that it was one Sci Fi author speaking to his peers, you are (1) not the intended {original} audience. He was encouraging his peers, and those trying to get into the SF F writing biz, to stretch their muscles a bit and not make the same old tired mistakes. He was also providing some I'd like to see someone fold this into SF/Fantasy some topics that get no treatment. His other bottom line was to do with better verisimilitude being a good idea.

Nobody has the skill or time to make a wholly fictional world, let alone on that players will understand and / or care about. Nobody? Incorrect. Besides the person who hosts these forums having done precisely that, and a lot of DMs I have played with having done so, numerous authors have done that as well.

At the same time, nobody has the skill or knowledge to make a perfect simulation of the real world, let alone one that people would care to read / play in. Yes.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-01-09, 10:43 PM
Coherence is a spectrum, not a binary. It's perfectly possible to have a world that is coherent enough for the purpose it's being used without providing a complete explanation of how its laws of physics work, or whatever you actually mean by "rebuild the world from the ground up".

Sure. No one[1] expects explanations for everything. But realizing that everything has changed means that you're no longer taking the (false) baseline that it's just the real world + magic. The idea isn't that everything has to be explained, it's that you can't tie yourself to the idea that it's just reality + magic. Because that is terminally incoherent. You have radically unrealistic demands on the laws of nature themselves; everything we call reality is premised on those laws being identical. Just accepting "the laws are probably different, even if the surface looks similar" gives much more wiggle room to accept all sorts of things without verisimilitude breaks.


Depends on how you define magic and dragons.

This all goes back to Clarke's laws, but I would say that any given application of "magic" or "fantasy" can theoretically be recreated in our universe using technology and materials we haven't even dreamed of yet, but I would never presume to be so arrogant I could say for sure which is which.

I mean, what is really so impossible about dragons? Every aspect of a dragon has occurred somewhere in nature before, and I can't see why I hyper advanced society with access to medical and material knowledge far beyond our own couldn't create something we would recognize as a dragon. The only challenge is the sheer size of some of the bigger dragons, especially if they are to fly, but I am not going to presume it is flat-out impossible for an organism to ever do what our machines do every day.

Square cube law says no. Breathing elemental energy says no (the existence of "elemental energy" contradicts all sorts of physical laws just by itself). Flying on something that size says no. The amount of food you'd need says no. Even being able to talk in a human language with that mouth structure is just right out.

So unless you radically depart and just make a (slightly) oversized lizard, you're stuck.

And D&D-style magic is right out, due to violating tons of conservation laws. Most advanced sci-fi falls into this category, especially anything involving FTL travel or communications.

[1] except that's the core of the invocations of this "fallacy"--the demand for isolated rigor in explaining all of the departures from reality, while letting the fact that most of the adherences to reality are even less probable in a world with magic.

InvisibleBison
2022-01-09, 10:59 PM
Sure. No one[1] expects explanations for everything. But realizing that everything has changed means that you're no longer taking the (false) baseline that it's just the real world + magic. The idea isn't that everything has to be explained, it's that you can't tie yourself to the idea that it's just reality + magic. Because that is terminally incoherent. You have radically unrealistic demands on the laws of nature themselves; everything we call reality is premised on those laws being identical. Just accepting "the laws are probably different, even if the surface looks similar" gives much more wiggle room to accept all sorts of things without verisimilitude breaks.

I don't see why saying your setting is "just reality + magic" is terminally incoherent. Why can't the fantasy laws of physics fall out so that in the absence of magic things work the same as they do in reality?

Mechalich
2022-01-09, 11:15 PM
I mean, what is really so impossible about dragons? Every aspect of a dragon has occurred somewhere in nature before, and I can't see why I hyper advanced society with access to medical and material knowledge far beyond our own couldn't create something we would recognize as a dragon. The only challenge is the sheer size of some of the bigger dragons, especially if they are to fly, but I am not going to presume it is flat-out impossible for an organism to ever do what our machines do every day.

The 'dragons' of Pern are in fact the product of a society with access to medical and material knowledge significantly in advance of our own (and access to an alien evolutionary tree in which helps with that pesky '6 limbs on a tetrapod' issue). While that series includes some profound BS (the the dragons can teleport through time and use telekinetic powers), the fundamental anatomy and even the, limited, fire breathing using a chemical catalyst is reasonably well accounted for (certainly by the standards of the late 1960s). There are still major problems with weight ratios and the wings being too small compared to overall body size (especially in the art), but you can see some of the steps.

You can actually broaden this in a fantasy setting, by saying that the various 'monsters' are the result of ancient genetic engineering. This can't account for magical abilities, but you can get around a lot of restrictions that way. Heck, you can even have giant insects and spiders, they just won't look like insects and spiders on the inside (D&D even went there once, the 2e Thri-Kreen book describes a crude system of alternate internal anatomy that tries to justify how a praying mantis the size of a small horse might actually work).


So unless you radically depart and just make a (slightly) oversized lizard, you're stuck.

You can get a lot further than slightly oversized lizard. A four-limbed dragon (six-limbed means an alternate evolutionary tree, which isn't impossible, but is a lot of extra work), is basically a pterosaur that went in for bat-style wings as opposed to pterosaur-style wings, which is mostly a difference in finger-bone structure. You can scale up pretty far from there, as the largest pterosaurs managed to crack an estimated 200 kg, and if you postulate superior biology in the form of better bones, muscles, or blood (all of which are quite reasonable, especially if the animal was engineered as opposed to evolved naturally) you can get further. The result would be very spindly and have huge wings compared to most traditional dragon art, true, but a big, flight-capable, saurian is absolutely doable.

You can't do elemental energy, but spitting superheated liquid is possible. Speech is also possible, with a bird-like syrinx just like a parrot (roaring, admittedly, is out, unless vocal chords are grafted on, this is a common error with regard to archosaurs, T-Rex can't roar). Yes spellcasting is out, but that's only an inherent trait in a small portion of dragon portrayals.

Mr Beer
2022-01-10, 12:28 AM
Yeah our hypothetical dragon can't breathe fire from an internal furnace but it can spit venom, strong acid or even some bombardier beetle type of binary chemical weapon that ignites in air. Actual bombadier beetle spray is boiling not burning but if one combination can basically explode and scald, then I guess others must be plausible. Maybe our dragon spits a self-igniting sticky mixture similar to napalm. A litre or two of that to the face would mess up your day even if it's not quite Smaug-grade destruction.

Satinavian
2022-01-10, 02:56 AM
You have a few choices in a fictional world.

1. Keep everything literally identical to the real world. No fantastical elements at all, no advanced sci-fi elements either. Nothing that suggests that world X is different from our world.

2. Add any fantastical element or advanced sci-fi element. Completely rebuild the world from the ground up to account for this change, being willing to throw out all preconceptions.

3. As #2, but don't rebuild things. Just staple the element on top. This is the "real world except for X" choice.

#1 and #2 are doable and (can) create coherent worlds, but take effort. #3 is the easiest and most common choice, and is inherently incapable of creating a coherent world.

No one ever really rebuilds the world from the ground up. There will be some effort to explore implication but writing a complete and consistent new set of natural laws as extensive as our understanding of reality is utterly impossible for one person or even a few.

If #3 is out, then #2 is out as well.

You don't get to handwave the changes for number 2 and insist that all deviations have to be understood and resolved for number 3.

Max_Killjoy
2022-01-10, 08:58 AM
Yeah our hypothetical dragon can't breathe fire from an internal furnace but it can spit venom, strong acid or even some bombardier beetle type of binary chemical weapon that ignites in air. Actual bombadier beetle spray is boiling not burning but if one combination can basically explode and scald, then I guess others must be plausible. Maybe our dragon spits a self-igniting sticky mixture similar to napalm. A litre or two of that to the face would mess up your day even if it's not quite Smaug-grade destruction.

Two glands, hypergolic combination. Perhaps a combination of materials somewhat less explosive and toxic/corrosive than the various rocket propellant materials.

KorvinStarmast
2022-01-10, 09:28 AM
Yeah our hypothetical dragon can't breathe fire from an internal furnace but it can spit venom, strong acid or even some bombardier beetle type of binary chemical weapon that ignites in air. Actual bombadier beetle spray is boiling not burning but if one combination can basically explode and scald, then I guess others must be plausible. Maybe our dragon spits a self-igniting sticky mixture similar to napalm. A litre or two of that to the face would mess up your day even if it's not quite Smaug-grade destruction. FWIW, the US Army and Navy (a few decades ago) were experimenting with an artillery propellant that was two tanks: each inert on its own (gasses) that feed through pipeps/manifolds/tubes into the artillery piece's combustion chamber such that it blew up and propelled 155mm and 5-inch artillery rounds (army howitzer and navy rifled gun respectively) the desired distance. An advantage of that combo was (1) ship board safety and (2) less chance of mishaps in artillery ammo dumps. (Also being pursued was a finer mixture/distance control aspect, not sure if that was achieved).
Memory is foggy, but I don't think it reached 'fielded' (I am too many years out of that loop to know if they finally succeeded).
A dragon could do something similar to that biologically: two different bladders that store two different kinds of 'spittable' bile /fluid that when they meet in the stream outside of the dragon's mouth, ignite.
Also, in my world dragons are very lean with very large wing spans. They are not the beefy dragons of the illustrated MM. (A modest nod to the cube square law).

Two glands, hypergolic combination. Perhaps a combination of materials somewhat less explosive and toxic/corrosive than the various rocket propellant materials. Said m ore elegantly than I put it for the artillery illustration. Thank you. :smallsmile:

PhoenixPhyre
2022-01-10, 10:28 AM
Two glands, hypergolic combination. Perhaps a combination of materials somewhat less explosive and toxic/corrosive than the various rocket propellant materials.

Except that
a) those hypergolic combinations also are all incredibly toxic and reactive to biological materials. Seriously, we know all of the options. And there aren't any biologically plausible ones.
b) that gets you something that if you squint, could plausibly possibly look like a fire breath. Doesn't account for all the other dragon options.
c) the energy requirements are massive if you want to be able to do that more than once every really long time. Which doesn't mesh well with the astronomical requirements to fly.

A combination of implausibilities (even if each one is theoretically possible) is also so implausible as to be unrealistic. More so than "the authors, not being experts in everything, didn't describe what they meant by "studded leather armor" well."

And @Satinavian--I don't expect anyone to explain everything. For anything. But option 2 is honest--you admit that the underpinnings are different, in whatever (not described unless necessary) ways to produce the desired effects. #3 is a lie--you claim coherence for something where coherence is absolutely ruled out. Reality (unchanged) + magic is contradiction. The laws of physics do not allow it. No matter how you explain it, you have inherent contradictions. There is no explanation that can make #3 coherent. It's not about explaining, it's about honesty.

And being honest also allows freedom from nit-picking from people who vaguely understand bits of things. As to the main topic, this is the only answer that works. "It doesn't work that way. I'm not good enough to do all the explanations, but I know how it works at the level we care about for this game." It also allows much more productive and interesting solutions--I've often found that leaving the underlying metaphysics a bit flexible, while realizing that they're not bound by real life at all (only the surface level is pinned to "something vaguely earth like") has allowed me to discover pieces of the setting that work together much more coherently than trying to play the "magic is an exception to real life physics" card. Because that way you end up with a stack of exceptions all the way down and nothing fits together at all, anywhere. And knowing one exception doesn't help you with other ones--everything's ad hoc. Understanding that there is an underlying order, despite that not being the same as the earth-like order, lets you (the setting designer and the player) play scientist and discover what this order must be.

Max_Killjoy
2022-01-10, 10:38 AM
Two glands, hypergolic combination. Perhaps a combination of materials somewhat less explosive and toxic/corrosive than the various rocket propellant materials.



Except that
a) those hypergolic combinations also are all incredibly toxic and reactive to biological materials.


Typical. Oh well.




It's not about explaining, it's about honesty.


OK, accuse people who don't adhere to your agenda-driven definitions of "realistic" or "coherent" of being dishonest.

{Scrubbed}

Max_Killjoy
2022-01-10, 10:56 AM
Given that it was one Sci Fi author speaking to his peers, you are (1) not the intended {original} audience. He was encouraging his peers, and those trying to get into the SF F writing biz, to stretch their muscles a bit and not make the same old tired mistakes. He was also providing some I'd like to see someone fold this into SF/Fantasy some topics that get no treatment. His other bottom line was to do with better verisimilitude being a good idea.


It's also worth considering that it was written in 1978.

In the intervening decades since it was first written, a lot of stories and settings have come to be that have, intentionally or not, taken the advice of that essay.

TexAvery
2022-01-10, 11:56 AM
The "because dragons fallacy" is itself fallacious because it is not "because only dragons". The people complaining about it are misunderstanding "because magic, therefor dragons (and lots of other stuff)" as "because dragons, therefor other magic". Unless the setting promised "reality except for dragons", the problem lies with the reader leaping to conclusions and trying to feel snotty by correcting the author.

See, for example, people having an issue with GoT when Melisandre creates the shadow. The cold (ha!) open is undead on the far side of an impossible ice wall. Then comes dragons and a woman surviving a pyre. Then other stuff. Then... "oh no, this isn't our world?". No no, it's really not, and you're just seeing more of it. You were never told that only dragons and wights exist beyond our world. The books have even more.

Honestly, I get frustrated that most worlds don't go anywhere near fantasy. It's magic... but it's a tilted round rocky world spinning and rotating around a single sun in 24 hours and 365 days to produce days and seasons exactly like ours, surrounded by space and stars that are more suns. But we renamed the months and days of the week for you. Hooray. I feel so fantasized. Where's something like Discworld, which is actually different, or where the stars are really pinholes in the curtain of night, or the day is really produced by Apollo riding his chariot across the sky? It's like there's no imagination.

Putting "fallacy" after a phrase and repeating it doesn't make it correct. I call it "the fallacy fallacy".

Max_Killjoy
2022-01-10, 12:03 PM
The "because dragons fallacy" is itself fallacious because it is not "because only dragons". The people complaining about it are misunderstanding "because magic, therefor dragons (and lots of other stuff)" as "because dragons, therefor other magic". Unless the setting promised "reality except for dragons", the problem lies with the reader leaping to conclusions and trying to feel snotty by correcting the author.

See, for example, people having an issue with GoT when Melisandre creates the shadow. The cold (ha!) open is undead on the far side of an impossible ice wall. Then comes dragons and a woman surviving a pyre. Then other stuff. Then... "oh no, this isn't our world?". No no, it's really not, and you're just seeing more of it. You were never told that only dragons and wights exist beyond our world. The books have even more.

Honestly, I get frustrated that most worlds don't go anywhere near fantasy. It's magic... but it's a tilted round rocky world spinning and rotating around a single sun in 24 hours and 365 days to produce days and seasons exactly like ours, surrounded by space and stars that are more suns. But we renamed the months and days of the week for you. Hooray. I feel so fantasized. Where's something like Discworld, which is actually different, or where the stars are really pinholes in the curtain of night, or the day is really produced by Apollo riding his chariot across the sky? It's like there's no imagination.

Putting "fallacy" after a phrase and repeating it doesn't make it correct. I call it "the fallacy fallacy".


And, you know, never mind all the other ways posters have described the fallacy being invoked by players and readers, that have been detailed in this thread.

It's more common to see it invoked as a demand to include something that's been excluded from a setting, than it is a criticism of something that's already been included -- and in that form, it is "because Dragons, then ANYTHING".

But it also does come up as a defense of bad worldbuilding.

The example you give... the question is not one of "when was this introduced?" but "was this planned from the start?" It's OK to introduce things along the way as long as they're part of the intended world or fit. The problem comes when things are just piled on as things go along, with no preplanning and no thought as to what does or does not fit.

KorvinStarmast
2022-01-10, 01:02 PM
The example you give... the question is not one of "when was this introduced?" but "was this planned from the start?" It's OK to introduce things along the way as long as they're part of the intended world or fit. The problem comes when things are just piled on as things go along, with no preplanning and no thought as to what does or does not fit. At this point, I point to the D&D spell list. :smallyuk: Like a cancer it grows and grows ... :smallyuk:

Max_Killjoy
2022-01-10, 01:14 PM
At this point, I point to the D&D spell list. :smallyuk: Like a cancer it grows and grows ... :smallyuk:


Some RPGs like D&D, or multiple editions of L5R, suffer from the push to create more sellable content, to the point that adding any stuff to new books for sale matters more than adding material that fits, or having a framework in place from the start into which new material can fit when it comes along.

L5R 4th edition is a great example... there was no consideration of counter-magic in the design of the original magic system, it was added in a splatbook later, and it shows.. there was little consideration taken for crafting in the original rules, crafting "powers" were added in a different splatbook, and it shows.

This affects setting more with games like D&D and L5R, because all new system material is tied to something in the implicit or explicit setting (respectively).

Talakeal
2022-01-10, 01:19 PM
Square cube law says no.

Mechalich already answered the rest of this post adequately, but I have to say, what about the square cube law? We have found the remains of dinosaurs on Earth that we estimate weighed over 100 tons, which is significantly more than most dragons. True, they aren't shaped quite like dragons, but these are just animals that we have found remains of who evolved by chance on real Earth (and its almost certain there are bigger ones we haven;t found), are you really saying that it is impossible for anything to be bigger (or shaped more like a dragon at similar sizes) even given different physiology, materials, or environment to work with? Even if intentionally designed but a much more advanced rare of genetic engineers?


