Abstract Wealth

[MGuy]

I'm probably going to be working on deciding about how much stuff I expect players to buy in my system sooner or later and I am very sure I'm going to be abstracting wealth in some way. I couldn't immediately find a thread covering how to go about abstracting wealth well and can only find it being talked about in threads about other things. I figure it'd be good to have a thread explicitly for it so that it can be talked about at length and easily searchable in the future. Also so it doesn't eat up the property thread.

[PhoneLobster]

This is one of those topics I'm actually interested in so I have too many different things to say about it.

So rather than swamp your thread in one go with all of that...

I think before abstracting wealth you need to know what your goals are.

Having currency and shopping isn't bad in and of itself. It's a major draw and engagement for players. To take home loot and cash it in for cool stuff.

It's just traditionally had some pretty flawed implementations and inexplicably bad PR.

In the end I use abstraction in wealth mechanics basically just to keep the numbers relatively low, keep the accounting manageable and make awarding items and cash as loot a functional core of the game play.

I think there is room to use abstraction in wealth mechanics to do other things like replace simple currency entirely.

There could be arguments to make for systems that just award item based power, fortresses, palaces, whatever by level advancement.

Or a system that just lets you pick whatever stuff you like that is equal to or lower than some abstracted slow advancing low granularity wealth value.

The question is what advantage are you attempting to wring out and are you avoiding the potential pitfalls.

Or are you doing what various rpgs have for some reason done and just introducing exciting new pitfalls out of nowhere for no reason whatsoever.

[MGuy]

A few of the things I'm asking myself when I decide to do abstraction is firstly:
What do wealth systems do in an RPG?
An obvious question but it's what helps me focus on what ideas to explore with it. So what do they do? They are a means of exchange for characters to get stuff. Whatever bells and whistles I attach to it from here, that's the core use I get out of even caring about wealth.

So next Why abstract it?
Because I want to cut down on bean counting. The less accounting players have to do there the more room it affords me to slip in more interesting accounting elsewhere.

What do I want it to do in this RPG?
I want it to be a measure of how easily characters can acquire and maintain various things in the game without having to adventure for them. Therefore I expect there will be things characters will have next to no problem acquiring and things characters will have more trouble attaining. I also expect what is easy to get and what is more difficult to get to vary depending on the game state. I'm going to be doing a swashbuckling style action/adventure thing with the game so primarily I want wealth to also tie into this somehow. I also want characters to have concerns outside of their next adventure/combat encounter and will likely have to make considerations for that.

What do players want it to do?
Players tend to want to leverage wealth for personal gain. MOST players almost exclusively only care about wealth as far as it allows them to do better in the game. Since DnD's game is focused on combat so too will the player's interest in how much money they have be focused primarily around leveraging it to make them better at the combat game. If I want my game to be more than just a series of combat encounters I'll also have to make considerations for the player's wealth to be able to aid them there. The main reason players tend to be 'hobos' is because owning a house doesn't help them with combat. I'm going to want to have players want to own a house both to help them in combat and to help them in other facets of the game.

What should be easy to obtain and what should be difficult to obtain?
Save for luxury items, there are many things of low value I don't mind characters getting 'effectively' infinite amounts of. The necessary ammo for their gear, traveling rations, bedrolls, etc all of these things are fine for the character to have consistent access to. What probably needs to be more difficult to acquire are things that allow the character more access and control over the world. The thing where as characters level up they need actual structures to gain access to/maintain their higher level abilities for example is a good way to blend access to wealth with adventuring as to acquire and maintain such an asset wealth is required.

How easily should players be able to gain more wealth?
Players' access to wealth should primarily be related to their personal progress in the game. As the players become more personally capable their access to the higher tiers of wealth becomes tenable and in certain ways necessary. I'm thinking soft cap here. That players 'might' get richer than they are supposed to be but not by much and ideally, even if they do it doesn't translate to personal power. Mostly players shouldn't be able to 'win' the game no matter how personally wealthy they might get.

This goes on for a while after this.
I have more things I've thought about and a lot more to decide. Like how to handle increasing wealth outside of adventuring. How trading assets in interacts with their wealth. How to determine under what conditions players will lose wealth (maintaining too many assets, getting robbed, sanctions, loss of assets via disaster, etc). How to create a secondary market for magic pants/artifacts. A way to discourage people from focusing on building wealth instead of actually playing the game.

