2 Unrelated questions: druid living expense and readying

[Polkageist]

Originally Posted by Dalin

For such a hardcore druid, I might just call it a druidic fee (or voluntary tithe) to the local circle of druids. But, if I were GM, I would just ask the player to come up with a rationale for it or pay character points for an advantage that exempts them from the usual cost of living. I don't know if there is anything canonical in the wider GURPS library for such an advantage, but I'm sure we could come up with something fair.

Oh, that's a good turnaround, if they're set on the theme of being an independent live-in-the-woods kinda wildling then sketch out what you're spending your $150/week on. It's not food or housing, because we're catching our own food and sleep in a tent so an excellent exercise to justify the deviation.

Yeah, yeah, you can also just roll Survival but that's boooring, or at least needing to have handy the cost of 2 days food & shelter plus healing to recover the lost HP when the occasional failure pops up. As a GM that's a bit of note-taking I'd assign to the PC, I think that's why the $150/week exists because it's really convenient.

Independent income as an advantage is a good offset, it wanders outside of DF and into general GURPS so ymmv on how appropriate it might be. Limiting it to JUST being able to offset the living costs is a good thing. Because it's weirdly linked with basic wealth as a percentage that gets gnarly so here's my quick take.

Alternative to "Wealthy": You're uncommonly good at living on the cheap. Maybe you hunt, catch, and gather all your food and sleep in a tree, or maybe you're just really good at scrounging and scraping and sneaking a snooze in unoccupied attics. However you do it, when you purchase the "Wealth" advantage use the effects one level lower than you've purchased (which means no starting cash or sell modifier 10 pts) and add the effect of never having to pay $150/week in upkeep.

Under the hood, independent income is both per-month and 1% of starting wealth. So for the $1000 starter, that's a whopping $600/month to cover living expenses or about 60 points. Yowza. But we're not going for cash-in-hand, so I'm more comfortable discounting that and eyeballing it at a weekly level AND using the $2000 you're not gonna get as a starting-cash standpoint means that 10 points for JUST that offset is fine.

edit: I just want to really re-emphasize how good of a question "What do you spend your $150/week upkeep on if not food and housing?" Be creative and cool, fun adventures and neat plot hooks come out of it!