[DF] - Party wealth disparity

[Kromm]

DF offers an old-school take on delving. In the bad old days of gaming, delvers were generally self-interested and greedy, and didn't share without huge interest rates and/or unpleasant bargains. The few who weren't like that . . . were also clerics and monks and paladins, who started dirt-poor and/or lost their power if they owned more than they could carry. For the most part, money went along with the desire to accumulate and keep it, not with the goal of giving it away to anyone but a charity – and fellow PCs were explicitly not a charity. That was right in the rules!

Fast-forwarding many years, we have games like GURPS, where Wealth is a social trait representing connections, credit rating, investments, job history, and so on. You don't get Wealth by having lots of money. Rather, you have Wealth because of your degree of connectedness and influence, and those traits assure that you happen to have cash. In fact, aside from starting money, Wealth has little to do with gear . . . it's more of a shadow-Status that determines what jobs you can hold down and what lifestyle you can afford to maintain.

However, DF rewinds all that evolution. There's no society other than a vague "town," plus a bunch of professions and races with stereotyped views of one another. Wealth reverts back to "Gear, the buying and selling thereof." The social balancing factors are stripped away, so the only way to justify the trait having a point value is to give it other balancing factors. Resale of loot is one of these, and a good one. But another is a return to early FRPG views of Wealth wherein it's "every man for himself."

Naturally, you're free to dislike that outlook and not use it in your campaign! If so, you should either stop charging points for Wealth or reinstall all of the social freight that goes with it in non-DF games. By definition, of course, that takes your campaign outside DF. Thus, you won't find many alternative solutions within DF.