Given that it was one Sci Fi author speaking to his peers, you are (1) not the intended {original} audience. He was encouraging his peers, and those trying to get into the SF F writing biz, to stretch their muscles a bit and not make the same old tired mistakes. He was also providing some I'd like to see someone fold this into SF/Fantasy some topics that get no treatment. His other bottom line was to do with better verisimilitude being a good idea.

I get that. Its just he comes across as very hypocritical as he leans super hard into lots of outdated stereotypes such as "the dung ages", Orientalism, and misogyny which make the type of stories he is advocating for seem, to me, to be even worse than what he is criticizing.


Nobody? Incorrect. Besides the person who hosts these forums having done precisely that, and a lot of DMs I have played with having done so, numerous authors have done that as well.
Yes.

We aren't talking about just creating an original fantasy world, we are talking about creating one from scratch rather than using reality as a basis. Which, imo, is impossible. OoTS certainly doesn't try, in any given panel I can point out dozens of things that require no explanation because they work just like they do in real life.


Seriously, we know all of the options.

No, we do not.

To me, your argument comes across as very naive and somewhat arrogant. We are not even close to understanding all of the laws that govern our universe, let alone all of their applications.

I have little doubt that in centuries to come we will find that a great many of our laws are partially or maybe even entirely incorrect, or at the very least will find clever ways to subvert them.

I don't really have a problem with studded leather, but IMO it is much easier for me to say "this alien device works under principles that we do not understand and seems impossible, yet it exists" than "this mundane object which we understand performs differently than it should because it looks kewl".


And @Satinavian--I don't expect anyone to explain everything. For anything. But option 2 is honest--you admit that the underpinnings are different, in whatever (not described unless necessary) ways to produce the desired effects. #3 is a lie--you claim coherence for something where coherence is absolutely ruled out. Reality (unchanged) + magic is contradiction. The laws of physics do not allow it. No matter how you explain it, you have inherent contradictions. There is no explanation that can make #3 coherent. It's not about explaining, it's about honesty.

All fiction is, well, fiction. It is by its nature dishonest.

Nobody has the time or knowledge to fully map out all of the details of a fictional world, or even to perfectly report real life events for a non-fiction narrative.

That doesn't mean that verisimilitude cannot exist. Just because dragons are impossible doesn't mean it isn't a plot hole if I have my 50 meter fire breathing black dragon motivated only by greed become a 50 foot poison spitting wyvern motivated only by hunger in the next chapter because I couldn't be bothered to keep my notes straight.

TexAvery
2022-01-10, 01:23 PM
And, you know, never mind all the other ways posters have described the fallacy being invoked by players and readers, that have been detailed in this thread.

It's more common to see it invoked as a demand to include something that's been excluded from a setting, than it is a criticism of something that's already been included -- and in that form, it is "because Dragons, then ANYTHING".

But it also does come up as a defense of bad worldbuilding.

The example you give... the question is not one of "when was this introduced?" but "was this planned from the start?" It's OK to introduce things along the way as long as they're part of the intended world or fit. The problem comes when things are just piled on as things go along, with no preplanning and no thought as to what does or does not fit.

Cool story bro. All I've seen is an insistence that a fantasy world conform to a restrictive reader's expectations. Your final point is also a fallacy - there is no rule that a fictional world must be completely set from the start with no room for expansion or further imagination. Not everything new is a deus ex machina.

Let's call that the "genesis fallacy". Man it's fun to call everything you disagree with a fallacy. I should do that more.

Max_Killjoy
2022-01-10, 01:27 PM
I get that. Its just he comes across as very hypocritical as he leans super hard into lots of outdated stereotypes such as "the dung ages", Orientalism, and misogyny which make the type of stories he is advocating for seem, to me, to be even worse than what he is criticizing.


As noted, the essay was originally written in 1978... roughly 44 years ago... almost half a century. A lot of scholarship on those details has occurred between then and now, and I'm much more concerned by people who push those ideas in material written now, still, in 2022... and I'd hate to miss the forest of that essay for the trees of those details.

KorvinStarmast
2022-01-10, 01:28 PM
I get that. Its just he comes across as very hypocritical You lack context. Suggest you read some of his Sci Fi/Fantasy. Operation Chaos is a good one to start with. Unlike (too many) modern fantasy writers, he didn't write phone book sized novels.

Nobody has the time or knowledge to fully map out all of the details of a fictional world, or even to perfectly report real life events for a non-fiction narrative. I doubt anyone demands that. What is desired is a reasonably consistent mesh between the primary and secondary worlds. (And this is part of why good science fiction is very hard to write).

We aren't talking about just creating an original fantasy world, we are talking about creating one from scratch rather than using reality as a basis. You are talking about that. Actual world building involves getting the mix of primary and secondary world about right.

To try and steer this back on topic, if that's even a hope now:

The initial concern was how much economics one might want to try and model in an RPG, or more concisely, in a given setting, or in a world that a DM is building.
The only good answer to that is "however much is fun for the whole table" - since economic models are darned hard to put together even by experts in the field trying to emulate any given economic system is already fraught with peril.

Max_Killjoy
2022-01-10, 01:30 PM
Cool story bro. All I've seen is an insistence that a fantasy world conform to a restrictive reader's expectations. Your final point is also a fallacy - there is no rule that a fictional world must be completely set from the start with no room for expansion or further imagination. Not everything new is a deus ex machina.

Let's call that the "genesis fallacy". Man it's fun to call everything you disagree with a fallacy. I should do that more.


I did not say "a setting can't ever expand".

What I criticized is settings expanding in an ad-hoc, just-so manner, with no thought given ahead of time and no thought given to what came before.

Need to start reading what you're responding to, before you post... but don't feel bad, you're not alone in that on this thread. I'd hate to think that this is deliberate strawmanning, but... it seems more likely each time it happens.

Still... "cool story bro" and your "fallacy" crack are putting you really close to the same ignore list that others have been ending up on, I've completely lost patience for the snotty, crappy, derisive, demeaning, condescending attitude that's dominating around here lately.

Max_Killjoy
2022-01-10, 01:43 PM
I doubt anyone demands that. What is desired is a reasonably consistent mesh between the primary and secondary worlds. (And this is part of why good science fiction is very hard to write).


At least one person has been demanding that, as noted in some of my posts above, as a standard that will be automatically failed by ideas about worldbuilding competing with his own.




The initial concern was how much economics one might want to try and model in an RPG, or more concisely, in a given setting, or in a world that a DM is building.
The only good answer to that is "however much is fun for the whole table" - since economic models are darned hard to put together even by experts in the field trying to emulate any given economic system is already fraught with peril.

IMO, as with most things, it's a matter of "don't present actively contradictory details".

I don't need to know exactly how much gold to the ounce comes out of the Mines of Westplacia each year... but don't show/tell me that alchemists can make as much gold as they like cheaply and easily, and show/then tell me that gold coins are still the most stable and common currency, unless there's an very good third fact to reconcile the two.

Talakeal
2022-01-10, 01:56 PM
You are talking about that. Actual world building involves getting the mix of primary and secondary world about right.

I was responding to PhoenixPhyre. I do not disagree with you about trying to find a proper mix.

KorvinStarmast
2022-01-10, 03:27 PM
At least one person has been demanding that, as noted in some of my posts above, as a standard that will be automatically failed by ideas about worldbuilding competing with his own. I think something is being, somewhat, misplayed here. Earlier in the thread the point of the 'thin layer of what looks like our world' plus 'under the hood a lot of stuff has to work differently than ours' and the important third point 'we don't necessarily have to know how it all works since our objective is to play a game.'
That third part is kind of important for any speculative fiction setting, not just mid to high fantasy or swords and sorcery. (Fritz Lieber's Lankhmar setting is but one example of juxtaposing gritty medieval stuff with magic and strange phenomena and even SciFi allusions)

Note that I have the advantage of playing in that person's created world. It has (1) a good primary world/secondary world mix (2) no presumption on anyone's part that anybody knows it all, but there is (3) sufficient world building done to go a few layers down from the aforementioned surface-layer for those interested. (The world building has been ongoing for over 7 years, and is well documented).

IMO, as with most things, it's a matter of "don't present actively contradictory details".
That's a nice standard to meet.

I don't need to know exactly how much gold to the ounce comes out of the Mines of Westplacia each year... but don't show/tell me that alchemists can make as much gold as they like cheaply and easily, and show/then tell me that gold coins are still the most stable and common currency, unless there's an very good third fact to reconcile the two. Concur.

@Talakeal
I do not disagree with you about trying to find a proper mix. Hurrah, we have an accord. :smallsmile: How many layers of veneer are applied (primary world) on top of the secondary world is a creator's choice.

(One of my favorite examples of this is the spec fiction novel Tumbling After by Paul Witcover. The primary world is easily recognized and entered - 20th century Delaware - while the secondary world effects are woven in with considerable skill).

Mr Beer
2022-01-10, 04:06 PM
Except that
a) those hypergolic combinations also are all incredibly toxic and reactive to biological materials. Seriously, we know all of the options. And there aren't any biologically plausible ones.

I don't personally know of a biologically plausible binary combination that would create a self-igniting mixture, however given beetles have evolved a boiling explosive weapon leads me to believe it's probably possible. Unless you're a professional chemist with a specialised background, with a biologist friend you can bounce ideas of, I don't believe that you can authoritatively state that this is not biologically possible. I mean that you can make the statement but it's extremely unconvincing.

EDIT

Thinking about it, our fire breath mixture doesn't even have to be self-igniting, our dragon could have a sparking mechanism. On that basis we don't even need a binary weapon, it could simply have a sort of stomach-gland full of ethanol or something similar.

EDIT2

The ignition mechanism could also be electrical in nature.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-01-10, 04:39 PM
I don't personally know of a biologically plausible binary combination that would create a self-igniting mixture, however given beetles have evolved a boiling explosive weapon leads me to believe it's probably possible. Unless you're a professional chemist with a specialised background, with a biologist friend you can bounce ideas of, I don't believe that you can authoritatively state that this is not biologically possible. I mean that you can make the statement that you did but it's extremely unconvincing.

EDIT

Thinking about it, our fire breath mixture doesn't even have to be self-igniting, our dragon could have a sparking mechanism. On that basis we don't even need a binary weapon, it could simply have a sort of stomach-gland full of ethanol or something similar.

Bombardier beetles
a) don't actually produce an explosive (it's a gas pressure pop), so no hypergolics
b) don't actually produce fire (it's boiling, but barely)
c) are on a completely different scale
d) are incredibly limited both in range and in damage and in use.

Hypergolic chemicals are well understood. And they're all uniformly nasty to organics, being composed of (at least) a strong oxidizer and a highly-energetic fuel. Furthermore, making them requires significant energy, putting this thing WAY into the hole, which is bad when the thing is already energetically implausible. You can't pull in energy fast enough.

And that much ethanol needs to mix with air in particular levels to be more than just a hot burp. Frankly, an ethanol flame just doesn't have the energy needed to do substantial damage unless you've got a huge amount of it. And then the dragon goes boom when someone pokes it, like a puffed up balloon.

Plus, this all doesn't give you a fantasy dragon, let alone the hyper-intelligent, nearly-immortal, capable-of-eating-rocks, made out of magic D&D dragon (which is the reference material). It gives you a big dumb lizard, for whom walking would be a challenge and flight fundamentally impossible. Beyond that, the big lizards of the earlier eras required the much higher oxygen concentrations (among other things) of those eras and would not survive in modern times.

The point being, D&D-style dragons and magic just flat don't work. Even worse than quibbles about armor construction. So we know the underlying physics and chemistry (if even such exists) much be very different. Recognizing that means that we can stop caring and just build stuff that's fun for the game and good for the purposes we need. We can stop worrying whether an expert would look disdainfully at you for calling that a <term> rather than <some other term>. It just doesn't matter. Creativity can increase and world-builders can focus on the things that matter, freed from incessant demands to justify their choices in terms of real-world history and technology and science. They're free to let fantastic things be fantastic.

A focus on "magic is the only thing allowed to break real-world rules" means that those who don't magic are locked in the tight little box named "Guy at the Gym". It also empowers the nit-pickers and munchkins and rules-lawyers who are looking for "flaws" in order to gain power. It also locks in a culture of narrow thinking, locking off huge swaths of possibilities.

Edit: But I've said my piece and others disagree. So I'll back out of this discussion now.

Brother Oni
2022-01-10, 04:58 PM
a) those hypergolic combinations also are all incredibly toxic and reactive to biological materials. Seriously, we know all of the options. And there aren't any biologically plausible ones.

If I proposed that there was a mammal that could regurgitate its stomach contents at will and said contents were strong enough to dissolve iron over time, would you see that as plausible or implausible?

Surely the acid would dissolve the animal from the inside out, or the act of regurgitation would cause irreparable harm to the animal, or the biosynthesis of the acid is so energetically expensive that it cannot coexist with the mammal's primary hunting method, which is persistence hunting, ergo by your understanding, it is impractical.

And if I said the mammal holds the acid in special mucus lined stomach to keep it away from the rest of its biological systems, or that it can self repair the damage from the regurgitated acid, would that be too impossible to be feasible by your standards?

Surprise, this animal does exist and it's us.


As for a flame breath for a dragon, the book Flight of Dragons proposed that the dragons had a flight bladders, which the dragon filled with hydrogen from a supplementary foodstuff (white fire rock, or chalk). There was a completely handwaved synthesis pathway but essentially it involved involved reacting elemental calcium with hydrochloric acid (from the stomach) to generate the hydrogen. I find that a step too far, but on the other hand, hydrogen bioreactors do exist, but their implementation would involve vastly redesigned dragons, which are semi-photosynthetic with semi translucent skin for the bioreactor portions of its anatomy.

Since you can also quite happily ferment methane and have some oxygen generation via photosynthesis, these two gases can be collected and stored in relevant storage organs until the flame breath is required, which is a horrid mixture of expelled flammable gases which can be ignited; the anime of Flight of Dragons had the Thor's Thimble, which was a special electricity generating organ on the roof of a dragon's mouth, much like an electric eel. I'd be happy with a special organ that essentially works like a flint and tinder and the dragon strikes the two components together via muscle contractions to provide the ignition source.

The point is, we know of all the current options for hypergolic solutions. We don't know ALL of the options and it's simple hubris to think that we do.

Talakeal
2022-01-10, 05:11 PM
A focus on "magic is the only thing allowed to break real-world rules" means that those who don't magic are locked in the tight little box named "Guy at the Gym". It also empowers the nit-pickers and munchkins and rules-lawyers who are looking for "flaws" in order to gain power. It also locks in a culture of narrow thinking, locking off huge swaths of possibilities.

Did you ever stop to think that maybe this is a good thing?

I sure get a lot more fun out of a game if I have meaningful restrictions and challenges to overcome rather than just being able to do whatever I want to win as hard as possible.

To use a video game analogy, 3.5 wizards feel like playing a video game with the cheat codes on, while 3.5 martials feel like doing a hardcore knife only run, and I personally find that latter much more fun in both cases.

Mechalich
2022-01-10, 06:17 PM
Beyond that, the big lizards of the earlier eras required the much higher oxygen concentrations (among other things) of those eras and would not survive in modern times.

No they did not. This is a flatly incorrect statement. Oxygen concentrations varied a lot during the Mesozoic Era. While oxygen concentration during the Late Cretaceous is suggested to have been significantly higher than at present, oxygen levels during the Early Cretaceous and much of the Jurassic - the time of the largest Sauropods - were actually lower than today, probably between 15-19%, though there is still much debate on this issue. Also, the largest lizard in the fossil record is Megalania (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalania), which only went extinct 50,000 years ago (meaning it very likely existed contemporaneously with humans). Dinosaurs - including all birds, pterosaurs, crocodilians, and related animals, are Archosaurs and are not closely related to lizards (which are lepidosaurs).


As for a flame breath for a dragon, the book Flight of Dragons proposed that the dragons had a flight bladders, which the dragon filled with hydrogen from a supplementary foodstuff (white fire rock, or chalk). There was a completely handwaved synthesis pathway but essentially it involved involved reacting elemental calcium with hydrochloric acid (from the stomach) to generate the hydrogen. I find that a step too far, but on the other hand, hydrogen bioreactors do exist, but their implementation would involve vastly redesigned dragons, which are semi-photosynthetic with semi translucent skin for the bioreactor portions of its anatomy.

One of the things about biological plausibility is that life is limited by evolutionary history. Evolution is good at working with what it already has, in terms of modifying that, duplicating that, repositioning it, and so forth, it's not good at creating entirely new things, especially in terms of cellular-level biochemistry in multicellular organs. A key reason for this is that evolution is limited to changes that keep the organism alive and reproductively viable or they aren't passed on. The latter is an important limitation, since there's a surprising number of bizarre mutations that clear the first hurdle but not the second. As a kid I visited a nature center that had a turtle with two heads, alive in captivity. It functioned, in terms of basic metabolism, but it couldn't possibly survive in the wild.

But you can bypass those limits by imposing an artificial designer who can stop the ongoing process and design a creature from the ground up. Humans have already started to do this in a limited way - for example we created rabbits that glow in the dark - but a fully created ecosystem could easily go several orders of magnitude further.

For most classical monsters it's generally possible to imagine a biological creation that would get pretty close to them in physical form and even would represent most of the non-magical abilities of that creature. Flight is actually one of the harder ones simply because the weight ratios are such a pain. By contrast something like a Minotaur is perfectly viable.

Kraynic
2022-01-10, 07:03 PM
A focus on "magic is the only thing allowed to break real-world rules" means that those who don't magic are locked in the tight little box named "Guy at the Gym".

