What is an appropriate store of value in pre-industrial civilization?
Trying to stay away from the obvious, like gems and gold.
I'm looking for something more useful. Flour is one, but is dangerous to keep, the value to weight ratio means a slow rate of transfer, and suffers from spoilage.
So, like gold but a consumer good. Salt?
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Jewelry is a good place to store value, even when you're talking glass beads and cheaper medals.
ReplyDeleteCorn.
ReplyDeleteEva Schiffer Because people value it, it can tarnish/break (thus causing a need for more work, as desired), and there is skill in producing high quality, hence valuing labor?
ReplyDeleteNot bad. Not bad at all!
Craig Hatler Why corn?
ReplyDeleteIt's a staple "grain" (technically a fruit, I know that sounds weird but still). The kernels have a hard shell, which should keep them from spoiling until they're cooked. Pretty versatile, can be made into bread, etc.
ReplyDeleteEven with pre-industrial civilizations, it's perfectly reasonable to have coins or scrip that represent something abstract. The koku in Japan is a perfect example. It's a tradeable economic unit that represents what is essentially rice futures.
ReplyDeleteIf you're looking for storing something directly, I do think salt is a good one. The advantage of jewelry was specifically that it could be carried rather than stored, so I'm not sure that quite fits your description.
Craig Hatler The value to weight ratio will be similar to flour, and corn has most of the other problems as flour. Its flammable, and rats eat it.
ReplyDeleteWilliam Nichols There's evidence (that I have read about... and I'm not a specialist in history) that there were specialized jewelry makers going back a very long time, certainly way back in ancient Egypt and even in less huge civilizations like some of the super old Viking burials.
ReplyDeleteFancy things become a status symbol (that part of consumer culture is not new with industrialization).
Eric Simon Yeah, coins and script, absolutely. You want something backing that, at least at some ratio. We used to use gold (sort of), and I think that sort of standard was common. Maybe at a 10 to 1 ratio, but enough so everyone feels safe about the imaginary money.
ReplyDeleteEva Schiffer That's cool , and really fits the setting, actually.
ReplyDeleteReligious iconography, valuable due to the images present, the craftsmanship that went into it and, yes, the materials.
Start from the definition of what makes good currency.
ReplyDelete1) durable. If it isn't durable, value is lost. Tomatoes rot, water evaporates, not good currency.
2) divisible. If you can't "make change" its utility declines dramatically.
3) rare. If anyone can wander into the countryside and get more, its utility diminishes. Gravel is durable and divisible, but it isn't rare.
4) portable. It has to be movable from point a to point b to facilitate transactions.
5) its intrinsic value is low relative to its value as currency. One of the biggest mistakes I hear is people talking about gold as having intrinsic value. It doesn't. It's value as currency was precisely because it wasn't good for anything else. By contrast most poker games that use M&Ms for poker chips tend to end early because everyone has eaten their M&Ms...their intrinsic value as a snack outweighs their value as currency.
So gold is an ideal currency and was used as such long before actual coinage, because it doesn't rust or tarnish, it can be divided (easily being soft with a low melting point) its quite portable, its not much good for anything else (as mentioned above, jewelry is effectively currency), and it's hard to come by.
A lot of other things have been used for currency over the years, but nearly all of them fall short of precious metals in one or more of these categories, which is why most commerce oriented societies gravitated to precious metals.
A key opportunity for you lies is identifying which way your ultimate choice fails in one or more of the above categories and how society has developed to minimize the consequence of that failure.
For instance Cattle have been used as currency. They are durable and hard to come by in the sense that herd size has a natural equilibrium that is both self sustaining (durable) and limited by nature (rare). It effectively provides its own transportation and is divisible to the tune of 1 animal denominated by age, health, gender. It's biggest weakness is its vulnerability to climate and environmental change and it's intrinsic value as a source of meat and material (leather/bone/horn). Identifying how your culture overcomes those limits to permit cattle to be effective money is an interesting source of word building.
Salt has been used as a form of currency/compensation in several societies.
