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Post by Grog on Mar 2, 2014 15:29:15 GMT -8
I'm planning on running a post-apocalyptic campaign in the near future. At our last session, my players all gave the game their blessing. I want it to be very gritty (downright bordering on realistic). I've got the damage system etc handled, but I'm wondering what the best way to handle stu 's version of gritty, that is, the resource side. I've got a good set of rules for building and managing settlements, but finding a fun way to "grittily" handle the cash and resources gives me pause. This seems a lot more difficult to work out than "combat will get you killed." I'm very interested in tips and ideas about how people have handled this in the past. I personally don't mind doing some bookkeeping, but I want to make managing resources (or lack thereof) an interesting part of the game, not a burden on my players. One idea I just came up with is creating "wallets" for my players and using some sort of play money. I thought about making them all wooden boxes in which to keep their nuka-cola caps, character minis, various papers, maps, etc. Of course, that then leads to making equipment cards for everything they have, etc.
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Post by HourEleven on Mar 2, 2014 15:46:04 GMT -8
The most interesting way I can think of to manage resources in a post apocalyptic game is to do away with money altogether. Make whatever is acknowledged as money to have a real value - a usefulness.
A PC game example is "Metro 2033." All transactions happen by exchanging bullets for services. When resources are scarce, trading usable goods for usable goods is much more dramatic or intense.
I'd do away with any currency and use bartering. Then managing money is the same as managing equipment. Your wealth is only what you are willing to carry and willing to part with.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Mar 2, 2014 17:21:13 GMT -8
I'd go with HourEleven's suggestion. Especially for a post apocalyptic game money would be meaningless. Without governments to back it paper currency has no value, and things like gold coins aren't really worth much either as you can't eat them, can't build cloths or shelter out of them, and they don't make good weapons. The only things with value should be things that will help you survive.
Go with a barter system, force the party to make the choice the tools of survival. Do they keep the water or the bullets. And remember to keep track of their reputations. If they keep killing people so they don't have to make the choice towns start barring the gates, or shoot at them on site.
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Post by ayslyn on Mar 2, 2014 18:01:36 GMT -8
I actually liked what they did with Dark Sun 4e. Survival Day was an "item" consisting of all the materials needed to survive for a day. It struck a nice balance.
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Post by squeatus on Mar 2, 2014 18:33:42 GMT -8
I actually liked what they did with Dark Sun 4e. Survival Day was an "item" consisting of all the materials needed to survive for a day. It struck a nice balance. See, I'd like that in a lot of other settings, but at that point I'd probably just hand waive it or include it as a part of some monthly maintenance/lifestyle thing. In Dark Sun resources seemed to matter, and replacing all the tracking with something like "Give me a six pack of Daily Survival, please" just doesn't seem to fit the desperate/scroungy/gritty nature of Athas (or any resource-starved world.) I think the barter system is a great way to handle things, especially since you can control wealth easier by making goods non-portable, or fragile, or not in demand, etc. Lot more convincing than PC's constantly developing holes in their backpacks or encountering thieves and rust monsters, anyway.
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Post by ayslyn on Mar 2, 2014 20:06:58 GMT -8
It's a nice compromise if you don't want minute bookkeeping, but do want to track it on some level, which was what it aimed to do.
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Post by squeatus on Mar 2, 2014 22:38:31 GMT -8
It's a nice compromise if you don't want minute bookkeeping, but do want to track it on some level, which was what it aimed to do. Equipment and Inventory tracking makes me want to throw all my books off the table and quit. In fact, that's what I do at the end of every session--I just have people e-mail me their equipment updates later and pretend to care about it since careful attention to the amount of shinies they collect seems to make some of my players happy. So I'm all for simplifying it whenever possible. I think I might actually employ that "Daily Survival" solution in every single situation where I want resources to be relevant, but I want to retain my sanity. I just think, for the purposes of a Dark Sun feel, that particular simplification took aim at the problem and knocked it out completely. A dying world/wasteland like Athas is an environment I think (equipment/water/food) scarcity is really required--and one of the few times I don't have a problem doing *some* book-keeping. Daily cost of living just abstracts it to the point that I can't make running out of food become a problem even if they're fully hydrated. I also don't want to miss the opportunity to sit everyone on a mountain of gold and have them wanting to trade it all for a gallon of water. I'm probably oversimplifying the implementation of "Daily Survival" in my head, though. Sorry if this comes off like threadjacking. I definitely think it's germane to the conversation, but if it's not helping I'll fuck right off to another thread.
