Wealth Scores and Bounty Hunting

snarfoogle

First Post
When I first saw the rules for Wealth in d20 Modern, I thought something was off, but I didn't know what exactly. Now, with me thinking of a bounty hunter game, I realized -- how do you incoporate bounty cash & such into the Wealth System. Any thoughts on values, cash and maybe an alternative system?
 

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I'll preface this with: "I love wealth."

At any rate, there are two ways to do this.

One, decide on some dollar value for the bounty. This can be anything, really. Then, to see how it affects the player's Wealth score find the DC of that value, subtract by three and act as if "selling" the amount of money. So this will net you a Wealth bonus of +1, +2, +1d6+1 etc etc.

The other option is to decide on a Wealth bonus you want to award the players and look for a "sale value" DC that would be close to it. So, say, you want to give them a +3 Wealth Bonus award. Find what they could sell for 1d6+1, add 3 and call it that.

Remember if it's a single bounty to divide the money equally before you do anything to it.

Just realize that the money is "flavor". You could really call it 50,000 dollars and decide that it'll give them +2 Wealth apiece, it doesn't matter. What really matters is the end effect of the Wealth score of the PCs.

I've handed out in my current game: An entire diamond mine, several million dollars in rare wood, some very influential economic contacts ... but the highest wealth bonus of the group is +19. I could have never run these story lines in a cash-system with any sort of success ... they had to liberate slaves from an illegal mine and ended up with de facto rulership of the island. I gave them all a Wealth bump, said that the upkeep costs and such meant they didn't see a giant jump. Then they all traded their shares in the mine to the merchant family that owned their airship in trade for the ship itself. The wood incident they had all kinds of fun getting out calculators and adding up how much it all was worth, then dividing it up ... between the PCs, and they wanted small percentages for the crew, and their independant corporation. All total several million dollars worth of goods, a mine, and their own ship jumped their average Wealth from +8 to +17 over the course of several adventures.

The characters have been buying real estate, repairing the ship, buying and producing goods and items, all kinds of stuff. Very much a change from the D&D cash culture of saving up 4000gp 2cp and spending 4000gp the next day on a Cloak of Charisma. They've had ACCESS to things that might wipe their Wealth bonus out, but for some reason they're very much resistant to it.

EDIT: To clarify my methodology.

The Diamond Mine: I just gave them all a +3 Wealth bonus apiece for the initial value of, say, some diamonds that were ready to enter the market place, the economic weight they could leverage, etc etc. There was no dollar value ever assigned to any piece of it.

The Rare Wood: This adventure arc netted them all sorts of rewards. As far as Wealth goes, I decided on a value for each pound of wood on the market, then how much wood they could collect and transport. I found the total value, divided it all up, then looked up the individual values on the DC chart. Subtracted three, "sold" the new value and applied the bonuses to the characters.

--fje
 
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Don't forget that with a bounty their should be a Reputation bonus too. So something like +1 Wealth +1 Reputation would be a standard bounty. Whiel a Bounty for someone like UBL, would be along the lines of +4 (1d6+1) Wealth +4 (1d6+1) Reputaion per character.

BTW, my characters have rarely gotten above +10 wealth, they keep taking 10 or 20 on new stuff every few levels and dropping their wealth back ot 0. (Profession also isn't real high on their skill allocation list)
 

Mine is a pretty odd game.

We started at lvl 4. Before lvl 5 hit they had completed the first several plot arcs and had liberated a diamond mine held by pirates where they were using the crews of conquered ships as slave labor. Sort of led a slave revolt, had a big ship-to-ship battle in the sky, and they had a mine and some fame. At this point they were crew, but the PCs were on the island when the sky battle started and the ship took a pretty heavy (plot driven) pounding and the captain died in the fighting. Leaving the first mate (a PC) in control of the ship.

When it started they all had starting Wealth for 4th level PCs, minus a few points for occasional expensive gear, but they outfitted themselves as they thought the crew of a merchant ship would. Nobody bought armor, everybody equipped themselves with clubs and daggers. One guy bought two small pistols, which sapped his Wealth a bit.

For the most part they stuck with very minimal gear, found gear, or gear they built themselves. It's a Grim Tales game, so everybody needed a Craft anyway. One guy took Craft (Tailor). Another Craft (Carpentry). The gun-guy took Craft (Gunsmithing). That first arc was mostly RP, sneaking around investigating, and any firefights they'd scavenge the shot, powder, and gun of anybody that had a firearm.

But what they have bought, they've bought big. The diamond mine they pretty much traded for their own airship as equal value. They each got a +3 bonus for that adventure to represent goods and whatnot they sold, but they also recieved some musketoons and pistols from guards. The ship came with some personal firearms as well.

In the trading, the merchant house they were pressuring to get the ship from offered up a daughter in marriage to the new captain, whose dowry and connections gave him a free Windfall feat (as well as all sorts of hooks for future adventures). So he became the most wealthy member of the party.