There are some systems in which this works pretty well. D&D just isn't one of those systems.

Mr Beer
2022-01-10, 07:49 PM
Bombardier beetles
a) don't actually produce an explosive (it's a gas pressure pop), so no hypergolics
b) don't actually produce fire (it's boiling, but barely)
c) are on a completely different scale
d) are incredibly limited both in range and in damage and in use.

a) This is nitpickery, the chemicals mix and "explode", no it's not an explosion in the technical sense like gunpowder or C4 but they "explode" in the normal understanding of a violent reaction that makes a loud noise and sprays stuff everywhere.
b) Yes, I said boiling, not fire. The point isn't that this is a fire weapon but that since we have an example of one type of violent, hot, lethal binary weapon used in nature, it's not hard to imagine that other types are plausible.
c) Yeah they are on a different scale because beetles are smaller than dragons.
d) Bombadier beetles can outright kill predators with these chemical weapons. How is this "incredibly limited" in any normal understanding of the phrase? Do you mean that a beetle-scale chemical weapon won't hurt a human? Sure but a dragon size one will.


Hypergolic chemicals are well understood. And they're all uniformly nasty to organics, being composed of (at least) a strong oxidizer and a highly-energetic fuel. Furthermore, making them requires significant energy, putting this thing WAY into the hole, which is bad when the thing is already energetically implausible. You can't pull in energy fast enough.

If you're saying that all known hypergolic rocket engine fuels specifically aren't biologically plausible, you may be right. I'm talking about a "dragon fire" breath weapon though, which is way more general. There are probably suitable binary component choices for such a weapon.


And that much ethanol needs to mix with air in particular levels to be more than just a hot burp. Frankly, an ethanol flame just doesn't have the energy needed to do substantial damage unless you've got a huge amount of it. And then the dragon goes boom when someone pokes it, like a puffed up balloon.

I mean if I doused you in a litre of of Everclear and then set fire to you, I think that would do "substantial damage". I think the napalm approach is viable here, a mix of ethanol and sticky saliva, maybe some stomach acid mixed in for funsies, followed by a flaming breath.

BTW your argument that we need to mix our ethanol with air to do anything extremely contradicts your position than a dragon with an ethanol gland explodes whenever lightly jabbed.


Plus, this all doesn't give you a fantasy dragon, let alone the hyper-intelligent, nearly-immortal, capable-of-eating-rocks, made out of magic D&D dragon (which is the reference material). It gives you a big dumb lizard, for whom walking would be a challenge and flight fundamentally impossible.

I don't think anyone claimed a demigod mountainous magic-using genius intellect uber-dragon would plausibly evolve on Earth, rather than a large flying lizard with a firey breath weapon could do so.

TexAvery
2022-01-10, 08:17 PM
I did not say "a setting can't ever expand".

What I criticized is settings expanding in an ad-hoc, just-so manner, with no thought given ahead of time and no thought given to what came before.

Need to start reading what you're responding to, before you post... but don't feel bad, you're not alone in that on this thread. I'd hate to think that this is deliberate strawmanning, but... it seems more likely each time it happens.

Still... "cool story bro" and your "fallacy" crack are putting you really close to the same ignore list that others have been ending up on, I've completely lost patience for the snotty, crappy, derisive, demeaning, condescending attitude that's dominating around here lately.

You said a setting couldn't add a divergence from reality that wasn't planned from the start. I read your post; you might want to work on your consistency, or communication.

I am being short and sarcastic with you because you are... being snotty, crappy, derisive, demeaning, and condescending by acting as if your personal preference is provably correct and superior, and attempting to put an air of authority on it by citing a "fallacy" as proof.

Go ahead with the iggy list, please. I'll drown my sorrows with a mai tai over dinner and be (not) thinking of you.

TexAvery
2022-01-10, 08:25 PM
Did you ever stop to think that maybe this is a good thing?

I sure get a lot more fun out of a game if I have meaningful restrictions and challenges to overcome rather than just being able to do whatever I want to win as hard as possible.

To use a video game analogy, 3.5 wizards feel like playing a video game with the cheat codes on, while 3.5 martials feel like doing a hardcore knife only run, and I personally find that latter much more fun in both cases.

It would be good if that were communicated in the PHB instead of the monk being described as "one of the most powerful". And the wizard, as written, should be right out.

Actually, I suppose the wizard does have its place. My one 3.5 campaign I played the Incantatar and (with the help of reading here) often bailed out the muggles and made sure to always buff the fighter so he wasn't outshone by the druid. That doesn't make it great design overall system design, especially when it's undocumented. The DM didn't really grasp how little danger we were usually in.

Max_Killjoy
2022-01-10, 08:32 PM
You said a setting couldn't add a divergence from reality that wasn't planned from the start. I read your post; you might want to work on your consistency, or communication.


Really?



The example you give... the question is not one of "when was this introduced?" but "was this planned from the start?" It's OK to introduce things along the way as long as they're part of the intended world or fit. The problem comes when things are just piled on as things go along, with no preplanning and no thought as to what does or does not fit.


Huh.

I mean, the use of "or" instead of "and" is subtle and all, but still.

As for the rest of your post... "rubber vs glue" isn't exactly a powerful refutation outside of elementary school.

TexAvery
2022-01-10, 08:43 PM
Really?

Huh.

Hmm, I did miss that; thank you. But that "fit" is according to you, and the rest of my point stands. The "but dragons" whining crowd thinks that "dragons" means "only dragons", while it really means "reality is not the rule here, be on the lookout for differences". I continue to have no patience for it as a concept. I'd much rather authors push the limits and think of interesting things than feel constrained by "ooh, this might upset someone on the internet".

You edited, so now I will edit. The rubber and glue line was something I was thinking of pulling out, directly, on you, because you have literally been extremely dismissive and superior in this thread in pushing your position, so I returned in kind and you got offended. So very (not) sorry.

Mechalich
2022-01-10, 08:46 PM
It would be good if that were communicated in the PHB instead of the monk being described as "one of the most powerful". And the wizard, as written, should be right out.

Actually, I suppose the wizard does have its place. My one 3.5 campaign I played the Incantatar and (with the help of reading here) often bailed out the muggles and made sure to always buff the fighter so he wasn't outshone by the druid. That doesn't make it great design overall system design, especially when it's undocumented. The DM didn't really grasp how little danger we were usually in.

That's a playtesting and math-hammering related problem, which is a rather different design aspect. It's a common problem. Playtesting is expensive and most TTRPGs are built for cheap. Likewise, most people who work in the industry do not have backgrounds in the relevant mathematics subfields (this hews back to the OPs point in that most fictional settings do not have an economist on the design staff) and it's quite common for games to output results that are clearly mathematically different but lack an in game meaning. This is best known from the oWoD, where for most rolls the difference between 1-success and 10-successes had no quantitative value attached at all.

D&D 3e is a notable system in this regard in that it doesn't play the way the initial designers thought it played. The design team made a huge number of individually small mechanical changes mostly intended to simplify the system and make things work easier in active play - for example converting the rather bizarre to-hit equation used by 2e's Thaco and armor class to a simply target number system - but they thought the result would still mostly play the same way as 2e play. They playtested only the lowest levels, with very few optimization tricks engaged (and in fairness most low-level optimization tricks aren't available in Core), and came to the completely erroneous conclusion that they had met their expectations. When fan experimentation made it clear that, starting from the mid-levels onward, the game didn't play like the designers had expected at all, WotC, in a reaction absolutely typical of a corporate entity in this situation, simply denied this (and from a purely business perspective, I actually think this was the correct move, though a rather morally bankrupt one). Corrections only crept in very gradually, and you have to try and comb the RAI and fluff-speak to figure out what the real idea is. Generally, Pathfinder 1e, which represents the version of the 3e system that had the fullest chance to adjust builds and playstyle with a full knowledge of the system, eventually adjusted to a Tier III balance point. In that system neither the monk - too weak - or the wizard - too powerful - belong in the system.

All of that is very mechanics heavy, but it does extend out into the world-building. A D&D-style fictional setting where there are only Tier III classes is very different from one with the full range of classes available, and probably has far higher verisimilitude, but you can't retroactively turn an exiting setting into that without lobotomizing it, which the fans won't accept. There's actually a real world example of this: 4e drastically rebalanced everything in D&D, but in order to adjust the Forgotten Realms to 4e they had to hack the setting apart so extensively that they blew a multi-century hole in the timeline and world map using the Spellplague. Everyone hated that move and it ultimately had to be disavowed.

TexAvery
2022-01-10, 08:51 PM
Oh yes, I am aware of that whole story. I was just trying to (broadly) agree with T's point, but with the caveat that it should be clear so that player expectations are set appropriately.

NichG
2022-01-10, 09:04 PM
Hmm, I did miss that; thank you. But that "fit" is according to you, and the rest of my point stands. The "but dragons" whining crowd thinks that "dragons" means "only dragons", while it really means "reality is not the rule here, be on the lookout for differences". I continue to have no patience for it as a concept. I'd much rather authors push the limits and think of interesting things than feel constrained by "ooh, this might upset someone on the internet".


The fallacy is using dragons as an excuse to justify other elements, rather than just saying 'yes, these other elements are also different in my setting'.

The conclusion (settings are allowed to differ from reality) is fine. The method of reaching that conclusion (because you accepted one difference, you must now consider all differences equal) is not.

TexAvery
2022-01-10, 09:36 PM
The fallacy is using dragons as an excuse to justify other elements, rather than just saying 'yes, these other elements are also different in my setting'.

The conclusion (settings are allowed to differ from reality) is fine. The method of reaching that conclusion (because you accepted one difference, you must now consider all differences equal) is not.

As presented, I mainly see that as a distinction without a difference. As an attempt to force a DM to include a player's non-conforming elements in the campaign? Ok, but that applies to many things, including what supplements are allowed. What I see it mostly used for is "I disagree with the direction of this story", and that... I have little patience for that being called a "fallacy" rather than "this story has taken a turn away from my personal taste".

What's the difference between "settings are allowed to differ from reality" (fine) and "all differences must be accepted" (not fine)? One a reason for the other, as I see it, with the latter's inclusion of "all" making it unpalatable for some. Some people will like the proverbial fantasy kitchen sink; others won't. Neither can be stated to be "correct".

And I really do think the fad of naming a fallacy for everything has, ah, jumped the shark.

NichG
2022-01-10, 09:52 PM
As presented, I mainly see that as a distinction without a difference. As an attempt to force a DM to include a player's non-conforming elements in the campaign? Ok, but that applies to many things, including what supplements are allowed. What I see it mostly used for is "I disagree with the direction of this story", and that... I have little patience for that being called a "fallacy" rather than "this story has taken a turn away from my personal taste".

What's the difference between "settings are allowed to differ from reality" (fine) and "all differences must be accepted" (not fine)? One a reason for the other, as I see it, with the latter's inclusion of "all" making it unpalatable for some. Some people will like the proverbial fantasy kitchen sink; others won't. Neither can be stated to be "correct".


As an author, if you choose to include an element, that's a choice that you have. There isn't a wrong choice, only perhaps a choice that is mismatched to what you're trying to achieve. It doesn't need to be justified with respect to some other choice you made, because if it did, then someone could just attack that other choice. So the error is in trying to justify something that you have the choice to make as if your ability to do so derives from elsewhere, rather than just 'authors making choices is okay'.

The person absorbing the consequence of those choices can like them or dislike them, and no logical argument can remove their ability to have an opinion on the choices the author made.

Mechalich
2022-01-10, 10:20 PM
As an author, if you choose to include an element, that's a choice that you have. There isn't a wrong choice, only perhaps a choice that is mismatched to what you're trying to achieve. It doesn't need to be justified with respect to some other choice you made, because if it did, then someone could just attack that other choice. So the error is in trying to justify something that you have the choice to make as if your ability to do so derives from elsewhere, rather than just 'authors making choices is okay'.

The person absorbing the consequence of those choices can like them or dislike them, and no logical argument can remove their ability to have an opinion on the choices the author made.

I'd extend it a bit further. If verisimilitude or some other realism-related attribute of the fiction is important to what the work is trying to achieve (ex. in a Natural History of Dragons universe it is important that dragons be animals sufficiently integrated into the modified ecosystem that they have a viable natural history to study, as opposed to being, say, star drakes powered by the cosmic microwave background radiation), then the choice to include any element needs to be evaluated in terms of how it impacts verisimilitude. This is essentially an artistic cost-benefit analysis as to whether or not some element is 'worth having' in a story.

This takes place even in works that don't involve supernatural elements at all. For example, in almost every modern Hollywood film the people onscreen are unreasonably attractive compared to the average for wherever the story is set, often to extreme levels - ex. the idea that James Bond would encounter an unattractive woman in some plot-critical position is practically blaspheming the canon. Does this damage verisimilitude? Yes it does, but only modestly, especially after it's become ingrained in the audience subconsciousness after decades of exposure, so the calculation to flood the zone with gorgeous actors is almost always going to be seen as favorable.

Additionally the importance of verisimilitude in a fictional work varies immensely from functionally zero, such as in completely gonzo anime like Kill la Kill, to extremely high, such as in historical fiction focused on the recreation of a single event, as in a film like Midway, with a huge range in between, and just as having too little verisimilitude can damage a work, having too much can do the same thing. The OPs initial problem is a player making an isolated demand for unnecessary rigor in terms of economic verisimilitude in the probable effort to gain an unfair advantage.

In most TTRPG gameplay the demand for verisimilitude is very, very low, often enough that the completely bonkers fantasy kitchen sink of D&D is acceptable. Note that D&D-based narrative fiction has a much high need for verisimilitude than most active games and for that reason the more successful novels - Drizzt, early Dragonlance, dial down the quantity and potency of fantastical elements drastically.

The great danger of low verisimilitude settings is when the story causes a setting element that makes no sense to suddenly become a key plot point, often become the story has changed framing or mode. This is one of the reasons why sequels and prequels are so difficult, because often a story only works within the confines of the specific conditions setup up for it to occur, and attempting to step outside those conditions reveals a universe that is not, on its own, functional.

TexAvery
2022-01-11, 01:25 AM
As an author, if you choose to include an element, that's a choice that you have. There isn't a wrong choice, only perhaps a choice that is mismatched to what you're trying to achieve. It doesn't need to be justified with respect to some other choice you made, because if it did, then someone could just attack that other choice. So the error is in trying to justify something that you have the choice to make as if your ability to do so derives from elsewhere, rather than just 'authors making choices is okay'.

The person absorbing the consequence of those choices can like them or dislike them, and no logical argument can remove their ability to have an opinion on the choices the author made.

I had a longer response typed up and it got eaten because I didn't quite finish it before dinner. I think I agree with you though.

KorvinStarmast
2022-01-11, 09:22 AM
a) This is nitpickery, the chemicals mix and "explode", no it's not an explosion in the technical sense like gunpowder or C4 but they "explode" in the normal understanding of a violent reaction that makes a loud noise and sprays stuff everywhere. See also fuel air explosives, or the explosive combustion of flour or coal dust.


since we have an example of one type of violent, hot, lethal binary weapon used in nature, it's not hard to imagine that other types are plausible. That is kind of what I was reaching for in my example a few pages back.


I mean if I doused you in a litre of of Everclear and then set fire to you, I think that would do "substantial damage". I think the napalm approach is viable here, a mix of ethanol and sticky saliva, maybe some stomach acid mixed in for funsies, followed by a flaming breath. FWIW, Robin Hobb used acid breath, or a cloud of acid breath, for a scene where one of her dragons was in a battle in a seaside town. Given that acid is what is in the gut of a lot of animals to aid digestion, that might be one of the better approaches to dragon breath: acid, not flame. It's still destructive. \

The original D&D game had a limit (three breaths per day) that roughly fit into a bit of verisimilitude: your internal bladder only holds so much bile/gall/urine/acid for breathing, your body needs time to recharge that. (Pern's dragons were also a bit limited in how much they could produce in a given day, IIRC, in terms of the riders had to carry bags of rocks...been a while since I read those books). Very effective albeit limited.

Compare that limitation to the dragons in Game of Thrones (a never ending flame thrower tens of yards long) or a D&D 5e dragon whose breath recharges on a 5 or 6 roll from a d6: if you extrapolate that out into a day you can calculate an amazing amount of fire bearing {something} to produce that kind of energy.
One way to side step this logistical problem is to reach back to something about magic spells from AD&D 1e. Spells from that edition were explicitly written as being channeled from one of the planes into the prime: positive or negative material plane, plane of fire, plane of earth, and so on. That goes hand in hand with dragons, which takes us to this fantasy point for any fantasy setting: it works on metaphysics, not physics. Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, or, Earth+Air+Fire+Water+Spirit (which IIRC Jordan borrowed from an eastern philosophy for his GoT series of novels).
The matter is to what extent and depth the metaphysics reaches: that's an artistic decision, not a scientific one.

Back to our fire/ice/lightning breathing dragon: if the fire breathing dragon is in fact channeling fire from the elemental plane of fire with his breath, or the Queen of the Ice pack is channeling frost cones from the para-elemental plane of ice when she breaths her frosty breath, you avoid the "how does her internal bladder/organ produce that?" issue by tapping into the in-universe reality of metaphysics. If one is playing D&D, the overlap of various planes with the Prime Material plane is an assumption for nearly every setting I can think of, even if Dark Sun, for example, with its defiler / preserve duality is different from FR's "magic is remarkably common" which is different from Greyhawk's "magic is here but it's dangerous to use" and so on.

