Wealth Ranks

[JonSetanta]

Wealth Ranks

Version 1

Rank # (category of wealth)
Baseline (minimum needed to reach rank #)
Maximum (point in which expenses match income, a stable cap on wealth)
Free (purchases of this amount or less are free once Baseline is met and held)


Rank 1 (levels 1 to 5)
Baseline 1000
Maximum 10000
Free 500 under

Rank 2 (levels 6 to 10)
Baseline 10000
Maximum 50000
Free 5000 under

Rank 3 (levels 11 to 15)
Baseline 50000
Maximum 200000
Free 25000 under

Rank 4 (levels 16 to 20)
Baseline 250000
Maximum 750000
Free 125000 under

Rank 5 (levels 21 to 25)
Baseline 750000
Maximum 1000000
Free 375000 under


This is an attempt to simplify expenses in D&D. The ability to make minor purchases for free will hopefully negate the detailed accounting required in many situations.

Here's the original wealth-by-level chart.

2 900
3 2700
4 5400
5 9000
6 13000
7 19000
8 27000
9 36000
10 49000
11 66000
12 88000
13 110000
14 150000
15 200000
16 260000
17 340000
18 440000
19 580000
20 760000

Version 2 (RobbyPants)


Rank 1 (levels 1 to 5)
Baseline 1000
Maximum 10000
Free 100 under

Rank 2 (levels 6 to 10)
Baseline 10000
Maximum 50000
Free 1000 under

Rank 3 (levels 11 to 15)
Baseline 50000
Maximum 200000
Free 5000 under

Rank 4 (levels 16 to 20)
Baseline 250000
Maximum 750000
Free 25000 under

Rank 5 (levels 21 to 25)
Baseline 750000
Maximum 1000000
Free 75000 under

[RobbyPants]

It seems that having the Free value be half of the Baseline value is a bit high to me. I'd probably go with something closer to a fifth or tenth. So, once you hit your 1,000 mark, things that are 100 or 200 are free. Not 500.

Even still, I've never found the simple subtraction of money that difficult, so I've never been able to fully jump on board systems like this. It always irks me thinking about buying a near infinite amount of "free" things. I mean, maybe if the cost is trivially low, but even 10% of your wealth is quite noticeable.

[Username17]

Wealth Level systems always mean that getting the same treasures in different orders end up with you getting different amounts of wealth at the end. That's weird, and I'm unconvinced that it's desirable.

What would probably be better is having a lifestyle level where you had a certain amount of disposable income each adventure. It is true that you don't really want to concern yourself with the cost of bread mos of the time. But straight up D20 Modern style wealth levels simply works very poorly.

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

So how about wealth as a function of a saving throw or skill check? You can modify it, and if you make the check, your wealth level can afford it at this time. If you fail the check, either the item wasn't available or this particular market you're in priced it out of your range. You can sacrifice a single point of your wealth statistic to auto-pass a check (or pass a check that you could have made but failed the roll on).

Really quickly simple stuff like bread would be an auto-roll, and that occasional potion of healing/whatever wouldn't be an issue. Your wealth check would be a reflection of investments, holdings, letters of credit, and the ilk.

You'd have to build the rules so that a party couldn't take turns buying a potion of healing, one at a time, auto-succeeding, and end up with 200 of them. You'd also have to figure out some way to allow wealth to increase via selling shit.

[Ice9]

Small stuff is really where it breaks down. Saying that "a Potion of Heroism is free at this wealth level, therefore enough potions to equip an entire army are also free (or worthless, if you're trying to sell them)" is just a non-starter for most groups. But on the other hand, what constitutes buying a "group" of things? If you buy them a minute apart? A day? A week?

Also, the random roll is a bit variable for anything that isn't very rare. The cost of most things is not that unpredictable.

[PhoneLobster]

You know... if you just want to cut down on accounting as a simple overlay to d20 D&D wealth by level stuff...

...you could just do it with really basic numbers reform. D&D just uses far too large numbers for gold piece values. You could readily run around reseting GP prices to like 1000th their current value or something and just give out less gold coins and out of nowhere you have significantly less accounting.

And if you still want "lol huge!" piles of coins (and gold ones specifically) you should then just change the basic unit of game currency at some point in the early levels to become The "Treasure" and just have it be, well, about 1000GP or more in value. And when players loot some place you say "you got 2 Treasures!" and smaller numbers are recorded all around, and if you ever care about smaller amounts of cash in any significant way you can break a treasure into it's small change if you HAVE to, and that would work pretty well.

[JonSetanta]

I want to avoid wealth checks, so this is the best I could come up with concerning free minor expenses.

[Caedrus]

Wealth Level systems always mean that getting the same treasures in different orders end up with you getting different amounts of wealth at the end. That's weird, and I'm unconvinced that it's desirable.

