Resources in Burning Wheel and MSH

[Luke]

Personally, I get very bored with tracking money in a game. PC expenses can never be adequately  represented, in my opinion.

Sure you make 100 gold pieces as a reward and now you can buy all sorts of snazzy armor and weapons. But what about the general cost of living? What about food, lodging, bills, loans, repairs, etc?

See, I like a gritty game where players can be poor and out of luck, but not so crunchy that it becomes unmanageable detailing of pennies.

So, in that vein, has anyone played Marvel Superheroes? In that game you have a Resources stat that you test when you need something. You don't clock dollars and cents if you need a Lear Jet, you test your resources to see if your character can swing it at the time. And beyond that, resources covers and determines your lifestyle. Tony Stark had Incredible Resources (I think): A corporation, laboratories, and a bad-ass suit of armor. While Peter Parker had Poor or Typical resources: an apartment and a low-paying job.

Do you think something like this would fit in BW?
A player would still spend RPs  in character burning to buy equipment and contacts, but then can also buy a "lifestyle"? That lifestyle then determines (without costing it out) what you can afford in-game. And if you want to acquire worldly goods that are beyond your means you can test your resources somehow?

Brainstorm with me.
-L

[Matt Machell]

It's a good system, and works in Exalted and World of Darkness games (and numerous others). Depends on how much abstraction you want really? Is money important enough to the game to warrant detailed modeling? If feel is more important than micro-management, then it'd probably suit you.

-Matt

[ethan_greer]

I haven't seen MSH, but here are some other games to look at: Clinton's Donjon, D20 Modern, and my own Thugs and Thieves, all of which use different abstract monetary systems.  Any of these could be checked out for more inspiration.

Bottom line, abstract monetary systems are used in many varied systems, and I don't see what would stop you from incorporating something like that into BW.

Good luck!

[Valamir]

An easy shortcut that doesn't involve a major change to BW is simply to implement a Standard of Living rating.  This rating is nothing more than a flat monthly expense that the player must pay to continue living in the style to which he's accustomed.

For added detail I've done the following with it:

Base buy in:  a much higher flat cost (usually equal to 1 years worth) to buy in to the next SoL.  This covers the initial expenditures for a new wardrobe, decorative jewelry and up front costs for new furnishings or even all new living quarters.

What it gets you: each SoL has a rough guideline of what you're assumed to have access to without needing to track seperately.  This assumes obvious things like a wardrobe, and the level of food and drink.  I also throw in things like a place to live, free "contacts" (adding new ones every so often) representing bar tenders, maitre des, investment guys, barristers, or whatever other professional types would be suitable at that level.  Also generally a "pocket change" level in gold (or $ or whatever) allowing the character to make purchases at that level or less without having to track the expenditure...like buying a round of drinks, or a bauble at the bazaar or what have you.

Game stat effects: Modifiers to various etiquette, social persuasion, etc rolls indicating the effects of dressing well and so forth.  I usually also have a minimum "etiquette" (or whatever) level for each social class.  Buying into a social class higher than your "etiquette" means you lack the social skills to actually travel in those circles and suffer penelties for "putting on airs" and the like.

Modifiers for advantages and hindrances:  In games that offer traits like "thrifty" or "gluttonous" or "wastrel" or the like, adjustments can be made to the levels accordingly.

In practice it means periodically debiting a few months gold from character sheets periodically in exchange for being able to assume alot of elements about the characters without having to count beans.  The "buy in" amount is also a great way of giving players something to shoot for to spend money on other than new weapons and armor.

In one campaign, the players got so tired of being treated like paupers and street riff raff by perspective employers that when they finally got a huge windfall they spent it almost entirely of buying their way into a more professional appearance so that the next time they were summoned to the king servitors weren't spraying perfume around them and wiping off everything they touched.

[Luke]

hm. interesting. this is definitely along my line of thinking.

But, what about the other side? the commitment that a lifestyle requires from a person? Income, contacts and other bennies don't materialize out of thin air. As we all know.

What aside from dumping in money, what does the character owe to his lifestyle? In some campaigns the gameplay and the lifestyle will go hand in hand. But what about someone like William Marshal who spent very little time in his "lifestyle" but benefitted greatly from the riches of the age? Or, on the other side, what about an overworked banker who has all the money in the world and no time or energy to spend it?

Or what about the perennially poor kings of europe? courts full of pomp, but ultimately very poor monarchies who could barely field an army without begging.

Just brainstorming on variations and possibilities.

[Mike Holmes]

A couple of comments. Ralph, did you rip that off from Traveller or Pendragon? It's pretty much exactly how Traveller does it (and I can't remember Pendragon's method at the moment, though I remember it having something like this). In that game, fail to keep your SoL up, and you lose a point of Social Standing. Ouch. Dissapointed parents.

Ron usually credits Call of Cthulhu as the first game to have an abstraction for wealth with it's "Credit Rating" skill (odd as that sounds).

Anyhow, in general terms, think of it this way: characters have skills like Biology. If the character has the skill at level X, that doesn't tell us what he knows precisely (in almost any game with skills). It merely gives us a number to roll against to determine if he knows that thing. So, why can't wealth be handled in the same way? Just a rating that can be rolled against to determine if the character has what it takes to accomplish some task. Purchasing tasks, in this case.

