The wolf with a purse
You kill a wolf. It drops twelve gold coins.
Every MMO player has seen it a thousand times, and nobody asks where a wolf keeps its purse.
One coin, everywhere
Most games have one gold coin. Monsters drop it, every shop takes it, and it's worth the same in every corner of the world.
It's simple. It also makes money feel like a score instead of a thing people care about. Grind long enough in one spot and everyone ends up rich, so nothing costs anything.
What we're doing instead
Monsters don't drop coins here. Ever. They drop what they are: hides, meat, bone, the odd tooth worth something to the right buyer.
Coin comes into the world one way. Somebody pays you for something they want.
Each realm mints its own money, and some coin is trusted more than others. Dwarven work carries a maker's mark, and people trust the mark because a dwarf's name is on it for life. A guild that stamps its name on every piece can't hide a bad one. Out on the frontier there's no mint at all. People weigh cut silver on a scale, or run a tab on a notched stick at the inn.
Coin comes into the world one way. Somebody pays you for something they want.
What it means for you
If you're rich, it's because you sold something somebody needed.
A trader only wants so many wolf hides in an hour. Flood the market and they stop buying, so you go somewhere else, or sell something else. The plan is for prices to differ from place to place too, so a hide that's cheap by the river might be worth carrying up into the hills.
Now and then, skinning and butchering a big predator, your knife catches on something hard. A few coins. Sometimes a signet ring with a crest on it. Whoever was carrying them never made it home. Then you've got a question to answer.
Where it really is
Built today: no coin from monsters, and traders who only buy so much before they stop.
Not built yet: the different coins in your purse, the scales, the moneychangers and the grim finds. Those come after we've played the first slice ourselves and fixed what's wrong with it.
If that sounds like your kind of game
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