Hunt economy

From SWILwiki

The economy of the Pterodactyl Hunt consists of the exchange of currency (red, blue, white poker chips) for goods (longswords, shields, (silver) daggers, amulets, hunting licenses). The cost of these items affects the strength of hunters (whether they have more equipment than basic Orcs and Hobgoblins, and how quickly hunters are able to amass enough gold for all six members of a party to buy hunting licenses to go after the 'dactyls (and thus, the length of the hunt).

Basic prices are set at the beginning of the hunt, erring on the side of expensive, and slashed by Hunt Central if it seems like no one can afford anything. After about two hours, if nobody has a hunt license yet, the price often gets reduced dramatically. The Wizards do the initial price setting and later price-slashing, while the Squires handle most of the mundane money stuff.

It is generally agreed upon at each year's post-hunt debriefing that the economy wasn't quite right, and should be tweaked somehow, but records of prices at past years' hunts seem not to exist anywhere, so it's hard to tell which trends were good, and which bad.

Table of contents

1 Experience Points 2 Gold 2.1 1999 2.2 2002 2.3 2004 2.4 2006

Experience Points

Long, long ago, the Hunt contained experience points, which were given out either in addition to, or instead of gold. It is extremely unclear to JillianWaldman what they were good for, although she does have a picture of them (http://www.swil.org/archives/Pterodactyl/Experience_Sheet.gif) she got from Jimmosk. Anybody who cares to elaborate, should.

Gold

The primary currency of the Pterodactyl Hunt is "gold", which is made of plastic and sold at a Target near you, under the cunningly disguisative name of "poker chips".

White poker chips are the lowest value coin, red the medium value, and blue the highest. Some years, red and blue have been switched.

1999

Amy' posted these prices from the 1999 Hunt to the hunt list in 2003:

• Small Shield -- $20
• Vorpal Sword -- $50
• Silver Sword -- $50
• Amulet of Warding -- $30
• Hunting License -- $70
• Dactyl Eggs -- sold out
• Pizza -- 1 dactyl heart

She notes that they also had experience points that year, so the prices aren't immediately relevant to the modern hunt.

2002

Here's a cautionary tale from the 2002 Hunt. 'The sort of story you read your children if you want them to grow up to be economists' -- i.e., this is why the economy is important. Records of prices may not have been kept, but it was agreed upon that licenses were too cheap, and the dactyls were all killed too quickly.

Due to the massive oversupply of cash in the Hunt economy, real prices
took a nosedive.  My dactyl was swarmed and taken out after only about an
hour of play.  The dactyl guard team I was on decided that keeping the
game balanced was more important than hobgoblin/orc pride and attached
ourselves to the other dactyl, which had the dual purpose of a) warning
the other dactyl and guards of the dangerous situation, and b) keeping the
other dactyl alive for that much longer.  While I sincerely hope that this
situation *never* *comes up* *again* (ahem), the flexibility to repeat
this should be maintained. -- Michael Noda to the hunt list, June 2003

2004

I don't really remember why we did this, but in 2004, we changed the Hunt economy dramatically, possibly in part because we still hadn't gotten around to / couldn't find in stores more poker chips. This was known as the "New Economic Plan", and failed dramatically.

We renamed the poker chips to sound cooler: white=argent, blue=azure, red=gules. We also implemented a very strange exchange policy - higher chips could be exchanged at Hunt Central for lower chips (change), but you couldn't put together a bunch of lower chips to make higher chips. I don't know if the squires actually used this policy, or if it quickly turned out not to work.

Prices (struckout prices were reduced during the Hunt):

*	Argent	Gules	Azure
Longsword	5 3	-	-
Silver Dagger	10	8	-
Hunt license	10	10	5
Shield	10	2	-
Spondee Bait (one use)	5	5 3	-

How much money did monsters hand out?

We divided them into basic, medium, and hard. Basic monsters (Orcs, Hobgoblins) handed out one Argent. Medium monsters (Jabberwock, Race Kings, who else?) gave out one Gules. Tricky monsters (Werewolf, Spondees, who else?) gave out one Azure. (The Hydra got to pick whether it gave out 2 Gules or 1 Azure). This meant we eliminated the "honor mechanic", where monsters get to hand out different amounts of money for a coward's blow to the back, a face-to-face kill, and a really awesome face-to-face kill. At debriefing, we decided we needed to reinstate the honor mechanic.

2006

As best we can tell, these are the prices for the 2006 Pterodactyl Hunt. Struckout prices were reduced during the Hunt. We used the standard currency denominations — blue = 5, red = 3, white = 1, with basic monsters giving out 3 for an awesome kill, 2 for a standard one, and 1 for a cheap backstab.

item	price
Longsword	6
Silver Dagger	24
Hunt license	100 60 30 *
Shield	10 or 12 **
Spondee bait	8

* At debriefing, we decided that 50 was probably the right price for a license, and we should start there the next year, instead of setting it too high for it to be a realistic goal and then slashing it when people had already started giving up. ** This is a guess because the poster got defaced after the hunt so we couldn't read the price.

	History of the Pterodactyl Hunt	(view·discuss)
Topics	Equipment | Economy | Victors | Characters | Quests | Organizing
Years	1982 | 1983 | 1984 | 1985 | 1986 | 1987 | 1988 | 1989 | 1990 | 1991 | 1992 | 1993 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 2006 | 2007