Now, the difference is that, if you do have what it takes, and you use it, unlike knowedge, wealth goes away. So, how do you handle that? As Ethan mentions, Donjon has a system for handling actual purchases, though some systems ignore it. But simply, the result of a contest may ends up potentially being a something like a "wound" to your Wealth stat.

There are a lot of nifty ways to handle this.

Mike

[Luke]

yah, you actually test your Remarkable (or whatever) Resources in MSH when you want to start your fancy corporation. Or when you want your corporation to buy you a car, or an anti-graviton gun, you just roll the dice against your Resources. It can be green, yellow or red test depending on the rarity of the item.

Resources could easily be given a rating (like Faith or Health or any skill) in BW. And it could be tested against an Obstacle for purchases or other arrangements.

Hah! And it could be tested like Forte against Spell Obstacles for Tax. If you miss successes on your Tax test, your Forte temporarily drops:

If you miss successes on your Resources test -- if you fail to properly absorb the cost -- your Resources are taxed and drop (by one per missed success?).

[Valamir]

Sure, detail can be added as needed.  Of course, if you're playing a campaign where that detail is important you are probably going to want to expand the idea quite abit.

The first time I used a system like this was in a Privateers and Gentleman campaign from FGU.  Like all FGU games character improvment required training which was measured in months and money spent.  For that game the above idea took the form of a parallel system of months and money spent on social status.  Higher social classes had higher demands of time as well as money.  If you're spending the requisite time hobnobbing with the gentry whenever you're in port and playing whist at the Captains Club, you're not spending time on the game's training system (in FGU "months" meaning time not spent "on adventure" was as much a currency resource as gold pieces in D&D).

When I ported the system over to a AD&D campaign, I scrapped most of the "table o' time" requirement from FGU.  The Standard of Living system morphed into a "what does your character spend his time doing in town in between dungeon crawls" kind of system.  Some characters would blow alot of money on this, living high on the hog and spending money freely.  Others chose to live like paupers hordeing every Coin.  Whenever it was necessary to involve NPCs this influenced how they reacted.  Frex, after the ubiquitous "Bar Brawl", the PC with the higher SoL was let off with a wink and a nod from his good friend the Lord Constable.  The pauper PCs were thrown in the drunk tank, fined and made to pay damages.  There were no rules for that per se...just the same kind of adjucation that a DM ordinarily makes or, in the case of BW, the same kind of judgment required to make the BITs work.

In other systems that have solid "contacts" rules, I did have the contacts materialize out of thin air as far as actual play went.  They were assumed to be developed during that down time that nobody ever actually plays out.  Of course, if characters are long absent, or move or some such, than this could change things, but again that's really a GM judgment thing unless one wants to get really FGU fiddly with the rules.

As far as the poor kings question, the system works wonderfully for that.  In a Fantasy Wargaming campaign (from which I stole the idea of the upfront buy in cost) I had a character who wound up a duke.  He spent so much money trying to maintain the required SoL that he had less money than when he was a simple knight.  He had a lot of "stuff" (a court full of pomp) as it were, but little disposable income once the gilded mirrors and imported Italian marble were paid for.  The funny part was, that when another player slammed a silver mug down on the war room planning table to make a point the Duke shouted "are you crazy!  the wood for that table came all the way from Africa!"  Priceless.

[Jeph]

Feng Shui uses something even simpler: you're either Poor, Working Stiff, or Rich. Role-play accordingly.

That's my favorite method. ;-)

[Valamir]

Ralph, did you rip that off from Traveller or Pendragon? It's pretty much exactly how Traveller does it (and I can't remember Pendragon's method at the moment, though I remember it having something like this).

Whose to say.  In point of fact the idea may have come from an old Dragon Magazine article.  I certainly didn't steal it from Traveller directly as I'd only ever played a couple of times and never had any books.  But Traveller very well have been the antecedent of whereever I got the idea from.  Pendragon has a very rudimentary (yet ideally suited) method of determining the level of maintenance where conspicuous consumption can actually earn you Glory, but I'd been using my version well before I encountered Pendragon.  It seems likely that the Pendragon system drew upon CoC as so much of its mechanics did.

[iago]

You're interested in both what resources can get you, and what it takes to maintain those resources.  If I wanted to satisfy that design urge, I'd do this on a sliding scale.

Say you have a resources rating of "3".  The cheapest way to get this is if the maintenance difficulty of the resources is also "3".  Taking the maintenance difficulty down until it gets to 0 (self-maintaining) costs more "up front" in terms of character points or whatever.

A "disadvantage" version of this would be where the maintenance difficulty is higher than the resources rating (a good way to represent hard-working poor), where you get character points back for each level of maintenance above your resources rating.  (Resources 1, Maintenance 3, gets you 2 units back).

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

Also, check out the Wealth system in Hero Wars, in which wealth is an ability, and not necessarily linked to money per se (this is handled locally per conflict).

Ummm ... oh! And the coarse but still-interesting little mechanic I came up with for Mongrel, the game internally linked to my Simulationism essay.

Best,
Ron

[Luke]

it seems i am always following in the footsteps of Hero Wars. And I have never even seen the damn game.

I think I've settled on having Resources be a shade/exponent rated ability that you purchase in character burning. It will fluctuate in play like a Sorcerer's Forte when reduced by spell Tax.

thanks for the input, i truly appreciate it.