Re: (TFT) Jobs table: 100,000 simulated soldiers and farmers

[PvK <pvk@oz.net>]

Jay, you make some interesting points, but they are all overridden by ideas such as:

* Economics is all an invention. There is no predictable cause and effect.
* Economics are very complicated. It's almost impossible to track accurately in your head.
* Only a small part of GM's want to make much of their campaign dynamic and subject to rules, math and record-keeping, and economics are not one of the things most of even those GM's would choose to rules, math and record-keeping, even if they (wrongly, I think) thought that it was valid to apply rules and such to economics. Though there will be some such GM's such as yourself, and more power to them. (And there are some economic games that could be consulted - see Metagaming's Trailblazer, for example.) However that doesn't mean that any other GM's need to do so.

In your alternate Dale example, any number of completely different things could reasonably happen following your premise. E.g.:

* The Dwarves, Elves, and/or Goblins, and others, could and probably would show up at other times to profit from the situation one way or another, if not all at once to have a decisive battle.
* Individuals and groups within Dale could get greedy and try to use political or physical power to get as much of the gold as possible, and either keep it there or go elsewhere with it.
* It might turn out to have little or no effect on the local economy if it was really parted out evenly. It might become a commodity that no one traded in because everyone there had more than enough of it.
* On the other hand, a culture of hording and paranoia might set in.
* It might fracture the community into different groups with different attitudes towards the gold.

Really the GM is free to say how the community and individuals in his world react to and develop economic ideas. Just like he gets to say how people relate to colors - maybe red is considered noble, and yellow is considered official, so the king's guard wears red and yellow stripes. Economy is just about as arbitrary. Which is not to say it's not very interesting; it's just not something that can be proven and argued about, because it is more in the realm of imagination and culture than it is in the realm of provable science and deterministic cause and effect.

PvK
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