Independent Income at later TL stages

[maximara]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

I don't know who Incanus is, but his premises in that article were fundamentally wrong.

His premises are sound its just that his solutions cause more problems then they solve. Despite efforts to fix it wealth is still kind of broken in GURPS

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

I've never heard of GURPS giving a standard for monthly income. Jobs are the closest I can think of and they vary.

I think they mean Typical Monthly Pay (B517) which, like Standard Wealth, is based on TL. "Actual pay at each TL varies within a range bracketed by the typical monthly pay of the previous TL and that of the next TL." The values are for workers of Average wealth.

This Typical Monthly Pay scale didn't exist in Classic.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

My own financial circumstances are impossible to represent with GURPS rules, at least without a complex build, counter-intuitive interpretations, and paying points twice for the same thing. The problem is not that my wealth and income are unusual. It is that I own my house.

I don't see that one as especially problematic. I just treat it as Independent Income equal to the rental value of the house, on the assumption that if you didn't own the house you'd be paying rent, so owning the house frees up the income that would otherwise go to paying rent. For some characters that's an oversimplification, of course.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I don't see that one as especially problematic. I just treat it as Independent Income equal to the rental value of the house, on the assumption that if you didn't own the house you'd be paying rent, so owning the house frees up the income that would otherwise go to paying rent. For some characters that's an oversimplification, of course.

Okay now. My annuity income and my house are Independent income. My furniture and car are what my cost-of-living provides me. What is my Wealth?

You are trying to use two orthogonal basis vectors to describe a one-dimensional phenomenon.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

Okay now. My annuity income and my house are Independent income. My furniture and car are what my cost-of-living provides me. What is my Wealth?

You are trying to use two orthogonal basis vectors to describe a one-dimensional phenomenon.

What GURPS calls "Wealth" has rather little to do with the real world meaning of the word.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

Okay now. My annuity income and my house are Independent income. My furniture and car are what my cost-of-living provides me. What is my Wealth?

♫ GURPS is not a simulator.
GURPS is not a simulator. ♫
♫ Hi-ho the derry-o,
GURPS is not a simulator. ♫

GURPS is not designed to try to recreate your finances in game form. That is not a bug; it is a feature.

• You pick your Wealth to represent your credit, the general state of your finances, and how other people identify you by your money.
• Your starting wealth is how much cash you start the game with, varying by Wealth and Technology Level.
• You pick your Status to represent how much lifestyle stuff you have and how people react to your station in society.
• Your Cost of Living, based on Status, is how much you have to pay each month to maintain that Status.
• Your job's income is how much money comes to you each month due to your job.
• Your job's Wealth, along with your Technology Level, defines the bracket of how much income it is likely to provide.
• Independent Income is how much money comes to you each month having nothing to do with your job.
• Debt is how much money you have to give away each month because you owe it to someone else.

You PICK these things to build the character you want to play. You do NOT plug in salaries and equity and to try to calculate Wealth, income, or anything else. This is not an economic simulator; it is a series of traits you take to play a character who operates with those traits.

That's it. That's all this is. There is no economic system behind it. It's just a bunch of traits to define your place in society and how much money and stuff you have. You set them to whatever best represents your vision of the character and once a month get or lose money. No more. It's not hard. It's not broken. It's there to give a bit of background verisimilitude to a collection of statistics that goes on adventures.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by whswhs

What GURPS calls "Wealth" has rather little to do with the real world meaning of the word.

Okay. So ignore the real-world meaning of the word and tell my what my Wealth is in GURPS' terms.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

♫ GURPS is not a simulator.
GURPS is not a simulator. ♫
♫ Hi-ho the derry-o,
GURPS is not a simulator. ♫

Go on. Patronise me. That's going to be fun.

You PICK these things to build the character you want to play.

Yes, and the hopeless tangle of false distinctions, incomplete analyses, overlapping definitions, contradictions, and lacunae usually means that the character I want to play is just as hard to define as a real person.

GURPS's representation system for the things surrounding Wealth is insufficiently expressive, but also over-determined and contradictory, so that there are some fairly ordinary situations that it cannot describe. That is a problem for describing characters in an RPG with it.

Its inability to describe my situation is an example, that provides specificity for the purpose of discussion.

• You pick your Wealth to represent your credit, the general state of your finances, and how other people identify you by your money.
• Your starting wealth is how much cash you start the game with, varying by Wealth and Technology Level.
• You pick your Status to represent how much lifestyle stuff you have and how people react to your station in society.
• Your Cost of Living, based on Status, is how much you have to pay each month to maintain that Status.
• Your job's income is how much money comes to you each month due to your job.
• Your job's Wealth, along with your Technology Level, defines the bracket of how much income it is likely to provide.
• Independent Income is how much money comes to you each month having nothing to do with your job.
• Debt is how much money you have to give away each month because you owe it to someone else.