ReplyDeleteTea bricks can be made into beverages like tea or eaten as food, and were also used in the past as a form of currency.
ReplyDelete...
Some tea bricks were also mixed with binding agents such as flour, blood, or manure to better preserve their form so they could withstand physical use as currency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_brick
Mickey Schulz Yeah, salt makes a lot of sense. You can't eat it, but you sure can use it in food.
ReplyDeleteMarshall Miller bwhaaaa. That's ... impressive. I think it has much the same benefit / problem as flour: its great for low value transactions (coinage, if you will), but bad as a store for high value. I think, at least from a first pass.
Goats were often used as semi-abstract unit of currency in many pre-industrial societies. Most cattle actually.
ReplyDeleteIt probably also matters how much you want people to use currency for small vs big things? I mean if people are mostly paying for large things (like marriages or large chunks of land or something huge) then a cow as a unit is way more reasonable than if you are going to need to go buy a single bowl of rice regularly to not starve.
ReplyDeleteEva Schiffer Absolutely true, which is why I've been thinking flour for the day to day and am looking for something bigger to offset.
ReplyDeleteSean Gomes Yeah, cattle definitely makes some good sense.
I'm thinking jewelry is good at being valuable, while cattle is inherently valuable; milk, blood, and meat.
If I'm not mistaken, cattle was even used as a measure of social status. I'll have to look it up, but I think early voting rights were reserved for people who owned X head of cattle.
ReplyDeleteSince flour has all the problems mentioned above, how about having the priesthood accidentally create money by handing out chits which can be traded for a cup of flour at a later date and at any chapel.
ReplyDeleteWithin ten years local merchants have started trading amongst each other with small sacks of chits, now commonly known as either Cups or Flowers.
Realising the potential in this (and 50%of all trade involving the church one way or another anyway) the church start producing small ingots worth 60 cups or 1 bag of flour. The ingots are probably known as Sacks.
Perhaps also handwritten/etched/branded strips of leather worth one cart or sixty sacks of flour. Maybe call them a Full Weight or a Ton.
Don't underestimate the value of social capital. It isn't just "show off that I'm awesome." People take others with high social status more seriously: listen to their advice, trust their judgment, give them more trust, and access to more resources to lend and borrow. It can mean the difference between a fresh start and dying in abject poverty, or being executed for a crime vs judged innocent.
ReplyDeleteI like Brian Ashford 's idea.
ReplyDeleteBrian Ashford , Mickey Schulz Yeah, that makes sense.
ReplyDeleteSince the Priests aren't really economists or bankers (or at least, most won't have the mentality of being one), I adore the idea of it being accidental.
The church itself may not even be the central banker. That -- and the Sacks and Tons -- could be entirely invented by merchants outside of the church. Sure, some of those would be given be Nobles, but that's secondary.
Thanks!
In the end, everything comes back to flour.
ReplyDelete1 cup of flower is called a Cup or a Flower. The Church did not immediately have a chit for this, because they did not need one. In dnd, this would be the copper piece.
The weekly income for praying is 50 cups of flour. That's called a Prayer, and was the first coin of the Caliphate. This meant the priests did not need to bring all the flour to the Temple, but could instead give out chits. In dnd, this would be the silver piece. This was actually a coin, with an image of the Most Ancient Skull of the Prophet on one side, and your local Governor on the other.
Upwards from that is the Congregational Prayer, enough flour for a congregation to pray. That's 100 times a Prayer. This is the gold piece, and represents 5,000 cups of flour. The church does not produce this, but it is made by merchants. This is not actually a gold piece, but is instead a bracelet.
Then, there's a full years prayer. A Faithful Prayer, call it 2,500 cups of flour. Faithful can be used on any to represent being fifty times: a Faithful Cup, a Faithful Prayer. Or, yes, a Faithful Congregational Prayer. The Nobles talk in these sorts of terms.
A Faithful Congregational Prayer is an absurd amount of wealth: 250,000 cups of flour!
What other names for wealth? What would you pay for a goat, in good condition? A cow? A dozen strawberries, picked and washed that morning? A cutting from a delicious apple tree?
