One of my favorite aspects of blogging is how conversational it is. And I do not mean the casual tone employed by most blogs; I mean the fact that, at least within a certain segment of bloggers, we are often reading each others’ posts and responding to them or riffing off their ideas, and ultimately coming up with more interesting gameable material than if we were locked in a cramped room with naught but a typewriter and a copy of basic D&D.
To that end, I sometimes participate in, or challenge the rest of the blogosphere to participate in, collective blogging where everyone tries to write about the same subject and post it on as near to the same day as possible for our varying schedules. For instance, perhaps you noticed a lot of blog posts about vampires back in October? That challenge, and the one I summarize for you today, were spun up on my discord server (which has a Patreon-only area, but also a vibrant public space).
This time, in an effort to reclaim “Black Friday” (U.S. shopping pseudoholiday) from the clutches of consumerism in favor of the DIY spirit of tabletop blogging! For the inaugural “Blog Friday” (clever, I know), I challenged a handful of brave bloggers to write something about shopping, treasure, merchants, or anything vaguely economic themed for their own blogs. The results were really varied! I’m catalog and summarize the entries for your perusal.
I did, naturally, write my own post, and ordinarily I would just re-share it in full here, but there are two problems that may present issues in the future. The first is that it is too long to fit in an email and Substack is ostensibly an email platform. The second is that my post features a lot of random tables using markdown, which isn’t supported on Substack. How do folks want me to approach this in the future? Excerpt posts too long for email? Screenshot the tables and include them as images? Suggestions welcomed. Anyway, without further throat-clearing…
I present: Blog Friday 2024!
Prismatic Wasteland (me!): It’s the Barter Economy, Stupid (This is one of my longer, meatier posts of the year where I tie in a lot of mechanics I have been working on into a interconnected web of game design. How does my abstract wealth system, my rules for bartering, my rules for the player-characters’ reputation, my carousing rules, and my system for random encounters and random treasure drops in dungeons all fit together? You’ll need to read the full post to glean the answer, but I’ll drop a juicy morsel from the post below)
When the Company wants to buy equipment, they follow the procedure below:
The Company totals up the Value (described above) for all the goods and services they want to buy.
If in a settlement, the Company makes a Reputation Roll (described below). If the result is positive, decrease the Value of the goods and services by the result. If the result is negative, increase the Value of the goods and services by the result.
The Company decides which Treasures they want to exchange for the goods and services and rolls the Treasure Dice (described above) for all such Treasure.
If the amount rolled on the Treasure Dice is equal to or exceeds the total Value, the Company removes the Treasure and obtains the goods and services. If it is just off by 1, one player character can choose to spend 1d6 Charisma (this is a thing in Prismatic Wasteland) to modify the result of the Treasure Dice by 1. Otherwise, the Company will have to abandon the purchase or offer more Treasure, rolling its Treasure Die and adding it to the result until it exceeds the total Value of the goods and services being acquired.
That is the barter mechanic at the heart of my post, but to fully realize the brilliance of my genius design (appropriate that I misspelt brilliance when writing this sentence at first), you will need to read the full post at the Prismatic Wasteland blog.
