Cost of Living Questions

[weby]

Originally Posted by VariousRen

Hmm, interesting. So there are no alternate rules in any of the pyramid issues that provide more in-depth rules for cost of living, job income, status, and so on? Maybe I'll sit down one night and work out some more detailed rules.

I think the basic idea would be to:

1. Scale CoL as a percent of TL, modified for the prosperity of the area you are.
   
2. Seperate jobs from status, and instead base them on skill plus a status modifier. It's harder to be hired if you don't know people or live the lifestyle they expect, but not impossible. There has to be some way for a Status 0 person to get a status 1 job so they can become status 1.
   
3. Introduce finer granularity into every day life within status levels, area for players to find a happy medium with risks and rewards.

I basically threw out the GURPS jobs/wealth/status rules and built my own.

Some basics:

In that wealth is 5 points/level and is looked up on the speed/range table as relative to 1. So the 1.5,2,3,5,7,10... progression.

Basic pay scales directly as the wealth. But you can try to get higher wealth level job by taking a penalty to the job search and monthly job roll. The penalty is quite complex, but simplified it is about -3/missing wealth level for "average cases", If you are bad at your job you can do the reverse to get a job that is below your wealth level and get a bonus that again averages to +3/extra wealth level.

Status is wealth/2 round down as base. It can then be modified from that.

Cost of living is based on wealth as base, but you can live at higher or lower wealth level if you wish, but that modifies your range of allowed statuses as relative to the base.