Alternate Wealth rules
 

The current wealth rules basically seem to be “The bard/thief sells stuff for everyone, taking whatever cut they want.”, which lands the poor face character between a rock and a hard place: either they paid (e.g.) [20] points and are no better off than the others, or they’re just asking for tensions within the group.

My suggestion is to make wealthy characters feel richer, instead.
1) Everyone sells at 40%. Reaction rolls, etc., still apply.
2) Wealth modifies prices of everything bought for yourself:
40% Very Wealthy
60% Wealthy
80% Comfortable
100% Average
130% Struggling
160% Poor
200% Dead Broke
The difference can be from your estate covering some of it, paying alimony, getting out of taxes or your guild collecting outrageous fees, or the thug on your street going “Nice duds you have there, I think I’d like them” half the time.
3) You still pay $150 for cost of living, but it represents better or worse accommodations: A Very Wealthy character has $3,000/month living arrangements, with a mansion and servants, while a Dead Broke one is squatting in leaky abandoned buildings barely good enough to avoid penalties. No game effect either way, and servants certainly don’t follow into the dungeon.

The goal is that Poor characters will tend to be poorly equipped, and rich characters will be richly equipped.

The GM shouldn’t fret when the rich guy administers his healing potion to the poor one, but stop blatant abuse: “Your serfs heard you’re using their taxes to outfit the wizard and have roughed up the tax collector.”

Re: Alternate Wealth rules
 

What is the incentive to let the connected character sell stuff then? If they are jerks just sell your own stuff. In my last GURPS DF game the bard just took a small fee and then divided the spoils evenly, so the other players were still getting a way better deal than selling it themselves.
Land management is probably far beyond the scope of the game.

Re: Alternate Wealth rules
 

This is interesting on a few levels for me. On the surface, there's a bunch to object to. But the playable result of wealth disads resulting in a multiplier for item cost is that the Wealth disad, which has somewhat permanent/lasting effects until bought off, will continue to make its presence felt on every transaction.

This feels like it'll work well in play, as a representation of how Wealth - specifically the lack of it and the lack of social standing that comes when you don't have it, especially in less egalitarian structures - is a constant drag on nearly everything.

Oh, you're Dead Broke and want to buy a sword? That's $6,000 to you but your wealthier friend can get it for list price at $600, no fuss.

Re: Alternate Wealth rules
 

I feel like if I did this the PCs would just have the connected character handle all transactions.

Re: Alternate Wealth rules
 

Seems to be the case. If I'm understanding the proposal, it would change Bardface Moneybags from the guy who gathers up all the dungeon loot, sells it for the most cash possible, and distributes the cash to the group... into the guy who gathers up all the group cash, buys the most goods possible, and distributes the goods to the group.

(I guess Bardface Moneybags would also handle selling, too, if reaction rolls matter for selling...)

Good or bad, I don't know, but does that accurately represent the gist of the proposal?

Re: Alternate Wealth rules
 

The problem with traditional Wealth is that it's a transient advantage in games where characters can reasonably gain large amounts of money after character creation. DF tries to fix that by turning it into a benefit for mercantile transactions, but that runs into a new problem: it's useful for someone in the party to have it, but being the sales-bot is probably even more boring than being the heal-bot, so you really want to convince someone else to do it.

There are two easy fixes for wealth. One is to simply not use it in games where PCs are expected to routinely gain large amounts of money. The other is to require PCs to buy wealth if they acquire significant money in play.

Re: Alternate Wealth rules
 

This is the key part. You can’t have a buy-bot, because it’ll only work for their stuff. It doesn’t matter who buys stuff for the dead broke barbarian, the barbarian’s own wealth determines the price of the item.

A side advantage I haven’t mentioned is that barring absentee players, there is very little reason under the current rules not to have a single wealthier character, with every super poor. This version makes everyone’s Wealth matter for themselves, and nobody “paying points for the whole party”, which was really my initial motivation for coming up with it.

I don’t do the disadvantage version in my campaign, so those values were just thrown out randomly and stand to be adjusted Douglas seems to prefer 1000% or 200% for Dead Broke).

The rule doesn’t involve land management; that’s simply part of the background explanation. If you try to cheat by pretending stuff is for you, you’ll end up paying the difference eventually anyway. But giving you old sword to the barbarian after you get a new one ten sessions later is fine.

Re: Alternate Wealth rules
 

To me, DFRPG is a game about teamwork, and wealth (as it currently works) contributes to that. I don't see any value to changing it to a purely selfish advantage.

Re: Alternate Wealth rules
 

The way I see it, everything that you buy is, to at least some degree, for the party. If the knight spends 30 points on ST, he's using it to benefit the party by killing monsters and soaking damage. If the cleric spends 30 points on ER, she's using it to heal and buff the group. And if the bard spends 30 points on Wealth, she's using it to buy and sell things efficiently -- and why not do that for the whole group?

Re: Alternate Wealth rules
 

How does this work? If the bard gives something to the barbarian then they also mysteriously lose money?

Yeah, if you allow the PCs to trade before the game starts, one player is willing to not only handle financial transactions during play but also to outfit the entire party (and therefore not going to get much personal use of high starting wealth) and you are willing to either allow a premise that makes this possible or just ignore plausibility entirely. I don't really see that actually happening much in real games. I floated this "exploit" to my group because I was curious what they thought and it was uninamously declared to be a bad idea, YMMV, of course.

Personally I just don't allow PCs to take actions (that aren't backstory) before the game starts, because this causes me to have an existential headache.