[Think Tank] What Sorts Of Things Can Help Keep Gold Valuable Throughout The Game?

[l3lessed]

This for me is where survival mechanics become critical for a games longevity. Extra gold should be spent on daily needs, like in real life, from food, to water, to healing/medical stuff, to camping/temporary shelter stuff, to labor/jobs/skills you don't have, and so on.

Outside that, spawns need balanced better too. People didn't carry around bags of gold every where they went, and they sure as hell didn't keep all their valuables on them when not needing them. By just adjusting item/gold spawns, this alone could help with late game hoarding that happens in all beths games. Couple this with survival stuff that money requires, and it would help allot.

If we can ever get in a follower mod/script/companion system setup, players could dump gold into hiring npcs to fight for them.

I dealt with this in Skyrim using mods this exact way, and never had massive piles of gold I couldn't be spending, if it was stock piling and storing food so it doesn't rot, to having to repair items continually, to having to replace camping and survival equipment that either got lost or lit on fire in the middle of a battle, to hiring new npcs to help me because my previous paid companion couldn't hang with the dragonboarn and let a Draug cut their head off.

[Ralzar]

Agreed.

Climates&Calories is starting to touch on this with food items, clothing and armor weather damage and camping equipment.

However, there is no conceivable way to design the gold sink of this kind of system both so it's possible to use by new characters AND so it can handle the frankly absurd sums of money characters get from just picking up armor/weapon during the game and selling it. This because of the level scaling of drops. I pretty much wrote the whole modified loot table used in the RP&R:Items mod and I nerfed most drops quite a bit (while buffing the loot piles a bit). Problem is that most of the loot works on a level multiplier. So setting a mob type to drop 10 gold suddenly turns into 100 gold and then 200 gold. Not to mention the armor drops with increased chances of Daedric from lvl10+. Once Daedric starts dropping, the economy pretty much becomes pointless unless you play to limit yourself.
I usually do this by not having a wagon combined with the RP&R encumbrance effect. Which honestly feels like a much more natural playstyle. You only pick up armor/weapons if you intend to use them.

Anyway, my point is that the entire problem is created by the loot systems interaction with the level scaling. (Damn you level scaling, damn youuuuu!). It's very hard to make a system that can compensate for the completely unrealistic amount of money you start hauling in. Magiconos mod for limited gold will probably help. And I am formulating ideas for a wagon mod which would make wagons more realistic and less of a "bag of holding" that it is now.
Still though, with a little stubbornness you'll easily make all normal cost items completely pointless once you start selling some daedric stuff.

[Ah_Ftagn]

The simple answer is: Don't change it in the base game, but let multiple possible solutions be added via a single or even multiple mods.

Example Methods:

+Reduction of the chance that loot objects appear, and random chance that one of the objects in there is removed before the player opens the loot object. This can also be applied to non-equipped items on NPCs that actually use equipment (If the equipment the NPC is wielding is dropped, possibly due to another mod or a feature in this one, default it to being in poor shape, and make the object's condition affect it's value).

+Rebalancing item sale and quest reward value after accounting for the character's ability to haggle (personality/mercentile), so that the sale value or quest rewards are ALWAYS less than actual item value or base reward cost unless ideal conditions (maximum reputation locally if good or quest is not illegal, and with the mercentile/questgiver factions, max personality and mercentile, capped at 1.0X item value after calculations and operating with diminishing returns but no established minimum sale value above one gold piece) are met. The impact for quest rewards should be halved to prevent characters with low personality, reputation, and mercantile skill from being unable to cover basic needs and equipment repairs.

+Rebalancing item purchase cost as per the idea immediately above but in inverse fashion, so that the minimum purchase price of an item or service is always 1.0X it's value, but the maximum purchase price is uncapped and dependant on skills, stats, and reputation with similar diminishing returns in skill, stat, and reputation impact.

+Taxation: Each province has its own base tax rates on banked and carried/stored wealth, owned homes or ships, and other forms of personal property. Banked gold has reduced tax rates and also generates interest that partly counteracts the rates of taxation of stored wealth. Being inside of a province means being taxed on banked and carried wealth, owned homes, docked ships, and item value, being outside of it means the only thing taxed is your bank account, with a seperate tax for owning a home. Tax collectors appearing when taxes can't be simply taken from your bank account automatically might be a suitable use of the quest system, while the rest of this is dependent on normal scripting. Finally, a feature could be toggled here that would actually cause base tax rates to INCREASE as you get wealthier when you don't own a home in the province, and just use the base tax rate if you own a home in that province.. This would counter the ability to hoard gold (Esp. if the tax rate got higher faster as you got richer without being a homeowner), make it harder to afford a house, and cause someone who DOES own a home in a province to make that province his go-to for storing wealth. If the ramp-up was figured out right, it might counteract a LOT of the gold bloat from being higher level (and getting better items and more gold per drop as a result). Not a perfect or complete fix, but it'd reduce the impact a lot. Possibly add the crime of tax evasion, and give it a suitable penalty in forms of fines, prison time, loss of owned home, etc?


