especially when it's not just progression disguised as an economy?

It’s frustrating, especially when barely scraping by is the most engaging and immersive part of any good RPG.

Why can't they implement simple systems like:

>selling 20 bandit swords reduces the price of those swords and the price of the crafting materials used to make them. On the flip side, items made with that material become cheaper too making hoarding pointless.

>early game merchants shouldn’t buy high-level gear because they wouldn’t be able to resell it.

>merchants shouldn’t work with you unless you have a certain reputation or status.

>If you suddenly have too much money with no proof of honest work, merchants should report you to the guards, suspecting theft.

>stolen items should be much harder to sell or use

>requesting rare, highlevel gear should take days to fulfill, not minutes.

>If you’re a low level character walking around with high-level gear (either stolen or cheesed), it should attract high level enemies, making it dangerous to use gear you're not ready for.

I mean, there are tons of ideas but honestly, I’d be happy with just a slightly better in game economy that stops me from having all the money in the world by mid game.

>>3795667 (OP)
Many of those ideas are terrible but the worst two are
>If you suddenly have too much money with no proof of honest work, merchants should report you to the guards, suspecting theft.
I don't give a shit how realistic it is, it runs counter to the vast majority of games' having the primary method of money acquisition be wacky adventurer bullshit or random quests resulting in sudden windfalls; it makes the "uh oh this dipshit called the guards" an inevitability, and unless that's part of the plot, that's tedious as hell.
>stolen items should be much harder to sell or use
You already have plenty of games that straight up prohibit the sale of stolen items except one or two dedicated merchants for it, and it raises the same question there: How the fuck do they know? Unless your map is very limited (one city tops) it utterly shatters the suspension of disbelief that EVERY single merchant is somehow aware this specific knife belonged to Bob the Farmer from Bumfuckville, a village they probably don't directly trade with because it's in a whole other region.

In most rpgs your character is earning money adventuring so he can spend it exclusively on more adventuring. Any economy is going to inevitably break down when it revolves around such a singular purpose. Rather than elaborate supply and demand systems, just zero out the character's cash reserves at regular intervals; whatever he didn't spend on upgrading his gear gets converted into various minor bonuses reflecting all the debts he's cleared, favors he's done, gifts exchanged with noble patrons, carousing, salaries he's paid to his servants, and other expensive activities he's done offscreen.

>>3795667 (OP)
>selling 20 bandit swords reduces the price of those swords and the price of the crafting materials used to make them. On the flip side, items made with that material become cheaper too making hoarding pointless.
It'll get out of hand almost immediately, guaranteed.
>early game merchants shouldn’t buy high-level gear because they wouldn’t be able to resell it.
Just an inconvenience and solves very little.
>merchants shouldn’t work with you unless you have a certain reputation or status.
Just a minor inconvenience and changes nothing unless gaining rep is a chore, at which point it turns into a bullshit grind.
>If you suddenly have too much money with no proof of honest work, merchants should report you to the guards, suspecting theft.
Arbitrary bullshit. How much is too much? What do you mean proof? What are those guards gonna do about it? It'll either turn into a constant annoyance or be irrelevant after the first time when the player drops 80% of their cash before talking to a merchant.
>stolen items should be much harder to sell or use
Already the case in many games (sometimes, as the guy above mentions, straight up impossible), and usually extremely immersion breaking too, thanks telepathic NPC network.
>requesting rare, highlevel gear should take days to fulfill, not minutes.
Some games already do it, just adds a minor inconvenience. Unless there are strict time limits, where it adds an incredibly annoying inconvenience, but still nothing more.
>If you’re a low level character walking around with high-level gear (either stolen or cheesed), it should attract high level enemies, making it dangerous to use gear you're not ready for.
That one just makes no sense, fuck do you mean? WHY should it attract them? What, are ogres fucking magnetically drawn to blinged out swords across miles?
At least if you're gonna argue for gear control make it something with ANY logic in-setting, like bandits going hey, YOU shanked someone and got that, so can they.

>>3795667 (OP)
Problem with general economic balancing is you cannot 100% predict the player experience. Gamey today are designed with critical path in mind aka players who ignore everything but the main story. With such setup anyone who goes even remotely out of their way to do shit will end up with too much experience, gold, etc. and break the game in some fashion.

>>3795667 (OP)
Economics are basically witchcraft

>>3795679
>Inconvenience
They are good
Enough inconvenience in fast travel could make you travel the distance instead
And enough inconvenience in sell cloud lead to you make wider decisions and prevent you from going robber mode as soon as you are lower on cash.

>How much is too much
Depends on the same and your status


>Attracting enemies
Yeah cut throats might be more interested in some guy wondering around with more fancy shit

>>3795667 (OP)
Never balance a RPG for autistic people..

