Over at Kaijuville, Kaiju made a great post comparing a couple of different systems for tracking money in RPGs. (He just posted part 2 as well.) This is a topic near and dear to my heart, because I have been struggling with it for a couple of years.
To expand on his comparison, I'm going to present a couple other systems I like. Spycraft was forced to use something more abstract than just cash, because of how requisitioning gear for missions from your employer would work. Following up on that, the guys over at Crafty Games came up with a different abstract system for FantasyCraft.
Spycraft
Both versions of Spycraft use essentially the same method for tracking what resources a given character has available. The changes in 2.0 were mostly about how to figure out what items cost, adding more options, and the addition of a couple of subsystems.
The size of the bank accounts of the individual characters is largely irrelevant. After all, when spies go on missions, it is very rare that they are using their own money to do so. As such, the core of the gear system has to do with how much the characters are able to requisition from the quartermaster, not with how much they can save up. (One of the new options in 2.0 involves ways to run this if you are playing freelancers, a la A-Team.)
Each class gets a certain number of Budget Points and Gadget Points per level. This number is then modified by your Charisma (because being nice to Q gets you better stuff) and the importance of the mission you are going on, and used to calculate how much stuff you have. Budget Points are used to calculate your normal gear, such as guns and binoculars. Gadget Points are used to cover super-science gadgets, like laser watches and submarine cars. In addition to your mission load-out, each character also has "personal gear" that includes signature items (e.g., Bond's Walther PPK) and the contents of your standard "go bag" (so a thief always has rope and lock picks at the ready).
One of the interesting quirks to this system is that characters don't get to keep anything they recover on missions. If you bust a smuggling ring and recover a briefcase with $1M in it, that all goes back to the Agency. If you take down a bad guy with super-science gadgets of his own, you don't get to slip them in your pocket and take them home. This makes a great deal of sense for the genre. But, I can tell you, it can be hard for some gamers to swallow.
FantasyCraft
In the process of transforming a system designed for super-spies to one designed for fantasy heroes, the gear system certainly had to change. But, a straight-up cash system didn't fit with some of the design goals, most particularly that more and better gear should be influenced by class, level, and feats.
The solution was to split cash into two categories. You have "coin in hand" which you can spend freely during an adventure, and your "stake" which is the money you have set aside, invested, and basically intend for larger purchases down the line. You also have two relevant stats, Panache and Prudence. With a high Panache, it is assumed that you spend much of your money on a lavish lifestyle. You gain a bonus to certain interactions, and it determines how much coin you start each adventure with. Prudence, on the other hand, determines how well you manage your money over the long run. At the end of each adventure, only a certain percentage of your coin in hand, including any treasure you gained, can be moved into your stake for use in the future. All the rest of your loot is lost to the proverbial ale and whores (or at least spent on day to day expenses).
Bottom Line
Gear is tricky. If you go with a simple cash system, then you also need to track every purchase along the way. That smacks of Papers and Paychecks. If you go with an abstract Wealth stat, then it becomes possible to game the system. (The d20 Modern system could be exploited to generate infinite duck tape, because an item that cheap didn't require a roll, and therefore the purchase would always succeed.) If you look to ignore the issue as irrelevant, it becomes difficult to appropriately reflect the incredible power that money can wield. (World of Darkness, with its Resources merit, suffers from this to some extent.)
A wealth system should be able to handle several important story functions. The characters should be able to be stripped of their resources and forced to scrabble to survive. Common, everyday expenses should be able to be easily ignored. (These two goals are very difficult to reconcile.) The players should feel strongly rewarded when they either find a large treasure or get paid a large fee. A character should be able to be designated as "rich" mechanically, with significant bonuses as a result. The economy of the setting should either make sense within the rules, or be abstracted to the point that the characters have relatively little impact on the wider economy.
Finding a single mechanic that can elegantly handle all these needs is something of a Holy Grail. Finding one that can also be easily ported from a medieval society to a modern society then onto a post-apocalyptic society is probably impossible.
Do you have a favorite wealth system? Can you, shall we say, show me the money?
Great post, Marshall! I don't have the books for Spycraft or FantasyCraft, so I wasn't familiar with the systems. Thanks for explaining them.
ReplyDeleteI like the idea you mentioned about money serving story functions, exactly what I was thinking about with this. It's an interesting subject.
Thanks!
ReplyDeleteOne of the really interesting bits is to start looking at how money is treated in the source fiction. Take Buffy for example. Money is completely irrelevant for the first five seasons (except for one episode where Cordelia loses the family fortune). Then it becomes a central plot arc in season six. But, even then, it serves as a stressor for Buffy, and not something that is tracked. It would also have been really weird if Buffy decided to pay off the mortgage by killing a couple rich old vampires and taking their stuff.
Fictional characters seem to deal with money on one of only a few levels. Destitute, in which the character has effectively no money and can't even feed themselves. Poor, in which sub-optimal options must be used because the characters can't afford fancy things like plane tickets. Sufficient, in which any ordinary expenses can be easily covered, but problems cannot be solved by throwing money at them. Rich, which is just like Sufficient but with nicer accoutrements. And, finally, Moneyed, in which problems can be solved by dispatching staff, making phone calls, and whipping out a black American Express card (it is very rare that a protagonist is Moneyed).
Oddly enough, the challenge in any wealth system is finding clean ways to distinguish between Poor, Sufficient, and Rich. Destitute and Moneyed usually take care of themselves.