Gear rich, money poor
 

I am helping someone make a character who fits a classic niche - an impoverished starship Captain in the vein of Han Solo, Malcolm Reynolds, and many others. I know this has been discussed previously but could not find a definitive answer, so let's try again for the general case:

What is the appropriate advantage and cost for a character who owns some item(s) worth substantially more than their Wealth level would indicate?

This can apply not only to the impoverished Captain but also the peasant Knight, warrior monk, and mech jockey, individuals who may possess items worth far more than their desired Wealth. The overall wealth level is often an intrinsic part of the character description - these are NOT wealthy people and often have low status, but they possess a ship or suit of armor or magic sword or vehicle that is worth a big pile of cash.

Wealth provides not only starting cash but also Status and the possibility of future earnings - if the character is Filthy Rich to afford the ship, even if you negate the status you still have someone capable of earning big bucks with a job, and that is not the case for these characters.

Trading cp for money and Signature Gear provide greater initial wealth without the other hassles, but it is scaled to the starting wealth for the TL, which means it progresses much, much slower than Wealth - by the time you had spent enough points to get a ship, you've used up every point in the party!!

I would rather not do this by fiat, since there are likely to be other situations where different characters will want to do this to different extents - character 1 wants a sword worth $X, character 2 wants a powerstone worth $Y, and character 3 is happy with the regular wealth rules thankyouverymuch.

Any suggestions?

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

You haven't found a definitive answer because there isn't one. The problem is that in the sources you cite, spaceships are treated like the economic equivalent of cargo vans. They don't cost millions or billions of dollars to buy, just thousands.

However, these costs are unrealistic, and rules like those in GURPS Spaceships don't handle them. You have to unrealistically force down the price of spaceships. If in a realistic, modern setting you could hand-wave average Wealth as including a heavily mortgaged house, in a cinematic space setting you can hand-wave average Wealth as including an old rust-bucket of a ship.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

Scale SigGear like Wealth, and enforce the interpretation that you're buying individual items. For any single item, the more points you spend, the more cash the next point is worth. You can get one thing worth tens of millions, but not ten millions of things, for a given CP cost.

Depending on the setting, ships might not actually be all that expensive. I've seen this argued for Firefly, for instance. Lots of classic Heinlein puts ships within the reach of families, no worse than a real-life house or car.

The PCs might not actually own their ship. The classic Traveller sources of ships were (a) mortgaged, so the bank is the owner, or (b) old loaners for detached duty scouts, so the scout service was the owner (Patron). And variations, campaigns in which you're active duty in a service, so that Patron is providing the transport. One variant of (a) is the 40-year-old, paid-off ship, which barely runs as it is, and so isn't worth anything like the price new.

Wandering further afield, there are those settings in which the ship itself is a character. You might buy this as Ally (or another sort of Patron), or just not have a CP cost, any more than you charge PCs for every NPC with which they associate, or for each other.

And how do you know that, in the absence of any setting details or technology? Settings with real-world, modern-day realistic spaceships are not settings where a few PCs own one and are knocking about it in. On the flip side, applying the word "realistic" to, say, Star Wars when debating only the price of the Millenium Falcon seems like a strangely selective set of reality blinders. Why is a ship necessarily expensive? Certainly, there's a lot of settings where that's true, but a certain arrangement of metal and plastic doesn't necessarily cost hundreds of millions of dollars just because it's IN SPACE!

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

The answer is a higher level Wealth. Wealth and money are different things. Someone with expensive gear has spent all their wealth on their gear, and their wealth is now tied up in their gear. Combine this a job whose wealth level is lower than the person's wealth level, and the need to spend money to maintain your assets and you have someone who is making do but has something expensive.

