Property Rules

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

The general idea of this is similar to Frank's Domain Rules thread, but on a far smaller scale. I figured that made it distinct enough to discuss as its own topic.

"What's the point of this?", I can hear you ask. Simple: As PCs grow in personal power, wealth, experience, and (most importantly) confidence about their place in the world, some of them will want to assert themselves and exert greater control over the GM's precious campaign setting. What we want (is open to discussion) is for players to be able to use their greater resources and character abilities to have measurable effects on the world without making GMs wet themselves in fear, but not on the same level as owning entire countries and becoming a miniature warlord.

Obviously I want a Pokemon skin slapped onto this, but I think that the general ideas can be applied to multiple settings as needed if you just tweak the details about what the PCs own, among other things.

Since we have a smaller scale than domain stuff, the first questions that need to be answered are:

• How many properties should PCs have control over? Personally, I lean towards a smaller number with a more intimate list of customizable options for each property. Owning 5 inns doesn't feel as special as owning 1 inn, you know? However, we're still playing a cooperative RPG, so this leads into the second question...
• Are PCs allowed to individually own property? If one person wants to own an inn and the other wants to run a church, how do we make it so that they aren't all off playing with themselves? At the same time, if 2 PCs really want to own different properties that don't make sense being under the same roof, what do we do? I'm not so sure about this one, since it's not as clear-cut as having an entire country governed by a council. Sure, you could have the PCs all be on a board of directors or something, but for what's essentially supposed to be 'small business' rules, that seems excessive.
• How long is each "turn"? This will dictate how often the PCs have to check in on their property (I'm already getting sick of saying that all the time) to see how it's doing. In a setting with modern communication, this won't mean much to the characters physically, but it still takes table time regardless. Weekly? Biweekly? Monthly? I think weekly or biweekly would be best, but I'm open to discussion.
• How usable is this by NPCs? If a PC rolls up to a bank and robs it, would that have the same mechanical effect as if the PC owned their own bank and had it robbed? I'm not a fan of rules that apply differently to PCs and NPCs, but we don't really need to know all the details of every business in town, either. I think the system should be simple enough that a GM could shit out the important details of a place on the fly and do long-term models as needed, but deep enough for players to actually toy around with it.
• How does this actually interact with my fucking PC, man? Clearly we don't want all of this to be divorced from the main game, which is ostensibly about adventuring or something. At the same time, we don't want people taking their profits and translating that directly into superpowered pants that let rich characters be way better than broke ones. This tells me that it could offer some small measure of personal power, it should largely interact with robust non-combat systems to afford the PC more control over their life and environment.
• How many properties do we even want, anyway? A lot, probably. Because of that, it would be ideal to have a lot of properties with short, but measurable effects. Possibly with a robust customization system on top of that? I'm not too sure. If a PC owns a farm, how much should it matter that they're growing corn instead of tobacco? Magical reagents instead of mundane food? What if they have employees? What if they don't, and the party wants to take all their cash and settle down in a town and play there for the rest of the game?
• What does this look like at the highest levels? If my PC is a superpowered badass who can grab the tapestry of the universe with my bare fists, am I still running a fucking inn like the 2nd level jackass down the road? Can I hire succubus dancers instead of regular ones? Can I leverage my pyromancy abilities into making the best blacksmithery in all the land? Can I make a farm that's so fucking huge that it covers multiple hexes on the overworld map? I think that shit sounds cool and should probably be a part of customization.
• What if a PC doesn't want to do any of this stupid shit? Not every player cares about asserting their character, and that's fine. I don't think we want to punish anyone for deciding to hoard their personal wealth and spend it on ale and whores instead. Should they just have other fun methods of draining their cash without that resulting in a sword with a bigger number on it?

I've given my thoughts on most of these points, but I'm eager to hear what other people have to say. I think there's room for a system that strikes a balance between "you're a murderhobo until level 20" and "you are the lord of your castle and are charged with the protection of several villages until you decide to reenact Mount and Blade and take over the continent", but I might be full of shit. Let me know!

[Kaelik]

A discovery I recently made when my personal group ended up getting around to playtesting the Fortress Management system in Fiends and Fortresses is that another question you really want to fit in there somewhere is:

Hey like, how much time and how detailed do I actually want this stuff to be?

Because it turns out I had conflicting ideas in my head that polluted the whole design with incompatible attempts to great a fast short resolution with the players doing a lot of work in roleplay and also a management game that got overly fiddly and took way too much session time, producing garbage results.

