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Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
{{Video Game Examples Need Sorting}}
[[File:reccet 391.png|link=Nerf Now|frame| So ''[[Recettear|that's]]'' why it costs [[Team Fortress 2|him]] [[Team Fortress 2/Memes|$400,000 to fire his weapon for 12 seconds.]]]]
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Take, for example, inn prices. The farther out from the origin point one goes, the more expensive a night at the inn is. It does not matter if the inn is in a capital city, or whether it's in a podunk village in the middle of nowhere. To understand the significance of why this is wrong, consider the following: which is going to be more expensive, given properties of approximately the same size and number of stars: a hotel room in Manhattan near Times Square, or one in Poughkeepsie? (If you don't know where Poughkeepsie is, [[Appeal to Obscurity|you've proven the point]]). The point is: One night's stay at an inn late in the game costs about as much as buying the entire metropolitan city you started out in.
In short, '''Adam Smith Hates Your Guts'''.
Named after [[wikipedia:Adam Smith|Adam Smith himself]], (the one from the 18th Century, ''not'' George Goodman, the current-day writer on finance who uses this pen name) who is usually considered to be the father of modern economics. Common in games that manage to avert [[With This Herring]]. See also [[Command and Conquer Economy]]. A hero with a [[100% Heroism Rating]] might be able to get a discount, though.
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Not to be confused with [[No Hero Discount]] (which is where storekeepers charge full price even though you're saving their butts). Also not to be confused with [[Adam West]], though he may hate your guts too, if only because [[Cloudcuckoolander|they may contain microscopic bacteria that he saw in a dream once]]. A subtrope of this is [[Rising Cost of Health Insurance]] (where inns or priests/[[EarthBound|hospitals]] rise in price in response to the character's level).
{{examples}}
== [[Tabletop Games]] ==▼
=== Board Games ===
* Completely averted in the board game ''Container'', where the players are responsible for producing, storing, shipping and buying the titular multicoloured containers, and there are no outside market forces whatsoever. How much does it cost to buy an orange container? As much as the seller is asking. How much can you make from shipping three white containers? As much as the buyer is willing to pay. It's basically a self-contained economic system, and you could use it to teach supply-and-demand theory.▼
* ''[[Monopoly (game)|Monopoly]]'' is based on this principle. As the game goes on, the players acquire more and more property, monopolize what they can, and charge higher and higher rents to other players who land on their property. Players whose income does not increase fast enough to pay off increasing rents will eventually be eliminated, until only one remains.▼
=== Tabletop RPG ===
* In [[Dungeons & Dragons|D&D]] fourth edition, for ease of play everything has a fixed standard price (particularly visible in the way the cost of any magic item is purely a function of its level). Fair enough. However, player characters can never sell anything (''including'' magic items) not explicitly put into the game as a cash-substitute treasure by the scenario designer for more than 20% of it's notional 'market price'... (There's a reason for that, and it's that the game developers explicitly wanted to encourage players to take their characters ''adventuring'' rather than have them sit around using weeks and months of in-game downtime making stuff to generate more money. But it still fits the trope to a T.)▼
** A special case is also the component cost for the Raise Dead ritual. It starts at 500 gold pieces' worth of materials... until a character reaches 11th level, whereupon it suddenly increases by a factor of ''ten''?and then the same thing happens once more upon hitting level 21 (of 30 possible). [[Hand Wave|Handwaved]] by the game as 'death being less willing to return great heroes'. This because death has to be significant enough that it is meaningful, but not significant enough that dying is a major disruption to the game. 500 gp is a pittance to a mid to high level character, so the cost needed to be increased in order to make it at least mean something. It is a constant struggle in such games for death to be meaningful, but not crippling. In previous editions, you lost levels for dying and being raised, so this is a significant step forward as far as pricing goes. And honestly, 20% is not all that strange if you look at it from an economic perspective; sure, the merchant seems like they're ripping you off, but how often do high-level adventurers come by town? In the default assumption, the heroes are pretty much THE heroes, and there just aren't all that many other people who would be capable of buying that + 5 flaming bastard sword that you sold to Bob's Used Weapon Emporium.▼
** Lampshaded in [https://web.archive.org/web/20120101190146/http://nodwick.humor.gamespy.com/ffn/index.php?date=2008-11-19 this] ''[[Full Frontal Nerdity]]'' strip.▼
** A relatively recent{{when}} addition to the 4th-edition rules is item rarity. Common items can be purchased, created by [[Player Character|PCs]], and sell for the usual 20%. Rare items, however, cannot be crafted or
** It was averted in earlier editions, where a low level group would have to survive dozens of encounters to get the treasure necessary for a raise dead, where a high level group could have a small village brought back for what they got per encounter. This was not a good thing.▼
* ''[[GURPS]]'' went to a ridiculous extreme in justifying and averting this trope. Magic items are balanced via a relatively simple economic system they built for the game (and explain to any GM who wants to change it).▼
== [[Video Games]] ==
* The picture above is a parody of ''[[Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale]]'', in which '''you''' can be a blood gutter merchant who sets a price of whatever you sell very high. Note that the tactic does work on one [[Rich Bitch]], but to others, raising item's prices above 200% will piss off most of your customers.
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** The trope is also literally inverted. You can recruit Adam Smith himself into your Continental Congress, in which case he loves you and wants you to succeed. Unless a rival colony snatches him away from you.
** The Firaxis remake makes the latter impossible, as once you get a Founding Father, he's yours. No other colony can get him. Whether or not this is good depends on whether or not you were able to get him first.
* ''[[The Legend of Zelda]]'':
** In ''[[The Legend of Zelda:
** Also in ''[[The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker|Wind Waker]]'', Tingle charges ridiculously high prices for his goods and services that are necessary to advance in the game, even requiring the player to get a wallet upgrade for the sake of a single extra Rupee.
