freak'in wealth system

[Dismas]

Well, for sleeping bags, you are selling second hand goods, so you are not going to get full value back

I think people get hung up on on the conversion table, trying to use it to dig past the abstraction. It is a tool for the GM to guage how difficult a skill check to assign, a bit like a table that listed a set of distances and the DC for jumping that distance.

The players wealth bonus does not indicate how much money they have, it indicates how much they can (or a prepared to) lay down on a single purchase without batting an eye.

Finding a suitcase can be handled in two ways (according to Charles Ryan)
1) GM assigns a abstract wealth bonus (say +3), players split this bonus between them. For most parties this is going to mean that the case needs to contain +4 wealth to have an effect on all of them.
2) GM assigns a cash value to the case, players split cash and work out changes to their wealth as if they had just sold it.

Option 2 is my prefered method as it takes into account the players current situation in a much better way than 1).

The Modern QA (http://www.otherniceman.net/download) has a bunch of questions of the wealth system that have been answered by the authors of the life of the game.

 

[Staffan]

Question. Does getting a suitcase full of money constitue a one-time bonus to a future wealth check, a permanent change in finacial status, or some sort of staggered drop over time? It seems odd that a really poor person finding a hundred dolar bill (or three, just go with it a moment) will have their wealth rating raises permanently... So it begs the question of how a singular windfall is going to change a more wealthy character's rating permanently.

Assuming the suitcase has enough money in it, you get a permanent bonus to your Wealth stat. However, buying things often lowers your Wealth stat as well, so it's more of a semi-permanent thing.

Example: Joe Bum with a wealth bonus of +1 finds a wallet with ten crisp ten-dollar bills in it. A hundred bucks is a purchase DC of 10. If Joe bought an item worth a hundred bucks, he would have lost 1 point of Wealth, so he gains one if he gets a hundred bucks - so now he has a wealth value of +2. (One interpretation is that you have to "sell" the money, which would reduce the DC by 3 - same effect in this particular case though).

Joe then goes to buy something worth fifty dollars, which has a DC of 7 or something like that. Since that's more than his wealth bonus of +2, he loses one point of wealth, and is back where he started.

Now, if it had been Bill Gates who found the $100 (Wealth +50 or something like that - "Very rich" is "+31 or higher), it wouldn't have affected his wealth since the DC 10 is below his Wealth bonus.

 

[Morgenstern]

I guess where I'm going with this, is can the bum find a couple of hundreds, and now eat a sandwhich (forgive the crudity of my example - I don't know the DCs) forever (assuming he doesn't buy something that drops his wealth). And I mean, thousands of sandwiches. Because bums are wise finacial investors or something...

 

[astrobryguy]

Heap is nearly right; only thing is, since money's face value doesn't change no matter how many times it changes hands, there's no -3 penalty to the effective purchase DC.

Depending on the size of the cash deposit (and the source of the money) the PCs may need to launder the money, which may be the source of the -3 to effective purchase DC. After all, banks are required to report large cash deposits to the IRS.

Cheers,
AstroBryGuy

 

[DMScott]

I guess where I'm going with this, is can the bum find a couple of hundreds, and now eat a sandwhich (forgive the crudity of my example - I don't know the DCs) forever (assuming he doesn't buy something that drops his wealth). And I mean, thousands of sandwiches. Because bums are wise finacial investors or something...

If he takes the money and only uses it on sandwiches, then yes, the assumption is that he's sufficiently prudent to maintain that level of wealth by whatever means, whether that be investment or a series of part-time jobs or some other method. The details of doing so are abstract, since the game isn't generally played as "d20 Rags to Riches". If the bum doesn't have the discipline to maintain his level of wealth, then he's probably not just going to use the money on sandwiches anyway.

Of course, if an abstract system isn't your thing, then it's easy enough to chuck it and require players to track their cash and credit balances with banks, credit card companies, retail outlets, car leasing companies, insurance companies, etc. Nobody's forcing you to do it the easy way.

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

... The details of doing so are abstract, since the game isn't generally played as "d20 Rags to Riches".

Of course, if an abstract system isn't your thing, then it's easy enough to chuck it and require players to track their cash and credit balances with banks, credit card companies, retail outlets, car leasing companies, insurance companies, etc. Nobody's forcing you to do it the easy way.

Which is, I think, the point. If you think of one POSSIBLE scenario you might think it odd. "Well, if the bum buys a thousand sandwiches, his wealth will NEVER reduce!!" But does the bum buy only a thousand sandwiches, one a day, for eternity?

It's like the question: "Would you rather get a dollar a day for five hundred days or one hundred dollars today?" Does the dollar-a-day guy get more money? Yes and no. If this ONE ASPECT is the only thing that occurs in either life (nothing but a dollar a day, nothing but 100 dollars) then yes. But the UTILITY VALUE of that dollar a day is less because more occurs in your daily life than is covered by a dollar a day. If you have a 50 dollar debt you need to pay off or it'll accrue at a huge rate, you may never actually pay it off with 1 dollar a day instead of 100 dollars today. Likewise the guy with 100 dollars may invest it in something that will net him a return of far more than 500 dollars in the course of two years. If you focus narrowly on one very specific question, the abstract system breaks down ... you're SPECIFICALLY breaking the abstraction by asking a non-abstracted question ... thing is, that non-abstracted question has no relation to the real world.

