Tom's Hero Games Blog

Expanding the Wealth Rules?

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tomd1969

, Sep 7th, '07 at 03:44 PM (1377 Views)

One thing that has always bothered me about That Other Game is the amount of bookkeeping necessary to equip your character properly. Who cares that I got 10 gp, 8 sp, and 1 cp? If I want that, I'll play WoW, thank you very much. For my taste, TOG is too figurative.

With a pen-and-paper RPG, most of the time we don't have the luxury of a computer to keep track of how much money we have. Plus, I've always had a problem keep straight how many silver pieces are in a gold piece, and how many copper pieces are in a silver.

In the modern world, true wealth doesn't quite work that way, anyway. Things can be bought on credit, for example, which That Other Game happily ignores. Beyond that, true wealth is not just a measure of how much cash you have on hand, but how much you have in assets--real estate, stocks, bonds, even rare pieces of art can be part of a wealthy person's portfolio. Many wealthy people do have a lot of cash on hand, but most of their wealth is locked into their investments and other assets. In order to make a truly large purchase (like, say, purchasing a Lamborghini in cash), they first must liquidate some of these assets, which could take some time.

Now, the Wealth Perk in the Hero System is happily abstract. "Well-Off," "Wealthy," and "Filthy Rich" are about as abstract as you can get. The problem that you can get into is how much buying power do you really have? If you're "Well-Off," surely you can purchase a Chevy Cavalier, but can you purchase a Mercedes Benz? How about a Bentley? Porsche? How about if your character were Wealthy instead?

I would like to know your thoughts. What Wealth System do you use in your campaign?

Updated Sep 7th, '07 at 04:14 PM by tomd1969 (Fixed typo)

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Comments

ghost-angel - Oct 18th, '07 09:02 PM
The categories do have a "money" value attached, but the nature of Hero means that value is limited to an applicable campaign. For instance 10 pts of Wealth (Wealthy) in a standard Modern Setting is about 5 Million/Year. A good amount to be sure.

But once you use Wealth in other campaigns is changes meaning. Nominally you should assign a Montary Value on a campaign by campaign basis.

But it should have an actual number attached to it by the time you get to the table I think.
tomd1969 - Mar 30th, '08 11:58 AM
Wow, someone posted a comment? G-A no less? I'm honored.

I'm well aware that the optional Wealth Perk has a monetary value attached, but what does it mean, really? It also happily ignores the Warren Buffetts of the world (other than a hand-wavy "Filthy Rich").

I might not have stated it as clearly as I desired (I'm reading it now, and I'm thinking, "What the *(&)*)#*&@ was I thinking?"), but I was proposing a system that was a little more robust than the current system (which, I think, would be key in mercantile Sci-Fi or Fantasy campaigns, for example), while not becoming an exercise in accounting like TOG.
Nolgroth - Mar 30th, '08 01:48 PM
I find that the current Wealth system is very sorely lacking in functionality. At the beginning of the space opera campaign I'm running, one of the characters had Wealth. All it seemed to do was flesh out a role-playing aspect of his character that could have just been done as descriptive.

Resource Pools (Dark Champions) seem a far better way to track equipment for the individual character.
ghost-angel - Mar 30th, '08 02:12 PM
Resource Pools are good for tracking what equipment a Character has immediate access to.

Not very good for the acquisition of equipment itself (i.e. Can I Afford That?)

One of the reasons the Money Perk really has no hard values attached to it is one of the underlying pinnings of Hero: It's a campaign dependent value. It requires Campaign SFX to be attached before the points even begin to have meaning. You could write an entire book as thick as 5ER on how to apply the Money Perk to games.

The System doesn't need expanding per se, but Campaign design almost requires it.
tomd1969 - Mar 31st, '08 01:58 AM
This blog entry was from so long ago (has it really been six months?) that I've completely forgotten where I was going with this. I know that I had an idea for a Wealth Roll, which was modified by an abstract "Cost" of an item. There were further modifiers to this... I had notes somewhere... I'll see if I could find them.
ghost-angel - Mar 31st, '08 02:18 PM
The problem I see with a rolling mechanic for Wealth is it starts to look like Chart Master, er, Role Master.

X Points of Wealth should always be in Y Income Bracket. a set thing.

What changes is not the ability to afford, but the availability of the item and the ability to acquire. Wealth should (almost needs) to be coupled with Contacts, and/or various Social Skills (Trading, Conversation, and Persuasion being particularly important, Seduction could help too in some cases). The Equipment Access Perks in Dark Champions (dividing items into Common/Street/Military/Advanced also helps provide rules for what anyone has available to buy, regardless of what they can afford to buy.

This actually goes to show Hero's strength in this area, by using synergy and a combination of factors you not only achieve the level of detail you want easily, but it can modify itself from encounter to encounter without needing an extra set of, or more complex, rules.
tomd1969 - Mar 31st, '08 10:36 PM
Fair enough. To be honest, I've pretty much abandoned the idea by now, as what I had worked up was essentially even more complicated than counting GPs, SPs, etc. (which was definitely *not* what I was going for).

You do bring up some valid points about Perks, something I hadn't considered. Requires more thinkin'.