Because it is metaphysics, each setting can have a different presentation/bundle of metaphysical models and qualities. A part of the joy of play is in discovering how the metaphysics works in a given world.

In the more successful campaigns I have played in over the years, the players (through their PCs) don't know all of what's under the hood up front: they need to discover it through play. It is my feeling that the part of the player base who do not enjoy the wonder of discovery and exploration are in this case a part of the problem, not a part of the solution. I guess tastes differ on that though.

The "but dragons" whining crowd thinks that "dragons" means "only dragons", while it really means "reality is not the rule here, be on the lookout for differences". Yes, that's what the charitably minded do, rather than the nit pickers.

Playtesting is expensive and most TTRPGs are built for cheap.
Bingo.

D&D 3e is a notable system in this regard in that it doesn't play the way the initial designers thought it played. The design team made a huge number of individually small mechanical changes mostly intended to simplify the system and make things work easier in active play - for example converting the rather bizarre to-hit equation used by 2e's Thaco and armor class to a simply target number system - but they thought the result would still mostly play the same way as 2e play. FWIW, when Diablo II was released by Blizzard, it became apparent early on that the only attempts at balance were for normal difficulty. Similar (only checked low levels) approach. And they had a decent budget.

They playtested only the lowest levels, with very few optimization tricks engaged (and in fairness most low-level optimization tricks aren't available in Core), and came to the completely erroneous conclusion that they had met their expectations. Which is a shame.

When fan experimentation made it clear that, starting from the mid-levels onward, the game didn't play like the designers had expected at all, WotC, in a reaction absolutely typical of a corporate entity in this situation, simply denied this (and from a purely business perspective, I actually think this was the correct move, though a rather morally bankrupt one). Their actual money maker was/is a card game. :smallbiggrin: For all that they hosed this up, I am glad they picked up D&D to keep it from dying as TSR was.

Corrections only crept in very gradually, and you have to try and comb the RAI and fluff-speak to figure out what the real idea is. Generally, Pathfinder 1e, which represents the version of the 3e system that had the fullest chance to adjust builds and playstyle with a full knowledge of the system, eventually adjusted to a Tier III balance point. In that system neither the monk - too weak - or the wizard - too powerful - belong in the system. Interesting. As I don't PF, this is an interesting observation.

There's actually a real world example of this: 4e drastically rebalanced everything in D&D, but in order to adjust the Forgotten Realms to 4e they had to hack the setting apart so extensively that they blew a multi-century hole in the timeline and world map using the Spellplague. Everyone hated that move and it ultimately had to be disavowed. Then again, FR as a setting has had ample holes in it since 1e days. :smalltongue:

Max_Killjoy
2022-01-11, 10:10 AM
Hmm, I did miss that; thank you. But that "fit" is according to you, and the rest of my point stands. The "but dragons" whining crowd thinks that "dragons" means "only dragons", while it really means "reality is not the rule here, be on the lookout for differences". I continue to have no patience for it as a concept. I'd much rather authors push the limits and think of interesting things than feel constrained by "ooh, this might upset someone on the internet".


That's not what's going on, and it's ironic that you describe a concept that calls out "whining" ("But but but GM, you let that player have X, why can't I have Y? I demand you give me Y!") as itself being supposedly "whining".

More broadly, it's a false dichotomy -- the assertion that a setting can only be "the real world" in all ways with no deviation, or a "kitchen sink, just-so, faerie-tale" world, with no middle ground; the assertion that once even the smallest single element of deviation from "reality" is introduced, all bets are off, and any attempt at verisimilitude is a waste of time and any limitation on what's allowed in is "unfair".

Or to put in your framework, "dragons" can very much mean "be on the lookout for other differences" -- the fallacy in question is about the assertion that "dragons" means "all other differences are valid, in play, etc, and you're stupid to put any limits on it."


The rest of this is off-topic, but hey, it's been made a thing by my "fellow poster", so I'm going to address it.



You edited, so now I will edit. The rubber and glue line was something I was thinking of pulling out, directly, on you, because you have literally been extremely dismissive and superior in this thread in pushing your position, so I returned in kind and you got offended. So very (not) sorry.


Whatever "dismissive and superior" attitude you're seeing is entirely your own inference, and maybe tells us more about what sort of "discussion" you're expecting, than about anything else.

Or, in your own words... "cool story bro". /s

Seriously, this was my original post on the point... if you really think is is "dismissive" or "superior", then I don't know what to tell you:



I do have some pushback on that.

1) If a real-world term is being used, then use it accurately, don't just slap a different / wrong meaning on it and then say "But it's a different world". If it's a different thing, use a different term. See also, movies or stories that claim to be set in and use a real time and place, and real people, but are really just random fiction using those names for marketing reasons. (This IS NOT Sparta, guys.) Don't call something a longsword if it's not a longsword, call it something else.

2) Sometimes things don't work for very basic practical reasons. Studded leather never being a thing isn't "because historical circumstance", it's because sticking some metal studs in soft leather doesn't make it any more protective than soft leather without the studs (which is very nearly no protection to begin with). Even if the setting has some special source or process that makes soft leather more protective, sticking a few metal studs in it won't make it better armor.

Max_Killjoy
2022-01-11, 10:29 AM
That's a playtesting and math-hammering related problem, which is a rather different design aspect. It's a common problem. Playtesting is expensive and most TTRPGs are built for cheap. Likewise, most people who work in the industry do not have backgrounds in the relevant mathematics subfields (this hews back to the OPs point in that most fictional settings do not have an economist on the design staff) and it's quite common for games to output results that are clearly mathematically different but lack an in game meaning. This is best known from the oWoD, where for most rolls the difference between 1-success and 10-successes had no quantitative value attached at all.

D&D 3e is a notable system in this regard in that it doesn't play the way the initial designers thought it played. The design team made a huge number of individually small mechanical changes mostly intended to simplify the system and make things work easier in active play - for example converting the rather bizarre to-hit equation used by 2e's Thaco and armor class to a simply target number system - but they thought the result would still mostly play the same way as 2e play. They playtested only the lowest levels, with very few optimization tricks engaged (and in fairness most low-level optimization tricks aren't available in Core), and came to the completely erroneous conclusion that they had met their expectations. When fan experimentation made it clear that, starting from the mid-levels onward, the game didn't play like the designers had expected at all, WotC, in a reaction absolutely typical of a corporate entity in this situation, simply denied this (and from a purely business perspective, I actually think this was the correct move, though a rather morally bankrupt one). Corrections only crept in very gradually, and you have to try and comb the RAI and fluff-speak to figure out what the real idea is. Generally, Pathfinder 1e, which represents the version of the 3e system that had the fullest chance to adjust builds and playstyle with a full knowledge of the system, eventually adjusted to a Tier III balance point. In that system neither the monk - too weak - or the wizard - too powerful - belong in the system.

All of that is very mechanics heavy, but it does extend out into the world-building. A D&D-style fictional setting where there are only Tier III classes is very different from one with the full range of classes available, and probably has far higher verisimilitude, but you can't retroactively turn an exiting setting into that without lobotomizing it, which the fans won't accept. There's actually a real world example of this: 4e drastically rebalanced everything in D&D, but in order to adjust the Forgotten Realms to 4e they had to hack the setting apart so extensively that they blew a multi-century hole in the timeline and world map using the Spellplague. Everyone hated that move and it ultimately had to be disavowed.

More broadly, this illustrates one of the issues with steeply-scaling level-based systems... without an intensive amount of care and testing and rework before publishing, they're really 2+ systems in a trenchcoat.

Level 15 vs Level 1 isn't just more powerful characters vs more powerful foes, it's an entirely different game with some mechanical similarities.

That's not to say that point-buy can be divergent, but that's more an issue of approach than inherent change... take HERO, where the "always use the cheapest way to build an ability", "always use the most expensive way to build an ability", "always use the RAI way to build an ability", and "always use closest mechanical model to build an ability" are all competing philosophies, and can result in very different feels to the resulting campaigns.

But that's also an issue even deeper in games like D&D, where more divergent approaches -- truly high-op or even gonzo mechanical-advantage build, "this is a toolkit to represent your character most accurately, fluff can be changed", "the rules define the world, archetypes uber alles", etc -- all live under the same trenchcoat as all the levels of gameplay.

TexAvery
2022-01-11, 10:40 AM
FWIW, when Diablo II was released by Blizzard, it became apparent early on that the only attempts at balance were for normal difficulty. Similar (only checked low levels) approach. And they had a decent budget.

Lovely post! To respond to this part alone, I had not ever internalized that; I thought I just sucked. :smallannoyed:

paladinofshojo
2022-01-11, 11:54 AM
How did a question on what to do about a player trying to extrapolate my world’s economy end up as a discussion about the realism of magic and dragons?

The Glyphstone
2022-01-11, 12:12 PM
Threads here tend to do that, if you hadn't already noticed...

Max_Killjoy
2022-01-11, 12:16 PM
How did a question on what to do about a player trying to extrapolate my world’s economy end up as a discussion about the realism of magic and dragons?


Worldbuilding. In this case, how deep into the economics of the setting it's reasonable or desirable to go.

As usual, there's a discussion about how much depth and internal coherence is required or reasonable for a speculative setting / secondary world -- such as how much

Sadly, that leads those who erroneously conflate a preference for high levels of depth and internal coherence, with a supposed demand for strict adherence to reality (the real / primary world), to come out of the woodwork.

Talakeal
2022-01-11, 12:25 PM
Plus, this all doesn't give you a fantasy dragon, let alone the hyper-intelligent, nearly-immortal, capable-of-eating-rocks, made out of magic D&D dragon (which is the reference material). It gives you a big dumb lizard, for whom walking would be a challenge and flight fundamentally impossible. Beyond that, the big lizards of the earlier eras required the much higher oxygen concentrations (among other things) of those eras and would not survive in modern times.

In the very first post on this subject I said it depends on what you mean by dragon.

I agree, a D&D style dragon is probably impossible without a bunch of underlying changes to the laws of physics (although who is to say it isn't possible in our universe to create areas where the laws of physics are warped?).

But I absolutely think it is possible to create a large, flying, fire-breathing, reptillian apex predator that your average person would look at and think "dragon".


Hmm, I did miss that; thank you. But that "fit" is according to you, and the rest of my point stands. The "but dragons" whining crowd thinks that "dragons" means "only dragons", while it really means "reality is not the rule here, be on the lookout for differences". I continue to have no patience for it as a concept. I'd much rather authors push the limits and think of interesting things than feel constrained by "ooh, this might upset someone on the internet".

You edited, so now I will edit. The rubber and glue line was something I was thinking of pulling out, directly, on you, because you have literally been extremely dismissive and superior in this thread in pushing your position, so I returned in kind and you got offended. So very (not) sorry.

This may be your impression, it isn't mine.


For many years I have been frustrated discussing works of speculative fiction because any time I would point out a plot hole or inconsistency, I would immediately get silenced by someone saying something along the lines of "There is magic / dragons / aliens / zombies etc., its all bull-poop anyway, why would you expect it to be realistic? Your argument is invalid!" I remember it really strongly when the first Matrix came out and people didn't like me complaining that it was an awesome movie, but the idea that humans generated more energy than they took in really broke my immersion.

I have also seen it used, by both sides, in gaming when someone comes up with a plan that wouldn't work, or that the DM doesn't want to work, like say filling a dungeon with oil or breathing underwater through a long bamboo pole. And I get it a hell of a lot when I say I prefer to play a character without supernatural powers.

For a more recent example, see the latest push to include magical weel-chairs in D&D, where people who say things like "Why would the bad guys make their fortress wheelchair accessible?" or "Why would you go to all the trouble of creating a major artifact when you could just cast regenerate" are met with similar calls to stop bringing logic into their fantasy.

As Mark Hall has in its signature, many people seem to mix up versimilitude with realism.

I was very glad when this fallacy was given the name "but dragons" as it put a name to a phenomenon that had been bugging me for years. Also, I really don't think there are that many named gamer fallacies. I can only think of three others (Oberoni, Stormwind, and Guy at the Gym) and the last one is really more of a concept than a fallacy.


It would be good if that were communicated in the PHB instead of the monk being described as "one of the most powerful". And the wizard, as written, should be right out.

Actually, I suppose the wizard does have its place. My one 3.5 campaign I played the Incantatar and (with the help of reading here) often bailed out the muggles and made sure to always buff the fighter so he wasn't outshone by the druid. That doesn't make it great design overall system design, especially when it's undocumented. The DM didn't really grasp how little danger we were usually in.

I am not in any way saying this is good game design, just that of the two I would much rather play the more limited option.

Easy e
2022-01-11, 12:47 PM
How did a question on what to do about a player trying to extrapolate my world’s economy end up as a discussion about the realism of magic and dragons?

I'm honestly surprised it hasn't some how got into the Casters > Martials debate yet!

Talakeal
2022-01-11, 01:10 PM
I'm honestly surprised it hasn't some how got into the Casters > Martials debate yet!

It's about to. Guy at the Gym and But Dragons! are closely linked, and when one rears its ugly head the other will surely follow...

KorvinStarmast
2022-01-11, 01:26 PM
It's about to. Guy at the Gym and But Dragons! are closely linked, and when one rears its ugly head the other will surely follow... Stop with the fighter hate already. Fighters aren't ugly. (This jest is grounded in Dragons in D&D having high Charisma in the current edition)..they cannot have ugly heads...frog has now been dissected.

TexAvery
2022-01-11, 02:26 PM
This may be your impression, it isn't mine.

*snipping the rest for brevity*

To me, those are just garden-variety plot holes and bad writing that occur in every genre; it's why I find Star Trek unwatchable. Oberoni and Stormwind serve much better roles. GatG is mostly funny because people explicitly both love and hate it. But dragons... meh, it doesn't serve anything and is just a phrase repeated as an attempt to prove an opinion is fact. And like all, it won't ever be resolved, so I think that'll be my last on the matter for now.

Max_Killjoy
2022-01-11, 03:58 PM
This may be your impression, it isn't mine.


For many years I have been frustrated discussing works of speculative fiction because any time I would point out a plot hole or inconsistency, I would immediately get silenced by someone saying something along the lines of "There is magic / dragons / aliens / zombies etc., its all bull-poop anyway, why would you expect it to be realistic? Your argument is invalid!" I remember it really strongly when the first Matrix came out and people didn't like me complaining that it was an awesome movie, but the idea that humans generated more energy than they took in really broke my immersion.

I have also seen it used, by both sides, in gaming when someone comes up with a plan that wouldn't work, or that the DM doesn't want to work, like say filling a dungeon with oil or breathing underwater through a long bamboo pole. And I get it a hell of a lot when I say I prefer to play a character without supernatural powers.

For a more recent example, see the latest push to include magical wheel-chairs in D&D, where people who say things like "Why would the bad guys make their fortress wheelchair accessible?" or "Why would you go to all the trouble of creating a major artifact when you could just cast regenerate" are met with similar calls to stop bringing logic into their fantasy.

As Mark Hall has in its signature, many people seem to mix up verisimilitude with realism.

I was very glad when this fallacy was given the name "but dragons" as it put a name to a phenomenon that had been bugging me for years. Also, I really don't think there are that many named gamer fallacies. I can only think of three others (Oberoni, Stormwind, and Guy at the Gym) and the last one is really more of a concept than a fallacy.


That's pretty much where I'm coming from.

BRC
2022-01-11, 04:39 PM
Once again, it comes down a lot to which side you're arguing.

Like, the fact remains that not every fictional world is going to stand up to a rigorous look at it's underlying systems, and I don't think it's fair to hold every worldbuilder, especially if it's just a GM making a game for their friends, to the standard of building a world with zero holes in it's logic, especially when a lot of that logic is coming from the underlying rule-set of a game like Dungeons and Dragons.

It's not wrong to expect a world to make sense, and people are looking for different things as far as a setting being grounded vs fantastical, but I think you DO owe the worldbuilder at least a good-faith attempt to engage with the world as it's presented before you start complaining that it's unrealistic.

Like, I think there are three levels that you really need to think about.

1) Is the setting contradictory, or is it just more fantastical than I like/ In ways I don't like?
If somebody says "This setting has Wizards and Dragons and Giant Anime Swords", and your problem is with the giant anime swords, then you can have that problem, but call it what it is, a difference in opinion about aesthetic/level of fantasy. This is where 'But Dragons" is the most applicable defense. If you can accept one impossible-but-cool thing, but cannot accept another, than it's not that the second thing is somewhow Worse than the first, you just personally don't like it.

Like, for example Archery takes a LOT of physical strength. D&D 5e makes Archery fully dex based, an 8 strength 20 dex character hits just as hard with a bow as a 12 str 20 dex character. This is SUPER unrealistic, and no amount of magic takes away from the fact that it takes a lot of arm strength to pull back a bowstring, and the heavier a bow you can draw, the harder your arrow will hit things.
But if you have a problem with low-strength archers, I'd say that's more about the setting not matching up to your standard as far as rigor than anything else. It's a common staple that's generally pretty harmless. Let people have fun in dumb ways. If it's a dealbreaker for you, then find another game before throwing a fit.

Fantasy isn't just "Here are a few fictional things", it can involve a genuine detachment from reality in the interests of telling a cool story.

Like, consider "The Hero is surrounded by a bunch of Mooks". Realistically, how many moderately skilled opponents could the Best Swordsman In The World defeat in open battle? But we can accept The Hero fighting five, ten, twenty faceless mooks without issue.