For spaceships you should read Spaceships:2 since this covers this in depth.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

Wealth and money are indeed different things, which is exactly why higher Wealth is not the answer. Wealth is your social ability to accumulate buying power. Han Solo or Mal Reynolds aren't Wealthy at all; they just own old ships that serve the same dramatic function and economic niche as cargo trucks. You don't want Mal to be able to get higher-paying jobs; you want him to be Poor and having trouble getting a good job, but still have his own ship.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

PK has a very well thought-out variant on his MyGURPS site:

http://www.mygurps.com/h_money.html?p=ih&v=0

Allows for some very large capital purchases at character creation without wealth necessarily getting in the way.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

I could only second this one + sometimes Signiture gear protection is nice. If the story is about group travelling with this ship. GM might want to give the captain some extra points for extra responsibility. Resposibility like tracking the fuel, funding repairs. This bonus is only for player that does the book keeping the person doesn't has to be the in game captain. The player could fit the role of chief engineer pretty well. If GM does the book keeping nobody gets the extra points. Its plot device. If player waste there ship it could as well end the campaign. "These are the voyages of starship Enterprise." Without enterprise it is meaningless.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

I recommend defining your ship as a HEADQUARTERS (Supers p.85) and apply "Special Abilities, +100%" for a Starship (+50% for space, +50% for Mobile).

Alternatively, you can take your ship as an ally or patron depending on your point levels.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

Up to 20 points, sig gear is the way to go. Beyond that, you tend to need wealth, but any character with huge amounts of gear and a low wealth level needs to explain how they can't either turn that gear into wealth, or leverage that gear to create wealth.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

Just give the character the equipment and then start imposing Disadvantages to it until you’re satisfied.

For instance the Millennium Falcon had “Enemy” Hut bounty hunters\creditors were after it. The “Cursed” disadvantage as it became unreliable at the most inopportune times ("Don't worry, she'll hold together . . . You hear me, baby? Hold together!"), and the “Unique” (I don’t have a definition of this one so I am just assuming) disadvantage ("I've made a lot of special modifications myself.")

You could probably add “Age” (increased maintenance cost), “Appearance” (“She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid.”) and “Reputation” (First as a smuggler ship, and later as a known rebel ship).
I’d create at least one new disadvantage called “Coveted” ” (“You've never heard of the Millennium Falcon? It's the ship that made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs." “Let’s steal it”). I’m sure others could think of more.

Serenity had similar problems.

You could do this with any extraordinary piece of equipment, thus providing balance as well as springboards for even more interesting storylines.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

That's fine when your Wealth is abstract, but when 90% of that Wealth is a single asset, your only way to accumulate buying power is to use that asset. Nor would I put Han or Mal down as those with a steady job. They finds jobs they can do, and then get paid if they are completed, assuming they don't just get screwed over by the client. And all without going against their morals. So for them it's more about not getting paid regularly rather than getting paid little.

So long as necessities cost close to income you are probably going to be poor irrespective of amounts involved, and if there's only one place where you are able to spend any excess then extravagance isn't going to happen that often.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

I would alter sig gear to be 50% of starting wealth not standard campaign wealth. Then you just grab a lot of wealth and put it all in gear.

Finally, you don't take the skills for a high paying job. (Or if you do get those skills you don't take the job.)

Bam! Lot of gear, low wealth.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

This , plus note that the average old aged pensioner often outright owns His/Her home which can easily be worth over $100,000 real world dollars {5 times starting wealth} , they are not however earning wealthy [20] level income if they get a job .

Few sane people will try to "leverage" their actual home {which is what Serenity was to Mal and Co. in Firefly} into equivalent income {Wealth Advantage} unless they have no good choice and even then will seek to keep the risk to a minimum .

One golden rule used by actually successful entrepreneurs is "don't invest more than you can afford to lose .




I wonder if levels of Wealth can be bought with a Mitigator (no income) limiting them to whatever income level they bought at full cost .
I'm too tired to figure what a fair % the mitigator would be worth though .

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

Well for one thing, if you're not able to earn the Wealth-appropriate income, you're not getting your points-worth for Wealth.

For another, spending 90% of your Wealth on a spaceship hardly precludes earning pay appropriate to your Wealth level. Just drop a few points on an appropriate job skill, point out that you've already got the Wealth on your sheet, and go. Now, the difficulty might be if your personal earnings at your wealth level don't look so good when you're also paying upkeep on the ship. But that means that running the ship has to produce substantially more revenue than a Wealth-level job would.
And you've gotten a grand total of [0] points for your poverty compared to someone who decided they were okay with earning money after all.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

You could also mix some level of wealth and debt. This is doubly useful if your equipment would normally warrant higher fees. IE- if you own a starship why aren't you making money in line with people who own starships; with wealth enough to own a starship and then debt the answer is easy- you do; just your other obligations eat most of that money leaving only what your adjusted wealth indicates.

