Abstract Wealth Pyramid #3-44

[Polydamas]

The thread on independent income is getting a bit heated up but early on someone asked a good question about whether anyone had tried these rules out. Many people find that the Wealth / Cost of Living rules do not work very well for people with jobs at TL 6+, and that bookkeeping for your characters' everyday lives is not fun, and Abstract Wealth tries to provide an alternative.

On forum.rpg.net/ Shadowjack writes "'Alternate GURPS II,' I believe it is, has the Abstract Wealth rules, which I personally find invaluable. I was literally in the middle of trying to come up with similar rules myself when that issue came out, and I promptly ditched my attempt because that author had already done it cleaner and better." Someone has alternate wealth rules for GURPS 3e Revised. This is all that a quick DuckDuckGo turned up.

This is a thread about people's experience with these rules or similar rules in other systems, not to debate whether the rules in the Basic Set work well for people with jobs at TL 6+.

[maximara]

For those who aren't familiar with this system Wealth is turned into an attribute with 10 being the baseline.

Instead of keeping tract of how much wealth a character actually has with regards to buying stuff the player rolls against their wealth level and consults a Threshold Value table (based on TL) to determine how easily it is to actually purchase that item.

With the exception of a critical success and normal failure each purchase attempt results in effective Wealth getting a cumulative -1 for a set period of time.

Failure doesn't mean 'can't afford something' but more 'can't afford something or item isn't readily available'.

Real life examples I can think of are some of Nintendo's Amiibos or certain buildable Lego figures (Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker). Thanks to scalpers those were way over priced.

From what a reddit post said d20 Modern has a similar mechanic

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by maximara

From what a reddit post said d20 Modern has a similar mechanic

Marvel FASERP was the first place I saw this and it had rule that purchases 3 or more levels below your level were automatic and didn't penalize your level. Even this was too severe. It added up to "Tony Stark can always afford to buy lunch".

Any such system needs such a rule and the threshold needs to be set high enough that anybody who's not homeless can normally afford to buy lunch. Indeed it might be the primary useful characteristic of the system that "purchases below level X are automatic" rather than "It is y difficult to buy one expensive item per month".

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by maximara

Failure doesn't mean 'can't afford something' but more 'can't afford something or item isn't readily available'.

Or perhaps 'can't find at a price I can afford'. There are things I am not really looking to sale, but if Warren Buffett decided he really wanted a used Toyota I could part with it.

[Donny Brook]

I would never consider using this system. I find it, frankly, just silly that dice rolls would change the amount a character has in their wallet or bank account at any given moment. No setting I would ever devise or wish to play in would be so nebulous and indeterminate. Would you roll for how many bullets are in your gun? Or whether you have your sword at any given time?

[Flyndaran]

I think you're ignoring the cheap and trivial amounts for each wealth level.
Those would cover what's in your wallet or debit card.

Even then, failing to spend a large but not insane amount could simply be the bank flagging it as suspicious or any of the other realistic financial annoyances.
Sadly, I think it wouldn't be hard at all to come up with very plausible reasons why a character can't access their money.

That said, I'm also not a big fan of rolling for purchases in most games.

[CeeDub]

I'm a huge fan of Alternate Wealth, and use it for any campaign in which the PCs have at least a semi-settled life, i.e. not going from adventure-related windfall (loot and/or quest reward) to the next without any regular income. It usually works well enough, IF money management is way in the background of your setting.

However, it gets really clunky if your PCs are even a little out of the norm, financially speaking. Alternate Wealth needs better integration with existing advantages from Basic, especially Independent Income and Debt. Also, there are no rules for starting wealth. I think somebody proposed a number of free purchases, something like ten trivial, three normal, one expensive. Haven't tried that, yet. So far, I just eyeballed what seems reasonable.

Finally, I'm not sure low Wealth scores are priced fairly. -40 for Homeless vs. -25 for Dead Broke is quite the difference.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by CeeDub

Finally, I'm not sure low Wealth scores are priced fairly. -40 for Homeless vs. -25 for Dead Broke is quite the difference.

The 5-7 range (Homeless [-40], Destitute [-30], and Working Poor [-20]) is a little jarring given that the rest of the table is effectively the original table. I suspect it was an effort to make that range work while keeping 10 as average.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

I would never consider using this system. I find it, frankly, just silly that dice rolls would change the amount a character has in their wallet or bank account at any given moment. No setting I would ever devise or wish to play in would be so nebulous and indeterminate. Would you roll for how many bullets are in your gun? Or whether you have your sword at any given time?

For very many people in the real world today, how much cash + credit they have at a given moment is basically random and under the control of factors out of the scope of an adventure story. Nobody wants to simulate how their character is managing inflows and outflows to fund daily life ("Bob's washing machine broke and flooded his server room, but one of his debtors finally pays him for the work back in '04"), we do that when we are not gaming. And the cost of products often varies widely: I have seen the same grade of cloth sold for 1 shekel in a shop in a back street and 2 or 3 shekels in the touristy street 5 minutes by bicycle away.

And adventurers tend to be closer to 'working poor' than 'comfortable middle-class person with a good credit rating.'

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by CeeDub

Finally, I'm not sure low Wealth scores are priced fairly. -40 for Homeless vs. -25 for Dead Broke is quite the difference.

What do you mean? P. B25 lists "Dead Broke" as the lowest wealth level. The lowest Cost of Living on p. B265 is a homeless person, flophouse resident, or couch surfer. Edit: Pyramid #3-44 removes "Dead Broke" [-25] entirely and replaces it with a list of graduated wealth levels with Homeless the lowest, so do you mean that the lowest level in the two systems is priced differently?