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I appologize if this has been discussed before; if so could somebody please show me where?

Last night I was searching through all my RPG books looking for different ways to quantify wealth. I found only three.
1. Exact wealth, as a "currency" trait that defines exactly how many coins you have and each piece of equipment. By far the most common, it seems to me that this is really only appropriate to a game focused on economic "adventures" and cumbersome in almost all the systems it is actually used in. Obvious examples are D&D, GURPS, and even the Storyteller system.
2. As an ablative trait, that goes down when used and up during some game conditions. I could find only two examples, Donjon and Exalted. Exalted doesn't say when or how the Resources trait would increase, only that it can. Donjon abstracts almost all wealth, allowing a roll to see if you own a certain piece of equipment.
3. As just another trait. Sometimes rolled to determine if you can buy something. Sometimes just ignored, assuming characters have or can buy any equipment they want. Typical of games like Feng Sui, The Window, and Over the Edge.

Each method probably has it's place in various types of games, but it seems to me that in most cases the choice is not decided based on the goals of the game, if it is considered at all.

Why does wealth seem like such a difficult concept to model? How come there aren't more systems that look like #2? And what can a Simulationist GM who doesn't like to keep track of equipment list do?

Quote from: AeliosWhy does wealth seem like such a difficult concept to model? How come there aren't more systems that look like #2? And what can a Simulationist GM who doesn't like to keep track of equipment list do?

Probably because Wealth, and what it is used for tends to devolve into counting your pennies to easily.

Example, caught About a Boy the other day. Well, part of it. Hugh Grant plays a man who is independantly wealthy. He's been living off the proceeds of a xmas song his father wrote. Now, he didn't buy anything extravigant, but if he needed something or he wanted something he had plenty of liquid cash to acquire it.

Now, go back to 1986-7 when I saved up all the money I had in the world to get an NES. Not easy on $5 a week. A pathetic allowance for the time.

The difference her is that weath and money is about what you do with it. Hugh Grant in About a Boy was not attempting to do anything special with his money, so it was a non-issue. I was attempting something very special, I thought, so every penny counted.

So to remove money from the equation,you also need to remove what you can do or get with money as well.

Such is my take.

d20 modern uses a more abstract system similar to your #2 mechanic, and gives rules for it going up and down.

(Hmm, I wouldn't have expected a d20 game to be innovative. I'll have to take a look.)

So wealth is like any other trait. It's usefullness is defined by what you can do with it. Logical. But then the question becomes "what /should/ you be able to do with wealth?"

In a typical fantasy game it probably isn't important to know if you can buy a cow or a chicken, but it would be important to know if you can buy sword or armor.  But that doesn't necissarily determine what kind of wealth mechanism to use. Knowing that you need 40gp to purchase a swourd is no different than knowing you need two dots in resources or that you come from a "middle income" background. So we still need a way to decide how to quantify it.

I cleaned the kitchen and dining room for three months to earn my NES; how would that fit into a wealth mechanism? Can I use my "clean house" trait in place of my wealth trait? Given that this was a social contract with my parents it isn't even important to know how much a servant makes or how long it would take to "earn" enough for the purchase. Can I make an contested roll of my "whining" trait vs my parents "income" trait?

Hello,

Your three categories confuse me a little, because #3 seems to include both systems which do include a "Wealth" value, and systems which do not. Am I understanding you correctly by re-phrasing as follows?

1. Money is quantified literally in the game-world. On my sheet, it says how many dollars (or whatever) are available to my character, and what for. Any purchasing is going to be a matter of decreasing these values on my sheet, in addition to whatever role-playing the GM and I might do. (Classic example: Dungeons & Dragons, late 1970s)

2. Wealth is quantified as a score, but money is left relatively abstract or referred to only as a function of wealth. See below for more discussion and examples.

3. Wealth and money together are handled almost entirely by Drama. I can buy it or I can't, depending on my character's "place" in the world, and we don't monitor how much I have or have left. (Classic example: early Champions, early 1980s)

Here are some historical approaches to the middle category, by game system.

In Call of Cthulhu, one character "skill" is called Credit Rating. You roll it in order to buy things. It's also often used as a social-interaction roll, in terms of getting one's character past bureaucratic or social obstacles.

Exactly what Credit Rating represents is therefore pretty variable in play. In some ways, it's what kind of funds you can lay your hands on ... but perhaps is better understood as your character's ability to refer to available funds, in a way that gets other characters to respect that potential. Or both.