>>3795692
>Enough inconvenience in fast travel could make you travel the distance instead
And if you reach the point most people do so most of the time, the fast travel system may as well not exist, and you've wasted everyone's time, yours as a game developer included.
>And enough inconvenience in sell cloud lead to you make wider decisions and prevent you from going robber mode as soon as you are lower on cash.
That, however, will literally never happen. Every single one of those proposed solutions can be bypassed with minimum effort, and the same goes for every single attempt made by games so far. Players have been conditioned repeatedly to become shitty little loot goblins, and breaking that conditioning requires far more than a single game placing some hurdles in their path.

>Yeah cut throats might be more interested in some guy wondering around with more fancy shit
Problem with that is, how would so many of them find out? Why would they keep coming if/when the first few fail? All such things should be justified, or you're just replacing one stupid abstraction (the economy being vague and meaningless) with another (telepathic NPC network out to fuck you as the player personally), just because you prefer one over the other.

>>3795700
I am not autistic i just think early to mid game grind when you are just barely scrapping by is the most engaging part mechanically.
Looking forward to buying slightly better shoulder pads, spells and shit like that

>>3795704
Nah features can be restricted as well

Well everything can be bypassed you can speed run 50 hour long games with right exploit but it's about preventing most people from doing it unless they are willing to jump through many hoops and at that point they might as well just play the game as intended

I mean it's not that hard to justify shit
Just throw in
"Be careful good sir, these walls have ears"
And ambushing rich fags is nothing new

>>3795680
>Gamey today are designed with critical path in mind
Not my problem and i deserve better than this bidenomics
A lot of games can do it with xp why can't they do the same with money

>>3795707
But none of the suggestions are that hard to bypass, not to mention they're extremely vague. Like, again, what counts as sufficient proof of income? What, do they check your quest log or something? Do quests come with signed contracts? Do only SOME of them count? Do you need to explain to every single dipshit trader that actually, Count Shiddenfarden from that other city paid me, trust me bro, you'll hear news about me saving his son in uhh two weeks or so?
Are 'under the table' quests then just traps for unwitting players, and helping a rich merchant who won't admit to having hired you just a method to fuck someone over because everyone will then immediately question where you got that thousand gold in three days? What's the point, then?

>>3795714
Dude, it can be implemented better than I described.
It should definitely raise some eyebrows if you were poor yesterday but suddenly swimming in wealth today.
And yeah, you'd probably have a proof of doing favors for people in high positions most of the time.
>Are "under the table" quests just traps for the unwitting?
Yes and no. Early on, you won't make noticeable wealth from those kinds of quests. But if you keep doing them later, you'll just accumulate evidence of your own crimes, which increases your notoriety and locks you out of certain paths.
Like, you're not going to see someone who made a ton of money from meth just casually using it to buy legal assets.

>>3795667 (OP)
>>selling 20 bandit swords reduces the price

lmao 20 item sold is inconsequential in the grand scheme. You are not important enough to impact the economy that much.

But seems to me kindgom come deliverance had this sort of thing

>>3795705
This is an issue of your own making, if you have that many resources you should be advancing through the game faster, unless you are a completionist aka autistic.

>>3795767
*That many resources by late game

>>3795667 (OP)
>unfun
>unfun and potentially retarded
>Good idea thats in a lot of rpgs already
>unfun
>unfun
>unfun
>Could be fun if well implemented

>>3795705
>I am not autistic i just think early to mid game grind when you are just barely scrapping by is the most engaging part
I agree, just without the grinding part. Why do you grind the engaging part away?

Grinding, it literally grinds out any challenging or otherwise interesting parts.

Grinding is the devil.

>>3795680
MINEY CRAFTA?

>>3795776
By grind i just mean trying your best to get it done, trying to kill two dumb fucks with your shitty axe so you can sell their stuff and buy a slightly better axe

>>3795771
Everything is unfun if implemented badly
>Why do you mean I have to read dialogues and talk to boring NPCs to find out the approx location of flingshlim

>>3795793
>trying to kill two dumb fucks with your shitty axe so you can sell their stuff and buy a slightly better axe
and then you kill four dumb fucks for four bags of loot to sell

Grind is unsustainable.

>>3795667 (OP)
Sounds like WRPG slop

>>3795824
>No RPGs are supposed be visual novels with no immersion

>>3795816
Ideally there would be a better Veriety of quests and they'll be more meaningful because the economy is so brutal

>>3795828
I tell you now, RPGs will never be balanced for miserly pinchpenny fucks. Never going to happen.

You want money to be tight, you think for a roleplay reason or self-imposed rule to spend more gold and/or receive less gold.

