freak'in wealth system

[HeapThaumaturgist]

I understand where you're coming from Psi ... but the issue with the ship is the same thing I see in D&D every day: "I've got 2001 GP!! I'm spending 2000 gp on the magic sheild I want." At least the future guy blew his money on something that could double as a home. Most D&D characters tend to own a sleeping bag and an assortment of magical items as expensive as Lear jets in Modern.

I tend to be a bit of a stormtrooper about things like that, though.

I honestly tend to use requisition rules more often than just Wealth in my games ... and the On-Hand Items wealth checks alot, too, which is just a magnificent addition. My players very quickly took to Wealth, and they all love it.

--fje

 

[Plane Sailing]

This may well be a crushing blow for your d20 Homeless game.
<snip>
My heart bleeds for you,

DMScott, Please would you refrain from ridiculing Morgenstern while making your points. We all want to stay friendly here and Morgenstern has moved away from his original combative posture, it would be great if we can all do the same.

I've not run a d20Modern game yet, and I'm looking forward to it. I'm finding this discussion about the wealth system very interesting

Cheers
Plane Sailing
(Moderator)

 

[jerichothebard]

Another thing that seems to be forgotten about the abstract wealth system, is that included in the abstraction is the idea that your wealth bonus is liquid assets. Meaning, that is what you could presumabley spend per month after meeting your financial obligations - rent, car payment, utilities, student loans, whatever. Also included in this is the means to meet those obligations - to wit, a job. And, finally, it also includes a measure of financial discipline - not living beyond your means.

To my mind, this irons out the question of the bum with the $100 and the sandwiches.

With a wealth of 0, he is making enough money - which isn't very much - to meet his obligations - which are almost nil. Included in his abstract 0 could be the idea that he is begging for change at the pier, but also taking his meals at the soup kitchen.

The $100 he finds in the alleyway is a windfall for him, because it is above and beyond his normal level of maintenaince. So, yes, he could stretch that $100 a long way - buy a sandwich at subway every day for a while. Does it represent a permanent change? No. Because at some point, he will buy two sandwiches, or decide to have a coke with it, or buy a fifth of whisky, and his new wealth score will drop. In other words, he will live beyond his meager means.

On the other hand, maybe that +1 will represent a change in his lifestyle - he will use it to buy a clean shirt at the thrift store, and a shower at the Y, and get a job as a laborer or something. So, his means go up a little. With discipline, he could maintain that level, but still, he couldn't go overboard.

I realize this isn't a great answer - there's lots of justifications and hypotheticals in there, though it hangs together nicely, I think.

In the end, it's an abstract system, and it is a little sketchy at the extremes - as all abstract systems are.

Even the real-life credit rating system, which boils all your financial history into one single, abstract number, suffers at the extremes. I recently read an article noting that people like JLo and Ben Affleck and Larry Ellison have, on the face of it, terrible credit rating scores. So does our friend the bum. Because the abstract system that was designed to deal with the financial history of normal people can't cope with the extremes of hyper-wealth and hyper-poverty. It wasn't designed to handle that much financial solvency or that much financial drain.

Basically, my point is, don't over-think it.



jtb

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

Here's something that might help. Even though I find no real big problems with the Wealth system, I'll tell you what I'd do if our hypothetical homeless guy's player said he wanted to buy fifteen sandwiches in a row, taking time on each one, so he could give them to all of his friends and not lose any Wealth.

I'd tell him no.

*shrug* That issue is a bit more of a DM fiat adjudication issue, I'd say. If the guy wants to buy 15 sandwiches, he can buy 15 sandwiches, but I'll rule it that he's buying them all close enough together that it's going to impact his Wealth as if he expended 30 dollars in close order.

If the hypothetical homeless guy found 100 dollars in the desert and had no way to use the money or exchange it or make more outside of that 100 dollars, and THAT was the story and THAT was important ... I'd just track the 100 bucks until he got out of the desert and we could go back to doing something else.

