Is it me, or does one usually end up rich at the end ?

[Damned Registrations]

Draq hit on the crux of the matter I think. The problem isn't just that you're killing a billion guys, it's also that you have an unlimited amount of time. If the player is actually going to miss out on oppurtunities because he's dicking around in the wilderness ferrying junk to sell, he'll only carry valuables to sell (Gems and treasures, especially valuable equipment) and only sell when he's in town anyways. At that point it's simply a matter of balancing loot + frequency of trips + carrying capacity.

 

[DraQ]

Draq hit on the crux of the matter I think. The problem isn't just that you're killing a billion guys, it's also that you have an unlimited amount of time. If the player is actually going to miss out on oppurtunities because he's dicking around in the wilderness ferrying junk to sell, he'll only carry valuables to sell (Gems and treasures, especially valuable equipment) and only sell when he's in town anyways. At that point it's simply a matter of balancing loot + frequency of trips + carrying capacity.

In urban settings law could be made less indifferent to player murderizing someone because they hit first, then scooping the loot off the corpses right in the middle of the street. PC even generally non-criminal would generally have plenty of reasons to not mess with the guards and so even justified combat would often turn into hit and run, preventing thorough looting.

 

[CorpseZeb]

Strict rules of law, limited amount of money (because of economy law), limited amount of items on the market (because of manufacturing rules/resources, not to mention about NPC shopping plans) and... we get pretty static world (if you are rich, you stay rich, if you are piss poor, you stay pissing...).

 

[wwsd]

Another thing in several games is that you tend to gather a lot of powerful items throughout the game. If the game also only requires you to be really good with one weapon or armor type, you can simply keep the very best items and sell off all the others. Some games make it just a bit too easy to walk out of a dungeon with six Swords of Awesome, all worth a lot of gold.

Also, it sometimes happens that, at some point in the game, the need to buy anything apart from training is usually eliminated. By that point, you're pretty rich and the amount of money you have simply keeps growing, no matter how hard you try to spend it. To actually lose money, you'd have to start training all the skills that you didn't actually pick at the beginning, just to make a kind of uber character that can do anything.

I was writing this with Morrowind in the back of my head, but it's not the best example because it does actually have merchants who can't afford most of the really strong items. Problem is that almost everyone knows of the Creeper and Mudcrab merchants, and if you allow players the opportunity to get rich quickly, even in the form of an easter egg, they'll take it for sure.

Perhaps it would work better if you had merchants with limited gold, with actual legal restrictions on what you can sell, which have their consequences if you try to break them (in MW, they talk a lot about Dwemer artifacts being banned, but you can't actually get into trouble for trying to sell them), without easter egg merchants with lots of gold, and with some kind of living economy, rather than just having traders keeping the items you sell for all eternity, and combine all this with a living economy.

 

[sgc_meltdown]

You may be pleasantly surprised to know Demon's Souls, while having quite a few magical items and much crafting material to loot, does not have a way to sell them for the ingame currency, which is souls.

Instead you can only get souls by killing stuff or choosing to convert whichever boss demon soul into a wad of souls which means you don't get to use the ability they unlock.
Apart from buying consumables which you will be using up like a fat man with potato chips you will constantly need souls to increase stats (lore justified by the maiden in black using them to magic up more heroism into your spirit or something), the cost of which rises exponentially, so you'll always be scraping together something for a purchase.

Which leaves the problem farming of course but if respawn was turned off along with careful management of overall difficulty in areas versus quality of currency drops there's your perfect control of personal character wealth right there.

The most important thing is to harshly control the sources of currency in your game and have ever increasing tiers of money sinks that the character has to all but need to spend currency on, like the aforementioned stat increases.

there are frills like currency weight and item decay and stuff too I guess but nuances like these are best considered against the context of something fundamentally worthwhile. HA HA HA WE AM MAKE GAMEBRYO GAME ECONOMY FIX WITH REALISM MODS LIVING WORLD no you aren't mr modder I admire your technical skills and everything but you are putting a monocle on a turd

 

[Bulba]

How about another approach to that problem? What if you attached some arbitrary weight to money, let's say - 100 coins weigh 1 kg. Then, as you get wealthier, it becomes quite a burden. Do you keep it in a bank (if the gameworld supports the idea of banks) or do you buy some jewelery so it's easier to store? Maybe you buy a cart and haul it everywhere with you? There's so many possibilities for questlines about rich characters. Maybe somebody who claims to be a distant relative needs a loan, or a mad scientist wants you to fund his questionable research?
The bottom line is - wealth affects more than just ability or disability to buy something.

In the first diablo they had something similar - you could carry only a limited amount of gold per slot, so if you would happen to stroll upon a ring that was worth more than 10k, it would be a wise decision to keep as an investment.

One think I found funny in pretty much every modern RPG, its a bunch of quests where you need to help someone who has money problems and as a good solution you give him the cash. Now the funny part is how they always ask for some shitty low sum of 100 gold pieces and you found more then that in two random barrels and already have several thousands gp in your inventory, so its not hard to choose to be a good guy. Now if that money meant the difference between helping some random stranger and having something to eat then the decision would be more difficult.

I know eador is a lot closer to a strategy rather than to an rpg, but this is the game for you, if you wish to have a regular type of the experience.

 

[hoverdog]

I know eador is a lot closer to a strategy rather than to an rpg, but this is the game for you, if you wish to have a regular type of the experience.

Color me interested. Tell me more. Is there a non-russian version at the very least?

 

[Aldebaran]

In any game with a rest function, I would prefer to see a many optioned chart sprout up on the screen before a PC gets a single second of his twelve hour, bone mending relaxation session. In, for example, the typical fantasy setting that we have all seen four thousand and five times, you would be given the option to choose between varying levels of wards, rations, healing potions (this would be the only time you could use them and they would be required for any serious injuries), and characters set on watch duty (this would increase time rested as opposed to directly affecting cost) that increase in price exponentially as you choose more advanced settings.

The game would, ideally, be balanced around the player taking suitably expensive rest options the further the player progressed in the game, or depending on the location: if the player was on a jaunt through hell, they would be expected to have most party members on watch duty and have some of the most powerful wards in place, or they would be fucked accordingly.

Aside from providing a very frequent, setting appropriate, and possibly expensive money sink, this would also have the benefit of forcing players to adopt a strategy in every encounter since each injury is going to represent a hit to the party wallet.

Alternatively, it could cause potentially game ending scenarios as players spiral into destitution and are forced to rely on the welfare of their liberal overlords.

 

[Bulba]

I know eador is a lot closer to a strategy rather than to an rpg, but this is the game for you, if you wish to have a regular type of the experience.

Color me interested. Tell me more. Is there a non-russian version at the very least?

hm... surprisingiy no. they are going to release a second one in february 2012 and it will be released in eu as well.

 

[Lesifoere]

I remember that in the first TW, gold was a bit hard to come by at first what with needing to buy bestiary books.

RPGs don't really try to be economy sims or anything in general, though. Also, lol Fable 2.