Abstract wealth systems pretty much by definition involve non-reciprocality. The amount that goes in is not going to equal the amount that comes out, because it is abstract. Now that doesn't have to be especially abusable. If you abstract peoples' living expenses into something that rounds off their copper pieces every month, people are relatively unlikely to pool their copper pieces and redistribute them so that the rounding removes the lowest number of copper pieces. I mean, they could do that, and I've even met players who would want to. But for the most part, it's just not worth it.Krusk wrote:I had a post on how to have cake and eat it, but then realized I'm like Mr. McDuck. My big hurdle with d20 modern and other similar abstract systems is the idea that I can buy infinate cans of coke, but never afford a single 12 pack.Lago PARANOIA wrote:An abstract wealth system would probably not satisfy these people.
There is always something cheap, I want infinate of that I can get, but something expensive I want 1 of I can't afford. In a system where I track each income and expense, I can save for the 1 item and get it. I can also get a reasonable ammount of the thing I wanted infinate of.
The only "limiter" I can think of is to say "This month you can buy 11 cans of coke" but in that system I am just tracking [purchases] instead of dollars and really thats the same thing.
Can anyone help me out with this?
With systems in which inputs and outputs are abstracted, you're pretty much guaranteed to have the value of things that people get out of the system be inconsistent, and when that happens people who are intent on gaming the system will do so and get more out of than people who don't. And then the question is whether whatever people are doing to juice the system is something that "makes sense" in whatever context.
Let's say you had a system where people just had an "abstract" budget of things that they could get on a weekly basis at a certain wealth level. Getting a healing wand would break that budget and eat into your principal, but getting a healing potion every week wouldn't. So a character who bought and saved a healing potion every week would be better off than a character who simply bought a more expensive healing wand - even though the healing wand costs less overall. That would actually "make sense" in that getting a healing potion is a relatively small expense and can probably be budgeted around by having less whores and carriage rides or something, while a single large purchase like the healing wand literally couldn't come out of the walking around money and would have to eat into the mattress money or something.
Alternately, let's say that we're talking about something more like D20 Modern, only instead of having that represent gold pieces we're using it for something that fits better like favors. You are mechanically rewarded for doing someone a series of increasingly large favors rather than the other way around, which actually makes sense because doing favors for people actually works like that. And if you owe the Godfather big enough, his guys will show up and eat your pizza and won't even count that against your debt. Again, that "makes sense" in the favors context.
So there are ways to make it work, but you have to match the results the abstraction system suggests to the behaviors you want to encourage. For the "favor levels" system, it actually encourages you to do little favors for people before you do big favors for them (and by extension probably means that people won't do big favors for people they don't know well). That's fine. For the "gold levels" it encourages you to buy an ass tonne of trade goods before buying a boat, which is kind of weird. Even though it's essentially the same system, the different framing makes it either acceptable or unacceptable.
-Username17