Friends of the Wasteland
At least 15 other bloggers participated in the inaugural Blog Friday! These include (but please do let me know if I inadvertently missed anyone, especially if that anyone is you):
Mindstorm: The Art of Bartering (This post also focuses on bartering, with a totally different mechanic that is more focused on the individual merchants themselves. This is especially appropriate because this isn’t a catch-all system; it is for those freaky merchants you find hiding out in dungeons, swamps, and other unlikely environs, waiting for adventurers to part with unusual items. In typical gameablity focused fashion, Mindstorm also provides 3 example freaky merchants that you can immediately toss into whatever dungeon you are currently running)
Town Scrier: Early Middle Ages Currencies (Town Scrier comes up with a system of medieval-inspired coinage with rare currencies that actually feel rare, not just a platinum chip that is worth 10x as much as the silver chip. They also provide some interesting game scenarios that involve currency, such as coin clippers, alchemists interested in buying your pure gold, debt collecting bandits, and the economic effects of adventurers bringing back so much gold from dungeons)
Playful Void: Gold! A Blog Friday Post (Idle Cartulary discusses why she hates gold in D&Dalikes and prefers a silver standard, and also discusses the similarity between the prices of certain goods in D&Dalikes to the hellprices of our current reality [which is bad], and gives a big table of non-rationalized prices)
Personable Thoughts: Blog Friday: Abstract away your wealth! (Personable makes the case that even though counting gold, unlike counting XP, is diegetic, it is also boring, and advocates for a system of abstract treasure values [this turned out to be somewhat similar to the Treasure concept in my Blog Friday post—evidence of great minds and their alike-thinkingness])
Magnolia Keep: Blog Friday: Money Sinks in Tabletop Roleplaying Games (Magnolia Keep narrates her relationship to the old-school approach to gold (i.e., for XP) and offers an evaluation of the various modes of providing outlets for all that lucre player characters accumulate over the course of a campaign, from carousing, to castle construction, to choosing how lavishly you live during downtime)
Root Devil: Neither a Borrower or Lender Be (Root Devil details some rules for borrowing money for your player characters’ fledgling business ventures and also how the powers-that-be will try to tax away some of that wealth once they hit it big. As a forward, they mention the vampire nightclub their players operate on the side of their adventuring, which sounds fascinating)
Elsewhere Elsewhere: The Money Tree (Elsewhere Elsewhere presents a location to slot into your hexmap that changes over time. It involves a farmer who plants his life savings in the ground, and what surprises [for weal and woe] grow from that. There are also, as an aside, some really good puns employed as the money tree grows. My particular favorites are the Hedge Fund and the Stalk Market. The best ideas are often pun-based)
Traverse Fantasy: Cinco: Treasure & Downtime (Traverse Fantasy details her simple (positive) downtime rules and how they interact with her equally streamlined treasure rules for her forthcoming Cinco system. I especially like the rumor system, which gives an avenue for players to influence the “lore” of the world if they care enough to spend their treasure on it. This is a great way to get your players invested (get it?) in your campaign world!)
Loot Loot Lore: Do you NEED an economy? (Loot hates shopping (same) and accordingly just decided it was simple enough to cut out the vestigial organ that was gold from their game. They detail their system for advancement that doesn’t rely on that old favorite, gold-for-XP)
Fail Forward: Blog Friday: Gold With Utility (Fail Forward advocates for a currency that has a use-value and not just an exchange-value, being able to do something with gold like giving it magical properties or useful as bait in dungeons. They then talk about how they have translated this concept to their sci-fi setting)
Goblin Punch: d6 More Dungeon Merchants (Mr. Punch himself writes a sequel to an older post where he presented 6 merchants you might find in dungeons with 6 more merchants of the dungeon variety! And if you are looking for bespoke mechanics for negotiating with these merchants, simply consult the Mindstorm post above)
Explorers Design: Not All That Glitters Is Gold (Have you heard about how cigarettes are sometimes used as currency in prisons? There is no reason why the currency in your game needs to be metallic disks with the faces of assholes on them. Explorers Design presents 50 inventive currencies you could use instead of your gold. Combine one of these with the gold-for-XP rule and you get more evocative results like severed thumbs-for-XP)
Falling from Orbit: Employment Contracts in Mothership (Falling from Orbit takes Mothership’s Net Worth table and expands it to make a system of income bands utilizing an abstract wealth system with a sprinkle of corporate horror because, of course, it’s Mothership after all)
Archon's Court: The Gift Economy In Play (Archon describes a concrete system for implementing a gift economy as the basis of exchange in your games. One of the ideas in here that most tickled my brain is the idea that in such a game, every gift you get is also a adventure hook because how else are you, an adventurer, going to repay the kindness of this gift?)
Echoes from the Geekcave: All That Glitters (If all this newfangled thinking about gold in the above posts are bridges too far for you, the Geekcave stands athwart these posts and defends both the gold standard against those who prefer to use silver coins as the standard and those who want to make their elfgames economically realistic. As they say, “the dragon sitting on the hoard is realistic, but what the coins are made of is too far?”)
Want to Join the Next Blog Bandwagon?
You can! These are ad hoc, irregular events where everyone tries to post something on the same broadly defined topic on the exact same day. Like all blogging, it should be low stakes and only as much effort as you feel like putting in. The next topic is “Elements” and folks will be posting onFebruary 7, 2025 (allegedly this is National Periodic Table of the Elements Day). We talk about it on my discord server (I think I linked to it earlier in this post), but there is zero need to join that to participate. All you need is a blog and a dream.
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