Alternatives to the D20 wealth system

[Ghendar]

My apologies is this has been talked about before. I got the idea for this thread from briefly playing D20 Modern and not caring for how players buy items in the game.

I prefer giving players actual money (ala D&D). Has anyone ever tried to convert to this type of system? If so, what problems, if any, did you encounter? Is such a conversion unbalancing to the game?

I'd love to hear some thoughts from anyone who has done this or is planning on doing it.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

There's no real work "converting" directly. You know an item's PDC has an actual $ value, so use that instead. Use round numbers to avoid annoying math.

The problem comes with upkeep. You don't just buy a car, you lease it (or whatever the term is). You pay for it over time, unless you're really wealthy to begin with. You then pay for insurance, upkeep, and the like. Some $ system users are realists and want you to do the math for financing and the like. Heck no! Games are supposed to be fun. They're not supposed to be about paying taxes and bills!

I would just use the PDC (or a fraction thereof) to figure out the down payment, and everything else goes into "upkeep".

You would have three numbers to play with large scale. First is income, second is "rent/mortgage", and third is upkeep, expressed as a multiplier of "rent/mortgage". The Alternity game system did this fairly well. Note that Alternity did not tell you how much to modify your upkeep by if you bought a car, though. Figuring out simple upkeep costs would be the real work with a $ system.

Note that upkeep covers small purchases like paying for gas for your car and bullets. You don't want to charge your PCs actual money for the $23.04 they spent on gas (or whatever a realistic amount is).

Note potential balance alert (more of an abuse alert really): if you can afford a car, you can afford a $1000 black market LAW. The GM is going to have to be prepared to disallow purchases of potentially unbalancing stuff. Some things, like $100,000 cellular interceptors, will simply always be beyond the reach of PCs unless they steal one!

 

[Turanil]

I'd love to hear some thoughts from anyone who has done this or is planning on doing it.

Here is what I intend to do for my campaigns: money is tracked for important stuff like weapons, ships, cars, luxury services, bribes, etc., that is, things that are important to a RPG adventurer (rather than a real person). Then, mundane costs of living are a fixed sum per month, which must be decided by the GM according to the PCs considered. For example, for someone like most of us on these boards (I suppose...), mundane costs of living would range from 1200$ to 3000$ per month. So each month in the game the PC spends that amount of money in addition to purchasing special equipment, travel expenses, and what not.

Now, as a side comment, I would suggest that if an adventurer doesn't have a normal job, and gets money from unknown sources in big sums, and irregularly, as would fit a typical RPG adventurer, I suggest that the authorities (probably the FBI) someday take notice and pay a visit...

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

Depends on the type of people your players are and the kind of game you like to run.

If everybody wants to agree that everything happens in full dollar amounts, that nobody will play the stock market, no-one gets credit cards, etc etc, it would work out just like D&D or any other game that tracks full-dollar amounts in-come/out-flow.

Saying: "You have $1,000." "I spend $500 on a Glock 17." Isn't unbalancing in the least.

Wealth takes modern finances and does a few things with it:

It turns a complex interlocking system and boils it down to a simple value. Rent, clothes, gas, food, going-to-the-movies, are all accounted for. Job, account interest, trust funds, are all accounted for. The back-end is in the broad numbers.

It turns paperwork, down-time, and accounting into a dice-inclusive game system. Like a Will save or an Attack Roll.

The only problem I'd see with doing straight dollars is if you have a smart-aleck who decides to try running investments and credit cards and the like. But that same guy is going to try and find ways to bend the Wealth system, so, don't really see as either methodology is going to stop somebody that wants to be a problem.

For myself, 70% of my last D&D session was spent appraising, identifying, selling, divying, burning (several feats that can consume magic items for other purposes) ... re-divying, and buying magical items. We spent several days of "Game World Time" between shopping trips, but I still had the same 523gp 37sp and 25cp a few days later. We didn't take the time to buy ale or rations or feed for the horse. We're not going to take time calculating how many copper pieces a day my character spends on food or ale, but I have a copper-pieces line in my character cash page. I remarked then that I'd rather have rolled a few Wealth checks back and forth and had been done in a few minutes. Any sense of realism was ruined by that 25cp that have been there since 3rd level. Any sense of simplicity went out the window when we had to pull a calculator and scrap paper out to work the multiplication and division to do finances for 13th level characters.

The next time I run D&D, I'm going to use the Wealth system instead of tracking cp/sp/gp/pp. Last time I ran a fantasy game I used Wealth and it turned out well. YMMV.

--fje

 

[Committed Hero]

The nice thing about the Wealth system is that you can avoid worrying about financial things. Not just leases, salaries and the like - since I won't argue that anyone keeps track of that in a modern rpg - but avoiding arguments about how much cash someone is carrying on hand, and exactly what someone has in his apartment/car/et c.

There are advantages to strictly working in dollars and cents, but if money is to play a secondary role in a game I would recommend staying with the Wealth system.

 

[Masada]

Spycraft 2.0 has a nice enhancement that could be tweaked to work with d20 Modern. They break wealth down in to 3 categories Lifestyle, Possessions and Spending Cash. You can put your wealth awards into one of these. Each is only a 10 point scale where a Lifestyle 10 character would be living in Buckingham Palace and a 1 pointer lives in government housing. You'd have to scale back the wealth awards granted in a game and at character creation.

Cars are tied in to your Lifestyle and broken down in to catecories for selection. You just pick one off a list that your Lifestyle qualifies for. Possessions work similarly where the player picks from lists based on how many points you have in Possessions. For Modern you would have to develop some conversion mechanic to take equate Purchase DC with Possession level. For example, Possessions 5 would let you pick 4 PDC 20 items. Spending Cash "refreshes" every "mission". Spending Cash converts straight to dollars for purposes of buying gear. So Spending Cash 5 might just equal $5,000 (I don't have the actual mechanic in front of me).

The system has some nice features to it and helps dodge some of Modern's quirks.

If I was forced to pick an alternate system right now, I'd just use cash ignoring salary and expense.

 

[Ghendar]

There's no real work "converting" directly. You know an item's PDC has an actual $ value, so use that instead. Use round numbers to avoid annoying math.

Perhaps conversion wasn't the right word to use. However, this thread gave me exactly the kind of ideas and thoughts I was looking for. Thanks, guys