View Single Post
Old 04-07-2018, 02:07 PM   #30
phayman53
 
Join Date: Dec 2012
Default Re: Looking for good House Rule on Wealth

An alternative way of handling extra gear with no additional wealth finds its roots in the way ATE handles wealth. In ATE for every point of extra gear, you get half the starting wealth extra. That is nice and simple and linear, but it does not take into account the diminishing returns of losing character points. Another idea I had was to separate starting wealth from extra gear completely. So wealth level would give you your normal 20% of listed wealth, but each point of extra gear give you more total cash like this (basically, each point buys half of the next wealth level):

[Edit: this was supposed to be a table with two columns, Points in the first column, multiple of starting wealth in the second]
Points Multiple of TL starting Wealth
1 *0.5
2 *1.0
3 *1.5
4 *2.0
5 *3.5
6 *5.0
7 *12.5
8 *20
9 *40
8 *60
9 *80
10 *100
11 *280
12 *460
13 *640
14 *820
15 *1000
etc.

This extra starting wealth would not impact your earning power in any way, it just represents gear that can be used for adventuring that you have accumulated over and above what would normally be able to have.

So, the TL2 Camillan Hastatus from Loadouts: Low-Tech would have Average Wealth, and $150 from that to use towards his weapons, armor, and travelling kit. He could then pay 4 points to cover the rest of the gear he would need to outfit himself in basic Hastati kit, giving him $1650 to spend on weapons, armor, etc. Or, if he wanted the additional optional equipment, it would cost him 6 points to cover the almost $3300 he would need.

However, a TL3 Knight Errant Norman Milite would be status 2 and have wealth (wealthy) for $1000 in starting gear. However, he would also need, according to Loadouts: Low-Tech, $7,370 in armor, $120 for a shield, $600 for a thrusting broadsword, $40ish for a spear, etc. Plus, let's go with the $5000 for the heavy warhorse in Basic (though the size and stats on that aren't the greatest) for a total kit of about $14,000. This would mean he would have 20 points in Wealth, plus need an additional 7-8 points in gear to equip himself to the standard of a Norman Milite.

That seems reasonable to me. The advantage of this scheme is it is straight-forward to calculate. The disadvantage is that the points in gear get no help from wealth, so there is diminishing returns at high wealth levels for the fist few points spent.

Is this too generous? Too useless to characters with high wealth?
phayman53 is offline   Reply With Quote