I think if you played it you'd see that 99.9% of the time issues like that just don't come up and thus it just doesn't matter. So there's no real need for rules to handle them. And when they come up you just say: "Can't really do that." The system is there to HELP, to make things quickly, not for your players to buy hypothetical infinite sandwiches or hypothetical infinite sleeping bags. It's there so when a character needs a sleeping bag we can have an enjoyable game moment seeing if he can purchase it and how long it takes and how purchasing a sleeping bag is going to affect his overall financial situation, if at all.

The Wealth system is there to be fast and mirror reality enough that we can nod and say: "Yup." and then move on. I think PROBLEMS, issues that have come up in play, are wonderful things to discuss and pull apart and see where we as players and GMs could have handled the situation better or where the rules just failed to mirror what we NEEDED in the GAME ... but hypothetical possibles are really straw men. They don't stand up. We point at a part of the system that just doesn't matter in a game and say: "HA! Don't work. Broken, it sucks." Why? Has that come up? And when situations have come up in games I try to step in and say: "Here's what goes on, this is a way to handle it within the system as it stands that mirrors reality and utilizes the system." That's what I was trying to do with the initial question of the initial poster ... a few seconds, two tables, you can translate finding 50k in a bag into the system effectively and easily.

--fje

 

[Dismas]

The GM can give a one time bonus if they like (remember a +2 bonus is equiv to doubling spending power).

The rule is that it will take a miniumn of 1 hour per purchase DC.

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

For demonstration purposes, here's what went on as far as using the Wealth system in my last game:

One of the players wanted to build some small remote drones for recon purposes while in the field. We decided on a price DC for the components, she made a Wealth check and successfully purchased "Components For Robot Drones". This consisted of God-Only-Knows-What ... didn't really matter, what mattered was the overall price and shopping time to collect the proper things to build her drones.

Earlier, all of the players felt they were currently of high enough level as to warrant Mastercrafted personal items. The group has a mysterious patron that funds their living arrangements and outfitting, so I decided that since this was a down-time check they could use Requisition Rules to see if their employer would agree to those requests. We went around the table, figured some DCs for items, and everybody managed to get their personal "thing" but one player, who rolled badly. We had MC Brass Knuckles, a Desert Eagle, and some Impromptu combat leathers (for the martial artist fellow, who just felt left out of the armor and weapons requisitioning fun). The guy that missed his roll had wanted a MC longsword, and I said that it would take a little longer to dredge up that sort of item, but that their butler had a line in on something suitable and they should check back (try again) later.

Later, during the game, somebody wanted to know if he'd thought to pack his character's "Custom Set Of Lock Picks" ... a bolt cutter. I said: "Let's find out." and we used the On Hand Items rule to see if he had brought them with. Successful check, so yes indeed, he'd brought some bolt cutters with.

Not thirty seconds later, another player wanted to see if there was a chain in a nearby truck that he could use, with the truck, to pull the handle off a door. I decided this would be just like an On Hand Item check, but we'd use his REPUTATION instead of Wealth ... just seemed like a good idea at the time. In the past I've used things like Charisma checks with random DCs for the sake of game uncertainty, but I thought: "Hey, the Wealth system has put DCs on items for me already ... and reputation is an arbitrary number that I've been raising as these fellows become more popular and heroic." It was a very popular game mechanic at the table that night, as it posed interesting connections between the narrative and the metanarrative (I.E. the story being told that evening, and the overall game of individuals rising to the ranks of heroes).

--fje

 

[ledded]

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

Maybe it's d20 Modern's use of gunpowder firearms and steam/electric/combustion trains and tanks to inherently unbalance our game in lieu of using armies wielding wands of magic missle and magically constructed warforged thingys that's got him so upset... (just joking)

Seriously, I understand that the wealth system can easily break down under the microscope of theoretical mathematics miniutia, but seriously I don't think it was ever intended to answer those questions. It's not like we're doing Partial Differential Equations here, it doesnt have to hold up as long as it works.