The 'buy it as signature gear' is always valid for most any sort of equipment.

Next option is to build your piece of uber equipment as an ally- a suit of power-armour, or a magical sword, or even an aircraft are all stat-able as allies (and are actually insanely inexpensive point-wise, and will grow as the character grows).

Finally, I always like to view the cost of vehicles like spaceships in the same vein as cars today- that may be incorrect, as large items like boats don't follow quite the same curve of depreciation, but in a setting where it seems that EVERYONE has a spaceship then it might be entirely possible to buy a twenty year old beater ship for less then 10% of the original sticker price but still have it be performance competitive with other ships (though need a lot more TLC and not be as visually impressive as well as lacking the most cutting edge features.)

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

For large static investments, such as spaceships, it may be fair to treat their value as some multiple of their monthly net profits, rather than on what it might cost to purchase one new; somewhere around 200-250x is appropriate. That would be profit beyond normal pay scale for crew; a ship that merely lets you make the same income with the same amount of work as you could get working for someone else isn't all that valuable (say, 10x monthly wages).

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

I think if I was to use just straight Wealth, it would need to have something, a Vow or other disadvantage that restricted the player's ability to casually cash in the item, and yet still give them a point break for passing up the income normally associated with Wealth.

And again, please note that I am looking for a solution that fits more than just a ship - one character I wanted to do a long time ago was a fantasy warrior who, though poor himself, had a very valuable magical sword. I really need a solution that equates $ to cp, not one that tries to reprice a starship (something I can do in setting as needed).

I do like the PK (via JP42) solution for scaling Signature Gear and Trading Points for Money. That may solve the issue most directly and fairly.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

I dislike assuming debt - sometimes that makes sense for the character (Han Solo), other times it does not (Malcolm Reynolds). And I think Wealth still works as a good arbiter of income regardless of the value of the ship - perhaps the maintenance, supplies, fees, and salaries associated with the ship eat up a huge chunk of income, but someone with Very Wealthy has the connections, prestige, bankroll, and other abilities needed to turn that extra bit of profit. Meanwhile the Struggling shipowner is buying parts as needed (and more expensive), getting worse deals, etc - same exact ship, but one guy rakes in the dough, another one struggles, just like anything else.

While I understand it has become very popular in GURPS, I loathe this option - prices are often readily available while point costs are not, statting up an item often misses or misrepresents things, and it is simply counter-intuitive to me. I don't want to have to design a ship as a character when it is a ship with a pricetag hanging off it.

Not an issue - I am not trying to haggle on prices, I am trying to put what the character wants into cp in a manner consistent with the background story. What if the character wants to be a deposed noble, flying around with nothing more than the yacht they escaped in? No real Wealth beyond the very nice ship, no real Status, no hope of a decent income... but the ship is big, beautiful, and debt-free!

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

That puts the profit margin on the ship itself, when for narrative and realism purposes it should be at least as much a function of the Captain and crew. It also decouples the gaming advantages of the ship itself - a heavily armed raiding craft may not be as profitable as a medium freighter in a particular setting, but it is certainly a big help in game!

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

I understand but do not support, your position on the building possession with CP thing.

However I think these two statements directly contradict. Han solo has the melinium falcon, which is by all rights a top of the line spacecraft, but has huge debt, spaceships are rare, and having one is a big deal. Malcom Renolds has the ludicrous beater of a spaceship held together by mud and only flying because he has an ally with gadgeteer 2 that is somewhat restricted by limitations AND the setting has 'everyone and there dog has a spaceship', and the awesome space-yacht is either worth something as a vehicle for employment, or its not a very good spaceship and thus well within the range of a 'signature gear' purchase. (Spaceship used in all three examples but feel free to replace with power armor, magic sword, or whatever)

Unless you have a habit of letting PCs build characters who directly challenge the game world setting there will be no true 'one size fits all' answer for this sort of question, and I feel that dismissing 'I don't want to fiddle with prices' is kind of disingenuous to the overall problem.