So I would say try to figure out what percentage of each session or how many sessions out of 10 if it is split up that way you would want for the party to spend focusing on this, and then that should probably help you answer your other questions.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Oh. Yeah... that's... obvious. Oops.
Yeah, I think this ties into the third and last questions - the more involved it is and the more table time it takes, the less likely a player is going to engage with it. That's a general rule of thumb though, isn't it?

Assuming a 4-5 hour session, I'd say you would want to be reminded of your property stuff every... fifth session or so? I'm not the best judge of tempo, but that's enough time to go somewhere, do an adventure, and come back, right? That's generally the pace I think would be best - you go out and adventure, then come back with your spoils and play around in town fucking with people, then you go back to the adventure. Rinse and repeat until you've reached a satisfying conclusion or the game falls apart.

EDIT: I forgot to mention how much time it should take once it's actually brought up in-game. At most? I'm thinking half an hour, including roleplaying and stuff. And that's assuming a lot of roleplaying and standard fucking around at the table. This is strictly taking care of your property and not other things you might be doing in town, though.

[deaddmwalking]

If a player opts to own property, you should be able to make the results of owning the property able to be determined by a die roll, and players can take actions to stack the modifiers (optionally, of course). Most PCs are likely going to want to set up a manager for the property so they don't HAVE to solve all the day-to-day problems, but if something happens, they can deal with it.

Events should happen 1/week; results should be calculated 1/month (ie, four events prior to determining what the result is. Events can be good/bad, and a null event (nothing interesting happens) is fine. Dealing with a bad event means no penalty to the result roll; dealing with a positive event means a bonus.

Properties can produce wealth (obviously), resources, and recruits. A church may produce wealth and a specific type of recruit (acolytes), while a smithy can produce wealth and equipment. Players should be able to choose some amount of re-investment (from zero to 100%) - not collecting anything allows the business to grow with tiers for how much you need. Ie, a Level 1 Smithy may cost 5k GP to set up; when your profits are 10k GP it grows to a level 2 smithy. If your profits are 1k/month you can reinvest 100% and get a Level 2 smithy at the end of 10 months. If you take 50% of the profits, it would take 20 months. If the players get a windfall (such as a dragon hoard) they can directly invest in upgrading their property to a new tier.

Higher tiers would produce better results (more equipment, higher quality recruits, and higher profits).

Some of the events might downgrade a property (a fire burns down one wing of the inn, reducing it from a Tier 3 to a Tier 2), and some might completely eliminate it. Those events should be rare and ought to be able to be dealt with reasonably. It might make sense that the PCs decide to create a volunteer fire department (and lend some of their followers to it) to provide benefits to their property holdings.

It's also possible that a campaign event outside of the random events might impact their property. If there is an invasion happening and their town is in the way, failure to deal with the invasion will impact their property. Whether that's 'the event' or in addition to the randomly determined event is up to you.

Generally, players will likely prefer to deal with the property issues between sessions; you play a session and ~1 week passes in game; then you determine what was happening while players were away (and how they can learn of it). If players are very interested in an event, it can take actual table time and that's fine.

[MGuy]

My work is still untested so I have no idea how it'll pan out but I've given a lot of thought to property management and whether or not it should be a thing. I'm leaning toward 'yes' so the question I'm trying to answer now is how central to the game owning property is going to be. I have a feeling that any answer I give to that question will help me determine how invested I will be in creating rules for it. Whenever I talk about property ownership with my dnd groups consensus seems to suggest that those who want to actually engage heavily with it are well within the minority with more of them preferring to mess with builds and gear. So I'm thinking about making property a lot like a passive ability, similar to a piece of gear, or some other background convenience.

[Orca]

If it's too unimportant or its use isn't obvious then some people of my acquaintance would ignore it entirely. I saw this in a campaign using Kingmaker.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Thanks for the feedback, everyone. I'll brainstorm a rough outline for what I think some good goals might be.