I admit on the infinite sandwiches/hobo example, it does fall flat, and sometimes on other more reasonable examples also. But I've always felt that it is within GM's power to rule on these and similar instances. It's all a matter of scale. The wealth system, to me, is just meant to handle the scale of modern living and economics so that the boring stuff (balancing the checkbook) is handled more efficiently than "real life". In modern, a guy with no bills whatsoever that just wanders around living hand-to-mouth scrounging from whatever he can find is called homeless. In D&D he's called an adventurer . If all you have to worry about is 100 bucks and an occasional meal, then the wealth system isnt even necessary; no credit, no bills, no permanent shelter, no problem. Just shell out a few bucks when the GM says you need to and go on with life.

But if your character is a modern professional, with a day job doing <x> and a night job of whatever your campaign does, then not having to worry about his bills, credit, etc is what I like about the wealth system.

Anyway, we've never even had the complexity of issues stated by some of the pro-wealth system examples I've read above. We just look at it as 'selling' cash to yourself per the rules.

EDIT: Ok, sorry, I just redundantly spit out Heap's example, apparently I didnt read the whole thread very well in the first place. Doh, my bad, sorry. Anyway, we do it the same way he does, as follows.

A four person group receives $40k, lets split if four ways ($10k each, DC 25). They have the following wealth: 6, 10, 14, 22. Each one computes their new wealth as if they had just sold an object that cost $10k.

"Purchase" DC is 25, -3 for "selling" for a DC 22, or in this case, overhead for a big pile of cash; I know, it sounds wonky, but work with me. Call it taxes, overhead towards your mundane bills, a straight infusion of cash not that directly affecting your absolute on-the-spot purchase power, whatever.

They increase in this order per the nice easy little table on page 91:

6 gets 2d6+1 increase (2d6 for 'buying' > 16 over his current wealth, +1 for > 15 purchase)

10 gets 1d6+1 increase (1d6 for 11-15 points > current wealth, +1 for > 15)

14 gets +2 increase (+1 for 1-10 points > current wealth, +1 for >15)

22 gets +1 increase (+1 for >15)

That may not be how it's supposed to be done, and folks may have covered it already (my apologies if I'm just beating the dead horse), but there is very little math involved here. Split it up, subtract by 3, look at the table.

At first glance this may not seem fair, but it is an increase in effective buying power at that moment, in relation to their current standard of living. So the guy with a 6 may actually surpass the guy with a 10 if the rolls fall right, but that *is* possible because the guy with a 10 may have had incidents in his lifestyle, which already costs him more, that bled away some of the cash.

A good GM will make the standard of living for each player be felt in subtle ways, and in the ways others react to you. If you are flashing around $100 bills at am up-scale night club trying to get information but dressed in ratty Dollar Store clothes and arriving in a busted old Ford Fiesta, then people will react differently to you than if you spent some money on nice clothes and a decent car first (reducing that wealth, or 'current buying power').

If for some reason the players wanted to just spend it outright, I'd just let them do that, provided the GM handles issues like spending large wads of cash in one place, which can possibly incur modifiers to the DC for buying on the black market, etc.

Now I've done a few scenarios where I ran these kinds of numbers with similar episodes in *my own life*, from the starving college days when 10k would feed/shelter me for over a year, to now when 10k wouldnt quite pay off my car.

In agency/military-type games, the requisition rules seem to work pretty well, though we've really not used them that much as our game features everyday people who have semi-ordinary lives.

 

[Morgenstern]

I'd like to thank everyone who has come up with a simple explination of day-to-day changes for my bum (most of which also work for college students ) in almost coincidentally boosting his lifestyle with a small windfall. Why a one time boost can lead to a long time benefit in a concrete example helps. I'm not entirely sure it always should, but clearly some of the biggest stumbling blocks (lack of fiscal discipline) can knock that windfal off again quickly. I am also starting to formulate some optional rules that might patch the extremes (both low and high) a little, but some of the more recent comments brought up even more interesting ideas.

