The standard model of an adventurer is that of an independent contractor. Some part or parties have a job they need doing. The adventurer or adventurers take the job and get paid out for completing it Everyone is happy. Alternatively, the adventurers inhabit a town surrounded by wilderness and ruins, which they explore/plunder for treasure, which is then converted to cash at the hub town.

These approaches has a few flaws that I’ll list in no particular order.

1. It presupposes several things about the setting, namely the existence of larger- than-life-heroes in one case and a cash economy in the other. This is a minor problem but either of these assumptions is weird in a West Marches style game and could be inappropriate in a variety of them. Usually this also means there are lots of tracts of legally unclaimed land, or that kings and dukes pick random yahoos off the street to handle their problems.
2. It makes the transition to domain level play awkward. This doesn’t matter in every game, but in games where it does matter, this is a huge problem. It also prevents the characters from engaging in the setting and the world, which in turn can encourage murder-hobo behavior.
3. It trivializes part of the game. Almost every rulebook I’ve ever read has a section or chapter called ‘equipment’ or something similar which shows off tables of various commodities. The tables list weight, properties, names, uses, and prices. Those prices, however, become trivial information. The independent contractors amass liquid cash so quickly that the price of the goods becomes irrelevant with equal speed.

This last item probably the biggest issue with the traditional approach. Acquiring tools and materials is trivial, and so this leads to a lot of gaming the system, i.e. buying food supplies or a quantity of iron goods that shouldn’t exist and trying to resell them. Obviously the DM can intercede at this point and put a stop to whatever market-based shenanigans the PCs are planning. Some games try to include market rules for what can be bought where and in what quantities. Other games also move around the problem entirely, and just have obviously magical items available on the market to serve as a sink for the player’s cash. I don’t think there is anything wrong with either of these approaches, but I also don’t think they’re generally appropriate for all types of games. So, I want to think through an alternative. I say ‘think’ because I’m not playing or running a game right now, so I can’t really tell how well it works at the table. But if I were running a game, I would probably run it something like this.

Patron Economics

Mostly inspired by this Coins and Scrolls post. It is good. Read it.

To summarize some ideas from the post: Every adventurer has a place in society and someone they report to. The knights report to their lord. The priests report to their bishop. The peasants report to whoever collects their taxes, so usually their lord. For my purposes, the lord or whoever is the nascent form of the patron as I imagine it. That dungeon your plundering is owned by someone, and you need permission to plunder it. Failure to do so results in loss of status, fines, torture, hanging, etc. Furthermore, any treasure you extract really belongs to the lord who owns the land, so you give up all the treasure you found and hope they are generous when rewarding you.

This basically how I imagine the patron system. The player characters are not independent contractors. They have a boss they report to. Unlike the linked post, my patrons will be considerably more diverse in background. They can be lords or bishops, but they can also be mayors, archmages, guild masters, traders, viceroys, and crime bosses. They know about dungeons, and they are perpetually strapped for cash. This boss takes everything they earn and decides how they divvy it up between themselves and the adventurers. As is expected, this arrangement almost always prefers the boss. In my theoretical game, the default patron tax is 98%. Bosses don’t like their employees being too rich. It means they can choose a different boss, or in starting having airs. No can do. 98% of everything. This naturally includes treasure, but it also includes stuff like equipment recovered in the field. They’ll probably let you keep stuff for your own use for free, but if you want to resell all the three tons of iron you picked off the corpses of your enemies, that’s going to go through your patron.

Which brings us to the next aspect of the patron. They are your access to the market. The only thing you can buy normally in most pre-industrial are some tools, textiles, and food. Maybe some higher class items if you are in a big commercial city. But other things – plate armor, specialty weapons, caravan or water transport, building materials, labor, training, or anything in bulk? That probably has to go through a factor. The adventurers don’t know any factors and wouldn’t be able to afford them if they did. But your patron can serve as a factor. Any more advanced purchases goes through them. They do want you to be effective, after all. From now on, any prices quoted in my game are the prices that you pay through your patron. It will generally be much higher if you seek these things out yourself.

Clever players can find a way to enter the market themselves, if they’re clever and/or the game calls for that. They can also hide treasure from their patron, as mentioned in the linked post, or they can negotiate a better price for their services. But starting out, they are going to be working under a patron, and they’re going to be getting screwed.

The Social Game

When tabletop gamers talk about the social game, they’re talking about the everyday concerns of negotiating to get what you want via charisma and persuasion. But this should really be called the diplomacy game or something, because what I think about when someone says “social game” to me is the social status of the characters, not specific actions they take. Typically, this isn’t thought of by default, another byproduct of the independent contractor approach. But in this new system, this discrepancy must be addressed.

