In Older times there where many different kingdoms dukedoms and god know what else you called you’re self. the largest most powerful ones made and printed there own currency… witch made things complicated. the currencys had different purity rating a different sises and most of the currencys where worth more depending on how large and powerful an empire was. Rummer could drive the value up and down as well. knowing that a silver coin from the north eastern area of the map is worth more then the silver coin from the bottom most kingdom could make things more interesting for traders… or annoying. what do you all think anyone besides me in interested in learning the value of each kingdoms coin and keep track of it?
the area isn’t large enough for this to have practical or gameplay purpose
Isn’t the relative power of states started change the worth of currencies only after banknotes?
Note that most of the common people didn’t have any money. They were buying and selling via barter trade. So this really didn’t bother them much.
And as @213 said, there is no use for that.
Prague Grosh wasn’t the ‘Dollar of Central Europe’ anymore, but it still had strong position in Bohemia & co.
This disturbs me too much to think about the idea.
I agree with @213, but it is also true that coins of all sorts could appear in the game instead of “units of money”. After all, money sometimes travelled quite far from the place of origin. It would be interesting to have to deal with moneychangers, false coinage could be an initiator of brawls and fights, even official releases of coins would have a decreased precious metal content (as they usually did even in medieval times) and one’d have to pay a close attention to how much one really has… Very real-life experience, which has some spicy analogies to our days.
I think that the whole “as real as possible” theme of the game has attracted a lot of people demanding stuff that could be too boring or hard to implement in this kind of game. It is not a merchant simulation. I think that if they add some basic trade from hunting, or smithing, as a side job for spending time out of quests, it would be good.
What about the Barter system, giving/taking loans. Putting your armor as collateral and guy a loan to do whatever, would be some interesting quests.
Yes, but just like the idea with different coins, it may turn out a lot of work wasted (if not many people even consider pawning their equipment) or even counterproductive. A Barter system needs a lot of fine tuning to be realistic and to cover all loopholes. I mean things that appear in some RPGs like: “merchant in town A sells a sword to me, merchant in town B buys the sword off me for a higher price, so I spend days just travelling between A and B and become millionaire just by earning the difference”.
Even the different coinage complication I suggested may annoy a lot of people. Let us be frank, we mostly want realism in what we can do, but not so much in things that we are required to do. Even the announced realistic aspect of “food going to spoil if kept in the inventory for too long” is going to annoy some players.
I think money should be historically accurate. Though barter would be difficult to introduce as if a blacksmith needed a new pair of shoes he may trade a dagger for one. Do if nothing else whatever form of currency in the area and time that existed in that time place (my “guess” would be coins, with whatever symbols that made them official) should be used.
I think, having countless currencies from all over europe in the game would be overkill while on the other hand would add nothing to improve the overall experience. But coins could have different appearances to portray a broader variety of currencies although they are basically worth the same.
Maybe something like that could lead to a quest were the player tracks down the coin counterfeiters and bring them to justice. Which means (according to historical sources) that they would be slowly lowered into boiling oil.
To counter this the buyer could have only a limited budget for a certain timeframe (e.g. a week) which he can spend on things he would like to buy, also his store has limited capacities. Based on how much money he has left, how much items of this kind he already has stored and how frequently the player is coming to him to sell something etc. the NPC merchant will then decide either to lower the amount of money he is willing to spend or to just refuse to buy anything at all. Shouln’t be that hard to do, just a bunch of variables, ratios and thresholds to compare etc. Voila the player isn’t able to sell silly amounts of items to NPCs any longer. And the same goes for the seller (NPC). In his inventory items are limited, too. and he won’t sell every last thing because like in real life maybe some items are reserved for other people (NPCs) who already paid for these goods and will later come by and pick them up as part of their cycle.