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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7384354" data-attributes="member: 82106">Meh, I don't think there's any big contradiction. The players have an agenda, a focus for play. If they travel for 5 months and its 'dangerous' in ways that aren't addressing that, then its just color. You can say, if asked, "Yeah, there was a time you almost got lost in a snowstorm, and then there was this time when you laid low for 3 days to avoid an Apache war party." As I said, its not MANDATORY that you skip all that, but it could well be dramatically more interesting to telescope it all into a transition (I call them interludes). My real point is, there's no fixed time period or distance which makes an elision from the narrative 'too much'. HoML does it. The PCs start with X amount of gear (like in 4e, there's a list with associated costs and they get 100sp to spend). From then on their wealth is basically abstract. They might, narratively, find '1000gp', but there's a simple chart that shows what fictional amounts equate to 'trivial', 'significant', and 'great' wealth/expenditure. The basic assumption is that treasures give the PCs 'significant' money, they can achieve significant expenses in the ordinary course of play, possibly with a check required, but not a really difficult one. If the fictional positioning of the game results in a PC becoming separated from his wealth (IE losing all his goods) then he's going to be stuck scraping to make a 'trivial' expense, but normally those are just assumed. 'great' expenses are going to require the characters to pool all their resources, or obtain some unusually rich source of money, and will require difficult checks. Its possible some PC might find this kind of check within his modest reach if, narratively, he's focused on and insured that he acquires wealth as a specific asset (this would probably constitute a major boon in my game, the equivalent of what you gain for going up a level in 4e). It does work. Clearly if the players are going to try to break that system, then the GM will have to push back, but I've never seen that be a real problem in actual games.Oh, wealth exists, we are just not obsessed with tracking gold coins. Fictionally there's some specific amount of money that anyone possesses. If a player insists that his character count it out, then he can, but there's little point. If you pick a pocket I'll tell you if the haul you got was nothing, trivial, routine, good, or great maybe, but the net effect is still abstract. I mean, in 4e such a haul would simply be part of a treasure parcel and the picking of pockets would be an SC, probably covering many individual attempts. Right, and I acknowledged that its an open question what should be involved. It could be trivial, you asserted that it HAD to be played out.This is filled with notions of play that are very specific to certain ways of running games. I merely assert that your 'universals' are not universal at all.Yeah, well, I wouldn't generally do such a retcon either, but I don't feel a need to build my campaign around avoiding the opening. I just tell the player that doing so would be relying on knowledge of the future they didn't have back then. I guess you could also go back and retcon in a portent or something if you wanted. I might go along with that sort of thing if it was really apropos (IE your character has an established history/backstory/associations that make that plausible on the face of it). As I said to Maxperson, I just feel like my general rule is 'zero added extraneous things along the way' is a valid option and the option that is at least a consistent rule I can follow. OTOH I am not known for being 100% consistent, I might add something in the middle of the Tokyo trip if it seems like it would be interesting and relevant, and dramatically 'works'.</blockquote>

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