d20 Modern Wealth System vs. Fallout

[DigoDragon]

I am putting together a Fallout style campaign using the d20 Modern system. Everything fits together fairly easily except for the Wealth System. I know how the system works and have experienced it in a few campaigns first-hand. My question is if I should stick with it or convert it to something more like a cash/barter system?

The advantage of the Wealth System is making financial transactions easy to handle. If your Wealth bonus is say an 8, then there's no trouble if you want to buy a drink at the tavern, but you have to work at raising the funds for a rifle. The system assumes that players have income, credit and investments. Fallout's setting is post nuclear war where credit and electronic banking systems are extinct. The currency would be a combination of hard money (bottle caps in Fallout proper) and barter. Converting to a cash/barter system is doable, but is it worth it?

Thus, I am unsure what to decide and I seek advice. Anyone have experience with cash/barter systems using d20 Modern?

[Tvtyrant]

Personally I think d20 modern's system does work better for a dual cash barter system. Instead of tracking all of the junk you scavenge and the various esoteric currencies you make transactions assuming that you haggled with both. Maybe you gave the person $300, a wrench, 100 bottlecaps, a keyboard and a jar of nails in return for a hand gun and some bullets. It took 6 hours to haggle the price, including adding and removing a paint sprayer from the items on the table and possibly getting some horseshoes. A wealth check effectively does all of that with a single roll.

[Sith_Happens]

Like you said, the Wealth system from d20 Modern assumes the existence of a financial industry and that the PCs have sources of relatively stable income. In a setting where only physical money exists and the PCs are living off of odd jobs and looting you want to be tracking exact holdings and putting specific price tags on things. There's really no good way around that.

[Digitalelf]

The d20 Modern supplement, "d20 Apocalypse" has the exact rules you are looking for (e.g. Trade Value, Starting Gear, Wealth Increases, and yes, Bartering Rules).

It's a very good supplement to d20 Modern if you're planning on running any kind of post-apocalyptic d20 Modern game. It has stats for modified gear, new equipment, new feats, new skills, new advanced character classes, new monsters/creatures, and it even has rules concerning vehicles and fuel.

The book is only 96 pages, but it packs so much into those pages; there is so much in this book that I know you'd find invaluable, and at the very least, highly useful...

[Closet_Skeleton]

I don't even remember what we did in my post-apocalypse d20 modern game. I think we just assumed there was nothing worth buying that was better than the experimental or mastercrafted weapons the players got as loot and that the party had enough loot to trade for subsistence supplies.

If a rule doesn't suit a campaign just cut it out. d20 modern had a well designed but deeply flawed1 core book and a short flurry of weak supplements that in my opinion killed it as a line, so I'm not that familiar with d20 Apocalypse since d20 Future was so terrible it put me off. From what I remember apart from the bartering rules d20 Apocalypse just had too little depth and tried to cover too many possible settings2 to be useful. Sadly I don't think it was OGL like Urban Arcana and d20 Future were.

1this is kind of unfair since my main problem with it now is that Saga Edition improved on it immensely so lots of mechanics just make you say "why don't we do this the Saga Edition way rather than this nonsense?"

2it doesn't suffer from this as badly as d20 past, the tiny soft cover that tries to be about all of human history, since it at least had a proper theme. The mechanics it does have work in either a pseudo-science zombie apocalypse or a book of revelations inspired demonic invasion but it doesn't really have any specific mechanics for those scenarios despite having blurbs and artwork for them.

[Digitalelf]

d20 Apocalypse just had too little depth and tried to cover too many possible settings to be useful.

I think it depends on what you are trying to get out of this book and the other d20 Modern Supplements. If you're looking for a full-fledged campaign setting, then no, most of the d20 Modern supplements did not fill that need, but, if on the other hand for example, you just need general information on future tech to expand a d20 Modern game into the far future (and not a campaign setting set there), then d20 Future fills that need. It’s the same with d20 Apocalypse... The OP already has a campaign setting in mind, so d20 Apocalypse should suite his needs just fine IMHO.

[Closet_Skeleton]

if on the other hand for example, you just need general information on future tech to expand a d20 Modern game into the far future (and not a campaign setting set there), then d20 Future fills that need.

That was exactly what I ran and I found d20 future so useless that I just homebrewed everything instead. d20 Future isn't actually generic, its a specific space opera setting that obscures what that setting is (TSR's Star*Drive with the serial numbers filed off) so its not actually that useful for generic use unlike d20 apocalypse.

Since you have to make up your setting to actually use those rules, you really might as well just make up the rules as well. Since d20 Future's mechanics have no unifying theme to them and don't even mesh well with the d20 system you might as well just a traveller rulebook to fill in the details instead.

[Digitalelf]

Since d20 Future's mechanics have no unifying theme to them and don't even mesh well with the d20 system you might as well just a traveller rulebook to fill in the details instead.

Yes, there are better games or systems that do this or that better than this or that game or system...

But again, I think it really depends upon what you're trying to get out of a book like d20 Future (or any of the other d20 Modern supplements), because I found d20 Future to be highly useful in my sci-fi oriented d20 Modern games.

You obviously didn't. Different expectation I guess... :smallsmile:

[DigoDragon]

Personally I think d20 modern's system does work better for a dual cash barter system.

The d20 Modern supplement, "d20 Apocalypse" has the exact rules you are looking for (e.g. Trade Value, Starting Gear, Wealth Increases, and yes, Bartering Rules).

Okay, so I'll shop around online for the pdf of Apocalypse. Probably can get it cheap second-hand (err, wait, digitally second hand?) and i'll pull the barter system out of that. Should complete my campaign. The next step is getting feedback from the homebrew section on races and traits. So thanks fto everyone for the tips and ideas!



I think it depends on what you are trying to get out of this book and the other d20 Modern Supplements.

Just needed a monetary system for my campaign setting, whether it's abstract or cashly concrete.

[Digitalelf]

Okay, so I'll shop around online for the pdf of Apocalypse. Probably can get it cheap second-hand (err, wait, digitally second hand?)

Wizards of the Coast does not offer anything other than D&D titles as PDFs right now (and this seems to be the case for the foreseeable future). Unfortunately, your only recourse is to try and find a used print copy.

[Knaight]

Like you said, the Wealth system from d20 Modern assumes the existence of a financial industry and that the PCs have sources of relatively stable income. In a setting where only physical money exists and the PCs are living off of odd jobs and looting you want to be tracking exact holdings and putting specific price tags on things. There's really no good way around that.

There are plenty of ways around it, the d20 modern Wealth system just isn't one of them. Abstract funds can work just fine representing a bag of money, you just need some sort of ranking system and a way for it to fluctuate nonlinearly. The best example of that I've seen has been in REIGN, where if you have lots of money you can safely ignore small purchases, items get grouped such that this doesn't let you stock up on infinite amounts of small purchases, and the wealth level gets decreased when buying things sufficiently close to it (with barter determining the exact details).