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Old 12-10-2012, 01:17 PM   #3
Anaraxes
 
Join Date: Sep 2007
Default Re: Gear rich, money poor

Scale SigGear like Wealth, and enforce the interpretation that you're buying individual items. For any single item, the more points you spend, the more cash the next point is worth. You can get one thing worth tens of millions, but not ten millions of things, for a given CP cost.

Depending on the setting, ships might not actually be all that expensive. I've seen this argued for Firefly, for instance. Lots of classic Heinlein puts ships within the reach of families, no worse than a real-life house or car.

The PCs might not actually own their ship. The classic Traveller sources of ships were (a) mortgaged, so the bank is the owner, or (b) old loaners for detached duty scouts, so the scout service was the owner (Patron). And variations, campaigns in which you're active duty in a service, so that Patron is providing the transport. One variant of (a) is the 40-year-old, paid-off ship, which barely runs as it is, and so isn't worth anything like the price new.

Wandering further afield, there are those settings in which the ship itself is a character. You might buy this as Ally (or another sort of Patron), or just not have a CP cost, any more than you charge PCs for every NPC with which they associate, or for each other.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Stormcrow
these costs are unrealistic
And how do you know that, in the absence of any setting details or technology? Settings with real-world, modern-day realistic spaceships are not settings where a few PCs own one and are knocking about it in. On the flip side, applying the word "realistic" to, say, Star Wars when debating only the price of the Millenium Falcon seems like a strangely selective set of reality blinders. Why is a ship necessarily expensive? Certainly, there's a lot of settings where that's true, but a certain arrangement of metal and plastic doesn't necessarily cost hundreds of millions of dollars just because it's IN SPACE!

Last edited by Anaraxes; 12-10-2012 at 01:22 PM.
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