Problem:
PC has otherwise expensive item, but should be poor and have to struggle for money.

Situation - 1:
Expensive and rare items can be leveraged for money- If you have a +5 flaming sword of awesome then you should command money equal to your skill +5, which means that you are not poor while leveraging your flaming sword. Further there is a certain prestige attached to having such a device, because they are rare and useful.

Situation - 2:
Expensive and common items cost way too much and don't really do anything because they are supposed to be common to the setting. There is a mad wizard who cranks out flaming swords, and lots of people have them, so having a +5 might be of note, but does not let you command extra money, there is no special prestige attached to having such a device, because they are common- and in fact the prestige may be attached to rarer makes, models, styles, or even just what's 'in fashion' that year. (FLAMING swords, that's so last year, now it's all about electricity!)

Solution -1:
Wealth+debt; you don't make as much money as your special trinket should allow you to. Debt makes the most sense for explaining this, but in all fairness you could just as easily attribute it to something else and say that the debt is virtual and the impact on how much you get paid because of other factors to the PCs global inability to make money. They aren't getting 100,000 and then spending 80,000 of it on there debt, they are just getting the 20% outright for other reasons.

Solution 2-:
Used/beaten/useless costs less: You can have a +5 flaming sword because the social and utility components of the item are weakened due to there being so many of them out there, you don't need extreme wealth to buy the item, but its effect on gameplay is going to be mitigated because it is not a unique thing; enemies are aware of its capabilities and may have a superior model, and there are lots of people out there hawking there skill with similar equipment. On the upside not having the brand new top of the line or useful example of that device means that you can have it cheap.

So solution 1 really applies to han solo, and solution 2 applies to Malcom Renolds. The displaced noble could be done with either of them- he could take enough wealth to afford the yacht and then enough debt to be at the wealth level you want with the justification 'can't really work/leverage his gear for wealth' (Though why you can't use a top of the line Yacht as a delivery vehicle/tour boat seems strange to me). Under solution 2 the Yacht may be top of the line for a Yacht, but it is imcapable of being leverage for wealth and is therefore pretty useless on the sale market. It does not go as fast as a transport/delivery vehicle, its not as comfortable as a luxury cruiser, and its got minimal armaments- The Noble gets to buy it with starting wealth for the price it would sell for, which is not very much. It was a prestige item when he was a rich noble and could afford to deck it out with the newest fashions and trends, now it's just an awkward under-performing space-plane.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

I do not think it is disingenuous at all - I am looking for rules to fit a narrative, not changes in narrative to fit the rules (which is where piling on debt or debilitation come in). If a player wants "expensive item(s) but low wealth and earning potential" I want to do that without adding caveats just so that the rules add up nicer.


And this is exactly what I am talking about - you are suggesting changing the game world so that the item is less valuable. That is explicitly NOT what I am looking for.

But still valuable - just because it is impractical for commercial exploitation does not mean that it is suddenly cheap. Luke Skywalker could probably have made a ton of credits by selling his father's lightsaber at the end of A New Hope (as it was quite possibly an extremely rare and valuable collectible) but that does not mean that having that lightsaber would make him a highly-paid mercenary or otherwise enable him to make an income commensurate with the sale value of his possessions. Wealth assumes a certain correlation between income and net worth, and I am looking to skew that relationship.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

What do you think of PK's houserule for Trading Points for Money (previously linked by JP42)

http://www.mygurps.com/h_money.html?p=ih&v=0

Amount grows geometrically per CP. For example, 50 CP gets you 200x starting wealth in gear. 100 CP gets you 20,000x starting wealth. This not Wealth; it's a one-time swap.

PK rules also offer Sig Gear plot protection as a separate feature bought separately.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

I think this is by far the best solution I have seen, and am mostly just waiting to see if the forum has any other ideas or is going to rally around this one. I have posted on the GCA forum to see how to implement it there - the campaign that I am being prodded into running will be for newbies and want to let them design their characters in GCA to minimize errors and questions.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

I think the myGurps solutions are elegant and endorse them. They are ALL worth looking through, are well thought out.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

I'd suggest something equivalent to a Vow of poverty, but kicked over to a metagame level. 'Person who has a crazy valuable item but can neither profit from it nor cash it in' seems pretty much unfounded in reality, so going straight to fiction-level props seems appropriate. (And buying the thing with RPK's points for cash rule fix, of course, because the Basic Set version totally fails at the high ends.)

