Abstract Wealth mechanics
- From: Ben Finney <ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 02 Nov 2008 09:24:03 +1100
Howdy all,
GURPS has the familiar “Wealth level” mechanic: a series of discrete
bands, measuring the sustainable wealth a person can access and
providing numbers to show how much currency that translates to.
That takes care of abstracting income levels, how much wealth a person
has access to, and the point cost of that trait, but it leaves the
*spending* of that money concrete and rooted in concrete G$ down to
the fractional amounts for every specific item.
While it's good to have such detail available if desired, for all the
groups I've been in this is far too detailed accounting to be fun. At
the other extreme, most groups I've been in ignore exchanges of money
altogether and simply hand-wave whether a purchase can be made or not.
I would like something in between: There *can* be a lot of excitement
in stories that turn on whether the characters can get enough wealth
together for some specific need; but most times, the story *doesn't*
go into tracking the actual changes in bank accounts or the market
value of anything, instead opting to convey a mostly-abstract sense of
*how difficult* the purchase is, versus *how capable* the characters
currently are at managing and accessing money.
Put that way, it points to an obvious solution: GURPS Success Rolls.
Take actual currency amounts out of the picture, and abstract wealth
to a system where a character's wealth is a characteristic (that can
be depleted and regained, somewhat like FP), attempts to purchase
something are made via Success Rolls against that characteristic, and
prices are expressed as Task Difficulty Modifiers. All the excitement
and flexibility of the core Success Roll mechanic, without the
fiddling expense-sheet-tracking of a concrete currency.
One reason I explicitly want to move away from having actual prices
*in* the mechanics is because, in my experience, that directly
encourages exactly the sort of coin-by-coin accounting that I want to
escape from.
Actual prices can be *correlated*, so that they can be used for
flavour descriptions, but I don't want mechanics to use actual prices
as *input* to anything.
This is the same for, e.g., tracking down a Contact: I have no
interest in using an NPC's actual itinerary to figure out whether they
can be contacted on this occasion and whether they want to meet the PC
this time. I want an abstract Frequency of Appearance roll, and then
we can *narrate* the effects that the NPC's itinerary had that led to
the result.
In other words, I'm quite happy for the narration of the set-up and
resolution to bandy thousands of credits and millions of francs, but
*only* as a way of description; the actual currency amounts should be
irrelevant to resolving the challenge with a die roll.
The interesting part of wealth in the game, for my groups, is whether
a character can meet the challenge to their immediate capacity to
purchase, not the accounting of actual prices. I'd like an optional
mechanic to do that smoothly with GURPS.
I'm happy to try writing such a system as a Pyramid article
submission, but it would be silly to start from scratch if someone has
been there before me (and would likely count against a new Pyramid
article covering similar ground).
Does such a thing already exist for GURPS? I've tried searching
Pyramid (oh how I wish there was a full-text archive search function)
but found nothing relevant.
--
\ “All television is educational television. The question is: |
`\ what is it teaching?” —Nicholas Johnson |
_o__) |
Ben Finney
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