Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General RPG Rules: Does money have weight?

I think the bigger question is "What in the game world costs so much that I need to spend a chest full of gold to buy it?"

You have here a question that is asked in every RPG, and yet every RPG to date simply takes the easy way out - you have unlimited gold carry potential for trade. This means that you can sell a private jet to joe schmoe with the infinite pockets.

What if you took an entirely different approach and considered how this would work in the real world (even 1000 - 2000 years ago):

The average land baron doesn't walk around with much money. Aside from the potential to be robbed, gold and silver (especially gold) has a substantial weight value attached to it. Paper money weighs a lot as well (anyone who has lifted a duffle bag of greens knows what I'm talking about). But the average person doesn't have or need that much money in one spot at one time.

To put it in game terms, why would the player carry $10,000,000 in gold coins to a blacksmith to have a sword made? Seems like a character with that much money would have a castle, some servants, and probably a wagon to ferry the gold.

So, then, why wouldn't the character simply have a servant order the item and transfer the gold?

This opens up three layers of economy:

1) The average (common) economy with little money. This is food, simple potions, basic weapons, and other sundries you would expect to find in day to day life. These are relatively inexpensive items that are expected to be purchased in small quantities.

2) The mass production economy with large quantities of money and relatively cheap items. The players who like to buy 100 health potions at once would fit in this category. After all, you probably won't go a gas station and buy 100 bottles of soda. Likewise, there are bound to be laboratories, larger smiths, etc that produce goods in enough quantity for cities, armies, and empires. Instead of selling one or two items directly to the player, the player must go through a broker and buy in quantity. These are then shipped to the player's destination of choice (castle, manor, house, tent, ditch, etc).

3) The luxury economy with rare and extremely expensive items. These items would be difficult to track down and require a chest or two full of gold and gems to buy. While the product is probably small enough to carry, there is no way that the player could possible carry that much gold to make the purchase. In other cases, the item may have to be delivered (catapult? Bronze Statue? Chevy Blazer?).

To facilitate the second two economies, the aforementioned bank system could work, where the player deposits gold into a banking system that tracks it (and eventually their own estate?). Instead of instant delivery, the player could expect delivery in x amount of time (either for transportation, production, or both.

Obviously I don't know how the game is going to play, and how much the passage of time matters, but this could add another depth to the game where your gold shipments could be lost or raided, and hiring guards to protect the shipment a way to balance the economy a little more. If people want to live like land barons, they have to spend money to protect their holdings.

That's just my thought.

Yeah, I think it's totally possible for Larian to do something like that to make weighted money feasible.

I just think it would be a gigantic waste of Larian's time and resources compared to just making weightless money.

I completely disagree. Giving the player the choice to go rogue or become part of the game world is a great way to add intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. It also adds more play time per developer hour than a standard campaign. This is why so many RPG games have been implementing it.

The average land baron also typically stays in one spot and just sits there getting rich by sitting there making money off his land. Your usual adventurers don't start out with a house, servant and bank account.

Game economics are different from real world economics. No one used gold coins for the most basic transactions in the real world, Gold was worth far too much, copper and silver coins were used for smaller purchases, then later came paper money. Things also cost less than what you pay in games because in the real world your primary income isn't from wandering into a cave and wandering out with a huge sack of gold coins that more than pays for any expenses you incurred fetching it.

Trying to model game economics on real-world ones seems like a silly idea.




Maybe my brain just hasn't woken up yet, but I don't know what you're trying to say, or why weighted money has anything to do with it.

I've been playing PC RPG's since the late 80's a quite a few of them did have systems in place where money had weight (like Pool of Radiance and other gold box games). Personally I think it makes sense, but I think you need the right kind of game mechanics to support it and make it fun.

For instance, in the Gold Box games there wasn't just "gold"...you had various types of money. There was copper, silver, gold, and platinum. In the main city there were banks that you could convert 100 copper to silver, 100 silver to gold, etc...so you could reduce the weight you are carrying by converting less valuable metals to less (quantity) but more valuable metals.

If money has weight we should also be given cool storage options. Not just a barrel in a house, but (like the above example) possibly a bank or vault where we could make deposits and withdrawals.

Anyways whatever you guys decide I think would be fine. While weighted money (with the appropriate supporting mechanics) would totally be cool with me, it's not a feature I think I would miss either. Just not that a big of a deal I guess :P

Really? Then why was the defense of Spain against the Dervish and the Crusades a giant land grab by Norman, Germanic and Norwegian barons? Why did wealthy land owners on the American east coast take part in the Westward expansion and rail road development?

Owning land does not enslave you to it.

Also, don't tell developers they can't base the economy off a realistic model. You would have to throw out almost every modern game that uses some form of currency over the last 10 years.

I'm not sure what's difficult to understand about not starting with those things and working your way up. Of course, I thought it was absolutely obvious that I meant a ladder system over starting with those things. Since, you know, you tend to start with a little bit less money and purchasing power too. Those two things seem to have some correlation in an RPG .



That's fine. The developers understand it, and that's all that matters.

You can't. For RPG it will be too complicated to implement actual realistic model. There always will be simplifications that will lead to worts case scenario in the end and you will have to put up with compromise like many simulators nowadays.
Artificial one always works better. It requires much less work and gives good enough impression and immersion. If you are looking for economy manager I think DoS isn't for you. Believe or not - it is an RPG after all.

Paraphrased


Why both of course. The solution I would suggest is to have huge diminishing returns to the benefits gold can provide. If the best equipment in the game is expensive even for player 2 but provides only a marginal combat benefit over the equipment player 1 can buy then there's a benefit to searching through every barrel but not one that breaks the game. Players might gripe about this but it's reasonably balanced and quite realistic.