What would probably be better is having a lifestyle level where you had a certain amount of disposable income each adventure. It is true that you don't really want to concern yourself with the cost of bread mos of the time. But straight up D20 Modern style wealth levels simply works very poorly.

-Username17

So what would you suggest instead?

[Sashi]

The simplest thing is to just literally say "Here are the things who's cost you don't have to track, and how often you don't have to track them."

[RobbyPants]

Wealth Level systems always mean that getting the same treasures in different orders end up with you getting different amounts of wealth at the end. That's weird, and I'm unconvinced that it's desirable.

What would probably be better is having a lifestyle level where you had a certain amount of disposable income each adventure. It is true that you don't really want to concern yourself with the cost of bread mos of the time. But straight up D20 Modern style wealth levels simply works very poorly.

-Username17

So what would you suggest instead?

Personally, I'd say just track big expenses as normal, and just don't worry about mundane crap at a certain level. If your level 1 rat-stabbing game finds it important to track rations and nights spent at flea-beds, then you have to track those costs with your copper and silver coins. Once you get the the point where you have tons of gold, then you stop worrying about them as well as stuff like five-star hotels.

So, rather than saying "anything under X is free", just say any room, board, and general supplies under X is free, for that one person.

The simplest thing is to just literally say "Here are the things who's cost you don't have to track, and how often you don't have to track them."

Then you're running a "timer" on all of your gear.

"Okay. I bought 10 potions, so I have to wait one week before I can buy them again"

How is that less bookkeeping than saying: "Ten potions? That's 1,000 gp"?

[JonSetanta]

I reasoned that large amounts of relatively cheap shit (minor potions, 10-foot ladders, chickens) are free for certain benchmarks and can't be resold in mass quantities easily due to the ability of everyone else in the same rank or higher easily gaining their own.
No demand, you know. Drops the value right out the bottom.

The only thing regulating quantity for higher wealth ranks is volume and availability.
You can't, say, buy 1000 pigs from a town if they only have 5. That's just common sense.

I'm not even considering Wish Economy with that. Seriously, fuck that. Consider wealth ranks as "mundane cash" for "mundane people". Peasants, lords, kings, etc.

[RobbyPants]

Yeah, then something like this could work. I'm still not sure it's that much more simple, but I think it could be workable.

[Grek]

Having tried to do something like this in the past, I can heartily recomend that you do not. It isn't going to work well.

[JonSetanta]

Having tried to do something like this in the past, I can heartily recomend that you do not. It isn't going to work well.

.. hmm

[Caedrus]

Wealth Level systems always mean that getting the same treasures in different orders end up with you getting different amounts of wealth at the end. That's weird, and I'm unconvinced that it's desirable.

What would probably be better is having a lifestyle level where you had a certain amount of disposable income each adventure. It is true that you don't really want to concern yourself with the cost of bread mos of the time. But straight up D20 Modern style wealth levels simply works very poorly.

-Username17

So what would you suggest instead?

Personally, I'd say just track big expenses as normal, and just don't worry about mundane crap at a certain level. If your level 1 rat-stabbing game finds it important to track rations and nights spent at flea-beds, then you have to track those costs with your copper and silver coins. Once you get the the point where you have tons of gold, then you stop worrying about them as well as stuff like five-star hotels.

So, rather than saying "anything under X is free", just say any room, board, and general supplies under X is free, for that one person.

How do you address the weird metagamey issue of "buying stuff in different orders to optimize your wealth"?

[RobbyPants]

That's why I've never been a fan of these systems from the start. It seems, either you simply tally your gold as you spend it, or you try to gain some level of simplicity with "wealth ranks" in exchange for weird metagame side-effects.

I've yet to see a wealth system that doesn't have some side effect or that isn't more complicated than simply subtracting COST from TOTAL.


Edit:
I supposed I should answer your actual question instead of sidestepping it.

Assuming you were talking about my last suggestion, my answer is: it doesn't matter. I'm not talking about big purchases here. I'm only talking about downtime expenditures and replacing expendables. For regular "large" purchases, they're run normally. So the idea is, you just don't worry about buying enough arrows for the adventure, but that doesn't give you infinity arrows to dole out to armies.

As for the "order" you buy things it, that has to do with your relative wealth. When you're stabbing rats in the face because you're level 1, you get to stay at flea-bag inns for free, because that's not fun to track. You don't get to stay at five-star hotels without paying, because you don't have that sort of expendible income. When you're fighting dozens of demons, you can stay at any hotel you want for "free" (you're paying, but we just aren't tracking it), because you have that much money.

[JonSetanta]

The important part about being able to buy vast amounts of (lower rank) cheap jank is that the people with better wealth ranks don't fucking care.

It's not represented by mechanics, but surely part of the setting itself and implied rules.

