Crunch Friday - Economy - I can buy a spaceship – why can’t I afford a missile launcher?’
I know, Crunch Friday on a Saturday....ssshhhhh perhaps no one will notice.
This week, Oliver has delved into the economy of the galaxy and how it will appear in the RPG.
In EDRPG you start off rich. The spaceship you begin with costs 100,000 credits. How much is that, exactly? Is that the modern day equivalent of $100,000? £100,000? Hmm … well, actually it is quite a lot more than that.
So how much is a credit? Well, since the balance of value amongst goods remains roughly the same as on Earth, I took the current price of a ton of gold, a ton of vegetables and a ton of consumer goods (mobile phones) and several other items, averaged them out and realised from this that a single credit is worth something like $40, or £25.
As I said previously, each character begins with a ship worth up to 100,000 credits. That is, roughly, the equivalent of owning ten tons of gold. Do you own ten tons of gold? If so kindly purchase the ‘Hire a GM’ pack on the Kickstarter.
What are the consequences of a credit representing such a large value? Well the first one is that the galaxy needs some small change. If I wanted to buy a chocolate bar on Zaonce I wouldn’t pay 1 credit for it. I could use that to refuel the car. Clearly some smaller unit of currency is required for purchases that aren’t related to massive spaceships and their improvement.
Therefore I split the credit into the MicroCredit (mcr), with 100 microcredits making one credit (the equivalent of $0.50), and the Unit (u), 100 of which make one microcredit (worth half a cent in US currency). This finally allowed little Sally to buy a candy bar without first selling her dad’s car.
And yet this problem was just the tip of the iceberg. Dividing up the currency of the game into smaller units didn’t make the players any less rich. Rather it served to highlight just how rich the starting player was. Remember that 100,000 credits is the real world equivalent of five million dollars. That’s right: five million dollars.
Now some of this can be explained away through the effects of compound interest, but the spending power of the figure is real. With 100,000 credits you could really buy five hundred tons of hamburgers.
The reason this presents a problem in game is because of the comparative cheapness of Personal goods (clothes, handbags, guns, armour, etc.) compared to the value of spaceship goods (two ton laser guns, racks of high explosive missiles, 30 megawatt fusion reactors, etc.). Namely; if you can buy a single 2,200 credits pulse laser, you could also buy two hundred and twenty sub machineguns.
A ‘harmless’ character, fresh on the page, could buy almost every item of basic equipment in the book with the amount of money it takes to refuel her ship. Imagine her loaded down with assault rifles, laser pistols, shotguns and plasma cannons, chucking high explosive grenades like fruit at a political rally.
This problem defined the entire approach to the game’s weapons in the personal combat system, and led to the creation of the rare vs common inventory item. One of the first consequences of having wealthy characters is that the cost of personal weapon cannot be used as a balancing tool. It doesn’t matter that the Assault Rifle costs 15cr and the Autopistol costs 4cr – both weapons are in direct competition with each other, and each gun needs an individual reason to be selected over the other. In the case of the Assault Rifle, for example, it has a damage advantage over the Autopistol, is more accurate at long ranges and can include an underslung grenade launcher. The Autopistol, on the other hand, is more accurate at short ranges and is also one handed, allowing the possibility of firing two weapons at once and also being quicker to draw and conceal. The two weapons therefore have different uses in combat, and you might prefer one over the other depending on where your character finds themselves.
The same rule applies to every personal scale weapon in the book. The laser pistol must present an advantage over the assault beamer, the shotgun over the missile launcher, and the sword over the chainsaw.
Other balancing factors – which I won’t go into any detail here – include a strict policy on how many guns you can carry (including the ammunition), and the legality of carrying weapons in civilised areas (which varies from anything goes to no weapons at all).
Of course one of the real risks of making all weapons balanced is that they can become … well … boring. If every gun is basically as good as the other, give or take an ideal situation of use, then you can eventually reach the point of not caring what weapon you are using at all. I’d like to think that I’ve avoided the appearance of ‘boring weapons’ due to their high ‘swing’ (weapons tend to miss more than they hit, but when they hit they are devastating) and differing profiles, but the fact is once you’ve seen one machine gun you’ve seen them all.
Except, not quite. Because one advantage of having a rich money economy in a game is that, with a little imagination, you can go quite wild. Enter the Rare Weapons.
The idea behind rare equipment of any type is that there are some handcrafted weapons out there that exceed the abilities of a common gun. These weapons are not mass produced, are frustratingly hard to find, and go for silly amounts of money. When it comes to rare equipment the prices go crazy, because there is a huge demand and very limited supply.
The Playtest includes two rare weapons, the NG75 Autopistol and the Hyperion Laser Pistol. They each present a tiny advantage in either damage or accuracy. They cost a fortune, with the NG75 costing 42,000cr and the Hyperion 47,000cr. A basic model with only slightly less accuracy or damage costs less than 10cr. But if you were a millionaire who knew they were going into combat which would you buy?
The core book contains dozens of different rare weapons, and over the coming weeks we’ll explore some of my favourites, including the Micro-Shotgun, the GL779 Intellipistol, the Asellus Deflector Pistol and the unpleasant Laifan AB5 Serrator.
