The stage of commerce

There are all kinds of issues, mine are focussed on the stage of gaming. The larger stage of gaming is always up to discussion, yet what happens when you want an open system that manages itself? Consider a clock, cogs interacting with other cogs.

For a clock the cogs are set, for system that allows an open system the foundations of cogs connected and have a connected interaction, but each of these cogs can connect to a different system and their sizes, when changed allows for a different interaction. I spoke about taverns in an earlier blog, but what if we consider guilds. A Guild of commerce would have a guild master and artisans connect to that guild house, so we see interaction on one hand, on the other hand we see shops interacting with NPC consumers. You think it is easy, but it is not. Consider that you need to create a ‘global’ stage of interactions. The cogs help here, they give a clear indication on connection points. In any nation you have costs and payments. So as a nation has taxation, we need to set these interactions to some kind of level. Let’s say the nation of Carrotville has income, it gets it from shops. It gets it from large farms. This means that they need income, better national income means a better nation. But how to set that? You can set a fake number, and go from there, but to set a stage of thousands of interacting NPC’s requires a different system, hence my idea of a machine of cogs to aid in this. And consider, the entire land is bigger than the game, so we get a part and that is seen per county. Lets say the game represents 4 counties, the nation if 8-9 counties. Now we see the stage where guilds play a role. In the middle ages there were merchant guilds and craft guilds. Of course for any RPG we would need a guild of the arcane and a guild of fighters. Yet let’s not duck into all the elements and let’s focus on commerce.

In the past I already discussed bookshops, taverns, and smith. We need to include goods and foods. This gives us the shops we need as a bare minimum, and considering the size of any area (in the past shops were seen in larger towns and anyone within a distance came to this place). So we now have the larger stage, and the people in that area add to this commerce. Farms sell food and goods to shops. Miners deliver resources to smiths, so as the cogs interact, we see what and how much (on average) goes in any way, but the cogs are not enough. Cogs make it an exact science, we need a random factor to be added between 1%-3% and within that percentage we need a chance element books that affect your business 50%-75%, other books 15%-35%, in that setting we now get a larger fluctuation, when we add elements for town enrichment and town size the numbers become interesting. We see enough fluctuation to make it work and to make it random enough to set a fit. The bookshop is interesting as in the old days literacy was a virtue left to the wealthier people, so the small towns would never have a book shop, but there was the larger need of a tavern, over time as we inspect the cogs we get a stage that can create the rainbow tables for a game, and the nice part if it is that because of the random factors the rainbow tables are dynamic and that creates a whole new environment. One where the game can live without you and you become a contributor, not the driving force of anything. We need to consider these steps as gaming must continue to evolve and any game needs to grow. It is time to stat designing the great RPG games of 2024/2025 and this is one direction that it could optionally go.