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The Elder Scrolls series, flaws and all, is generally better about applying magic to its world-building.
For the most part its worldbuilding is like the one thing The Elder Scrolls actually did really well (that and Morrowind’s aesthetic/art direction), at least in terms of the lore. Where it fails is translating that intricate, weird, well-thought-out worldbuilding into gameplay and storytelling.
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Also you go into the dwemer ruins or nord burials untouched by men and mer for thousands of years and find tons of septim coins, with face of dude born thousands of years after those ruins become sealed. I mean Tiber did dragon break but using it to put money with his face everywhere would be kinda petty even for him.
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They clearly are not though, it’s most likely just Akatosh and/or Sheogorath putting things in to confuse adventurers and archeologists.
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I mean there is shitton of artifacts and treasures left from the original owners of ruins, often lying just plainly in sight. You think someone go into the ruins and not only don’t take the jewels and incredibly expensive looking shiny weapons and armor but also leave their own food and money? And repair the very aggressive centurions or reraise draugr they would need to destroy to get into the place first time?
I think with video games you have to have a suspension of disbelief. Skyrim, for example, is tiny. It’s only a couple of square miles (if that). Most people live in cities with more area. Daggerfall is the largest and it’s the size of Great Britain.
While it would be cool to play in something actually to scale, you wouldn’t be able to play the game. It would be terabytes of information. Your processor and graphics card would explode trying to render the full distance of the horizon. Unless you’re okay with having load screens every block, you’re not going to fit a bunch of NPCs doing day to day stuff.
So something that’s a far off ruin seems a lot closer than it is. I think if these places were to scale, it’d be more like traveling to a ruined castle in Scotland from England. Or perhaps an even larger distance, like if civilization was in Mexico and all the dwarves lived in Alaska where they died out.
It literally doesn’t even seem like it would be a challenge to implement a basic system to handle this, there’s a lot of different people/organizations who would be interested in antique valuables and who might even send you out on quests to retrieve them given that it’s already supposed to be one of your main occupations and sources of income, and its natural player behavior to automatically go to shops to exchange trash loot for fungible currency.
Just have 1-2 diegetic pach*nko prize exchanges per significant settlement where you can put in all those piles of antique gold coins and crappy armor and get real money for it.
It literally doesn’t even seem like it would be a challenge to implement a basic system to handle this
Just do what New Vegas did and have multiple currencies that everyone just let you trade in
try to pretend that magic items would remain as super rare after centuries or even millennia of adventurers rummaging around and eventually putting them on the market.
But the places they are getting sold into are from time to time invaded and turned into rubble by monsters, eldritch horrors etc for no reason other than to
destroy the capitals and allow imperialism to grow againmake new ruins for heroes to plunder. See, the invisible claw of magic market regulate itself!It’s just another form of capitalist realism to think that a magical feudal society would have a well developed money economy like a capitalist society to the point where everything is a commodity with a price tag that can be sold on a market that’s always nearby. In an actual magical feudal society, stuff like magical swords would simply have no monetary value but be weapons that could only be wielded by certain strata of society (nobility, knights, wizards). Serfs, tradesmen, traders, and so on would be forbidden from touching let alone wielding a magical weapon on pain of death. There will still be an exchange value of the item based on the labor hours that was used to create the item, but it wouldn’t be something that you would buy or sell in a store.
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It might be a situation similar to that of diamonds irl. They’re not terribly uncommon, especially not uncommon enough to warrant the exhorbitant prices they supposedly cost (as in, a blood diamond, not a lab one), and new diamonds are added every day to the economy, but prices are kept high.
I’m imagining a bunch of superstores on a zoom meeting fixing prices across the region. hm, I might have a plot for a campaign.
It’s shiny though
I’ve always struggled with Gold Coins in D&D. I think it’s because of the roots of the game, where in the earliest editions, Gold was your Experience Points, and you only gained Experience Points if you could get the gold out of the dungeon.
As the editions came out, the game became less of a dungeon crawl and more of an action movie simulator. Especially with 4E and 5E. I don’t know in what edition they decoupled Experience from Gold, but that is probably when the Gold stopped making any sense. Just try finding an answer to the question “What are the wages of commoners per day/week/year”. You’ll get nowhere.
Once players have thousands and thousands of gold, most of the time, unless you’ve really invested in making it part of the game, they won’t even spend it. What are they going to buy with gold that’s better or more interesting than the items you’ve placed in the dangerous places? It puts you in this position where you either allow them to buy magic items or not. Being able to buy a +1 weapon has implications for your entire world.
I could write forever about this. The lack of guidance from Wizards is part of the problem. I think the next time I run a game of “D&D” it’ll be one of these OSR games like Knave or what have you.
Have you seen what an economy based on SoJs and HRs looks like?
Don’t remind me.
I haven’t played Diablo II since 3 came out and I still remember FG and perfect gem exchange rates.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Wtb alteration orbs 1500/div
