Bay 12 Games Forum

You do not need to go to the extremes with the economy. You may very well have most of the society as it is but only add coin economy to some aspects of it. This is how it has been traditionally. You share with the tribe but trade with the outsiders, as an example. Now you only set aside a small part of what is shared to what is traded - not to make a fortress "more efficient", but to create and break social ties within the dwarven community. 

What you need for this is:

1) a source of (abstract) wealth
2) a method for the flow of the said wealth
3) a way to cycle it back to the source

Let's have the king as the source. He demands the minting of a batch of coins if he has feels he's lacking some. When he feels like it, he dumps some of them on his nobility, or whoever strikes his fancy. These dwarves then use the coins to first satisfy their own needs and if they are left with a surplus, they start giving them out as gifts to those they like who they see as less wealthy. And so it goes. If we have use clothes here as an example, we could say the shops where the clothing is sold are all owned by the crown, so the coins return back to the source and the cycle repeats.

So clothing is this example serves as a way of displaying how close to the throner (power) you are.

Add in donations to the temples, and the clothing of the priests becomes a symbol of the influence of the said religion. Add in charity to the followers of a certain religion and you have your basic social security. Heretics and outcasts end up wearing tatteret old clothes, just as they should.  And then add features such as begging, gambling and so forth to ensure poor dwarves engage in time wasting activities (from the perspective of the fort) to truly make them useless and miserable.

Perhaps then introduce guilds again and have the guild leaders plead the king for coin in financing them. A guild would simply be a closed society for certain professionals that would choose their leader from within their ranks. The number of members and the relationship the leader has with the king is the determining factor of how much coin the king gives to the guild. You can also donate to the guild, like with the temples.

Have the rest of the fort function quite the same as before. No dwarf will die of lack of clothing, but unhappy dwarves do unhappy things, creating more fun. The social classes are not an end to themselves to be strived for, but rather something that would emerge out of this. The point of all this is to make a more interesting dwarven society with meaningful variables that are quite out of control of the player.

This is not a refined idea, but more like tossing out some thoughts. If I understand the Dwarven Economy as it was (never played it), there was a problem with plenty of dwarves running around with too many coins and not knowing what to do with them. There is a way to balance this meaningfully with features like begging, thieving and giving gifts.

Some useless dwarves end up being poor, because they do not earn enough to pay for their desired standard of living. They will then resort to begging, which will cause unhappy thoughts in most dwarves. The beggar will become unhappy and so will the one he targets, but also those who witness begging, especially if it is excessive or aggressive. Giving a gift, however, would cause happy thoughts all around and strengthen bonds. A dwarf would be more inclined to beg from his friends than from strangers. So beggars would tend to start pestering those closest to them, causing them to like them less.

To add to the fun, the guard would sometimes arrest aggressive beggars or beat them up on the spot.

Contrary to humans, dwarves could function such that the more coin you had, the more inclined you would be to extend a helping hand (and thus be prone to attract a swarm of beggars). Of course some beggars would resort to theft and pickpocketing, adding to the fun factor with the predictable social consequences.

The main thrust of the idea is this: useful dwarves end up rich and the useless ones end up poor. The rich get happier, gain more influence and thus become even more useful and productive by giving out gifts to those poorer than they are. The poor will end up spending their ever diminishing supply of social capital by resorting to begging. For the economy this means that those with too much coin are inclined to give it away and those with too little are inclined to beg for it, thus creating a balance in the economy.

A bonus in this is a creation of different social classes. Those who have will always tend to have even more, and those who do not will always tend to have even less, while the middle class balances there on the fence between the two extremes. Run out of productive work and see your life ruined. Beautiful.