GURPS: Beverly Hillbillies (or: annoyed by GURPS' handling of the nouveau riche)

[Michael Thayne]

The handling of living above your Status in GURPS: Social Engineering strikes me as... not nuanced enough to be true to real life. If you don't try to conceal what you're doing, everybody reacts negatively, which doesn't strike me as particularly realistic. It makes the nouveau riche social incompetents to the last, when as far as I can tell, the reality is that it causes you to be looked down by higher-status people, but it will impress at least some people.

I guess you could model this with the rules for False Identities, but while this may work for modeling Jay Gatsby, it seems unlikely that men who have car speakers worth more than the car aren't trying to be mistaken for lawyers, they're trying to impress people who can only afford the car--and to some extent it works.

There are also some weird game-mechanical aspects to how this works in GURPS. If you luck into Multimillionaire 1, and you don't pretend you got the money some other way, you're required to live a lifestyle that's less than 1% as expensive as what you could afford (i.e. a Wealthy lifestyle, assuming you get imputed Status from Weath), lest you get an Odious Personal Habit. Which seems odd, plus, if you don't advertise your wealth through spending, how does anyone know you're Status 2 rather than a guy who merely has Wealthy (and the 1 level of imputed status that comes from it). It seems like in real life, part of the reason for the nouveau riche to live as lavishly as they can afford, rather than how old money thinks they should, is to avoid being mistaken for someone who doesn't have money at all.

Similarly, in a classless meritocracy, it's impossible to have higher than Status 5 unless you have Rank. But in fact, do multimillionaires with a job that could justify Rank live more lavishly than those without? I confess I don't know the world of multimillionaires that well, but it seems unlikely.

Thoughts?