2) Are the "Flaws" In the worldbuilding Contradictions, or just not the most likely way for things to have gone?

There's a tendency to mistake "The most likely outcome" with "The only possible outcome" when talking about fictional worlds. This goes back to the OP, where the player in question said "These coins are from an era where the kingdom was more prosperous, therefor the current coinage MUST be debased and these old coins are worth more".

Sure, that's a likely outcome, but it's not guaranteed. The GM isn't obligated write you an essay on the cultural and economic factors that kept the percentage of gold in the coins stable even as the kingdom faced financial troubles, and just because something is likely to have happened doesn't mean it's guaranteed to have happened. If you're not calling out an actual Contradiction, but instead calling out something improbable, that's more on you than the world.

3) Are the flaws/contradictions crucial to the story being told, or are they minor background details.
So, let's say you've spotted a genuine Flaw, something that straight up makes no sense given the rules of the setting. Is that contradiction actually Important, or is it in some minor piece of background info. Once again, these worlds are just built for fun, the GM doesn't have time to think through every minor setting detail.

An example of a genuine Flaw might be something like this:

During the War against the Vampires, The Vampires used a cunning plan to assassinate King Frederick. Knowing that they could not overwhelm the Paladins in the Royal Guard, they instead captured the King's brother James and turned him into a Vampire, then sent him back to King Frederick with a story of how he Escaped from the Vampires. That night, James snuck through the castle and murdered his brother.
If the Royal Guard were Paladins, and they knew that James had been captured by Vampires looking to assassinate Frederick, I think it's a genuine flaw in the setting that none of the Royal Guards thought to check if James was a vampire, considering they would have had no shortage of methods for doing so. That's such a serious oversight that it goes from "Unlikely" to "Unbelievable", unless there's something else at play (Like a traitor within the Guard).
And, most importantly, this is a very important event. A lynchpin of the story, so such a blatant hole in the logic begs to be filled.

Now, by changing the event, we can make the exact same flaw in logic far less of a problem.

During the War against the Vampires, The Vampires tried to assassinate King Frederick with a cunning plan. Knowing that they could not overwhelm the Paladins in the Royal Guard, they instead captured the King's brother James and turned him into a Vampire, then sent him back to King Frederick with a story of how he Escaped from the Vampires. That night, James tried to sneak through the castle to assassinate the King, but was stopped by the Royal Guard. The King, outraged by this affront, swore to see the Vampires destroyed.

Yes, we have the same flaw: The Royal Guard failing to spot that James was a vampire, and that should be cleaned up, but it's less important now. Rather than the takeaway being that the Vampire's Plot worked when it should have failed, our takeaway is that the Vampires Tried, Failed, and the King is outraged. The fact that the assassination got farther than it should have (James should have been spotted as soon as he got to the Castle) isn't nearly as big a deal.

Mechalich
2022-01-11, 06:19 PM
1) Is the setting contradictory, or is it just more fantastical than I like/ In ways I don't like?


Increasing the amount of fantastical content in a setting tends to produce contradictions. This is an extremely key point.

In particular it tends to product contradictions when the setting design attempts to hold elements derived from non-fantastical context (ie. real world history) constant in the face of added fantasy elements. This is often very clear when dealing with fantasy that isn't set in a secondary world but instead some historical period nominally on Earth and it quickly becomes clear that the fantasy elements should have prevented that history from ever coming to pass in the first place. My go-to example is Jet Li's Hero, a movie that's trying to make a complex point about the burden of power and the price of peace, but takes place in a Wuxia fever dream world where armies are pointless and only swordmasters matter, rendering the peace through overwhelming force the Emperor is trying to impose impossible.

However, the average tabletop campaign isn't trying to make a storytelling point of any kind. Most games, especially D&D-style games with a heavy emphasis on tactical combat, utilize story merely as a framing device for the purpose of a gloss of justification as to why you're murdering your way through all these funny looking creatures. Case in point, the most successful D&D story ever told is that of Baldur's Gate II and that story is so laser focused on the protagonist's conflict with their archenemy Irenicus it lets you buzzsaw your way through civilization altering-changes with a wink and a grin (the Sahuagin City bit is particularly notable in this regard). That the world makes no sense doesn't matter.

And this circles back to the OPs point about economics which is to say that at the low level of verisimilitude where the campaign is almost certainly operating none of those things matter, a GP is a GP, spend your money and move on. Demanding some isolated element of a setting meet a verisimilitude demand drastically in excess of that setting is just as problematic as when some isolated element drops drastically below the same. TVTropes has a, fairly well-known, Scale of Science Fiction Hardness (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/SlidingScale/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness) that gives a decent idea of different broad levels of fantastical content in a given work. There's inherently better at being at any point on the scale, but in general a work should only be at one level.

TexAvery
2022-01-11, 06:50 PM
Increasing the amount of fantastical content in a setting tends to produce contradictions. This is an extremely key point.

In particular it tends to product contradictions when the setting design attempts to hold elements derived from non-fantastical context (ie. real world history) constant in the face of added fantasy elements. This is often very clear when dealing with fantasy that isn't set in a secondary world but instead some historical period nominally on Earth and it quickly becomes clear that the fantasy elements should have prevented that history from ever coming to pass in the first place. My go-to example is Jet Li's Hero, a movie that's trying to make a complex point about the burden of power and the price of peace, but takes place in a Wuxia fever dream world where armies are pointless and only swordmasters matter, rendering the peace through overwhelming force the Emperor is trying to impose impossible.

In a fascinating coincidence, yesterday evening I was having a discussion with my MIL (HK immigrant) about the burying of scholars and burning of books, by the same emperor. And I told her about that movie, which I watched 20 years ago and never since, but did enjoy regardless of the challenges.

Brother Oni
2022-01-12, 12:07 PM
In particular it tends to product contradictions when the setting design attempts to hold elements derived from non-fantastical context (ie. real world history) constant in the face of added fantasy elements. This is often very clear when dealing with fantasy that isn't set in a secondary world but instead some historical period nominally on Earth and it quickly becomes clear that the fantasy elements should have prevented that history from ever coming to pass in the first place. My go-to example is Jet Li's Hero, a movie that's trying to make a complex point about the burden of power and the price of peace, but takes place in a Wuxia fever dream world where armies are pointless and only swordmasters matter, rendering the peace through overwhelming force the Emperor is trying to impose impossible.

I'm not sure whether it's made clear in the translation, but most of the fantastical Wuxia elements in Hero are either mental battles (Nameless vs Long Sky), outright lies (any of the red scenes) or massive exaggeration (the Emperor's green scenes, most definitely the library scene).

The most absurd it gets is Nameless' 'Fatal Ten' technique and the respect/caution that the Qin soldiers give to the martial artists. If Nameless was that good, why all the lies to get within 10 paces of the king in the first place? Couldn't he just have slaughtered his way into the palace, much like Broken Sword and Flying Snow did?

Max_Killjoy
2022-01-12, 12:09 PM
I'm not sure whether it's made clear in the translation, but most of the fantastical Wuxia elements in Hero are either mental battles (Nameless vs Long Sky), outright lies (any of the red scenes) or massive exaggeration (the Emperor's green scenes, most definitely the library scene).

The most absurd it gets is Nameless' 'Fatal Ten' technique and the respect/caution that the Qin soldiers give to the martial artists. If Nameless was that good, why all the lies to get within 10 paces of the king in the first place? Couldn't he just have slaughtered his way into the palace, much like Broken Sword and Flying Snow did?

That's really not clear at all in the English subtitled version, at least from my recollection of it.

(Hell, I don't recall if it was sub or not, even, now that I think about it, it's been a long time.)

Mechalich
2022-01-12, 07:19 PM
The most absurd it gets is Nameless' 'Fatal Ten' technique and the respect/caution that the Qin soldiers give to the martial artists. If Nameless was that good, why all the lies to get within 10 paces of the king in the first place? Couldn't he just have slaughtered his way into the palace, much like Broken Sword and Flying Snow did?

Because he considers the soldiers themselves to be innocent and doesn't want to callously murder hundreds/thousands of people? Seems like a pretty good reason to me, especially considering the choice he ultimately makes.

And the key event in Hero is that Broken Sword and Flying Snow are able to storm the palace. That's the 'we have just decided armies are irrelevant' moment in the film. It's the complete failure to expand upon that which undercuts the premise, because war, peace, and conquest would have no resemblance to actual history at all in a world where such people could exist.

Now, one of the reason's Hero is a good example is that while it totally undercuts its own story premise, it's also a film for which the story is a fairly low priority. I think if you put the question to Zhang Yimou about it he'd shrug and go 'well, it's metaphorical' and move on, because the focus of effort on that film is almost entirely on the visuals and having a ridiculous premise doesn't really make any difference from that perspective. The film is trying to make a point, and it does fail to do so, but it wasn't trying all that hard, especially not compared to a bunch of the other stuff it was trying to do visually, most of which is quite successful.

Consistency in worldbuilding is one of those factors in production that varies immensely in importance based on what the story is trying to do, to the point that increased consistency can be actively detrimental to certain kinds of stories - in a very simple example, Roadrunner cartoons would be significantly less funny if they treated the laws of physics properly. TTRPGs, however, are a tricky case because they are necessarily collaborative, and that collaboration has adversarial elements because the GM and players are controlling in-universe actors in opposition to each other. This makes the worldbuilding vulnerable to acts of exploitation that may destabilize the game in a way that simply doesn't happen in single-author productions. The situation described by the OP is both a very obvious, and very mild, attempt to exploit system flaws in an adversarial environment (and because the move is so obvious the solution is pretty clearly for the GM to tell the player to cut it out OOC).

However, TTRPG settings are vulnerable to worldbuilding issues that are much less obvious. The most common and most troubling scenario is when a player recognizes something that the rules imply to be true about a setting that the GM (or in many cases the writer who published the setting in the first place) failed to realize and accommodate. The classic example here is 'Speak with Dead solves murder mystery.' After all, the fact that speak with dead renders murder mysteries irrelevant is probably either totally inconsequential or generally beneficial in a classic dungeon crawl as in 'hey, maybe we should ask this dead guard's corpse what killed him,' but the moment the party steps out of the dungeon and into a classic detective plot it breaks apart all over the place. The solution is a simple one - don't run murder mysteries in a system where you can talk to the dead, the problem is that when dealing with less obvious worldbuilding breakdowns the GM will often fail to anticipate that a story element they wish to choose has been rendered non-viable by the system.

The extreme case here is high-level (especially 17+) 3.X D&D, in which there's so much fantastical power at the character's fingertips that essentially all storytelling options have been rendered irrelevant and the setting is irretrievably broken.

RandomPeasant
2022-01-12, 07:58 PM
Heming and hawing about how much you can give to players in a world that postulates dragons seems like it is entirely missing the point to me. A dragon is the equivalent of a modern attack helicopter at the low end, and a medieval army's only hope against such a thing is some variant on "wait for them to run out of supplies", which doesn't work on the dragon. Unless you are willing to cut out enough stuff that you are making a game that is better understood as "Crusader Kings Tactics" than any derivation of a D&D-type thing, you have to figure out a way to work with the fantastical.

Telok
2022-01-13, 02:09 AM
A dragon is the equivalent of a modern attack helicopter at the low end, and a medieval army's only hope against such a thing is some variant on "wait for them to run out of supplies", which doesn't work on the dragon.

Depends on the edition of the dragon. If 80 or 120 archers and a small keg of poison from a cultivated plant can cause significant harm in a single salvo before any dragon can get close enough the breathe fire/whatever then you have a different reality (where dragons are more whiney flying elephants with flamethrowers) than one in which dragons can turn invisible, change shape, and simply ignore non-magic arrows (where dragons can plausably claim to be divine before primitive tribes).

Putting flying elephants with fire breath in your world building and then writing stories & adventures where "dragons" are treated like Godzilla or Smaug is an open invitation to ridicule. But that's D&D for ya. Entire nations worth of nobility without any way to detect or deal with shapeshifters or mind control, yet its all been hunky dory for centuries of medeval stasis. Par for the course.

Satinavian
2022-01-13, 03:43 AM
An example of a genuine Flaw might be something like this:

If the Royal Guard were Paladins, and they knew that James had been captured by Vampires looking to assassinate Frederick, I think it's a genuine flaw in the setting that none of the Royal Guards thought to check if James was a vampire, considering they would have had no shortage of methods for doing so. That's such a serious oversight that it goes from "Unlikely" to "Unbelievable", unless there's something else at play (Like a traitor within the Guard).
And, most importantly, this is a very important event. A lynchpin of the story, so such a blatant hole in the logic begs to be filled.

Now, by changing the event, we can make the exact same flaw in logic far less of a problem.


Yes, we have the same flaw: The Royal Guard failing to spot that James was a vampire, and that should be cleaned up, but it's less important now. Rather than the takeaway being that the Vampire's Plot worked when it should have failed, our takeaway is that the Vampires Tried, Failed, and the King is outraged. The fact that the assassination got farther than it should have (James should have been spotted as soon as he got to the Castle) isn't nearly as big a deal.
I disagree with the example.

If it was that inconceivable that the paladin guards would not have cought James, the vampires should have known as well and not committed to such a stupid plan in the first place. Your fix just moves the idiot ball from the royal guard to the vampires and nothing is won in plausibility. A better fix would have been to say that the vampires managed to hide the abduction of James to avoid any additional scrunity or questioning when he visits the castle or to say that James as royal family knew some secret passages to sneak in. Those could even be combined.

BRC
2022-01-13, 10:15 AM
I disagree with the example.

If it was that inconceivable that the paladin guards would not have cought James, the vampires should have known as well and not committed to such a stupid plan in the first place. Your fix just moves the idiot ball from the royal guard to the vampires and nothing is won in plausibility. A better fix would have been to say that the vampires managed to hide the abduction of James to avoid any additional scrunity or questioning when he visits the castle or to say that James as royal family knew some secret passages to sneak in. Those could even be combined.

I mean, part of the point was that narratively the "Fixed" story was just as dumb and implausible as the original story. However, by shifting the big takeaway of the incident from "The King is assassinated" to "The King swears revenge on all Vampires", you lessen the impact of the inconsistency, since the big takeaway is no longer dependent on that inconsistency.

The second story works just as well if the Vampires didn't think the plan would work, they just wanted to piss off the King. It works just as well if James gets caught and decapitated by the Royal Guard at the castle gates. King Frederick would still be outraged that the vampires turned his brother, and would still swear revenge on all vampires. It's not a great story, but the purpose of such stories in worldbuilding is to provide context to later events. The context "King Frederick has sworn revenge on all Vampires" isn't reliant on a sequence of events that make no sense.

Brother Oni
2022-01-13, 12:54 PM
Because he considers the soldiers themselves to be innocent and doesn't want to callously murder hundreds/thousands of people? Seems like a pretty good reason to me, especially considering the choice he ultimately makes.

Why would Nameless consider Qin soldiers to be innocent? Nameless is from the defeated kingdom of Zhou, which was crushed by the Qin army and their doctrine of using crossbows as artillery. If anything, uniformed soldiers of an enemy kingdom are even more fair game than the civilians of the same kingdom as clear enemy combatants.

The reason why Nameless didn't kill them, was because there was no point except being petty - he had spent years trying to get close enough to the king, only to be convinced by the King's ideology and purpose, a purpose that not even the King's most trusted advisors realise and think of him as a tyrant. Considering the Warring States period that the King ended, there's more than merit in the king's plans.
The king realises that there's people out there who understand what he's trying to achieve (ending the suffering of the people), but he's bound by his own laws to execute them as they're assassins.


And the key event in Hero is that Broken Sword and Flying Snow are able to storm the palace. That's the 'we have just decided armies are irrelevant' moment in the film. It's the complete failure to expand upon that which undercuts the premise, because war, peace, and conquest would have no resemblance to actual history at all in a world where such people could exist.

And yet Flying Snow wasn't able to do so by herself at any other point in the years since their first attempt. I think you're taking the film far too much at face value when there's multiple points which indicate the heroes aren't as powerful as the film would have you believe; see the multiple 'battles of the mind' and Nameless being an unreliable narrator. Nameless in particular; he isn't an army destroying high level wuxia hero - he's 'merely' a very good swordsman who still needs to get within 10 paces of his target to guarantee a kill. If he could storm the palace by himself, why bother with the deception? And it's not because he doesn't want to murder hundreds/thousands of enemy combatants.

In most wuxia fiction where these high powered heroes exist, they live in a sub-society, Jianghu, which exists tangentially to the real world. They tend not to get involved with the real world and there are plenty of equally powerful fighters in Jiganhu which can keep them in check. There may be some overlap, for example an army commander may have some standing in Jianghu as a minor martial artist of some note, or a powerful hero might also run a small business and be a person of some standing in his local real world community, but by and large, Jianghu and the real world don't interact much.


The film is trying to make a point, and it does fail to do so, but it wasn't trying all that hard, especially not compared to a bunch of the other stuff it was trying to do visually, most of which is quite successful.

Really? I think the film's point is perfectly clear - the ends justifies the means, all you need to do is to make the final goal a worthy one. I concede that the point of the film runs heavily counter to Western thinking, which also isn't helped by mistranslations of key phrases - 'Our Land' = '天下' (tianxia) being the main one.


The situation described by the OP is both a very obvious, and very mild, attempt to exploit system flaws in an adversarial environment (and because the move is so obvious the solution is pretty clearly for the GM to tell the player to cut it out OOC).

