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Talakeal
2017-01-01, 04:21 PM
I was tired of the mindless penny-pinching that was going on in my game. Players were always living as cheaply as possible and grubbing for every penny, hoping to sell all of their used equipment for top value and wanting to lounge around in town between adventures making all the money they could by selling their services to NPCs "off camera".

So, I decided to implement a more abstract wealth system.

Basically players have a "wealth" score. The base value is determined by the character's social class, and it is then modified based on how much treasure the party has found over the last adventure. (This is an abstract system, so a goblin's coin pouch might be worth one, a winter wolf's pelt three, a bank vault ten, and a dragon's hoard fifty without worrying about exact values). They can further modify this score with certain skills and feats.

Then when the players are in town between adventures they can make a number of attempts to purchase items equal to their wealth score. Each attempt has a chance of success depends upon how rare and valuable the item is, so a long sword might have a 90% chance, a healing potion a 50% chance, and a vorpal sword a 5% chance.


I tried running this system and one of the players just couldn't get into it. He tried spending all of his wealth looking for a single rare item and failed to find it, and afterwards he said that, essentially, in his mind the merchant had taken all of his money but failed to give him anything in return.


I tried to explain that his wealth score was not a tally of his bank account, but instead an abstract measure of how much liquid income he had to burn. Failing his rolls simply meant that he could not find someone who had the item he wanted at a price he could afford before his on hand resources (be they time, money, patience, contacts, marketplaces, etc.) were exhausted either by the search or maintaining his lifestyle and that he needed to go on another adventure to replenish his wealth before he continues his search, but he couldn't wrap his head around it.


So, does anyone have any thoughts on running an abstract wealth system?

I know some games like Exalted and The One Ring use similar systems, does anyone have any experiences with them?

Anyone notice any big flaws with my proposed system or have any suggestions? (I can provide more specifics if needed).

Any ideas on how to explain an abstract wealth system to someone who is stuck in the D&D warrior-accountant mindset and get them to understand and accept it?

Thanks!

Koo Rehtorb
2017-01-01, 04:37 PM
I quite like the resource system in Torchbearer (a game revolving around looting dungeons).

It's a dice pool system, 4-6 on each d6 is a success, 1-3 is a failure. Buying something has a target number of successes you need. So if someone was trying to buy a bundle of torches it would be an obstacle 1 resources test. If someone has 3 resources they'd roll 3d6 and if one of those dice was a 4+ then they'd succeed at buying the torches. Additionally, if you fail the roll the GM can choose to give you what you wanted anyway, but permanently reduce your resources score by the margin of failure. So if you rolled 2 successes vs an ob4 plate armour then the GM could give you the armour but reduce your resources by 2 as you spend all your wealth on it.

What loot does is add a temporary bonus to your resources score for one roll. So if you had a brooch worth 5d of treasure you'd add 5d6 to whatever your base resources score is for that one roll. Loot also insulates you from your resources score being reduced for that roll. So if you spent 2d of treasure on the roll then you negate up to 2 points of resource reduction.

Resources go up by making resources rolls. You need a number of successes equal to your current resources score, and a number of failures equal to your resources score -1 and then your resources go up by 1. So the way the game works out is that you get richer by going to dungeons, getting loot, and using that loot to buy things. And if you're not careful then you can easily bankrupt yourself back down to a broke ass adventurer again.

Jay R
2017-01-01, 05:23 PM
I tried to explain that his wealth score was not a tally of his bank account, but instead an abstract measure of how much liquid income he had to burn. Failing his roles simply meant that he could not find someone who had the item he wanted at a price he could afford before his liquid resources where exhausted by non-adventuring related expenses of maintaining his lifestyle and that he needed to go on another adventure to replenish his wealth before he continues his search, but he couldn't wrap his head around it.

He can't wrap his head around it because that does not match what happened. Under the old system, how much you can buy is determined by your wealth. What you can buy is random. By contrast, In your subgame, how much stuff you can buy is also random. And he lost the random game.

Thought experiment: Two players with the same wealth march into town, and they each try to buy a rare item. One of them makes the roll on the first try. He spends the rest of his wealth buying lots of other things, based on a series of lucky rolls.. The second player keeps trying to buy the rare item and fails to ever make the roll.

They stay in town the same length of time, eating the same food and staying at the same inn. They spend the same amount of time trying to buy things; the second guy just had worse rolls. What "non-adventuring related expenses" did he incur that the other guy did not?

This implies, in effect, that somebody can drink up enough money to buy a vorpal sword in a single town visit.

You are calling it an abstract wealth system, but it doesn't model how wealth works, even abstractly. From his point of view, it's a mostly random sub-game to determine by luck how much you can buy, and he lost that sub-game.

For somebody like me, who enjoys resource management games, it would be a fun game to play, and I'd have contingency plans for when the first couple of rolls didn't work. But your player didn't think in terms of resource management, used a bad strategy, and lost - because he's playing a game he doesn't understand. And so he's not having fun.

