Wealth and Equipment as Reward

[Kae'Yoss]

How do you incorporate equipment rewards into the wealth bonus for encounters?

Say, We have a EL7 encounter, usually giving a +10 bonus. But not everything will be cash, for the bad guy had a gun, too, which the players might keep or might sell. how much do you subract from the +10 bonus? One or two, I think, depending on the overall wealth scores of the players.



How much of an NPC's wealth score will transform into a bonus to the player's scores? Is it nothing, and they get only the equipment they pry from his cold fingers? Will they get a little fraction as a bonus, for the cash he kept on his body?

 

[Moonsword]

Maybe a couple of points at most of hiw Wealth score would go to the PCs, unless they manage to get control of his investments or he's carrying a really fat wad of cash. I'd also make sure to balance that reward against the PC's own Wealth bonuses. If a PC's is +15, and the crooks is +2, a point from his bonus is about twenty bucks. Not enough to matter that much, IMHO.

 

[jeffhartsell]

Once PCs become moderately wealthy, the NPCs equipment will net them typically +1 wealth per item, unless the PCs are getting cars, planes, helicopers, and other big ticket items.

The rules for selling stuff help limit the PCs from getting too much wealth from looting unless the PCs are not already wealthy. Selling a HK PSG1 sniper rifle only nets a PC with +19 or greater wealth a +1 bonus.

The PC with +19 wealth that sells a Bell Model 212 helicopter (which would probably then be considered stolen) with a sell value of 39 (45 - 3 [sell] - 3 [stolen]) would net 2d6+1 wealth.


From the d20 Modern SRD...

Selling Stuff
To sell something, a character first needs to determine its sale value. Assuming the object is undamaged and in working condition, the sale value is equal to the object’s purchase DC (as if purchased new) minus 3.
Selling an object can provide an increase to a character’s Wealth bonus. The increase is the same amount as the Wealth bonus loss the character would experience if the character purchased an object with a purchase DC equal to the sale value.
Regardless of the character’s current Wealth bonus, he or she gains a Wealth bonus increase of 1 whenever the character sells an object with a sale value of 15 or higher. If A character sells an object with a sale value less than or equal to his or her current Wealth bonus, and that sale value is 14 or lower, the character gains nothing.
A character cannot legally sell restricted objects unless the character is licensed to own them. A character also cannot legally sell objects that have been reported as stolen. Selling objects illegally usually requires that the character have contacts in the black market, and reduces the sale value by an additional 3.

 

[Moonsword]

I was actually only referring to money the villains have readily available, not equipment. That's already built into the system in the sales rules.

 

[takyris]

Stupid followup question:

How do you divide up wealth bonuses among multiple players with different wealth levels? If I want to give out a +6 bonus and there are 6 players, do they each get a +1?

-Tacky, somewhat embarrassed at still not understanding this

 

[jeffhartsell]

Divving out wealth is up to the players. If you give them a suitcase of $1,000,000 in cash that is worth +11 wealth and you have 5 players, it is up to them on how to split the +11 bonus.

Same idea as in DnD when you give out a +2 dagger of giant bane, a +3 bastard sword, +4 mithril chain shirt, and 39k in gold. It is up to the players on who gets what.

 

[takyris]

So a +11 bonus could be one +11 bonus, two +5 bonuses and a +1 bonus, or eleven +1 bonuses?

That's certainly easy, and if it works that way, great. But does someone with a +17 bonus really benefit from the same amount of money that would only take a +1 bonus person to +2?

Blah. Abstract. Sorry.

And really, that works fine for me. I can sell that in-game.

-Tacky

 

[MThibault]

If the PC with a +2 wealth feels that a +1 payment is proportionally smaller than the +1 payment that the PC with +17 received, I can justify it as having much of the actual cash tied up in debt consolidation, mortage overpayments and investments. The actual spending power of that sum of money doesn't go as far for the guy who has all of his credit cards maxed out and is behind on the rent as the fella who's biggest concern is how best to shelter the money until he needs it.

It has never come up, but I might think about letting the low wealth PC *not* be at all responsible and receive an extra +1 on his wealth score from a large-lump sum payment, but he would take a -4 (cumulative with every payment squandered) on his Profession checks when leveling, so the bank is going to start demanding payments sooner or later (i.e. he's got to be pretty lucky not to have his wealth increase reduced by +1 when he levels)

Cheers

 

[jeffhartsell]

Aye, and part of what you have to take into account when determine wealth bonuses is the party average, so the wealthy PC coupled with the broke PC means that the broke PC gets less than they might otherwise while the wealthy PC is getting more than her share. A +1 bonus to someone with +40 wealth is a ton of wealth compared to a +1 bonus for someone with +0 wealth. But, that +1 for the broke PC does way more good.

In the end, it's probably not going to break the system unless you've got players trying to find loopholes. Typically, you should have players with comparable spending power unless you have very different character concepts working together, a la the street urchin with the princess in disguise.

 

[FatGnome]

I figure wealth bonus to be what the average player can spend once a week on things above and beyond their regular needs. So in other words you would have to get another +4 to your wealth bonus if you wanted to buy a CD every week. (Figuring CDs at about $20) So in order for a player to get a +4 then you would need to get about $1000. My question is who carries $1000 around with them or into fight situations. So it is not common to find this is my point here. I would not give out wealth bonus and plan not to very often in my campaigns. Let them get the bonus from leveling unless they need the money for something in particular.

When divvying out money though if they want to break it up then you take the total amount of money (nonabstract) divide it however it needs to be divided and then go back to wealth bonus (Abstract again).

So an example $1,000,000 is a what +41 or so?? Say we have 5 people who want to divide it evenly. So now we have 5 chunks of $200,000 so each persons wealth bonus goes up by 36.

Or I would say that since from $200,000 they could only make the additional payments of $3846 a week then the total wealth bonus would actually be about a 22. I personally think this is the way to go because the WB is all about how much you can regularly afford that original $1,000,000 would really be closer to an added wealth bonus of 28 for being $20,000 a week. Now of course I am using a year to divide by and if you plan on going much longer than that make the wealth bonus go down even farther. So for example if they are saving for retirement you could divide by 1560 for 52 weeks times 30 years making that 1,000,000 into a WB of 15. That could be nice and evil to do to the players but then again if you are GM what else are you supposed to be but evil towards your players?