On topic I'd prefer if nothing had a weight value and I could focus on exploration and combat rather than juggling my pack to see if I could get more value out of dropping 2 swords and a dagger and picking up a breastplate. If that doesn't fit with the design goals maybe there could be a portable store item to turn all non magical loot you pick up to gold immediately.

There will be teleporter stones in the game, so you can at least leave one at a home base and/or near a merchant, and use them to quickly drop off or sell loot.


Welcome to the forum.

Why thank you Raze.

I'd argue from there that there's no gameplay based reason to have weight be any consideration, at any time you can teleport you are 2 loadscreens away from a fresh weight limit anyway. A quick read of the forum though suggests Divinity has quite a large simulationist following and this wouldn't be universally approved. I'll just play a character who has qualms about looting the dead.

There can be real game reasons for having weight and I have played quite a few games where this was the case (sometimes it worked well and sometime it was rather annoying); having said that i have no real comments other than if money has weight I prefer it falls into "it worked well" case; otherwise I prefer it to not have weight

I think fun should always come first and game mechnics only second. Why implementing weight mechanics (for gold) if it doesn't the fun you have while playing the game? Weight limitations for money is imo quite senseless since you could always barter large amount of coins for some of higher value (like silver coins -> gold coins) of even for some very valuable things like jewelry (rings, chains etc)which you could sell if you need money for buying something else. Weight limitations for money would increase the world coherency but at the cost of endless running from one merchant to another to buy or sell things (which is quite boring imo).

Gold should weigh... SOMETHING but not enough to burden you completely.
and enough to make money not useless.

Gold/Silver bars, Gems/crystal, or just junk items that can be only sold for money and have no other fucking purpose in game but to be sold for in game money..... SHOULD have weight.
(i HATE these type of items if they are in every chest i find and after many hours it make money useless)

money itself should be weighted but you should be freely able to carry around 1000~ thousands of gold coin with ease and item prices should depend on that.

ok, i have admit something shameful here but I CHEAT!
i always cheat money after playing ANY game after a certain time in or on my 2nd/3rd playthroughs.
i always do it.. I will likely do with same with weight if it becomes a huge problem and i don't feel like rpg-ing it up.

Also keep in mind as i said before money can become useless... because there are not enough items to buy or you so much of it, its pointless now. So having weight on money/gold can be good thing to balance it out.

Yes..simply yes.. and indeed small valuables also..like diamonds and rubies.. like in DD

I think that this depends of what kind of game it will be. In an Action-RPG we do not want to care about such things like ‘realism’. But in a Classic-RPG we can be able to notice more details of realism.

Since very few games have gold limit, nobody will notice if the gold has no weight. But if you would implement such limitation, you will need a good justification, and if the system works fine, it will have make history again because weight always got sense.

Gold limitation must be supported for a balanced loot system, i.e. you will don’t want to have the necessity of exchange gear frequently, in this case, gear doesn’t need to stay in inventory all the time, also a craft system could solve the excess of items (like melt 10 swords to forge one better), it also needs good trade rules (the best sword can’t cost 1.000.000 times more than the cheaper one like in ARPG games). Etc. With simple rules well applied, gold can have weight and players will not miss anything.


Well, games who want to stay ok with all kind of players are often called casual. In most of cases you will need to choose what kind of players are you targeting.

And if you will implement difficulty settings, please: reward the effort! Since in most games people who ends in easy will have the same rewards that the ones who play in hard, but in less time, and this is a little unfair.


This is another topic but I want to say that this is a good idea to notice that the health bar is much more than a simple bar.

I hope money wwill have ALMOST no weight, let's say 1 goldcoin = 0,0001 weight, so if I'm carrying 1000 gold = 1 weight.
Further on: interchange with traders: let's say 1 Ruby weight 0,1 and has a value of 10 000 goldcoins or something.
Just an idea I like, nothing more.
If not like this, do it like in DD = money has no weight. And like Destello said: give players who play hardest difficulty other loot to find ! (so it give indeed more satifaction playing (in) a nightmare

No, really, there's no reason at all to give money weight at all. It's just a nuisance. One of the problems is that games tend to have one universal currency, so the smallest of trifles has to cost 1 gold, and the high end trifles cost 50,000 or more.

This is resolved in the real world by having multiple tiers of currency:
1 gold = 100 silver
1 silver = 100 copper
1 gold = 10000 copper

So that 50,000 copper piece Item of Awesome is only 5 gold pieces.

Weighted gold needs careful design and balancing to work well, and Larian COULD spend time, energy and money to get a workable system, but I'd rather they leave gold as weightless and focus that energy on making Henchmen more interesting.

It's easy to assume that every protagonist carries debit card on their pockets. It's impossible to carry 1000000000000000000000000 gold physically.

If you want my input, NO. It will be a hassle unless of course a debit cards were implemented in the game through the use of "source".

I played a NWN module with money weight and yes it's realistic but also a nightmare. If you are a hoarder it just ends up with a million trips back and forwards to dump money and go collect items. I'm already an inventory tetris professional and adding money makes it just too time consuming. Games aren't for complete realism in my opinion...you play games to have a break from annoying hassles not be assaulted with more (although challenges are good and fun and we don't want a dumbed down game). However big the inventory is it never seems enough! I guess if it were an infinite inventory it would be boring though.

Money should have weight. At least coins, since we have teleport pyramids, everyone will most likely find an empty house to dump stuff in that they'll sell later. They can do the same with gold.

The added wight can always be applied on the harder version, if such a version will be available.