Spices.
ReplyDeleteStorehouse tokens, for various kinds of goods.
ReplyDeleteThis costs a grey and two white: one token for a measure of embalming fluid and two for flour.
This from the question - When the faithful are paid in flour, do they get the flour up front, or 'tickets' to the storehouse? If they get tickets, that's the basic currency.
Levi Kornelsen Sometimes up front, sometimes coins. And yeah, that makes the token the basic currency.
ReplyDeleteAnd then the store of value is the same it is anywhere else; goods that the market values. And the market just means people. :-)
You really need to read Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years! We've all been taught that early civilizations used atomic, durable, interchangeable, portable, divisible, units of exchange in spot barter transactions as currency. We're taught this because economists made it up, as a just-so story, for certain economic ideas they derived from first principles. Come to find out, from historians and anthropologists, that that pretty much isn't how money emerged. Credit is far older than coin; money as credit shows up in ancient Egypt and Sumer thousands of years earlier than coins show up (around 600 BC in the Hellenistic world), and although people certainly had physical stores of value earlier than that (cattle, silver ingots, etc), they didn't use them as money for everyday transactions; when they used exchange at all (rather than sharing, gifting, or tribute, which have totally different mechanics), they used credit tallies, and only used exchanged the stores of value relatively infrequently, essentially to settle up long-term trade imbalances.
ReplyDeleteI highly recommend the book!
I've read a goodly portion of it, Benjamin Rosenbaum ! But, indeed, I have probably been ignoring lessons from it in thinking about this.
ReplyDeleteAnd if memory serves, Graeber suggests that temples were the place initial transactions occurred, and that priests kept the records. What I don't remember -- and the answer is probably no -- is if any ancient temple or priesthood had a single unified accounting. By which I mean at least two things: a unit that everything else is translated into (which becomes the de facto dollar), and an accounting system.
What we also forget is simply keeping track costs a lot of wealth (however it is measured) before paper and ink get cheap; the notion of keeping records to the an arbitrary level of precision, where no one lives or dies by that level, is probably pretty damn modern. So, I mean how we keep record to the penny and further. You'd collapse a lot of smaller things into something large, like maybe the amount of flour it takes to live for a week.
That's large enough, but it may even be too large. Who knows.
My memory of Graeber is that a given temple complex did have a standardized unit of value and accounting system; not a double-entry bookkeeping system, but a simple single-entry tally of who was owed what. But the point is, the unit was not a thing. It was not a chunk of silver, or a bag of flour, or a week's provision of salt. It was "one tally". And as you lined up to do your work each day in the temple, and as you went to the commissary to get your lentils and porridge dished up, and as you decided to stop by at the clothes dispensary to get a new loincloth, the priests added and removed tally marks according to whatever the going rate for those things was. "Lunch costs two tally marks on ordinary days, three on festivals when we get meat." "Foremen get five tallies a day, laborers two, and stonecutters six". Tallies aren't amounts of silver or salt -- they're just tallies. It's just money, arbitrary fiat money, which precedes coin.
ReplyDeleteAnd somewhere in the storehouse there are bags of silver ingots that, in some theoretical economist's sense, "back" the tallies as money. But they don't back them in the sense that you can go ask for your silver, because you can't. If you're a stonecutter or a laborer or a foremen, the silver is irrelevant to you. If you're a member of the specialist merchant class and your job is to haggle with the merchants of Tyre to arrange for the shipments of cedar wood for the temple ceilings, then you do care about the ingots of silver. But even then, you don't ship silver every time you receive cedar, because that's crazy inefficient. You have your own records, with the merchants of Tyre, of who owes what to whom, and the only time ingots get shipped is if, after months or years of trading, someone's like, "look, my boss is getting kind of antsy about how much debt you're carrying with us, can we settle up?"
So, in sum: tallies don't "represent" silver. If anything, silver represents tallies.