• All PC-relevant info about their property should be able to fit onto a single notecard, be simple to understand, but still have an impact on the game.
• It shouldn't come up more than every 3-5 sessions unless you're playing at an accelerated pace or something, because the game is still ostensibly about adventuring and owning an inn is just your PC's hobby.
• The system should come online at around level 5, or Tier 2, or whatever nomenclature you use to signal that the players are exiting the baby PC zone.
• Properties produce good things that you want... but probably in a narrow field so that other PCs don't get their toes stepped on. Properties start at Tier 1 and can go up to Tier 4, producing better (and possibly new?) things as you go.
• The Tier of a property should be directly correlated to how much cash it brings in and other outputs. Bigger operations require more resources to sustain, so if you can't meet a minimum threshold, then you shouldn't be able to grow, and exceeding that threshold quickly lets you grow faster.
• Properties should be largely passive bonuses of varying sorts... but almost never combat bonuses. This sort of relies on the rest of the system to have things to do besides kill people. But the bonuses should still be large enough to entice usage of the system.
• It should be mildly min-maxable? I'm not saying we intentionally design it that way, but part of the fun of tabletop games is trying to stack as many bonuses onto your character as possible so you can do silly shit. Seriously though, no trap options or anything awful like that, just a bunch of fun bonuses that make you wonder how to optimally combine them with your character concept.
• You can use it in-game and quickly resolve it, or you can use it in-between sessions. Either way should work.

Anything else?

[deaddmwalking]

In D&D parlance, a property should produce a value of goods, or half that value in cash. Ie, if you own an Alchemical Works, you can take your profits in the form of vials of acid and Tanglefoot bags and get double the value that you would get for taking it in cash.

[hogarth]

If it's too unimportant or its use isn't obvious then some people of my acquaintance would ignore it entirely. I saw this in a campaign using Kingmaker.

Whenever I see people trying to make up minigames like this, I think: "Hey kids, do you like D&D? Then you'll love D&D glued to a half-assed version of Monopoly!"

[MisterDee]

Kind of my feeling as well. Like, there's probably room for a D&D-adjacent business boardgame that could even integrate to some extent with the base game as an optional module. But it's definitely something that should only be put in place with everyone's buy in, and/or run separately from the main game so that people who aren't invested in that particular bit of game can just skip it instead of being stuck doing the D&D equivalent of seeing the decker character take over the session for a Matrix run.

[JigokuBosatsu]

I feel like GTA5 hit a pretty simple formula: owning property gets you money and unique quests. And free lapdances maybe?

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Kind of my feeling as well. Like, there's probably room for a D&D-adjacent business boardgame that could even integrate to some extent with the base game as an optional module. But it's definitely something that should only be put in place with everyone's buy in, and/or run separately from the main game so that people who aren't invested in that particular bit of game can just skip it instead of being stuck doing the D&D equivalent of seeing the decker character take over the session for a Matrix run.

Yeah, that's my biggest concern. Nobody wants to force some players to sit around with their thumbs up their asses while one or two players are playing Tax Evasion Simulator. At the same time, in my experience some players naturally tend towards wanting to use some of their ill-gotten gains to play a half-assed version of Monopoly, especially if there are few gold dumps available in-game. Like, if I've just got 10,000 gold sitting in my bag of holding and I can't buy magic items because my GM is a dick, what am I gonna blow it on? Hookers and blow, becoming an upstanding member of the local community, or both?

I feel like GTA5 hit a pretty simple formula: owning property gets you money and unique quests. And free lapdances maybe?

I think this ties into what DeadDM was saying, except you can sometimes replace "money" with "items" or "goons". Unique quests sound like an extension of weekly event tables to me.

In D&D parlance, a property should produce a value of goods, or half that value in cash. Ie, if you own an Alchemical Works, you can take your profits in the form of vials of acid and Tanglefoot bags and get double the value that you would get for taking it in cash.

This gives me Mount and Blade vibes, where once you've got some enterprise going you can either have your manager sell your goods at the local market and give you the profits, or you can take the items directly and go to a different market to try and get lucky there. Sounds solid to me.

[Previn]

Yeah, that's my biggest concern. Nobody wants to force some players to sit around with their thumbs up their asses while one or two players are playing Tax Evasion Simulator.

I was with you until it became tax evasion and now I want to watch people play that.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

You actually bring up a good point - some players tend towards playing criminals and we might be remiss in not accounting for that in some way. Whether it's blatantly criminality, such as just making illegal goods, or white-collar crime like tax evasion, it's certainly one way to spice the game up. I'm sure it wouldn't take long before a player chimes in to ask, "What if I try and sell this on the black market?" Depending on how advanced the financial security systems of your setting are, that could be worth needing to cover up on its own. What if the PCs want to secretly skim money off the top of their business without anyone knowing?

[JigokuBosatsu]

I suppose this is the juncture where we ask if this part of Blades in the Dark is worth scavenging.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

... which part? I've only played a dozen or so sessions and I'm not totally sure which mechanic you're referring to.

