Wealth Systems in RPGs
troypress.com
troypress.com
I do think you lose out in an abstract system though. Delving for treasure in a dangerous dungeon was most the appeal of the early RPGs. It's not quite the same rush discovering a horde that then gets abstracted away
Put that way, it sounds like it's less a wealth check and more like a credit check where it's assumed the boring stuff is deferred until after the adventure.
(Unless you're a fantasy-denizen enjoying the reverse-experience of Offices & Outlays, I guess.)
But I totally agree that the abstraction loses something about finding treasure.
D&D on the other hand has a set of mechanics carefully picked to be fun exactly as designed.
I think we're probably in agreement and I just misread your original statement. GURPS is very much a mechanics heavy game whereas D&D married their world setting to their game mechanics and abstracted it to a degree to which they are difficult and often not worth separating. That's why it feels weird to say D&D is more mechanics based than GURPS when GURPS has mechanics for everything you could want to do regardless of setting. I'd go so far as to say GURPS is JUST mechanics, and you've got to bring everything else to make it work.
For larger things, there's coin. One coin is "A full purse of silver pieces. A week’s wages." Coin can be spent/sacrificed for significantly larger things than day-to-day expenditures.
A character banks coin in their stash which determines their lifestyle quality and, eventually, their quality of retirement.
It feels much more like a stat to me, but has some of the flexibility of a resource as well.
It always seems weird to me that I'm (using GoW as an example) a God who can command thunder from the heavens, yet simultaneously am forced to loot people's forgotten stash to build my next set of armor. For a while, my son nicknamed Kratos as the God of Loot, rather apt I think.
1) Do not give too much wealth to PCs. Keeping the heroes poor is a kind of dramatic tension that not many campaigns explore!
2) Give them ways to spend their money! If the PCs need to go to an island, make the waters dangerous, and drive the price of the safer boat up. The danger is not fully evaded, but perhaps now they have a crew to help in any encounters. The party of course is always free to think of more creative ways around.
Make sure you as a DM always have an idea of the goals of the PCs, that includes economically. If a PC is aiming to purchase a nice item, keep that in mind when doling out gold, but always be sure to keep dramatic tension of the economy in place.
The key aspect of "keep them poor" is really just "limit the availability of upgrades." In a desolate world, there's nothing to buy. With super-hero tier PCs, even in an abundant city, there's nothing to buy that matters that doesn't also come with knock on consequences.
(It's sort of like the 5E Ranger. 5E has a bunch of wilderness survival rules, spells, etc. that can be used for campaign gameplay - but one Ranger in the party makes most of them irrelevant. The Ranger player will get personal satisfaction from using those abilities for a handful of minutes per campaign, then all of it will be forgotten.)
Need to clear a dungeon? Divert the nearest river to flood it and then use some other means (magical) to clear out the water.
Need to cross a bridge guarded by trolls? The new bridge you build won't be guarded by anyone.
You can flood a dungeon or build a new bridge, but both will take at minimum weeks, if not months.
If the King's daughter was kidnapped by those who live in the dungeon, or if the outcome of a battle hinges on you being able to cross that bridge over a chasm, they're not going to be happy when you come to them with a three-year plan for civic improvements.
Also note that Caesar's crossing of the Rhine (a notoriously tough river to bridge) took 10 days, and several similarly amazing feats of quick river diversion have occurred in Chinese history. All without magic. If you don't care whether your works are permanent, the work can be done very quickly.
In a future setting (Eclipse Phase), the party was sent out to investigate rumors of a downed spaceship.
We bought a rover, bought a wagon to go behind the rover. Filled it up with the setting's equivalent of C4. The GM tried to stop us on route, we planned very far and ended up hauling the trailer by hand (the rover got destroyed by a landmine, we specified a 10m rope between the rover and the wagon full of explosives just for such an occasion, the GM had forgotten about that, we didn't, we wrote it down).
We kept lobbing explosives into the ship (low G) until bits of alien started flying out. The GM looked... a bit sad.
High lethality games encourage creative problem solving.
My goal would be to have lots of money moving through their hands without them being able to hold onto it for long.
I also remember an article from the 1980s that recommended having thieves steal their money if they got too rich. That sounds a bit unfair to me, although maybe it could work as part of a system there they stay at increasingly more expensive lodgings in order to keep their accumulating wealth safe.
IIRC this was a frustration of mine with Rimworld. It was annoying and made wealth very toxic. The more you had, the more frequently (and more powerful) thieves showed up and wrecked your shit.
I didn't even have nice things, I just polished the floors so colonists wouldn't be so miserable with bunker life but apparently that raised collective wealth to the point of inviting raids.
