Independent Income at later TL stages

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Varyon

This strikes me as much more appropriate. You'd need to adjust the suggested wages, however, as those are built roughly as "CoL + 10% Starting Wealth;" if you want to maintain that and have CoL be 80% of monthly wage, you'd need income to be right around 50% of Starting Wealth per month, which is... pretty freaking high.

I'd probably just note that this is really just applying the 80/20 rule to income as well as initial resources. I'd probably do something simpler for PCs such as "hourly income = base wealth/1,000; CoL = base wealth/10", so it takes 100 hours/month to cover your cost of living. This also means 1 level of independent income is worth 10 hours per month (1 point in less sleep would be half an hour a day or 15 hours per month, but less sleep doesn't count against your limit of 8 hours per day for long tasks; this in turn implies "can work long hours without penalties" is worth 1 point for +1 hour/day).

The 1/10 rule, while simple, does produce costs below survivable levels for Struggling at TL 0 and Poor at TL 1-3, so there might be a need to tweak things at TL 3 and lower.