What to do with gold when there's little to no shops.

[Razelle]

I'd like to ask the community about unique ideas they've done with their in-game money not tied to spending them in a game's various shops.

In my own game, there won't be any consumables, and the shop's only purpose is to buy/sell new accessories. Weapons/Armor are found in chests, or on rare enemies. This has me running into the same problems that many games, even those with healing items, have. I have played many games where I have millions of gold, but really nothing to spend it on since I've never been the item using type, and buying equipment rarely ever makes a dent into the huge amounts made even by the midgame.

Some games mitigate this a bit by using casinos or arenas with fees attached to them. I love arenas, so I'll probably do that at some point in my own game, but in the meantime I've given myself less options of what do to with my currency.

One thing I had in mind was using it as a training system, where money is used to learn/power up skills in the place of the usual AP/JP system in some JRPGs. It gives money much more to do, and there's an incentive to use it.

What have you implemented in your own games to make money more useful than watching large numbers grow larger?

 

[Scott_C]

I had an adventurer themed public library that the player could donate to. Donations allowed the library to buy new books that gave trivia and combat tips about the world's monsters.

Unlocking every book in the library was expensive enough to use up all the spare gold generated during an above average play-through where the player did every single side quest and spent a reasonable amount of time grinding.

 

[Warpmind]

Investing in urban development, perhaps? If the game has a single town as a base, funding new buildings and expansions could pay off in the long run - a library, as Scott_C suggested, sponsoring an upgrade for the local smithy for better gear/maintenance, sponsoring the local tavern to attract more customers (who may include shady guys in the dark corner, providing quests, maps and other adventure hooks), investing in local farm upgrades, et cetera.

Numerous options that can change the setting and thus the availability of certain resources drastically.

 

[Kes]

It's possible to use gold as part of the skill costs, so that it's not just MP.  I'm not sure which script does it - Yanfly's perhaps?

 

[Sieginder Niederlage]

Gil Toss.

 

[Cadh20000]

If you use a crafting system you could have a crafting fee for each thing the player makes.

 

[GrandmaDeb]

Have banks and have your player stick all the money in banks. Make various money-hungry NPCs appear based on the amount of filthy lucre you have accumulated. (Girls who want to marry you, investment scammers, bankers who want you to buy their bonds, maybe if you hit a certain level an entourage of elephants and dancers can parade through the town led by exotics asking if you want to buy an island.


Money is just a joke anyways, right? Make it fun.

 

[Myst88]

Maybe give players the option to buy houses in each major town and city (I'm thinking similar to Skyrim) And they can upgrade, so they can add their own crafting tables, smithys, and alchmy tables. And of course this would be super expensive.

Depending on the game if a town or city gets destroyed you have the option of using your gold to help rebuild, maybe even make it better then before?

Auctions are a good way to get really rare items you wouldn't find in shops or dungeons. But the rarer the item the more expensive.

Also a good way to to limit how much gold the player gets is to not have enemies drop gold. For example in my project monsters don't drop gold. (Some enemies do such as humans, zombies etc) And instead the player has to earn their gold by selling loot. You can choose how often loot drops, plus how much it sells for. So it's a good way to insure the player dosn't earn thousands of gold pretty much right from the start.

 

[Razelle]

All interesting suggestions; some in fact I hadn't even thought about. Using money to strengthen the hub city sounds like an excellent idea, and fuels all kinds of event and extra game play possibilities.

Something else I thought about while reading through the topic is to give money to certain characters in a town area that acts as payment towards certain jobs. For example, if there are a group of bandits blocking your route, you could pay an unsavory merchant to purposely give up some food supplies to the bandits. The food could have some sort of poison in it, so now for a time when you encounter bandits in the area, they'll start off with a poison status effect.

I think it'd really add to NPC interaction, being able to give random people jobs to make your life easier.

 

[Vis_Mage]

One interesting idea you could try is allowing the player to melt down a pretty large sum of the gold to literally let them make golden armor/weapons. Perhaps it could also be used as a means of faster travel, such as paying a traveling merchant a small fee for him to take you to a previous location without all the backtracking.

 

[Cadh20000]

There is also the possibility of hiring mercenaries and needing to pay them every so often to keep them.

 

[Julien Brightside]

Throwing coins in the fountain.

Do it enough and you clog the waterpipes.

Now you got to pay to repair the fountain.

 

[Pine]

Don't use currency, use trading instead.

I've been looking into such possibility where you don't use gold for buying stuff but instead the price for an article is based on the value your items have for a village or village. For example, somewhere in which corn is highly produced, you'd need, say 10 pieces of corn to buy a sword, or one piece of potato because potato is far more valuable to this specific place. In another town it would be the opposite.

 

[Iavra]

I found this post to be quite interesting: http://www.gamesmakingnoob.com/2014/10/currency-systems-in-rpgs.html

 

[Sixth]

Gamble shops.


Enter with 1568486 billion gold coins, buy a few random stuffs for random price, exit with 10 thousand gold coins and with a few pretty crappy stuffs.


"Too much gold" problem solved.


I bet most old timers who played diablo know what I mean.


But if you really don't like/use shops, there are other ways...


You can also make your equipment "destroyable" in numerous ways.


Enhance/enchant system, upon failure there is a chance to destroy the item.


Durability for equips, with a very few items which could restore it.


And some other ways I probably forgot by now.

 

[Dark Horseman]

Gil Toss.

"Shut up and take my money!" *critical hit* "Wait, not that much!"

 

[Eschaton]

Have less of it.

Edit for clarification: anything in which I work, money is finite. You cannot farm money; you complete quests and explore every nook and cranny in the game to find it.

Ideally, there will be JUST enough in-game currency in any project I make to buy everything that is for sale. Also, I would make anything for sale finite.

 

[Mako Star]

You could have less money or make the things that ARE purchasable more expensive.

Depending on the scale of your game, paying for a carriage/whatever to get from one side of the world to the other.

Ability to purchase a mode of transportation, maybe.

Let the players purchase a house and items to go in that house.

Monsters that have a Steal Gold skill!

Taxes?

Being forced to bail out the major weapon shop conglomerates by order of decree from the Royal Family?!

OH OH! Let the player get a girl pregnant! Children are a really good sink for money!

 

[galun]

This is not really my idea since some big game already did this (Dragon Quest maybe?), but I'm using it for my game anyway. I'm sending large amounts of money back to my home village/base. when it reached certain goals, 50.000, 100.000, 200.000, 500.000, 1.000.000 and so on the town gets upgrades, grows bigger, prettier and more expensive.

 

[Kes]

galun, please refrain from necro-posting in a thread. Necro-posting is posting in a thread that has not had posting activity in over 30 days. You can review our forum rules here. Thank you.