Some recent threads about gold seem to focus on the lower end where people feel gold is too greedily horded by the Oblivion engine and players felt poor until they got very high level, when they were too rich. I agreed. I hated low-level treasure and money because there essentially wasn't any, more the most part. I didn't feel enough sense of reward... some people don't feel good just helping others, I guess I'm greedy, but I want to stumble into a treasure trove from time to time and feel wealthy in game. I hate being poor. That's my real life. I want to spend money in a video game. We spend enough to BUY the game, but then are poor inside of it? How is that cool?

The reason money is so jealousy gaurded in Oblivion is because you can become rich at higher levels and then the game is broken. They sought to avoid that by making it harder to get throughout their system.

I think some new ideas about how to make the player be required to spend more money contributing to the world (you are the hero after all) need to be thought of and brought forward. Here are few of mine.

1. Guild Dues at higher levels should become pretty serious. But you should be able to learn or do something special for that responsibility too.
2. If you get a girlfriend and start a family in the game, you need to provde a house and the supplies to feed and maintain them. You should leave extra money in their account for when you won't be coming home for a while. They will draw out a percentage each week to spend, plus 20-50% more each week for random unpredicted problems occuring that require money (little Dovakhiin broke his arm, and had to go to the doctor...etc)
3. You can help to build a small town into a bigger town and help create a new economy, trade routes, and help establish /locate a unique product/mineral that gives that town a unique economical boon. You need to contribute some money each month toward establishing that.
4. You can go around to each village and pay them a little money to help build their infrastructure and keep their poor off the streets to reduce crime. If your money is successfully used to reduce crime (theiving or murdering for food etc...) then you earn some kind of a cool reward in game that makes you more powerful somehow.
5. Maybe you need to pay people to upgrade your home into a mansion, with greater and greater appearance, stonework, chandaliers, and all the good stuff ... statues, paintings, etc ... all at great cost.
6. Maybe you need to support your guild by buying whatever new rising star has joined the Guild a new set of armour. It's like a tradition. Someone also bought you one in the early levels of the game. Now it's your turn to give back. How much you donate to the armour, how cool it is, helps establish if you area greedy lord or a generous lord, and how much other people around Skyrim will help you in return (for free) because of that.

Those are only a few of my ideas, I'll write more later after work. Let me know some of yours in the meantime. How can we allow Bethesda to give us more money in the early levels and not worry about making us too rich to break the game?

What are your suggestions?

I really like these ideas!

One thing is building, but simpler would be if you just would have to cash out money for upkeeping your cottage/mansion/castle, not sure about taxes, maybe, but for PERSONNEL doing their things there = Workers, butlers, guards, and personal poledancer/courtesan/stripteasewench from daggerfall (In 2d of course.. which looks like 3d )

We have to keep in mind, even if they don't have a fluid open ended economic system it can be easily done via simple editing. Knowing full well they provide the tools that allows us to customize the game as we please. I see no reason none of this can be done, either by them or us.

Personally I liked the low rewards at lower levels, if I could scraqe together just enough for training it felt like the Gods were smiling.
I like the money sink at higher levels in theory, but in reality I don't want to be fighting a bunch of angry trolls and have a message pop up telling me I have just paid 2000 rent. Simpler to keep rewards a a lower level throughout, we will still eventually get rich.
Don't get me wrong you have some good ideas, just worried about the implementation.

taxes and upkeep ftw

those are some good ideas, this games gonna be amazing

I'm gonna sleep at fighter's guild I think, and eat leftovers and some other people apples n stuff and then buy my first REAL shield n armour... I've already gotten sword of course for beating some dude in face.. and fancy clothes of course:P

but really, taxes or upkeep for personnel would be cool.

I didn't think of that, good save there, but I'm sure there are better ways of handling that situation than this. Maybe a Courier (or a homing pigeon) could meet you (find you) in town with a letter for you (this could be built into the Radiant Story engine as "Assign Courier with Wife Letter Default Letter #64 but attach the subclause mission entitled: "Repairman Overcharged Me").