In Army Ants, characters operate strictly in the military sphere, and the sheet includes a variable called Clout. Clout is used at the requisition desk to modify one's attempt to get equipment from the supply people (or rather, ants), and for all intents and purposes, it's "money" in the context of the game. "Social skills and rep such that it affects my ability to get stuff from those who dole it out."

In Sorcerer, a character's Cover score operates as a combination of skills, social signals, possessions, and finances, and may be rolled for any purpose within these spheres.

In Hero Quest (formerly Hero Wars), "Wealth" is an ability very much like any other, and it is employed very much like the Cover score in Sorcerer, except that secondary abilities are almost certainly used to augment and "hone" the use of Wealth for the particular situation.

Best,
Ron

edit: here's a thread! Resources in Burning Wheel and MSH (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=7658)

Quote from: AeliosKnowing that you need 40gp to purchase a swourd is no different than knowing you need two dots in resources or that you come from a "middle income" background. So we still need a way to decide how to quantify it.

It is different. Gathering and managing resources like GP has a certain amount and type of Step On Up. The other two options has less or at least a different kind (if any).

Keep in mind a game does not have to be Gamist to have Step On Up and a player's preference does not need to be gamist to enjoy Step On Up.

Hey Jack,

I think you're going off a little half-cocked. For one thing, Gamism isn't really the topic at hand - and you're butchering it anyway. When you play with Step On Up, you're playing Gamist. The terms are synonyms. Take this to the GNS forum if you'd like.

For another, let's back up and look at those categories before talking about what really is different or not different. I'm seeing a bit of "is," "is not," that needs to stop.

Best,
Ron

I suppose my catagories were a little confusing, as I was mixing elements. Perhaps I need four systems to illustate my thoughts.

Yes, Ron, in #1 I meant literal game world currency, dollars, gold pieces, etc. But more generally it can be any currency trait used to purchase wealth. In some ways is closely resembles most experience systems. I.e. spend whatever points to get whatever bonus, based on a fixed exchange rate. I think Exalted actually falls into this category, even though youre resources do not equate exactly to jade pieces there is still a fixed exchange rate between the resources trait and what you can purchase. And in at least one version of D&D you could trade experience for gold.

#2 is a currency trait not based on a fixed exchange rate. Spend whatever points and roll too see if you can complete the purchase. I.e. Donjon; apparently just adding a fortune mechanism to #1 above but really far more abstart, since you are not keeping track of how much wealth you have, but your ability to make purchases, which decreases as you use it.

In #3 I included any possible forture mechanism into tha drama step, which I'm not sure is approprite. So let's say that #3 is purely fortune; you roll a trait to see if you can make the purchase, but the trait never changes as a result of how you use it.  Cover would fit into this category.

#4 then is purely descriptive (drama?). You don't have any traits other than your idea of what your character should be able to do. The purchase is not resolved with any mechanism other than description and role playing.

All of them are valid. All of them are apropriate to some kinds of games. Sometimes you want the crunchiness of counting your pennies, sometimes you just want to know that it's there.  

I am most interested in #2, because I have never seen it used outside of Donjon (Exhalted is really more like #1, and I haven't seen d20 modern), and it seems like an excellent way to abstract wealth, without losing the meanning of currency, that you can spend it.

Arg. I think it's still confusing. Maybe that's because I am confused.

(Brief lecture on Exalted wealth mechanics deleted, as a warning to those who post at work without their book handy.)


EDIT: To add something to the topic, maybe the reason you see more "concrete" monetary systems is just that, conceptually, it's easier to wrap your mind around. From a design standpoint, I suppose, it's a bit of a pain in the ass to write up a "complete" list of prices for everything the players might conceivably want, but once that's done, all you have to do is add and subtract whenever you buy something or find some treasure. And if all that bookkeeping draws focus away from what the game is really supposed to be about . . . well, you drift, or you play dysfunctionally, or you get tired of it and play something like Exalted.

(I had either forgotten, or never known about, the wealth roll in Exalted. I thought your stat went down when you purchased something equal to your wealth level, regardless of any fortune mechanic.)

It seems to me that there are a few things to consider when attempting to create a system mechanism for wealth. The above systems are presumably attempts to create such systems but there may or may not be reasoning behind them. And that is what I want to address, why choose or create a wealth mechanism?

