Ryan Paddy said: One approach I've seen be successful is to not have an economy. Characters have a "wealth" attribute that determines how much gear and coin they start each event with, and any coin that is accumulated during play does not carry over to the next event. Click to expand...

Ryan Paddy said: If you're going for something closer to an economy, with money arriving with new characters and from NPCs and circulating among the player base and having relatively stable worth, then you need real sinks for cash to leave via to stop inflation. Click to expand...

Roughly speaking, these are two obvious ways to handle economics - either you abstract it out (you don't have enough players for interesting economic dynamics/your players are not interested in economic dynamics) or you try to include some interesting dynamics.In practice, the main problem is that you don't get players with all of one sort of preferences - if you abstract out wealth, some players will pester you to add in some economic dynamics for them - if you have some economic dynamics that requires that everyone has to run to stay in the same place, some players will complain that they are forced to do Boring Stuff.In theory, the solution is to make it optional - i.e. no one starves if they don't engage actively with the economic system, but if you want to make Big Profits from Trading Wheat you have to engage in a system which requires constant upkeep and has decreasing returns. Unfortunately, players often don't view things that give other players potential advantages as 'optional' - it's difficult to get the payoff from Trading to be big enough to justify the risks inherent/efforts required in the Trading System - but not so big that the players who don't enjoy Trading complain about being shut out/being forced to do something they don't enjoy.With respect to the economic system, fundamentally you need to know what the lifetime of your campaign is. If it has a finite lifetime, then it's acceptable to have inflation and increasing returns - you can effectively run a civ game. Balance may be tricky, but there's no fundamental issue with the system have a finite life expectancy due to economic evolution.Alternatively, if you're system is expected to run indefinitely, you really need an overtly 'entropic' economic system. Think 'beach dynamics' - with a moderate amount of effort you can create sand castles which will persist for a time - but you bigger you build them, the more upkeep and maintenance they require and the more rapidly they collapse for lack of it. Effectively, the economic game has an equilibrium state from which it can be perturbed with player effort (with increasing perturbation requiring exponentially increasing player effort), but to which it'll return whenever that effort slacks off. That doesn't just apply to economics - that applies to any game which has stability as a feature (Odyssey's political system).The problem with entropic economic systems is that players are often used to finite duration tabletop games with pauper-to-billionaire economic systems (or Wealth style abstractions), which is never going to be compatible with an entropic economic system (or, more generally, a game with indefinite duration and historical consistency).With respect to "what are the goods?" that's always going to be partly a function of how many players there are, because you're buying Stuff to interact with Other People. 10 people do not make much of an economy. 10 million people make a really big economy because there's a lot of different ways 10 million people can interact. The usual patch in larp is to have an NPC economy with a cast of thousands who just happen to off-scene - effectively introducing some sort of civ game (one of the most popular things we did at a local system was introducing a Devotion system where PCs priests would preach their creed to the local setting NPC inhabitants in order to convert/reconvert/prevent counter-convertions - the dynamics weren't deeply complicated, but it was easy to integrate into the preexisting building system - if you spend a lot of money lavishly upgrading your Church and maintaining it every week, you'll get more converts when you preach, quite possibly poached from the churches of other PCs - if you have enough devoted NPCs, you can then use this use the threat of riots as a political bargaining chip).For the more mundane PC stuff, you need to think about what is mobile in the game. Weapon and armour physreps are not normally mobile, so these basically have to be 'trash' in your economy - literally, not worth the effort of carrying off monsters/other players (watch the historical accuracy people start to weep). Weapon/armour/character upgrades, on the other hand, can be mobile (but they need to things that decay - either finite time or finite charges - if you introduce permanent non-consummable items you will just need to introduce a permanent non-consummable item consumer ...).Marios