Do you NEED an economy?

Spore and XP

I am currently designing my heroic OSR game. One big touchstone for my heroic OSR game is Spore, a game developed by Maxis. In it, you gain DNA points to grow from a cell, to a creature, to a tribe, to a civilization and ending at galactic force. I intend to focus on the creature stage as you stop evolving after the creature stage.  You can gain DNA points from eating plant matter and other creatures to later, befriending and killing other species. I thought I could just replace gold with DNA and call it a day. That felt lazy and did some further thinking. Why do these creatures want treasure? They aren't even fully sentient. So I created a XP checklist inspired by games like Dungeon World and Vagabond. Since I don't use XP for gold, the only reason I had it was for shopping. Shopping is the bane of my existence in ttrpgs so I just decided than and there that there was no gold and shopping, instead treasure can be more ordinary items like rope and 10 ft poles. 

 

From Electronic Arts
Checklist benefits

The checklist is handy because I can cater the experience to suit the premise, have short term campaigns since you are getting at least 2 XP per session and leads to a lot less tracking and number crunching. The 5 goals each give one XP, with 5 required to level up and gain a new evolution. These questions are asked to each player at the end of each session:

  1. Did you discover something new?
  2. Did you befriend a species?
  3. Did you kill a species?
  4. Did you fail a roll and accept the consequences?
  5. Did you succeed a roll with Fear?

(Fear is what I call disadvantage in this system similar to Shadow of the Weird Wizard)

From Schwalb Entertainment

 

What I learned

The lesson I learned here was the lesson of kill sacred cows if you don't know why they are there. If your game the characters be fully evolved, you don't need a evolution system. If you don't want to interact with the economy, you don''t have to. Just because every cool kid in the playground today has a cool economy, you don't need to fold to peer pressure

Clickables

Black Magic talks about making their own OD&D

Dungeon Doll shows us their dungeon gods

Rise Up Comus gives us some starting equipment packs. 


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