--How closely should it model real wealth? What is real wealth? Is it cash or all physical assets?
--Can wealth go up and down?
--Is there a fortune mechanic involved? Is there a chance you may not be able to purchase something even though you are wealthy?
--Should it even be conisdered as part of the system? What if it isn't?

Quote from: Aelios(I had either forgotten, or never known about, the wealth roll in Exalted. I thought your stat went down when you purchased something equal to your wealth level, regardless of any fortune mechanic.)

Oh, damn. I just double-checked the book, and you are correct. My bad.

Gentrification: I think you may be on to something, it seems easy to make a catalog of prices, but it is dysfunctional in most games.

Keeping in mind that I am a strong simulationist, producing a gatalog for a historical/fantasy game is pretty easy because there wasn't that many products on the market. For a modern game you colud simply collect JCPenny catalogs etc. But when you start to look at sci-fi games the notion of a catalog becomes absurd. Not only is there no way to even list every product, it is impossible to know what kinds of products would be available. Most systems get around this by listing only ten or twenty "most common" products, or producing large supplemental texts with huge lists.

The Donjon system seems to me like it holds just about the right level of abstraction. But it depends on a constant influx of treasure to keep it balanced, which works perfectly in that game but may not work in a more modern or sci-fi game where most wealth is intagable. The same level of abstraction could work very well, as long as there was a way to figure out how much any imagined piece of equipment was worth.

Is this discussion more appropriate to the Game Design forum?

Moderator sez:

1. This topic is just ginchy right here in this forum. That means "good."

2. Please, never edit posts once they've been responded to. Doesn't matter what you said, you can always post a new one correcting yourself.

Best,
Ron

Ron: Whoops, apologies for the unnecessary editing.

For those who missed my original post, I was explicating Exalted's wealth rules. Characters have a "wealth" trait; items have a "cost" trait. Both are abstract -- i.e., they represent a very broad estimate of how rich you are or how expensive something is, and nothing is ever described in terms of a specific number of coins.

If your wealth is higher than an item's cost, you can afford to buy it, and the item becomes yours with no further game effect. If the cost is higher than your wealth, then you cannot afford it, and you must find some other way to acquire it (such as stealing), or come back when you're richer.

If your wealth equals the item's cost, you can afford it -- barely -- but your wealth stat drops by one level, representing a major blow to your personal finances. (I had originally asserted that you have to roll to see if your wealth stat drops, but Aelios corrected me on that matter.)

I'm still not sure I would call that a "fixed exchange rate," but it does seem clear that Exalted's system, though abstract, is still meant to model the ebb and flow of actual wealth -- that is, your wealth stat represents some number of real coins, indeterminant but for most practical purposes finite, that are presumed to exist somewhere on your person or at least readily at hand. It is not a system for "fixing" possessions, such as in Hero Wars or Dying Earth.

Aelios: I wouldn't consider a system of hard currency + price lists dysfunctional per se. Certainly it works for people who enjoy simulating that sort of thing at that level of detail. No price list can be complete, obviously, regardless of genre, but I expect most groups just do what mine did and guesstimate for all the weird little items not on the list, using the items that are as a guide.

The Exalted system (and systems like it), on the other hand, can often be . . . problematic. While it dispenses with most of the trivial bookkeeping involved in a typical coin-counting game, it introduces a lot of bothersome ambiguities that are hard to wave away, precisely because it is still, fundamentally, simulating a coin-counting game. The game text, on the other hand, presents it as an essentially genre-related issue: "This game is not about counting pennies."

The system works well enough if everyone is on the same page, but if you have two different players with two different understandings of what the wealth system is supposed to represent, and two different expectations of how the GM should rule when an ambiguity pops up, and both are citing the exact same rules to support their interpretation . . . then you've got the potential for dysfunction.

I think Multiverser handles wealth differently than any of that.

We ignore it. In the main, it just isn't relevant.

O.K., that may be overstating the matter--but we've got no monetary system, no wealth stat, no character currency, and we don't use drama for it. The character owns what he owns; his money is just pieces of equipment. After all, a modern U.S. twenty dollar bill is not terribly easy to spend in Libya; it has no real value. What would its value be in Narnia or Ringworld? If you're jumping between universes, your net worth is really measured in terms of the stuff you carry, and not in terms of any artificial valuation thereof.