Though when you get to Mal and Han, I'd suggest that their somewhat struggling lifestyle can be justified by their other Disadvantages...if you don't mind the possibility that they'll eventually break out of it. Han's asset isn't that huge...the Falcon might be somewhat exceptional for a small freighter but it's really not that huge an asset in the Star Wars universe, unless it's compared to the resources of common-folk on an impoverished backwater like Tatooine. Meanwhile, Han has some very serious Enemies...and he does seem to make fairly real money, when he's actually making money rather than playing rebel hero.

Mal's ship, meanwhile, is probably not one that's actually a great investment. It was sitting in a second-hand yard when he found it, it probably only survives by the grace of Kaylee, and Mal isn't really a man of business sense. He got a ship because he wanted a ship, and he keeps flying because he can't stand not to, not because it's necessarily the best way to keep fed. Man has a bit of an Obsession, even before he goes picking up his other problems.
I dunno how much an old lightsaber would go for, really. I mean, if he were able to auction it to the crazy rich of the galaxy as Darth Vader's original lightsaber, sure, but he doesn't know that and probably couldn't find the handful of buyers who'd really care.

On the other hand, having a Death Star in his kill log probably could place him as a highly-paid mercenary fairly soon, if he were on the job market as a pilot. (He wouldn't be worth that much as a foot-soldier until after Dagobah.)

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

I think we are potentially having a miscommunication.

My point is: If the item can be leveraged for wealth then there needs to be some explanation AND mechanic for why its not being leveraged for wealth. If the item cannot be leveraged for wealth, then the item is worth a lot less then its 'sticker price'- these two factors are true in both the real world and can be reflected in the GURPS world very effectively and cover a huge number (possibly all) sources of 'item rich, money poor'.

Luke Skywalkers' father's lightsaber is a great example of an item that is probably worth a fortune to the original owner only, radically less to sell- lightsabers are immensely personal items that are hand crafted, that are really only useful in the hands of a limited number of precognitive psychics. Lightsabers might have value based on lineage and ownership, to collectors, but as a weapon or item it would only be a curiosity to the world of money, and in and of itself not do anything to command money- to a non force-user its a prop to pretend you are a force-user, and probably priced as such.

Another great real-world example is a tailored suit. I might pay $1300 to have a suit hand-made for me, if I loose some weight and the suit is now baggy on me and for whatever reason I did not have it re-tailored I'd have to search far and wide for a buyer, and probably get less then $200 for it. I can't leverage the suit for money- a finely made, but baggy, suit is not going to win me any advantage in negotiations and business vs a cheap but well fitting suit.

Though perhaps I am misunderstanding you- could you list a few more examples; perhaps there is something I am not seeing rather then not communicating effectively.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

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.)

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

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.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

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 way I would price that is to figure out how much it's going to increase your income per session, and then price it based on that. If there are three pay periods per session, that item should be priced differently than if there are three sessions per pay period. I think. Or it might not make sense to price it as a capital good at all if you're running a one-shot where it's not going to come up.

I would price it based on the frequency that it would matter in the game.


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.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

Yes, but I can handle the explanations independently - Debt, Vow, Code of Honor, Compulsive Behavior... there are a ton of options for explaining WHY a character would do so, but not until I have Wealth parsed into its components so that I can have what I need (initial wealth) separate from what I do not (earning potential).

And if that narrative suits you, that is fine... for YOUR world. In my universe, a lightsaber, a powerful (if dangerous) relic of a devastated order that once watched over the galaxy is probably of immense value. Not to everyone, of course, but what ever is? An authentic viking sword nowadays is completely useless as a weapon - but it is still worth a ton of money. Heck, a top-end high-power sniper rifle is worth more than some cars to the handful of people capable of using them effectively (of which there are some!).

And General Grievous cannot be the only person crazy enough to want a lightsaber and borged enough to not have much to risk...

