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Old 09-04-2016, 07:54 PM   #31
Kalzazz
 
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Default Re: Paper Men and Plastic Monsters: GURPS Content Post

My typical school of adventure design is that an adventure usually involves a series of N many thematically related challenges, a boss fight, and a wrap up, with 0 or more of the thematically related challenges being a fight . . . . so I guess my games may well lend themselves more to people getting their trauma plates smashed up

I've reread Abstract Wealth . . . I admit I still don't see it likely to be fun and don't see it as being easy. Its a whole set of rules with a new table and everything.

I agree that the basic set rules now that you've reminded me of the fun with job rolls and cost of living and such are probably not fun . . . . I get to deal with making job rolls, getting paid my salary, and then spending cost of living every month myself, and I personally would love not to think about buying new AC units and refrigerators and such myself . . . . so, that is not something I would wish to simulate

I can tell you
1. What I've done and what I would probably do instead of abstract wealth to handle 'money, but not headache', in a silly house rules approach
a. If its not on screen adventure related, I don't worry about the numbers. You want to have a new television? You live in a mansion or live in a hovel? Groovy, its all good. Cost of Living goes the way of the dodo bird, tracked money is strictly concerned with adventuring stuff. Literally, I had a character who the player originally viewed as a street samurai from the wrong side of the tracks, from slum apartment complexes where entire families lived in units the size of a postage stamp in Nu-Kyoto. As he gained more CP and completed quests, he decided that he wanted his family to now live in a nice house. Poof, done. No fuss, no muss, no calculating how many moneys a nice house cost in kyen (kilo-yen, what was using as the term for moneys)
b. How you get money - No job rolls (I'm not sure I've ever done job rolls, or cost of living . . . it just . . happens. I don't keep track of game time either, so I would never know when to do job rolls or cost of living anyway). You get money from completing quests, and you get money from finding things and taking them to magical places which transform loot into money (flavor wise they are shops with cute names like Blood Bath 'n Beyond, but really, anyplace that you can stroll in with a giant stack of quality preowned AKMs and stroll out with a stack of money instead of a stack of ATF agents is using alchemy to transmute loot to cash)
Quest rewards come in the form of 'Y + Z X' where Y is some arbitrary number, Z is another arbitrary number, and X is 10% of starting wealth (for your wealth level). So say, 5000+3X. The DM picks Y and Z based on the amount of challenge, amusement, whatever. The Y means that everyone, rich or poor, gets some amount of pecuniary award for completing the quest. And the Z part means that people also get rewarded based on their wealth level, so that richer people get more than poorer etc. Whether this moneys is in the form of cold hard cash, magical trinkets from the voids beyond, tax deferments, soul options . . . whatever. It gets written down the same on the character sheet. If you want to spend money, you just spend it, and if you don't have enough on your sheet you can't. I don't really worry about portability, people can walk around with it. And between adventures they can have money magically disappear from their character sheet to be replaced by new goodies (during adventure need to actually game out shopping if its something not readily found at WalMart, like a new machine gun or LAW for instance)

For vending loot I use the DF rules . . . mostly because are simple and easy and scaled to Wealth



1. And I can tell you if I was forced at gunpoint to pick published rules out of a GURPS book to follow - I've never used them, but the MH1 rules look very promising. The replacement budget portion is Per Adventure (not per month), and it sweeps the normal day to day cost of living and such into the background

The lack of rules for vending loot is a problem, but obviously loot vending is not really a thing in MH that much
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Old 09-04-2016, 10:33 PM   #32
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Originally Posted by Kalzazz View Post
My typical school of adventure design is that an adventure usually involves a series of N many thematically related challenges, a boss fight, and a wrap up, with 0 or more of the thematically related challenges being a fight . . . . so I guess my games may well lend themselves more to people getting their trauma plates smashed up
Well there are probably going to be challenges on Sandman missions, some of those will likely involve violence, but a lot of the time they are probably going to be able to go back to a firmbase of some kind in between. That said, I probably will use those rules, as I said.

Quote:
I've reread Abstract Wealth . . . I admit I still don't see it likely to be fun and don't see it as being easy. Its a whole set of rules with a new table and everything.
In practice most of the things they'd want to buy with personal finances as opposed to using Project funds during play probably fall under the trivial purchases limit and therefore aren't ever going to require a roll. I really don't anticipate many rolls in this game at all; mainly I just wanted to have the rules available in the event that it comes up.

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You get money from completing quests, and you get money from finding things and taking them to magical places which transform loot into money
The PCs in my game aren't thieves or mercenaries, they aren't going to be collecting loot for resale at all. Anything of value (i.e. dangerous History B artifacts like glyphs and reality shards) they are supposed to just turn in. Instead they have a job in the Project, and a cover identity somewhere else, and receive a civil or military service salary from the Project through their cover.

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And between adventures they can have money magically disappear from their character sheet to be replaced by new goodies (during adventure need to actually game out shopping if its something not readily found at WalMart, like a new machine gun or LAW for instance)
Again though they're very unlikely to want to spend any money on anything especially cool, so really we'd be doing this to track the spending of small amounts of money on stuff they aren't likely to expense to the Project (drinks, cigarettes, newspapers...). I'd really rather just say that they buy that stuff and move on without slowing play to figure out how much an energy drink costs in the airport in New Dehli.


