Quote:
Originally Posted by cosmicfish
If the value to the person is greater than the value to the world (whatever value that is), then why sell it? In some cases it may be sentimental ("This was your father's lightsaber"), in other cases it may allow a lifestyle that would otherwise be unattainable to the owner (Mal could not live as he wanted without Serenity, even if he could probably make a lot more money by selling it), or it may enable the only career that the individual wants or can pursue (a MechWarrior selling his extremely valuable battlemech might never get another job again!) - while I gave fictional examples, I do not think that they are unfounded in reality.
And regardless - I am getting a lot of narrative help on why someone would or would not have a certain value of wealth with certain paired disadvantages, and that is not what I am looking for. I am looking for a rule that allows a character to have Wealth at one level but starting equipment at a substantially different level - WITHOUT adding disadvantages other than those that negate specifically and solely those advantages bundled into Wealth. I (and my players) will take care of the narrative.
|
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. So we have two things:
Mechanics:
Wealth+debt forms a new advantage, as per building new advantages. This new advantage is very customizable by the amount of starting money and the amount of money that you make, which is why I and others are such great fans of it.
Stop, end, enough to say about the new advantage which is a combination of Wealth+debt mechanically.
Story:
Its difficult to envision how someone has great things and is not able to leverage them into more money, so we have been talking about that as well, as they are related items- but they are also disconnect. The story for WHY you have great items and are unable to leverage it into great wealth is separate from the mechanics, but bears discussion.
Related:
I have further postulated that the value of an item is NOT related to its sticker cost, and this can be critical for the mechanical price that a player will pay for gear. This does not factor in to the mechanics of a new advantage which is the combination of wealth+debt, nor the story to justify having a good item without being able to leverage it for money. As such I encourage consideration of such when potentially adjusting the price for purchase with starting wealth (IE- Cars cost 20% of starting wealth, used cars 5-10% however a standard Honda civic with no power steering and manual everything is only .5% of starting wealth; however they will all get you to another location). This is again unrelated to story reasons for how you can have high wealth items and be unable to leverage them for wealth, or a mechanical representation of having better starting items but not a higher rate of pay.