Starting out, my adventurers have no formal social standing whatsoever. They have no land, no money, and no citizenship or protection under the law. Generally, they have no family, and if they do, their family is in as bad or worse circumstances than they are, or the family has completely forsaken them. This is another difference between my approach and Skerples’s – every adventurer is on the displaced bottom rung of society. No knights with farms or priests with congregations. Some adventurers might be fugitive or in debt, but mostly they are the unnoticed and uncared for. All they have are some skills that are potentially useful for tomb robbing.

This is because no one would accept adventuring if they couldn’t keep most of the money they got from it, so the only people doing it are the truly, insanely desperate. Once they get in, they might develop other reasons to stay, but no one starts adventuring because they think it’s a good career choice. Even if you had money, most people wouldn’t give you the time of day. The adventurer is an unknown. They are a nobody.

This is why the patron can hire you at such low rates, and why they don’t go to someone else. Actual soldiers would refuse to enter the depths of the Earth, but this thug that’s good at killing people might be able to do the trick. But this is also the opportunity for the adventurers to get ‘back in’ to society. Naturally, even with the insane tax, the adventurers will eventually become rich. Money talks, and clever adventurers can acquire property and commensurate social standing, either through their patron or out from under them.

However, the patron isn’t purely a barrier to the adventurers access to society, but also the doorway. First of all, servants of powerful people tend to have a pull of their own. When your starting out, that guard will probably bludgeon an adventurer over the head just for looking at them, let alone asking to be let into the castle. But once the adventurer is a known and valued personage in service to the mighty baron, they won’t even have to ask. They are, after all, honing a very specific skill set that no one else has, and frequently develop a reputation for solving difficult problems of all kinds. This makes experienced adventurers a prestigious, if sometimes disreputable, ornament for a patron. It’s like patronizing a theatre troupe, or a an artist, or a chef. Adventurers can get invited to balls and courts, either as a part of their jobs or just to show off. They can be ‘loaned’ to other big men who need their specific skillset. The baron’s stable of adventurers might catch the eye of the king or archmage that needs something specific recovered from a dungeon.

Any social circle the patron is part of will soon include the adventurers. Clever adventurers can use this access to society to schmooze and persuade, like they do in the game already. Moving patrons is possible and even encouraged. The adventurers can go from nobodies, ignored and hated, to the toast of the court and a name on the lips of many. Now when the king is asking them to rescue the princess, it’s because his army can’t do it, and the adventurers are the only people around that might be able to handle a hostage crisis.

In Play

“Alright,” I hear you say. “But won’t this make my PCS way less empowered? Don’t I want to give my players to have as many tools as possible?”

Yes, it will. This is for the type of game where the PCs start as nobodies and become heroes/villains/bastards through their own hard work. If that isn’t your cup of tea, no worries. Again, nothing wrong with the alternative. But I want to figure out how to make the game I described, and like to play and run, work better. Don’t worry, it isn’t all bad. The moment to moment play in the dungeon won’t really change. While I don’t want the adventurers to be rich, they will have enough money to buy crowbars, candles, and ten-foot poles. The expense of doing so will no longer be trivial, is all. Hell, it might encourage to them to use their tools more creatively, since it cost them more, relatively speaking.

But really, this is mostly concerned with downtime, and the context around the dungeon. It’s pissing on the player a bit, which is why I’m adding some things you might consider unfun, like ‘paying taxes’ and ‘having a boss’ to the formula. It is obviously and loudly pissing on the player, by placing them in the setting of the game, and critically placing them at the bottom of the setting.

“Well,” you say “this sounds rather cruel and unusual. You seem like one of those DMs that revels in punishing their players, and want to retain death-grip control of the setting and trajectory of the plot, you secondary-world-enjoying, world-building, con-langing, gazetting, source-book-writing, fork-tongued blogging knave!”

“Don’t you think worldbuilding should be a collaborative project? Shouldn’t the players be able to effect the world and see the consequences of their actions?” You ask.

Yes and yes. The issue is that I don’t think it should be easy or immediate. Some random jackass should not be able to destabilize the kingdom, or even get within spitting distance of a king, much less assassinate him. It strains believability to have randos offing key political figures, but more importantly it loses any impact. What does killing the king matter if any 3rd level thief can do it? Sure, it’s all pretend, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be earned. If you start out not being able to affect the world, fighting for your life in shitty cellars to recover shit-encrusted treasure for your asshole boss, it juxtaposes your acts of political derring-do. It feels more rewarding. The DM didn’t just hand it to you, there was challenge involved. If the world doesn’t resist changing even a little bit, then their isn’t any accomplishment in changing it, is there? Weightlifters don’t use 5 pounds dumbbells for the bench press. As a player, I want to feel like I had to work to affect the setting (dorky as that might be), and I as a DM I want my players to work for it too.

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