Economies and Conflict Generation
In A New Deal, characters were accorded a quantifiable value of “big bucks� representing their access to political favors and their clout in City Hall. Entertainers garnered more influence as they became big stars, law-enforcement officials needed political favors to carry out large-scale searches of Chicago, city officials and mafia could spend “big bucks� to promote or vote down large public works projects. Unlike a character’s political power in Caer Phaedria, which had the same value for every edict, “big bucks� were expended with each use. Players not only had to assess the merit of possible expenditures of “big bucks,� they had to make judgments on their worth as well. Every “big buck� spent on one project was one “big buck� less for other ventures.
In Guild parlance, A New Deal used an “economy� to mimic a political process. Guild games usually design economies by starting with limited supplies, a larger demand for scarce resources and mechanics for making transactions and assessing the value of those resources. Not all game economies use game money as the principal resource. Some economies are centered on Random Technical Items, some are based on ammunition supplies, some supply weapons and tools useful for other forms of goal achievement and some trade with “Macroeconomic units� (MEUs) of commodities, which are valued an order of magnitude beyond game money. The GMs of Nanopunk: Tokyo often discussed the game as an “angst economy,� as human emotion played a vital and quantifiable role in the game. Economies can be difficult to balance, as GMs must ensure that there are sufficient quantities of resources to make game-winning transactions feasible but not so much that they become trivial. However, the considerations involved in balancing economies are mostly numerical, which may be easier for the GMs’ to figure out.
Economies serve as systems that can generate conflict without the prescription of the GMs. If players realize that all the characters need more resources than they have in hand to accomplish their goals, some will begin to antagonize each other for the sake of procuring supplies. The balance of individual character abilities becomes a concern in these scenarios, as a sufficiently powerful character might easily be able to eliminate random characters and seize their resources. Disincentives to this sort of approach may include player-controlled or GM-controlled law-enforcement, transaction mechanics that keep resources secure even when a character is dead or a character’s psychological distaste of theft.
Beside economies, there are many other ways to generate character conflict without explicit instruction in the character packets of the players. Seduction mechanics may result in characters fighting over characters instead of resources. Alternatively, predisposing characters against certain kinds of stereotypical player actions may result in some interesting clashes. A player who attempts to gather a large number of people to accomplish a difficult task, for instance, may become a target for a character who suspects that large gatherings could be plots against the government. In many cases, GMs try to give players some chance of recognizing the potential danger of their actions.