Newtonsolo313
2017-01-01, 06:47 PM
Here are some flaws i found in your system
1. The players can still penny pinch by simply never buying anything
2. it assumes that the item you are looking for is actually in the town no matter what
3. it assumes that you do not run out of shops to look in
4. it does not match up with the mechanics of d&d a more sensible approach would be to set a DC then have them use there respective skills instead of rolling a percentile die
5. you do not lose wealth for buying stuff, if someone gets a vorpal sword first try they only paid 1 wealth for it
6. if you add the same amount of wealth every time you get an item what you have really is just an alternate currency system
7. it assumes your characters all have the same level of money management skills

Slipperychicken
2017-01-01, 07:33 PM
I was tired of the mindless penny-pinching that was going on in my game. Players were always living as cheaply as possible and grubbing for every penny, hoping to sell all of their used equipment for top value and wanting to lounge around in town between adventures making all the money they could by selling their services to NPCs "off camera

If it was me, I'd probably just shame them for any excessive thrift, use a daily value to indicate the cost of their poor living standards, make their sales a simple one-off roll instead of roleplaying a whole negotiation, and only let them earn downtime cash plying regular professions for which there are rules.

It also depends on the game. If it's 3.5 I can see where it's coming from. I'd probably switch to a game where money isn't so vital to the PCs' ability to participate.

Talakeal
2017-01-01, 07:38 PM
Here are some flaws i found in your system
1. The players can still penny pinch by simply never buying anything
2. it assumes that the item you are looking for is actually in the town no matter what
3. it assumes that you do not run out of shops to look in
4. it does not match up with the mechanics of d&d a more sensible approach would be to set a DC then have them use there respective skills instead of rolling a percentile die
5. you do not lose wealth for buying stuff, if someone gets a vorpal sword first try they only paid 1 wealth for it
6. if you add the same amount of wealth every time you get an item what you have really is just an alternate currency system
7. it assumes your characters all have the same level of money management skills

1: What does this gain them though except not having any equipment?

2: Quite the opposite, if everyone fails the roll to acquire the item it can be safely assumed that it wasn't available, or at least not for sale at a reasonable price. Or do you mean any item has the potential to be in any town?

3: Every roll doesn't necessarily mean a single trip to a single store. It might be a day in the market, or visiting an auction, or sending a letter to a broker, or any number of other things. Again, its supposed to be an abstract system.

4: I actually do factor the players skill and the size of the market into the chance of finding the item, but I didn't want to get into the nitty gritty.

5: Yep. This can be explained away by them finding someone who was desperate to make a sale, or someone who doesn't know what they have, finding someone who really needs what they are offering for trade, or fast talking the merchant, or simply by the character having a windfall at the same time.

6: Not sure what you mean by "add the same amount of wealth every time you get an item"

7: See #4. Although the system is actually designed under the assumption that the party will pool their resources and buy and sell things as a group for maximum efficiency.

random_guy
2017-01-01, 07:45 PM
You might be interested in the influence system in Dark Heresy. Each player character has an influence score, which represents funds, favors, or major debts owed to them. A requisition test based on influence determines whether or not they can successfully acquire an item. Failure does not result in a loss of influence, it can represent insufficient influence to compel someone to part with a good, a temporary unavailability of the good, or the merchant could just be in a bad mood. The difficulty of obtaining an item depends on its scarcity. If a player tries to overreach and obtain an item with a particularly high scarcity level, then a particularly bad failure can reduce in a loss of influence. This represents provoking a merchant with an insulting offer, or some either suitable situation. A player can voluntarily reduce their influence score in order to automatically succeed on a test. This represents calling in a huge favor that reduces the number of favors a character can call in the future. Influence tests can be improved by the acquisition of talents (Dark Heresy's equivalent of D&D feats). The actual influence score itself is increased by the DM as a reward for completing quests. The DM controls the availability of items by determining which merchants have which items. The DM can also establish a limit on the number of requisition tests a character can make.

Talakeal
2017-01-01, 07:49 PM
He can't wrap his head around it because that does not match what happened. Under the old system, how much you can buy is determined by your wealth. What you can buy is random. By contrast, In your subgame, how much stuff you can buy is also random. And he lost the random game.

Thought experiment: Two players with the same wealth march into town, and they each try to buy a rare item. One of them makes the roll on the first try. He spends the rest of his wealth buying lots of other things, based on a series of lucky rolls.. The second player keeps trying to buy the rare item and fails to ever make the roll.

They stay in town the same length of time, eating the same food and staying at the same inn. They spend the same amount of time trying to buy things; the second guy just had worse rolls. What "non-adventuring related expenses" did he incur that the other guy did not?

This implies, in effect, that somebody can drink up enough money to buy a vorpal sword in a single town visit.

You are calling it an abstract wealth system, but it doesn't model how wealth works, even abstractly. From his point of view, it's a mostly random sub-game to determine by luck how much you can buy, and he lost that sub-game.

For somebody like me, who enjoys resource management games, it would be a fun game to play, and I'd have contingency plans for when the first couple of rolls didn't work. But your player didn't think in terms of resource management, used a bad strategy, and lost - because he's playing a game he doesn't understand. And so he's not having fun.

I don't see how it doesn't serve as an abstract model of how wealth works.