+Local economy simulation: A set of predefined variables impacted upon by random events temporarily alter the base value of specific goods, services, and equipment, updating once per month for each province (saving this information to local files outside the save files if possible, to avoid save bloat, and updating stuff visited more recently or that was just entered first, then other provinces over time and record progress in order to minimize script lag and prevent corrupting this information for that character?). The modified costs should be kept separate from the base costs so that item costs don't permenently change as a result in a way that persists when removing the mod. (Note: If a player is used to games like Elite: Dangerous, this may actually cause them to get rich faster by exploiting market value differences and fluctuations!)

+A "Contraband" feature: Certain objects might be illegal in certain provinces based on local customs. If caught with these items on your person (a rare thing even for someone untrained in stealth, if this is a non-equipped item like a painting, ectoplasm, soul gems, or a vampire tooth), you will be asked to surrender them by a guard (Unless they are a SEVERE infraction, such as a soul gem with a person in it... then you're just arrested and charged with both smuggling AND whatever criminal act allowed you to get the item in the first place, such as Murder in the person-filled soul gem case). You have until 15 days pass to buy them back from a black market seller before they are gone forever if they are confiscated. If you refuse to allow your stuff to be seized, you are convicted of smuggling, which probably has a punishment based on a line out of the in-game book "Legal Basics". Also, you still lose the items. Ex: A few good examples of stuff that might frequently be illegal in some provinces are daedric or dwemer equipment, daedric artefacts, and soul gems (Since in daggerfall there is no stated difference between black and white souls, so it might be possible to soul trap a human or elf, khajiit, argonian etc in ANY soul gem). Presumably, being part of the mages guild might make it less "Illegal" to have certain objects like soul gems that aren't filled with people, dwemer things, or daedric things depending on rank and local reputation in the area, since the assumption is that the mages guild polices itself a fair amount.

+Survival/Needs Mod Integration: A seperate plugin added to the core plugin, which adds all of the appropriate features above for specific needs mods specifically where required. For example, a Climates and Cloaks version might add additional cost or a reduction in cost to specific clothing items based on region, make certain food or drink items (or ANY food or drink items) cost more or less based on location and random events, add legality information for the contraband feature to mod-added items, and so on.

[Ralzar]

Having played with my mods and with non-optimal characters and playstyles for a while. I can say this:


The economy is not NEARLY as broken if you do the following:

1: Use "Roleplay&Realism" and "Roleplay&Realism: Items" to limit encumbrance, make dropped items be in worse condition and make sell price be affected by the sold items condition.

2: Use "Physical Combat & Armor Overhaul" to increase weapon/armor condition deterioration. (And make the combat mechanics work better)

2: Do not buy a wagon. This severely limits the amount of trash loot you can scrounge up from a dungeon. My "Realistic Wagon" mod would also work to some degree for this, since you would have to actually drive the wagon, which slows you down and might not be worth the hassle

3: Use Tedious Travel. Again, this makes you not want to drag around any excess items. (add Climates & Calories etc to make travel cost money as gear gets worn down, you have to rent rooms and buy food etc)

4: Do not have an extreme Strength stat. At around 50 you can't carry all that much more than the set of armor you wear, a couple of weapons, arrows and some supplies. So the only loot you pick up to sell is small high-value items.

5: Avoid exploits like taking out loans with no intention of paying them back or robbing shops in the night.

Playing like this, the game feels different. You're spending next to no time buying/selling in shops. When I started my most recent character I had to take out a bank loan to afford a horse, which I am at lvl6 still struggling to pay back. It feels like a much more natural gradual increase in your means. The constant upkeep of equipment is a constant money sink. As you level up and get better weapon/armor, the amount of money being used for upkeep of this higher value equipment also increases. I have actually been in the situation of having to ditch a piece of armor because I couldn't afford to repair it and if I was just carrying it around I couldn't pick up loot to sell to make more money.

So at the moment, as long as you set some rules for yourself and mod the game heavily, it is possible to play with a much less broken economy than vanilla offers.

[Ah_Ftagn]

Hmm... you know, making it so that taking out loans, letting them default, and not going back to that province for long enough that you aren't automatically arrested on sight whenever you enter a town causes the province's banks to hire people to kill you might be a good way to at least give someone a reason to NOT do that.