[JigokuBosatsu]

The part where you have territory and "legitimate businesses" and corpse disposal pig farms and uses for the proceeds of villainy. Not a mechanic, specifically, but the approach.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Well, Blades in the Dark is a game about being a criminal. I could see all of that stuff being useful, but I'm not so sure how much it should be focused on. I'm really thinking of only owning a single business, so one PC would have to be in charge of a legit storefront while another would be in charge of the pig farms, and so on. I think criminality should be a possible aspect of owning property and not a focus, so stuff like territory would be going too far IMO.

[PhoneLobster]

You know that feeling when you see people posting discussions of ideas you had shared, worked on, elaborated on, tested, and iteratively messed with for over a decade only apparently no one noticed?

I was somewhere close to the starting point you seem to be at 10 years ago when I decided I wanted to do the "Barbie Mansions" thinghttp://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=51753.

Then by some indications in a largely irrelevant thread about what I was doing with combat resourcing about a year later I had something working out pretty well with a evil genius type campaign that was basically my first practical attempt at applying the idea. I didn't just go adding a mini game either. I homebrewed an entire system from scratch in order to accommodate and promote the mini game.

Then I spent oh I don't know, the last decade running different flavors and rules variants of campaigns including a strong focus on owning and running places. Some of which you might find via various threads on my home brew but I'll be honest I've made enough of a mess of that with endless rewrites overtime that I'm afraid to even check exactly what my sig might link to.

Oh yeah and for years I also dropped in on various "domains" threads to point out the accounting involved was on its bare face comically ridiculous and burdensome for any sort of practical application.

So rather than say "go read everything I've ever written including things only accessible through google cache or stealing my old hard drives" I'll just throw out a few broader ideas to start with.

Yes complexity bad
Do not make people do accounting. This is arguably the largest downfall of the various domains rules discussions around here. Don't have rules that keep ledgers with incomes and expenditures and balances. Definitely don't have multiple ledgers for multiple resource types. I could go into details of various stream lining mechanics I've put together to avoid accounting like the plague that it is but the absolute simplest and probably most important one is this.

Profits are one off events. Expenditures are one off events. You BUY staff and buildings you sure as hell do not pay maintenance. If your barbarian's airBnB makes money its small change you barely give a crap about and definitely don't track in real time, the barbarian makes real money exclusively by stealing dragon hoards. It's an abstraction. Who cares. It works. Do it. You'll thank me.

That's a starting point. Run with that philosophy and you can pull all sorts of shortcut bullshit like "do we have food supplies for the fort?" being a fairly intuitive binary yes no instead of an accounting nightmare. EVERYTHING needs to work like this. You do NOT have complexity to spare.

Engagement Hard
It's a minigame. It's not hitting things with a sword. Some players won't care. You need to REALLY commit to engagement. I mean like every damn thing needs to matter to everyone as much as possible. The engagement in fact needs to wildly outclass the complexity costs. This goes somewhere on another point trust me.

Integration Good
Minigames must integrate with other game mechanics, other minigames, and most of all your, er, maxigame. If your game is about typical TTRPG combat then your minigame MUST tie back to that or it's better off dying in a ditch.

To give you an idea BEFORE I decided to try the barbie mansions thing I was running 3.x+Tomes+More of my own material expanding on the Tomes than there were tomes.

It didn't take much of a look at what barbie mansions would need before it became clear that I needed to throw EVERYTHING out and build a system from scratch around integrating the minigame into the main game.

Try this one cool trick to gauge complexity/engagement
OK. So lets say you are juuuust starting out with this. And you just want the barbarian to own an AirBnB and the wizard to own a starbucks franchise.

The absolute bare minimum complexity is "Fine the bard can just OWN a musical brothel down town who cares we do NOT do any accounting she just owns one".

The absolute barest integration into the main game would be "A fight happens there this one time".

Possibly absolute barest player engagement is "Bard. One day a fight will happen there. So. Before then. Just draw a god damn map please?"

Observe how long they take to draw the map, how much they or others care, see if it works out. I mean. It should. Works with most players. But not all, and it might get you to begin to get a real visceral grip on how long even something very simple like "draw a map of a rather small business" is going to cost you and how much time you are going to need to save with other complexity short cuts just to allow for that sort of absolute minimum administration.

Completely Sell Out to Materialism
I think the thing that barbie mansions is ahead of you on, the key to making a property owning minigame work, is an embrace of materialistic player character power.

