Game Ideas Un limited: Prepaid

  Someone recently asked me if he was the only person who didn't have a cellular phone.  I'm sure there are many people who don't have this modern inconvenience; I, however, am saddled with one.  My wife is of the opinion that there are people to whom I don't want to talk at all who should have the power to contact me at any time and any place, interrupting whatever I am doing with their concerns, concerns which they think should be more important to me than whatever it is I happen to be doing at any given moment.  Specifically, she wants the schools to be able to call me whenever they want.  So I have a cell phone, and I often have it with me, at least when I can't get out of it.

  What interests me about it, what caught my attention about it even before this question arose, is that mine is of the prepaid variety.  I have to buy time in advance of using it.  Compare this to the land line service I have in my house:  I pay for calls I've already made, after the fact.  The phone company sends me a bill telling me what I owe them, and if I'm negligent in paying for services rendered, their chief recourse is to prevent me from making any additional calls until I've settled my account.

  It occurs to me that there are many things for which I pay in advance, and others for which I pay after the fact, and that there is not all that much of a pattern to these.  For example, I have for decades heated the house with gas, and gas heat means that the gas company charges me regularly for the gas I've already burned.  Those who have oil heat, on the other hand, must buy it to have it, or they can't burn it.  The truck pulls up and fills the tank, and they pay for what they want, in the expectation that they will use it eventually.  In that sense, their oil is like my prepaid telephone service, and my gas heat is like my land lines.

  Of course, there are many things that you get when you pay for them.  I pick out my groceries and pay the checker before I take them to my car.  In a sense I'm paying for them before I use them, but I am taking possession of them.  However, there's no inherent reason why my groceries couldn't be prepaid, why I couldn't transfer funds from my account to the grocer's and then at my leisure pick up what I need charged against my credit balance.  Similarly, there's no inherent reason why the store couldn't keep a running tab on what I take and bill me at the end of the month for it.  In fact, those who use credit and debit cards are doing something very like that, but that generally there is a middleman who handles the transaction.

  Similarly, I start using the gas in my car as soon as I pull away from the pump, and may well obtain the next tankful at another station; there really isn't a practical way for me to pay for it as I use it.  But compare most diners to most fast food restaurants.  In the former case, you order your food, eat it, and then when you're done you pay for it.  In the latter, they'll have your money in the register before they've finished fouling up your special orders.  At one time doctors sent bills to their regular patients for services previously rendered.  Today some forms of medical insurance (such as the HMO and IPO models, but also the original Blue Cross model) have patients paying in advance for services they might or might not need.  Most doctors expect payment at time of service, but will bill your insurance company if you've got traditional insurance, which means they're paid later.  They'll also bill you, if your insurance didn't cover it all.

  There is no particular method to the madness.  Generally you pay bus fare, train tickets, and airlines before you ride; but you pay taxi drivers when you reach your destination.  The toll booths for most bridges and tunnels that lead into New York City (they have one-way tolls into New York) are all on the New Jersey side, before you cross; those crossing the Delaware River (also one-way tolls going toward Philadelphia) tend to be on the Pennsylvania and Delaware side, so that you pay after you've crossed.  You pay to get on Philadelphia's High Speed Line, but you paid to get off the MTA's similar service in Boston, as a song famous in the fifties highlighted.  I can, if I like, take each letter to the post office when I need to mail it, and pay to have it delivered at that time, but most people buy stamps in bulk so that they can send letters when they need to--clearly prepaying for delivery service they expect to use in the future.  Today I can buy service agreements for many of the things I buy, in essence paying in advance for repairs I might never need, and so getting them at a discount if I do need them.  Too bad I can't get this on my car; but that's because it's an old car--service on new cars is often included, prepaid.

  What appears through this is that there's no particular reason why something should or should not be prepaid.  Certainly we can focus on individual cases and see why these are one way or the other.  Heating oil is delivered like gasoline by any of several competitors, so charging me for what I take is easier than charging me for what I use; gas, on the other hand, is piped through the ground to reach me, and is more easily metered and billed as I use it--I can't easily change gas companies.  Yet I could pay in advance if I switched to bottled gas.  Similarly, there's no reason why a taxi couldn't charge in advance, or an airplane take payment on arrival.  It's just the way it's done.

  Since it is nothing more than the way it's done, it presents opportunities to consider how it might be done otherwise.  If the characters check into an inn, does the innkeeper want his money before he arranges the room, or will he bill you in the morning?  Do the mercenaries you hire want their coin before they leave town, or are they willing to trust you to pay them on their return?

  Put the shoe on the other foot.  Will the merchant who hires the characters to escort him safely to his destination pay them up front, or will he insist that they succeed in getting him there before he'll impart their earnings to them?  Can they persuade the stranger with the map to trust them to share whatever they find if he'll let them take it, or will he part with it only if they pay him the small price he asks for it?

  Consider the possibilities in the future.  If food comes from replicators or other dispensers on the ship or space station, do the characters receive bills at the end of the month for the food they've eaten, or do they have to pay the food service at the beginning of the month for the amount of food they expect to consume?  Is there a monthly life support bill, and if you don't pay it do they shut off your service?  Do you pay for site-to-site teleporter use, and if so when do you pay?

  While you're thinking about how your economic system works, you might take a look back at some of the earlier articles in this series which have touched on it.  Value talked about the fact that no object, not even a diamond, has an inherent worth, but is dependent on whether people want it, something well within the control of the referee in the game world.  The history of money, and the many forms it has taken over time and might take in the future, was the subject of Cash.  Shares wasn't too far afield, as it discussed various means of equitably dividing the material rewards a group of characters received for their efforts.  Although Opportunity Costs is more about budgeting time than budgeting money, it is definitely about resource allocation, and part of our economic thinking.  There's a lot of material here to help build the financial systems of your worlds; this is one more piece to the puzzle that can make it more interesting, more alive.

  We have a tendency to manage these things pretty much the way that is familiar to us.  That is exactly the wrong way to do it, in most cases.  We are in unfamiliar worlds, and should expect the unexpected.  We should give some thought to how this world does things.  Different is good.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.