Quote:
Originally Posted by starslayer
I think this is where our disconnect is coming from. If you mechanically take wealth+debt, you do not need to have this literally be debt.
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The way it is written, yes, you do. Debt means that you have to pay X amount of money every month, and that is different than a situation where you simply cannot make as much - if you have Comfortable Wealth and have a bad month you make no money, but if you have a Filthy Rich income (reduced to Comfortable leves by your Debt) and you have a bad month you
lose money. It is the mathematical situation where ax = x+b only under certain circumstances. Debt is also fixed whereas income is not, and it implies some type of additional consequence of not making that payment, neither of which are the same thing as just not making as much money.
Quote:
Originally Posted by starslayer
Story:
Its difficult to envision how someone has great things and is not able to leverage them into more money,
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I have never said (that I recall) "not able to leverage them into more money", I said "has some reason, role-played and possibly played out in other advantages or disadvantages that makes them choose to retain high-value items instead of cashing them in for a greater income".
In Terminator 2, Sarah Connor could have probably sold all those guns she was hoarding for enough to set herself up quite nicely, but instead chose to accept a modest income so that she could instead be prepared for the robot apocalypse. She could have sold them to American drug gangs for millions, or used them to establish a mercenary company and made millions propping up third-world dictators... that doesn't mean she had to. And it doesn't mean that having those very valuable assets (which in GURPS she would have needed to pay for somehow) meant that she had to spend thousands and thousand of dollars a month (a la Debt) to prevent some catastrophe related to them. They were hers.