If you've got a Gaming Outpost subscription, take a look at Game Ideas Unlimited: Cash. From one perspective, all economy is barter economy; it's you offering what you have to me in exchange for what I have. Currency, in this, is a system for evening out the inequities by converting what you have and what I have into some common means of valuation. Now if I want your cheese but you don't want my bread, you'll still take my money, because you can trade it to the butcher for some meat, and he'll give it back to me for my bread. Money, though, has only the value to which we agree. The same piece of money could be the price of a loaf of bread in one world, a priceless collector's item in another, and tinder in a third. Even the value of gold and gems is entirely dependent on whether people want them or not.

Money is thus more tied to the setting; and the amount of detail provided for how to use it and what it's worth is entirely based on whether it's important to the setting. For The Dancing Princess we took the time to explain the old English coin system (pounds, shillings, crowns, farthings) and give some idea of a day's wage for various jobs the player character might take to settle in to the world. In The Mary Piper we just invented diktar, and gave a few prices as benchmarks as well as standard pay for the jobs the player character could expect to be offered. I'm doing a scenario right now where money is spoken of in quantities without names--it is suggested that someone will offer to pay the character "a hundred" for doing something, but not what that's worth. It's not important enough to the setting to go into detail.

So while I can see how many games use money in the ways you've described, you don't really have to have it at all, as far as I can see.

--M. J. Young

Afterthought.

Frequently in Multiverser play when a player character wants to use in-world currency to buy available merchandise and there's no easy benchmark for it (or even if there is) a die roll will determine what it costs relative to what the player character expected it to cost--from significantly less to significantly more. In those situations, you're using the money as a character currency in a system that partially randomizes how much you must use to achieve your objectives (and knowing that if you verse out, it might become worthless, depending on what type of money it is).

--M. J. Young

Conspiracy X has a fairly developed abstracted money system.

Firstly, almost everything you need is a big ticket item acquired through Resource Points which are derived from the characters Influence.  But RP's are broken up by the *type* of Influence - frex, Military, Intelligence or Sceintific.  So you cannot just freely exchange RP's for goods, they have to be the right RP's.

In the field, if cash is required, the characters can make a funding test against the wealth of their department to see how much of a slush fund is available.  Difficulty increases for repeated uses in a month.

Magical rituals can be used to increase your wealth "coincidentally".  For the period, funding tests are made as if influence was a level higher.

This is one of my favourite resource models.  One of the things I like about it is its move away from the "homogenous market" and I think there are lessons here to be learned by other games.  The homogenous market in FRPG's drives me spare.

Quote from: M. J. YoungO.K., that may be overstating the matter--but we've got no monetary system, no wealth stat, no character currency, and we don't use drama for it. The character owns what he owns; his money is just pieces of equipment. After all, a modern U.S. twenty dollar bill is not terribly easy to spend in Libya; it has no real value.

In an RPG, money is basically a mechanism for "getting stuff" via an even exchange. I've been speaking of coins because they're so typical, but in a more general sense it's just purchasing power. Whether an item is being purchased with coins or scrip or chickens or junk you've collected on the road, it's still money in the sense that it allows your character to "get stuff" without resort to theft. In Multiverser, if I'm reading you correctly, a character's power to "get stuff" varies wildly from setting to setting, and is usually (I would assume) pretty low. But more to the point, it's never strictly quantified (even in an abstract sense), and all transactions have to be role-played out, even if only to the extent of, "Will he give me sword for this dinged-up box of Turkish Delight?" ("No.") Am I mistaken, or doesn't that smell like drama?

Hello,

M.J., I agree with Mike. It reads very much like Drama to me, modified occasionally, as you describe in your second post, by Fortune.

Best,
Ron

MJ, If I may be so bold I would characterize the wealth system you describe for Multiverse as drift. Since you described the game as not having any wealth mechanism at all, but also that you have an informal system that you use. I.e. one not defined by the rules. That's fine, I would even guess that yours is the best way to do it in the Multiverse.

I don't think directly modeling currency, in coins and bills, is inherently dysfunctional. But I do believe that in any game that it is used it shifts a lot of focus to counting coins at the expense of other game elments, and that can be dysfunctional. This particular mechanism is a little more fogiving of dysfunction than other kinds of rulse, like action resolution, because it very rarely involves other skills.

