Affording a spaceship?

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

If, on the other hand, the character is a wanderer and starts with 100% of starting wealth, then simply reduce the prices of spaceships to that of cars.

Okay...

I build a world, then I GM a campaign set in it, and I decide that in this campaign, the players' characters shall be settled by default, and that defines the cost of spaceships in the world.

Then, a year later, I decide to GM another campaign in the same world, taking place in the same time period as the first campaign, but this time I decide that the default for player characters shall be a nomadic lifestyle. So suddenly all the hundreds of thousands (if not tens of millions) of spaceships in the world, owned by thousands or millions of NPCs, get their price reduced to 1/5 of what it used to be.

Then, the year after that, I decide to GM a third campaign in this world, still in the same time period, but going back to settled-by-default, so suddenly every single ship in the entire universe gets its price quintupled.

I'm confused now. I'm really confused.

And not only am I confused.

The billions of NPCs who live in this world are also confused.

They thought that they understood ecnomics and finance. Not perfectly, even though high-TL Economics is obviously going to be at least slightly more scientific than present-day-TL Economics. But they thought they had a rough idea, they thought their experts, professors at the major business universities, had a rough idea of how stuff works, how money works, how and why prices change. Enough to usually be able to see changes coming before they happen (anticipation - a major benefit of living in an actual world is that you can develop a useful sense for what to anticipate), and always foreseee hugely drastic changes (such as prices getting divided by 5 or multiplied by 5) well in advance, when the cause isn't a paradigm shift (typically a major technological advancement, such as the development of fusion reactors), and to always be able to explain serious changes in hindsight.