Ash said:
Could you elaborate on Oregon's system? I'd love to hear what they're doing differently that might be able to integrate into other systems.
Nothing's overly solid right now, as I'm still working out the details, while cludging together our race packets, player handbook, event stuff, and a couple other odds and ends (plus, you know, dealing with real life
). My goal is to allow ships/caravans/etc. be usable in both Seattle and Oregon (we get lots of cross-traffic) so the general tag and what you purchase for how much will likely be identical. As I've seen it used in Seattle, people show up to Logistics with their ship/caravan tag, a Plot person is pulled, and bead draws are done by the player there. If something "cool" should come up, the Plot person has to come up with information on the fly for the player. The way I'd like to implement it in Oregon is that the bead draws are done by the plot team during our pre-event meeting, outside of player witnessing. They'd have to trust that the plot team is being fair, but it will allow our plot team to discuss with one another the best way to make a very mechanical and out-of-game process (bead draws) into a more story-related event. For instance, a player sends in a downtime-action submission saying "hey, between events, Bob is sending his ship (a Brig with 2 cannon and advanced rigging) down to the southern tip of the Crescent to scout for enemy ships. The ship is under orders to back off if they spot anything with significantly larger tunnage appears armed." During our plot meeting, we'd figure out the appropriate bead odds, do the draw, and then turn that result into a story which we relate back to the player prior to the event.
Two things that I don't like about the existent Seattle packet, though, is that by doing the bead draw in the player's presence, they become oog-aware of any oddities by virtue of how plot might manipulate the bead draw (by adding extra beads in one direction or another), and the explanation for the assorted rules may not necessarily make sense. For instance, the Seattle packet requires that the "mutiny" bead is never removable... we have a player whose ship is entirely crewed by other PCs, so how does that work? The packet I'm working out tries to make clear that the rules for ships (for instance) are simply guidelines that the plot team will use to construct their responses, and that agreeing to use the economics packet by no means guarantees any particular result or mix. If a player wants to send their ship unknowingly into waters that are rife with pirates and villains and krakens galore, I believe the more immersive experience would be to simply have them issue the orders and find out the results either as downtime information or, better yet, in-game when their crew starts showing up in the circle. If they decided they were personally captaining the ship, we can give them cool stories to bring them in-game with. The general themes should remain intact: buying weapons reduces the chance of piracy, buying rigging reduces wrecking, installing these things reduces tunnage and the amount of profit you can expect to garner. But I don't know that there should ever be a guarantee that these things will have a hard-coded degree of effect, and I want to make sure that we have the best possible opportunity to provide the players with interesting stories.
This is a good idea, or something quite like it. It would have to be tweaked. Even a one for one exchange would work well and take care of that problem.
I was thinking about that. 1 for 1 doesn't necessarily encourage trade-ins as much as I'd want, I think, and having a sliding scale for trading in coin in either direction means people will hoard one form of coin to trade for the more advantageous one. Maybe a different rate (1.5 to 1, maybe?), but the general idea of getting more gobbies for your coin than the coin itself is worth could be good. The only issue I see there is that it might impact people from making donations... I dunno. Just spitballing here, more than anything.
Gilwing said:
Who's to say you have to auction off magic items? I would bid on stuff that can't be made.
Back in the day I played Ultima Online (before ever crack). People would use there gold to purchase houses and use it as a storage area. They would also show off the rare and unusual items.
The issue there is physrepping. Players (shockingly, I know) have this urge to want to use or show off the nifty things they buy. Selling someone a house means at some point they're gonna want to be at that house. Selling someone a ship means at some point, they're gonna want to sleep on that ship during the event. Some of it requires having understanding players and giving them attractive reasons not to do such things, but if you go to far overboard, you're going to run into issues. What do you do with the guy that "buys" 500 retainers and wants to overthrow the government?
Libras said:
The problem I see with coin = goblins is that a definitive price has been set on LCO rituals. If the chapter accordingly adjusts the goblin cost of the scrolls for this, s'all cool.
True, that's something that would need to be looked at.