Nobody buys only one sandwich a day for a million years. Other things happen to that individual. His Wealth Bonus isn't made up of just that 100 dollar bill ... it's an abstracted assumption that he in some way has outputs and inputs that don't matter enough to be individually tracked ... he finds a quarter, he washes a windsheild, he buys coffee with his sandwich one day and a beer the next ... the only time it warrants consideration is when THE STORY involves something to warrant consideration. 100 dollars is enough money to warrant consideration for somebody in that situation. That's what the changing of the wealth bonus means. 100 dollars doesn't affect Bill Gates because, to him, 100 dollars isn't a big enough deal to warrant the consideration of the story.

So you don't BUY 100000 sleeping bags, so 10000 sleeping bags isn't really something to complain about. What the Wealth system says is that guy with +20 Wealth isn't going to notice buying a sleeping bag once. That's not a big enough deal for him for it to warrant notice within the story. But buying 1000 sleeping bags is. If he needs 1000 sleeping bags NOW, that's a story element, and we find how much all those bags are worth and THAT affects his Wealth.

You don't buy 1000 Glock Pistols one at a time. Another complaint I've seen is that anything over 15 reduces your wealth by 1. So a guy with +250 wealth goes broke after buying 15 Glocks, right? No. Because you don't buy 1000 Glocks one at a time doing nothing else every day but buying a single glock and going home. If you buy 1000 Glocks, you buy them all at once, in a lot, and the DC is something like 50 and you lose one Wealth because you're sickly rich and know how to buy 1000 glocks. It's only slightly a story element for that individual.

--fje

 

[Garnfellow]

Which is, I think, the point. If you think of one POSSIBLE scenario you might think it odd. "Well, if the bum buys a thousand sandwiches, his wealth will NEVER reduce!!" But does the bum buy only a thousand sandwiches, one a day, for eternity?

That was an excellent defense of the Wealth system.

I really think the d20 Modern abstraction of wealth is brilliant, but it is a darn hard concept for even very smart gamers to get their heads around. AND it is not very clearly explained in the core book.

 

[Morgenstern]

I hope you'll excuse me if a statement that reads "the system only breaks down if you actually try to use it" doesn't exactly inspire confidence. Let me try again. The bum can now buy an infinite umber of sandwhiches. Now. Today. All day. Not one-a-day for the rest of his life. I'm mean, as written, he can buy 5 each for himeself and every one of his friends in the greater upstate NY area. It's not that the sysytem is abstract that bothers me, its that it fails so casually.

Would it have been so hard to say that any puchase with a DC more than half your wealth rating knocks a point off? Or 3/4, or whatever. Some sort of scaling break point so there isn't this strange, magic line between 14 and 15 (IIRC)? It shouldn't matter if I buy in bulk or not! If I'm a billionaire, filling out 22 separate mail orders for a car shouldn't bankrupt me. A scaling system would also simultaneously create a range where you are so poor that buying sandwiches might actually represent a permanent drain on your resources.

It just seems like the GM is hobbled, in that he can't offer one-time bonuses. That that suitcase full of cash, or any other windfall represents a permanent change. As an abstract "you should be telling stories about something other than money, and here's a tip of the hat to the modern world" system I do get it. Modern stories usually aren't kill them/take their stuff scenarios, so a monetary system of reward probably isn't appropriate. OTOH I don't really appreciate the incredibly juvinille argument that the only alterantive is to track ever dollar and every credit exchange. That's lazy thinking at it's worst. I know that option's bad too, but throwing that out trying to forestall even hinting that the wealth system might be flawed it doesn't convince me that as abstractions go, we couldn't have done better than what was presented.

Eh. I'll trouble you no further.

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

Eh. I'll trouble you no further.

Thanks, because your ad hominem stylings and strawman turns don't much engender further discussion.

At any rate, no system is perfect and, in the end, it's each individual's mileage. I merely attempt to suggest that initial impressions may not locate the value within the system as-is and/or demonstrate and explain how it might be used beyond initial assumptions and what I see are synedochic fallacies. I certainly appologize if it seemed I was suggesting that no-one should use their own judgement in adjudicating the system to their liking.

--fje

 

[drnuncheon]

I hope you'll excuse me if a statement that reads "the system only breaks down if you actually try to use it" doesn't exactly inspire confidence. Let me try again. The bum can now buy an infinite umber of sandwhiches. Now. Today. All day. Not one-a-day for the rest of his life. I'm mean, as written, he can buy 5 each for himeself and every one of his friends in the greater upstate NY area.

Actually, he can't - there's a certain amount of time involved in making each purchase. So if you want to buy an infinite number of sandwiches all at once, you need to add together the cost and buy them all at once. If you want to buy them one at a time, taking time for each one, then you use the individual purchase DC. In the bum's case, that time probably translates into panhandling enough money to get a sandwich.

J