>>3795667 (OP)
>inflation for staple items over time
>no selling items to vendors
problem solved

>>3795667 (OP)
I don't really like selling loot and animal parts like some kind of dumpster diving scavenger.
Just give me bigger bounty rewards from quests that make sense like merc work or wanted posters.
The occasional treasure to sell is cool like a memorable gem off a high level bandit or rare monster part but it gets tedious looting containers for 30 gold plates 14 gold posters and books etc.
Garbage should be worth zero, I don't know what the obsession is with random clutter in RPGs anymore.
I don't want to have to worry about hauling every bandit sword back.

More involved reward negotiation would be good too, while we're at it more out of combat systems should be resolved more like battles instead of a single roll. With special abilities in speech or investigation trees you might can use to get an animated clue, this type of thing.

Usually combat is the only truly engaging activity but there's no reason RPGs have to be that one dimensional.

Grinding trash and hallway scavenging is fucking dumb, tedious, and downgrades your heroic character to some shopping cart hobo living in new york, sf, or portland. Almost every reward should be tied to completing objectives instead. If you want to do a big lootable treasure room just make it the reward at the end of some mission, more variety that way too as no two treasure rooms should be anything like each other. If you want to be a gritty hobo well that's called a thief and the reward is breaking into the house or manor and not having encounters at all if you're lucky. Just waltzing into the commoner's house and vacuuming everything not nailed down is also bullshit.
>you could just not do that
Not really because you are then playing at a disadvantage in most games and you never know when loot crazy devs hide something important or rare in a random vase.

>>3795912
>Garbage should be worth zero
Nah see that's stupid in its own way, as then you can have items you can snag that for some reason nobody wants even if it's made of silver or some shit. Here's a better one: Just don't have garbage. Don't let the players pick up shitty plates and forks for some ungodly reason. It's a relatively recent thing, the weird expectation of being able to grab anything, and it's time to go back to a clear distinction between "this is relevant" and "this is part of the scenery so things look lived-in".

>>3795667 (OP)
The problem with rpg economies is not that they’re “unrealistic” but that most games don’t really know how to balance it, making currency either too difficult to acquire even with heavy bartering or cash sloshing to such an absurd extent that you’ve trivialized the experience.

>>3795924
If not both. Far too many games have the rollercoaster experience of scrounging every fucking penny in the early game and then just shitting gold in the midgame to the point you end up wasting it on random bullshit just to feel like it still serves a purpose.

>>3795912
>I don't really like selling loot and animal parts like some kind of dumpster diving scavenger.
>Garbage should be worth zero
Why don't you guys just not play like that?

See a bowl worth 2 gold? Ignore it. Problem solved.

Even strategy games built around trading usually have terrible economies. It's just not something that justifies the effort to model in an RPG.

>>3796042
I mean, everything in video games is already smoke and mirrors
you just need to apply it properly to economics.
That way, it feels more real and forces you to make difficult decisions.

For example, the slight friction in the save system in KCD forces you to plan your routes so you can save between missions.
And a bit of friction in fast travel encourages you to complete all the missions in the first region first, which feels much more realistic.

>My tastes are objective truths and should be the law: the thread
>Again
Man this board's fucking washed

>>3796069
Realism isn't in any way important to a video game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGpFEv1-mAo

>>3796133
i just think games should be more indepth and interactive and they should look out for obvious pitfalls
i am sure designers can do better job than me, just suggested some pretty basic that should deter a good amount of players

>>3796137
true but interactivity is, but if your actions feel pointless it makes interactivity dull and boring
it's much more immersive even your smaller actions have consequences realism is just the vehicle

>>3795667 (OP)
>merchants shouldn’t work with you unless you have a certain reputation or status.
That's Rogue Trader's economic system. RT have absolutely insane, vast amounts of wealth at your disposal so you get stuff effectively for free, if they know you're good for it.

>>3795667 (OP)
who gives a shit about muh economy

>>3796443
i do

I think just by having gold or equivalent you're already inviting disaster. Abstraction is the solution, not more and more detail and complication.
>>3796424 brings up one of the possible alternatives, for all my disdain toward RT (born of the tabletop experience, not the vidya, mind) it does one thing right - RT do not operate on cash, if they're influential, convincing and lucky enough they can buy an army just by signing a piece of paper, which is represented by just making a roll against a modified Profit Rating.
With the exception of Dark Heresy, the other 40k tabletop do it right as well, in slightly different ways - requisition rolls based on your regimental rank and general circumstances in Only War, acquisition rolls based on your infamy and various modifiers in Black Crusade, and so on. Now having it all hinge on a SINGLE roll you get once per whenever can get stupid (rules as written, you can either be left without a crucial piece of gear for half the campaign, or casually break it by lucking out and hitting that 1% on something bullshit session one) but there's options there.
But the bottom line is - you still have to worry about getting what you need, but it's not about scrounging trash and the adventurer resale market. You get something because you get it assigned, work the system to get your hands on it with all transactions/trades implied, straight up just find someone who has it and kill them, whatever.
I mean I'm sure it's not the only systems that do it, it's just what comes to mind.
If you wanna go even further you could even have the Blades in the Dark shit where you don't even have specific gear until it's relevant, you just specify how much you carry (more being more restrictive on your mobility) and retroactively bring it up... but the only reason that works well is because it's a heist game, in MOST cRPG that would fall on its ass.

