This is a good analysis ! I think the reality is that most games are just that, and expecting the economics to make any sense at all is a pipe dream.
Unless you're playing Chivalry and Sorcery. Oh god... the most complex RPG ever designed. 100+ pages of close packed small print tables that enable you to simulate 12th century France in minute detail. Beautiful as a reference source, hard to play.
I'd love to see some of the mechanics you put together to make Knave work ! Perhaps what needs to be added is "day job" earnings, so that as you climb the ranks of nobility you accumulate peasants (or parishioners for priests...), and earn a tithe from each one to help keep up your shiny new castle or church 😀 Then the adventuring is just a bit of beer money on top.
Yeah I honestly don't know if I'll do much for the economy beyond reducing the cost of a few things (arrows most notably) when/if I come across them and they feel wrong.
As long as I am creating and running my own dungeons I can keep things mostly consistent, it's when you start pulling in other OSR modules that things break down when you realize a single Knight in Knave's default economy burns through the entire hoard of gold you almost died for (imported from another OSR module) in just a few months. Why go adventuring at all? If a Knight - not even a noble - is making that much, why is anyone risking fighting monsters instead of signing up for the military?
Its stuff like that, that I have to just actively ignore and work around.
I'll likely spend a lot longer on making the slot system interesting, since it really bugs me. It doesn't do the job I assume it was designed to do, so I'd like to have it do something else entirely. I want to try my plan before I talk too much about it, but I want to have slots matter still without being necessarily tied to literally everything you ever pick up, because that's just annoying.
I'll definitely talk about it more as I go though. I had been complaining about it to my wife and she just nodded along and then like ten min later went: "so when are you making your game?"
Smartass knows me too well 😂