You outright state that the wizard's bespoke scissors workshop should not grant super powered pants.

But the wealth/power dilemma exists without owning buildings and businesses. Businesses, especially annoying accounting ones that grant any arbitrary amount of potentially cumulative income ONLY exacerbate the issue.

Barbie mansions was an idea to try and solve the issue entirely by saying fuck it what if wealth just IS power and what if we integrate that properly for once.

What if the wizard's bespoke scissors workshop is in fact THE way to get super powered pants?

So then I tried it. For 10 years. With a bunch of variants. In a dedicated system customized around it.

I've tried a lot of crazy rules ideas over the years. With mixed successes. few have been as wildly successful as embracing and integrating wealth as power. It definitely makes a very short list of definite absolute successes. And not just as part of integrating a building/property minigame. In general better integration and embrace of a highly materialistic implementation of character power/advancement has had several unexpected and significant benefits.

So much so that I now believe one of the worst ideas in TTRPG history was the idea that SOME sorts of character advancement currency (XP) were sacred and excellent, while OTHER sorts of character advancement currency (wealth) were verboten and needed to be crippled and limited.

It's weird really, computer games haven't fallen into that stupid pitfall. Why have TTRPGs? I'd say mostly because Gygaxian punitive bullshit has more of a foothold in the table top hobby. Bad GMs felt bad about letting characters have magic items and it all spiraled into an innately broken character advancement economy that explodes whenever it interacts with a cheap ice-cream truck owned by the party druid (or for that matter anything else).

I'd ramble on about this for eternity if you let me so I'll try and end it short.

If your wizard can only buy a holiday home in a swamp that does nothing they don't care.

If your wizard can buy a holiday home in a swamp that gives incremental currency income through elaborate accounting that EVENTUALLY trades in for a magic staff the game expects you to obtain and maintain by other means the game WILL break in five ways.

If your wizard can buy a holiday home in a swamp and it CANNOT buy a cool staff but it DOES grant an annoying incremental bonus no one asked for it will break your game in... er... less than five ways.

But if your wizard MUST buy a holiday home in a swamp to create charge and maintain his awesome new "next level" acid swamp wand THAT can be made to work and THAT is where the player engagement in the minigame and integration to the main game can, and probably must, happen.

[MGuy]

The necessity part was interesting enough for me to still have it in my notes.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Sorry PL, I've crawled through the forums all the way back to 2009 and I'm pretty sure I skipped out on your thread because of the name. Oops! I'll take a look at it, but your more recent post takes priority at the moment.

Do not make people do accounting. This is arguably the largest downfall of the various domains rules discussions around here. Don't have rules that keep ledgers with incomes and expenditures and balances.

Oh god, yes. I strive to make my game as playable as possible on an actual fucking tabletop, with you and some random people sitting around drinking or engaging in other mind-impairing activities like playing a fighter. I want to be careful about this sort of shit with items, much less with property. What you're making me think of is integrating profits and expenditures into the random event table, so you sometimes get a Monopoly-like windfall of cash, or somebody robs the lockbox or something.

You BUY staff and buildings you sure as hell do not pay maintenance.

How does this tie into not doing accounting? When do you know you've reached a threshold where you can buy a new dishwasher or succubus dancer? Is it after a certain amount of time has passed or what?

Minigames must integrate with other game mechanics, other minigames, and most of all your, er, maxigame. If your game is about typical TTRPG combat then your minigame MUST tie back to that or it's better off dying in a ditch.

Yeah, I gotcha. That's kinda why I ran into the same feeling as you did and started making shit from scratch. Part of the fun is trying to integrate a bunch of different systems together into something that actually has some flow to it.

You outright state that the wizard's bespoke scissors workshop should not grant super powered pants.
But the wealth/power dilemma exists without owning buildings and businesses. Businesses, especially annoying accounting ones that grant any arbitrary amount of potentially cumulative income ONLY exacerbate the issue.

Well, you're assuming D&D, aren't you? If the base game doesn't have a wealth/power dilemma, then what's the issue in your Bad Dragon factory not granting you extra sorcerer powers? Don't get me wrong, I enjoy me some power gaming, but I'm not sure if equipment is the best way to pursue that... but I haven't really done much on equipment yet, so... I dunno!

So much so that I now believe one of the worst ideas in TTRPG history was the idea that SOME sorts of character advancement currency (XP) were sacred and excellent, while OTHER sorts of character advancement currency (wealth) were verboten and needed to be crippled and limited.