I don't have a 'whole' system done yet but I've got scattered ideas and notes. Right now I'm thinking of just treating assets like equipment that you can buy, sell, or swap out just with a longer timer before anything is extracted from them. The assets that generate wealth will act like 'equipment slots' for assets that don't generate wealth. So in order to run your diabolic cabal you need to run a bank to cover the expenses. I suspect I'll do most maintenance costs this way. Expanding/building an asset to the next tier would probably require bonus wealth of some sort, probably something that I would expect to be earned through regular play of the game.

Anyway I've not actually gotten to the point where I'm nailing these things in place so it's all up in the air and subject to change as I progress.

[ETortoise]

Do you see wealth as an individual stat, or as a group stat? If wealth is individual, then you need to write rules for PCs helping each other buy stuff. Also, what happens when the group finds a big pile of cash? A small pile of cash?

I am interested in abstracting wealth away from coins. I like to give treasure in the form of goods because I think it’s more fun to find exotic spices than just coins. But most of the time players just want to know the GP value and maybe the weight.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

This is relevant to my interests, as I also want to minimize bean counting. What you've got me curious about is how abstract wealth can relate to crafting items. Let's say that we do away with all non-abstract wealth so people don't even have to worry about how much currency they have anymore - in this scenario, you can buy a shitty sword with Wealth 1 or something. If you have Wealth 1, can you just create that same shitty sword? What about if you wanted to upgrade that sword to something actually usable after you've already made it? What about if you want to create things that aren't usually available in stores?

If I have a fistful of dragon crystals and I want to make my shitty sword into the Dragon Death Dealer +5, am I just out of luck if I don't have the proper Wealth but someone else in the party does?

[Mechalich]

I don't have a 'whole' system done yet but I've got scattered ideas and notes. Right now I'm thinking of just treating assets like equipment that you can buy, sell, or swap out just with a longer timer before anything is extracted from them. The assets that generate wealth will act like 'equipment slots' for assets that don't generate wealth.

I think, for the use of this sort of system, you want to make it so that your fictional society is 'cash poor.' As in it is difficult to convert any amount of cash directly into 'wealth' because there's simply not a lot of cash around and most of the wealth represents physical assets like land, livestock, ships, and buildings.

Expanding/building an asset to the next tier would probably require bonus wealth of some sort, probably something that I would expect to be earned through regular play of the game.

This seems to be maintaining a difference between the maintenance costs and the capital expenses of building a new thing. If the society is cash poor, them adding to an asset means finding a way to convert a pile of cash into something actually useful in society, which means finding a buyer, which takes a certain baseline level of wealth to contact in the first place, so you can build your wealth ladder in this way.

Essentially, I think it's very important, in this scenario, to tie wealth closely to social class, so that as the characters gain go up in level they also ascend social tiers. Many East Asian societies had a model for this, through their complex court rank setups, and this applied to warriors who would gain increased court rank alongside their increased military rank, and would be expected to build bigger houses and maintain larger households as a consequence.

[JigokuBosatsu]

Sailors or soldiers or miners or whoever blowing their coin on drink, flesh, etc. before they go back out on another "adventure" is a pretty old thing, and it certainly is a big trope in fantasy. So I can see a lot of people viewing that as an integral part of being an adventurer. Hell, look at how popular Darkest Dungeon is- that's basically half the game. And interestingly enough, it matches pretty well with the past three posts in that all the treasure you pick up is pretty abstract- either converted to coin, generic upgrade material, or in the case of the Antiquarian generic "antiques". The exception to all this is of course the trinkets you get that are primarily useful in combat and often class-specific.

I... don't know where I was going with that. I will say that a blend of all of the above appeals to me the most. Find fine spices as loot? While it might have a cool fluff description, it just adds to the value of your haul. The incredibly tasty and rare Black Turmeric of Lost Flarblenutz? Worth a lot more but you have to find a specific buyer. Loot a badass spear from the goblin chieftain? You can use it as a backup weapon or a trade good but in general shouldn't have to think too much about it. Find the Lich Baron's Flail? Sure, you might sell it for a small fortune to a collector or maybe you donate it to the temple of Wilf the Wargod. That will get you way more blessings and resurrections than an equivalent amount of "wealth" represented by spices.

[MGuy]

This is relevant to my interests, as I also want to minimize bean counting. What you've got me curious about is how abstract wealth can relate to crafting items. Let's say that we do away with all non-abstract wealth so people don't even have to worry about how much currency they have anymore - in this scenario, you can buy a shitty sword with Wealth 1 or something. If you have Wealth 1, can you just create that same shitty sword? What about if you wanted to upgrade that sword to something actually usable after you've already made it? What about if you want to create things that aren't usually available in stores?