Especially if the people sent to kill you are level scaled to be like, 1-3 levels above you by default and appear in groups of random size, say one to six enemies (reducing level of spawns by 1 per 2 enemies, but ensuring they are always at least at your level minus one?), with larger groups, and including as possible spawns:
+mages that at higher levels tend to have and make use of paralysis, and per round AND instant damage spells while benefiting from high elf, dark elf, or breton traits at random, and at higher levels start simply appearing from invisibility buffed with (as levels increase) per round healing effects, resistances, mage armor, and so on. At REALLY high levels, give them disintegrate spells and have them try to use them on the player for instant kills, after displaying a "You have been soul trapped" message onscreen as fluff text.
+warriors that benefit from redguard, nord, khajiit, wood elf, or dark elf traits and pick appropriate weapons. These people should have the best grade of weapon that you can get at your level from random drops, and on death the message "The warrior's weapons and armor disintegrate into ashes" appear, replacing any equipment on the warriors with the "ashes" loot item. Alternatively, it could be something more like "The warrior's weapons and armor revert to being made of poor quality iron", and their gear is replaced with iron versions at 1/4 durability.
+sneaky backstabby enemies that vanish and backstab you, with the same changes to gear after death, same selection of gear when spawning, same possible races, etc, plus the effects of high critical strike, stealth, backstabbing, illusion, and (whatever school of magic lockpicking effects are) skills, normal invisibility spells (True as well at higher levels), and lockpicking spells.

I can tell you right now, this'd make it a lot more entertaining to try to get away with defrauding the game's banks.

[Ralzar]

Yeah, speaking of bank fraud:

The bank really should freeze your account, send out statements saying your credit notes from them are invalid and inform the other banks of the bay about your criminal ways. Suddenly another regions bank starts saying "I am sorry sir, but due to your record in the banking sphere we must decline you as a customer. Have a good day."

But then, the whole loan mechanic could use a bit of an overhaul. Loan amount should be limited by reputation with bankers (merchants?) instead of level. Or they might need some collatteral, like a house, to issue a big loan.

Also, it would be nifty if they kept sending you demands for interest payments

[Ah_Ftagn]

Honestly, if you are going to do things that way, keep in mind that news doesn't really travel that fast unless the mages guild get involved, and the mages guild and banks aren't direct allies (though not enemies either). The mages guild also heavily restricts teleportation between provinces at its guild halls.

So as a result I'd say that when you enter a province with a bunch of stolen money (if the bit below is true, in the form of laundered funds as salable items), you should have the banks not catch on for a while, and if you deposit it (again, possibly as laundered gold) in the bank of a province that "hates" the province you stole from, it may not even result in the closing of the account or you not being able to get an account. Keep in mind that the banks may actually be operated by the province itself, thus why every bank shares account balances and value of bank notes within the same province.

If this wasn't the case, the banks would either have the same accounts everywhere (making it possible for your wealth to follow you, either immediately or after a short delay depending on technical limitations of the game), or they wouldn't have the same bank balance in the entire province (or accept each others bank notes within that province). National ownership of a bank isn't an unrealistic concept- China has an official bank if I remember correctly, which its citizens can make use of with extreme convenience.

Also (as a note on mechanics, possible correction), if I'm not mistaken, letters of credit aren't even able to be used outside of the province they were written in, even in classic daggerfall. I remember playing daggerfall on my phone once (Thank you magic dosbox), robbing a bank in Tigonus, going to Daggerfall to try to spend the money and deposit the letters of credit, and them not being even acceptable outside of Tigonus.

If the statement immediately above is accurate, then to make the fraud "stick", you have to launder the money by buying expensive stuff you can carry with you, possibly in a wagon. Otherwise the bank notes are just paper in daggerfall's other provinces.

This is a touch more realistic in a way, to be honest, and could POSSIBLY excuse the fact that the bank fraud isn't catching up with you. I mean, there isn't going to be a tamriel-wide database on bank fraud incidents, fraudsters and suspects, this isn't the information age and scribes and drawn or painted images are still expensive, tracking you down isn't exactly easy for non-professionals (paper trails probably don't exist any farther than the first province a person travels to- If you go to a second province and then cross the line to the next province afterwards, no one is going to know.

==

To put this in a real world context... until the advent of computers, fax machines, ARPANET, and then the internet, a person could leave one state or province after committing an actual series of brutal murders, and unless it became national news they could basically live the rest of their lives without ever worrying about even the slightest chance of being arrested for their crimes. A man could "divorce" his wife by simply saying he was going to go grab something from a store (cigarettes are the cliche'd example, but it's something that happened a fair amount), travel a mere TEN MILES, then start over from scratch and never hear from, see, or be found by the wife again, especially if he was willing to hide his identity or get fake documents (Good quality fakes couldn't be cross referenced either, because there was no internet or fax!). It's debatable the runaway husband would even NEED fake documents though, as if neither he nor his wife were known in that town, and his wife had no reason to visit, the fact that men kept their last name unaltered with each marriage and women didn't would have made it simple for him to stay hidden.