Sometimes I have money but just can't find the item I want to buy for sale anywhere. Sometimes I have something valuable to sell I just can't find a buyer. Sometimes I have unexpected expenses come up. Sometimes I decide to splurge and waste large amounts of money on frivolous things. Sometimes I am able to convince someone to sell something at a discount, other times I offend the seller (or vice versa) and we are unwilling to do business despite the mutual benefit. Sometimes a friend is able to make a connection for me.

So to guys want the same object and are living the same lifestyle. Guy A is able to by a sword, guy B isn't. Possibilities:

Perhaps:
Guy B went to the market / auction house on the wrong day.
Someone else (perhaps his own party member) just bought the last one.
The cops raided the black market fence before guy A could get there.
The fence who bought his treasure short-changed buy B.
Guy B's friend came down with the plague and needed to borrow money for medicine.
Guy B's came into town and, flush with dungeon money, decided to splurge on a wild party and now can't quite scrape together enough funds.
Property taxes are do on guy B's family farm.
There is a famine and the serfs who live on guy B's land can't pay their taxes.
Guy B's notices his armor is worn out and needs to be repaired before he thinks about buying a new weapon.
Guy A reminded the merchant of his dead son and so he let him have a sword that he normally wouldn't be able to afford.
Guy A knows a guy who can hook him up. Its a shame guy B didn't think to ask.

The list of possible explanations goes on and on.


You might be interested in the influence system in Dark Heresy. Each player character has an influence score, which represents funds, favors, or major debts owed to them. A requisition test based on influence determines whether or not they can successfully acquire an item. Failure does not result in a loss of influence, it can represent insufficient influence to compel someone to part with a good, a temporary unavailability of the good, or the merchant could just be in a bad mood. The difficulty of obtaining an item depends on its scarcity. If a player tries to overreach and obtain an item with a particularly high scarcity level, then a particularly bad failure can reduce in a loss of influence. This represents provoking a merchant with an insulting offer, or some either suitable situation. A player can voluntarily reduce their influence score in order to automatically succeed on a test. This represents calling in a huge favor that reduces the number of favors a character can call in the future. Influence tests can be improved by the acquisition of talents (Dark Heresy's equivalent of D&D feats). The actual influence score itself is increased by the DM as a reward for completing quests. The DM controls the availability of items by determining which merchants have which items. The DM can also establish a limit on the number of requisition tests a character can make.


This is pretty similar to how I handle it, the only difference is that there is a limit to the total number of attempts you can make rather than how many attempts you can make for a single item.

I really don't want every visit to town to be:

"I want to buy a vorpal long sword. No? How about a broad sword. No? How about a vorpal cutlass? No? How about a vorpal bastard sword? No? How about a vorpal scimitar..."

Newtonsolo313
2017-01-01, 08:51 PM
1: What does this gain them though except not having any equipment?

2: Quite the opposite, if everyone fails the roll to acquire the item it can be safely assumed that it wasn't available, or at least not for sale at a reasonable price. Or do you mean any item has the potential to be in any town?

3: Every roll doesn't necessarily mean a single trip to a single store. It might be a day in the market, or visiting an auction, or sending a letter to a broker, or any number of other things. Again, its supposed to be an abstract system.

4: I actually do factor the players skill and the size of the market into the chance of finding the item, but I didn't want to get into the nitty gritty.

5: Yep. This can be explained away by them finding someone who was desperate to make a sale, or someone who doesn't know what they have, finding someone who really needs what they are offering for trade, or fast talking the merchant, or simply by the character having a windfall at the same time.

6: Not sure what you mean by "add the same amount of wealth every time you get an item"

7: See #4. Although the system is actually designed under the assumption that the party will pool their resources and buy and sell things as a group for maximum efficiency.
1.What i am saying is that if a player has no desire for new equipment they will not lose wealth
2. what im trying to say is that the chance of finding an item should decay with each roll
4.ok makes sense
5.i guess but that kinda seems ad hoc
6.what i mean is that if you get fifty goblin pouches thats equal to a dragons hoard and what im trying too say is that you it will just be using a abstract form of currency which i guess is your goal
7.makes sense
if your campaign is high magic consider having them find stuff like those magic item shops that disappear when you leave leaving you with a cursed item or something or when low magic just a straight scam.
maybe if the town is small put an limit on how many dice they can roll, it wouldn't make sense to spend all your time looking for stuff in a farming village with only one shop that does not have what you need
maybe give your players something similar to what they wanted but a little bit worst or better, for instance you might come away with a greater healing potion instead of a lesser or maybe you find a +1 sword instead of a +2 sword

Slipperychicken
2017-01-01, 10:35 PM
I don't see how it doesn't serve as an abstract model of how wealth works.

Sometimes I have money but just can't find the item I want to buy for sale anywhere. Sometimes I have something valuable to sell I just can't find a buyer. Sometimes I have unexpected expenses come up. Sometimes I decide to splurge and waste large amounts of money on frivolous things. Sometimes I am able to convince someone to sell something at a discount, other times I offend the seller (or vice versa) and we are unwilling to do business despite the mutual benefit. Sometimes a friend is able to make a connection for me.