The letter, when you open it, would read something like: "My dearest husband, I paid the rent today and things are well. Yesterday a wild horse smashed into our front door and it cost me 1000 more to replace that. But I think the man that repaired the door is a thief, he must have overcharged me because he thinks I am just a lonely maiden without someone to look after her. Hahaha, how little he knows, right? See you soon, honey (I hope). Your wife.... " and then if you wish to add the Quest Item "Talk to the Repair Man About the High Repair Bill" you can take care of that next time you're back in town.

The amount of cool things the Radiant Story could enable seems almost limitless and that is probably the best way to build these couriers and give them the letters that inform you as to the status of things happening back at home.

We can carry too much heavy loot, which therefore becomes our currency, and smaller valuable items (gold, gems, trinkets, which don't need to scale in value along with the player level so much) are under represented as rewards

Taking out a bandit stronghold I would really expect to find the treasure they've been hoarding, rather than just the clothes off their back and a pair of calipers. I wouldn't care about having to leave most of the mundane and low enchantment armor and weapons behind if the chest had a decent haul, and the bandits pockets had some coins and a bit of jewellery

A thread that came out recently talking about "selling spells" got me thinking about this post I made again because one of the ways we discussed in that thread of making money was that junior mages could approach you to buy spell knowledge from you the same way you approached your higher-ups earlier in the game. Later, you might even be able to open your own school and get paid for dozens of students at a time. This would allow the floodgates of wealth to open for you like any good business.

Then you'd have more money to devote to your economic responsibilities, some of which I theorized in this thread. But I've been chatting in other threads about this same thing, and here are a few of the updates ideas:

1) Pay for Private Property Damages ... If you destroy private property casting ultra-powerful terrain-deforming spells, then you may have to pay the owner of the land to repair whatever damage has occured. This could be backed up by the Skyrim legal system such that if you failed to comply then you could be tarnished in some way, or cut off from buying and selling in the city proper and without great hassle.

2) Paying Bribes Against You.... If you've played a semi-evil character but then somehow get connected into a proper guild later in the game, your "secrets" might be exposed unless you pay the "bribes" ... which you must do to buy time so you can uncover who is bribing you. This: so that you can kill them to protect your secret and so you won't have to pay the bribes anymore. If you have an evil past, it can come back to haunt you should you desire to seek power and political offices such as guilds at the higher levels.

3) Money to Raise an Army ... If you play as an evil character and totally go off-path from the scripted storyline, and decide to conquer Skyrim city by city with the dragons as your evil accomplices, then you may need to raise the money (through fear and tyranny) necessary to hire an army or bribe the right people to help your cause.

Raising a Child ... Often very expensive, but what if that child becomes sick? Then it can become VERY expensive. Perhaps if you are too rich and you have a wife and now a child you are raising in your own home, you would suddenly experience the tragedy of a cancer or a deadly disease that may be cured with very expensive alchemical potions and cures that require some of the most rare and expensive curatives and additives, not to mention melting down gold as part of the process etc... so that you need tons of money to save your child. He has your eyes, and you named him, and every day he says something new and is a part of you, and knows your face when you walk in the door. So you'll be attached... it would make an entirely new ambition within the game for you. A real responsibility. Will you man up? Or cow down?

Raising & Selling Thoroughbreeds .... They could be horses, but if there are anything else to ride in the game, perhaps you could raise those too. You have to pay people to groom them, run them, train them, and manage them. If you do your job well, you will produce thoroughbreds capable of selling for anywhere between 5 and 25 times your investment price. If you fail to do well, you lose the lot as they are imperfect and useless as show horses (or insert whatever mountable creatures fits here) .... Of course these thoroughbreds would also be the fastest horses in the game, so if you ever needed to use them, or lend them to some warriors, in some major battle, then your sacrifice might even be acknowledged by the Empire and the Skyrim bards might even sing of your epic exploits upon the world's fairest & fastest beasts ever to grace the soil of Tamriel, etc....