I think this is where we differ - in light of no further information, I'm still inclined to give the player the benefit of the doubt and say that they're making somewhat hamfisted attempts to inject their personal knowledge and interests into the game with no ulterior motive. Whether the GM takes the player at their world and uses them to inject some verisimilitude into the economy of their game, or the player is being malicious and needs to be told to stop, is on them as they have the most information about the situation.

Talakeal
2022-01-13, 12:56 PM
Heming and hawing about how much you can give to players in a world that postulates dragons seems like it is entirely missing the point to me. A dragon is the equivalent of a modern attack helicopter at the low end, and a medieval army's only hope against such a thing is some variant on "wait for them to run out of supplies", which doesn't work on the dragon. Unless you are willing to cut out enough stuff that you are making a game that is better understood as "Crusader Kings Tactics" than any derivation of a D&D-type thing, you have to figure out a way to work with the fantastical.

This assumes that dragons care about human affairs.

I imagine most of the stronger dragons would be treated like a natural disaster; most of the time they are totally unconcerned with human affairs, but when they decide to make themselves known there is next to nothing humans can do to save their society.

KorvinStarmast
2022-01-13, 01:12 PM
A dragon is the equivalent of a modern attack helicopter at the low end, and a medieval army's only hope against such a thing is some variant on "wait for them to run out of supplies", which doesn't work on the dragon. But it did in the Original game, since their breath weapon was limited to three times per day. (Not sure if I made the point in this thread or another one, but the WoTC dragon 'recharge' breath mechanic is an amazing power boost).

I imagine most of the stronger dragons would be treated like a natural disaster; Absolutely, particularly with the frequency of recharge on the breath. (Fizbans Treasury in D&D 5e takes it up another notch by introducing a Wyrm class dragon that's a bigger disaster than an Ancient Dragon). And somewhere in my deep memory, I think that either Bilbo, or Smaug himself, refers to Smaug as the great calamity or disaster or something like that. I'll try and find the citation... *greatest of calamaties*

RandomPeasant
2022-01-13, 01:24 PM
Depends on the edition of the dragon. If 80 or 120 archers and a small keg of poison from a cultivated plant can cause significant harm in a single salvo before any dragon can get close enough the breathe fire/whatever then you have a different reality (where dragons are more whiney flying elephants with flamethrowers) than one in which dragons can turn invisible, change shape, and simply ignore non-magic arrows (where dragons can plausably claim to be divine before primitive tribes).

Even then, the dragon has an enormous advantage in strategic mobility. Maybe you can shoot down the dragon if it tries to raze your town, but what happens when it just burns your outlying fields night after night until the crop fails? It's not just power that warps the fantasy setting, it's any fantastical element. If you want a setting that would actually look like medieval Europe, you have to go even lower fantasy than Game of Thrones, and the market for that is pretty tiny.


This assumes that dragons care about human affairs.

And the complaints about spellcasters assume they care about human affairs. Which is in many respects a much stronger assumption, as unlike a dragon a Wizard of even modest skill can (in the editions where people are most concerned about this sort of thing) magic himself up a palace filled with cocaine and literal sex fiends, which Dragons are supposed to covet material wealth most easily obtained from mortals. I think "the powerful don't care about the powerless" is a pretty reasonable approach to dealing with high-end characters in D&D, but it doesn't only apply to monsters.


But it did in the Original game, since their breath weapon was limited to three times per day. (Not sure if I made the point in this thread or another one, but the WoTC dragon 'recharge' breath mechanic is an amazing power boost).

The breath weapon is only relevant insofar as tiny men with crossbows are a threat to the dragon. If they aren't (and in editions other than 5th, they basically aren't) using the breath weapon is just a time saver.

KorvinStarmast
2022-01-13, 01:30 PM
The breath weapon is only relevant insofar as tiny men with crossbows are a threat to the dragon. If they aren't (and in editions other than 5th, they basically aren't) using the breath weapon is just a time saver. It also sears in the juices and flavors of the meat, leaving that sweet rare center, when one is dining on various herd animals, as dragons are wont to do :smallsmile: (Hmm, I guess ice/white dragons have other dining preferences, green dragons pickle their food, and so on).

Max_Killjoy
2022-01-13, 01:58 PM
(Side note, searing does not seal in juices, there's no empirical evidence to support this. What it does do, is kill anything living on the surface of the meat, and add a host of flavor compounds through the Maillard reaction.)

PhoenixPhyre
2022-01-13, 04:01 PM
(Side note, searing does not seal in juices, there's no empirical evidence to support this. What it does do, is kill anything living on the surface of the meat, and add a host of flavor compounds through the Maillard reaction.)

And actual empirical evidence that says it has no effect at all in either direction. Water or "juice" loss is almost entirely down to internal temperature, with side notes of "how/if it was salted" and "are there substantial temperature gradients" and a component of "how much fat was there to start with". But yeah. Searing it does kill surface things[1], but it's main job is to promote flavor by the Maillard reactions[2].

[1] although you don't need to actually sear it to do this--even just a regular cooking will easily kill anything on the surface. The fact that most of the bacteria in a solid chunk of meat are on the surface is why it's much safer to eat rare steak than rare ground beef--the grinding process distributes the "surface" contamination all the way through. Unless of course you trust the butcher and the preparer, in which case go ahead. I don't eat rare meat, because I don't like the texture.

[2] plural. It's not one reaction, but hundreds or thousands or more. Just being pedantic here.

KorvinStarmast
2022-01-13, 08:39 PM
(Side note, searing does not seal in juices, there's no empirical evidence to support this. What it does do, is kill anything living on the surface of the meat, and add a host of flavor compounds through the Maillard reaction.) When's the last time you ever had a blue steak? (Yeah, we are going off topic) Only had one once (have a crazy friend with like six different kinds of grill in his back yard).

Unless of course you trust the butcher and the preparer, in which case go ahead. I don't eat rare meat, because I don't like the texture. As far as I'll go is usually medium rare. My brother is all about rare. He likes it {almost} raw and wriggling. Only rare I'll do is the above mentioned blue steak, and a filet mignon.

Telok
2022-01-13, 10:06 PM
Even then, the dragon has an enormous advantage in strategic mobility. Maybe you can shoot down the dragon if it tries to raze your town, but what happens...

Not actually the point.

Point:
Putting flying elephants with fire breath in your world building and then writing stories & adventures where "dragons" are treated like Godzilla or Smaug is an open invitation to ridicule. But that's D&D for ya.

Mechalich
2022-01-14, 01:11 AM
Even then, the dragon has an enormous advantage in strategic mobility. Maybe you can shoot down the dragon if it tries to raze your town, but what happens when it just burns your outlying fields night after night until the crop fails? It's not just power that warps the fantasy setting, it's any fantastical element. If you want a setting that would actually look like medieval Europe, you have to go even lower fantasy than Game of Thrones, and the market for that is pretty tiny.


The game market for extremely low magic fantasy is minimal, while the novel market is significantly stronger. For example, Guy Gavriel Kay and Joe Abercrombie are both very successful writing about - very, very different - fantasy worlds that are extremely low on magic, and there's plenty of other examples out there. Also, novelists have certain options that games - especially combat heavy games that expect a large number of combat encounters on a regular basis - don't really have. Games demand a modicum of frequency in the use of fantastical abilities and of durability on the part of their users (so that the magic using PCs don't immediately perish) that provide a floor to magical power that is already pushing the limits.

It is of course possible to raise the amount of viable magical power in a setting by upping the technology level. Firearms - cannon more than guns actually - really do help level the playing field. The gets to the point where in some renditions of modern urban fantasy, a lot of the commonly used magic is chronically underpowered (though there are usually OP strategic abilities that tend to compromise the worldbuilding).

It's also possible to limit magic mostly to tactical effects, which can be balanced reasonably well as tactical RPGs often do. If magic is simply another way of hurting people it's not really destabilizing. It's all the non-combat things magic can do that are really the problem.

Satinavian
2022-01-14, 03:24 AM
The game market for extremely low magic fantasy is minimal, while the novel market is significantly stronger. For example, Guy Gavriel Kay and Joe Abercrombie are both very successful writing about - very, very different - fantasy worlds that are extremely low on magic, and there's plenty of other examples out there. I disagree. There are many low magic games and many rare magic games and those do certainly not worse than the common or high magic non-d&d games.

Also, novelists have certain options that games - especially combat heavy games that expect a large number of combat encounters on a regular basis - don't really have. Games demand a modicum of frequency in the use of fantastical abilities and of durability on the part of their users (so that the magic using PCs don't immediately perish) that provide a floor to magical power that is already pushing the limits.In low or rare magic games the magi users are actually competent in the mundane stuff as well and solve most problems without magic. That works fine enough.

It's also possible to limit magic mostly to tactical effects, which can be balanced reasonably well as tactical RPGs often do. If magic is simply another way of hurting people it's not really destabilizing. It's all the non-combat things magic can do that are really the problem.You only need to do that if you insist on doing your worldbuilding without magic and then still have magical elements in the game. I vastly prefer to have a good understanding about what magic can do and how difficult that is and integrate magical solutions in the daily life of societies that should use them.
Honestly, combat magic is usually the kind of magic least plausibel as there tend to be more than enough alternative ways to kill people around, the caster can't be much more useful than a fighter for balancing issue and thus the magic would be better spent elsewhere for things less easy to do without.

If you really want to copy real world societies 1:1 and still have magic, you should stick to "magic is super rare" or "magic is successfully kept secret".

SpanielBear
2022-01-14, 07:28 AM
Just a thought, but without mentioning any specific details for many thousands of years societies *did* run, worldwide, on the assumption that magic was real and required meaningful government policy to utilise or defend against. Saying a magic using society couldn’t look anything like our own, runs into trouble if you consider, e.g., witch hunts. And it’s not that this was an assumption of low magic either, we’re talking raising storms and sinking entire fleets.

RandomPeasant
2022-01-14, 08:03 AM
The game market for extremely low magic fantasy is minimal, while the novel market is significantly stronger. For example, Guy Gavriel Kay and Joe Abercrombie are both very successful writing about - very, very different - fantasy worlds that are extremely low on magic, and there's plenty of other examples out there.

I'm not sure Abercrombie is really the example you want. It's true that his setting is low-magic, but it's also very much a setting that changes dramatically over the course of the series. And, of course, the most successful parts of the genre are still things like Sanderson or Rowling, who are far from any conception of "low magic".


It's all the non-combat things magic can do that are really the problem.

As always, there's not really the distinction people want there to be here. Unless you kick verisimilitude to the curb entirely (in which case I would argue you're compromising your nominal goal), something as simple as the healing spell you need to be a combat medic means that the wealthy and politically connected will no longer die in childbirth or of infected wounds. That's a pretty enormous shift from anything like "historic reality".


I disagree. There are many low magic games and many rare magic games and those do certainly not worse than the common or high magic non-d&d games.

I'm sure the long tail of RPGs has plenty of low magic games in it, but the biggest names after D&D are Vampire and Shadowrun, neither of which I would call particularly "low magic".


You only need to do that if you insist on doing your worldbuilding without magic and then still have magical elements in the game. I vastly prefer to have a good understanding about what magic can do and how difficult that is and integrate magical solutions in the daily life of societies that should use them.

The whole thing where we're supposed to be trying to get "medieval Europe" to work, and figuring out the maximal amount of magic you can layer in without breaking that just seems wrongheaded to me. Because that's a really small amount of magic! In fact, it's a really small amount of almost everything people want out of a fantasy game. Just postulating that there are Orcs or Elves or Goblins in your setting is already going to mean huge changes, let alone any amount of actual magic. People don't want something that is functionally medieval, they want something that is aesthetically medieval, and that's a much easier target to hit.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-01-14, 10:41 AM
The whole thing where we're supposed to be trying to get "medieval Europe" to work, and figuring out the maximal amount of magic you can layer in without breaking that just seems wrongheaded to me. Because that's a really small amount of magic! In fact, it's a really small amount of almost everything people want out of a fantasy game. Just postulating that there are Orcs or Elves or Goblins in your setting is already going to mean huge changes, let alone any amount of actual magic. People don't want something that is functionally medieval, they want something that is aesthetically medieval, and that's a much easier target to hit.

This. And frankly? Most people don't care about "historical inconsistencies". They don't know, and don't care even if they do. We're (mostly) nerds here. But most people aren't. They want something that doesn't grossly offend them on a surface examination. Which even D&D does mostly ok[1]. And something that looks, on the surface, recognizable from their fantasy books or shows or whatever. Yes, this means mostly races that are humans with funny faces and "hats". The market for truly alien races as playable characters is quite niche.

Of course, I don't think most people want to necessarily play in a "we're gods and casually bend the universe to our whim" game either. There's a balance to be struck--neither the top of high magic nor the depths of gritty "dark ages" (scare quotes intentional) realism are part of the mainstream. They're playable, don't get me wrong. Just not mainstream.

[1] except the Forgotten Realms. But that's entirely my own bias.

Mutazoia
2022-02-04, 12:48 AM
A brief note to the original point of this thread:

Point out that the fantasy world has elves that live for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and have their own currency. Why would anyone pay extra for an 80-year-old coin when the elf who came through town just paid for his lunch with a 300-year-old one?

KorvinStarmast
2022-02-04, 08:20 AM
Just a thought, but without mentioning any specific details for many thousands of years societies *did* run, worldwide, on the assumption that magic was real and required meaningful government policy to utilise or defend against. Saying a magic using society couldn’t look anything like our own, runs into trouble if you consider, e.g., witch hunts. And it’s not that this was an assumption of low magic either, we’re talking raising storms and sinking entire fleets. That rarity and danger is a part of where the whole Cthulhu (and the CoC game) start, isn't it?

Point out that the fantasy world has elves that live for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and have their own currency. Why would anyone pay extra for an 80-year-old coin when the elf who came through town just paid for his lunch with a 300-year-old one? Good point.

I'll take that a step further: The "it's worth more to a collector" may be true, but the 80 year old quarter still spends like a quarter. I used to work as a cashier (in the 70's, high school job). I would now and again get silver coins in change / payment, and I'd (as often as I had loose change in my pockets) swap them out for non-silver all the time. Had a collection of over 80 of them, pre 1964 dimes and quarters, that were part of what got stolen from my apartment during a break in (late 80's). :smallfurious: The initial premise that the "economist-player" asserted is somewhat flawed for a variety of reasons, and one is that there is by default a market for coins older than X years.
That is entirely a world building matter for the DM (or an anachromism imported from our modern world to their game world as the clock on Bilbo's mantle was).

kyoryu
2022-02-04, 11:36 AM
A brief note to the original point of this thread:

Point out that the fantasy world has elves that live for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and have their own currency. Why would anyone pay extra for an 80-year-old coin when the elf who came through town just paid for his lunch with a 300-year-old one?

I don't think lifespan would impact much? We have plenty of things that are rare that are less than average human lifespan years old.

Coins tend to change hands fairly frequently - what you have on hand was probably given to you within a few months, at most. Sure, there are some people socking stuff away in a jar, but those also tend to be socked away in a jar, and I don't see how that changes much.

Where you'd see old coins entering circulation is a "hermit leaving the woods" kind of situation, where someone went into the woods a long time ago with some amount of currency, and then coming back to civilization. They'd have no way to spend money in that scenario, and no way to get new money, so the coins they'd use would be dated close to when they entered "the woods". And of course as soon as they were in civilization for any period of time, their coins would circulate through as well.

Look at Korvin's post about the rarity of coins from '64 or so - there are plenty of people alive that were born before then, and they don't pay in coins from 1964.

Mutazoia
2022-02-04, 02:37 PM
I don't think lifespan would impact much? We have plenty of things that are rare that are less than average human lifespan years old.

Coins tend to change hands fairly frequently - what you have on hand was probably given to you within a few months, at most. Sure, there are some people socking stuff away in a jar, but those also tend to be socked away in a jar, and I don't see how that changes much.

Where you'd see old coins entering circulation is a "hermit leaving the woods" kind of situation, where someone went into the woods a long time ago with some amount of currency, and then coming back to civilization. They'd have no way to spend money in that scenario, and no way to get new money, so the coins they'd use would be dated close to when they entered "the woods". And of course as soon as they were in civilization for any period of time, their coins would circulate through as well.

Look at Korvin's post about the rarity of coins from '64 or so - there are plenty of people alive that were born before then, and they don't pay in coins from 1964.

But the people that were borne before '64 live in a world without elves. Much of the elven/dwarven currency would be passed around elven cities for centuries before an elf ventured out into the human lands. Chances are he/she would carry a bunch of coins from various eras because they would have been in circulation that long. Coins are not subject to the kind of wear and tear that paper money is. Hell, I still find wheat-head pennies in the cash drawer at work (still haven't found a steel penny though). They're not worth any more because they are old.

Saint-Just
2022-02-07, 01:52 AM
But the people that were borne before '64 live in a world without elves. Much of the elven/dwarven currency would be passed around elven cities for centuries before an elf ventured out into the human lands. Chances are he/she would carry a bunch of coins from various eras because they would have been in circulation that long. Coins are not subject to the kind of wear and tear that paper money is. Hell, I still find wheat-head pennies in the cash drawer at work (still haven't found a steel penny though). They're not worth any more because they are old.

First of all modern currency being fiat has no bearing on the discussion.

