42. Coin - Granularity and Digits

One of the design accolades that I’ll always give to John Harper, is that he understands the experience of play, and understands how to write rules that generate the second-order effects of play that he wants. Harper isn’t the kind of designer who tells you how to play, he’s the kind who creates compelling situations in one direction, which pulls you away from the stuff that you didn’t want to do anyway, but mechanically felt that you had to.

Which brings us to Coin, and abstractions of wealth. In an effort to write these posts in less than an hour, I don’t want to go through the history of abstractions of wealth in Indie games, but there’s a deep history. Perhaps Dungeon World’s Coin would be the closest abstraction, but even then, John drops the baseline significantly and that has some amazing impacts. The reason I want to approach this such, though, is that it runs contrary to a lot of expectations I had about economic design in games. So here’s a little piece I’m calling “Economics in the System: Three Design Rules I Thought I Knew (And How John Harper Taught Me Better)”

And, to keep these short and try to get back to daily, I’ll be doing one per day. Seth Godin told me to do so.

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I’m not an economics designer. I’m not an “anything” designer. I reject labels like that. I’m not a TTRPG designer, or PbtA designer, or Systems or Narrative designer. I’m a Game Designer, and even that doesn’t cover it. Maybe you’d call me a Player Experience Designer, and maybe that would you tell you what you need to know. I’m not a specialist designer, and I don’t believe in specialising within game design to the detriment of our own learning. So when I was asked at work to design a draft hero gatcha economy, I took it as a broadening challenge.

My point is that I’ve done some economic design. But I’m not an economy designer.

There are a few general rules in economic design that Blades in the Dark blows out of the water, and these have changed my general approach to economies in games:

RULE ONE: “One is a bad number to use. Because two is your next option, and it’s twice as large.”

It is conventional wisdom in economic design that to use “one” a baseline is a bad idea. You want some granularity. If “one” is your standard, than your only option to go up is “two”. And (not to blow any minds here) two is twice as large as one. So your only step of granularity is to double. So conventional wisdom says we instead use 10 or 100. If a normal enemy drops 100 gold, then I can make the next one drop 103 gold, adding variety without tilting the economic scales.

Dungeon World, for example, uses a two digit system, which elevates to a three digit system in later play. A throwing knife is one coin, a Hunting bow is 100 coins, most stuff exists around 30-50 coins as a multiple of ten. With some variety (a sword is 8 coins. The novelty of a short sword being 8 coins and a longsword being 15 is dependent on that level of granularity provided by two/three digit numbers). Blades in comparison is a one digit system. Two digits are possible but anomalous.

Ragged Bow; near, 15 coins, 2 weight
Fine Bow; near, far, 60 coins, 2 weight
Hunter’s Bow; near, far, 100 coins, 1 weight
Crossbow; near, +1 damage, reload, 35 coins, 3 weight
Bundle of Arrows; 3 ammo, 1 coin, 1 weight
Elven Arrows; 4 ammo, 20 coins, 1 weight
Club, Shillelagh; close, 1 coin, 2 weight
Staff; close, two-handed, 1 coin, 1 weight
Dagger, Shiv, Knife; hand, 2 coins, 1 weight
Throwing Dagger; thrown, near, 1 coin, 0 weight
Short Sword, Axe, Warhammer, Mace; close, 8 coins, 1 weight
Spear; reach, thrown, near, 5 coins, 1 weight
Long Sword, Battle Axe, Flail; close, +1 damage, 15 coins, 2 weight
Halberd; reach, +1 damage, two-handed, 9 coins, 2 weight
Rapier; close, precise, 25 coins, 1 weight
Dueling Rapier; close, 1 piercing, precise, 50 coins, 2 weight

Equipment - Dungeon World SRD

1 coin: A full purse of silver pieces. A week’s wages.
2 coin: A fine weapon. A weekly income for a small business. A fine piece of art. A set of luxury clothes.
4 coin: A satchel full of silver. A month’s wages.
6 coin: An exquisite jewel. A heavy burden of silver pieces.
8 coin: A good monthly take for a small business. A small safe full of coins and valuables. A very rare luxury commodity.
10 coin: Liquidating a significant asset—a carriage and goats, a horse, a deed to a small property

Monetary Values - Blades in the Dark p42

What isn’t spoken of, and what John has very cleverly created in Blades, is that if “100” is your baseline, there’s an expectation that players can find “50” or “25” or even “1”. There’s a verisimilitudinous difference between “nothing in their pockets” and “a few coins”. In a traditional economic system baselined at 100, players are eager to find (and sum) those fractions of wealth. I would wager that gameplay in which players loot bodies, searching for fractions of spendable currency, is not a compelling form of play[1]. If Blades is intending to emulate genre fiction, there’s no scene in Peaky Blinders where ol’ Tommy Scarecrow goes through someone’s pockets for a few shillings. I think it’s critical that we remove that.

[1] - Not compelling form of play for the kind of audience that pursues Blades in the Dark. That is, an audience seeking the “all killer, no filler” play session. There’s certainly a joy in looting the bodies and rolling on loot tables (or having pre-determined contents of every character’s pockets), relating (as is the focus of the linked article) mostly to realism, verismilitude, or simulationism, delete according to your degree of Forge-allergy.

By using a single digit baseline Harper makes chasing those fractions less compelling. It’s easily framed for the GM and the players that most people don’t carry 1 coin around with them, so looting bodies is unlikely to bear sweet economic fruit. In the same way, while Dungeon World has decided to make services worth “14 minus charisma coins”, Blades’ single-digit granularity doesn’t allow for that level of abstracting down: An extra downtime action is 1 coin. There is nothing less than 1 Coin that isn’t zero, so players can’t/don’t fictionally position themselves to get it cheaper. This is what I’m saying when I talk about how good a designer Harper is when it comes to the play experience.

I do wonder about the trade-off in other parts of the design. I idly wonder about whether that loss of granularity is one of the reasons Payout feel samey (which, when we reach that in September of 2025, I’ll be very glad to talk about how I do find Payout a bit samey, administrative, and that I miss some parts of the genre that it tries to abstract out, and I think this is part of the reason. But that’s far from here).

I’m not an economics designer, but hot damn can I appreciate the smoothness of Harper’s designs.

Mark Experience,
Sidney Icarus

The Header image is: "Euro Coins" by Images_of_Money is licensed under CC BY 2.0.