If I have a fistful of dragon crystals and I want to make my shitty sword into the Dragon Death Dealer +5, am I just out of luck if I don't have the proper Wealth but someone else in the party does?

Keep in mind that my system for this isn't complete and I'm not working on wealth in it at the moment. These are just ruminations. Anything I say about it will just be what I think the best solution is 'right now'.

So about crafting. There's not an appreciable difference between creating a wealth 1 item vs buying it save for convenience. If you make it yourself you can churn a thing out whenever you want, wherever you have the ability to. There aren't +number items in my game for reasons but in the spirit of what you're saying creating a higher tier item requires just having access to whatever you need to create that higher tier item. So if you're still at wealth 1 but you have tier 2 crafting materials you can rent out the local guild's tier 2 facility and create an item that would normally require wealth 2 to acquire. So t2 item on a w1 budget.

Creating something that isn't available in regular markets is its own thing that doesn't matter in terms of interacting with the wealth system. That's a question for the crafting thing which I 'am' idly working on though it's only being done because I'm working on the skills in my game. Upgrading an item is likewise a crafting concern.

To address other things brought up. I'm not actually sure how I should approach players pooling their wealth. Likely it'll come to dividing the wealth cost of something between players but that might prove difficult if I'm working with very small numbers. Same thing with what happens if players decide to split shouldering the burden of maintaining a thing.

So that being said wealth will be abstract enough that yes, spices, fine cloth, and jewelry picked up and not used will just be absorbed into being part of your wealth. Cool fluff yes but just wealth. Darkest Dungeon and Blade in the Dark has carousing as a thing and I've already started writing up how doing it is also a necessary part of the life of an adventurer. That's separate from wealth though. It's more like a separate lifestyle/self maintenance thing.

Now Assets themselves will be a separate thing from wealth of course. Wealth is a thing you use to trade for goods. Assets instead produce a thing. Assets in his game will be more than just structures. Vehicles, businesses/organizations, family, friends, and renown will be assets that provide certain benefits and require maintenance. That means yes, having a family carries with it a mechanical benefit that helps the character out in game.

[PhoneLobster]

Ok I'm going to just restrain myself to pick two things to say about wealth one of which is relevant to current discussion and one of which isn't.

Wealth Vs Availability
OK. So wealth and crafting. What's the point. I have one idea and it's pretty much part of something I've been doing for a while.

Availability limitations.

Elf store in elf town sells items and skills culturally preferred by elves, and like randomly this one dwarf axe someone recently pawned. Orc shop in orc town sells an entirely different range of items.

The items you find in the ancient human ruins are something else entirely, but you just get what you find no picking and choosing at all.

Or hey maybe you could just make some items?

Now all these items might be of similar, even identical values. The elf spear isn't especially better or worse than the orc sword or the ruin glaive or the hand crafted man catcher. I mean they ARE different, you MIGHT care about the specifics, but more broadly, they are relatively equivalent, it's fine to call them equal.

If you go look up the game rules they might even all appear on the same list of "level appropriate items page 2" or whatever.

The point is that players don't shop off the entire list of everything game mechanically possible every time they shop, and sometimes they just find something lying on the ground and get no choice at all.

You don't limit item availability to be a dick, you don't pretend it's about game balance, it's just a way of differentiating cultural flavor for different communities and making things interestingly variable.

If a player really wants a man catcher, you let them have one, maybe they have to make it or commission a smith, or maybe they just make it clear to you and you just make arrangements that they either find one or it turns up in the bargain bin at a store one day. But in the mean time availability for any item varies.

The end result is intended to be something like...
item power Finding=Shopping=Crafting
item cost Finding Items=Finding Cash to Spend on Items=Finding cash to craft items =Finding materials to craft items
convenience Finding>Shopping>Crafting
choice Crafting>Shopping>Finding

It leaves a place for crafting that isn't discount item power or purely wasting your time. It's not really what limiting item availability is FOR but it can do that too.

Wealth Vs Poverty
It's a nice idea to know what looking poor looks like in your system. Is it a thing that's not for the PCs? If so how is it carefully separated? If it is for the PCs, or if some form of poverty is for the PCs at some point of play, what is that intended to do and look like?

OK. So I started out with, yes there is a level of economic interaction that isn't for PCs I'm... kinda done with PCs needing to track expenses for buying a piece of meat on a stick snack at the market place.