If the internet and fax machines belonged to a single private military company, were limited to those of general rank or higher, and no one else in the world was allowed to use them (No, not even the government!), then all of this stuff about the times before fax and the internet would STILL be true. It would also be true if it was the Military, not a PMC. Unless you committed war crimes or crimes against the whole country you'd never be caught.

Now, think of Tamriel's current state, particularly in the illiac bay, as being more akin to... the wild west, except that the telegraph office doesn't exist... only the railroad companies have a telegraph machine, and they aren't letting people on the trains OR letting them use the telegraph..

[Ralzar]

Also (as a note on mechanics, possible correction), if I'm not mistaken, letters of credit aren't even able to be used outside of the province they were written in, even in classic daggerfall. I remember playing daggerfall on my phone once (Thank you magic dosbox), robbing a bank in Tigonus, going to Daggerfall to try to spend the money and deposit the letters of credit, and them not being even acceptable outside of Tigonus.

If the statement immediately above is accurate, then to make the fraud "stick", you have to launder the money by buying expensive stuff you can carry with you, possibly in a wagon. Otherwise the bank notes are just paper in daggerfall's other provinces.

Hm... I'm pretty sure that is NOT how they work at the moment. Credit notes are basically just borderless paper cash. What you describve makes a LOT more sense and is a much more realistic mechanic.

What should be possible though, would be to deposit the credit notes in another banks accounts, but have to wait an amount of time, based on region distance, for the bank to verify the credit notes.
Which could lead to the bank you loaned from answering back that you are a criminal and the notes are false and they should arrest you

[Ah_Ftagn]

Time spent verifying is believable... and would ensure that laundering the money has a purpose while allowing the notes to still work outside of the original province. Still, politics would probably impact that too. Money stolen from one kingdom's enemies would likely just be purchased by the bank at reduced value because the kingdom itself demands that much.. hell, the kingdom may even demand that the money be able to be deposited!

A historical precedent in the real world is Privateers, who literally were state sponsored pirates that stole the wealth of one nation for the benefit of their patron nation. A current events one is North Korea at one point being the epicenter of the highest quality counterfeit american dollar bills in the world, which they supposedly had an actual ministry of the government printing out to sell to fund the nation (Given North Korea's antagonistic relationship with the united states, this is pretty believable honestly, not to mention the fact that their economy has never been that "profitable" on the surface, and shouldn't even be able to support the level of population they have enough to keep them alive but emaciated when you factor in estimated GDP from only "legal" sources - Not so much a reflection the people or culture as it is desperation of the people and government, the government of the country, and the relationship with the nation the supposed counterfeit notes were meant to defraud).

Keeping both of these things in mind, it's pretty blatant that verification might not even matter beyond reducing value of the notes after depositing, especially if say, defrauding the bank of daggerfall and then depositing the notes into the bank of sentinel or the bank of wayrest. Or any of the nine possible fraud to deposit chains from these three provinces/kingdoms (Though I suppose the more accurate term here would be counties once the warp in the west happens!).



NOW THAT SAID... even if you DID get caught with counterfeit bank notes, what of it? You aren't the automatic prime suspect because you could have been paid in them for some good or service! if you get caught with them, it's less a reflection of how trustworthy you are, and more that somewhere along the chain fraud happened, you're just at the other end.

Remember: Scribes and artists were UNGODLY expensive. A portrait or book cost so much money only nobility tended to be able to afford books (In Daggerfall, you could assume the average amount of money a person has in their pocket is between 3 and 10 gold, books cost hundreds of gold pieces MINIMUM using the game's own prices... so the expense of book still holds true despite the existence of libraries and bookstores). Without magic to duplicate the books, you'd be presumably looking at ten times the cost per book, since scribes copying stuff took a LOT Of work. In the real world middle ages, your average university library had a very tiny selection of books... possibly as low as ten, or even six! it was probably an ordeal for your local ordained priests to even get a bible!

Now, based on how things already work in daggerfall, context clues like the high prices of books in a magical world where you can presumably SUMMON duplicate books permanently, the expense involved in buying a portrait that isn't even of YOU, the mages guild's tight control over teleportation, a lack of easy to use and widespread magical communication (Lysandus's letter is a good clue of that), the national squabbles, the province-wide (but no wider) sharing of bank account values, and so on...

I'd say that being able to defraud a bank and launder the money is "normal", as is being able to get away with it, At least given the circumstances. Even if you had counterfeit or 'stolen' bank notes it wouldn't even mean you were untrustworthy.

[Ralzar]

I would think an easy solution would be to have the value of the credit notes get lowered or refused based on the regional relationships. The game really needs more ways to point that out ayway. So a 100K creditnote becomes 50K if deposited into a Wayrest bank for example, with the banker telling you this is because of the current poor relations between the two regions.