Wealth is esentially a resolution system for "getting stuff" as Gentrifictaion pointed out. The stuff you get is then, presumably, a mechanism that allows or gives bonuses to other actions. A rope gives a bonus to climb a wall, a torch allows a character to see in the dark, etc. We, as humans, are often so focused on what we have that wealth system have become an inherent part of most games even if it doesn't have to be. Often if wealth is not in the rules it is added through drift, as in the case of Multiverse that MJ described. Champions is the only game I can think of right now that totally did away with wealth and posessions, by making them powers you had to buy. Even then questions like "how come my character can't own a flashlight" come up. In Champions wealth is no longer equipment (as an item of value), but an ability of the character. Some other systems may do this as well, but less explicitly.

I did a little more research last night and found that in Call of Cuthuluh (sp?) the credit rating skill isn't wealth, it is the ability to get loans and sometimes bribe officials. Wealth is still in dollars and cents.
In Ars Magica you have equipment but no real wealth. The equipment you have is determined by your coven, you buy background points in your coven to give you access to more expensive goods. But the actual total wealth, and how much provisions you have, is not an issue.

Contracycle, do the resource points diminish as you use them? If so then I would guess that it's a mechanism very similar to hard currency, it represents somthing different but it's still a currency trait you spend to get, a bonus or ability. It is interesting that it is less homogenous than most wealth and I bet that works well in that game.

Quote from: AeliosI don't think directly modeling currency, in coins and bills, is inherently dysfunctional. But I do believe that in any game that it is used it shifts a lot of focus to counting coins at the expense of other game elments, and that can be dysfunctional. This particular mechanism is a little more fogiving of dysfunction than other kinds of rulse, like action resolution, because it very rarely involves other skills.

Although I myself am not a huge fan of coin-counting, I still think you're putting the cart before the horse here. It's only dysfunctional if 1) it really is drawing a disproportionate amount of focus away from other priorities, which is a possibility but not an inevitability, and 2) those other priorities are something the group as a whole wants to be focused on.

It is useful to discuss alternatives to coin-counting, because clearly not everyone finds that method satisfactory. However, I don't think it's useful to dismiss coin-counting as an inherently destructive game mechanic.

Following up on Mike's post,

Furthermore, I don't think anyone has suggested that coin-counting (to adopt the term) is inherently dysfunctional.

It's a major feature of playing Tunnels & Trolls, for instance, in which it's exceptionally well-integrated into every other aspect of play.

So let's not get bogged down in defending something that isn't being attacked.

Best,
Ron

Quote from: Ron EdwardsSo let's not get bogged down in defending something that isn't being attacked.

Sorry again; I think I must be misunderstanding part of Aelios' position. Lemme chew on it some.

OK, well I do have a big beef with coin counting - becuase in effectit is massive attention to system, attention that I think could and should be better, erm, spent, elsewhere.

This is not to say that, as an element of system and measurment of challenge or success, it has no place.  By no means.  But what does bug me is that in effect it is a parallel resolution system, like a combat system, and almost always a bad one.

Theres a time and a place for book-keeping and the RPG table is not it, IMO.  It undermines certain kinds of verisimiltude, or makes more problematic than they are worth IME, as different forms of coinage complicate an exchange. This is less problematic in modern or future games in which money is usually electronic transfer of whole figures.  Also, such systems can undercut auhentic non-monetary systems of wealth that struggle to be meaningful when juxtaposed with money.

Lastly, I think these money systems present a pressure against socially integrated characters.  This occurs because money in large quantities, and large ranges of quantitites, is so hard to actually use in play that it seldom engages the characters.  There are practical limits to how much money can feature if all its accounting has to be literal and without recourse to mechanical abstraction.

Ignoring the multitude of wealth systems for a moment I question whether a wealth system is even necissary. In Orkworld, Champions, and Ars Magica (others?) you have equipment but it has no value other than it's assigned bonus. It is esentially the same as a skill or ability even though it may use a different mechanism.

At it's most abstract "Equipment: Lantern" is the same as "Ability: See in the dark, lantern." From this perspective wealth systems are advancement systems, like experience. It should even be possible to write a game based solely on equipment, without any "character" attributes at all. But that's off topic.

The biggest problem with eliminating wealth rules, especially to the level of Champions, is suspenison of disbelief. We *expect* that characters can pick up the gun our enemy dropped and use it, we expect that we can go down to the local grocery store and buy some band-aids. And so we expect that our characters also have some kind of wealth that allows them to do the same things. We also exect that our characters may drop or break a lantern, but that they would not lose their special elf ability "infravision."