Money in BitD is very abstract, and a single coin represents a serious amount of money. And you don't buy stuff with it because you can only take so much stuff with you, and what that is depends on your character. Instead you use it to upgrade your lair or bribe people, I think.
So it's not quite what I was thinking of, although it certainly has some of the elements. Maybe it has shaped how I'm thinking about it now.
I remember how longer ago, I was thinking of a Robin Hood game where character progression depended on how much money you gave to the poor. That way you can still buy stuff for yourself and not level up, or give to the poor and level up.
A game centered around moving money, but not acquiring it, could be very interesting. You could tease out a few interesting scenarios and have meta-progression where helping others can create a network of skills. (i.e. you helped the baker pay her debts, now she will bake bread for you at cost.)
https://bladesinthedark.com/downtime-activities
> A PC can make time for more than two activities, at a cost. Each additional activity from the list costs 1 coin or 1 rep. This reflects the time and resulting resource drain while you’re “off the clock” and not earning from a score. When you complete a new score, you reset and get two “free” activities again.
Spending coin on stress reduction certainly helps. If a player gets a 2-coin reward for a score, I'd hope they stashed one and burned one on something.
Money attracts that kind of thing, even in the real world. There's a reason rich people have guards. Also bodyguards - I was just listening to a podcast about how a fairly rich (and flashy) drug dealer got kidnapped and ransomed because he didn't think about what a target he was. Obviously more challenging when you're talking about heroes who are personally formidable, but think about friends, family members, retainers, etc.
First problem would be how do they even transport, store, and guard it without being jumped, ripped off and robbed? Did they think millions of coins would fit in a few sacks?
Maybe a "No Country For Old Men" type situation? Sure they're rich as kings but there are more powerful beings that know about their wealth and they are coming.
It's cool to have a pile of gold and treasure until you have to figure out how to protect it:
- banks are few and far between and how much is "too much" for a bank?
- does the local lord or king appreciate rich, unchecked groups active in their area?
- bands of thieves are great but what about another group of adventurers?
- if their wealth is truly amazing, do rumors make it to a dragon's ears?
Odds are, the party has figured out how to break into and raid many dungeons and keeps. What happens when they have to secure one?
I would never run a D&D game but instead I would run Paranoia or Call of Cthulhu or Toon. All of those games are fast paced, the first two are definitely unfair against the player so that a lot of problems of "game balance" just don't happen. If I found some people who wanted to play Paranoia right now I could make up enough random dangerous events to deplete their clones before they ever get to the briefing rooms. (A folder full of prerolls is a big help of course) And in CoC it doesn't matter how much money you make because it can't buy you sanity and there isn't anything you can buy that is going to "break" the game.
I care about what happens to Alfonso Derecho Izquierda Quijano, the Kobold Paladin who's in love with a dragon. I want him to have an arc, I want him to grow as a person, and eventually I want his story to end - either in death on the battlefield, or having achieved his dream of wedding a dragon, or coming to the realization that he wasn't chosen by a dragon but that it simply coughed up some armor from a guy it had eaten while flying overhead.
Having said that, I also want to play some games where characters are disposable, including Paranoia. That's fun too!
It's moved over the years from the meat grinders of the early editions to the much more character focused ones now, but some things haven't really kept up.
The big one being character death becoming trivial midway through, and the combat kinda being centered around that. Death doesn't mean much when you just keep reviving them, and it's left up to the DM to figure out how to balance that (since the 5e economy is a mess).
5e long ago should've adopted a downed/injured system like much of the competition, with death being much more rare. Then again there's about 100 other things they should've done, and it's pretty clear they won't, so meh. Guess it just sits on the DM's
If a player really wants their character, I'd offer them the chance to do a spin-off campaign where they're in an afterlife, but if someone dies, that's it.
If you emphasize the "role playing" part, you become a character within a larger play, perhaps even the main character. So of course you don't want to die and roll a new character, just as it would be strange for a character to die in a play, but then the actor come back as a new character in the same play halfway through. The fighting and action become just flavor around playing the role, not necessarily the point in and of itself.
If you emphasize the "game" part of this, the former sounds a bit strange. What's the point of a game where you can't lose? For some, what's the point of a game where you're not fighting much? Of course you die, this is just a paper and pencil version of Rogue (the game, not the class).
And of course there's shades in the middle. 5E's strength is also its biggest weakness. You can do any of these things, however none of them are as good as a system that specializes in those. It's a swiss army knife, and a lot of people have gotten into it because of its popularity and versatility. Which ends up having a feedback effect: people play 5E because other people play 5E. And the people who want to learn a new rules system are exceedingly rare in my experience outside of the die hards.