Just do me a favor and start ranting about this. I don't really have much issue with PCs having money, but I'm not so certain that wealth should give you the same kind of character advancement as XP.

But if your wizard MUST buy a holiday home in a swamp to create charge and maintain his awesome new "next level" acid swamp wand THAT can be made to work and THAT is where the player engagement in the minigame and integration to the main game can, and probably must, happen.

Owning a bank is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural. Hrm. I like what you're saying, but don't you worry about having too many minigames to juggle around, or do I just lack faith in my players?

[pragma]

You must own a bank to gain a level in warlock is not the worst rules pitch I've heard.

[JigokuBosatsu]

You must own a bank to gain a level in warlock is not the worst rules pitch I've heard.

I suppose depending on the patron that might not be particularly outlandish.

[PhoneLobster]

How does this tie into not doing accounting?

Well technically accounting still exists. But if you eliminate regular income and regular expenditure you are exclusively tracking a balance and since the fantasy tax man won't audit you then you don't need to record and keep your one off expenses and windfalls.

Basically it cuts you down to player interactions like "Player 1: Hey other players can we afford to buy a garage I can keep a cool monster truck in? Lets look at one single number and see" and eliminates interactions like "GM: OK players now refer to your records and apply one strategic turn of income and expenditure resolution to all resource and currency types, don't forget to add the new monster truck garage upkeep!"

It's way less stuff to write down, it's way less stuff to dig through sheets to refer back to.

If the base game doesn't have a wealth/power dilemma, then what's the issue in your Bad Dragon factory not granting you extra sorcerer powers? Don't get me wrong, I enjoy me some power gaming, but I'm not sure if equipment is the best way to pursue that... but I haven't really done much on equipment yet, so... I dunno!

Well to start with if wealth does nothing bad dragon factories... do nothing.

But aside from that. I don't think it's much of an assumption that most RPGs of any significant complexity have some sort of wealth=power dynamic. And ones which sorta try to crimp it and half ass it usually just result in weird exploits and breakages.

Also however I think material wealth, items absolutely SHOULD matter, a lot. A fantasy RPG where items genuinely didn't matter whatsoever is... fairly esoteric. Almost any RPG where items were minimised to the point of being basically free and achieving utterly trivial effects isn't super satisfying.

While an RPG where a new rocket tank or an awesome new extendo spear DO things, things you care about, that's not just fairly normal, it's normal because it's cool, it's the thing we are basically all aiming to represent. And you might try and argue that your mithril pajamas and your sword of it's totally on fire are somehow disconnected from spare change coins... but then you aren't arguing about wealth=power, you are negotiating over which currency applies to the equation.

Basically the cool kids choice on the place of items in games is "important place" and that's wealth that is power right there.

Just do me a favor and start ranting about this. I don't really have much issue with PCs having money, but I'm not so certain that wealth should give you the same kind of character advancement as XP.

What's the difference between XP and Money?

You hit a dragon and XP and Coins fall out (or items worth coins). You then exchange XP for character advancement. And then you exchange coins for character advancement. Is there all that compelling an argument to treat them dramatically differently?

Hell the more iterations of this I try the more I wonder... is XP actually the bad one?

So each iteration one of things I struggle with is, OK there's more than one character currency, so... which options cost what?

For some context I've been running this as a points based system.

OK so your sword and your wizard dress cost money.

Your "Skills" are probably individually of equivalent mechanical value, but maybe perform different mechanical roles, they probably cost XP.

At least. In early iterations.

But even then. Bob is a lizard man. His skin is armor. What does lizard man skin armour cost?

Overwhelmingly in my experience almost every game I have seen says "oh that's part of Bob. SO IT COSTS XP". Or, mechanically massively worse "It costs Bobs 'Race' selection".

Oh wow I could go on about the never ending mess that is 'Race' selection and it's game mechanical implications. Short story it is the worst bit of "Level, Class, Race", it's functionally IMPOSSIBLE for it to balance more than an incredibly narrow band of so called options and it makes your game Racist, not in like a real world offensive way, not in a "orcs are a metaphor for Queenslanders" way, but in an actual "The game will mechanically punish a large minority of player characters" way.

Anyway. Points based systems help get around the pitfalls of 'Race' selection. But buying aspects of your character that function like items... with currency normally reserved for a set of dramatically different options like skills... hm... yeah there can be complications.

