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.

Old Farts Demanding Swords : Well Why Didn’t He Just Do That From The Beginning!

Forgotten realms has a bad rap.  It’s a rap earned from the fact that the campaign has ‘big names’ in it. Names like Khelban, Elminister, and Drizzt. Like in a Star Wars campaign, people playing a Forgotten Realms game want to encounter these people, they want to touch on the wealth of fiction and depth of character design that runs throughout the setting. When done properly, this can feel engaging, and one feels like one is a hero amongst heroes. Like Spiderman running into Wolverine. When done improperly, as it is done very frequently, one feels like he’s Krillin in Dragonball Z.

Krillin, for those with lives, and not into very old anime, is a character in a series based on supernatural martial arts. He’s an “ok” fighter in a realm of people who can punch through time, spontaneously teleport, and throw the personification of life energy at people. He accomplishes stuff, he’s the strongest human alive, he does his part, but nobody watches the show for him.

Forgotten Realms has a reputation of DMs putting players into situations where they have to be saved by Elminister at the last minute out of the blue, or where they have to watch Drizzt walk in and solve their problems, or even beat the bad guy for them.  Adventures where the PCs ‘open the gates’ for a Drizzt, or ‘unbind Eliminister’ were distressingly common back in the day. Essentially our heroes act like valets for people of some obscenely over leveled state (in 3^rd edition, Elminister was something like a 35^th level mage and 8^th level cleric or some nonsense).  They were walking cut scenes.

The DM wanted to make sure he didn’t undersell the ‘heroes of the realm’ but did so by underselling the real heroes of his realm, the PCs. This again, ties to the world building problem, that leads to again, our high level problems.

When you buy into ‘Elminister solves the problem’ all problems get very small. Dark Lord Simon Antfarmer is the man who burned your village to the ground, and caused terrible things, but he’s an eighth level fighter to Eliminister, who blasts him out of hand before puffing on his pipe and telling uncomfortable stories about how he sleeps with his foster daughters.

Your player’s drama gets subsumed, crushed, and overwhelmed by an NPC who has no buy in, no interest, and no concern. This is because the world wasn’t properly designed, and because you aren’t selling the 8^th level bad guys enough. And since you didn’t sell the 8^th level guys enough, when the party gets to higher level, they won’t either. There are people I’ve seen, since third edition came out, who think 9^th level is ‘low.’  

So. Our real problem is, the players are glaring at Elminister and saying ‘Why didn’t he just show up from the beginning and take out Simon?’ Why did they have to fight through legions of fire ants, down through orcs, and then just have a red robed pervert show up and splatter the guy. Why didn’t Elminister do that from the start? He obviously could!

In Forgotten Realms we get a lame brinksmanship answer ‘if Elminister did that, then Manshoon would do it too, and blah blah.’ This is lame. Its bull. It’s also a corruption of the real reasons why high level characters don’t smash all the orcs, and get the crappy swords themselves.

That’s for next time though.

Old Farts Demanding Swords : Points of Light Make For Bad Long Term Campaign Settings

Adventurer-Conqueror-King is an OSR game. It leads us back to the old days where heroes set out to dungeons, and brought back treasure. They used these expeditions to tame the surrounding wilds, bring order to the chaotic, crush evil civilizations, and build order and justice.

Some have called ACKs a ‘Points of light’ setting. It’s not.

Points of Light, the default D&D 4e setting, posits numerous small kingdoms and sparks of normalcy (the points in the points of light) amidst the bleak, chaotic and insensible wasteland. It’s a return to the Dying Earth of Jack Vance, where if you went forty five minutes away from your particular encystment of ‘civilization’ you were liable to come across some sort of brain eating slug monster, or daemon, or dark thing from before that would crush your spirit and render you a motive husk. D&D owes a lot to Jack Vance and this outlook, but the problem with basing your setting on The Dying Earth is that well, it’s a freaking dystopia.

The Dying Earth is a world where people stab one another over who has the fanciest chair, the sun is going out, everybody is a backstabber, there are practically no good people left on the entire planet, and basically things just kind of suck. Dark Souls is cheerier. Dark Souls at least has good people in it.

 I bring this up in our High level discussion because the way a world is structured, determines how high level play is meant to look. The Points of Light setting, notably, and as I touched upon in the last post, is terrified that if anybody can do anything, the players won’t be ‘heroic enough.’

As a result, the only people who have ‘good stuff’ are the bad guys, and the PCs are solely responsible for fixing every damned thing in the entire setting.

Lost puppies? Players.

Orcs? Players.

Demons? Players.

Chaos gods? Players.

Inefficient tax code? Players.

Marriage ring down the well? Players.

The players are the only competent people in a world of benighted super-competent hell barons and ‘normal folk’ who are so normal and folksy it’s a surprise they can breathe without assistance.

All, in the misapprehended belief that if the king can keep his own people safe from orcs, the players would have ‘nothing to do’ or ‘wouldn’t feel special.’

This creates additional problems as the players level up as it never feels like they actually accomplish much. Their legacy will disappear the second they stop playing their characters, and there is always. ALWAYS. A bigger, badder threat and one day they will be worn down and destroyed.

Evil triumphs ultimately, screw you.  

In the short term, they get to lord over the 0-level humans and town guard, at least unless they piss off the DM, at which point the town guard who can’t fight a kobold effectively become hyper competent in taking them down.

The problem here is that the DM or world designer wants so badly for the players to feel important, he makes a world that doesn’t function properly. Nobody exists except for the players. Inns and merchants exist to supply and provision the players. Bad guys exist solely to challenge the players. The afterlife and demons exist only for the players. And there must always be an enemy to challenge the party, so the forces of evil just seem to constantly unlock bigger and bigger guns as the players level up, like some sort of hidden arms race.

And if the players do make solid changes? They have to be undone, or negated, or pushed aside, so the next batch of PCs can feel ‘important’ compared to their PC predecessors.

The motivation to make players feel important and special is good. Evil however works by bending goods to wrong purposes. And so it is here. In such a desire to make the player and his accomplishments meaningful and challenged, they are instead rendered pointless. Nothing fixed can be allowed to stay that way. Meaningful changes to the setting cannot be achieved.

The player’s actions are meaningless beyond the initial thrills of success.

Now, if the players never intend to revisit the setting, or are happy with the sudden flash of success, then this can work, but points of light settings never work as recurring campaign settings, or they stop being points of light.