Wiki Spotlight: Psi-Wars Currencies

"I can do Calamari Flan… But I can only pay half."

―

Greef Karga, the Mandalorian

Do you know what Psi-Wars needs more than anything? If you answered "Unnecessarily detailed rules on currencies in Psi-Wars that nobody will use" then you, my friend, have the same sort of problem my brain does late at night.  Because that's what I wrote. 9,000 words of obsessively detailed currency rules.

Why would I do this? Well, first, because my brain wouldn't shut up about it.  I kept coming up with new currency ideas, and I had to sketch them somewhere.  Believe it or not, these are somewhat edited down from what I originally had! But more than that, I got to thinking about the Heist, and what people would steal, and how they would expect to get paid. Combined with my recent explorations of finances for other things, I found myself coming up with all sorts of questions, questions like:

• Do cash-based currencies even make sense in a sci-fi setting?
• If they don't, what do people on remote, "uncivilized" worlds use for money?
• If they use cash, or commodity currencies, how much do they weigh?
• How do you handle interstellar commerce? How do you balance the books of a star-spanning corporation or empire?
• If the Empire controlled financial institutions, what prevents them from freezing the accounts of political dissidents?
• Why would the Empire allow the Alliance to use the same financial institutions they do?
• How do criminals get around various laws to buy stuff on the black market or get paid by fixers?
• What does commerce in the Umbral Rim look like? How crazy can we get it?
• Do the Keleni even need money?
• What sort of money did various ancient empires use? Do they still use them?

I began to answer the questions for myself, writing out notes, looking up rules for these in other books, discovering the Flux rules in Cyberworld, diving into various financial concepts, and as I wrote out the notes, they became more and more detailed, and I had to trim them down further.  I had a noted down quick summary of every currency which, I notice, is no longer present in the article, but I could add it back, if you guys prefer.

I've separated this off for a reason.  I imagine the vast majority of people playing Psi-Wars just scratch off the word "Dollar" in GURPS and replace it with "Credit" and don't think more about it.  And when they get to an alien world with alien commerce, they just stop for a moment, shrug and make up something on the spot.  And, you know, that's fine.  I've listed that as a default set of rules in my currency article.  But some inspiration for some of these weirder currencies might be nice, and if you think about things like my questions above, you might want some answers to things like "How can a criminal do business in the Empire?" and "Do Keleni have money?", so I've provided those. I've even added some rules to allow you invest your character more deeply into a particular currency, and to play up its impact on the setting, if you want.  I may further expand these, depending on what people want. But I don't expect most people will ever use them, so everything about the article is self-contained. It's a "nice to have" that you can explore at your leisure.

Pyramid 4/3 Sci-Fi/Tech Review

 Last, but definitely not least, we have the Sci-Fi issue of the Kickstarted Pyramid Trio.  As usual, I'll give a TL;DR of my final thoughts first, and then a break down of each article.

Overview

Rating: 5 stars

Look, this shouldn't be a surprise; I like SF, so the SF pyramid gets the best score, right? Well, it's more than that.  First, there were several articles that spoke to precisely what I've been working on recently and so are directly relevant to me.  That's sort of unfair, as you're working on something else and so different things will be pertinent to you, but it's still relevant, because if one person is working on something, chances are more people are working on something similar.  Second, a lot of this stuff is just good.  There are two I've noted as NA.  Perhaps they should be one star, I don't know, but it feels more like a deep interest mismatch than necessarily a quality problem.  But in my opinion, this had the best material, and some of the most engrossing articles, of the three pyramids, so it's my favorite.

My only complaint is we FINALLY have a new tech pyramid with no new Ultra-Tech. What's up with that?

Pyramid 4/2 Modern Action Review

Having finished Pyramid 4/1, let's move on to Pyramid #4/2.  As before, I'll give you a TL;DR summary first, which I'll write after I've written my review of everything else.  Then, after that TL;DR review, I'll break every article down.

Overview

Rating: 4 stars

There's no articles here, unlike Fantasy, that I just won't read because I won't use the underlying system.  There were several articles that I found immediately useful and/or very well written.  There were, however, several "useless" articles, and a one that I would consider badly written (though it still had value).

As with the Fantasy/Magic issue, there's more than enough good material in here to justify your $5 or whatever its final price will be.  Particualrly stand-out articles include the Checkpoint and Highway Stars, which I think anyone running a modern (or even only "modernish") campaign will find useful.