Do you ever use wealth score as a modifier for social interactions? Can an obvioulsy wealthy person expect better treatment from the service industry, and is this a useable tool to flavor or even tangibly alter game play? A lower middle management yuppy and a world-class athlete get markedly different trreatment when vacationing in Las Vegas. Mostly based on how they dress and how they tip (tips being proportional and far below the threshold of permanent changes one would hope), rather than the staff necissarrily knowing who they are. Has anyone tried hanging some mods off of wealth to reflect this?

Has anyone had a character wanting to use the Disguise skill to dress up or dress down, with it affecting their apparent wealth? Are people runing games at all where the characters (or some of the NPCs) are perfoming elaborate cons, where being able to pretend your wealth is (a lot) other than it really is would be a huge factor?

Are there rules for finding out someone's wealth rating... or apparent wealth rating?

If me and my buds find a suit case, can I forego my cut, maybe for favors from them later? Sort of a~
"Nah, man. I'm flush right now. You guys split it."
"You're a great guy Danny - We won't forget this."

Are there any rules for splurging? Can I tank my permanent wealth rating 2 points (or more!) in the future for something extravagent now? Something I could not buy with a regular roll? Would the same sort of big purchase up front, higher long term cost make sense of characters actually did want to take out a loan? The rules have been described as modeling the "optimal" use of funds and time, but we all know there are real world strategies of short term gain that aren't always without merit. Buying a house seems like the ultimate common real world example of big purchase beyond your month-to-month means, with long pay out. Is a 1 point knock appropriate for such a purchase or can characters stretch themselves? The phrase "leveraged to the hilt" is both a spur for dramatic action, and a great clue in many investigation scenarios where I come from . Guy has a lot of expensive things, but less disposable income than the bum...

Does the book have gambling rules? Can I go to Vegas and drink cheap drinks while watching my wealth rating bounce up and down for a weekend? With the house probably cleaning me out to the extent that I'm willing to risk, but maybe I bet big that one time?

I've been watching Law & Order all week. The fun they get into with mobsters, extortion, and racketeering is too good to let money go by entirely abstract in some modern settings. Loan sharks. Paid hits. Embezzlment at an upscale office park. I wouldn't ever sweat stopping for a tank of gas unless I was running a game where the players were ultra poor. Before you all laugh at the idea of Homeless D20, I've got some great stories about vampire LARPers being chased by a bum with a stake - a couple of homeless folks vs. a vampire threat that regular folk refuse to acknowledge (could make for a heck of a challenging scenario... But, hand waving/abstracting all money matters without offering even the basics of guidelines seems like a mistake to me. Money IS drama. On tap. Or to quote Way of the Gun to the best of my recollection~

"Two-million dollars isn't money. Money is what you've got in your pocket when you go down to the grocery store. Money is what you buy a gallon of milk with. Two-million dollars is a motive with a universal adaptor on it."

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

When making new rules, I like to stay as transparent to the system as possible.

I would say that, as far as reactions based on apparent wealth go ... The Allegience and Reputation system seems to work pretty well for that. I'd say give the individual the same bonuses you would for having the same Allegience if they demonstrate/BS that they share the same general socio-economic bracket. And if you don't have it, run a Disguise (as per normal rules) to say you do share that bracket. Bada bing, bada boom.

There are certainly gambling rules in there ... they work within the rest of the Wealth system in that if you don't bet enough to challenge your Wealth you're not doing anything more than enjoyably spending some time at the table, drinking comped drinks. After you start betting enough to make it interesting, it's under the Gamble skill description.