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1. And I can tell you if I was forced at gunpoint to pick published rules out of a GURPS book to follow - I've never used them, but the MH1 rules look very promising. The replacement budget portion is Per Adventure (not per month), and it sweeps the normal day to day cost of living and such into the background
I'm not sure what you mean. The rules for Patrons on p. 53 of Champions say "just assume that each PC has $2,000 per month, free and clear, modified by Wealth." So that's definitely per month (which is actually not a problem because I will be tracking time in this campaign). Let's say I use these rules instead, what do we gain from it? They now have to account for trivial purchases (which again I anticipate is the majority of what they'll spend) on incidentals. That sounds like a whole lot of not fun to me.
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Old 09-04-2016, 10:56 PM   #33
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MH1 does specifically call out food as part of cost of living that is just magically accounted for, so drinks would be fine, I would consider magazines (for reading, not shooting) and cigarettes as something also magically accounted for, because drinks, magazines and cigarettes are well, what else would cost of living be?

So you don't have to track the cost of all the trivial incidentals, MH1 tidily stuffs all that stuff off into the background, convenience!

And for the 'not trivial incidentals', having an actual sum of money, and taking the cost of whatever you are buying and subtracting it from that sum of money is something that is very intuitive to people, as they have been doing 'Susie has $20 dollars, she buys 3 cookies at $2 each, how much does Susie have now?' since 1st grade

And in order to use the Abstract Wealth rules, you need to know how much the item costs to know which bucket it falls into, so this doesn't eliminate the need for knowing cost

Now, an example of what I expect to see come up (from my gaming)

PC - 'Hmmm, some aerial shots would be nice. I make a quick run to radio shack and pick up one of those Phantom Drones and an iPad'

'Uhm, Phantom drones cost what? 2k? Okay sure, subtract 2k from moneys and you got the drone and an iPad, roll uh . . Electronic Operations (Surveillance) and Piloting'

vs

'Uhm, Phantom drones cost what? 2k? Okay Wealth of 11, its more than 800, more than 1600 . . less than 2400, so okay! Roll vs 9, and if you make it you are at -1 to Wealth checks and your Threshhold drops to 400 for 2 months'
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Old 09-04-2016, 11:12 PM   #34
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MH1 does specifically call out food as part of cost of living that is just magically accounted for, so drinks would be fine, I would consider magazines (for reading, not shooting) and cigarettes as something also magically accounted for, because drinks, magazines and cigarettes are well, what else would cost of living be?
Cost of Living in GURPS usually only covers money spent at home in downtime, not adventuring expenses, the MH rules do handle this differently, I see.

Quote:
So you don't have to track the cost of all the trivial incidentals, MH1 tidily stuffs all that stuff off into the background, convenience!
I guess the MH rules do imply that you handwave this stuff. In which case the PCs are now amassing $2000 down on their character sheets every month and spending it on basically nothing. Until one of them gets the (sensible) idea to invest it or something. All of this is way too much about money in a game that isn't supposed to be about money at all, IMO.

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And for the 'not trivial incidentals', having an actual sum of money, and taking the cost of whatever you are buying and subtracting it from that sum of money is something that is very intuitive to people, as they have been doing 'Susie has $20 dollars, she buys 3 cookies at $2 each, how much does Susie have now?' since 1st grade
Sure, but it's also time consuming and boring. It also doesn't include credit, which is a huge part of realistic 21st century finances and once you include credit it gets a lot more complicated (the last thing I want to do pretty much ever is track APR on a fictional credit card, yuck).

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And in order to use the Abstract Wealth rules, you need to know how much the item costs to know which bucket it falls into, so this doesn't eliminate the need for knowing cost
In the unlikely event that it comes up sure, but then we deal with it and move on. I don't need to know the cost of stuff that probably costs a couple of bucks, to call it trivial and ignore it.

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Now, an example of what I expect to see come up (from my gaming)
Why would they use a commercial drone instead of having the USAF (or other local asset) send a Predator or Scaneagle (or equivalent)? Even if they did need a commercial drone for some reason why wouldn't the Project pay for it? The drone problem seems solveable by a Patron roll. I suppose they might still want the drone in the event that the Patron roll fails (1.9% of the time), and are willing to buy it with their own money, in which case we have the rules available (but again this isn't going to happen much if ever).
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Old 09-06-2016, 01:07 PM   #35
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Not the post I planned for today, instead I address a misunderstanding from the previous post.
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Old 09-12-2016, 05:57 PM   #36
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Default Re: Paper Men and Plastic Monsters: GURPS Content Post

Sunday's post a day late: I hype Dungeon Fantasy 19.
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Old 09-13-2016, 05:33 PM   #37
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Today's post leaks the first Ontotectonic Projection in my Madness Dossier campaign.
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Old 09-15-2016, 02:07 AM   #38
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Some observations today about the Sandman templates.

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Old 09-19-2016, 01:44 PM   #39
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Peter Dell'Orto wondered if anybody has figured out what is probably going to be in December's Pyramid: The Dungeon Fantasy Collection, so I did.

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Old 09-22-2016, 09:02 PM   #40
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The first part of the recap of my first session of my GURPS Horror: The Madness Dossier campaign.

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