There's nothing stopping Bill Gates from buying every iPod he can get his hands on. Millions, billions of iPods, but why?
He doesn't give a shit.
Maybe one, perhaps, maybe a few more as gifts for friends and family, and it surely wouldn't cost him anything, but there's no point for him.
That's something that can't be represented by numbers. It's a part of personality and motive, to which I can't assign ranks and point values.

[Username17]

The best such system I've seen is Shadowrun's. It was written in 1989 and has pretty much stayed the same ever since. You pay a flat fee every month as upkeep on your lifestyle and then you don't bother keeping track of how much you spend on waffles, tennis shoes, rent, or fuel. It's simple, it works, it speeds up play, and metagame effects are minimal.

-Username17

[hogarth]

The best such system I've seen is Shadowrun's. It was written in 1989 and has pretty much stayed the same ever since. You pay a flat fee every month as upkeep on your lifestyle and then you don't bother keeping track of how much you spend on waffles, tennis shoes, rent, or fuel. It's simple, it works, it speeds up play, and metagame effects are minimal.

-Username17

Does the wealth system eventually allow you to afford all of the level 1 cybernetic implants you want (say), but restricts you on the level 4 cybernetic implants? (Obviously I've never played Shadowrun, so I'm just making up expensive player character upgrades.) Because that's the kind of system sigma999 is proposing.

Seriously, the number of games (of any genre) where the GM had us keep track of "upkeep" stuff is vanishingly small, so having a specific rule for that kind of stuff is pretty unimportant in my book.

[JonSetanta]

The best such system I've seen is Shadowrun's. It was written in 1989 and has pretty much stayed the same ever since. You pay a flat fee every month as upkeep on your lifestyle and then you don't bother keeping track of how much you spend on waffles, tennis shoes, rent, or fuel. It's simple, it works, it speeds up play, and metagame effects are minimal.

-Username17

From what, 4e? I made a character for that edition recently and buying cybernetics was like Accounting 101 all over again (which I failed)

[Username17]

No. In SR, you have to pay for all your cybernetic implants. I have never seen a system where you could buy level 4 items for money but level 1 items were free and yet level 4 items cost some fixed multiple of level 1 items that actually worked. I don't think that can work.

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

Well, there is sort of a system that does that in the GrimDark games. Sort of. Wealth is treated like a skill, and purchasing things is a skill check. Say you have a wealth of 50, and you want a crate of las pistols. They're common, and relatively inexpensive, so it's a +30 roll to acquire. You roll under 80, you get the las pistols. Failure means the local economy can't support your purchase/purchases (I buy the farm equipment to trade for focusing crystals, which I trade for power cells, which I trade for a crate of las pistols)

However, if you want a crate of bolters, those are rare, and a lot more expensive, so you're looking at a -20 difficult roll.

You can burn 5% of your skill to auto-succeed, representing you burning tangible, persistent income sources to achieve short term results.

It does work, and at a certain point you auto-succeed on cheaper stuff. Still, it's fiddly, and requires a lot of text in a book to explain. It's also an "epic level" option for Inquisitors, and a standard option for theoretically rich Rogue Traders.

[PhoneLobster]

It sounds exactly like the sort of stuff Frank is talking about.

Someone should dig up that d20 modern wealth system thread. I'm pretty sure there was one around here...

I think I remember covering some of the basic details of how their wealth check system (sounding alot like the one you describe) created infinite wealth and was generally totally borked.

Best I can find is some thread where I tried to explain this stuff to the god damn "Brilliant Gameologists" unsurprisingly their general response was "wait you mean just saying the d20modern wealth system works isn't actually an argument as to how it works? wtf? You is blowing my mindz!".

So that may not be of much direct use.

Edit: I seem to have found a local thread here. Some brief mention and dismissal of d20modern wealth system, then some guy proposes his "fixed" wealth check system and I eventually get really rather annoyed with him.

[hogarth]

No. In SR, you have to pay for all your cybernetic implants. I have never seen a system where you could buy level 4 items for money but level 1 items were free and yet level 4 items cost some fixed multiple of level 1 items that actually worked. I don't think that can work.

I agree that it doesn't work, but it really doesn't seem all that different from your proposed "Wish" economy (i.e. at a given point, you can suddenly afford all items of level X-1 or less and you have to pay for items of level X or higher).

[Username17]

No. In SR, you have to pay for all your cybernetic implants. I have never seen a system where you could buy level 4 items for money but level 1 items were free and yet level 4 items cost some fixed multiple of level 1 items that actually worked. I don't think that can work.

I agree that it doesn't work, but it really doesn't seem all that different from your proposed "Wish" economy (i.e. at a given point, you can suddenly afford all items of level X-1 or less and you have to pay for items of level X or higher).

The post wish economy works because the things that you don't track also don't "add up" to things you do.

-Username17