(A note on Champions, if I remember correctly it was possible to buy a point-pool that did not represent any specific ability. Couldn't that be used to "buy" equipment, and when you lost the item you would get your points back to use for something other piece of equipment? Is this a "wealth" system?)

Hi Atom,

Your description for equipment is exactly how it works in Hero Quest - you have "Lantern 18" on your sheet just like you have "Clear-headed 13" or "Rock-climbing 20."

However, the sheet also has "Wealth

• " as well, which is used for things like purchasing or conceivably for augmenting various other abilities, especially negotiatory ones.
  
  Now, in my mind, both of the above are "system." Not a unique system, like the space for gold-pieces-count on the Tunnels & Trolls sheet, but an expression of the more general system of play. I suggest that the same goes for Orkworld, in which items are expressed as extra combat dice and extra Trouble dice.
  
  Gareth, I see your point, and in many cases, I agree with you. Tunnels & Trolls is one of the rare exceptions.
  
  Michael, we got our wires crossed a little. I was referring to Aelios' post about dysfunctionality, not to any point you made.
  
  Best,
  Ron

My favorite LARP system design, the Arabian Nights LARP, uses both explicit money (coins) and an abstract Wealth status (ranging from "beggar" and "poor" up to "fabulously wealthy"). Characters can buy various wealth statuses for various amounts of money, and can also (at a loss) cash in wealth status for money. Purchasing wealth status stands in for a whole raft of transactions (buying or hiring housing, clothes, entertainment hosting, grooming, servants, slaves, etc.) by which the character spends money to create a higher-status lifestyle. All those purchases would be too tedious to play out explicitly.

Wealth determines certain social obligations and privileges, including influence over officials (with higher wealth status amounting to sort of a continuous automatic bribery), access to various modes of travel, and whether or not the player must worry about housing or hunger. (So, for example, if your wealth status is "poor" or "beggar," you must actually buy food each day or suffer game mechanical effects of hunger, but if your wealth status is higher you can ignore those rules, because your ability to afford food is taken for granted.) However, you can't use wealth status to buy a camel or a pomegranate at the market; you need actual coins for that. Wealth is a lot harder to steal than money.

It's possible to be wealthy but have relatively little cash on hand (like being "house poor" in real life). It's also possible to be a beggar with a huge hoard of cash, but you'll still be treated as a beggar (albeit as a beggar with cash in hand, if you flash it.) Lower wealth statuses above "beggar" require periodic additional payments to maintain (so the character must work at a trade or otherwise earn an income), while higher wealth statuses not only don't require this, they automatically generate ready cash from presumed but unspecified profitable investment of part of the money used to purchase the wealth status.

It would be very surprising to me if this were the only example of dual use of explicit money and abstract wealth in a single game system. The approach has many advantages.

- Walt

Walt, I think splitting it into liquid wealth and assest is a pretty good division. It is difficult to keep track of the value of assests anyway, but many games demand that you do, at least during character creation. Another good division might be stationary assets vs portable assets, especially in a game where the characters leave their homes for long periods of time. This goes right back to the "what should the game be like" question. Wealth systems should support the goals of the game just as much as task resolution systems do.

Ron, good example, and I think it shows what I personally don't like about the the Hero Quest system, as well as I can surmise. Equipment and, to a lesser extent, relationships are very transitory and I don't see how the lost of the trait can be portrayed. Perhaps it works in Hero Quest, I don't know (I'm going to try and pick up the game on my way home). But I don't think it would wolk for me, this is only because I am very Simulationist. It destroys my suspension of disbelief. I appologize if this seems contradictory to my earlier post, wherein I was deconstructing the need for a wealth system and not necissarilly expressing my preferences.

Refering to Multiverser,

Quote from: RonIt reads very much like Drama to me, modified occasionally, as you describe in your second post, by Fortune.

He was echoing what

Quote from: Michael 'gentrification' GentryIn Multiverser, if I'm reading you correctly, a character's power to "get stuff" varies wildly from setting to setting, and is usually (I would assume) pretty low. But more to the point, it's never strictly quantified (even in an abstract sense), and all transactions have to be role-played out, even if only to the extent of, "Will he give me sword for this dinged-up box of Turkish Delight?" ("No.") Am I mistaken, or doesn't that smell like drama?