You ever check out availability rules in shadowrun, ACKS/other OSR, or 5th edition D&D? They all determine item availability separately from the purchasing process, and don't automatically charge players just for looking for items. Though usually players can get a bonus for making an offer above market price (obviously if no one accepts the offer, you do not spend it), or throwing money around to generate interest.

The general theme seems to go like this: A player declares his character will try to acquire an item. The GM compares some measure, usually cost, to a table to decide how hard it is to get, with sufficiently inexpensive items not requiring any availability roll at all. The GM then rolls against that value, perhaps taking into account relevant factors such as scarcity. The PC then spends an amount of time searching for the item. If successful, the player gets into a price negotiation which proceeds normally. If unsuccessful, the PC cannot locate it in his area, does not spend any extra money, and must either wait for a certain period of time or travel elsewhere before trying again.

Beleriphon
2017-01-02, 01:57 PM
I think the d20 Modern wealth rules are usable here. Its possible to game the system to a degree, but for the most part items are priced according to a Purchase DC. Characters have a wealth score they add to a d20 roll to see if they can afford an item, and if its even available for them to purchase. Items with DCs lower than the score are basically automatic purchases, items over the DC need to be rolled against. If you hit the DC or exceed you get the item, if you miss you get the item but your wealth score goes down, so you've gone into debt called in too many favours, or done something else that makes it harder to buy stuff later.

One important part in the D20 system options is that Taking 10 or 20 is possible, although the Take 20 always reduces the wealth level.

The Glyphstone
2017-01-02, 02:23 PM
I think the issue may be that while is it 'abstract', it's not necessarily disassociated, since I'm also having the same problem the player apparently did reading the OP. A party that returns from an adventure with seven wolf pelts, two dragon's hoards, one bank vault, and nineteen goblin coin pouches still has a flat, concrete amount of currency to spend, it's just rendered into a descriptive 'Wealth' value instead of specifying 'X gold coins'. Each attempt to acquire an item reduces the Wealth value of a player, which does imply they are spending money/trade goods, and if that roll fails, they spent that money or trade good and got nothing in return; fail enough and you have indeed spent all your wealth with nothing to show for it somehow.

Most abstract Wealth systems I'm familiar with, like D20 Modern and FFG's 40K games, have Wealth/Profit/Influence as a fixed number that isn't correlated with short-term changes in fortune, but gradually increases over time as the players become more wealthy and powerful, capable of leveraging all their resources to get what they want. In those systems, actually reducing your Wealth stat is a big deal, liquidating permanent assets for a temporary cash influx and a corresponding bonus on your purchase roll; otherwise, it's assumed that while you can't simply buy everything in sight, your Wealth statistic is abstract and not influenced by your purchasing habits. Rather, it's up to the GM or the system to apply limits to buying - for example, you might have a rule that limits a player to attempting one purchase for each integer of 10 in their wealth score; 25=2 buy rolls, 30=3 rolls, etc. The roll itself can apply whatever modifiers you want, but since failure doesn't reduce their Wealth, it's simply a failed attempt to gain what they want for whatever reason is appropriate, and once they've used up their buy attempts, they have to go back out and adventure some more. Meanwhile, the town is restocking their goods, or getting in new shipments, or finishing its existing commissions, or whatever obstacle prevented the acquisition of their desired item, and upon return their buys are refreshed (possibly with a higher Wealth score once they sell their latest haul of loot).

Talakeal
2017-01-02, 03:09 PM
I think the issue may be that while is it 'abstract', it's not necessarily disassociated, since I'm also having the same problem the player apparently did reading the OP. A party that returns from an adventure with seven wolf pelts, two dragon's hoards, one bank vault, and nineteen goblin coin pouches still has a flat, concrete amount of currency to spend, it's just rendered into a descriptive 'Wealth' value instead of specifying 'X gold coins'. Each attempt to acquire an item reduces the Wealth value of a player, which does imply they are spending money/trade goods, and if that roll fails, they spent that money or trade good and got nothing in return; fail enough and you have indeed spent all your wealth with nothing to show for it somehow.

Most abstract Wealth systems I'm familiar with, like D20 Modern and FFG's 40K games, have Wealth/Profit/Influence as a fixed number that isn't correlated with short-term changes in fortune, but gradually increases over time as the players become more wealthy and powerful, capable of leveraging all their resources to get what they want. In those systems, actually reducing your Wealth stat is a big deal, liquidating permanent assets for a temporary cash influx and a corresponding bonus on your purchase roll; otherwise, it's assumed that while you can't simply buy everything in sight, your Wealth statistic is abstract and not influenced by your purchasing habits. Rather, it's up to the GM or the system to apply limits to buying - for example, you might have a rule that limits a player to attempting one purchase for each integer of 10 in their wealth score; 25=2 buy rolls, 30=3 rolls, etc. The roll itself can apply whatever modifiers you want, but since failure doesn't reduce their Wealth, it's simply a failed attempt to gain what they want for whatever reason is appropriate, and once they've used up their buy attempts, they have to go back out and adventure some more. Meanwhile, the town is restocking their goods, or getting in new shipments, or finishing its existing commissions, or whatever obstacle prevented the acquisition of their desired item, and upon return their buys are refreshed (possibly with a higher Wealth score once they sell their latest haul of loot).