Hire Thieves to Steal Paintings as a Long Con ... ... if you played an evil-aligned lord or knight but had no skills as a thief, then you would have to pay real thieves to steal things for you that you could later sell at auctions. You pay a large amount for the heist, then pay some artist to make 6 copies that look identical. Then you sell each of the copies to someone with little art background who thinks its the real one they've just heard about being stolen ... they think they're getting a world-famous painting "for a STEAL" .... but they've just been conned. So you make 5 times the profit on the job.

The last one isn't very "responsible" but it sure is all about money, hahahaha....

Besides the title "Economic Responsibilities" doesn't have to mean "moralities" it just means when you need money to do your in-game duties, you can get it, and when you have too much money, the game will think of ways to help you spend it so you have to try and get more. These ideas are merely ideas for how the game might help you spend that money so you always are in a situation of needing to get more. Put the pressure on you ... hahaha

I honestly never had trouble finding sources of good income, even early in the game. It comes down to research, knowledge is power after all.

Enchanted items (even the crappy crap you usually find on bandits) sell more than other items, potions sell better than their individual ingredients (usually), weklend and varla stones sells really well (especially if you don't need them, or don't use them because of a certain way that you're playing your character), vampire dust adds up, and doing the collector questline isn't a bad way to get started on a small fortune (since the rewards are not leveled, except the crowns).

and you can wipe out most of the cost in repairing your equipment by doing the repairs yourself. Same goes for recharging items. Doing it yourself with azura's star saves a ton of money, since the rechargers seem to charge you 1 gold for each point of energy that needs to be restored.

Yeah, forgot about that. I typically keep around a lot of hammers on my characters (usually no less than 5 at a time), kind of weighty in the earlier levels but costs less than having the weapons and armor repaired.


Few times I carried around the Mace of Doom I always had a spare Varla Stone on me (no way you can recharge that all the way with a single soul gem, and it's expensive as hell to have it recharged). But playing a character that caries around a lot of enchanted armor and weapons demands you dabble in mysticism don't matter what else you want your character to do.

I'd only go for this kind of change if these expenses were optional and *not* quest-related in any way. And then I wouldn't use the options. Because I am a hoarder in games, and gold is just one more thing to hoard. And it works out pretty good for me in all the games I play. :shrug:

As has been stated already party, regular tax and cost for food as well as the cost of maintaining a house / several houses and potentially the cost of own mercenaries.

While I don't mind the mundane "money sinks" like food and taxes, some people might, so here are some examples of money sinks that are more "adventure oriented."

Some quests should simply be too hard for a lone hero to handle, so a retinue of men-at-arms is required. Just between 1-4 because of the limitations of the game. These are not purchased for 50 gold and then become permanent companions. Try 50 gold a day, with the option of paying in advance (although they might run off if you do that)

You may also want to pay them in terms of equipment, so that they aren't dropping like flies. And if you purposefully allow them to die after half the job is done, other mercenaries will become wary of you as an employer. Eventually, you could even give them horses.

I could live with this, but only if the dues scaled with your rank instead of your level.



I'm ignoring this one because I saw "start a family in the game" and I won't even humor that. It's an extremely stupid idea that was inspired by Fable, which it can fit in since you rule the kingdom and start a revolution (refering only to 3, it didn't fit into 2 at all), it doesn't have a place in a game where you have to kill a god to save Nirn. Reason why: "TEH DRAGONS ARE ATTACKING!!!" then "ZOMG HONEY, YOU HAVEN'T BEEN HOME IN 3 DAYS, YOU MUST NOT LOVE US!"



I'v e suggested starting a new trade post/town before and some people like it. I've got your back with this one.



That woulld really muck up the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood. Moreso the former, as it would eliminate the beggers, who you bribed information from.



