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Originally Posted by maximara
Which as the GURPSwiki points out is a problem. Heck even within the US there are huge variances though City Stats helps by creating a defacto adjustment to wealth
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No it doesn't.
City Stats has you make a note of the typical Wealth level of the inhabitants. That is not an adjustment; that is a description. In a Poor city, the typical inhabitant is Poor. There might be Dead Broke, Struggling, Average, Wealthy, and other inhabitants, but the
typical inhabitant is Poor. Someone who is Average Wealth in this city has more wealth than the typical inhabitant.
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because a city with a comfortable wealth level will also have a comfortable Cost of Living to meet the city's level of "average". That means earning an average income would likely be pushing the character to Struggling.
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A Comfortable city is one in which the typical inhabitant has Comfortable Wealth. Cost of Living is not determined by a city's Wealth level; it is determined separately for each inhabitant by that inhabitant's Status. A Poor person living in a Comfortable city still has a Poor job and can afford a Status -2 Cost of Living. The only thing it means to say that the city is Comfortable is that this Poor citizen is not living at the typical Wealth level. That doesn't change anything about their own Wealth level or their income or their Cost of Living.
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But average GURPS wealth is set by the setting TL not by local conditions.
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No. A character's "starting wealth" (i.e., starting cash for player characters) is set by the campaign's TL and the character's Wealth level. If local conditions are that the typical person is Poor, then the only thing that happens if you take, say, Average Wealth is that you've got more Wealth than the typical citizen. You get whatever Wealth level you pay for regardless of how Wealthy the people around you are.
You're just letting the word "average" confuse you.
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If the tribe as a whole is "Dead Broke" than that would be part of the tribe template.
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No it wouldn't. You can choose any available Wealth level. Unless there are usually NO exceptions to members of the tribe being Dead Broke (and I find the idea of an entire Dead Broke tribe to be utterly implausible), you should be free to choose any available Wealth level, just as a person living in an Average Wealth city can choose any available Wealth level, not just Average.
You might put a specific Wealth level in a character template to reflect a certain kind of character stereotype, but you wouldn't put it into a template just because it's the typical Wealth level around you.