This is one of the things that I don't like about Critical Role. Heavy, heavy on the role-playing aspects, but you as a listener (and, one assumes, the other characters) don't know any of the characters' backstory except what's revealed bit by bit. It's more than a little challenging to follow, especially if (like me) you have podcasts on in the background while driving, etc. I'm not ignoring it, but my mind isn't always 100% on following the details.
They're very good actors, and it's a great show if that's what you are looking for. It's just not what I want.
If 50k gold was the cost of a new heart for Karlach I would feel completely different about it.
I'd really like a game where eventually the shopkeeper tells you: "Look, you've already sold me 10 of these +1 magic swords. We've got only 8 capable warriors of fighting age in this village, and none of them have the kind of money to buy these swords. I'm afraid I can't justify buying even more from you."
Skyrim kinda-sorta did this, but the campaign didn't have any hard limits of "world ends in X days" to stop people from just waiting for an economic reset, and there were some other ways to glitch things.
I think it would be interesting to see some actual supply and demand: if you're flooding the market with crap you looted from goblins, at some point they become worthless. Even +1 magic swords can become worthless if you sell enough of them.
So that's what I'd suggest for consumables. Give a limited number so the player can't hoard and aren't too powerful, but make getting more of them easy and frequent.
However, one nice thing with Doom is its commitment to the "fps chess" system. Chainsaw ammo might be scarce but the decision to use it is intuitive and requires no second thoughts. With BG3 every opportunity to use a limited item tries to awaken my latent save scummer and it feels like you can never make a good decision without first knowing how the story will play out.
I think WoW's move also kinda works. It's a question of economics and you should mostly always be using them.
Of course you could save a lot of money by choosing a poor or squatter lifestyle, but I tend to make that matter. Eventually they all settled on a medium lifestyle for $5000/month.
Of course this does mean tons of bookkeeping. I've also played and loved games that abstract wealth away. And I certainly think some games should abstract it away a bit more. But for Shadowrun, this makes sense. They're criminals for hire, so they're in it for the money. (Although they're currently doing the most dangerous run ever for free, so I'll reward them with extra karma.)
Got to a point where the party stumbled across a dragon lair and instead of fighting or bypassing it, the party wanted to go in and ask it for financial management advice. "They have hoards and there aren't any tax collectors here, so dragons must have figured it out!"
So I made the dragon be a tax collector. Very motivated fight (they lost).
I'm just not sure what the PCs would do in that setting, what "problem" there would be for them to solve.
Luckily for me and our players I just hand wave a lot of it once it gets too crunchy.
In games like that (or maybe in all games) it's important that all players are happy with the level of crunch. It's fine if everybody engages with the Spreadsheets in Space, it's also fine if everybody prefers to handwave it. But if some engage and some don't, you've got a problem.
I was afraid my players would consider Shadowrun too heavy and too much bookkeeping, but everybody was willing to commit to it and make it work. And I still handwave a lot because the Shadowrun rules are a mess.
The core "Free Trader" trope is very difficult from many levels.
It starts with this "small band and their ship" meme. The problem is that the ship is worth $40M. Traveller economics are basically based on 1980 prices, so $40M is, you know, "worth something". Sure, the ship is mortgaged over 40 years, but that's part of the problem.
Outside of the "milk run" markets (there are some trades, where if played straight by the rules, are just instant, large profits), it's simply the matter that folks are running around in a ship worth millions of dollars (Traveller uses credits, but we'll stick with dollars), that takes millions of dollars to repair and maintain.
You'd think that the crew should be on the brink of disaster all the time. $400,000 annually just to maintain the ship. Pile on the mortgage payment, and you need an annual revenue of $2-3M. Show of hands who here would be content with a "small business" that's pulling in $2-3M a year?
Encounter with a Pirate? Did they take out your turret as you raced to the jump zone? $4M in damage.
The fundamental point being that if you were in this business, and had the $4M in the bank to handle these kind of repairs (well, better bump it to $10M), at some point you look and say "You know, I have $10M in equity in my ship, I have $10M in the bank just in case, what the heck am I doing jetting around the universe in the dangerous dark? Why am I not on the beaches of Gamma Hydra VI sipping margaritas?"
If the cargoes are more mundane ("mundane"), say worth $200K, then a) is a pirate willing to risk millions of dollars of damage for $200K? b) is the captain willing to risk that? Why would a pirate bother with $200K of cargo when there's several million dollars worth of drives, weapons, computers, etc. on the ship. Heck, why not take both? Combat is very expensive, so make it worth while and worth the risk.
The whole trading campaign is badly skewed by the economics and, perhaps, the lack of the players putting themselves in the position of the actual people, and just focusing on numbers.