But if you price things by function then lizard man skin is an armour item, cat girl claws are a weapon item, and weapons and armour cost wealth currency, not XP. At that point you've solved a lot of problems. Everyone has the same budget for the options that fill the same functional roles.

You just need an excuse for Bob's lizardy skin to cost money and that isn't hard I mean it has a resale value just say that dietary requirements to properly grow it probably also cost him wealth equivalent value and call it a damn day.

Also for starting characters players will conceptually accept starting wealth disparities more easily than starting XP disparities. They know that if they are a soft toothless human and everyone starts naked in a ship wreck so that Bob the Lizard technically has armour when you don't and Tina the Cat Girl technically has a weapon when you don't... It's just a matter of picking up an item or two and the disparity will be rapidly cured. There is an agency and sense of immediate availability that does not exist with XP, however ultimately false.

It also helped with race bullshit because it helped with one of the main divides you need in character background based options. If its something physical like cat girl claws its wealth based. If it is CULTURAL like elf sword skills, it's XP. And then you get the cat girl who grew up in elf town and the solution to what is an inscrutable riddle for level/class/race systems god damn writes itself.

And isn't it great when everything is neat and tidy and fits into clean categories and OH NO!

What about Gary the fire breathing salamander man? I mean. He has a breath weapon. WTF is a breath weapon? What does a breath cost I mean yeah OK it could be an attack so maybe it's a item like cat girl claws or a long bow. But. Maybe it's conceptually and practically more like a fire ball Spell and Spells are basically Skills and cost XP right?

[A few iterations pass floundering around this...]

So then that leads to wait... what are Spells? What should Spells cost?

I mean. The whole D&D wizard thing with the buying and finding scrolls. That... that works. That REALLY damned works. It could actually work a great deal better with some changes. But the basic concept of "the fighter finds and buys swords and armour for attacks and defenses" and "the wizard finds and buys spells for attacks and defenses" and "the fighter/wizard just picks and chooses"... that could really work.

And if spells were functionally items, and I mean allot of them fill the same roles... they cost wealth right? And that really helps solving the problem of what Gary the salamanders breath weapon should cost right?

So here you are like 4 rule set iterations or so in and more and more things are costing money and less and less things are costing XP.

And now you ask the question... what do skills really cost? how do you want to manage their availability? I mean. Wouldn't it be cool to find a Skill in a lost Skill Tome. Like a martial arts manual from one of those movies or comics. Or you know...

... like a Spell.

No no, I mean. You can just learn skills from I don't know teachers they don't have to write it down... but then... maybe that's also like Spells.

Damnit, Ok, so wait what if skills are still special, I mean you can just teach youself your own skill maybe? But... I mean the Wizard can maybe teach himself his own Spell... the Cat Girl grew her own weapons herself... and even the Warrior can make his own sword.

But skills take TIME to learn. Maybe. Oh nuts. Spells take time to learn. Cat Girl claws take time to grow. Swords take time to make.

Well fine then. You can just FIND a sword, or a Spell. You could even I don't know find a potion of cat girl claw growing (now extra conveniently priced at the exact same cost as cat girl claws). But you can't find a skill... unless you find a teacher, inspiration, or a skill book...

Oh nuts. Do Skills cost money now?

Is XP redundant?

OK well how have I been handling XP during these iterations?

Oh dear. Well you see. XP charts and fixed formal XP rewards are a) hard and b) kinda bullshit. So I did the very clearly sensible thing and just decided XP is an abstract currency you sometimes just reward players with.

"Well that was a big fight have an XP each, go buy a... probably shrinking pool of options..."

And yeah "oops" looks like XP is already just... more relatively arbitrary GM awarded loot.

And sure having different types of loot and currency, even if they function very much the same can be used to break up your options thematically or mechanically. I COULD still keep a separation.

But what is actually happening with my recent iterations... XP is is DYING man. It's on god damn life support. It might already be gone and it's just a lingering ghost. My current work in progress... XP isn't a currency the closest thing is maybe just some tags relating to how/where certain options are obtained and honestly that's pretty much just a rough draft of something I might abandon any second.

I've gone on a long journey that is increasingly looking like a trip to a unified character advancement currency and that currency is looking a lot more like money and a lot less like XP.

When you think about it. Is it a surprise that a game centered largely around a fight/loot/advance loop would end up there?

but don't you worry about having too many minigames to juggle around, or do I just lack faith in my players?

I worry about players juggling a single main game. My "minigame" solution is fairly straightforward for everything. Everything gets integrated to the main game as much as humanly possible. Everything in every game component attempts to eliminate all complexity that isn't immediately and highly rewarding.

