CRPG Addict - The Economy Sucks: SSI GoldBox

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In a guest post at the CRPG Addict there is an in-depth look at why the economy of the SSI Gold Box games was useless.

Unfortunately, as many fans know, there is one glaring flaw in these games: they essentially lack any sort of useful economy. Money, in almost every game in the series, is essentially useless, because of the fact that the party is given copious amounts of it, at every turn, as a reward. Unlike most other games of the era, there is simply nothing worthwhile to spend money on. In an average play-through your party will throw away literal mountains of copper, silver, gold and platinum.

My goal, in this article, is to examine the how's and why's of this situation, and to essentially assign responsibility for this state of affairs as I see it. During the course of this post we will discuss several points about these games. SSI's company line that they were forced to use the rules as written, the changes made by SSI to the written rules, how money sinks were avoided, and how they clearly followed treasure tables, while ignoring written rules in the DMG that were supposed to be used in conjunction with said tables.

Let's begin.
[...]

1.0 Rule changes

SSI has always stated that their license with TSR required them to follow the AD&D 1st edition rules. Their stance is that any issues with the economy were endemic to the rule set. From the CRPG Addict's discussion with SSI Producer Victor Penman (contained in a posting on Champions of Krynn):

I asked Mr. Penman about [the problems with the in-game economy], and he attributed this problem mostly to the AD&D rules, which gave experience rewards based on both enemy hit dice and the amount of treasure collected.... TSR required SSI to use official rules for both experience and treasure... Penman somewhat brusquely told me that, "Following the rules and providing XP were our concerns, not what people spent money on."

Unfortunately, this statement is heavily inaccurate as SSI modified the AD&D core rules substantially in order to fit them into the paradigm of the game they wanted to make. Changes were made at several levels in order to adapt a table top, human moderated experience, into a computer based, pre-programmed experience. In some cases, rules were changed as their written implementation would not work in actual play. The rest of this article examines the many changes that SSI was not afraid to make to AD&D 1st edition rules.
More information.
 
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It's true enough. Gold became a leaden weight and after a while it made no sense to keep most of it, especially when gems and jewelry have a higher value/mass. Then again, the AD&D system as a whole makes little sense. :p
 
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The AD&D system is great with modifications. :p It was the first RPG written and you knew there would be rough areas that had to be smoothed out. I don't think I have ever met anyone that played AD&D that followed the rule on dwarves and elves only being able to attain certain lvls.

I still play AD&D and we have a booklet with all our modified rules. It is about 50 pages. :)
 
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I loved how my party began as beggars in Pool of Radiance, the tavern fights, how I could reach the level cap without much adventuring. :)
 
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AD&D, of course, was not the first RPG. That honor goes to D&D. There were many RPGs released in between D&D and AD&D. Not that it matters...
 
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Good article, and it's right. The Gold Box games were amazing but the economy was shite. Even the $9 game "Ember" I just played seemed to "get" economy right in that money was available but scarce enough that there were always high-level "ultimate" items that were available to grind/work towards or seem *just* out of reach for a bit. It's nice when economy is "right" in a game but it's definitely not a must to me; if anything I'm a fan of a higher-fantasy world where 'economy' means that as adventurers you have a chance to get fantastically rich, own property, etc.

(Just as original AD&D rules intended, 1st edition had an interesting system built around followers and acquiring land when your characters started to reach 10th level or so and 'economy' was kind of meaningless except on the macro scale.)
 
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There is a reason for the Gold Box games to keep the treasure tables from the game. Although it is a dumb reason, the reason is clearly stated in all of the Gold Box game manuals. The idea was that you could take the characters you developed in the Gold Box games and use them in your pen and paper campaign where there actually are uses for that much gold as you gained levels and could build kingdoms, run organizations, etc. It states it right in the game manuals. I mentioned this a few months back on the CRPG Addict comments section and was immediately attacked, even by the writer of the blog himself, even though I expressed no opinion on the matter and just thought it was something he overlooked and might find interesting. The guy is acutally kind of a jerk. But anyway, that is why they just let the gold pile up instead of limiting the loot drops which they could have easily done.
 
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Also, you can transfer your characters from PoR to Hillsfar to accumulate even more gold you don't need for CoAB!
 
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Back in the early days of AD&D goldbox gaming my friends and I would render the economy essentially worthless by using the very well known item duplication cheat for valuable items like wands of fireball, dust of disappearance and girdles of giant strength. Short of that, as rjshae mentions, jewels and gems were the perfect currency for carrying your coinage and it was like a fun little lottery when you got them appraised. :)

That said, the underlying assumption in the argument that everyone is going to reach this saturation point where the economy breaks down is probably flawed and should be acknowledged. The article is certainly exhaustive, but not particularly logical in its focus.
 
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Well it's not like you needed to duplicate items for the economy to break down in the gold box games. It happened on it's own just by playing normally.

But if you read through the addict's gaming logs, bad economy was common in games around this time period. There was a lot of evolution in game mechanics around this time, and people were still learning that it was important to make currency useful beyond the first few levels. Pool of Radiance was way ahead of it's time in many areas, but in terms of economy it was bad but not that much worse than many other games around that time.
 
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Because a game lacked a feature that "other games around that time" had, IMO, does not make it flawed. Not only is it not a flaw because it was explained why they did it (whether or not you like the reasoning is your own opinion), but also because there is not a checklist of features that a game has to have in order to not be flawed, regardless of what other games at the time are doing. IMO, of course.
 
As I said, sometimes I even like the Monty haul style economy. Fits the D&D flavor; you're killing dragons and suchlike; you shouldn't have to worry about being a crafter, banker or greengrocier like all games try to include these days. Cool adventure games don't necessarily need crafting systems built around collecting weeds and turning them into potions. Or realistic economies.
 
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