ReplyDeleteOf potential relevance here:
ReplyDeletehttps://youtu.be/g_3wRicL-QI
So the tally is the currency. And the tally is, basically, one unit of human work-energy-effort. Which is super similar to backing with Lifeless labor, right?
ReplyDeleteI think that's right? Mind you, this is one particular account from some historians about the original origins of money -- it's not that it necessarily functioned exactly that way every time. But Graeber argues convincingly, I think, that this generalized and abstract "I owe you something, we'll settle up later" was far more common in early history than any "these sheep are worth four pounds of salt" spot-transaction system.
ReplyDeleteSure, Benjamin Rosenbaum , because community is important.
ReplyDeleteThere's something similar to this that we still have: if I buy lunch for a friend, they don't owe me $10. Absolutely not. They owe me lunch. Or breakfast, or half of a dinner. Whatever.
I think that remains common when doing transactions where your relationship to the people is more important than the transaction. So, where there is community and mutual concern.
Baking that into a game system is important, too. ... I need to write a move.
The move'd be something like this:
Ignore a Debt: When you ignore a debt owed to you worth at least 1-keep, mark xp.
.. .Something like that. That's close, at least.
I think the point is exactly that those relationships you have with your friends, where it's "you owe me lunch", not a dollar amount, or even "you owe me", or "we look out for each other", or "I don't care who pays in general, but I have been noticing that our friend Ted never pays, so we're beginning to think of him as kind of a mooch" -- those relationships were the original standard default of human existence, and the idea of an exact transaction which can be reduced to a number, and is therefore possible to make sense of out of the context of a relationship, is a relatively late innovation.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure the debt/xp move you've written addresses the question. I mean, it's a fine move, in the sense that there could be some playbook which is about the forgiveness of debts and that could be powerful (forgiveness of debts is a huge theme in Middle Eastern ancient literature, and most of our words and concepts like "liberty", "redemption", "salvation" come out of a Biblical tradition in which they originally meant specifically the cancelling of debts). But it doesn't really get at the question of what is a debt. I think the point is that early in history, debt would be baked into mechanics as an open question to the player: "what do you feel like you owe Enoch?" or "why does everyone think Enoch ought to betroth you to his daughter? What did you do for him?" and that only later, with temple hierarchies, you get "when you labor a day for the temple, gain 1-tally", and only much later than that does "1-gold" show up as a portable, durable unit of value that's worth the same in this temple over here, and in that palace across the river, and also in a town a months' journey across the desert where no one knows you.
But early on, trading with strangers is an act full of desperation and danger, and essentially amounts to trying to create a relationship with them by rhetoric and charisma, since trading outside such a relationship is meaningless.
In a society that never had coin, there's no such thing as "1-barter".
Yeah. So, intentionally trying to remove 1-barter / 1-coin / 1-keep from a game, such that the players don't use it is hard.
ReplyDeleteThat's a technology fundamental to our understanding of the world; we allow modern economists to influence and assist in all of our decision making. Having players think in terms of a non-transferable debt, which is a social obligation and absolutely not an economic one is hard.
Briefly, I think we do have a few categories in the modern world:
family and close friends: shared obligations, which are not obliviated by wealth but sometimes necessitate them.
2nd tier friends: obligations, but they can be resolved with transfer of wealth.
3rd tier friends: Minimal obligations, but trust that debts will be repaid.
Strangers: no obligations, direct exchange.
Credit Card Transactions: mediated exchange trust Visa. I neither need to trust you, nor do you need to trust me. Instead, we both trust Visa.
Apologies for the tiers of friends -- I promise I only kind of think of my friends this way.
What you're describing, without the use of wealth as a translateable good, means there's effectively trusted and not; if I trust you, then you can borrow from me as much as you want and it doesn't matter. If I don't trust you, then I cannot really let you borrow from me.
Now, to bake that in: If there's something like Hx, then maybe the higher your Hx the more someone will loan you. Maybe that gets to the sense of conditional loaning: I'll loan you enough to live for a while, sure, no problem. But, only because i know you.