If you mean that you have multi-tiered decorations, i like that. You would have to buy the upgrade's counterpart from the previous tier before it's unlocked.



I think you could do this, but I'd be better off with being able to donate to the guild and a couple days later, the guild would look better and/or have better stuff. If you want to really put this into the backbone of the guilds, you could have it where some of the towns lack guild halls for certain guilds, and one or two towns have no guilds. You can make donations towards establishing/upgrading a new guild hall in each town. And by doing so, guild members like you more and you get discounts, comps, perks and other fun things for being such a good time Charlie. Damn, I think I might do a guild overhaul thread now.

Similar to what others said, there should be an investment system similar to Oblivion, but better. For example, in Oblivion you could invest in a merchant and their gold stock was permanently increased. Well, how about investing in a store and they start acquiring super rare items that you can buy/steal, but weren't available before? Or investing in your guild to increase their training services or equipment.

Speaking of training, how about instead of limiting it to 5 training sessions per level, why not make it unlimited, BUT the costs increase exponentially. And the only way to reduce the costs again is to sleep and level.

Money sinks are fairly easy to design.

Houses.. you can have everything from a hovel for 2k to a grand castle for millions.

Special knowledge.. like how to wear more enchanted rings or amulets.. or how to use more armor at the same time... taught by VERY demanding people...as in truely huge amounts of gold.

The ability to buy weapons and armor for the civil war...

The ability to buy perks outside the skill perks... basicaly special training or abilties you buy from certain very very greedy people.

Yiour own pet dragon.. that would HAVE to be spendy;/

The ability to bribe goblin tribes or some such to go attack your enemies towns or cities.

The ability to hire assasins to kill those you dont want anyone thinking you killed;/

I'm going to have to disagree. Higher guild dues and the like will just make people like guilds less.

The way to balance high money gain at higher levels is to have big sale items for the player to shoot for - let me give an example.

Let's say one of the best rings in the game (Strength+30,Max Magicka+200,Intelligence+30) could only be bought from none other than the Greybeards.
500,000 gold for it. With something like this, money still matters to the player because he or she is saving up for one of those big items - that way, looting money still has the twinge of gain, rather than apathy because you make too much money and have nothing to spend it on (cough cough...FABLE 2...cough cough)

One mod I have for Oblivion has an item for sale that costs millions - and I'm still saving up for it heh, and money as a result still feels rewarding.



So please Bethesda, give us some epic items to buy for obscene prices in the late game.

High level stuff (esp. loot) should not be worth nearly so much gold. That will solve a lot of the problems right there. No more dumping 250,000 in glass and daedric loot on the Mudcrab Merchant.

I'm hopeful a system is implemented where most of the weapons and armour you loot are smashed and nearly worthless. Value can only be restored to these items if your smithing skill is high enough and you have the raw materials, otherwise they are basically just raw material themselves.

Money will be done right in video games when you are taxed for housing, the loot is balanced (making adventuring more akin to survival), the ability for the player to be part of the in game economy, ect. But the game would have to be tailored around that, and I doubt we'll see that kind of thing in TES anytime soon. Thats just not the focus of the series now. (unless Im dead wrong and the activities you can do in cities in Skyrim is a step in that general direction).

The idea in Fable 2 and 3 was present, but with time you became so rich money, instead of being practical, was just for giggles.

That doesn't solve the problem. All you've done is replaced one problem with another. Now no one can afford anything.




Tax in a video game? That would be promptly modded out.

The thing is, would a Greybeard really just "sell" such an item to the highest bidder? I imagine that's the kind of thing that get passed on to you for being "worthy" of bearing such an object.

And even if it was buried in a tomb and found by a thief, either he would not realize the value and let it go for maybe a couple thousand gold, or he would recognize the power and use it himself to become rich. Anyone who could afford it, wouldn't need it.

What's really needed is less gold. If you only got 25 gold for finishing a quest rather than 50, you'd have to spend a lot more wisely.