I'm still not seeing what the illegality is, Tim. For instance, an antiques dealer can sell antiques for whatever they like, and then people resell them for different prices. Basically, I'm not seeing how it is that they can't sell their products any way they like.
Perhaps it's because it makes buying random bags gambling? OTOH, if you made the exchange rates based on commonality then you'd always be getting the same value in the random bags.
Of course this leads to the price fixing problem, however. Some commons are going to be worth more in-dungeon than others, so they'd all sell out, while others wouldn't be purchased at all. Is this a securities issue? Is it like issuing bonds, and then messing with the price to profit? Is that where the illegality lies. (Any lawyers out there who could explain?)
Don't get me wrong, I think that a barter economy only is more stable, and more interesting in some ways. Again, the problem is with the gold, however.
I liked True Dungeon and will play again next year, but I am not going to spend my gaming money on a pouch of random collectible tokens.
The nice thing about how it works is that none of this requires at all that you buy any. The tokens may make it easier to get through the dungeon, but it's certainly not impossible to make it without them. Nor are any of the other suggested benefits neccessary to play.
Does it give them an "unfair" advantage? Well, yes, if you're directly comparing end performances of differing parties. What I'm sure will happen is that some people will start playing "pure" runs where they go in with no tokens. Because otherwise there's no really good way to judge player ability from one to the other. In any case, there are so many odd factors already (just think about different GMs) that even then it'll be hard to call any run a completely fair comparison. So, I think for the most part you're really up against yourself in TD. And to that extent, you can handicap yourself without bias with regard to tokens.
Just tell people who made it all the way through that you did the same thing sans tokens, as a way to one up them if that's what you're looking for. The key thing here is that nobody has a worse time because somebody else used tokens.
I was hoping that my suggestion would help make a True Dungeon economy and not encourage people to buy tokens on eBay for real money.
If you want to pay more to support TD, Tokens just gives you a fun way to do it. What eBay is doing is ensuring that there
will be people at GenCon next year that will be there to sell tokens for cash - precisely what you asked for. You will be able to buy tokens next year at fixed prices from profiteers. You might not like the prices, but they'll be market value.
Raven, yeah, I'm seeing that gold to magic price guide for the "TA Store" as a necessity in some ways. Again, to support the value of the gold. In fact, I'm tempted to start hoarding gold in the hope that it's value will be boosted by such an exchange rate in the future (he said, hoping to undo any damage done to gold values with his last statement about it).
That said, it becomes tantamount to giving real dollar prices. If a bag of random tokens costs $9 and gives 39 gold on average, and the converted value of the other tokens is, on average 200 gold, then you have an approximate gold to dollar conversion rate right there. It's meaningless, until you can exchange tokens for other tokens at fixed rates. Once that happens, then you have an approximate correllation between actual currency, and the cost of any particular item. Not sure if that falls under Tim's area of being problematic, or not.
Mike