RPG Design: What Am I Going To Do With All This Money?
There's a question I wish I had to ask in real life more often. Like, ever. Alas, I'm talking about fantasy worlds. RPGs, particularly. Both computer and table-top.

Heroes and their Treasures
While it may not be the final dramatic objective, the overarching mechanical goal in RPGs is to improve your characters' power. There are two means of doing this. The first is by increasing their inherent abilities, or internal improvement. The second, and even more significant in some games (particularly fantasy MMO's), is external improvement through better tools. A +4 Butter Knife of Annihilation, Armor of Imperviousness to Nuclear Blasts, Boots of Buttkicking, a Big Blue Dress of squeezing out one extra spell before you run out of mana, whatever.

Exceptional tools for use by heroes is a staple of heroic fiction upon which these games were originally based. Glamdring, Excaliber, Sting, the Millenium Falcon, Silver the horse, the Batmobile, and more. I was reading up on "Jack" tales a couple years back - research for a possible RPG that has been backburnered for something a little less aggressive for now. Jack is best known for his exploits with the magic beanstalk, but there are tons of stories about him. And besides magic beans and a magic harp, he was constantly being gifted with powerful magic items, usually by either old crones or beautiful young maidens.

The thing is, those Jack tales were all stand-alone stories. If they all dealt with the same Jack, then Jack was a polygamist with multiple personalities and a massive stash of magical items that he forgot about before every adventure. In more modern stories (and RPGs), our heroes have a bit more persistence between adventures. This is fine. But what do we do with the treasure hoard?

In stories, our heroes just don't have to deal with such things. If an "upgrade" occurs, it's usually because the previous tool was lost / destroyed / used up, or he / she just sort of ignores who inherits their former possession. Who cares what happened to the Klingon Bird of Prey Captain Kirk and his crew used in Star Trek IV, anyway? These are stories, not games, and so the author is very deliberate about the dramatic purpose of these external extensions of the characters.

The other thing about these stories is that these items are always earned by the heroes. Maybe it's just an artifact of the modern, western fiction, but these tools are almost always legitimized by the hero having to earn them in some way. In some cases, it may be inherited, though even in those cases it is often re-earned. Or, in Luke Skywalker's case, his father's lightsaber was lost in a battle with his dead ol' dad, and he had to create his own for the final confrontation.

In many stories, the fellow who simply buys his way into the rank of heroes by purchasing a bunch of neat toys is simply a pretender. His fraud is exposed later - sometimes fatally - when he demonstrates he doesn't deserve the honor he bought into.

RPG Heroes and their Disposable Gear
Now we have the roleplaying game. As it is a game, simple use of "dramatic need" goes out the window. Loot is part of the positive feedback cycle of the games, which is rarely used for anything other than upgrading the characters with more powerful tools. This brings up some problems. What do they do with their loot?

Some players, for roleplaying benefit, use their gains to donate to the poor, pay their father's medical bill, or whatnot. Most, however, simply spend it on upgrading their character. Getting super-powered gear at the local Magical Mini-Mart, or in-game equivalent.

While this is neither heroic or particularly dramatic, it causes an extra issue: The toys the players get via purchasing and trade-ins may be much better than the great, awesome, dramatic loot the game designer (or gamemaster) had them earn through desperate and exciting adventures? What do you do when Frodo figures he's better off selling Sting, the Mithril Shirt, and what the heck... let's pawn the One Ring, too... for a +5 Shortbow of Belly Bursting and an Ever-Full Beer Tankard?

But if you don't give them that opportunity --- what kind of "money sink" do you put in the game that is of value to the players. 1st edition AD&D had rules requiring that the player characters spend a hefty amount of money in order to gain a level, but this wasn't so much a money sink as a source of endless player complaints.

And so wonderful and wonderous items of heroic fantasy, theoretically rich in dramatic benefits beyond mere game mechanics, get commoditized in the economy of a game to the near-meaninglessness of pellets dropping at the press of a feeder bar. It's bad enough in single-player CRPGs and Dice & Paper games, but its absolutely insane in Massively Mutiplayer Online RPGs.

What To Do About It?
Now, I could argue that's not a bad thing. Especially as a player. Because we're ultimately talking about a game, here, not a novel, and that changes everything. As a gamer in an RPG, I'm worried about my character's survival, man. All the cool dramatic fuzzy-wuzzies don't mean a thing to me if I'm destined to be a secondary character who dies in the middle of the book in a pool of his own blood, mourned for maybe a chapter or two and then forgotten. While I subconsciously yearn for drama and story, my immediate concern is far removed from that. I'm here to kick butt, take names, and win, dang it. And I'll use store-bought magic items, endless restoring of saved-games, finding loopholes in the game system, and anything else I can do to accomplish that objective. And THAT is the fun of the game, dang it!

Maybe not as fun as some alternatives, but there's a fine line between that kind of fun and pure frustration.

But assuming you'd like to get the best of both worlds, there are a couple of solutions I've seen, and one more I've tried (without much success).

The Store Sells Only Mundane Magic...
One option, especially in games with lots of randomized loot, is to make sure that the "earned" loot is always superior or less generic to what can be found for sale in the game world. The "store-bought" gear is only useful to replenish consumable (limited use) items, or to fill in gaps in the character's equipment list. The problem with this is that very soon the player's wealth vastly exceeds anything they could conceivably purchase, and so any 'rewards' that aren't immediate and direct upgrades become useless to the player.

Upgrades "R" Us
Another option is to allow the player to upgrade a single item, rather than replacing it. This does an admirable job of helping simulate the heroic fantasy that fathered the entire genre. The problem with this is that once the player finds their prized weapon, the game master / designer can no longer reward them with a better weapon. Gandalf throws all other swords into the "for sale" bin, so he can upgrade Glamdring to shoot lighting bolts out of its crossguard and stuff. And once again, upgrading is kind of a mechanical, drama-less activity.

Upgrade II: The Quest For Loot
One thing I've experimented with Dice & Paper games is maintaining a "quest component" in the creation of magic items. Maybe the new armor - in addition to requiring a hefty upgrade cost - also requires a rare cockatrice feather or dragon scale (or both...) This - in theory - allows me the opportunity to make the new item a memorable event and make it feel "earned," even though it remains an upgrade (and a money sink). Unfortunately, that's harder to implement in a CRPG. Not unless half the game was designed around generating semi-random quests based on the player's options.

What Do You Think?
Is it a problem when the gamemaster can't have treasure that is truly treasured by players? If so, what's the best way to deal with the problem, in "dice & paper" games or in CRPGs?


(Vaguely) related pondering of the trivial:
* RPG Design: Quest Abuse
* RPG Design: The Brute Force Problem
* RPG Design: Why Can't I Get Through The Stupid Door?

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Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games

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