Cris Tales's Currency

Who here’s been jonesing for another rant about a completely insignificant and silly subject?  For any of you unabashed lunatics who answered “Me,” today’s a special treat for you!



When it comes to the forms which money takes, RPGs have quite a variety.  Sure, you’ve got your garden-variety RPG currency like Gold or Gold Pieces, which hails all the way back to the genre’s Dungeons and Dragons origins, and plenty of others will just just refer to the money you’re looting as Coins, Leaves, Lucre, etc., and call it a day.*  Equally often, you’ll get a case where it’s some nondescript made-up currency that could be bills or coins or pretty shells or tulip bulbs for all we know, usually with a dumb name that no one in society would actually be able to regularly use with a straight face--imagine trying to have a serious conversation about finances while repeating the term Gil, Potch, Gella, or fucking Zenny, over and over again.  On occasion, you’ll get a currency whose form actually had some thought and reason put into it, such as Bottlecaps in (most of) the Fallout series, Shadowrun’s Nuyen, Reál from Disco Elysium, or space RPGs like Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic relying on Credits.**  Things like Cents, Dollars, and Yen are an easy go-to for series set in the real world, like Shin Megami Tensei: Persona, or the South Park RPGs.  Suffice to say, I’ve seen me a lot of different forms of money in my time as The RPGenius, and it rarely catches my attention.

But the decision to make Marbles the currency of Cris Tales’s world does give me pause.

Marbles?

Like, the little glass orbs that kids used to play with, back before fun was invented?  With the colors and the little swirly things in them and whatnot?  Real-life Materia, sans both the magical powers and the teenage dunce trying to steal them because she’s convinced that they’ll solve all her family’s and culture’s problems?  That’s what we’re using for currency in Cris Tales.  Marbles.

Huh.

You know, I’m trying to envision a functional marble-based economy, and it’s just not happening for me.  I mean, first of all, these little fuckers are round.  Practically perfectly so, in fact.  Not only are they not gonna conveniently stack the way a coin does--good luck carrying any decent pocket change around--but the moment you drop one, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve got a chase on your hands.  You drop a paper note, the wind may catch it.  You drop a coin, well, it may fall on its side and roll a little.  But so long as Fengalon isn’t really going to town that day, you’re gonna be able to pretty easily get that buck back, and as long as you weren’t cliche-adjacent to a sewer grate, you’re gonna be able to pretty easily retrieve that shekel.  But you drop a marble on a decently paved walkway, and that little fucker’s gonna be off like an escaped convict.  Bifelgan the Trader help you if you happen to drop more than 1 of these things at once; I guarantee you’re not retrieving even half of them once they’ve become a cartoon tripping hazard.

And speaking of losing the things, I know I made a crack about playing with marbles not actually being all that fun, and I’ll stand by that, but the world of Cris Tales is one in which basic, less-a-toy-than-just-an-object-we-can-force-into-that-role playthings seem appropriate to the setting.  I mean, for God’s sake, when you initially enter the town of St. Clarity, the first thing you see, I mean the first damn thing that happens, is a kid voluntarily allowing himself to be carried away by a wave of waste-water down into the sewers, with the loud proclamation that there’s nothing better to do around here.  With that being the entry bar for “fun,” don’t even TRY to tell me that kids in Cris Tales wouldn’t be playing marbles with the family’s weekly paycheck and losing them left and right.  The cliche of the deadbeat gambling addict husband losing all his family’s income at the roulette tables probably doesn’t even exist in the world of Cris Tales, instead it’s a cliche of the fun-starved child losing all his family’s income in a game of marbles.

Most of all, I think of the sheer, staggering inconvenience and weight of the situation.  Because let me tell you, the economy of this world is not in a healthy state.  If you think 2022’s inflation was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet; individually, these marbles are basically worthless.  The cheapest item on a merchant’s menu costs 200 of these things.  The cheapest.  Going by the average weight of a marble, that shakes out to something like 2 pounds’ worth of glass beads you have to hand over for the least expensive item you can buy!  The first time you get money in this game, like the initial gift that introduces the fact that there IS a currency, you’re given a startling starting stipend of 2,000 marbles as your initial allowance of pocket change.  Imagine being the RPG heroine who has to slam an entire 10-pound bucket of little solid glass balls down in front of a merchant every time she wants to purchase a goddamn juicebox.  Crisbell’s out here trudging through the wilderness, hauling around a colossal garbage bag on her back just filled to fucking bursting with glass bearings, her teeny-tiny little stick legs teetering with each trembling step taken as she tows her 2-ton trash tote teeming with translucent legal tender.

And keep in mind, even if she’s got the proportions of a stick figure on a hunger strike, Crisbell is an RPG heroine engaging in several different types of strenuous physical activities and combat, regularly leveling up and improving that Strength stat.  What about the normal, average citizen of Cris Tales’s world?  You telling me every average Joe on this planet is totally cool with and capable of lugging a laundry basket full of marbles across town every time he wants to do his grocery shopping for the week?

I know it’s objectively not the silliest or least logical form of currency I’ve seen in an RPG.  Meat in the Loathing series is much sillier, and Rupees in The Legend of Zelda are far less practical.  But Loathing gets a pass because its whole point is to be humorously absurd, and at least with rupees, the game clearly shows us that different colors correlate with different values, so Link is, ostensibly, just carrying around a silver and a couple golden rupees when he’s got 500 in his wallet, rather than weighing his person down with 500 green solid crystals.***  I guess it’s not unreasonable to assume that there are different denominations of value for different kinds of marbles, too, but the game doesn’t actually give evidence of this, so it’s an amusing and completely impossible-to-debunk probability that Crisbell’s walking-around money is a 12-foot-long burlap sack of glass orbs that collectively weigh as much as a train car, which she’s dragging behind her with every step of her global trek.  And hell, even without that, a perfectly round, smooth little ball of solid matter is gonna be inconvenient to store and carry, and easy to lose.  Marbles are a ridiculous currency.



















* Or they’ll name their currency some misspelling of an actual word for cash and act like it’s clever.  Yeah, Tales of and Kingdom Hearts writers, you really flexed your creative muscles there with Gald and fucking Munny.  Legendary stuff.


** Odd that RPGs with a tie to modern era or science fiction settings so much more often make an effort to consciously adapt their currency to their lore and give it a reason for existing in the capacity that it does, while more typical RPGs just say “Here’s your money, it’s called Oth, fuck you I’m not explaining why.”  Then again, putting some thought into the currency of Secret of Evermore is what led to that game’s annoying currency exchange mechanic, so maybe it’s just as well not to have anyone going into more detail about Zehn and Gilda and Meseta and so on.


*** Although who knows what process of exchange is going on to transmute the 5 green rupees he just found by trashing the local Pottery Barn into a single blue rupee on the fly.  Maybe Navi and Midna and the rest of the LoZ companions all happen to be able to open a direct portal to the Kakariko Credit Union, and we just don’t know because it doesn’t really come up much in the plot.