I think I'm kinda fine with those being "free" and I am DEFINITELY not wanting to have to scale the actual currency I first start tracking so it has units small enough to cover "a bag of peanuts" and "all your expensive professional adventuring tools" on the same scale. If a bag of peanuts costs even 1 unit of the same currency type as the pretty cool armor you might even end up wearing for most of an entire tier of your career... what the hell scale of numbers will your "heavy paladin knight plate mail" or whatever cost? I mean. Numbers were meant to stay low damnit.

So no, the real cheapskate junk that is FREE. And the way the game does that is say "Hey there is this OTHER currency, a currency below the currency you care about".

The proper first official PC Tier of currency is "Coins" because I didn't want to do the whole gold/copper/pewter/paper-mache coins thing. Sure poor peasants might rub some proper Coins together for the big investments, like that one metal tool they need for farming with. But in the end Coins are really for Low Tier characters to buy proper combat gear and things adventurers might spend money on. The REAL poors have a lesser currency.

So Small Change is a currency PCs will basically never track and the game rules don't feel the need to discuss in a more than cursory manner. Super poor NPCs in theory are trading in the stuff and actually might have limits for it but for PCs "Small Change" is basically a binary state. If they have ANY other currency even a SINGLE "Coin"... then they have small change and can have any number of fried lizards on sticks at the market place. So I guess in practice the Small Change represents and completely replaces something in between a Copper Piece and a Macaroni Piece, which were always annoying and pointless to count.

But what about Poverty that IS for PCs? OK I decided I wanted some of that. I didn't want it to be like can't afford to eat a lizard on a stick poverty, but I felt there should be a place for the rules to support some limited period of game play where the PCs didn't have all the items they wanted and their items were kinda terrible.

So very basic really. If you want to do that. You get a few tools.

First, the low tier currency is Coins, just don't give out many and don't give out many items directly either. For a very brief window people make decisions like "basic sword, or basic armour?"

Second, have a range of below par items. Having items worse than the official "Low Tier" standard can serve a few purposes. Filling in guidelines for makeshift junk like garden tools as weapons and curtains as cloaks. Having sub par gear for sub par bandits while the PCs are still working on becoming real Low Tier adventurers. And giving PCs some "better than nothing" filler until they can properly start filling out their important options with proper standard value LT selections.

In the end the (potential) Low Tier (LT) progression through poverty COULD be...

I can't even afford a lizard on a stick -> I found a single LT Coin and started a life of adventure -> I own my own broken wooden stick barely suitable to hit things with -> I can afford SOME nice LT items but I found the rest of my stuff in the rubbish -> I can afford a nice basic LT kit of important items that could have been a more sensible starting point for an adventuring campaign -> I can basically max out all my available equipment options with solid standard performance LT stuff -> I don't even count my LT currency anymore because I have so much I'm never going to run out, I now care about MID tier currency.

And it doesn't have to be that progression. It's probably best to start somewhere give or take around the basic LT kit point. But I feel even IF you aren't doing the "you start in rags in the gutter" campaign having the support there has knock on benefits for other games in the potential for better representing the weaker poorer NPCs around them and the occasional creative emergency like fending off a surprise tiger with a hat stand while wearing the curtains.

So anyway. A lot of wealth and currency discussion is about how to manage and cap the higher end of super wealth, but it's probably a good idea to figure out where you want to START counting and try and make that work as well, and also you know, prevent it from somehow combining with your higher end stuff to create a d20Modern style wealth dance.

[MGuy]

I hadn't considered making tier 0 items or made considerations for what happens at wealth tier 0. I'll have to add them to my notes. Also restraint isn't too necessary as long as the rants are on topic. I'm hoping for this thread to draw in all considerations for how Abstract Wealth be done, whether or not those considerations align with my current perceived needs.

[OgreBattle]

Mechanics wise I can see wealth used for...

Stress system: Have to spend G on things your character enjoys to remove stress penalties ala Darkest Dungeon and Pokemon to some degree.

Gating: X Wealth Level lets you get the airship pass, get clothes for the noble's ball. X Gold contributed rebuilds the shattered town, bribes the guard etc.

Downtime Investments / Kingdom Building: X Wealth level gives you a keep or tower or guild or grove to manage with little dudes to assign to tasks. This is downtime stuff

[hogarth]

I prefer the simple approach of the old Champions/HERO system (anything you use in adventuring you have to buy with your point buy and everything else wealth-related is just fluff), but I recognize that lots of people get into the looter shooter/murder hobo aspect of D&D and pop a chubby when the DM gives them an 8000 gp spinel and a Sword of Nine Lives.

