Starting a new thread, so that Albedo and I can yell about the nonsense that is Pern's economy. I think I'll start off with: everyone uses exactly the same currency, with no changes or noticeable inflation, as they have since literally Landing. This currency is the mark (with different crafts having their own specific Marks that they mint), and the smallest one (a hundredthmark) is made of wood. Cheap wood! And it's noted that this can be a problem because if you get bumped or caught up in a fight, the cheap wooden marks have a tendency to splinter. Like. Making sure your money-tokens don't fucking shatter when they're handled too roughly seems like it should be a bit of a priority? And also making them out of something that can't be replicated by someone with a chunk of wood, a knife, and a skill for whittling? I mean, the main reason why forgers go for big notes like hundred dollar bills is because hardly anyone sees one of those, so it's easier to slip a fake past; meanwhile, fives and tens are common enough that a cashier sees dozens of them every workday, and you'd need to make a lot of them to get a good return on your investment. But if you can just make dozens or hundreds of pennies with a piece of wood and some skill with a knife, and it'd look just as legit as the real ones, then um. I have some concerns here, and they relate to "why has no enterprising teenager done anything with this".
We had a Pern thread and a Pern RP planning thread that turned into worldbuilding a while back that also featured a lot of Yells About Economy.
I did search to see if there was an already-existing Pern thread, and mostly what I found was people talking about it in the "pet peeve fandoms" thread, and one Pern-specific thread that's over ten pages back in the archives for Fan Town. I didn't see the RP planning thread and figured that it would, honestly, be easier to just create a new thread rather than necro a really old thread; even if I had seen the RP planning thread, I'd probably have created this one, because this gives a specific area for Yells About Economy that doesn't risk derailing RP planning.