Maybe loans to someone you have positive Hx with only matter if they don't repay/reciprocate them (take -1 Hx) and to others whom you have negative Hx with if they do repay them (take +1 Hx).
ReplyDeleteWhat are you trying to get out of this system in the game? Cool world color? Pushing players to think of debt and cost as socially relative?
ReplyDeleteWhatever it is, think about that and build the mechanics towards it, not the other way around.
Yeah, just decouple the XP mechanic from Hx, and then add a "Incur a debt from someone" move where you roll+Hx.
ReplyDeleteHowever, you might take a moment to contemplate what living in a functioning network of trust will do to the stories you tell. A lot of stories are driven by need/debt/obligation, and removing that will remove a source of drive and desperation.
Eva Schiffer This is one part anthology, one part game design. That's why both are being done in unison. That's not a bug, its a feature. :-)
ReplyDeleteJosh Roby There's also the lesson the players learn from mechanics, right. Making it so that when you have social ties then people will keep you alive, you are teaching that to the players. Hmmm ... I think I just solved one of my problems.
Josh Roby The version of Hx I'm using in this game is a spendable resource that is called camaraderie. And there's a thing like corruption from Urban Shadows, called Jaded. Both of these are directly taken / borrowed / stolen from The Watch.
ReplyDeleteANYWAY, point is I'd been wanting a more visceral way to do start of session moves. I did have it as: If you cannot or will not spend keep, the GM will ask who will. If no one will, BAD THINGS.
This lets me add a thing: If you cannot or willnot spend keep for your lifestyle, then you may rely on your friends. You may spend a camraderie with anyone to offer them an XP if they spend 1 keep to keep you alive. THEN move on to the "Who will keep _ alive?"
So, if you have camraderie with the other PC, or with someone in your community, they can choose to give up their own wealth to keep you alive.
That coupled with the Forgive & Forget move actively reducing your own jaded (instead of XP) means you can level up by helping others, and can have less corruption by being forgiving your debtors.
That's not bad, and may actually be about what i want.
Let's move anything here that's about specific game design to new thread, which you should all see here: https://plus.google.com/+WilliamNichols/posts/CLiZFAZEARa
ReplyDeleteIf you don't and want to, let me know.
Let's have this become the anthropological question of store of value, debt, and tallies.
Well, I don't entirely know how to separate the game design and anthropological questions, but tell me if I'm in the wrong thread.
ReplyDeleteAbout this: "A lot of stories are driven by need/debt/obligation, and removing that will remove a source of drive and desperation."
I don't want to make it sound like the pre-600 BC understanding of the world was nicer or softer or more relaxed, because it wasn't. We're not talking "people close to you forgive your debts". In fact debt was a huge source of desperation and horror in the ancient world -- debt slavery was the largest source of slavery (and people pointed out a painful contrast between the official ideology of slavery, which was that slaves were captives taken justly in war -- basically "if I refrain from killing you, you're now mine" -- which as seen as morally valid, while becoming someone's slave because they did you too many favors you couldn't repay was NOT seen as morally valid) and there were periodic slave revolutions followed by declarations of amnesty and debt forgiveness (like the biblical "Jubilee").
Actually coin -- standardized, durable, portable value -- in many ways made this all LESS messy and complicated and brutal and desperation-soaked. If the only way I can get out from under my debt to you is labor and fealty, I may be screwed. If I can get work as a mercenary and get paid in gold (and Graeber makes the case that the rising dominance of mercenaries in Near Eastern and Mediterranean military organizations is linked to the invention of coin) then, hey, I can just give you some of this stored durable value and we're quits.
In game terms, a pre-coin credit economy isn't about not having debts bite your ass. It's about having debts that you can't redeem just by bringing units of stored value. You may have something valuable to offer, but you never get out of the requirement to roll Seduce and Manipulate or Go Aggro to make it stick. Resolving a debt is always a roll, because it's always a conversation, and it's always influenced by what they think of you.
Anything that in depth about history belongs in this thread. :-)
ReplyDeleteIn a fantasy adventure game, I think I want to avoid slavery / sexual assault / slavery in all but name.
