Steve Jackson Games - Site Navigation
Home General Info Follow Us Search Illuminator Store Forums What's New Other Games Ogre GURPS Munchkin Our Games: Home

Go Back   Steve Jackson Games Forums > Roleplaying > GURPS

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 12-10-2012, 08:45 PM   #31
cosmicfish
 
Join Date: Mar 2010
Default Re: Gear rich, money poor

Quote:
Originally Posted by acrosome View Post
I'm not tracking the problem with high Wealth coupled with high Debt. Then counter any implied status from the Wealth with a negative Reputation (Tramp Starship Captain)- a group known for thier shady pseudolegal dealings, lack of reliability, recreational barfighting, and occasional piracy.

Plus, since said captain cannot pay for his Status upkeep he loses it anyway, right? (I'm asking- I don't know.)
The basic problem is that doing so adds narrative elements that I do not want. Why does the Captain need to be in debt, or fly a derelict, if they do not want to? Yes, the character could simply choose not to take advantage of the income they are entitled to by being Filthy Rich, but that is the difference between choosing not to kill someone and having the Pacifism (Cannot Kill) disadvantage - one is a choice you make in game, the other is a requirement of the character for which you are compensated.
cosmicfish is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-10-2012, 08:49 PM   #32
cosmicfish
 
Join Date: Mar 2010
Default Re: Gear rich, money poor

Quote:
Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ View Post
The issue here is how character points intersect with in-game profits. When we're talking about something like the Millennium Falcon, we're talking about a capital good. It's going to multiply your income if you use it for that purpose. It would be the same as if you owned a factory in the nineteenth century.

...

The other issue is purchasing items that don't increase your income in any way, but that are still expensive. If you can't monetize it, like that fitted suit, then it should be priced using the normal wealth rules, as per PK's suggested rules (or something very similar).


Maybe you could split the Wealth advantage into two parts: Assets and Income. You could adjust the value of the Income advantage by how often it comes up in the campaign. If it's rarely going to come up, then apply a price modifier. I'd figure some numbers based on what percent of sessions you earn any money, and then apply something like an Accessibility or Gadget limitation to capital goods.

If you own the Millennium Falcon, maybe you pay for it out of Assets, and then put a limitation on your Income to represent needing to have your ship available.

It might make more sense to have only separate income rolls, with the Income advantage working as a modifier on your income rolls, where the modifiers to the roll are priced separately.

Maybe that would be something like Income +3 (Gadget, Millennium Falcon, -x%) [?].

I would have to sit down and figure up what all the different numbers should be on this stuff. This seems to be one of the biggest problems we have in GURPS: figuring point prices of traits that give you advantages over time in-play. It's the same problem we have with trying to price a trait that allows you to learn skills faster. How should that be priced? We need to figure an answer for that.
This is indeed the issue - Wealth assumes a certain bracket of income. If you have Filthy Rich Wealth, you get Filthy Rich starting assets and Filthy Rich income potential. Perhaps I want Filthy Rich starting assets and Struggling income potential. Severing the two, without adding new story elements is the goal here.

The myGURPS page does all this, I am just surprised that in a universal system that this idea of adapting to a preferred concept is knocking so many people for a loop.
cosmicfish is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-10-2012, 09:02 PM   #33
ErhnamDJ
 
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: OK
Default Re: Gear rich, money poor

If I had to come up with an easy way to handle this, here's how I would do it:

Split the Wealth advantage into two equally priced traits. Assets and Income. Apply this also to the disadvantage versions of Wealth.

You would have Assets (Multimillionaire 1) to own the Millennium Falcon.

Then give yourself a limited version of both the Income disadvantage and the Income advantage.

Income (Poor; Mitigator, Millennium Falcon, -x%) [?] and also Income (Very Wealthy; Gadget, Millennium Falcon, -x%) [?]


If this was really important for me to model with the fewest changes, that's how I would do it.
__________________
"For the rays, to speak properly, are not colored. In them there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this or that color." —Isaac Newton, Optics

My blog.
ErhnamDJ is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-10-2012, 09:07 PM   #34
starslayer
 
Join Date: Dec 2006
Default Re: Gear rich, money poor

Quote:
Originally Posted by cosmicfish View Post
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.
starslayer is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-10-2012, 09:14 PM   #35
ErhnamDJ
 
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: OK
Default Re: Gear rich, money poor

Quote:
Originally Posted by starslayer View Post
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.
Imagine a deposed eighteenth century nobleman. He has his nice clothes and his powdered wig, but they're not going to help him make any money, even if they're worth many times the starting wealth of the campaign.

If I'm playing a duke that's just been kicked off his land and he's on the run, how much do I need to pay for his wig? Or his trousers or his exquisitely-crafted boots?

How would you figure that out? If he's wearing clothes that would cost $50,000 but he has absolutely no wealth he can use as an investment or as capital?