That set of distinctions works very badly for a character whose starting cash is at odds with the general state of their finances. It works badly for characters whose status is maintains by a real property, a capital asset, or an hereditary privilege rather than by a recurrent expenditure. It works badly for any character whose job is non-existent, precarious, or at odds with the general state of their finances. It works badly for any character who comes into a significant reward or loot during play. Its use of capital sums to define the general states of characters' finances is confusing and misleading. And it isn't even simple. Why is the amount of money that you have to give away each month — or that you earn, or that you receive without working — not subsumed into "general state of your finances"?

♫ GURPS is not a simulator.
GURPS is not a simulator. ♫
♫ Hi-ho the derry-o,
GURPS is not a simulator. ♫

I put it to the reader that a general-purpose RPG that can precisely define the abilities of and assign a cost in generation for a psychic blurberry muffin, but that struggles with a retired householder who stuffed all his f***-off money into indexed annuities, has its priorities seriously out of whack.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Back in 3/e, perks had not yet been defined as a concept.

True but at least in the case of Mana Pool what classic called a "quirk" would be considered a perk in 4e. There may be other examples but that is the one I know of.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

I've never heard of GURPS giving a standard for monthly income. Jobs are the closest I can think of and they vary.

Campaigns, p.517.

It gives incomes for someone of average wealth at each Tech Level, and multipliers for those with more or less wealth (and these are the same as those for starting wealth), along with the expect Status of someone of that wealth and pay.

As it happens, the monthly incomes given equal Cost of Living for the expected Status (from B265) plus 1/10th of the starting wealth with that Wealth Level and TL.

It does discuss variations in pay rates, but these tables are taken as the standard (and thus inform the cost of magic items in Magic, etc.).

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

♫ GURPS is not a simulator.
GURPS is not a simulator. ♫
♫ Hi-ho the derry-o,
GURPS is not a simulator. ♫

GURPS is not designed to try to recreate your finances in game form. That is not a bug; it is a feature.

• You pick your Wealth to represent your credit, the general state of your finances, and how other people identify you by your money.
• Your starting wealth is how much cash you start the game with, varying by Wealth and Technology Level.
• You pick your Status to represent how much lifestyle stuff you have and how people react to your station in society.
• Your Cost of Living, based on Status, is how much you have to pay each month to maintain that Status.
• Your job's income is how much money comes to you each month due to your job.
• Your job's Wealth, along with your Technology Level, defines the bracket of how much income it is likely to provide.
• Independent Income is how much money comes to you each month having nothing to do with your job.
• Debt is how much money you have to give away each month because you owe it to someone else.

You PICK these things to build the character you want to play. You do NOT plug in salaries and equity and to try to calculate Wealth, income, or anything else. This is not an economic simulator; it is a series of traits you take to play a character who operates with those traits.

That's it. That's all this is. There is no economic system behind it. It's just a bunch of traits to define your place in society and how much money and stuff you have. You set them to whatever best represents your vision of the character and once a month get or lose money. No more. It's not hard. It's not broken. It's there to give a bit of background verisimilitude to a collection of statistics that goes on adventures.

Okay, let's look at a character from my campaign, which is set at TL10.

Over the years he's accumulated a lot of money. To reflect that he's bought Multimillionaire 1. He has Status 2 from Wealth, and has never bought more.

After a recent adventure went bad, His current assets are worth about $30M, so he's under the floor for a Multimillionare. That's fine, he'll drop in value as his Wealth drops to Filthy Rich (and if he later rises to MM1 again I won't charge him the points over again), and presumably drop to Status 1 if he doesn't pay points to retain it.

Currently he's employed at a job that supports Status 1 (and thus pays as a 'Comfortable' level), and thus earns $11,200/month.

All that's fairly clear, but now it gets messy. The rules say his monthly expenses should be $3,000/month at Status 2. So presumably he gets to save $8,200/month (despite living at a status level higher than his pay is supposed to be good for). Note that if he was actually Comfortable and Status 1, he could save up enough money to double his capital value in under a year.

Next problem: The player wants to invest some money to justify buying Independent Income. At 'only Filthy Rich 1% of starting cash/month is $50K x 100 x .01 = $50K/month, or $600K/year. At a 5% return per annum, that requires $6M in investment. Now, my player's character can afford that, but someone just at the floor ($5M) hasn't a hope, and that's to support an investment that's worth 1 point!

Also note that that one point of II brings in about double the monthly pay that being Wealthy (20 points) brings, and supposedly nearly covers the monthly expenses of Status 4 (what Filthy Rich people are expected to have).

To work even as a reasonable descriptive tool, it needs to not break when players want to do quite sensible things, and needs to provide some guidelines as to how to do these things.

Firstly, living costs should scale with TL, and in such a way that increasing wealth as TL rises doesn't let PCs save vast sums with ease. Secondly, II and Wealth need to not scale together so strongly because it makes huge levels of 'free' income very cheap for rich characters and Wealth already brings enough benefits. There are other problems, but those are the two that always leap out at me (and which consistently come up in my game).