What’s It Worth: Treasure and Debt

Okay, so this post is a bit of a doozy. It’s a big article, talking about a lot of fiddly mechanics and vague gestures of setting without actually providing anything usable. Some of it is cobbled together from things in my “game doc”, a 100-page pseudo-journal with all my thoughts of tabletop-ing written down. I want to transfer a lot of what I wrote there to this blog here. However, I’m also trying to be as clear as possible. I promise some kind of version 0.1 of all of this is coming.

Put your gold for EXP away boys, I’ve found the solution. 

The standard piece of treasure is the horse. 

Oh, the mighty horse! The horse is important mechanically because the horse is the base element of the resource-driven caravan crawl game: it gives you the time to move across the map (faster than walking), it allows you to transport sacks of treasure from dungeons to cities to turn into experience, it can transport supplies into the wild, it can be killed and eaten for extra food, it provides both bonuses in combat and the opportunity to escape combat entirely in terms of speed or sacrifice, it allows you to carry enough to actually use ranged weapons or magic… It is required for interacting with the trackless steppe in any meaningful way. This is no simple city crawl with noodle shops on every corner, this is a Caravan Crawl. 

When thinking about unified mechanics, and how all the elements of the crawl should work, from the sacks of supplies and the movement from area to area to the hauling of treasure and the amount a piece of treasure should be worth, know that the base should always be the horse. 

To really drive this home, though, we have to consider something about the way I want character creation to work for this kind of game. When players first roll up their characters, they start with Debt. Something that has been around for a while, but brought back to prominence with Electric Bastionland.

A player rolls 1d6*4 for how many thousands of dollars their character is in debt. There should probably be a table of who you might be in debt to, but regardless: you’ve got obligations to pay this back to banks or merchants or the University or the lizardman yakuza or whatever strangeness exists in the City. Fortunately for you, you’ve scrounged up about an 8th of what you owe. If you owe $4,000 by rolling a 1, you’ve probably got about $500 bucks left in your accounts. If you roll a 6, you start with an impressive $3,000 to buy your initial kit, but you owe $24,000 back.

Unfortunately for you, you have to spend money to make money.

It might be one of the reasons all you adventurers and mercenaries are here together in the first place: if you combine your resources, and you get very lucky, maybe you can go out into all that vast emptiness and make enough cash to pay your debts all off together. Maybe the one who was unfortunate enough to roll the 6 on the Debt Die is willing to almost pay off the debt of the lucky son of a gun who rolled a 1, and now they’re indebted to one another. It might make an interesting group dynamic: you’ve banded together to pay off the debt of one character, someone who can now go into all that civilization and negotiate for the other bond-jumping degenerates.

In the City… any city or town or village across the Long Rim, civilization, you are constantly harassed by your debtors: banks, merchants, university administrators, lizardmen mafiosos, and usually the Law. They want what you have. And if it’s not them, it’s priests and social activists and politicians who want you to grow up and get a real job. It’s safe, but it’s not free. 

In the Long Rim… you’re alone. It’s peaceful and quiet and eerily beautiful and you can figure out what you’re going to do about this Debt. It’s also filled with old quiet tombs of long-dead kings and queens who don’t really need all that money they were buried with anymore. It takes weeks to get there and it takes logistics and luck to haul everything back, not to mention avoiding the diseases and the wildlife and the starvation, but a good run earns a lot of money. Not enough to actually change all those people in the City once you pay off the debt, but enough where you don’t have to listen to them when you get home.

The City and the Long Rim are both dangerous but in different ways. In the Long Rim, you might get mauled by a mountain lion, or get lost in the woods, or starve, but no one’s going to shun you for not fitting into the culture, for being a “bad citizen”, for failing to ingratiate yourself to High Society. In the City, the rulers think you owe them something, and while they won’t maul and eat you, they will imprison you and force you to work menial labor off your debt, real or perceived. Another reason to be an adventurer, I guess: the choice between living like a peasant, to be the village blacksmith just like your da, and his da, and his da, forever and ever amen, or to risk it all in one big foolish endeavor out there and change your stars.

What happens if you don’t pay your debt off? Someone comes and breaks your kneecaps, probably. If you decide to live out in the mountains of the Long Rim, they might come to you, sending census takers and bounty hunters after you. But they’re not prepared like you are.

Ultimately, you’re running against the clock. If you reach $24,000 cash debt, that’s when the bounty hunters start showing up. If you start with a $24,000 cash debt, they’re probably already looking for you. 

Well then, asks the player, “How do I level up?” You pay off your debt. Each dollar you pay off is a point of experience. This helps differentiate what kind of money counts in this Gold for Experience game: yeah, you found the dungeon, and you found the gold, and you got the sacks of gold back into town, but the dollars don’t become donuts until you put it in the mail toward that massive debt of yours. Oh, and while you were gone, you roll an extra 1d6 thousand when you get back to town, that’s how much the debt has gone up. Fees and adjustments and interest and all the little things that piled up while you were gone. Not by a lot, but enough to keep that end total growing. The hope is it takes a party maybe six good dungeon delves to get it all under control, and by the time debt isn’t a problem, hopefully, something else in the world has sparked their interest.

All of this to say, if people are randomly rolling for their initial starting debt, you have to make sure that you think about the horse. My knee jerk reaction is to make a good, healthy horse about $200. That means that the person least in debt can buy two, which means 4 sacks of movement and $100 leftover for supplies. Looking it up, it doesn’t seem like $200 for a horse is too unreasonable, both by comparing it to what a good horse would cost during the American Civil War and the fact that we’re not looking at the pieces of saddles or bridles or training or anything else you would need to actually ride the thing. From a more medieval standpoint, a properly trained warhorse was the technological equivalent of personally owning an AH-64 Apache attack helicopter. It’s the reason things like chivalry and bushido and yoga existed: to keep the people in a society who had the military experience to overthrow the society in check.

Also, if a horse is worth $200, that means a herd of 120 horses can be driven cowboy-style into town to pay off the most indebted person’s dues. 

I mean, doing the quick math, if we said that cattle were $25 a head, it means that a cattle drive is 960 head to pay off the debt: that isn’t unheard of in cattle drives in the Wild West. Also, just because the good horses are $200, doesn’t mean that you can’t buy sad, broken horses for $100, or have merchants low-balling you $50 a head once you wrangle wild ones into town to see if they can’t get a good deal. Not to mention you can also start playing with the idea of certain breeds of horses giving certain benefits to riding, hauling, etc.

Rewatching the fantastic western Unforgiven, seven horses was the cost for the two cowpunchers for cutting up that girl’s face in the brothel. A $700 dollar fine (since they probably weren’t the best horses, and one of the cowboys specifies that those horses weren’t as good as one specific horse for the girl) for armed assault and grievous bodily harm sounds about right, if a little lower than actually hanging those boys. 

A horse can move 2 sacks, which means it costs $100 to move 1 sack. One sack can hold $2,000 coins. There’s a return on investment of $1,900 coins. That seems a little high, but I can live with it. As more complex forms of transportation are discovered, adding bonuses and penalties (wagons, special kinds of horses, camels, porters, zombies, motorcycles, converted battle tank-convertibles, etc), I’ll try and keep this conversion in mind. 

So, I have two more articles in the pipes, one about unifying dungeon and travel turns, and one about creating a space for yourself in the world. I’m going to try and get them out as soon as I can.