Last week’s Friday Funny on Everything I Know about Economics, I Learned from D&D was popular enough that we’ve asked Clinton and Greg for more… And they went shopping.

Rule 11: Everyone you will ever meet will charge you for every service they will ever do for you, with the exception of your friends, who will never charge you anything. If you are somehow able to become friends with a wizard, a doctor, a lawyer, a priest, a violent sociopath and a pickpocket, you are set for life. [More…]

Rule 12: There is a vast and infinite surplus of every single thing you do not want, and a desperate shortage of everything you do want – except when EXACTLY the right amount of exactly what you want is readily available swiftly, painlessly, and occasionally without charge, often in an effort to bribe you into not shopping.

Rule 13: Mundane store owners of all kinds will always require you to ask VERY specifically for exactly the thing that you want, cannot recommend bargains or products, often do not know what, if anything, they have in stock, often have no idea what their products are or how to use them, and charge obscure (but exact) list prices for all of them. However, all stores have exact change at all times in all denominations.

Subrule A: Most storeowners have no name, no facial features, no history, no goals beyond ‘shop-keep well’, no distinguishing personality, and apparently sleep in the back of their store on a huge pile of generic, nameless ‘goods’. If pressed, they will often lie and claim to have ‘forgotten’ their name.

Subrule B: The few store owners who DO have even the slightest personality are universally so unutterably annoying that you will yearn for the days when every person in town not cackling with evil or one of your close personal friends was summed up as ‘Mayor”, ‘Chet’ or ‘guy who knows Chet’.

Rule 14: Proper health care, while incomprehensibly, inhumanly expensive, is also instantaneous, infallible, without side effect and quite beyond painless. Sitting around ‘getting better’ is valuable killing-folk-taking-stuff time uselessly wasted. Only poor people get sick. Hell, only poor people DIE. Watch:

Cure wounds (Any): Free
Remove paralysis: 60 gold
Remove (any & all) disease: 150 gold
Remove blindness & deafness: 300 gold
Regenerate (every limb, every organ): 910 gold
Raise Dead: 5,450 gold
True Resurrection: 26,530 gold

Not ever, ever having to say ‘goodbye’: Priceless

Rule 15: Spending every cent that you own (and borrowing hundreds of thousands of dollars from your friends) in order to purchase a glowing chunk of metal from an old man in the woods is the best investment in your future you will ever make.

Rule 16: Money comes and goes like the wind, and having a lot of it will sometimes make getting more of it a problem – if a mysterious voice on the wind asks “Wait – how much do you have on your sheet?” you are about to (if poor) acquire a massive windfall, or (if rich) get gouged horribly/robbed blind the next time you sleep.

Rule 17: Money can buy everything, including beer, sex, servants, intelligence, better people skills, hats that shoot magical lasers and immortality. The few things that money cannot buy can be taken violently.

Rule 18: No one in the entire world accepts bribes, with the tiny exception of the very small percentage of the population who will actually OPENLY ASK for bribes.

Rule 19: Hiring people to work for you is in many ways similar to beating your head against a brick wall – you’ll never get anything accomplished, it sure isn’t fun, but damn does it feel good to stop.

99% of people you will ever meet would not agree to join you on something as simple as a run to the store for bread even for a small fortune in gold. On the other hand, 1% of all the people you will ever meet would eagerly follow you into Hell for no greater compensation than your company, and will inform you of such within seconds of meeting you.

Rule 20: The total value of everything in a coin-purse or wallet can be judged at a distance of 30 feet – and lifting a single gold piece off of a pile of gold the size of your house will give you an estimate accurate to within ten bucks of how much the entire thing is worth.

Did you miss the first 10 Rules of D&D Economics? Check them out!