Pyramid #4/1 Fantasy/Magic I

 

I didn't review Pyramid when it was out, but maybe I should have.  Still, it would have been a constant process, while this new Kickstarter version is more of a one-off deal, which makes reviewing it a more reasonable proposition, though I don't know how useful that will be to you, dear reader: either you backed it and you have it, in which case the only point of reading this will be to see whether I agree with you or not, or you didn't, in which case you have no access to it, but presumably you'll be able to access it later, in which case this review might be useful to you.

I'll review each article separately and then collect everything together in a single TL;DR review.

Overview

Rating: 4 stars

So, if I go over each article, I find there are none that I actively disliked.  I didn't really look over the RPM one, as I don't use RPM (I'm also rather skeptical of the need to write up so many spells for a system that's supposed to be flexible and free-form), so I didn't count that in my average as a "zero"; if I did, then the issue drops to about 3 stars, but that feels unfair.  I found at least three "I will use or look into this immediately" articles, and 3 more I would strongly consider using, or would strongly recommend to others.

I don't know what the final price of this issue will be, but given its size, it's almost certainly worth your time. It's obviously more worth your time if you're into fantasy, but I'm not running any fantasy at the moment, and I still found a lot of useful stuff.  This is up there with some of the top Pyramid issues from #3, and I definitely recommend it.

On Narrative Magic

My posts on magic, especially the one on flexible magic, tend to be quite popular, despite them not being on topic. But whenever I write them, a little voice in the back of my head objects.  It says something like this:

"But that's not what they want to use magic for.  You don't understand what they're trying to do with magic."

A lot of people who advocate for flexible magic are not generally advocating for it because they want to have infinitely flexible problem solving power, allowing them just invest in a single stat that will solve all of their problems.  Instead, they speak of adding greater flavor to their stories.  They want to run a game that feels occult or like a fairy-tale, and they feel like static magic doesn't offer them this opportunity, while flexible magic does.  They see my arguments about problem solving as moving in the wrong direction.  I actually address this in my post on Flexible Magic, but I thought I might address it in greater detail here.

First, before we get into the rest of this, I want to hedge that I disagree with the notion that static magic can't feel like a fairy tale or like occult horror.  For example, there's a Pyramid article with Path/Book Magic that's explicitly geared towards fairly tale tropes, and Path/Book magic in general is very occult. 

But these still create very solution-oriented magic that's repeatable, when that isn't what they want.  What they want is something that allows them to express their immediate creativity, to create magic that feels unique to the moment or the story. They don't want "I cast sleep.  I cast sleep again." They want this more dynamic thing where they might cast sleep twice, but the nature of the sleep spell, and how it interacts with the setting and the world changes.  The first time it might be a quick, light slumber spell to help someone sleep while their dreams are safeguarded from ghosts, while the second time it might be a dread curse (that also preserves the target in their current age and health) that keeps them asleep until the spell is broken.  Static systems struggle with this sort of nuance and detail, so they naturally reach for a dynamic system.

But I think the problem here isn't actually the dynamic system, it's the mechanical dissonance. They're trying to use a narrativist mechanic in a gamist, solution-oriented game system, and the net result of that inevitably creates the sort of problems that I complain about in  my flexible magic post, where people realize that magic is the One Stat to Rule Them All, and just rolls magic until the problem goes away.  There is, however, a solution to this that allows the creative player to have their creativity without breaking the system they're working with.

Do Force Swords Break Weapons?

This feels like one of the questions that has an obvious answer: duh, yes, force swords destroy weapons.  End of story.  Why are we even talking about this?

Well, because force swords destroying all other melee weapons causes some problems, mainly in that it destroys a great deal of melee variety.  Why use anything but a force sword in melee once the force sword becomes available?  Star Wars itself doesn't have a good answer, as I learned as I looked for art for this post, because a shocking number of weapons in Star Wars just stand up perfectly fine to a lightsaber, because of (mutter mutter cortosis something something beskar).  So even Star Wars is aware of the need for a variety of weapons in melee, and the need for them to stand up to a force sword equivalent, or your melee fights become boring.

This has been a question I've had for awhile, and was the topic of a previous post, but I found that the answer to the question above isn't what I thought it was.  It's a short hand that a lot of people use, because force swords effectively destroy weapons, but it's not actually certain.  Instead, it's a convenient shorthand.  I believe I already addressed this years ago back in Iteration 2, where I proved that you can basically ignore the following detailed rules, but they do matter if we want to make melee weapons "realistically" viable (as much as realism matters in a setting that uses super-science melee weapons).

So, let's dive in and see if we can explore some ways to handle this more realistically without bogging the game down.

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