Burnout Reaper, and Economies

Burnout Reaper is a dark and bloody cyberpunk game about the murderous gig economy: rich people need organs, and thanks to the omnipotent forces of supply and demand, your job is to acquire them from people who haven’t finished using them yet. A Grand Guignol style bloodbath relishing in the horrors of late-stage capitalism, Burnout Reaper is a brilliant, if blunt, exploration of Economy.

Each gig you take rewards you with Cyber Crypto, or CC. CC can be converted to Authority Credits, or AC, after each gig. The exchange rate is random, meaning your pile of CC could be exceptionally valuable, or practically worthless; You can puchase a few necessities with CC, but your bills have to be paid in AC.

If you don’t pay your bills, you lose 1 Will. If you don’t spend 15 CC or AC to indulge in mind-numbing drugs or vice-filled relaxation, you lose 1 Will. If you use a Will Die to increase your chances of succeeding at a gig and you roll a 1, you lose 1 Will. You start with 12 Will, you die if you reach 0 Will, and you cannot regain lost Will.

This hellish mess of CC, AC, and Will — a combination of permanent and temporary sacrifice — is an economy.

The important thing to recognize about economies in RPGs is that they don’t have to deal with money. Any system that involves a specific asset that can or must be “spent” is an economy. Michtim has its mood-token economy, while FATE has its fate-token economy. Blades in the Dark has stress, coin, and heat economies; D&D has HP, gold, spell slots, Long/short rests…RPGs are rife with economies. You could make the case that RPGs are nothing but economies.

Economies, in game terms, is the ebb and flow of a limited resource. Whether it is gold, heath, momentum, number of bullets…if it can “run out,” it’s a resource. An asset. Something that can be used to overcome a future obstacle and get you closer to ultimate success.

At the same time, these resources must be able to “reset” somehow. We may sacrifice our HP, but only until we rest or heal. We lose our bullets until we buy more. We lose our fuel-cells until we find enough Zeiton-7 to recharge them. Gold is spent until we find more treasure-troves.

So much of the challenge and character of a game comes from defining these resets. How often does each reset happen? How easy is it to reset? Does it cost you a different resource, as with Perseverance in Parselings or drinks/food in Hack n Slash; or can you only do it at certain intervals/situations, like long-rests in D&D or full-repairs in Lancer? Is gold a key to better assets like experience points, or an ever-draining gas-tank that requires constant filling like hit points? How many different economies does the player have to pay attention to, and how many influence other economies?

Once assets can be reset, sacrifices can be seen as investments; spend your HP wisely and you will gain enough experience points to reach your next level. Make sure you don’t waste your action tokens and you’ll reach the next story milestone — one step closer to the climax.

In Burnout Reaper, the economy is based on a random market and a permanent health-meter. If you exchange your CC to AC now, when the markets are good but not great, you might be able to survive though a market downturn. If you’re unlucky, that market downturn will continue and you might be stuck without enough AC to pay your bills. That’ll cost you Will and there’s no getting it back. Do you take the risk at exchanging at a sub-optimal rate, or not?

If that doesn’t sound like much fun, like an exercise in disempowered anxiety and regret over poor-investments, correct! Welcome to Capitalism!

For another example: In the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons, the rulebook clearly says that spellbooks are large, heavy, and cannot be brought along on adventures. At level one, then, a magic-user can cast one spell for the entire dungeon. They don’t get to re-learn their spells until they leave the dungeon and spend a full day studying each spell.

That may sound ridiculous. After all, early wizard spells aren’t that much more powerful than a strong arm and a sharp steel stick. It’s not until higher levels that magi get the really powerful spells and even then they have to ration. It seems like a pretty bad design choice. Was there any balancing factor? Anything that might make it more reasonable?

Of course there was: remember the original Dungeons & Dragons was all about raiding tombs, killing monsters, and getting all the gold. Even the modern editions have whole chapters devoted to how to roll-up treasure. Warriors would spend their money on better weapons, armor, and potions. Thieves and clerics could do the same. What did magic-users have? They had magical scrolls; scrolls that they could write themselves for a hundred gold a pop. If you picked up a thousand gold from a treasure chest, that was ten spells you could be carrying with you for the next dungeon before you had to use up your own personal stock of magic.

Game design is a complex topic, one I won’t be able to summarize here, but one of the mainstays of making a good game is “provide interesting choices.”

With economies, these are choices like: do I sacrifice now to get a benefit, or do I wait in the hopes of a better pay-off later? Do I spend all my money to make five scrolls, or just enough to make three while I save up for that powerful ring? Do I heal my HP now, or save the potion in case an ally needs it? Is this choice a good investment?

Half of making a good in-game economy is how you handle bad investments. What are the punishments? How much are losses based on luck vs the player’s own choices? How easily can someone recuperate their losses? This even extends to character creation. In games where death comes easily, characters are quick to make and absent of detail: see RPGs like Cairn or Mörk Borg. If death is rare or absent entirely without the player’s buy-in, characters can be complicated and narratively detailed, like in Lancer or Iron Edda Accelerated.

What fascinates me about RPGs recently is the strong turn away from cash economies. Money has become an abstract concept, with equipment either found or already possessed at the beginning of the game. What value does a scroll of fireball have when I can just nap and cast the spell again? Why buy a sword when I can pluck one off the next dead orc I slay?

Couple this with a cinematic style of gaming that doesn’t require managing food or rest, and money becomes an ephemeral tool, similar to charisma or reputation. There’s no need to track every coin like one tracks every hit point. You can see this in games like Exalted and Call of Cthulhu, where money is treated like a stat or skill.

Its a fine design choice for those games where the point is godly warrior combat or cosmic horror, but I wonder if its was a good choice for the dungeon-delving sword-and-sorcery style of game. Sure, we could say the point of those games is climactic combats and killing dragons, but there are a lot of dungeons between the pastoral farming village and the storm-cloud cloaked mountaintop. Counting every copper-piece is certainly a means of making you earn your climactic battle.

Indeed, games like Burnout Reaper have taken to forcibly introducing bills and regular drains on resources to reintroduce coin economies. If you don’t regularly pay your dues in Blades in the Dark, your gang is in for a rough time. Other games have implemented weapon and/or item degradation as a regular economic drain. (As a side note, I think the Item Usage Die is perhaps one of the single best design inventions in the past decade.)

The idea of a hero who is powerful or successful because of the items that they purchased has become somewhat passe. Instead, modern games give players unique and distinct abilities. We want our heroes to be powerful because of who they are and what they can do, not because of what they are wearing, purchased, or tripped over in a dungeon.

This isn’t to say that functional money/item economies are uninteresting or not engaging. Post-apocalyptic games are prime candidates for this sort of economy, where rare scrap and scavenged resources are required to keep you alive in the dangerous outside.

But game-narratives usually don’t play much with ebb and flow of resources. More often, they play with the ebb and flow of successes. FATE is a good example of this, while the best is probably the Belonging Outside Belonging system, where (to oversimplify) players can earn tokens by making “weak moves,” which cause narrative problems and conflicts. These tokens can then be spent to take “strong moves,” which result in successes and narrative progression.

Perhaps the most interesting economies for me are the ones that interact with other economies. Heat in Lancer is both a health meter and a weapon, depending on your mech. Fatigue in GURPS may fuel your spells, but at the cost of losing consciousness. Stress is a catch-all currency in Blades in the Dark, supporting almost any kind of success and risky to regain.

As for first-edition wizards, their scrolls were not just part of a basic magic economy; they were distinct items in their own right. They also interacted with a different economy that has mostly fallen out of favor in recent years. Next time, we’ll talk about Inventories.