Coppers

The rule that outranks everything else

Rolling more never earns more. There is no payout for a roll — not for a roll, not for a crit, not for a session's worth of them. The ledger has a closed list of reasons a balance may ever change and there isn't one for throwing a die.

This isn't squeamishness about grinding. RNGESUS records rolls off physical tags, and the value of that data is that nobody has a reason to fake it. Attach coppers to roll count and the numbers stop being observations and start being income.

Silver, gold and platinum

A hundred coppers make a silver, a hundred silver make a gold, and a hundred gold make a platinum. So a purse reading 1g 23s 45c holds 12,345 coppers, and the bar will happily tell you something costs "1 silver and 20 coppers" rather than make you count to 120.

It's the same money underneath. The ledger still keeps everything in coppers, every price is still a number of coppers, and nobody is going to charge you a fee for changing a silver. The bigger coins are only there so a well-off regular's purse fits on one line. (Platinum is a million coppers, which is a great many achievements. We put it in anyway. Optimism is free.)

Where they come from

Achievements, overwhelmingly. Most pay somewhere in the 20–100 range; the one-time-ever founding ones — things nobody had done here before you did — pay 500.

One quirk that looks like a bug and isn't: the achievement engine is driven by events, and the main one is a roll (a tavern game settling is the other). So an achievement about the state of your account — you registered a die, you joined a table, you made a friend — is awarded on your next roll rather than the moment it happened. It does fire; it just isn't instant. Some of the catalogue is also written but not yet awarding, because an achievement with no logic behind it stays a draft rather than going live and quietly never firing.

Not from winning at the tavern games. They cost nothing to sit down to and pay nothing to win, the dice ones and the board ones alike. A few achievements are about something that happens in a game — shutting all nine latches is one — and those pay the way any achievement does, which is once.

Being honest about the rest: amounts are also priced for a welcome purse, a daily visit, attending a session and running one. Nothing currently calls them, so don't plan around them yet.

Where they go

The bar's wares. Hats, tankards, companions, badges, frames, styles, seats — one item per slot, so the tricorn and the pointed hat are a choice. Every one is cosmetic. No item touches a die, a roll, a modifier or a number on a character sheet, and that's a rule rather than a gap in the catalogue. Items get retired rather than deleted, too: when the bar stops stocking something, everyone who owns it keeps it forever, which is why a seasonal hat is worth buying in season.

Drinks, at the counter. Cheapest to dearest: coffee, small beer, ale, and something stronger from the bottle with no label. Dearer ones last longer, and how long a drink sits in front of you is how long it keeps you from dozing off. One at a time — finish that first.

Standing a round, also at the counter, because you can't buy a round from an armchair. Flat price however many people it serves — a price that scaled with the room would punish generosity at the exact moment it's worth something. It reaches everybody at the fire, or everybody at your table.

Recipients get a drink and no coppers — two accounts standing each other rounds all evening would be a faucet in a nice coat. You can buy yourself anything on the menu, and generosity is counted separately, so your own whisky never reads as somebody else's.

A log for the fire. The cheapest thing here, and the only purchase that does nothing for you at all.

The tables are not a job

Every tavern game is free. There's no ante to sit down, no pot in the middle, and the house adds nothing to a win. That goes for a game off the shelf beside a table, a leg at the dartboard, a game for one upstairs, and one played by post.

• Winning pays nothing, to anybody, however it was won.
• A win is still a win. It's placed, it's counted, and the leaderboard knows about it. It just doesn't jingle.
• Walking away costs nothing either. The game is called off and nobody has lost it.

Grinding the tables earns exactly what it costs. That's arithmetic, not a rule anyone has to enforce.

What they can never buy

• Anything that changes a roll. Not a modifier, not a re-roll, not a weighted die, not a blessing with teeth. Same rule as "rolling more never earns more", pointed the other way.
• Access to a person. There is no priced way to get somebody's attention and there never will be. A drink can be a kindness to somebody who's asked to be left alone; it cannot override them.
• Anything real. Coppers aren't money and don't convert to it. Real money moves at checkout, in dollars — coppers can live in firelight, dollars can't.

Your statement is itemised and every line carries its reason. Corrections are extra rows rather than edits, so if your purse looks wrong the history will say why.