There could be any number. In Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Li Mu Bai could probably have sold the Green Destiny sword for an immense sum, but would he? In Alan Dean Foster's Flinx series, the main character possesses a starship superior to any other known to exist, and could have sold it and retired in a life of luxury, but doesn't because the ability to explore that it provides is simply worth more to him. Many other stories feature characters who have something that would be immensely valuable that they choose to neither profit from nor sell, simply because money is not their motivation.

And again, the issue is not the story behind it - it is the severability of Wealth into its component parts.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

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.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

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.

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.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

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.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

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.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

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.


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.

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.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

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.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

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...

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.

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.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

What’s wrong with Unusual Background, which is priced by GM fiat?

Han – you have a small starship. It’s fast, but an old and battered thing you won in a card game. You can evade customs patrols and get perishables to distant markets quickly, but most of your earnings will be taken up in spare parts and dockyard fees for the maintenance you can’t do yourself. That makes it revenue-neutral, so it’s not Wealth. Because it comes in handy sometimes for adventures, I’ll call that a 10-point UB (once won a starship in a card game).

Engor the Vicious: you have your ancestral +5 Flaming Sword. Bit flashy that, and lots of people know about it. The advantage it gives you in combat is going to be counterbalanced by the annoyance of staying alert for people trying to take it from you – by theft, or by killing you for it. Without a personal bodyguard of soldiers to do the watching for you, you will need to stay constantly alert for attacks. Your ancestors won’t be happy if you don’t buy Signature Gear for it and lose it in the first scenario, so we’ll include Sig Gear in the UB cost. That makes it a 20-point advantage: UB (inherited a Magic Sword).

So a starship costing millions is worth fewer cps than a sword costing tens of thousands. It’s up to you as GM to price the UB on how useful they will be in the campaign.

The Falcon is basically a bus to take them to the scenario and a getaway car in the event it goes badly, so not that significant. Also, it’s a tool for you as GM to get the party into the next scenario, so you want him to have it, and it’s a resource for the whole party so why should the captain pay the whole cost? For all these reasons, I’d say that the starship should be pretty cheap. Because you are using Unusual Background the cp cost does not need to relate to the sticker price. If the starship is in better condition and will enable the owner to make a steady profit, add the equivalent Independent Income to the UB cost based on its in-game utility, or if you want the extra book-keeping make it the captain’s job so that income is based on his Job Roll, which will be related to the Wealth level he buys normally.

The sword will make a huge difference to his survival chances every time Engor gets into a lethal fight, so despite its lower ticket price, it is still going to cost him a huge chunk of cps. About as much as +5 to his Sword skill, in fact! You can arbitrarily say that the complications of people wanting to steal it will be counterbalanced cost-wise by Sig Gear and its other attributes – the times when a magic blade or one that’s doing fire damage in addition is worth more than just being better at hitting. Then hand-wave away the facts that for +5 to Sword skill he’d have better defaults with other weapons – he’s not likely to use them. Or you can charge him for some of those factors, so that the cp cost reflects how much impact you think it will have on the campaign in Engor’s favour.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

What's "Effective Status" in this context? Han doesn't have much Status; Malcolm Reynolds even less.

I admit that I find the original Supers a little confusing, as it seems to confuse Status and Wealth. The given examples are a middle-class hero (Status 1) having a spare room, and a Status 8 individual a spare mansion. But these seem like examples of Wealth levels instead of Status. The two correlate in real life, but they're not identical.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

Expected standards of living are tied in to Status, not Wealth. Of course, if you've got Status 8 without some means of supporting the cost of living that goes with that, you're not going to be able to keep that spare mansion.

In modern societies it's typically very hard to disentangle the two.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

The effective status for a headquarters is in no way connected to your actual wealth or social Status. It is only used to determine the size of headquarters, based on the table (on page B266). You do not have to pay the cost of living to maintain the status of your Headquarters (Supers p.85)

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

To me, everything. As a player I hate GM fiat, and as a GM I am not fond of it for character design. While I do not think that GURPS is perfect I do think that it is more balanced that what I am likely to create by GM fiat. Especially when it could be used on multiple players in one setting - perhaps the warrior wants a magic sword and wizard wants a powerstone and a magic staff, and pricing them both by fiat can get dodgy and create strife in the group. That is why I am coming the forum, to get something a little more structured and reasonable-ish than hand-waving a cost.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

I fairly certain there isn't. Having Wealth does not earn you money. Having a Job earns you money. Yes, Jobs have a wealth level, and in most cases you probably have a Job with the same wealth level as yours. However having a Job doesn't cost points, you have no guarantee of having a Job or for there even being Jobs available. Earning money is what you do in game, not something you have on your character sheet.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

But having a particular Wealth level entitles you to getting a job at that level if you look hard enough. That's part of what you paid the points for.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

Basically...not so much. Wealth in particular is largely oriented around supporting characters who have a largely off-screen day job and personal economic foundation.

