» Tue May 22, 2012 5:31 am
Well, suppressing my urge to start going into Keynesian Economics, the boom and bust cycle, the Multiplier Effect, AND caveat emptor / the assumption of risk...
I honestly feel like this would be a good place to also model a Mercantilist banking system, if I can find proper ways to balance it.
The real medieval economy was focused almost entirely on credit and loans. Farmers wouldn't have actual money - they bought things either through credit (to be paid at harvest time), or through the trade of the practical goods they had on hand, like livestock, furs, and food. Only merchants carried coinage (because they had more opportunity to flee from their debts, they were more often expected to pay up front). Even lords largely ran on credit.
One of the books I was recently reading talked about how after the fall of the Roman Empire, people still measured everything in terms of denarii, even centuries after such coins ceased to exist. The sterling pound was basically never even minted in the first place for centuries after it had become the primary unit of measure of large transactions, especially when dealing with nobles and merchants - everything was handled as a matter of credits and debits on a business ledger, much like how modern banking relies upon invisible digital bank account funds to keep the modern economy going. There simply weren't enough coins in existence to fuel such an economy otherwise.
In the game Dwarf Fortress, in fact, I've been having some arguments similar to this in their forums about credit and debt. In that economy, the game's creator wanted to make dwarves mint their own coins which would have procedurally generated symbols on the coins, quality of the coins, and the date of minting stacked as an immersion factor, but it wound up causing huge problems because of (the lack of) stacking mechanics, and it turned out that the game economy actually ran significantly better when you simply refused to mint coins at all, and ran the entire economy on credit. When dwarves work, they get more in their debit account from the fortress. When they buy food, rent property, and buy whatever random crap, they buy off the credit from their account. The economy runs entirely on the ledgers of the chief bookkeeper of the fortress.
Ironically enough, that's actually pretty close to how such economies really did run. Legal tender used instead of money in medieval economies would actually be something more along the lines of a specific type of stick with notches marked into it and then split in half to represent the taxes owed by a specific landowner to the state. The state would then spend that stick as money to merchants, basically just selling who the taxes were owed to as money, because they knew they likely weren't going to see that tax in the form of actual cash.
Further, the "Jubilee" (in Biblical terms) was a common event in history - the clearing of all debts by royal decree. This was because the economy would frequently tend to collapse without modern anti-trust laws and regulations, and would become taken over by a small handful of extremely wealthy bankers who eventually manage to gain a monopoly over the entire economy, while the whole working class, and even the nobility, would go into debt. The solution was simply erasing all debt, burning all the ledgers, and essentially declaring whatever you have on hand is what becomes your property, screwing over the lenders in order to save the debtors. This was often done right after a new king took the throne, as it was a great way to get some instant popularity.
Keep in mind that there were no bankruptcy laws back then, you go into debt, they take your children as slaves to pay the debt, then take you and your spouse next if that isn't enough to pay the debt. Even nobles went to debtor's prison, although they would actually be treated as a pampered guest in prison, while the farmer next to him would be left in shackles to starve or forced to work as a slave. Clearance of debt was a huge deal.
It's only a brief period of time with people like Adam Smith around where people actually believed that somehow metal was magical enough to completely base the economy off of one of them. Even this was done primarily for the benefit of the major lenders and debt-holders, as it was largely a means of controlling inflation, which benefits those in debt (when inflation exceeds interest rates on your loan, you are functionally not paying interest on your loans at all). Hence William Jennings Bryan, and his "Crucify [the American farmer/working class] on a Cross of Gold" speech, talking about why the gold standard was killing America's economy.
In this idea, it would be more complex, but generally speaking, the merchants you deal with would actually be working off of debt. You could probably also sell things to merchants, and just get a debit account with them instead of actual money when they were out of money. In exchange, you could charge them interest for that money you were owed. Conversely, however, merchants that die or default will wipe out that debit. Further, you might owe loans through many of these guilds you take over, yourself.
Preventing abuse might be a problem, however - how do you make the player pay his/her debts, rather than just murdering your creditors? Instituting bounties for late payments might be problematic as well, as if the player is responsible for debts incurred by his/her guild, and we just make the debts incurred as a bounty on the head of the player, then if the player can't pay, and goes to prison, the debts will likely just compound, and the player would be forced into debt slavery... which would be realistic, but I doubt anyone would want to play at that point.
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Skyrim really doesn't have enough quests where you can really influence the faction beyond doing quest for them, except for thieves' guild where your doing quests would sort of re-establish Ragged Flagon's standing, if that makes any sense.
