Old Farts Demanding Swords: Opportunity Costs

Economics is a big deal in world building. You don’t necessarily  need charts with commodities, and arbitrage rates and what tax percentage is demanded in Elfyland or Dwarvyland, but you do need to understand some basics. See, Economics, is one of the most truly human of all fields.

Now, let’s get started, and this may be boring. If you find it that way, I apologize.

Let’s posit we have two nations. A and B. And that each of these nations produce two products. They produce Widgets and Gimbles. Widgets are a time honored economic commodity, you see.

Nation A Produces 10 Widgets and 5 Gimbles every month with their 30 man workforce. Half of their workforce works on either, so 15 widget makers and 15 gimble makers.

Nation B Produces 2 Widgets and 4 Gimbles every month with their 20 man workforce. Their labor distribution is similar.

Nation A’s widget makers are more efficient then nation B’s. Each worker in A, per month can make 2/3rds of a Widget and 1/3rd of a gimble.

Nation B’s widget makers make 2/10ths of a widget and 4/10^th of a gimble, per month.

Even though nation A is cranking out more gimbles and widgets then B, they’re less efficient (marginally) at making gimbles then B is, and they are monumentally better at making widgets. Therefore, they would gain more by selling B their widgets (and focusing production on them) and leaving their native gimble production to the way side (and benefiting from the efficiency of B in producing them) to benefit from trade.

Whenever A is making a gimble, its losing out on widget production it could be doing. This is an example of Opportunity Cost.

Opportunity Cost represents the value of a course of action when making a decision. For example, the choice by A to fucs on gimbles would represent a net loss in Widget production. That’s a cost. That’s something that gets weighed when a decision is made. Everyone does this. You probably did it a few times just today. You made that choice when you chose to keep reading this post instead of flipping on a Youtube video or going outside.

A high level character has this opportunity cost issue as well. A character at high levels has higher demands on his time, and his actions have a larger weight. Remember, decisions that matter, means player input matters.

An archmage might be able to blast through an orc tribe effortlessly in half an afternoon, but while he’s doing that he isn’t performing necessary spell research, attacking a higher level threat, defending the king from people trying to assassinate him, wooing his hot elf sorceress companion or managing his garden of magical man-eating rutabegas.

Trying to propose it as some sort of ‘cold war’ scenario between high level people is wrongheaded. The reason why Manshoon doesn’t crush every 7^th level band of adventurers isn’t because he’s worried Elminister would do the same to 7^th level evil parties. He’s Neutral Evil. He doesn’t give a shit about some random bunch of  7^th level jerks. It’s because he has better stuff to do. And that. That ladies and gentlemen is why you need world building to solve this high level problem.

If all that occupies Karzog the unspeakable is conquering the kingdom run by a fifth level fighter, and his opposition is a party of 6^th level yobbos, then there should be no reason stopping him from finding them and eradicating them.

Alternatively, if Karzog has other problems to deal with, then it balances out. If Karzog can’t go flitting about for fear that his lieutenant will take over his base while he’s on gallivant, or that he won’t be able to plumb the mysteries of the amber throne (which is why he wants to conquer the kingdom, for the money), or that he is simply too lazy, there’s more of a reason for him to be a ‘don’t bother me, I have men for this!’ homebody until the proverbial excrement hits the fan.

Notice I made reasons that don’t involve some fear of a bigger scarier wizard somewhere. He just has better stuff to do, then go traipsing around for people causing trouble to his plans, who are literally the reason he has minions. He’s too old, too rich, and too magical to be bothered. Now if the players cause significant problems, he should definitely come out to punch them, but it’s unlikely they’d be causing problems of that level, until they can at least weather a nose-bloodying from the guy.

As a DM, it’s important to make this point early. High level people are doing things. They have stuff to do. Things to accomplish, and demands on their time and resources. This is important to teach early on, because it lets you teach them more thoroughly to the players when the players get to high level.

Let’s say our players are 17^th level. They are movers. They are shakers. They are bad asses. Their foe has a plot to conquer a kingdom they rather like, and is moving on multiple angles. They heard a rumor about a magic sword he wants that some orc tribe has (it might be a feint or but is really dangerous if real), and they heard about how he’s going to be unleashing an atropal from the cage of ages, and that he’s been feeding information to a potential protégé working with the cult of fire ants. That’s three problems. Three problems that require expenditure of time, blood and treasure. Now the protégé is probably easy enough to smash, and the orc tribe is positively inconsequential, but going after either of those means that the players aren’t stopping that atropal from being unleashed. The resources they’d need to expend to blast the orcs out of existence are stuff they’d really like to have in their quivers fighting the big guys.

So the players do what high level folks do. They delegate. They take eight thousand gold out of the kitty and find a bunch of adventurers who are willing to grab a sword for them from a tribe of orcs. Maybe they send their followers or pay sixteen thousand to a rougher bunch to deal with that cleric.

Could they handle both? Hell yes.

Are the orcs with the sword, the protégé cleric and the atropal all significant terrible dangers to the world? Yes!

Do they have the time do take care of all of them at the same time? No!

And so three groups take care of the problems. Three equally meritorious problems.

If the players in this scenario are the guys grabbing the sword, that doesn’t mean that their actions are meaningless just because they aren’t stopping an atropal, far from it, that sword might be freaking vital to the enemy plan.

If the players are the guys stopping the protégé they’re stopping an evil cleric and freeing the land from the tyranny of fire ant based religion.

Their heroism isn’t diminished because there’s a bigger fish. And if the players at low level see why their small contribution is so important, they’ll likely not feel like the guys at the kid’s table, they’ll have buy-in, they’re part of the group saving the world. They don’t feel like they’re the only guys doing anything and the high level guys are just playing cryptic grab ass.

And this means that if later in the campaign the heroes who took down the atropal are themselves taken down, the heroes feel like there’s a progression for them to step up into. The apprentice adventurer grows to become the patron.

And then, at last it makes sense to the players why some bearded jerk giving out jobs might unload on them if they got tetchy at him, because it’s what they would do if some ingrate adventurers decided to try to throw down on them.