[LT/Fantasy Economics]Societies with non-interchangeable currencies/barter categories

[vicky_molokh]

Greetings, all!

Anyone tried exploring a society which has multiple non-interchangeable types of goods or currencies? Examples would be a tribe which has a strict taboo against bartering tools for food and vice versa (maybe with more categories - e.g. weapons, services, toys). Or the currency system of Dalaran, where you buy weapons and armour for Emblems, cooking training for Cooking Awards, rare gems for Jewelcrafting Tokens, simple services for Gold Coins and so on.

How do you handle it from both the anthropological and rules respective, and what knowledge can you share?

Thanks in advance!

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

How do you handle it from both the anthropological and rules respective, and what knowledge can you share?

This is actually normal. The usual division is between ordinary and prestige goods, good places to look for examples are bride prices (which often must be paid in specific high status goods, cattle for example) and kula rings.

One of the revolutionary features of money is to dissolve these differences by making it possible to establish an exchange rate between everything.

It's not clear to me what rules you would need exactly if this were a currency system rather than a kind of barter - you'd simply track all the different kinds of money separately right? I guess you'd need to establish a relation of each to GURPS$ for character creation purposes. Since such trades are being defined as never happening, nobody in the society would know what that rate was of course.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by malloyd

One of the revolutionary features of money is to dissolve these differences by making it possible to establish an exchange rate between everything.

Well, not quite everything. Taking a woman out for dinner and entertainment, and spending freely, produces a very different reaction than if you just offered her the cash.

Bill Stoddard

[D10]

Indeed, but having a decent standard of living, and taking her to a decent place where theres a good envyroment and good food no violence etc...

Also goes a long way ;)

edit: and that comes mostly with money

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by D10

Indeed, but having a decent standard of living, and taking her to a decent place where theres a good envyroment and good food no violence etc...

Also goes a long way ;)

edit: and that comes mostly with money

Yes. The point is not that money doesn't let you do either one; obviously it does. The point is that they're different spheres of exchange; there are many women who don't participate in the low-prestige sphere of direct monetary exchange for sexual services, and will be insulted if you offer them money, even if they expect you to spend money on them.

Bill Stoddard

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Well, not quite everything. Taking a woman out for dinner and entertainment, and spending freely, produces a very different reaction than if you just offered her the cash.

Bill Stoddard

To a limited extent. Things will sometimes be offered cheaper for emotional reasons. Not everybody will change sides for 30 pieces of silver either. Still there probably *is* a cash value sufficently high to buy either service, it just happens that you can sometimes appear to knock the price point down by not having to pay for the seller's self respect in addition to the service you are actually buying.

[Frost]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Anyone tried exploring a society which has multiple non-interchangeable types of goods or currencies? Examples would be a tribe which has a strict taboo against bartering tools for food and vice versa (maybe with more categories - e.g. weapons, services, toys). Or the currency system of Dalaran, where you buy weapons and armour for Emblems, cooking training for Cooking Awards, rare gems for Jewelcrafting Tokens, simple services for Gold Coins and so on.

How do you handle it from both the anthropological and rules respective, and what knowledge can you share?

Having only scratched the surface of this in one brief experiment I can't give you anything comprehensive. However my experience of this was that on the whole it was more of a pain in the backside than the benifits it offered to the setting justified.

In the end I wound up using a simple shortcut of drawing up a series of lists of common goods of different status categories and assuming that they were freely convertible within a given category at broadly book price and either impossible to exchainge outside of a category or at least very nearly so. If I were trying to realise your goal I would probably cheat and make sure that each class of goods included some suitible medium for storing value say gold, glass beads or cowrie shells for high status goods and salt for low status with these goods serving as a defacto form of currency within its class.

[hari]

I've lately been thinking about having both local currencies and kingdom wide currencies. This seems to be very in keeping with reality, and I don't think it has to be too difficult.

Most towns have a granary or mill or some other place used to process and store grain. Farmers bring in their harvest, leave it at the granary, and are given something like a receipt or a banknote. They can then use that banknote or receipt to buy other goods from other businesses in town. Of course, this won't be very useful for anyone who doesn't live close to the grain bank. It will have to be a local currency. And also, as the grain will spoil, it must be taken out of the bank fast. This creates a vibrant and active economy in which saving money is counter productive. The best way to provide for the future is to do something like building a cathedral to attract more business.

Kings don't like this, it keeps wealth out of their hands by decentralizing the economy. So they issue a currency backed by gold, or some other scarce high price commodity that everyone values and the king has in large supply. This currency mostly the same as what most of us take for granted in both fantasy worlds and today.

The two currencies are in competition. Their relative values are never quite the same. Some things may be good for one and bad for the other. The main difference is what you can buy, and where you can buy it. Buying local goods in a local market will be best done with the local currency. Buying exotic foreign goods or the work of skilled artisans will require use of the king's gold currency. Keep track of what kind of currency you have, if you use the right currency in the right situation, there is no real change. If you use the wrong currency for the situation, you may have to pay significantly more.

Now your differing currencies become less a problem of differing currencies, and more a problem of figuring the different costs for a single item in different places. The PDF Grain into Gold lists 4 prices for everything. One price at the source, one at nearby marketplaces, another in nearby cities, and the last one at distant cities. These often seem to follow a formula where the cost might progress from 10 to 15, then to 30, and finally to 60. Assume that at the source and in local markets you are to pay in local grain based currency and that in cities you are to pay in the king's gold. If you try to pay with the wrong currency, you pay extra.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by hari

The two currencies are in competition. Their relative values are never quite the same. Some things may be good for one and bad for the other. The main difference is what you can buy, and where you can buy it. Buying local goods in a local market will be best done with the local currency. Buying exotic foreign goods or the work of skilled artisans will require use of the king's gold currency. Keep track of what kind of currency you have, if you use the right currency in the right situation, there is no real change. If you use the wrong currency for the situation, you may have to pay significantly more.

No, actually you almost certainly won't. Unless there are no items you can buy in either currency all you need is to set the price in one or the other and determine the exchange rate between them that day. If there are two things you can buy in either currency at different exchange rates (i.e there exists something that's cheap in one coinage but expensive in the other), some smart fellow will start buying in one and selling in the other, taking his second currency to the second good, buy and sell in the other direction to get back more of the first currency than he started with. He (and everybody who sees him) can then repeat the cycle, and become fabulously rich. Not. Very, very quickly the prices will adjust so this inequality goes away. This process is called arbitrage when it occurs between national currencies, or between gold and silver coinages, and consequently has lots and lots of theoretical literature if you are actually interested in it.

[vicky_molokh]

I just realized that having two or more non-interchangeable currency types can be very handy for GMs running Spaceships games where they want to make sure PCs can't afford cool personal gear even though they have to pay for maintenance, repair and upgrade of the ship (and/or vice-versa).

This is done by simply declaring that (e.g.) private property and personal property use different non-interchangeable currencies, and declare ships and houses to count as private property and stuff you can carry as personal.