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Post by Grog on Mar 3, 2014 6:18:13 GMT -8
squeatus I think it's still germane. Abstracting to a "Daily Survival" was definitely one of the things I considered so its relevant. My post-A isn't quite as bad as the road for a couple of reasons. It's essentially one generation on. There are settlements of people who all live and work together. It is sort of the Road becoming Fallout. This leads me to a few of problems with just using a barter system: a) Fiat currency would become worthless (probably), but I don't believe that barter-only is a system that realistically lasts for any length of time once you have a stable population. In fact, anthropologists haven't really found a true barter system, they find barter-dominated, but pure-barter proves elusive. As soon as multiple people start having multiple transactions they develop some more efficient system of agreed prices mediums of exchange. In @houreleven 's example, bullets have become a currency. Currency is just a generally agreed upon medium of exchange, and the value of other goods is often stated in terms of that currency. It could be anything from dollar bills to bullet casings (which I actually thought of using) to playing cards to cigarettes to bottles of water to bottle caps to full cows. In fact, many currencies were based on an equivalent value in something useful (1 shekel = ~180 grains of barley. All of these things can be stores of value and media of exchange, which essentially makes them function like currency. b) economically, pure barter systems are extremely inefficient. I can't really even describe how inefficient they are. Every transaction requires a huge amount of haggling and price finding. In a situation where people are regularly trading the same or similar goods, eventually a standard "market price" will be arrived at. At this point the value of any good is known in terms of the values of several other goods. If any one of these other goods makes a good currency it will likely take over as such. I would then still need to have an equipment list so that I could figure out what was approximately equal, which leads to point C. c) I want to have meta-game systems for handling the economy. Why? Because I intend for this to be harsh and I don't want to be a dick about it. I don't want to be deciding every session "oh, today you're going to run out of food unless you sell off all your bullets" or "I think I will arbitrarily give you.....SIX CRUMPETS for the motorcycle!" I want to build a metaphorical economic clock and tweak and interpret the results, not imagine a pretend economy from whole cloth, because I feel like just making it up as I go is a good way to end up with a very adversarial game. Of course, I can create situations which might lead to such decisions, but I don't want to arbitrarily decide each transaction. It may seem like a fine line, but it seems important to me. One possible solution I've seen is: players can carry around up to x amount of unspecified tradeable/barterable goods without accounting for them specifically. This can be shell casings, beads, sewing thread, painkillers, bottlecaps, what have you. Once you get more than that it needs to be cashed out into something and tracked and dealt with. This speeds up all the small transactions, but the bigger ones (guns, barrels of fuel, bulk food for a settlement, etc) become major transactions that require a lot of haggling etc. That said, I do intend to have "food for a day" and "room and board for a week" items as a minor concession to my players. It's only so fun to say "well you have two potatoes, but you really need three in order to get enough calories for today." Sorry if my essay on money and currency comes across as pedantic. It's not intended to be.
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Ecrodorias
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Posts: 21
Currently Playing: Rise of the Runelords
Currently Running: Mini Adventures
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Post by Ecrodorias on Mar 3, 2014 9:11:18 GMT -8
Well, most currencies are made from commodities that are in scare supply. It has to be common enough to be available and rare enough to be worth something. For example in a post apocalyptic setting I can see clean water being valuable (especially if rainfall is too contaminated to be any use), and used for a currency. Of course grain and other things could be as well. Sticking to one or two items helps get rid of the over the top book keeping and still create problems... How do you transport it around, especially for big purchases, the possibilities of contamination and so on... Of course if you get bored with this, it doesn't mean that the next settlement over the hill doesn't do things completely differently. After all a small warlord might have set up a conglomerate of small towns and established his own currency... Hope that's some help
Ecrodorias.
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maxinstuff
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Post by maxinstuff on Mar 3, 2014 18:17:39 GMT -8
I'm going to pick nits and point out that a "fiat currency" by definition is not backed by any physical goods of intrinsic value. What you are talking about is "hard currency". I.e. It is a currency that represents a certain amount of some physical goods that have a real economic value. As a side note, gold or silver backed currencies present an interesting contradiction, as the "thing" backing the currency is in itself a fiat instrument with minimal real value (beyond gold's usefulness in small amounts in electronics). On the ACTUAL topic, just make the players track all their own shit All you need to do is ensure you track the passage of time (cue Gygax quotes). So at camp you might say "OK - everyone reduce your food and water by 1 day's worth. If you took half rations of either take a fatigue point (for one or both)."
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Post by squeatus on Mar 3, 2014 22:01:14 GMT -8
One possible solution I've seen is: players can carry around up to x amount of unspecified tradeable/barterable goods without accounting for them specifically. This can be shell casings, beads, sewing thread, painkillers, bottlecaps, what have you. Once you get more than that it needs to be cashed out into something and tracked and dealt with. This speeds up all the small transactions, but the bigger ones (guns, barrels of fuel, bulk food for a settlement, etc) become major transactions that require a lot of haggling etc. That said, I do intend to have "food for a day" and "room and board for a week" items as a minor concession to my players. It's only so fun to say "well you have two potatoes, but you really need three in order to get enough calories for today." Sorry if my essay on money and currency comes across as pedantic. It's not intended to be. I can't see any reason to apologize. This kind of discussion is engaging for me, and not in that adversarial "we must identify the one true solution" kind of way. I took away a lot of new ways to examine games and economy just from your one reply. Any conversation which doesn't devolve into Mr. Howell cryptically taunting folks apropos of nothing is a win. I think the solution you mentioned above would work for me in the post apocalyptic setting you describe--as a player and as a GM. I'd probably have my eyes glaze over at every potato count, too. The only caveat would be for the rare occasion you'd want to have the potatoes on hand matter, I guess. Like, when you DO want food to run out.... how do you do this without yanking the metagame rug out from under the players? (i.e. not making the players feel like you're arbitrarily starving them to be adversarial OR to put them on rails) Probably as easy as making it where you can't use the meta solution to stockpile daily survival items, maybe? Like, stop at a major population center and you can pick up two or three days' worth of food, but if you're out in the wastelands for a month you're still going to get an opportunity to bring up scarcity as a motivator (or obstacle, or invisible railroad) in your story. Something like that. Pressed for time, sorry for stream of consciousness.