[PhoneLobster]

See I think one problem for wealth is exactly that weird perception that the DM is "giving" players 8,000,000,000 Macaroni Cents and a Sword of Several Cats.

It's not so much that it is an entirely inaccurate perception it's more that it's odd that there isn't a matching perception that the DM is "giving" players their XP/Levels/Points as well. Because to the degree that it is a gift taped onto the back of a dragon it functions exactly the same way.

Wealth Vs Free Money
The gap between "fair" or "earned" rewards and "free money" is both the biggest real problem wealth systems need to solve... and a fake problem so minor that we've been casually taking the obvious solution for granted since the dawn of RPGs. At the same time.

So on the one hand we usually want player characters to receive wealth. Cool wealth that equals power no less. And on the other the worst thing in the world is them somehow receiving "too much" wealth or receiving it for "unfair" reasons.

And sometimes it is REALLY easy to see something as too much and unfair... like infinite wealth for passing two items backwards and forwards across a store counter top for half an hour. It can even be relatively easy to see slightly smaller break points, like when the basic weapons carried by a small squad of mooks accidentally resell for enough abstracted wealth to buy three castles and a jet submarine.

But that doesn't stop an endless history of internet threads that go more like "my fellow players got lucky on a dragon hoard roll and it's so unfair that killing that dragon got them a single Sword +4 that is breaking my game by a whole +4 because how dare they have magic weapons in the first place, and also did you know they also got a pile of money for it that they are daring to try and SPEND?".

Threads not especially mirrored I think by nearly as many complaints about the XP the player characters "unfairly gained" from that same dragon.

I think there is a perceptual gap that sees items as exciting and optional while seeing XP based progressions as dull and inevitable.

And I think a wealth system needs to differentiate between that. Because the solution for the d20Modern style "free money" and the solution for punching dragons so coins fall out "free money" is different in an important way.

One needs to be solved with actual game mechanics that don't do weird stupid things and the other is mostly solved by acknowledging that wealth rewards aren't somehow evil and just giving them out at a sensible rate for doing the things we want player characters to do.

I mean sure the second one does also need sensible mechanical support, so excessively variable random loot is probably bad, accidentally rewarding owning a bakery chain more than killing a dragon is probably bad, but really, it's still different and the solution includes or is rooted in a basic acceptance of the very concept of "loot drops" being you know. FINE.

Because at some point you need to have your loot drop rate in order and just say "and now it's OK to just drop some loot".

And remember. It's not free money if your players shivved something for it.

[MGuy]

The thing I'm focused on is trying to find ways to make sure the rules I create are all encouraging my players to do things I want them to do. Wealth is no different.

So it's not that I care about players getting"free money" as much as I don't want them encouraged to do things that don't advance the game in order to gain more wealth. If players desire more wealth and can get it by means that detract from the game I want them to play, then there's a problem. It isn't unreasonable for people within the setting to start becoming venture capitalists in order to increase their wealth and status but I very likely don't want my sword and sorcery game being eaten up by that.

I think that this is partially, if not fully, resolved by for me with the options I'm already looking at. Players aren't looking just to get bigger amounts of money for no reason. As stated before players want to leverage wealth in order to help them in the 'actual' game so any game where people are grifting and scraping for heaps of cash is a game where that cash translates directly into personal power. If players must be higher level to leverage the true benefits of the stuff they might be able to get with fuck tons of cash you can keep players playing the actual game.

Now that helps mitigate some anxiety I might feel about players possibly being encouraged to focus more on being business savvy than being adventurers. This does not help with other issues. Looking at PL's rant on d20 Modern I recognize another issue that I'm going to add to my notes.

I don't want players being able to 'solve' economics.

Or at least I don't want the solution to be easily uncovered and consistent between games. If one or a handful of discreet steps can be taken every game to 'just win' at wealth then that's an issue. I don't mind the idea that there are steps savvy players or characters built towards getting a leg up in the wealth department are "more likely" to see better returns from the wealth minigame but it is bad to me if the you can can definitely know what exactly you can can do for every game to win at wealth. It's fine for players to know that as they level up and gain power they will also gain more stable wealth because that gives the players reason to continue forging ahead. It is a problem if they figure out they just need to make a magic shop in every game and leverage it to get on the fast track to being super wealthy every game.