>>3795793
>Everything is unfun if implemented badly
there is no way to implement "wait X hours/minutes" to get the stuff you paid for fulfilling rewarding or fun

>>3796813
>RT do not operate on cash, if they're influential, convincing and lucky enough they can buy an army just by signing a piece of paper, which is represented by just making a roll against a modified Profit Rating.
Well no, they do operate on cash, it's just that since the RT controls entire colony worlds you have so much money that it's basically an abstraction at this point and so instead profit factor is how much you're willing to have cash flow to a merchant to show you're good for it

>>3795672
>How the fuck do they know?
This is what falls under acceptable breaks from realism. I'll admit Elder Scrolls takes it a bit too far though, there is a mod that puts a floor on items being given the stolen flag to mitigate it to a degree.

>>3797536
I meant mechanically. Obviously they still use cash (throne gelt or what have you) and amounts of money can be discussed and negotiated but you don't HAVE cash as a currency in the system.

>>3797549
>acceptable
To you, maybe, I find that retarded enough to immediately take me out

>>3797549
I mean, you can make it more realistic by only tagging the valuable items. But the merchant in the next town over wouldn't know unless it's a one of a kind unique item you stole.

Just to clarify, the intent of my post was to make some basic suggestions. In an RPG, I want each piece of gear to matter
none of it should be forgettable, sellable junk. And if it's junk, you shouldn't be picking it up unless you're doing a dedicated loot goblin run.

>>3801447
just like every spells should really change the strategy instead of just being
>more damage
>more AOE
>more accuracy
etc

>>3795672
I mean KCD just flagged items as "Stolen from X" people from the next village would buy it happily.

I more thorough worldbuilding setup would have it depend on the type of item. An apple? Sure. Guards armor? Basically impossible. A knight's tabard, or shield with specific heraldry? You're not selling it.

>>3795667 (OP)
Why not just pretend your real life is an RPG at that point?

>>3795667 (OP)
Why is high level gear gated by story progression, unless that somehow ties to the plot (new materials/techniques for production discovered during game story)? I can see it being gated by player reputation or geography (or time/difficulty of shipping), but otherwise I dislike main character syndrome (even if I am the main character).

>early game merchants shouldn’t buy high-level gear because they wouldn’t be able to resell it.
This doesn't make sense. They can sell it to traveling merchants or use it themselves.

>If you suddenly have too much money with no proof of honest work, merchants should report you to the guards, suspecting theft.
Assume I don't want to play a game with an IRS, but to escape into a world without one.

>stolen items should be much harder to sell or use
Why? How do you know it's stolen? Does the identity of the victim matter? Do goblin lives matter?

>If you’re a low level character walking around with high-level gear (either stolen or cheesed), it should attract high level enemies, making it dangerous to use gear you're not ready for
This is dumb. Enemies would avoid such foes. Thieves primarily want east prey.

I dislike linear progression in gear in most cases. A wooden club as starter gear isn't linear progression became it's a fucking stick. You can go in the woods and break one off a tree. Contrast that with a hierloom enchanted mithril spear, which is used exclusively by end game enemies, and which costs the income of a small kingdom.

>>3795676
This is a better idea. Have downtime events, have a time system, tie game profits/debts to this.

Send Orlandeau to chop firewood for a few weeks to recover after he gets injured in battle, generate a bit of passive income or free firewood for your base camp as input for other business ventures or crafting.

>>3795667 (OP)
Just do this:
Towns near rivers = pay less for fish but pay a lot for steel
Towns near mountain = pay a lot for fish but less for steel
Now you can roleplay a merchant.

Give the player a reason to buy a home or a business and invest in it, maintenance fees for armor, weapons, camp or whatever, split your quest income with your guild, or try solo adventuring (harder)
Make food something that makes you stronger, but isn't actually required to be used all the time (hunger in games is stupid)
Taxation

>>3795667 (OP)
>why do worlds without specialized economists have unplanned slapshod economies?
jeez, I wonder...