Update 1: Avoiding Ridiculous Numbers
A main goal is avoiding big numbers, in both the RPG side and the Incremental side. For the RPG side, I'm using classic D&D and Shining Force as models: lv. 1 characters will have around 5HP and do 1 dmg, for example.
The incremental part is trickier. For now, I came up with a multi-currency system to effectively replace a few tiers of number notation. There's copper pieces, bronze pieces, iron pieces, silver pieces, gold pieces, and platinum pieces. 100 copper pieces would be worth 1 bronze piece, 100 bronze pieces worth 1 iron piece, and so on. The idea would be that these six tiers replace the normal hundreds, thousands, 10 thousands, 100 thousands, millions, 10 millions.
If my math is right, which it probably isnt because I'm terrible at math, the values in terms of flat numbers should be:
- 100 copper pieces = 100 copper
- 1 bronze piece = 100 copper
- 100 bronze pieces = 10,000 copper
- 1 iron piece = 100 bronze pieces = 10,000 copper
- 100 iron pieces = 10,000 bronze = 1,000,000 copper
- 1 silver piece = 100 iron pieces = 1,000,000 copper
- 100 silver pieces = 10,000 iron pieces = 100,000,000 copper
- 1 gold piece = 100 silver pieces = 100,000,000 copper
- 100 gold pieces = 10,000 silver pieces = 10,000,000,000 copper
- 1 platinum piece = 100 gold pieces = 10,000,000,000 copper
- 100 platinum pieces = 10,000 gold pieces = 1,000,000,000,000 copper
Or in summary:
- 1 bronze = 100 copper
- 1 iron = 10,000 copper
- 1 silver = 1 million copper
- 1 gold = 100 million copper
- 1 platinum = 10 billion copper
- 100 platinum = 1 trillion copper
This isn't an all encompassing solution, many incrementals go into much higher numbers: sextillion (Sx), septillion (Sp), Octillion (Oc), and Nonillion (No) aren't uncommon... but at least it covers a pretty good early chunk of numbers, up to a trillion.
There will also be some gameplay design questions:
should 100 copper automatically become 1 bronze piece in your inventory, or should it be manually exchanged?
I'm currently leaning toward the later for two reasons: it can enable a gameplay element like a market where you try to get the best exchange rate, and it means you can also have things like 300 copper, 250 bronze, 3 silver, which enables currencies to extend further before going into higher brackets, mitigating the climb toward ridiculous numbering.
what happens beyond platinum?
Things probably won't get that far, but if they do, I will look to alternative resources, mystical stuff like "star diamonds" or so on. Alternatively, I could change the rates so that it takes 1,000 instead of 100 to move up a currency tier, which would pad things out quite a lot.