That being said, I do like the idea of things that cannot be redeemed with mere money. Though, taking care of someone -- keeping them alive -- that's not money. That's sort of wealth.and is literally making sure a person stays alive. Then they do owe you, for sure.
Well, I'm not saying that you should focus on slavery. I just noticed that when I said "they didn't have coin, 1-barter wasn't a thing" there was a tendency by commenters to interpret that as "so everybody just shared and there was no coercion and desperation." I'm just saying, no, it's the opposite -- having a standardized, widely accepted, durable, quantitatively precise unit of value is a step AWAY from desperation. Saying "you have 3-barter, so you're okay for this month for living expenses" is a safer and less desperate and less vulnerable position than starting from "How will you live?"
ReplyDeleteOut in the wasteland, when you come across a family herding its sheep, the widely vaunted social ideal is that they will feed you out of a sense of hospitality to strangers. But everyone knows that they might also slit your throat, or might expect you to marry one of their young people, or to take the brand as one of theirs, especially if you linger for longer than a single night. And even if it's only for a night, they will remember your name, and you may find them on your doorstep someday if they need another sword to take the next well from their enemies.They fed you that time. You owe them. The land is lawless, there are no standards, and memories are long.
Would it help if you simply gave them a gift when you came to their camp? Would that "pay for the night's stay", absolving you of future obligations? No, no it would not. If you gave them a gift, they would be compelled to give you a greater gift, and so on, enmeshing you deeper with them in a cycle of obligations.
But when you come to the temple, and enter within its gates, and begin to labor there, the priests make tally marks that say what you've done and what you're owed, and it's a great relief: finally here is measure, here is cleanliness and clarity. They erase two tally marks when you take your evening meal; they make two tally marks when you labor a day carrying stones in the hot sun. It's clear and rational and there's no messy emotional entanglement of grudges and desire and resentment and yearning. And if, at the end of the month, they tally up and you've come out ahead, your debts paid in full, they'll even allow you to leave...
I was just reading an amazing book on the origins and spread of indo-european languages and how closely tied that was to the development of the horse.
ReplyDeleteOne of the theories the book promoted was that words tied to the development of hospitality and guest/host obligations and feasts as displays of wealth largely came after the horse. The horse allowed for maintaining larger herds and flocks requiring more pastureland and longer migrations. This resulted in more regular contact with people who weren't immediate family requiring the development of a whole set of social structures around the etiquette and obligations of encountering strangers.
Ralph Mazza that makes a lot of sense!
ReplyDeleteAnd so, to get the initial question: the store of value is the tally, is the favor, is memory.
ReplyDeleteNot gold, not salt, not the Benjamins. Instead, humans saying that you owe them.
So, here's a goofy imaginary system!
ReplyDeleteYou have a fistful of little slips on card. These represent your connections in the mercantile world. Each has a name on it, for who that relationship is with (and some names might be on a whole bunch of tokens).
When you buy things on credit, you write the thing you bought on a card or box, and put one or more tokens on it. Those are who you owe for it; as you pay them back, you take the slips off. If you leave them on too long, you may need to mark them; those are now bad debt - paying them makes the slip go away, not go back to you; you screwed the deal and lost trust.
There's also a way to sink them into a box the other way, for "They owe you", which you take them off of to buy.
(This. Isn't necessarily a good system, but it's a tidy visualization, I think).
I get all that, but those are strictures that bind normal people, and we rarely play normal folks in RPGs. In fact a lot of times we play characters defined by their refusal to play by such rules.
ReplyDeleteIn an RPG, I'd worry about players disregarding social obligations with a "whatcha gonna do about it?" mentality.
Not an insolvable problem, but one worth considering.
Josh Roby It's a good point, but one of the things I think Apocalypse World does well -- or at least begins to make a stab at in a way that's transformative for RPGs -- is to root the characters in communities and networks of obligation.