Rolls do not reduce your wealth. Your wealth goes down over time on its own to represent living expenses regardless of whether or not you shop.

Basically each visit to town allows you to make a number of shopping rolls equal to your current wealth score to represent that is easier for a rich person to find the things they need at a price they can afford, but making these rolls does not reduce your wealth in any way.

It works almost exactly like:

"Rather, it's up to the GM or the system to apply limits to buying - for example, you might have a rule that limits a player to attempting one purchase for each integer of 10 in their wealth score; 25=2 buy rolls, 30=3 rolls, etc. The roll itself can apply whatever modifiers you want, but since failure doesn't reduce their Wealth, it's simply a failed attempt to gain what they want for whatever reason is appropriate, and once they've used up their buy attempts, they have to go back out and adventure some more. Meanwhile, the town is restocking their goods, or getting in new shipments, or finishing its existing commissions, or whatever obstacle prevented the acquisition of their desired item, and upon return their buys are refreshed (possibly with a higher Wealth score once they sell their latest haul of loot)."

The Glyphstone
2017-01-02, 03:33 PM
Okay, that's a bit different than what your OP sounded like. You specified that wealth was modified based on the last adventure's loot, which seemed to indicate a much higher variance in current wealth depending on how successful they were.

Talakeal
2017-01-02, 04:03 PM
Okay, that's a bit different than what your OP sounded like. You specified that wealth was modified based on the last adventure's loot, which seemed to indicate a much higher variance in current wealth depending on how successful they were.

Yes, that is part of the system. You get bonus rolls based on how much treasure you found in the previous mission. But those bonus rolls are a one time thing, and if you don't use them you can't "save them", although I suppose you could use an especially lucrative haul as justification for spending the XP to raise one's social class.

shuyung
2017-01-02, 04:30 PM
I think you need to take a step back and identify the problem you're trying to solve.

So you have players, and they acquire wealth in various ways. They then wish to expend their wealth in various ways. You take exception to some ways in which they either acquire or expend wealth. You then decide to do something weird to the wealth system to try to obfuscate the wealth flow methods that you object to? Correct me if I have misunderstood any of your activities.

Talakeal
2017-01-02, 04:39 PM
I think you need to take a step back and identify the problem you're trying to solve.

So you have players, and they acquire wealth in various ways. They then wish to expend their wealth in various ways. You take exception to some ways in which they either acquire or expend wealth. You then decide to do something weird to the wealth system to try to obfuscate the wealth flow methods that you object to? Correct me if I have misunderstood any of your activities.

As is the system is trying (and utterly failing) to simulate a real economy and spending habits.

It gets to the point where the simulation and the game are at odds with one another.

So I hope to replace the (bad) simulationist system with a good gamist one.


Also, I don't know why you assume that this wealth system is any weirder than any other. The classic D&D economy has never made sense, and there have been RPGs that have gone for more abstract wealth systems for as long as I have been playing RPGs. Vampire was released 25 years ago and it has never been a game where you kept track of every coin.

shuyung
2017-01-02, 05:03 PM
As is the system is trying (and utterly failing) to simulate a real economy and spending habits.

It gets to the point where the simulation and the game are at odds with one another.

That's nowhere near what is occurring. Your players are at odds with you. Why? What do they want to do, what do they expect to do? What do you want them to do, what do you expect them to do?


Also, I don't know why you assume that this wealth system is any weirder than any other. The classic D&D economy has never made sense, and there have been RPGs that have gone for more abstract wealth systems for as long as I have been playing RPGs. Vampire was released 25 years ago and it has never been a game where you kept track of every coin.
It's weirder than any other because it's unrelated to play expectations. The classic D&D economy makes sense, within the confines of classic D&D conditions. Classic D&D economy makes no sense in Vampire conditions, and vice versa. So what conditions are prevalent in your game? What do you see wealth being able to provide? What is the purpose of the economy? You can't replace something until you understand where what you currently have is failing you, and what you want to implement will solve for you.

Talakeal
2017-01-02, 05:43 PM
That's nowhere near what is occurring. Your players are at odds with you. Why? What do they want to do, what do they expect to do? What do you want them to do, what do you expect them to do?

It's weirder than any other because it's unrelated to play expectations. The classic D&D economy makes sense, within the confines of classic D&D conditions. Classic D&D economy makes no sense in Vampire conditions, and vice versa. So what conditions are prevalent in your game? What do you see wealth being able to provide? What is the purpose of the economy? You can't replace something until you understand where what you currently have is failing you, and what you want to implement will solve for you.

That is quite an assumption on your part. Why do you assume my players are at odds with me?

In D&D (or a game like it) you have a static economic model that doesn't function. It assumes a market that is totally static and stable for centuries with no supply and demand or market fluctuations. There are no recessions. There is no inflation. There is no regional changes. The market is so static that you can simply state flat values for gems and use them as spell components. High level wizards can create arbitrarily high amounts of wealth. Dragons hoard oceans of currency. Every small town has dozens of each type of mundane weapons and armor and low level potion just floating around in hammer space waiting for a PC to buy them. NPCs have drastically less wealth than PCs of equal level. Major Artifacts are completely impossible to buy no matter how much money you through at them.