** And don't get me started on that one shop in ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess|Twilight Princess]]''.
** In both ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild]]'' and ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom]]'', Beedle often has items that are hard (or impossible) to find elsewhere and [[Intrepid Merchant|you can find him at any stable]], but one item you should ''never'' buy from his is arrows. A pack of 5 costs 30 rupees, which is 10 rupees more than any other merchant, and seeing as Link can fast-travel to any place he's been, the convenience isn't worth the price.
* In ''[[Etrian Odyssey]]'' on DS, the price to spend a night at the inn goes up with every level that your party increases, as does the price to revive a fallen member at the hospital. Items and equipment are also rather pricey—in the first two games, a single Nectar costs a whopping 500en. In ''The Drowned City'', healing items get a much needed price drop, such as Nectars now only costing a mere 50en. Ironically, the shopkeeper here is a major [[Money Fetish]]ist; probably best if she doesn't find out she's selling this stuff at such a staggering discount...
* ''[[Civilization]]'' has an odd variant of this trope. The 'prices' of buildings and units, in the form of hammers (required production to build it), stays constant, no matter which era you're in. Thus, erecting a building in a newly built town will take exactly the same number of turns in the stone age as it will in the modern era, after building cranes, construction equipment and unionised labour has been invented. At the same time, buildings and units you unlock with better technology that you research later are prohibitively more expensive in terms of hammer cost. This leads to odd situations where you have a new town in the modern era where building a TV station (which is unlocked in the modern era) takes over eight times longer than building a library (unlocked upon learning how to read) or a Colosseum (unlocked by construction), and training a unit of riflemen takes four times as long as training a unit of longbowmen (which would be the opposite of [[Real Life]]).
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* ''[[Quest for Glory II]]'' has an interesting aversion; when the elementals show up, the merchants will gladly '''give''' you what you need to defeat and contain the elementals, provided you just ask when the time comes. The sole exception is the blacksmith, but he's a [[Jerk Jock]] anyhow, and he'll give it to you if you can beat him at arm wrestling.
* The [[Web Game]] New Star Soccer has 'NRG' Drinks. Every time you sign a new contract, the prices increase. Near the end of the game, an energy drink can cost more than your '''HOUSE''' .
▲== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
▲* In [[Dungeons & Dragons|D&D]] fourth edition, for ease of play everything has a fixed standard price (particularly visible in the way the cost of any magic item is purely a function of its level). Fair enough. However, player characters can never sell anything (''including'' magic items) not explicitly put into the game as a cash-substitute treasure by the scenario designer for more than 20% of it's notional 'market price'... (There's a reason for that, and it's that the game developers explicitly wanted to encourage players to take their characters ''adventuring'' rather than have them sit around using weeks and months of in-game downtime making stuff to generate more money. But it still fits the trope to a T.)
▲** A special case is also the component cost for the Raise Dead ritual. It starts at 500 gold pieces' worth of materials... until a character reaches 11th level, whereupon it suddenly increases by a factor of ''ten''?and then the same thing happens once more upon hitting level 21 (of 30 possible). [[Hand Wave|Handwaved]] by the game as 'death being less willing to return great heroes'. This because death has to be significant enough that it is meaningful, but not significant enough that dying is a major disruption to the game. 500 gp is a pittance to a mid to high level character, so the cost needed to be increased in order to make it at least mean something. It is a constant struggle in such games for death to be meaningful, but not crippling. In previous editions, you lost levels for dying and being raised, so this is a significant step forward as far as pricing goes. And honestly, 20% is not all that strange if you look at it from an economic perspective; sure, the merchant seems like they're ripping you off, but how often do high-level adventurers come by town? In the default assumption, the heroes are pretty much THE heroes, and there just aren't all that many other people who would be capable of buying that + 5 flaming bastard sword that you sold to Bob's Used Weapon Emporium.
▲** Lampshaded in [https://web.archive.org/web/20120101190146/http://nodwick.humor.gamespy.com/ffn/index.php?date=2008-11-19 this] ''[[Full Frontal Nerdity]]'' strip.
▲** A relatively recent addition to the 4th-edition rules is item rarity. Common items can be purchased, created by [[PCs]], and sell for the usual 20%. Rare items, however, cannot be crafted or bought—they only turn up as loot if the DM specifically places them. The good news is that they sell for 50% (or even 100%) of their list price.
▲** It was averted in earlier editions, where a low level group would have to survive dozens of encounters to get the treasure necessary for a raise dead, where a high level group could have a small village brought back for what they got per encounter. This was not a good thing.
▲* ''[[GURPS]]'' went to a ridiculous extreme in justifying and averting this trope. Magic items are balanced via a relatively simple economic system they built for the game (and explain to any GM who wants to change it).
▲* Completely averted in the board game ''Container'', where the players are responsible for producing, storing, shipping and buying the titular multicoloured containers, and there are no outside market forces whatsoever. How much does it cost to buy an orange container? As much as the seller is asking. How much can you make from shipping three white containers? As much as the buyer is willing to pay. It's basically a self-contained economic system, and you could use it to teach supply-and-demand theory.
▲* ''[[Monopoly (game)|Monopoly]]'' is based on this principle. As the game goes on, the players acquire more and more property, monopolize what they can, and charge higher and higher rents to other players who land on their property. Players whose income does not increase fast enough to pay off increasing rents will eventually be eliminated, until only one remains.
{{reflist}}
[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]▼
[[Category:Money Tropes]]
▲[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]
[[Category:CRPG Tropes]]
[[Category:Esoteric Trope Names]]
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