And the lengths I've gone to accross the entire system to prune complexity are extreme. They've been wildly rewarding in and of themselves much less for the complexity they free up for more rewarding mechanics but with TTRPG design being an environment where people actively don't believe a 1d20+x vs y isn't objectively superior to every variation of a handful of five different kinds of dice in a variable target dice pool with poker rules for pairs and straights, 4s on d20s are wild and exploding d6s... Lets just say "what if we kept HP/Damage numbers under 10" is not a popular position to take.

My game has a main combat game. And a constantly evolving character advancement system that usually involves cool houses which are also where a lot of fights happen.

Does it do stealth? Social stuff? You know the usual "minigames"? I rolled those bastards into the combat game to as near 100% as I could. Who the hell thought stealth even COULD function as some sort of separated minigame to achieve what it needs to? Same goes for social stuff even if it's less obvious and involves more heated internet arguments.

If it doesn't happen IN combat time then it has to be about preparing for it by being about building characters and maps FOR combat time. The end final destination. The rest is and should be the domain of fairy tea party and rolls you pull out of your ass. You can call some segment of combat related rules a minigame but I feel the more you make a system where the word "minigame" is an inaccurate representation, the better.

Maybe it would be best to not think of it as a minigame and instead aim for "downtime" or "between combat" rules.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Oh god, I asked for a rant and that's what I got. This is the kind of shit I'm looking for.

Basically it cuts you down to player interactions like "Player 1: Hey other players can we afford to buy a garage I can keep a cool monster truck in? Lets look at one single number and see" and eliminates interactions like "GM: OK players now refer to your records and apply one strategic turn of income and expenditure resolution to all resource and currency types, don't forget to add the new monster truck garage upkeep!"

So, to visualize this: A property is assumed to make enough money to pay for itself 99% of the time, and the only thing you worry about is how much extra cash is in the property. You get extra cash through randomly getting lucky, purposefully working there and forgoing putting the cash in your pocket in favor of putting it into your coffers, or just getting BIG LOOT that you sell and reinvest. Whether or not you have a surplus or deficit is handled by a single number from which you buy cool shit you care about. Is that similar to what you're saying?

Almost any RPG where items were minimised to the point of being basically free and achieving utterly trivial effects isn't super satisfying.

Yeah, that's certainly not what I want. I'd like items to be cool enough to where people want to get them because it actually does something neat. It's hard to have wealth COMPLETELY disconnected from power, given the reality we live in. How can I put it...?
I don't think owning a Bad Dragon factory should give you extra sorcerer powers, but I do think that owning a Bad Dragon factory should let you make magic buttplugs that give you extra sorcerer powers, which you can use on top of selling to people. I think I just don't like things to be too direct in this regard.

A bunch of wild XP and Gold deliberations

Man, am I glad I don't have any race selection going on. Jesus.
I see what you're getting at, though. It's kind of like, 'what's the difference between Spiderman's webs and a really nice set of grappling hooks'? Bad example, but you know what I mean - if the end result is mechanically similar, what does it matter how you get there? I guess a better example is "do I level up my Pokemon to learn this Move, or do I buy a TM and teach it to it"? Hmm.

Oh dear. Well you see. XP charts and fixed formal XP rewards are a) hard and b) kinda bullshit. So I did the very clearly sensible thing and just decided XP is an abstract currency you sometimes just reward players with.
"Well that was a big fight have an XP each, go buy a... probably shrinking pool of options..."
And yeah "oops" looks like XP is already just... more relatively arbitrary GM awarded loot.

Oh god, no. I'm not sure how well this works in practice, but I'm playing with an 'XP contract', so to speak. Basically, the party sets their own goal and comes to an agreement with the GM as to how much XP achieving that goal is worth. They would come in Major, Regular, and Minor goals that give out more XP the higher Tier the party is. I think having the party effectively list out their own objectives might make things be less arbitrary, but I could be wrong.

Does it do stealth? Social stuff? You know the usual "minigames"? I rolled those bastards into the combat game to as near 100% as I could. Who the hell thought stealth even COULD function as some sort of separated minigame to achieve what it needs to? Same goes for social stuff even if it's less obvious and involves more heated internet arguments.

Ohoho, I've seen some of those. I'm not quite so sold on making things as combat-focused as I think you're getting at, but I can definitely agree on integrating everything into the main game as much as possible... you've just got to define the main gameplay loop first and go from there.