Likewise the game bases success rate based on how much money you have to pour back into adventuring. The ideal move (from a game perspective) is to spend as little money as possible on "fluff", to live like an ascetic monk begging on the street and spending every waking hour crafting items to sell. You need to loot every scrap you can from defeated enemies, and every possible coin you scrounge up needs to go right back into buying better gear. You adventure to get rich and you get rich to adventure, and endless treadmill with no chance to ever stop and enjoy the fruits of your labors.

Players don't actually enjoy playing Accountants and Actuaries. They generally would rather be out killing orcs rather than going over inventory sheets, and if you gave them a real choice about what they would do in their downtime they might actually do things that would make them human, engaging in various vices and enjoying life rather than simply hoarding every penny and living in the cheapest way possible, but the GAME (not the DM mind you, but the rules of the game) punishes any sort of expenditure that isn't directly related to buying better equipment.


The purpose of wealth in my game is primarily threefold:

1: To make characters who put points into a wealthy background, crafting skills, or mercantile skills viable archetypes by giving them some in game advantage over those who do not.
2: As a reward for players who go above and beyond due to either player or character skills. Completing optional objectives or successfully using skills to find hidden treasure needs some sort of reward.
3: To serve as a soft punishment without ending the campaign. Players who surrender can be robbed or ransomed rather than being killed, and players can use potions or other consumable items to turn defeat into victory for a monetary cost.

I am sure there is more to it if I think longer about it, which I will do.



I think you need to take a step back and identify the problem you're trying to solve.

So you have players, and they acquire wealth in various ways. They then wish to expend their wealth in various ways. You take exception to some ways in which they either acquire or expend wealth. You then decide to do something weird to the wealth system to try to obfuscate the wealth flow methods that you object to? Correct me if I have misunderstood any of your activities.

Question, is this specifically aimed at me or is it a litmus test for any rule?

Because it seems like it could be applied to virtually any change in the rules, and is phrased in a way that makes it sound like anyone who wants to change a rule is a bad guy.

Regwon
2017-01-02, 06:37 PM
I tried running this system and one of the players just couldn't get into it. He tried spending all of his wealth looking for a single rare item and failed to find it, and afterwards he said that, essentially, in his mind the merchant had taken all of his money but failed to give him anything in return.


I tried to explain that his wealth score was not a tally of his bank account, but instead an abstract measure of how much liquid income he had to burn. Failing his roles simply meant that he could not find someone who had the item he wanted at a price he could afford before his liquid resources where exhausted by non-adventuring related expenses of maintaining his lifestyle and that he needed to go on another adventure to replenish his wealth before he continues his search, but he couldn't wrap his head around it.


It seems like at least one of your players is at odds with you, and I dont blame them. You've introduced a system that takes away their agency in managing their own resources and replaces it with randomness. That player who went on an adventure to accumulate wealth, then failed to spend it on what he wishes, may as well not have bothered. Im all for introducing risks, but what youve done seems to be eliminate all of their choice for no benefit.

It feels really bad as a player when you have no control over resources you struggled to gain, when you dont know if you can do what you'd like to, and when you can't plan for the future.

It would be like telling a spell caster that they must roll randomly for the spells they prepare each day, and for the spell slots they have available. It would remove all they joy of being a caster and add no fun.

Can't you just let your player be thrifty and play the game they want to? If they're having fun why try and add unnecessary complexity. If they're living in the slums you can always roleplay their nights slept in a rat infestes hell hole.

Talakeal
2017-01-02, 07:12 PM
It seems like at least one of your players is at odds with you, and I dont blame them.

That is a reversal of cause and effect. Shuyung is saying I am implementing this wealth system because I was at odds with my players. You are saying that I am at odds with my players because I am testing a new wealth system.


You've introduced a system that takes away their agency in managing their own resources and replaces it with randomness. That player who went on an adventure to accumulate wealth, then failed to spend it on what he wishes, may as well not have bothered. Im all for introducing risks, but what youve done seems to be eliminate all of their choice for no benefit.

So imagine that I had been playing bog standard D&D 3.5. If they cannot afford the desired item, they cannot buy the desired item. If they are not in a community large enough to have that item for sale, they cannot buy that item.

Are you actually saying that giving the players a chance rather than just saying "NO!" is actually hurting the players and making the game less fun for them?


It feels really bad as a player when you have no control over resources you struggled to gain, when you dont know if you can do what you'd like to, and when you can't plan for the future.

It would be like telling a spell caster that they must roll randomly for the spells they prepare each day, and for the spell slots they have available. It would remove all they joy of being a caster and add no fun.

Just because there is a random element doesn't mean their choices don't matter. They stack the odds, and if the player keeps trying they will eventually get their item.

Ultimately it is a dice game. Things are going to be random. You might throw out your biggest spell only to have the bad guys all roll nat 20s on their save. You might critical hit an opponent only to roll 1 on the damage dice. You might seek out a blessing which gives you a reroll on a crucial task only to have the second roll turn out worse than the first. You might buy an expensive scroll only to botch your use magic device check and roll a mishap. You can have a brilliant tactical plan and then miss every attack roll.