A big potential solution is to add randomization, since it makes things more uncertain. To have game state affect these things so players have to adventure to continue seeing profits. Maybe some enforced and codified time constraints to force people who do want to act as investment bankers to do so less at the table since the demands of adventuring will inevitably drag them away from counting coins. I've only just considered this part of the issue so I'll have to think up more ways to toss a bit of uncertainty in the works.

[PhoneLobster]

When it comes to multiple wealth "solutions" I would regard any unwanted solution being viable even sometimes as being a minor "free money" related issue that could use fixing.

I'm not inclined to randomize between "owning bakeries" and "hunting dragons" to be both potentially viable options, I actively want to make one right and the other wrong. If it comes to options I like, so maybe "hunting dragons" and "hunting dragon hunters", I don't feel the need to randomize which is viable. I'm happy for both to be viable and just have it be a contextual matter of choice.

Endless Adventures Vs Small Business Investments Plan
So for instance in my case. I don't want "own a magic item shop" to ever be the "solution" to wealth.

Well. I don't mind if it is the solution to a low tier of wealth. But a lot of things can be solutions to low tiers of wealth. But it's not going to buy you the good stuff.

I also don't MIND if my PCs own Inns and Taverns and Brothels and Air-BnBs and coffee franchises and farms and dungarees. And I don't mind if they earn piles and piles of Coins (or Low Tier adventurer wealth) and stuff their pockets full of them and go shopping for all the low tier adventuring equipment they like.

But most if not all of those businesses cost them "Fortunes" to build instead of 'Coins" and those businesses are NOT going to EVER make them new Fortunes. Presumably they do something else of interest. Taverns raise community morale, inns house other minor adventurers to recruit or interact with, farms let you tick the "supplied with food" box for your fortress, whatever, anything else but more Fortunes.

Things that DO earn Fortunes are rare, big deals and slow to pay out low numbers. Being King of Town might earn you the odd Fortune in Tax, but it requires you to own a Throne room at the location, declare yourself King and have no one else try the same thing in opposition.

But what does that mean? That means that making your throne room work is an adventure and making it continue to work is going to spawn more adventures.

So you can go off hunting dragon hunters to steal the Fortunes in their vaults, or to liquidate their giant dragon knight statue that gives them a bonus and to turn it back into a cash Fortune, or otherwise basically steal Fortunes off someone. OR if you have one of the rare Fortune generators it is also an adventure generator.

Point is the only viable way to earn your current tier of wealth is tied specifically to adventures. Basically all my wealth earning strategies for "your current tier" of wealth are ALWAYS going to boil down to "go have an adventure". It isn't randomized, it is a consistent solution of sorts, but it is the intended solution, that hopefully earns at the intended rate (one fairly amenable to being controlled at the table).

If I let owning a bakery supply Fortunes it would also have to generate lots of brawling adventures. It would have to leave that one Japanese bread anime in the dust for conflict generation.

Anyway yeah. It's not automatically bad to decide that things OTHER than adventuring might earn you piles of money that matter. But I for one rather not. It's not entirely bad to "randomize" the success of approved viable wealth strategies, other than the potential for complexity, but I think it's entirely unnecessary, choices and story context at the table should provide enough variation on whose houses you rob and whether you try being King of Town or just rent your services out to King of Town to avoid the hassle or whatever.

I don't need a dice roll to tell me that this campaign being King Of Town will only work in Fairy Town and won't work in Ogre Town. Or that stealing hoarded Fortunes isn't going to work this entire campaign or even current strategic time unit no matter who you rob. And I'm not sure doing the same thing with bakery and airBnB choices is helpful if they are both approved wealth accumulation strategies in a general sense.

[MGuy]

When I'm trying to imagine what I write for this I'm figuring out what concrete choices I'm liable to put to paper. While I believe players might take on side gigs that could be used to generate adventures in and of themselves I don't think it'll be a good fit for the game I'm trying to make for a few reasons.

1: I don't know if players will elect to engage with this portion of the game. Ideally players should be able to choose not to engage very heavily with this portion of the system. Wealth itself will be a thing that they are intended to primarily accrue through regular adventuring and having a side gig should just be a thing someone does on their off time. Not only might there be different levels of engagement between groups but also within groups. If 'the game' is going to be Monster Hunter then that has to be separate from your side gig as that is something the group has agreed to be obligated to do while getting sucked into dragon hunter hunting constantly because one person in the group decided they wanted to hijack the game and turn it into that is unworkable.