It would make more sense, in an advance technological and economic society, to lease the ship, insure it against damages, hire the crew, etc. But, boy, the ruins the adventure. "We're going to the lost planet to check out the ancient ruin for artifacts, you in?" "Yea gee, that sounds well, but I have to meet with the insurance inspector to renew the certificate on my ship."
Yea, that's fun.
Piracy is a bigger mystery; I guess the only explanation is that they stole those ships, rather than buying them legitimately, because piracy is a poor investment. Or is it? Piracy was rampant in the Caribbean some centuries ago, and it still exists in some places. And privateering could be a profitable business.
One thing that helped, is that neither side really wanted to fight. Often pirates would let the crew live and keep the ship as long as they handed over the cargo without a fight, and that would be a better deal for both sides than a fight to the death where one ship sinks and the other is badly damaged.
But I also feel like the cargo has to be worth more. It's been ages since I've seen those rules, but if the merchant is making $200k on a trip, that doesn't mean the cargo is worth $200k, it means the cargo is worth $200k more at the destination than it was at the source, and the real value could be a lot more.
And if the ship is insured (which means piracy is probably rare enough), it might not even hurt the crew much to surrender their cargo. Except of course that rag-tag band of former military people that's behind on paying down the mortgage on their ship and cutting costs where they can, but somehow also in possession of more weaponry than your average merchant.
3.5 also had extensions with rules for stronghold building.
There is even opportunity to craft new conflicts solely revolving around how that money is being spent, and presenting tough choices between various options.
Perhaps they can even return some of that looted money back to the people from which it was looted, after all, the monsters and enemies that horde it likely didn’t acquire it fairly.
And after all that spending they’ll probably end up somewhat poor again, continuing the cycle.
The way out of this is to have the PCs do a job, or at least have a core activity the players and their characters sign up for. Jane’s Bond is a civil servant, Indiana Jones is a professional archaeologist, the crew of the Starship Enterprise work for Star Fleet, Jason Bourne isn’t employed, but he has no choice, they really are out to get him, etc.
What this goes is make the game about something other than just personal advancement. Either the kinds of problems you’re solving can’t be solved with money. In Call of Cthulhu it’s usually less formal, but you’re not in it for the money, you’re in it to save humanity. Alternatively the game builds in an economy into the core activity itself. Upgrading your starship and buying cargo. In Blades in the Dark you’re a gang of criminals with ongoing expenses. There’s a default core activity and objective you all share.
In the examples in the article of games that solve this in various ways we can see this at work. In Stonetop you’re in it for the community, it’s about survival. In Impulse Drive and Traveller you’re trying to make a living.
So the problem with D&D is the default murder hobo setup in which there really isn’t actually a setup. In practice a lot of D&D GMs and campaigns do build in a driver for adventure. A job, or an imperative threat, or an assumed objective everyone agrees to buy into.
All the fixed price items (mounts, vendor items, skills, etc.) are basically free, which has an interesting effect on the economy in some ways: bags, for example, sell for a lot, as an upper-bound for what the user-crafted bags should sell for. Now they're by far the cheapest option, so nobody crafts bags anymore. This kind of reminds me of a government price-controlled good and the chilling effect it can have.
And there are always the whales who just buy a shit ton of gold and put it in a guild bank.
The game furthers the concept by making souls an attribute you always carry on you and can lose entirely when you die unless you recover them from your dead body before dying again. You can go from very wealthy to very poor quite quickly by trying to push a bit longer to obtain more souls to level up. Or you can cash out if you feel like the risk of continuing your adventure is too great. This concept combines well with reusable health potions that only refill after resting at the site where you can spend your souls.
Gold gives you rewards, rewards are fun because they make challenges smaller, challenges require that you get more gold.
It almost requires the game to change as you get stronger. Im not sure you can just make weapons/enemy strength exponential. That seems more like it needs to scale linearly otherwise you either gut utterly crushed or you utterly crush it and skill isnt involved.
It Forces you to barter because you can't carry enough water to buy many things.
But you always have the pressure to hold onto some to drink. Or you die.
Or was it too annoying even with the record keeping automated?
I believe that some computer RPGs also took a similar approach - I think in the original Diablo, you had to tetris your stuff in your inventory, which itself could be upgraded to be larger.
Maybe in another campaign, I'll try this out, with weapons & items having interesting shapes that must be accounted for when storing in a backpack. After all, running around with twelve recovered goblin swords, five spears, and three shields is just not particularly plausible.
In ADOM, gold pieces also have nontrivial weight. There is an item, the girdle of greed, that increases your carrying capacity according to the amount of gold you have, and lets you carry insane amounts of gold.