People have a weird aversion to any rule which adds randomness to the game, but never seem to complain about the randomness that currently exists. Its like they think the Gary Gygax was the grand prophet of randomness and that any game which is not precisely as random as he foretold is somehow a failure.




Can't you just let your player be thrifty and play the game they want to? If they're having fun why try and add unnecessary complexity. If they're living in the slums you can always roleplay their nights slept in a rat infestes hell hole.

Again, this argument could apply to literally any rule. If the game said "players must stand up and recite poetry before their attack roll for a +5 to hit" they would recite the poetry because the game rewards them for doing so. That doesn't mean that it is a good rule or that players are having fun doing it. It doesn't mean that you are a bad DM trying to spoil your players day if you say "yeah, the poetry is lame, let's dispense with it and just give everyone a passive +5 to hit".

You are making the assumption that just because players are going along with a rule in a way that benefits them they are "having fun". You are also assuming I am "increasing complexity" which is actually quite the opposite. The new system is much quicker and more elegant and requires a ton less arithmetic and book keeping.

shuyung
2017-01-02, 07:32 PM
That is quite an assumption on your part. Why do you assume my players are at odds with me?

In D&D (or a game like it) you have a static economic model that doesn't function. It assumes a market that is totally static and stable for centuries with no supply and demand or market fluctuations. There are no recessions. There is no inflation. There is no regional changes. The market is so static that you can simply state flat values for gems and use them as spell components. High level wizards can create arbitrarily high amounts of wealth. Dragons hoard oceans of currency. Every small town has dozens of each type of mundane weapons and armor and low level potion just floating around in hammer space waiting for a PC to buy them. NPCs have drastically less wealth than PCs of equal level. Major Artifacts are completely impossible to buy no matter how much money you through at them.

Likewise the game bases success rate based on how much money you have to pour back into adventuring. The ideal move (from a game perspective) is to spend as little money as possible on "fluff", to live like an ascetic monk begging on the street and spending every waking hour crafting items to sell. You need to loot every scrap you can from defeated enemies, and every possible coin you scrounge up needs to go right back into buying better gear. You adventure to get rich and you get rich to adventure, and endless treadmill with no chance to ever stop and enjoy the fruits of your labors.

Players don't actually enjoy playing Accountants and Actuaries. They generally would rather be out killing orcs rather than going over inventory sheets, and if you gave them a real choice about what they would do in their downtime they might actually do things that would make them human, engaging in various vices and enjoying life rather than simply hoarding every penny and living in the cheapest way possible, but the GAME (not the DM mind you, but the rules of the game) punishes any sort of expenditure that isn't directly related to buying better equipment.

Your original pitch boiled down to "my players and I want different things from money", which is kind of the definition of being at odds.

In D&D, you have a static price list because it's a printed page and they had to write something. There's no real economic model to speak of. That's on the DM to adjudicate. It can be more or less detailed the more expertise and work you want to put into it.

The game bases success rate based on how much fun everyone is having. The ideal move is to give everyone their opportunities to enjoy themselves.

In earlier versions of D&D, pages were devoted to such things as players establishing keeps, castles, cathedrals, towers, groves, etc. depending on purview. In more current editions, such things are touched upon still, but in much less detail, and at times only offhand. I'll need you to explain what you mean by "enjoy the fruits of your labors". If your campaign is keeping the players bogged down in accounting, that's your problem. Unless you and your players enjoy that, then it's not a problem. The game doesn't punish any action, although the DM might. The game seeks to facilitate the players' agency. The DM might not. If there's a disconnect between what you view as "the game" incentivizing, and what "your game" is incentivizing, that's caused by you.


The purpose of wealth in my game is primarily threefold:

1: To make characters who put points into a wealthy background, crafting skills, or mercantile skills viable archetypes by giving them some in game advantage over those who do not.
2: As a reward for players who go above and beyond due to either player or character skills. Completing optional objectives or successfully using skills to find hidden treasure needs some sort of reward.
3: To serve as a soft punishment without ending the campaign. Players who surrender can be robbed or ransomed rather than being killed, and players can use potions or other consumable items to turn defeat into victory for a monetary cost.

I am sure there is more to it if I think longer about it, which I will do.

I'll take these in order.
1. This is irrelevant to wealth gained during a campaign. A wealthy background can give a PC a bit of a headstart, but becomes marginalized somewhere in the mid levels. Crafting and Mercantile aren't the point of an adventure campaign.
2. Wealth is a natural byproduct of adventuring. In the case of bragging rights, additional wealth from innovation can be a deciding factor, but compared to, say, yourself, can you tell a difference between the richest man in the world, and the 400th richest man in the world? This is how the basic peasant looks at successful adventurers.
3. I don't have any objection to this, this is a reasonable thing to do.


Question, is this specifically aimed at me or is it a litmus test for any rule?

Because it seems like it could be applied to virtually any change in the rules, and is phrased in a way that makes it sound like anyone who wants to change a rule is a bad guy.
It's your post, so it was specifically aimed at you. That being said, a philosophically similar line of questioning could be applied to anyone looking to make a change to a building block of a game. I'm not saying that anyone wanting to make a change to a rule is a bad guy, I'm saying they might be a misguided guy.