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Post by Grog on Mar 4, 2014 6:44:12 GMT -8
The written word is perilous, and can often convey (or not convey) meanings that weren't (or were) intended. I think that The players can have "supplies for a day or week" but if they get out into the wilderness and change destinations half way through, or fail/critically fail their navigation roll, or get waylaid and one of the characters takes a wound that slows down their pace...well, it might take longer than they initially thought...which means they might not have enough supplies. And if they aren't in an area with many settlements then they might be going hungry. Conversely, since my game will take place in the hell on earth that is central Texas (climatically speaking) they might be faced with the choice of travelling during the day and running out of water in their last day, or of travelling at night and taking a penalty to navigation and raising their chance of an unfortunate random encounter. Dealing with supplies en route, is where weight becomes important. I think that weight might be as critical to gritty as money. (The following is based on savage worlds, but probably applies to many similar games) If an average PC can only carry 30 lbs before becoming minorly encumbered and he's got an 8 lbs rifle, a 4 lbs sidearm, two 1 lbs boxes of 20 bullets, a 2 lbs backpack, and a 4 lbs sleeping kit and two 1 lbs torches, that's....22lbs of gear. At a pound of food and very sparse 2 lbs of water a day, three days of rations puts you over your initial encumberance limit. Of course, There isn't a huge penalty for going up to 60 lbs, but it does reduce your physical skill rolls. Then we have to start talking about tradeoffs. I think I've settled on bullets for currency. So a player can have up to twenty of a type of bullet floating around in their pockets/pack etc without affecting weight limit. Once they get above that point it becomes a "box of bullets" which has a weight of 1 lbs (just weighed a box of .45colt...). 1 bullet is worth 1 day of manual labor and would buy 3 days of preserved trail rations. So the PCs can't exactly run around with the wealth of a nation in their backpacks. And there are no banks.... Of course, they could always trade two boxes of bullets for a horse...(but then they need 15lbs of forage if they can't find any on the trail)... and on and on.
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Post by squeatus on Mar 4, 2014 6:59:22 GMT -8
Ohhhh I was so thinking in GURPS or D&D or... Savage Worlds? Your system seems perfect for that.
Anything more complicated would probably not feel right given the speed/elegance of the rest of the system.
On a tangential note: Hope there's a Javier Bardem-type to casually terrorize post-apocalyptic Texas.
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Post by Grog on Mar 4, 2014 7:27:19 GMT -8
I'm going to pick nits and point out that a "fiat currency" by definition is not backed by any physical goods of intrinsic value. What you are talking about is "hard currency". I.e. It is a currency that represents a certain amount of some physical goods that have a real economic value. As a side note, gold or silver backed currencies present an interesting contradiction, as the "thing" backing the currency is in itself a fiat instrument with minimal real value (beyond gold's usefulness in small amounts in electronics). I'll see your nit and pick a second: True. But true fiat currency is, in the big scheme of historical time, actually pretty rare, excepting bank notes and bonds. Some people consider it to be an invention of the modern era (although this might be stretching). I think the dominance of fiat currency in the modern era is why people say that money would be worthless in the apocalypse. Gold and silver is a good currency because it is: 1. Rare 2. Extremely difficult to counterfeit 3. A good medium of exchange 4. Stores value well (rust monsters beware!) 5. a good unit of account (can be split into different sizes or added together with ease, uniform in value, and is easily quantifiable) As a side note, I have this sneaking suspicion in a true apocalypse, after things settled down and trade resumed, modern cash money would become very valuable indeed. Why? Because it's deliberately designed to be incredibly difficult to counterfeit, even using modern machinery. Assuming that the mints didn't just start cranking out sheets and sheets of bills, the supply would be limited. A dollar bill isn't nearly as resilient as gold, but I've seen bills hold up through some pretty extreme abuse. The unit of account is printed right there on the bill (although you can't easily tear a bill in half and get half the value...)
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Post by Grog on Mar 4, 2014 7:53:59 GMT -8
Ohhhh I was so thinking in GURPS or D&D or... Savage Worlds? Your system seems perfect for that. Anything more complicated would probably not feel right given the speed/elegance of the rest of the system. On a tangential note: Hope there's a Javier Bardem-type to casually terrorize post-apocalyptic Texas. Of Course there will be such types running around doing bad things. Yeah, I started my players on savage worlds and they like it. I believe in my heart of hearts that it is elegant enough to handle the gritty apocalypse without bogging down too much. I like its modular nature. I was non-specific as to the system because this was intitially intended as a general topic.
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