2: It doesn't work for premades. I very much intend for owning property and wealth accumulation to be 'side' deals as I'm imagining that the game is still about saving the world, exploring an unknown continent, uncovering dastardly deeds and just as I don't desire one player hijacking the group to demand obscene amounts of time being spent on hunter hunting I don't want it to detract from what the GM sat everyone down to do.

3: I don't feel that having a 'right' answer is as important to me as having whatever answer exists be an engaging one. Engaging in the sense that players can understand that there are pros and cons to their choices, some level of uncertainty that can be mitigated through choices they make, and a solid reward for their efforts and investment. So bakery vs dragon hunting players would understand that the bakery is the 'safe' choice that is easy to maintain but the returns are small while dragon hunting is more profitable but also riskier. The consequences of failing at baking for a month might be reduced profits while dragon hunting failures can lead to persistent injuries or a greater loss of wealth/fortune.

[PhoneLobster]

Reading that I'm seeing less of a direct discussion of a wealth mechanic and more a discussion of Downtime Mechanics.

So as far as I read your thing there's a list of things that happen during "normal play" the thing everyone has agreed to come to the game for. Then there is this list of "side gigs" which aren't that, should be engaging, should have some rewards, aren't compulsory and are kinda your "off time" filler.

Seems like a few potential pitfalls in design direction, I'd try cleaning it up to my best guess at a close fit with something more like...

There is a list of things that happen in "normal play" that everyone signed up for, everyone's character is relevant to normal play and it is compulsory to participate. It takes up most of the time at the table.

The "side gigs" list isn't actually a side gigs list, its a list of "Downtime activities".

In between "normal play" the minority of the time at the table is spent resolving downtime activities over a time frame of however many Strategic/Downtime Turns happen until the next "normal play" event.

Downtime activities ARE in fact "compulsory play" whether directly signed up to or not. They however are relatively simple and quick to resolve and include options for your downtime actions that probably should be fairly close to "sitting this one out" if people like.

So you do your "normal play" whether its hunting dragons or attending the king's ball in a metallic leotard. But now it's going to be 2 months or "2 Downtime Turns" or whatever until the next dragon hunt/royal disco is held.

Player one spends 2 Downtime Turns running his bakeries.
Player two spends 1 Downtime Turn hunting the most dangerous game and 1 Downtime turn recovering from the injuries
Player three was already injured from the royal disco and spends 2 Downtime Turns recovering
Player four spends 1 Downtime Turn crafting a new dragon hunting leotard and then 1 Downtime Turn working as a Milkman for the Minotaur king.

It interacts with wealth mechanics. You can spend some time running a business, making items, working a job and you get some formal real reward for it. The balance point for how much reward and how complex the resolution is reliant on how much time and importance you want this to draw away from "normal play" but it's probably just filler that lets you get some relatively minor scale rewards and you pretty much "pick action and maybe make a roll for a result".

But framing it as "Downtime action mechanics" means you could also do things like make this the same frame work for long term healing, long distance travel, long term searches or intelligence gathering, and all sorts of other "not part of the main game" actions that might have tangential relations to the main game, or just be something you want to represent that doesn't fit directly in the main game.

I don't see it as a bad thing to have "I am Gravnor, Barbarian Warlord, Beheader of Hydras, Savior of Princesses, Owner Manager of the Finest Chain of Delicatessens in the land!" and then have that be not just a descriptor but an earned slightly interactive benefit that sends you on your other unrelated adventures with just a small handful of extra cash and an awesome picnic meal basket.

It's not where I want to go with property ownership or even downtime actions, but if I weren't doing what I'm doing it would be a pretty OK alternative.

[MGuy]

You are exactly right. That is both my intent and the direction I'm leaning in. Also I think you're conflating how I intend to handle people doing side gigs with actual wealth. Wealth just 'is' whatever thing I make to track valuables characters have that allow them to get stuff without adventuring. When I say 'wealth mechanic' I mean 'how wealth is handled in the game'. In the property thread I announced that I intend to have properties basically be like equipment/abilities that you leverage to get benefits. I only mention it here because you can use particular properties to generate wealth which is tied pretty closely in with how wealth is going to work.