If you start with the premise that in human lands currency is valued by it's precious metal content and is subject to debasement like it was IRL then existence of long-lived people changes nothing. If they truly live in extremely separate communities that interact with human lands once in a century then an "elf" paying with old coins would not be enough to lower the value of old coins, instead he would either be a fool who overpays for everything before his supply of old coins runs out or just would find himself unexpectedly wealthy if he wisens up to the situation. If "elven" communities are not isolated then there would be precious little centuries old coins within them - they will be either spent or melted down as soon as somebody - whether an elf or a human - realizes the situation.

And in any case you can have one country/people debasing its currency while the other doesn't do that in which case, an old human coin will be worth more but an old elven coin wouldn't.

kyoryu
2022-02-07, 09:53 AM
But the people that were borne before '64 live in a world without elves. Much of the elven/dwarven currency would be passed around elven cities for centuries before an elf ventured out into the human lands. Chances are he/she would carry a bunch of coins from various eras because they would have been in circulation that long. Coins are not subject to the kind of wear and tear that paper money is. Hell, I still find wheat-head pennies in the cash drawer at work (still haven't found a steel penny though). They're not worth any more because they are old.

I think you're missing my point.

The hypothesis is basically "if we had elves, then we'd have old elven coins, because elves live a long time."

In other words, it ties the likely age of encountering coins to the average lifespan or to the age of the bearer.

Yet this doesn't track, because in the real world, we don't see older people typically having older coins, and coins from within our lifespans become increasingly rare. Yes, they're less rare than bills due to wear and tear, but they're still nowhere near common.

You're making the assertion that coins would be passed around "for centuries", but there's no real support for that idea. The only possible linkage would be that the age of the people involved means that they'd keep the same coins, but again, in practice we don't see this - people born in the '50s don't typically carry around mostly coins from the '60s or '70s. They carry the same mix as the rest of us.

Mutazoia
2022-02-07, 10:07 AM
First of all modern currency being fiat has no bearing on the discussion.

And yet, a lot of the answers given, not to mention the OPs problem player, are using modern real-world currency as examples. We have to use at least some real-world correlation to make sense of things.


If you start with the premise that in human lands currency is valued by it's precious metal content and is subject to debasement like it was IRL then existence of long-lived people changes nothing. If they truly live in extremely separate communities that interact with human lands once in a century then an "elf" paying with old coins would not be enough to lower the value of old coins, instead he would either be a fool who overpays for everything before his supply of old coins runs out or just would find himself unexpectedly wealthy if he wisens up to the situation. If "elven" communities are not isolated then there would be precious little centuries old coins within them - they will be either spent or melted down as soon as somebody - whether an elf or a human - realizes the situation.

And in any case you can have one country/people debasing its currency while the other doesn't do that in which case, an old human coin will be worth more but an old elven coin wouldn't.

In what part of the DMG does it say the in-game currency is valued by its precious metal content and is subject to debasement? In the game, a gold coin is a gold coin.

IRL, money is only taken out of circulation when the bills get so old and tattered that they are starting to fall apart. The banks collect those bills as they come through and send them back to be destroyed, and the treasury prints new bills to replace them. The treasure prints (mints) new coins mostly to make up for the current ones that are stuffed in piggy banks or mason jars and don't return to circulation regularly.

As I type this, I have a wheat-head penny minted in 1923 on my desk. Next year that coin will be 100 years old and worth exactly one penny. Just because a coin is old doesn't make it "precious." You keep applying the logic that "old equates to more value" for coins. This is not true IRL, and definitely wouldn't be true in a fantasy world with long-lived races. Since fantasy worlds use coins exclusively, there is no paper money to wear out that would need to be replaced regularly. They would mint new coins (not as often as we do IRL) but the old ones would stay in circulation pretty much forever. A coin that was a hundred years old would be the same as one that was minted yesterday to an elf. And there is no logical reason for a human/halfling/dwarf/etc. merchant to value that coin any more than any other gold coin. There's no mechanic for it in-game. 1 one-hundred-year-old GP spent by Llanowar Leafblower is worth exactly the same as 1 one-year-old GP spent by Biff the (human) baker across the street. Remember, adventurers regularly bring in coins that are possibly hundreds of years old from dungeons and dragons hoards. The market would be flooded with old coins, even if you didn't take elven coinage into account.

If you are going to start to try to add rules for metal content and age value of coins to the game, you're adding a metric ton of work that adds exactly nothing to the game. You might as well add exchange rates as well, but I don't think even accountants would enjoy that.

Berenger
2022-02-07, 10:24 AM
As I type this, I have a wheat-head penny minted in 1923 on my desk. Next year that coin will be 100 years old and worth exactly one penny. Just because a coin is old doesn't make it "precious."

That's the face value. According to cointrackers.com, a 1923 wheat penny would be worth about 75 cents (or 6 dollars with a "S" mint mark) if in average condition and up to 200 dollars (or up to 1200 dollars with an "S" mint mark) if in mint condition.

Xervous
2022-02-07, 11:28 AM
That's the face value. According to cointrackers.com, a 1923 wheat penny would be worth about 75 cents (or 6 dollars with a "S" mint mark) if in average condition and up to 200 dollars (or up to 1200 dollars with an "S" mint mark) if in mint condition.

To a collector, yes. But used bath water also sells for ridiculous sums in certain modern markets. Put a greater percentage of the population in agriculture, strip out the ease of moving people and information, and you end up with few people searching for old coins in smaller areas. Connecting with a potential buyer for coins that are merely old would be a quest by itself, starting from gossip with a well traveled lord that leads you across several domains to finally see if the duke is interested in the old coins you unearthed. Everyone else would generally just see them as coins. If they weigh proper they don’t really care about the funny faces on them.

Max_Killjoy
2022-02-07, 02:26 PM
That makes for an interesting thought for worldbuilding... does the magic of a setting allow for the kind of communication that makes specialty markets such as coin collectors more possible?

Mechalich
2022-02-07, 07:38 PM
That makes for an interesting thought for worldbuilding... does the magic of a setting allow for the kind of communication that makes specialty markets such as coin collectors more possible?

Very likely it does, even at fairly low magic. If any creature able to function as a flying mount exists - and the largest pterosaurs had an estimated weight of up to 250 kg, meaning an animal capable of carrying a (light) human being is not inconceivable without any magic at all - then the fantasy society has access to both a high-speed courier service far more formidable than any pony express setup and the ability to also carry small high-value cargoes long distances.

A plausible flying courier beast might be able to transport around 50 kgs of material (including the rider, which has some interesting societal implications of its own) approximately as much as 1000 km a day - ten hours of flight at 100 km/hour being reasonable assuming no major obstacles or opposing winds. That's revolutionary to all sorts of fields.

Saint-Just
2022-02-07, 11:42 PM
And yet, a lot of the answers given, not to mention the OPs problem player, are using modern real-world currency as examples. We have to use at least some real-world correlation to make sense of things.


Reread the opening post. The "problem player" specifically convinced (or at least fast-talked into accepting) his DM that the economical situation DM described would inevitably/likely lead the kingdom in question to lower the amount of precious metal in their coin, and therefore would make old coins more valuable.

Technically PHB provides relatively unambiguous evidence for GP being valued for its gold content: GP are 50 per pound and a pound of gold costs 50 GP. But more generally to run the game only on the basis what is explicitly said in the books would be strange to unworkable. Rules do not say gunpowder doesn't work if it gets wet, rules do not say people who spend a lot of time outside for years can be distinguished from those who spend all their time inside, rules do not say that some crafts need facilities besides "tools" etc. You are supposed to fill in the blanks.

IRL some coins remained in circulations for centuries - if new coins were as good as old ones. Otherwise they were either driven out of circulation or acquired greater value. Existence of long-lived people adds nothing to that unless you posit that velocity of money is somehow tied to the longevity of users.

Finally while I do prefer games to have a greater verisimilitude than what is considered normal I do not insist on DM crafting a working economical and monetary model for their setting, it would be unreasonably burdensome (though, FFS, could we at least pretend that GP is a unit of accounting, and not that every gold coin in the world is the same?), it's just that I do not need to find your arguments, particularly about long-lived races having old coins, and equating fantasy money with modern money worthwhile just because I seem to agree with your conclusions about how closely that particular aspect of fantasy gaming should follow reality.

FrogInATopHat
2022-02-08, 09:26 AM
Rules do not say gunpowder doesn't work if it gets wet

Minor point of order, since this is not a 5e or 3.5e specific board.

Some rules (https://www.d20pfsrd.com/equipment/weapons/firearms/)* say exactly (https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/d/damp-powder/) that (https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Firearms_and_Other_Equipment_(Herregor_Supplement) )*2.

There is no reason to make unfounded assumptions about any aspect of the universe or to strong-arm a DM into accepting those assumptions based on spur-of-the-moment-ignorance of perfectly reasonable expectations .

*Ref: "Firearms, Black Powder, and Water"

*2 Ref: "Black Powder"

KorvinStarmast
2022-02-11, 04:17 PM
I'd like to thank all of you for this fun discussion. It got me to pick up (on a discounted books pile) this book (https://img.thriftbooks.com/api/images/m/fe3b84b45e648f0712af215844a0b37bd9087fb5.jpg): Stone Age Economics
Once I get done reading the biograpy of Edward I {England} (aka "Longshanks" in the movie Braveheart, which took a few liberties with historical facts) - the guy whose castle building program in Wales leaves us some striking examples of that form of medieval architecture (Caerphily being a fine example (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/Jmw-CaerphilyCastlel-2013-0002.JPG/1920px-Jmw-CaerphilyCastlel-2013-0002.JPG)) that were not struck down during various continental wars...that's my next non fiction book.

Looks intriguing.

Beleriphon
2022-02-12, 04:54 PM
Couple thoughts on how to approach this. Modern economics don't really apply to an agrarian feudal society. Modern banking wasn't really invented until the 16th century, and double ledger banking was perfected by Medici family around the same time period. To take an example, the value of coin was based on the weight of material the coin was made from. A tetradrachm minted when Socrates was still alive held the value of a tetradrachm that was used in Constantinople over a 1000 years later since it was entirely possible it might be the same coin.

Ancient Greek and Roman coins were use for centuries after they were minted, and retained their value because coins were just a state sponsored measure of weight. Athenian drachma were had 4.3 grams of silver, or 6 obols, and thus if you had 6 obol weights you could weigh the coins and assured you weren't being cheated.

I'm willing to bet that the Greeks would have happily accepted any coinage of sufficient silver purity at parity by weight. Heck, they had values of currency in Athens they didn't even mint, the "coins" were purely to provide value to heavy things like grain. For example, instead of 1500 tetradrachm the thing was worth 1 Athenian Talent.

Forgotten Realms has some different kinds of currency. Amn doesn't issue copper coins, it uses iron ones instead. But they're worth 1cp regardless. Waterdeep has a moon shaped gold an electrum coin that inside the city is worth 5gp, and outside worth 2gp.

Quick aside: Did you know you can't create counterfeit Roman Aureus since the Roman Empire isn't an active government issuing coinage?

SpyOne
2022-02-18, 07:05 AM
That's the face value. According to cointrackers.com, a 1923 wheat penny would be worth about 75 cents (or 6 dollars with a "S" mint mark) if in average condition and up to 200 dollars (or up to 1200 dollars with an "S" mint mark) if in mint condition.
Setting aside the collector market, pre-1982 pennies contain more copper than you can buy for $0.01. The amount of silver in US coins was gradually reduced from 1964 to 1970 or so, and all pre-1970 coins are worth more than face value as metal.

That said, there are plenty of examples from history of old coins being worth less than the current ones either due to a reset after a period of debasement or due to only current coins being accepted thus placing an exchange fee on old coins just like foreign ones.

SpyOne
2022-02-18, 07:28 AM
Ancient Greek and Roman coins were use for centuries after they were minted, and retained their value because coins were just a state sponsored measure of weight. Athenian drachma were had 4.3 grams of silver, or 6 obols, and thus if you had 6 obol weights you could weigh the coins and assured you weren't being cheated.

Ancient Rome kept issuing new coins in new denominations, and kept reducing the amount of precious metal in their coins. I suspect Ancient Greece was much the same.
Theoretically all denarii were the same, but just 11 years after they were introduced their weight was reduced by 15%, then Nero reduced both the weight and purity of the silver, which lasted about a generation before the purity dropped again. A denarius from 275 AD was the same weight as one from 241 but contained about 1/10 the silver, while the 241 denarius contained half the silver of one from 230.
(Thank you, Wikipedia.)

rel
2022-02-25, 01:09 AM
The major missing factor; The prices of commodities, spell components and the like are set by the Gfy, the god of commerce. Anyone trying to stray from the rules or worse game the system. Must save vs lightning bolt.

Complaints can be directed Gfy, this is widely understood to be a Bad Idea.

Satinavian
2022-02-25, 08:08 AM
Ancient Rome kept issuing new coins in new denominations, and kept reducing the amount of precious metal in their coins. I suspect Ancient Greece was much the same.
Theoretically all denarii were the same, but just 11 years after they were introduced their weight was reduced by 15%, then Nero reduced both the weight and purity of the silver, which lasted about a generation before the purity dropped again. A denarius from 275 AD was the same weight as one from 241 but contained about 1/10 the silver, while the 241 denarius contained half the silver of one from 230.
(Thank you, Wikipedia.)
Yes, but that was a silver coin, not a gold coin.

While aureus and solidus got somewhat smaller, they never were debased and while in 301 an aureus was worth 833 denarii where not even 60 years later a (even slightly smaller) solidus was worth over 4 million denarii.

The same happened later several times in the middle ages. Rampant debasement of silver coins while gold coins being relatively stable or even completely unchanged for centuries like the Venetian ducat, the Hungarian ducat and various florins and even guldens.

Gold coins always had a relatively high purity as well. You have to actually search to find a coin below 90% gold. The reverse is true for silver where you have to look for it to find high purity coins.



So if one goes purely by real world historical precedence, the arguments of the player are far from compelling. There was hardly ever a ruler messing with the material value of gold coins. And in nearly all cases that did happen, the new coins were mostly traded for their gold value anyway.

KorvinStarmast
2022-02-25, 02:39 PM
Ancient Rome kept issuing new coins in new denominations, and kept reducing the amount of precious metal in their coins. I suspect Ancient Greece was much the same.
Theoretically all denarii were the same, but just 11 years after they were introduced their weight was reduced by 15%, then Nero reduced both the weight and purity of the silver, which lasted about a generation before the purity dropped again. A denarius from 275 AD was the same weight as one from 241 but contained about 1/10 the silver, while the 241 denarius contained half the silver of one from 230. IIRC, the ancient Greek silver coin was the drachma, and it just occurred to me that denarius/denarii and drachma might have a common root somewhere. (As the Spanish dinero and denarii are related).

Off Topic: As I read your user name, all I can think of is Aegis and my nav system shutting down as we came in to land. (If the aft array wasn't in low power, it also made the digital watches start blinking zero).
Did you ever use or work on a SPY-1 radar?

Saint-Just
2022-02-25, 04:36 PM
IIRC, the ancient Greek silver coin was the drachma, and it just occurred to me that denarius/denarii and drachma might have a common root somewhere. (As the Spanish dinero and denarii are related).


Not really, even on the level of PIE reconstruction the roots are different. Denarius is deni-arius, ten-thing. The root for "Ten" never meant anything but "ten". Meanwhile drachma uses the root "grasp/grab/hold".

Though derived terms dinar and dirchem were in use simultaneously for two different types of Islamic coins.

Mr Blobby
2022-02-26, 03:20 AM
...Yet this doesn't track, because in the real world, we don't see older people typically having older coins, and coins from within our lifespans become increasingly rare. Yes, they're less rare than bills due to wear and tear, but they're still nowhere near common.

You're making the assertion that coins would be passed around "for centuries", but there's no real support for that idea. The only possible linkage would be that the age of the people involved means that they'd keep the same coins, but again, in practice we don't see this - people born in the '50s don't typically carry around mostly coins from the '60s or '70s. They carry the same mix as the rest of us.

Part of the issue is the definition of 'in circulation'. Rule of thumb, the more valuable the coin, the less it 'got about'. Not exactly applicable; but remember seeing stats somewhere that said the (old) UK £5 note lasted about a year, while the £50 is more likely to end up being demonetised before wearing out (41 years).

Similar can be said for high-value gold coinage; destined to be a 'store of wealth' than currency, spending 99% of it's life in a safe or something. The smaller denominations are more likely to wear out, be pulled in and re-minted [or used as raw material for another task] simply because they're more 'useful' in the market-place or paying the tax-collector.

People forget that gold and silver are in fact pretty soft metals.


...As I type this, I have a wheat-head penny minted in 1923 on my desk. Next year that coin will be 100 years old and worth exactly one penny. Just because a coin is old doesn't make it "precious." You keep applying the logic that "old equates to more value" for coins. This is not true IRL, and definitely wouldn't be true in a fantasy world with long-lived races. Since fantasy worlds use coins exclusively, there is no paper money to wear out that would need to be replaced regularly. They would mint new coins (not as often as we do IRL) but the old ones would stay in circulation pretty much forever. A coin that was a hundred years old would be the same as one that was minted yesterday to an elf. And there is no logical reason for a human/halfling/dwarf/etc. merchant to value that coin any more than any other gold coin. There's no mechanic for it in-game. 1 one-hundred-year-old GP spent by Llanowar Leafblower is worth exactly the same as 1 one-year-old GP spent by Biff the (human) baker across the street. Remember, adventurers regularly bring in coins that are possibly hundreds of years old from dungeons and dragons hoards. The market would be flooded with old coins, even if you didn't take elven coinage into account...