Within which framework, it works quite well. Your character sinks a bunch of their between-session downtime into keeping their job, and their wealth level is quietly normalized at the level of both their Wealth and their Job when you're not watching. If you want to munchkin your time use sheets by being unemployed, you're going to have to have to explain where you're getting your cost of living from, but otherwise everything's simple.

On the other hand, if on-screen time dominates your character's life (and particularly their personal economics), Wealth doesn't make much sense. The implicit connections and so forth don't have any time to implicitly be maintained and used in. If you're doing a job, you'll be rolling dice for it, not having it stuck in your background story, and Wealth very seldom makes any direct contribution to rolls. It may make more sense to strike Wealth entirely in such games.

Yes, I'm saying that I would not use Wealth in a free trader campaign.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

So you see this as a separate charge, just for the base ("HQ Status"?) And this "status" has none of the benefits of regular Status? Certainly a candidate for renaming.

No so hard. Mother Teresa, the Dali Lama. Barack Obama (who is personally wealthy, but nowhere near wealthy enough to maintain the lifestyle or influence of US President, nor did his personal wealth jump from the election). On the flip side, Warren Buffet (who until recently had very little Status, perhaps a Reputation among investors; even now, it might just be positive rep for tax advocates). Some middle class families own vacation homes; others do not, without also differing by a point of Status.

I agree there's correlation, but there's not an absolute match between the lifestyle that you live, your social influence, and your income, compared to say, feudal England. The Windsors are wealthy, yes -- but William the Conqueror owned literally everything in England before he started handing bits out. The Windsors are a long way from that kind of wealth.

If there are two separate Advantages at all, then there has to be some meaning for mismatched values of Status and Wealth, with either higher. Otherwise, it's just one Advantage.

Having extra property for use as a base seems to me more like a function of Wealth to me than Status. Maybe Superhero Status requires having a base. You just don't take that masked vigilante as seriously as the guy that operates out of the Fortress of Solitude or the top floor of the Baxter Building. But is that Status, or just Rep? Then, the Xavier Institute shows Wealth, but not Status -- mutants are disliked in that setting; politicians get elected by promising to crack down on them, not by being one.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

Indeed, the one place you can find it easy to separate Wealth and Status today is when Status-granting Rank intervenes.

...Meanwhile I'd love to see your source on Warren Buffet lacking Status. He doesn't have Rank, but I really doubt he's not getting imputed Status from his very substantial Wealth.
This has what to do with modern society? (Also, I'd dispute the Wealth value of 'owning' 11th century England.)
Of course there are two separate advantages. I said difficult to disentangle in modern societies, not indistinguishable.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

He might have some status -- though as far as I know, he's generally been pretty withdrawn -- but he doesn't have status anywhere near equal to his level of wealth. You've added the word "imputed", by which I guess you mean the couple of "free" levels you get.

Recall that the original point of departure was the examples in Supers of needing Status 8 to have a spare mansion, as opposed to Wealth 8.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

Couple of free levels? The man is worth $46 billion. I can't figure exactly how much without my Basic Set at hand but I think that's more than a couple. And that's the main form of Status in our society, so...

Being withdrawn doesn't really say anything whatsoever about his Status.
If you look at post #44, it seems clear that the point of departure of which you speak is not what you thought it was.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

It's basically one level per 25 points, and that's 150 points of wealth. Status 6 is probably a little overstated.

Re: Gear rich, money poor
 

Actually, now that I've got my book handy, it's Status 3, that being the maximum that can be gained from Wealth. It's likely he'd have another +1 or maybe +2 of bought status to go with that.