Titles and boons they earn in game is yet another thing. Way way way back, years ago, I outlined a kind of narrative system as well where players can spend meta points to make things they earn in game a permanent part of their character. NPC contacts, castles, etc. I still intend on using that idea and it's only evolved over the many years since I first talked about it. Being the Heroes of Townsville can be a thing on your character sheet and it can be used to do 'stuff'. That is something that isn't core to how wealth is going to handled so I'm not going to talk about it at length right now.

In any case you've hit the nail almost perfectly on the head. You've almost perfectly described what I very much intend to do.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

This makes me feel a lot better about my own downtime mechanics, because that's what I've got, too.

[JigokuBosatsu]

Barbarian Warlord, Beheader of Hydras, Savior of Princesses, Owner Manager of the Finest Chain of Delicatessens in the land

We've periodically discussed the finicky mechanic of earning feats based on defeating enemies- you don't want to interrupt your game so one PC goes off chasing 1000 gnolls to earn the Gnoll Slayer perk, but if the party annihilates all the hydras on Mount Testicle, you might want them to be able to spend XP to get the Beheader of Hydras feat/perk/whatever.

However, I think tying this in to downtime actions would be cool. So maybe you have to perform an extended Carouse to spread tales of your hydra slaying, and then you get the perk.

I think two important things with this will be to A: have all the downtime options consistent, so maintaining your properties, researching the weaknesses of the boss monster, or cementing your deed perks should all operate on the same mechanic. B: it needs to be balanced. I don't think each action needs to be "worth" the exact same bonuses. It can be asymmetrical, but that might make a nice cycle of risk and reward. So if you get a poisoned wound on your adventure, you can spend a downtime action running your tavern, but you'll still be fucked up. Or you spend your downtime in the healing temple, and while that doesn't net you any wealth or perks or anything, it will be worth it to be able to actually survive the next adventure.

[deaddmwalking]

The Hydra Slaying perk is something you want most before you scale Mount Testicle. That implies that you should be able to get it during the adventure, but before you reach the conclusion.

There is a lot of support for a training montage to develop the skill or talent you need; especially in cases where the protagonists initially suffer an apparent defeat. That part is really hard to do with D&D and derivatives - the cost of failure is usually too high.

[Foxwarrior]

Giving out a Beheader of Hydras feat (which is strong enough to matter) when the party defeats a bunch of hydras is I think best used as a way to say "you've fought enough hydras already, I don't want to play any more hydra fight battles, so let's just say you easily defeat any additional hydras you encounter." In a way I think it's more of a thing a DM might want to give to their players than a thing the players will want to spend resources on: from a DM's perspective this feat lets them continue to use hydras as set dressing without having them bog down the session, but from a player's perspective the incentive is to take feats that help you trivialize encounters that would otherwise be difficult challenges to sink your teeth into.

[OgreBattle]

I don't see it as a bad thing to have "I am Gravnor, Barbarian Warlord, Beheader of Hydras, Savior of Princesses, Owner Manager of the Finest Chain of Delicatessens in the land!" and then have that be not just a descriptor but an earned slightly interactive benefit that sends you on your other unrelated adventures with just a small handful of extra cash and an awesome picnic meal basket.

Could be like a 'spell book'. You acquire such titles through an adventure or maybe during downtime then have X amount of slots to fit them into during rest.

Or familiarity with enemies can be baked into the system. Like reading a book about hydra anatomy or killing a hydra gives you a bonus to stabbing all future hydras. This makes a setting change to fight new monsters not require those monsters to always have bigger numbers, them being new monsters means they're unfamiliar and the character needs to study/kill them to gain bonuses again.

[PhoneLobster]

A title may as well be a skill, a skill might as well be an item, you can apply the same availability limit methods of distributing them. So "Find", "Buy", "Craft" or equivalents, the "find" equivalent is the GM telling you it drops from a defeated hydra, this doesn't have to be a physical skill book it can just be the inspiration to learn the ability (and not XP to spend on just any ability).

That's fine.

Alternatively you buy it with xp currency like any other skill. Or if it's "not in the shops" because no one knows it you "craft" it in your down time by spending a month dancing around a crude hydra strawman you constructed in your backyard. And presumably you only do either of those if it's sensible to have the skill/title in future. I'm not sure you even need to treat titles as "special" and limit them to drops only or anything like that, they conceptually function pretty well as just kinda rare skills.

I guess it's almost wealth mechanic related if your look at it that way.

[JigokuBosatsu]

Good point!

you should be able to get it during the adventure, but before you reach the conclusion.

There is a lot of support for a training montage to develop the skill or talent you need; especially in cases where the protagonists initially suffer an apparent defeat. T