I use some weird item rules in the game: We use the multiple-levels and effects of mastercrafting found in the Black Company Rulebook, but I use the "+3 DC Per Mastercraft Jump" system from d20 Modern because I've never particularly liked that a Mastercraft Steel Sheild costs 165gp and a Mastercraft Leather Armor costs 170gp and a Mastercraft Spoon costs 150.03gp.

So the captain went out and had himself some very nice leather armor made. +2 equipment to defense, 3 points of Damage Conversion, 10% lighter, and +1 on Diplomacy checks when wearing it. (Decorative, Light, and a home brewed Increased Protection benefits. We use Fewer Dead Heroes which converts the defense bonus of armor in Lethal damage to Nonlethal damage. Increased Protection ups the conversion without upping the defense bonus.) The total cost was something like DC 17, which hit him for 1 point. Two other people realized they could get Increased Protection and Light on Leather Armor for DC 14 and picked up their "free" sets during down time after their Wealth Bonuses surpassed 15. That was around the end of Lvl 5 for them.

It's a magic-common setting, but for setting-specific flavor reasons metal objects can't be enchanted. No magic swords, no magic guns. So most of the "special" items the crew has are mastercrafted. The only magical items I can think of are the ship itself, its figurehead, a two minor cloaks, and a model ship that reflects the condition of the real ship and the positions of its crew for the wives at home. So nobody has gone out and blown all of their cash on a +1 Flaming Musket. They COULD go out and blow all of their cash on a Cloak of Charisma +4 or Leather +2, but it's cheaper and more effective to use Mastercraft bonuses that, while individually do less, do MORE taken all together. I like.

After the first DM-arranged plot-device wedding, the other players decided that, being respectable free traders as they were, and needing to get a leg up in local politics, they should settle down too. Around level 6 they were getting into politics. So one character (the wizard) went looking for real estate in the home city and put a down payment down on a house, then started courting local women of reasonably good family and station. All of which had its own prices and Wealth rolls and Diplomacy checks and was quite interesting and very unexpected. That depleated his Wealth. The gunslinger type spent some money on a few really nice pistols and two nice daggers, dropping his Wealth a bit (quick draw and TWF and single-shot pistols means quite a bit of cash in load-out). The captain, oddly enough, went out and blew some Wealth Bonus on really nice jewelry for the wife (expensive to begin with, then mastercrafted Ornate (+2 Diplomacy check when he gives it to her) and Decorative (+1 on HER Diplomacy checks while wearing it). Very IN character but out of character for your average game. All of this didn't drop their Wealth Bonuses below +11-12 or so, though.

The next arc involved getting some rare semi-magical wood so the wizard's NPC mentor could craft them a magical figurehead (I.E. their ship recieved its first Legendary Ship level). The wood turned out to be fey wood inhabited by dryads, but one dryad's tree had long ago drowned when a ground well shifted and the dryad trapped inside had warped into an undead Charisma-draining monster. After the battle they were given free hand to gather deadfall from the special trees, and I measured some usable deadfall in the back yard, worked up a rough sketch of the grove and calculated how much they could collect. I hadn't done this BEFORE the game, as I'd forgotten, and I underestimated how much wood a whole grove of those trees might shed on average ... so I'd over-priced the wood. The total value ended up around 2 MILLION silver (campaign baseline). Luckily they couldn't flood the market and chose to keep a reserve of it for use by the carpenter in projects. They gave all of the crew a 1%-apiece share for a bonus, reducing it again, then divided it among the PCs. So 2 million bucks carved and split and rendered only jumped them about 7 points on average (though they DID roll a little low). Everybody was happy, but deadfall a larger-than-life carving does not make ... so they had to role play and Diplomacy roll some interactions with one of the dryads to take a pretty large, though in no way fatal, cutting from her tree (the largest).

At this point, in a D&D game, they should have been outfitted with a quarter of a million in gear. They've never bothered to go buy much more than they have now.

Not to be left out, the player whose character wasn't currently trying to curry favor in town via marriages (he was being political by writing treatises to influence national opinion and using their trade routes for distribution ... genius idea of his, really) decided to learn Sylvan and try to woo the dryad they'd interacted with. Prompting some other adventures to find rare plants for gifts.

During huge swathes of campaign time, Wealth hasn't come up at all. Which I've adored. Nobody bothered "looting the bodies!" after they felt they had enough weapons that everybody who wanted a firearm could have one. I enforce encumbrance (and pretty hars encumbrance rules to boot) so nobody is a walking armory ... thus the popularity of lighter-than-normal armor as well. They're FUNCTIONALLY unbelievably rich ... owning their own flying ship, having powerful NPC connections in their major trade city, etc. They don't need huge Wealth bonuses to represent that. They're also officially, by the little chart anyway, rich.

Illustrating that, they went to my campaign's version of Monaco/Vegas/The Bahamas and I gave them the opportunity to hit the gambling establishments. But they're rich and without huge wagers and equally huge amounts of money being won or lost, they'd not see any fluctuation in Wealth. So what did I do?

They played for Experience Points. Heh heh heh. They were flabbergasted. They were also very very timid about it, but they thought that was a very fun day. We really sat around for several hours of the game day and played dice (Ship, Captain, and Crew) for XP.

--fje
 

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