Apologies in advance if my terminology is off, I break a rule, or I am repeating well covered subjects. I am new to this board and rpg creation in general.

In my homebrew we have a copper, silver, gold system like many other fantasies. One day while I was  contemplating how much I really despise bean counting and spreadsheets, the vague outline of an idea came to me that might solve the problem without adding to much randomness to the process like in some wealth system. Generally speaking, it's not getting or spending large quantities of gold that is complicated, but the minutia of recording a character's current exact "worth". Replacing that worth with a derived attribute that estimates their purchasing power and how many items they can own simplifies the recording process. The general idea is to abstract out your items and money into a estimated "wealth" attribute, and your wealth attribute becomes the "bowl" that holds your items. Though it is flawed as presented, I'm hoping that it is clear enough to get some feedback for how to implement or improve on the idea (or advice to abandon such an awful idea).

- If item wealth equivalency is nice and rounded, then item purchasing becomes simple and tied in to inventory management. If you have a wealth factor of 1.0 and a level 1 item is the wealth equivalent of 1.0, you can only own/afford one level 1 item. However, if your wealth is 2.0 then you can have two level one items or one level 2 item, etc.

- When in an appropriate place you can "sell" or swap any item knowing you can roughly "afford" to purchase items of equivalent wealth at any time, so your wealth attribute is unaffected.

- Since we're tracking both items and purchasing power, wealth has to expand to accommodate receiving either a substantial item or treasure, which would increase your total wealth attribute. Likewise it must shrink if giving away or losing a substantial item or treasure.

- Finally, you can afford an unlimited amount of anything that has a wealth equivalency below some factor of your wealth attribute, such as 10%. Such transactions are considered negligible and do not affect your wealth.

Specifically, I'm worried I'm just trading one master for another that is even more complex. If "substantial" scales to the character, there may not be an easy way to figure out how much wealth would increase or decrease. Also, when I shopped the idea around, many felt that receiving +.5 wealth was decidedly unheroic compared to 5000 gold. That led me to consider a currency conversion system, but again that adds complexity.

There are actually systems out there that abstract the actual beans from the counting.

One system I like that you could use would be to use a wealth Attribute as you've specified. Unfortunately, I like the idea of rolling a die and meeting a difficulty number to see if the item you wish to purchase is affordable. This is a simulation of being able to tap into your wealth, borrow cash, etc. to get something.

I would suggest that you not limit what people can own based on their perceived wealth or worth. If you have a 1 in the wealth stat, it shouldn't mean that you can't afford an automatic camera in order to take pictures of yourself fighting bad guys.

Instead, that camera would have a difficulty factor associated with it. Perhaps it's an easy to moderate task to buy an item (in d20, I would say a 10-13 or higher on a roll). For someone who is poor, you step it up to the moderate to hard range (13-16 on a d20). Roll that d20 and add your Wealth Attribute or Bonus to see if you can purchase the item.

Another way would be to roll your Attribute or *under* on a single die. For more difficult purchases, increase the die size or count, or simply present penalties or bonuses.

Resource allocation is about the same as bean counting, so I'll leave it off.

The main thing is that if you make buying and purchasing items in the game too complicated or difficult people will either ignore those rules or just not buy anything. So I think the K.I.S.S. principle holds in this situation.

Exalted has a pretty good abstracted wealth system.
You have a Resources Attribute
Every piece of equipment has a resources attribute.
There is no rolling. There are only four rules you need to know:
1) If an item is of a lower Resources rating than your resources attribute, you can afford an unlimited of them
2) If an item has an equal Resources rating to your Resources Attribute, then you can afford it, but your Resources Attribute goes down
3) You cannot afford an item with a higher Resources Attribute than your attribute
4) Your Resources attribute does not change if you sell or trade an item, unless it has a higher Resources rating than your Resources Attribute.
  It works pretty well. It seems to accomplish the goal of taking attention away from equipment grubbing and reducing the amount of associated bean counting. It hits you as off a few times, but generally, it feels about right...
  Hope that helps!

D20 modern has a wealth attribute. It seemed to fit both plausibility and gameyness.

Thanks for the suggestions guys. There are a couple reasons why I wanted to go with a system without a purchase check. One is because in a fantasy campaign there's not much opportunity for credit and borrowing, at least not for the "lowborn". I could see it coming into play on higher levels or with aristocratic characters, but for the most players, you can only afford what you have on hand to buy or barter or can borrow from the group. Second, is that treasure is an important part of why "adventurers" might do what they do and certain items can be very effective at enhancing the character's power. Therefore, I wouldn't want to abstract out the relative cost of items, or let someone purchase beyond their means. That said, I think it is important to be able to easily scale a wealth system for high levels to be able to encompass large amounts of wealth/items and even real estate holdings, etc, which is why the gold system is really starting to be torturous.

That said, I was really impressed with the Exalted method suggested by dindenver. It's definitely where I was trying to go with my idea, but much easier. I'll have to pick up a copy and see how it works. Although, one thing I liked about something similar to what I original dreamt up is that the resource attribute became a full indicator for a characters entire wealth, which makes it easy to compare where characters are in comparison to each other.

my system does this.  check my sig....  a character gains might by leveling 1 might allows a character to have 2 might worth of items, followers, and henchmen but no single item can have a might level higher than the character's.  might can also be rewarded as a gift by the GM and can be bought higher through "feats".  I also control the gear system though gear points and a third character page dedicated to gear allowing the gear to be more esaily controlled by the GM and outline all items costs in gold only.