To address "blowing all of your money now", that's covered by taking 20 on a Wealth check at the upper limit of your ability and ruining your Wealth score. There's no going into debt ... half of America is already IN debt and living beyond their means ... thus the vagaries of Wealth. I take out credit, get a loan, stretch my ability to pay those bills with income until I'm spitting it out faster than I can bring it in and I've got a ferrari and a machine gun and +0 Wealth. I'm a bum with no bills but no income, and I've got a +0 Wealth. Which is one of those reasons I like the system.

As far as better treatment for unbelievable wealth ... I'd say that's one of those Reputation check things. I'd probably consider giving out Circumstance bonuses for rich individuals in situations where richness is going to greatly effect their encounters.

Honestly, if you're looking for somewhere to make some rules, that one might be a place to run with it.

--fje

 

[Morgenstern]

When making new rules, I like to stay as transparent to the system as possible.

I'm a bit of a simulationist, but ease of use is very important to me, so we're on at least similar wavelengths .

I would say that, as far as reactions based on apparent wealth go ... The Allegience and Reputation system seems to work pretty well for that. I'd say give the individual the same bonuses you would for having the same Allegience if they demonstrate/BS that they share the same general socio-economic bracket. And if you don't have it, run a Disguise (as per normal rules) to say you do share that bracket. Bada bing, bada boom.

I like. I'd probably say being the same bracket is the baseline (no modifer) and then invert the same alligience modifier if you are not within a certain range. Similar principle though.

Does anyone use weathy as a prerequisite for holding an alligience? Anything already out there like having "Old Money" as an alligience, with the character beliving in the ideal of broad privilage for the upper class?

Is using Disguise to fake having an allegience already covered?

There are certainly gambling rules in there ... they work within the rest of the Wealth system in that if you don't bet enough to challenge your Wealth you're not doing anything more than enjoyably spending some time at the table, drinking comped drinks. After you start betting enough to make it interesting, it's under the Gamble skill description.

Excellent. Sounds solid from here. Can a Character use gambling as a profession skill to make money in a more slow, methodical way? Like the professional grifter whose 40 hour work week consists of going from table to table at small time games and fleecing the rubes?

To address "blowing all of your money now", that's covered by taking 20 on a Wealth check at the upper limit of your ability and ruining your Wealth score.

Define "ruining" in this case, please.

There's no going into debt ... half of America is already IN debt and living beyond their means ... thus the vagaries of Wealth.

Well, that certainly sounds like promising ground for some new options. I still have hope for loan sharks in d20M .

I take out credit, get a loan, stretch my ability to pay those bills with income until I'm spitting it out faster than I can bring it in and I've got a ferrari and a machine gun and +0 Wealth. I'm a bum with no bills but no income, and I've got a +0 Wealth. Which is one of those reasons I like the system.

That does inspire hope . Is there any logical situation where you might have negative wealth?

As far as better treatment for unbelievable wealth ... I'd say that's one of those Reputation check things.

That makes sense fot the sports star, but for the wildly successful dot.commie who got out in time, it seems like there still might be a strictly monetary hook for results to occur. If wealth includes things like how much money you can just throw away on a whim, then some folks are gonna palm the bouncer a hundred and step right in, while others are gonna have to stand in line. This intersts me becasue I can easily see a scenario where being in line on the street takes you one way to the adventure climax, and being inside gives you a different angle to pursue... You're standing there when there's a car crash, and help in pulling an important-to-the-plot NPC out of the car, while your rich, only slightly insufferable ex-dot.com buddy is inside already, buying rounds and pumping a local rap star for info that will help advance the plot. Both characters are rewarded for their differences (two rich guys would only get one path, two poor guys only the other) and everone has a moment to shine.

Basically, I'm wondering if in the material people have seen, is wealth ever a plot trigger, or only used as a logistical aide?

I'd probably consider giving out Circumstance bonuses for rich individuals in situations where richness is going to greatly effect their encounters.

Honestly, if you're looking for somewhere to make some rules, that one might be a place to run with it.

Neat. I'll definitely ponder it .