Unlikely to be 'flooded', but there would be all sorts of currency floating about. Silver is silver and gold is gold. And traditionally, medieval lands were short of currency, period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bullion_Famine. Rulers could and did fuss over the lack of currency hindering trade etc, but they didn't really care about who was on it. We saw this in the early-mid 20th RL, when several national gold reserves went walkabout, which included gold coinage from many different eras and nations.

Now, while D&D type worlds have several 'economic' issues [like how *does* a dragon accumulate gold?] the currency one is not one of them.


Finally while I do prefer games to have a greater verisimilitude than what is considered normal I do not insist on DM crafting a working economical and monetary model for their setting, it would be unreasonably burdensome (though, FFS, could we at least pretend that GP is a unit of accounting, and not that every gold coin in the world is the same?), it's just that I do not need to find your arguments, particularly about long-lived races having old coins, and equating fantasy money with modern money worthwhile just because I seem to agree with your conclusions about how closely that particular aspect of fantasy gaming should follow reality.

The problem is more the player might know a bit about economics, but knows sod all about economic history. And I have a simple solution.

Put the world on the 'gold standard', with everything valued in GP. So you do not find 50GP, you find 50GP's worth of coinage. So if it's debased, there shall simply be more of it, but the GP value is still the same...

The baliff, merchant and so on don't really care what is on that coin, just as long as it appears to be genuine metal in sufficient quantity - 'good' coin shall float along the trade lanes, like the Roman ones found in Scandinavia and India. I fully expect they'd weigh foreign coins, check for plugs/clips, perhaps squint at the oddities and so on [there may in fact be magic devices and/or 'check money' spell which is done - rather like fantasy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chop_marks_on_coins.]


Yes, but that was a silver coin, not a gold coin.

While aureus and solidus got somewhat smaller, they never were debased and while in 301 an aureus was worth 833 denarii where not even 60 years later a (even slightly smaller) solidus was worth over 4 million denarii.

The same happened later several times in the middle ages. Rampant debasement of silver coins while gold coins being relatively stable or even completely unchanged for centuries like the Venetian ducat, the Hungarian ducat and various florins and even guldens.

Gold coins always had a relatively high purity as well. You have to actually search to find a coin below 90% gold. The reverse is true for silver where you have to look for it to find high purity coins.

Gold coinage was more a 'store of wealth' than currency. Even more so the large ones, like the English 'sovereign' was not much more than a bullion coin. I mean, a sovereign was perhaps worth [using the 'loaf of bread index'] about £140, and skilled craftsman was earning perhaps around 10 sovereigns a year [of which he'd earn as his 4s a week, or perhaps his 8d a day which would then be paid in silver]. In the Medieval era, there wouldn't be many shops which would have enough change to 'break' a gold coin.

Silver coinage was designed for the majority of the 'big ticket items' in an ordinary person's life. And generally speaking, this was rent, taxes, wages and sale your 'works' [crops, animals etc]. It's interesting to note that in Roman coin hoards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoxne_Hoard the huge mass of coinage was silver.

SpyOne
2022-02-26, 09:52 AM
Off Topic: As I read your user name, all I can think of is Aegis and my nav system shutting down as we came in to land. (If the aft array wasn't in low power, it also made the digital watches start blinking zero).
Did you ever use or work on a SPY-1 radar?

Sorry for the Off Topic post. I'll be brief.
I don't know if you have asked that, Korvin, but I have certainly been asked before. The answer is no.
My online handle apparently originates in the Mandela Effect: I greatly enjoyed the game Spy Hunter back when arcades were a thing, and in my memory the car in the art on the machine had the license plate SPY-ONE. I say the Mandela Effect is in play because ... that doesn't appear to actually be true. But that is how I remember it, and I have remembered it that way for decades.
As soon as video games started letting you use six letters to mark your high score, I started using SPYONE.
And from the moment I first got a dialup account, my main email has been spyone@ whatever my provider was.

Jay R
2022-02-26, 02:15 PM
You can find logical flaws in every aspect of D&D. It's a simulation, which means that it is simpler than reality. [My simulations professor once said, "It's supposed to be simpler than reality. If we wanted to observe reality, we would observe reality."]

If I had a player try this, I would tell him: "We're playing Dungeons and Dragons, not Markets and Merchants. Your character has no Knowledge(Economics) skill, doesn't think in these terms, and will not get more money by having you try to over-complicate the simulation.

"I told you the purchasing power of the treasure you found, and that isn't going to change. If you want to thing of it as fewer coins worth more money each, feel free to enjoy yourself that way. But we aren't going to waste time trying to simulate modern economic theory in a medieval world.

"Besides, magic changes the assumptions. Detecting metallic content is as easy as detecting alignment, so each time a kingdom tries to debase its currency, it fails. The magic system trumps all methods of trying to play with the money supply."

And if all else fails, there is the all-purpose DM solution for any argument: "Five ghouls appear. Roll initiative." As I said in my Rules for DMs:

31. The purpose of wandering monsters is to prevent the game from bogging down. If the players spend over five real minutes in useless discussion, then it's ghoul o'clock.

Mr Blobby
2022-02-26, 10:54 PM
You can find logical flaws in every aspect of D&D. It's a simulation, which means that it is simpler than reality. [My simulations professor once said, "It's supposed to be simpler than reality. If we wanted to observe reality, we would observe reality."]...

While I agree with that on this case [though I think my solution is a simple fix for it anyway] I do think DMs need to be mindful of over-applying that maxim. That 'flaw' might in fact be a faulty premise which causes a whole wing of a game/story/etc to fall down.

Mechalich
2022-02-27, 02:09 AM
While I agree with that on this case [though I think my solution is a simple fix for it anyway] I do think DMs need to be mindful of over-applying that maxim. That 'flaw' might in fact be a faulty premise which causes a whole wing of a game/story/etc to fall down.

It's important to differentiate between two cases:
1. Things that the system isn't attempting to model.
2. Things the system is attempting to model but is failing to represent in a functionally viable way.

In D&D, fine-grained economics such as currency manipulation is clearly the first case, it simply isn't something the game is about.

Mr Blobby
2022-02-27, 03:01 AM
I would also add;

#3: Things the system does not need to model - as in, 'brings nothing to the game'.

For sometimes, just sometimes 'sorting out' #1 can make a game system better - for #1 is down to what the game designers thought of at the time, and well they will have missed 'stuff'.

But I simply don't see any worth of doing it in this case.

Yeah, I've played too many times with DMs who put everything into #1 to a point they're the Lawful Stupid one...

Jay R
2022-02-27, 11:18 AM
... I think my solution is a simple fix for it anyway...

Your solution and mine are pretty much identical.

You wrote: "Put the world on the 'gold standard', with everything valued in GP. So you do not find 50GP, you find 50GP's worth of coinage. So if it's debased, there shall simply be more of it, but the GP value is still the same..."

I wrote: "I told you the purchasing power of the treasure you found, and that isn't going to change. If you want to thing of it as fewer coins worth more money each, feel free to enjoy yourself that way."

We are both saying, in essence, "I told you the purchasing power and skipped over complicating economic theory that isn't going to get you more dough."


While I agree with that on this case [though I think my solution is a simple fix for it anyway] I do think DMs need to be mindful of over-applying that maxim. That 'flaw' might in fact be a faulty premise which causes a whole wing of a game/story/etc to fall down.

Of course. He also said (at a different time), "A simulation should be a simple as possible, and no simpler."

KorvinStarmast
2022-02-27, 03:57 PM
And from the moment I first got a dialup account, my main email has been spyone@ whatever my provider was. Thanks, I will try to remember.

We are both saying, in essence, "I told you the purchasing power and skipped over complicating economic theory that isn't going to get you more dough." Good one to keep in the back pocket.

Of course. He also said (at a different time), "A simulation should be a simple as possible, and no simpler."
Yep and that's a bit of a challenge.

Mr Blobby
2022-02-28, 12:38 AM
Your solution and mine are pretty much identical.

You wrote: "Put the world on the 'gold standard', with everything valued in GP. So you do not find 50GP, you find 50GP's worth of coinage. So if it's debased, there shall simply be more of it, but the GP value is still the same..."

I wrote: "I told you the purchasing power of the treasure you found, and that isn't going to change. If you want to thing of it as fewer coins worth more money each, feel free to enjoy yourself that way."

We are both saying, in essence, "I told you the purchasing power and skipped over complicating economic theory that isn't going to get you more dough."

Well, I do like to think of it more as 'I have listened to your point and accepted it has merit. So I've fixed it.' Well, at least to the player's face. *smirks*

Lacco
2022-02-28, 02:01 AM
If I had a player try this, I would tell him: "We're playing Dungeons and Dragons, not Markets and Merchants. Your character has no Knowledge(Economics) skill, doesn't think in these terms, and will not get more money by having you try to over-complicate the simulation.

As usual, the advice provided is on spot. There are always several approaches: moving towards what the player wants (adding economics to the simulation based on agreement of the table. Giving the player chance to add his own fluff to the agreed upon crunch (50gp = 50 gp worth of coins of whatever the type you want, feel free to give me some interesting hooks related to local history). Implementing the narrative the player proposed (e.g. making an adventure of finding a collector that will give them the full value of the coins).

Most of the time the player will appreciate if their inputs are used in any of these ways (depending on player it may be one of them or all of them). The only irritation comes from ignoring their inputs completely.

Still, the most important question of the thread is...

...where can I get Markets & Merchants...? :smallsmile:

Jay R
2022-03-01, 03:16 PM
Still, the most important question of the thread is...

...where can I get Markets & Merchants...? :smallsmile:

It's virtually impossible to find now.

When it first came out, it was pretty cheap. But some speculator bought up all the printed copies, in hopes that they would become valuable and he could re-sell them for a large profit.

And that's how you play Markets & Merchants.

Satinavian
2022-03-02, 02:14 AM
Still, the most important question of the thread is...

...where can I get Markets & Merchants...? :smallsmile:
I want to direct you to this TDE RPG supplement :

https://de.wiki-aventurica.de/de/images/thumb/a/a6/SH_DSA4_Q4_Handelsherr_und_Kiepenkerl.jpg/250px-SH_DSA4_Q4_Handelsherr_und_Kiepenkerl.jpg

The title literally translates to something like "Merchant & Peddler"

A full book about tradegoods, traderoutes, currencies, duties and other regulations, trade guild, investments etc. so that you can finally run games with focus on trade in your favourite RPG. At least if your favourite one happens to be TDE.


And yes, it is a real product, no joke. It wasn't super successfull, because people complained that the tradegood descriptions where often unneccessarily long, even for stuff that exists irl and some of the actual "run your merchant buissness" rules were not detailed enough.

KorvinStarmast
2022-03-02, 11:42 AM
It's virtually impossible to find now. Lawyers and Lawsuits never got past the never ending cease and desist orders. :smallbiggrin:

zlefin
2022-03-03, 07:50 AM
From a 'how to handwave this' perspective, for DnD at least; it seems easiest to go with Mechanus did it. It'd seem entirely in character for Mechanus to set standard, fixed prices, never change them, and keep buying/selling on planar markets until prices stabilize at the values they deem appropriate (or others buying/selling with them until that just happens anyways). Or for Mechanus made currency to become the standard simply because it's the most reliably made currency. I'm imagining an inevitable dedicated to hunting down those who damage or counterfeit currency.

Wintermoot
2022-03-04, 12:28 PM
My next character is going to abuse arcane mark and rope trick to make a fantasy equivalent of blockchain cryptocurrency.

SpyOne
2022-03-06, 11:14 AM
I want to direct you to this TDE RPG supplement :

https://de.wiki-aventurica.de/de/images/thumb/a/a6/SH_DSA4_Q4_Handelsherr_und_Kiepenkerl.jpg/250px-SH_DSA4_Q4_Handelsherr_und_Kiepenkerl.jpg

The title literally translates to something like "Merchant & Peddler"

A full book about tradegoods, traderoutes, currencies, duties and other regulations, trade guild, investments etc. so that you can finally run games with focus on trade in your favourite RPG. At least if your favourite one happens to be TDE.


And yes, it is a real product, no joke. It wasn't super successfull, because people complained that the tradegood descriptions where often unneccessarily long, even for stuff that exists irl and some of the actual "run your merchant buissness" rules were not detailed enough.
Being for a system that I don't know is a minor issue.
Being in a language that I don't know (which, to be fair, is most of them) is going to be a larger issue.
Any chance there was an English version, or am I stuck using FASA's Trader Princes and Merchant Captains for their Star Trek RPG?
;)

Lacco
2022-03-06, 03:16 PM
I want to direct you to this TDE RPG supplement :

https://de.wiki-aventurica.de/de/images/thumb/a/a6/SH_DSA4_Q4_Handelsherr_und_Kiepenkerl.jpg/250px-SH_DSA4_Q4_Handelsherr_und_Kiepenkerl.jpg

The title literally translates to something like "Merchant & Peddler"

A full book about tradegoods, traderoutes, currencies, duties and other regulations, trade guild, investments etc. so that you can finally run games with focus on trade in your favourite RPG. At least if your favourite one happens to be TDE.

And yes, it is a real product, no joke. It wasn't super successfull, because people complained that the tradegood descriptions where often unneccessarily long, even for stuff that exists irl and some of the actual "run your merchant buissness" rules were not detailed enough.

Well, I always liked TDE, at least from a distance: never had a chance to run it or play it, with the exception of Realms of Arkania (PC, not tabletop). I loved the atmosphere and ideas, and the not-only-combat challenges. So TDE is on my "to try" list. And this would be my first good motivation to actually improve my German (which I should have a long time ago).

As I have dealt with players that tend to view their adventurers as... entrepreneurs with weapons... I'd definitely read through it. Will see if I can get my grubby paws on it. Because having a ruleset you can bounce off when it comes to things like setting up a trade caravan or even a tavern. And I like interesting subsystems with some random tables: nothing gets my creativity better.

Also, I know the sentiment: some rulebooks, especially trade oriented, provide a lots of fluff, but no real mechanics or anything that I could work with. I'm looking specifically at some Traveller supplements: I've had more luck blindly going through blogs than with the supplements.


Being for a system that I don't know is a minor issue.
Being in a language that I don't know (which, to be fair, is most of them) is going to be a larger issue.
Any chance there was an English version, or am I stuck using FASA's Trader Princes and Merchant Captains for their Star Trek RPG?
;)

*furious scribbling into my long list of "to read"*

...any other suggestions?

Also, jokes aside, I'd play strange stuff like this. I always liked the joke image with four dragons playing Houses & Humans (https://external-preview.redd.it/RGvRgvnF0qnUWxKmPqI0PwKdCqjWELSfC9P8Bwwz5wQ.jpg?au to=webp&9690ac8b).

Satinavian
2022-03-07, 10:19 AM
Any chance there was an English version, or am I stuck using FASA's Trader Princes and Merchant Captains for their Star Trek RPG?
;)
Sorry, no English version. 4th Edition TDE only had very few translated products and only from the earlier installments.


@Lacco

Well, it has rules but i wouldn't say those are a particularly strong point. Most of the book is fluff about commerce and trade goods specific to the main TDE setting. I would not recommend buying the book for the rules alone or for primary use in other settings.

Berenger
2022-03-07, 10:27 AM
...any other suggestions?

There is Suns of Gold (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/114950/Suns-of-Gold-Merchant-Campaigns-for-Stars-Without-Number) for the Stars Without Number system.

paladinofshojo
2022-03-08, 03:53 PM
My next character is going to abuse arcane mark and rope trick to make a fantasy equivalent of blockchain cryptocurrency.

Chaotic neutral huh?

HurinSmite
2022-03-08, 07:48 PM
I didn't see it suggested by name. But Pathfinder has a book 68-ish pages called "Druma, Prophet and Prophecy (https://paizo.com/products/btq01vyi)".
It doesn't go into the nitty gritty about economics but gives a few suggestions on running a mercantile campaign. Most of the book is describing regions in a country with a unhealthy obsession with personal wealth.

Derges
2022-03-10, 07:50 AM
Me: After slaying the hobgoblin chieftain and his elite guards, you all search the room in the deepest part of the lair, you find a massive chest.

*Rogue searches for traps, it’s clean and they open it, party finds a small purse of 50 gold coins*

Bard: Cool, who minted these?

Me: Excuse me?

Bard: Who minted the coins? What is the name and face on them?

Me: Err, King Carolus Rex III…

Bard: Cool, so is he the reigning king or did he reign in the bygone past?

Me: He is the current King’s grandfather, so he reign ended over 80 years ago.

Bard: Cool, these should be worth more than double the current coins in circulation at least, correct?


I see two options to avoid playing his game:
1) No, the gold piece keeps its value based on the amount of gold 50 gold pieces is worth 50 gold pieces regardless of who minted it or its age.
2) Yes, however, these old coins have half the weight of gold and so are worth 50gp divided by two, multiplied by two to get... 50gp

I can also offer a 3rd option to go with him:
3) Yes, but these old coins are no longer legal tender and if you want to use them you'll need to find a fence or have them melted and illegally re-minted.

ross
2022-03-20, 09:16 PM
"No one here but you cares about economics, and your outbursts are not contributing anything of use or interest. This game is not a simulation and realism is not a design goal for this campaign. Stop being disruptive or leave."

rel
2022-03-20, 09:54 PM
"No one here but you cares about economics, and your outbursts are not contributing anything of use or interest. This game is not a simulation and realism is not a design goal for this campaign. Stop being disruptive or leave."

This seems needlessly hostile.