So agreeing that it did sound like drama (modified sometimes by fortune and sometimes, not posted, by karma, depending on setting), I wondered how I had missed that and why I thought it was an approach not previously mentioned. I had to go back and read

Quote from: what Ron previously3. Wealth and money together are handled almost entirely by Drama. I can buy it or I can't, depending on my character's "place" in the world, and we don't monitor how much I have or have left.

That was the part that threw me.

Multiverser does handle it by drama, but in a sense it turns that particular approach to drama on its head. We do monitor what you have, often quite precisely, but as "equipment" rather than "wealth". You have three hundred gold doubloons from your pirate adventure, four thousand seventeen diktar in the plastic currency of Sardic in various denominations, stuff like that. What is not recorded is what this is worth, which is something that has to be decided when you attempt to trade it for something else. Those doubloons will be worth quite a bit on many worlds, and in some of them there will be ways to know their precise value based on their weight in gold. There will be some worlds in which no one wants gold--but plastic has value.

Now, there's a sense in which an equipment costs list in a rule book is itself a drama mechanic (someone decided what each item should cost). The wealth itself in such games is usually a karma mechanic (an expendable resource). That leads me to see that there's a difference between what the character has and what its value is--that a character has one hundred gold pieces versus that each is the price of a rich meal and all together they're enough for a long composite bow.

So in a sense, the character's wealth is a matter strictly recorded, in that we know exactly what he owns; it's the buying power of that wealth that is flexible.

Agreed that it's drama, it just does it from the other end, monitoring closely what the character has but changing what that is worth.

Oh, and getting back for a moment

Quote from: to what Mikeusually (I would assume) pretty low

that's not so easy to say. Some players make an effort to collect "value objects" which are likely to be convertible to currency in a lot of worlds (gems, for example), and find that they can keep their buying power pretty high that way most of the time. Others just find a way to earn or acquire quantities of the local currency whenever they arrive. Others make due with what they've got. So it varies.

--M. J. Young

Oddly enough, I stumbled onto something, working on my Pneuma Engine for Spirit Chronicles.  Okay, follow me here.

[quick description of PE] // skip if you know already
Okay, the main limit I set when developing the Pneuma Engine, was that everything about the character (non-narrative material, that is) had to fit on the Aspect Matrix (grid).  Skills are placed on the grid, and the skills advanced, based on the largest skill adjacent to it.  Thus, for a skill to be adjacent, it had to had some tie to the other, thus eliminating the need for attributes.
[/quick description of PE]]

Now, I ran into the context of wealth pretty early.  Equipment, outside of major items, was tracked abstractly (donjon style, kinda).  So, to track wealth, I made it a skill, to be placed on the grid.  Boy, did I open pandora's box.  It didn't quite make sense at first, but then I simply redefined the wealth skill.  Instead of buying power, it represented an abstract combination of money, income, and ability to spend it wisely.  It also included a bit of haggling, and marketing, but I assume those could be seperate skills (placed adjacent to wealth).  This provided a few unique elements:

1)  When placed adjacent to another skill on the Aspect Matrix, that skill would benifit from high wealth (afford better training, etc.) and the wealth benifited from being adjacent to a high skill (professional skills make money).
2)  Experience could be placed into wealth, instead of other skills.  Also, since skills have a chance of advancing everytime they are used in play, so does wealth (Representing the fact that they either get better at buying, make money off of the deal, or, in the case of an expensive purchase, reduce the amount points lost.
3)  Player's can be rewarded in strictly Wealth Advancement Points (though this goes against the fluidity the system provides).

All in all, it still fits into #2, but I like the "accidental" effect the Aspect Matrix has had on it.

I discovered that my dissatisfaction with Hero Quest was a misunderstanding, a matter of scale. You don't pay for or purchase any basic equipment at all, up to and including livestock. If it's part of the character's profession it's there. If you need more equipment you can go home and get it or ask one of your relationships to give or lend it to you. Failing all that you can use your Wealth trait to go out and barter for it. Any value that any item has is purely drama. And although you /could/ have Lantern 13, you probably never would unless it was a magical lantern or if the lantern was somehow a plot element. I call it a matter of scale because of the "don't sweat the small stuff" aspect, only important equipment is purchased with Hero Points.