ReplyDeleteAW is anti-murderhobo: a lot of its character playbooks are tied down, stuck, and have to make things work. In a lot of ways, AW flips the traditional understanding of which sorts of characters are the NPCs and who are the PCs. I mean, who are the archetypical NPCs in a "you meet at an inn" D&D game? The innkeeper (Maestro D'), the local lordling in his keep (Hardholder), the healer at the local temple (Angel), some kind of courtesan or entertainer there to offer the possibility of seduction and blackmail (Skinner), a gang of bandits (Chopper), an unhinged cult leader (Hocus), a shopkeeper you can buy armor and weapons from (Operator), an old miser with treasure stowed under the floorboards (Hoarder), a dehumanized monstrous hulking brute (Faceless) etc. In traditional RPGs, all these people are tied down, stuck in relationships with each other, vulnerable to the social and economic realities of their local world, while you -- the "Adventurer" -- wander through doing deeds of glory, slaying the beasties, grabbing the treasure (notably: coin, with no history or relationships attached to it) and moving on. The Adventurer is precisely the post-600-AD mercenary created by coin money; the NPCs are the tightly interwoven community of a credit economy.
Apocalypse World flips roles; the Adventurer, passing through in a blaze of violence and expropriation, would just be a Threat; it's the people stuck in webs of social obligation who are protagonists. Even the Chopper is stuck with their gang. (Okay, so there's the Driver and the Battlebabe, but the Hx round should ideally draw even them in.)
...and in an AW-style game, "whatcha gonna do about it?" is an excellent invitation to a hard move. Debts are made real because the things the PCs depend on are mediated through them. You take something and ignore the debt in an AW game, you should have a whole lot of people on your ass.
ReplyDeleteThe archetypical landscape of an AW game is bounded. It looks a lot like the world of Fury Road: there's Immortan Joe's hardhold The Citadel, there's the Bullet Farm and Gas Town and some groups of raiders hanging onto little bits of desert, the hopeless crow people of the dead march, and the paltry remnants of the Many Mothers... and that's it. There's no way to escape across the sand to something else: that's a fantasy. The world is bounded. You can't piss people off and just leave: you'll just die. So all the violence and despair is contained in a social crucible.
If you're playing in a setting like that, your PCs don't just get to ignore the social rules. The social rules have teeth.
All of this actually hits an area I've thought DW isn't strong enough in: bonds between people.
ReplyDeleteWhile in AW, you can have Hx with anyone and its not limited by class in any meaningful way (starting sure is), DW is a low number, and it isn't super useful.
I like the solution of a spendable resource, and being able to use it to entice others to take care of you.
That helps fix some of the DW problem, while being more positive than AW's bleak edifice.
"a spendable resource, and being able to use it to entice others to take care of you" sounds something a little like Monsterheart's Strings.
ReplyDeleteIn some ways what I'm saying about pre-coin societies boils down to: they didn't have barter, they had Strings.
Teenagers form pre-coin societies because they don't have access to Benjamins.
ReplyDeleteBut yeah, If you have 1 camaraderie with anyone, you may spend 1 camaraderie with them to offer them an XP and camraderie if they spend 1 Keep to keep you alive.
That is: you don't have any keep (which, mechanically, is barter), and you're going to starve if you do nothing. You have camraderie with someone, and spend it. They can then choose to keep you alive, and can mark xp and camraderie with you if they do so.
Thing is, that's an ancillary mechanic on top of quantified barter.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to see a game that gets rid of tracking Keep and requires a move for any such negotiation. Any time you try to get someone to feed you, maybe they give you it as a gift and take a String on you that implies social obligation (and they can apply the condition "scoundrel" if you deny them when they ask something of you). Or maybe you have to roll to manipulate, and sure, you can offer them something in return, but that's just fictional positioning that helps set up the manipulate move. It's not a transaction, it's not automatic, it's not barter.
Yeah, collapsed down to "amount of wealth required to live for a while " ...
ReplyDeleteIf you always needed to exchange a string in order to live, that'd be ... interesting. That kills the murderhobo economy, as they expect to rely on coin.
That's not the game I'm writing. :-)
But, maybe you should write it.
