Crafting

[Slamz]

With a barter system the goods have to be farmed out in the fontier. They have to be dragged back to a place to be refined. The refinement locations are attackable so still at risk. Players can't hide raw goods. They will always be able to hide currency.

There's no reason you couldn't just make currency behave like a raw good.

So you go out and farm 400 logs and get jumped on your way back to town and you lose the logs.
How is this different than going out to farm 400 gold coins, provided you also drop them when you die?

You stack the logs in your warehouse and enemies can destroy the warehouse and steal or destroy your logs.
How is this different than storing gold in your bank and then letting enemies sack the bank to steal or destroy the contents?

If the casual player isn't in the mood to go picking flowers then he should go where the flowers are and kill the players picking the flowers. They drop all of there raw goods when killed and whaa laaa.

Or, with currency, if you want flowers, you could also kill the guy mining iron ore, or the guy skinning wolves or the guy chopping trees, steal whatever they drop, sell it for gold coins, then use the coins to buy the flowers.

All the currency really does is set a global common item whose only purpose is to help people perform exchanges. There's no reason it has to be any more secure than any other resource.



But I am starting to see some value in having currency be more "real".

e.g., suppose NPCs never drop gold. It is never generated in this fashion. If you buy an item from an NPC and give him gold coins, those coins do not "vanish" -- they become part of the NPCs inventory. Other CRPGs have done that -- NPCs actually have limited cash because there is limited cash in the world. If one NPC is out of cash you either need to buy stuff from him or go find another NPC who does have cash.