The way GURPS prices those sorts of resources is to make you pay the sticker price. Unfortunately, the way to get the money also comes bundled with an increase in income, which our duke does not have.
__________________
"For the rays, to speak properly, are not colored. In them there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this or that color." —Isaac Newton, Optics

My blog.
ErhnamDJ is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-10-2012, 09:32 PM   #36
cosmicfish
 
Join Date: Mar 2010
Default Re: Gear rich, money poor

Quote:
Originally Posted by starslayer View Post
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.
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 View Post
Story:
Its difficult to envision how someone has great things and is not able to leverage them into more money,
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.
cosmicfish is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-10-2012, 10:24 PM   #37
the_matrix_walker
 
the_matrix_walker's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Lynn, MA
Default Re: Gear rich, money poor

I'd like to reiterate my suggestion of using the Headquarters rules from Supers for this purpose.

Effective Status gives you the size of your base or ship. (It's really a variant Signature Gear, the effective status just determines the size of the base.)

Status -2 --Escape pod (a room)
Status -1 --Small Shuttle (small apartment)
Status 1 --Large Shuttle (comfortable house)
Status 2 -- Small freighter / Millenium Falcon / Serenity (Large house)
etc, all the way up to a Death Star at Status 8

Bases are Special Abilities, +50% to be in space. I would give it another +50% for mobile. You could then buy the components and labs, workshops, hidden compartments etc as perks.
the_matrix_walker is online now   Reply With Quote
Old 12-10-2012, 10:50 PM   #38
Ulzgoroth
 
Join Date: Jul 2008
Default Re: Gear rich, money poor

Quote:
Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ View Post
Imagine a deposed eighteenth century nobleman. He has his nice clothes and his powdered wig, but they're not going to help him make any money, even if they're worth many times the starting wealth of the campaign.

If I'm playing a duke that's just been kicked off his land and he's on the run, how much do I need to pay for his wig? Or his trousers or his exquisitely-crafted boots?

How would you figure that out? If he's wearing clothes that would cost $50,000 but he has absolutely no wealth he can use as an investment or as capital?

The way GURPS prices those sorts of resources is to make you pay the sticker price. Unfortunately, the way to get the money also comes bundled with an increase in income, which our duke does not have.
Actually, those clothes could pretty easily help in recovering a tolerable situation and means of support as a courtier somewhere...or could be cashed in for a fair bit of money. Though using it as an investment, in some times and places, would be setting your social capital on fire.

But, yeah, you can certainly justify something valuable that, even if in a pinch you could sell it off, wouldn't imply a Wealth level elevation.
__________________
I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident.
Ulzgoroth is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-10-2012, 11:16 PM   #39
ErhnamDJ
 
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: OK
Default Re: Gear rich, money poor

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth View Post
Actually, those clothes could pretty easily help in recovering a tolerable situation and means of support as a courtier somewhere...
A single suit of clothes? I doubt it. The most use he'd be getting out of them would be other people recognizing his Status. But if there's just been a revolution tossing out all the nobles...

Quote:
or could be cashed in for a fair bit of money
Right, but the sale price on tailored clothes isn't going to come to the purchase price, which is what we're looking at.

If I want those clothes at character creation, I'm going to have to spend an awful lot of points to get them. When you have what is in all other ways a person of Average wealth trying to get a single item (or set of items), the pricing gets all screwy. If you want cash but don't want to increase your Wealth, you have to use the trading points for money rule, which makes it incredibly costly in terms of character points to get those clothes. Or anything else. If you want to be a peasant thief who was able to steal a very nice horse a while back, you're going to be paying more points than if you wanted to be the duke who owns a hundred such horses.

The money rules are a jumble and they're not at all consistent. They're each priced radically different from one another, skewing the incentives in character creation away from the kinds of characters most often found in fiction. Which is pretty bad, since those are the same kinds of characters players often want to emulate, at least in my experience.

It's even been a problem in DF, where Signature Gear gives out $500 per point. You have to get up to Very Wealthy to get a better deal than that. You don't ever see multiple party members taking lower Wealth levels, since it's just plain worse than Signature Gear. You either take Signature Gear or you take Very Wealthy.

It's weird having multiple separate pricing schemes for the same thing in the same game. It requires the players to learn all these weird little nonintuitive quirks of the rules. Those weird quirks add up to making the game much more burdensome to learn.
__________________
"For the rays, to speak properly, are not colored. In them there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this or that color." —Isaac Newton, Optics

My blog.
ErhnamDJ is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-11-2012, 05:30 AM   #40
vicky_molokh
GURPS FAQ Keeper
 
vicky_molokh's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Kyïv, Ukraine
Default Re: Gear rich, money poor

Wonder why nobody started with Signature Assets / Conditional Ownership. Of course, you still need to modify the income, but either of those solves the 'just sell it' issue.
__________________
Vicky 'Molokh', GURPS FAQ and uFAQ Keeper
vicky_molokh is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Fnords are Off
[IMG] code is Off
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -6. The time now is 04:27 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.9
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.