After selling yet another Daedric weapon for another pile of money, my character in Morrowind had over a million gold rolling around in her enormous Jnco pockets. This is more money I would ever need and I still had an entire house full of expensive loot needing to be sold. This felt insane. I could bribe the most politically powerful man in all of Vvardenfell for a measly thousand gold. The most money I’ve ever been paid as a quest reward was five thousand gold. That was to assassinate five bosses of the Thieves Guild. Obviously my wealth was in a different stratosphere.
This is a common occurrence in role-playing games. Somewhere around mid-game, the player has more money than they could ever need. But the non-player characters stay poor. The player is able to buy whatever he or she wants. Some games like Final Fantasy VII have optional end-game money sinks that exist simply to take a lot of money from the player. But what if there was a way to make the player’s obscene wealth part of the game? What if the player was walking inflation?
It makes sense. A player with too much money might be tempted to buy fifty potions to prepare for a difficult boss encounter. Or in the case of Morrowind, visit multiple shops to buy every piece of scuttle in order to make a dozen potions of restore fatigue. This should lead to inflation as shops start charging more due to lack of supply. Fable has a simple inflation mechanic; vendors will charge high prices for an item if they have only a few left in stock. But that is just a start. Inflated prices should be a larger part of the game.
Think about how players could be tempted to change their behavior if they heard random NPCs complaining they were unable to afford the medicine for their children due to the recent leap in prices caused by the player buying all the potions. Imagine if this went further and was part of the morality and reputation system. Good, moral characters would be penalized if they hoarded supplies simply because they could afford them. I’ve said before that role-playing as a good character should be more difficult than playing as an evil character. If a player continued down this path, they could be labeled as a greedy one percenter by the common folk, undermining the player’s mission to win hearts and minds by defeating the great evil.
Back to Morrowind: as mentioned, one of ways to get people to like you is to bribe them with cash. Trainers will also take your money to train your skills saving time grinding. Considering how much money I’ve spent at trainers and paying off everyone to make them talk to me, there’s more money sloshing around the local economy than ever before, which should lead to even more inflation.
If a game developer implemented some system of this sort in a future RPG, it would subtly teach players at least one macroeconomic concept. The developer would not need to be overt about it, a dynamic market with NPC reactions would be enough.
The Keasy Depot 