Yeah, I'm just riffing, I'm not saying you need to do a pre-coin game. It might be interesting to have a hybrid, though.
ReplyDeleteShtetl World (the game I'm working on) is mostly a reputation economy. There's money around in principle, but it's genreally all fiction, no mechanics. Your Reputation stat varies from 0 to 20; at 20 you are universally revered, and at 0 you are run out of the shtetl. As long as your Reputation stat is above 0, you are not going to starve: the community is going to take care of you one way or another, though they may rebuke and resent you. Lots of moves gain or lose Reputation or put Reputation at risk, and higher Reputation gives you mechanical power (e.g., to persuade shtetl NPCs, and for courtship moves, and so on). If you actually go off murderhobo'ing and obtain physical treasure, you have the possibility of converting it to Reputation with the "when you donate a great treasure to the shtetl" move; but it's not automatic, and indeed, the shtetl might just as easily react with suspicion and worry that you've shown up with this cash and wonder who's going to come after it and what trouble you've caused now. So reputation is clearly the primary, "real", mechanically backed currency, and cash money is of secondary, more complicated utility.
The exception is one playbook, The Enterprising One, who is naturally inclined towards mercantile activities. That character has a Wealth stat, Ventures, and moves that risk, lose and gain wealth; they also have an optional/advance move that lets them easily convert Wealth to Reputation. That's analogous to what I was saying about the specialized merchant class for whom "durable, long-distance exchangeable store of value" was a thing. In the lives of most people, it wasn't.
That's interesting, in particular that most people survive off reputation rather than wealth.
ReplyDeleteDown & Out In the Magic Kingdom has something similar, in a post scarcity world. Where everybody has access to the basics: food, shelter, internet access and immortality. You know, the basics.
Things beyond that -- cars and soda or whatever -- you get based around whuffie, a measure of how much everybody likes you and what you are doing.
Having most playbooks use strings, and a particular playbook that can buy strings with coin? Brilliant, and really interesting.
So, in summary:
ReplyDelete1. Stores of value maybe have little meaning if you go back far enough, as the very notion of a store of value is a technology.
2. 1 coin / 1 barter / 1 keep / etc is a really recent invention, and most human history is closer to Monster Hearts' Strings than Dungeon World's coin.
3. The real store of value is people owing you.
4. Being rich is having externalized store of value that mean you do not need to rely upon others.
5. The temple tally is maybe a much more historical precedent for value, backed by nothing and representing nothing -- a tally is just a tally.
6. Items that're highly valuable per unit make sense as a store of value, but, again, there's no real standardized equivalence relationship.
I think I got everything. Thanks everybody.
Very good summary!
ReplyDelete(one more thought: insofar as workers start exchanging their tallies among each other -- if you do this for me, I'll tell the priest to transfer two tallies from me to you -- it's a fiat currency "backed by" the temple's willingness to provide things. I'm willing to do things for the tallies you're offering, more maybe than I would be just for you owing me, because if you welsh, the temple will provide. that's one step on the road from pure social relations to the emergence of pure standardized money.
ReplyDeleteIf the tallies are fungible, Benjamin Rosenbaum , then you've got a sovereign monetary supply right there. Each temple / town hall / whatever has its own currency. Transfer between those is harder, especially if they measure things differently.
ReplyDeleteI did some work a few years back converting measures of the world from one view to another. That was seriously hard, and we have computers. Without that, it becomes impractically hard to convert ... at least if the units are too fiddly.
That's an argument, i think, for minimal fiddliness of currency. For a single tally representing a lot of labor, that is.
Yes, that's the idea -- fiat sovereign money not backed by any durable store value, which we usually think of as being a recent innovation, turns out to be the very beginning of money.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, conversions between these little oases of standaridization are back in the realm of haggling and relationships, I think
... which, over time, themselves turn into being backed by a known quantity: temple labor.
ReplyDeleteSo, then, the entire monetary system becomes obvious for what it is: priests and scribes building society by manipulating the working classes into believing the record of value itself is valuable.
But, I think we may have known that already, even if we didn't say it aloud.