Jay R
2017-01-02, 08:07 PM
I don't see how it doesn't serve as an abstract model of how wealth works.

Because it just did something to that character that is not an abstract version of what usually happens with wealth in fantasy games.


Sometimes I have money but just can't find the item I want to buy for sale anywhere. Sometimes I have something valuable to sell I just can't find a buyer. Sometimes I have unexpected expenses come up. Sometimes I decide to splurge and waste large amounts of money on frivolous things. Sometimes I am able to convince someone to sell something at a discount, other times I offend the seller (or vice versa) and we are unwilling to do business despite the mutual benefit. Sometimes a friend is able to make a connection for me.

If these things are happening in your current game more than in previous games, you haven't abstracted the wealth system, you've increased the probability of losing money for no benefit.

You didn't merely abstract it, you changed it into something whose effects are very different.

He's not objecting to the abstract nature of the system. He's objecting to the huge change in what can happen.


So to guys want the same object and are living the same lifestyle. Guy A is able to by a sword, guy B isn't.

In a normal game, that means that guy B either buys something else, or leaves town with most of his money. But that didn't happen here. That's why "in his mind the merchant had taken all of his money but failed to give him anything in return."

If he were a more analytical thinker, he wouldn't blame the player. He'd believe that the abstract wealth system took all of his money but failed to give him anything in return. But he doesn't really care who took it - the merchant, the auction house, the cops. the fence, the plague, the party, the taxes, the abstract system, whatever.

He knows that he lost his money without getting anything in return, and he knows that if he played by a normal system, that wouldn't have happened.


Perhaps:
Guy B went to the market / auction house on the wrong day.
Someone else (perhaps his own party member) just bought the last one.
The cops raided the black market fence before guy A could get there.
The fence who bought his treasure short-changed buy B.
Guy B's friend came down with the plague and needed to borrow money for medicine.
Guy B's came into town and, flush with dungeon money, decided to splurge on a wild party and now can't quite scrape together enough funds.
Property taxes are do on guy B's family farm.
There is a famine and the serfs who live on guy B's land can't pay their taxes.
Guy B's notices his armor is worn out and needs to be repaired before he thinks about buying a new weapon.
Guy A reminded the merchant of his dead son and so he let him have a sword that he normally wouldn't be able to afford.
Guy A knows a guy who can hook him up. Its a shame guy B didn't think to ask.

The list of possible explanations goes on and on.

If these are examples of things that have actually happened regularly in the fantasy role-playing games that you regularly play or run, and your players regularly lose all their money without being able to buy things, then this is an abstraction of those wealth systems, and you just haven't told him why his money disappeared this time, like you usually do.

But if going to the market / auction house on the wrong day doesn't usually take all the character's money, ...
If someone else buying the last one doesn't usually take away all his money, ...
If the cops don't take other people's money because they show up a day after they raid the black market, ...
If the fence doesn't usually short-change a character to bankruptcy, ...
if your players' characters don't usually have to give up all their money for somebody's medicine, ...
If the DMs don't usually tell the player that his character threw away his money splurging on a wild party, ...
If players don't often lose all their money to property taxes, ...
If there aren't usually famines that take away the adventurers' money for serfs that he never knew about before, ...
If characters' armor doesn't usually get worn out because the merchant didn't have the right sword, ...
If one character reminding a merchant of his dead son doesn't usually take away all the money from another character's money, ...
If not knowing a guy who can hook him up usually costs somebody all his money for no supplies, ...

... then this isn't an abstraction of the wealth system, it's a completely new way for the character to lose his money and not get anything in return.

Specifically, it sounds like the probability of a famine, party, worn-out armor, property tax, or other financial calamity goes way up if he tries to buy something rare. That isn't an abstract system; it's just silly.


I really don't want every visit to town to be:

"I want to buy a vorpal long sword. No? How about a broad sword. No? How about a vorpal cutlass? No? How about a vorpal bastard sword? No? How about a vorpal scimitar..."

Then decide what items are available and stick with it, and don't take away all his money because there isn't a vorpal weapon.

Talakeal
2017-01-02, 09:37 PM
1. This is irrelevant to wealth gained during a campaign. A wealthy background can give a PC a bit of a headstart, but becomes marginalized somewhere in the mid levels. Crafting and Mercantile aren't the point of an adventure campaign.
2. Wealth is a natural byproduct of adventuring. In the case of bragging rights, additional wealth from innovation can be a deciding factor, but compared to, say, yourself, can you tell a difference between the richest man in the world, and the 400th richest man in the world? This is how the basic peasant looks at successful adventurers.

1: I have had a lot of players over the years want to play a crafter and a few who wanted to play someone with a wealthy or mercantile background. I can think of a lot of stories where one or more protagonists was a merchant or a tech guy. The "inventor" is a staple character on most ensemble TV shows that I grew up with and there are entire series whose premise revolves around their inventions. Merchants less so, but there are quite a few memorable stories where someone solved the issue with a basic knowledge of economics or business practices (for example any episode of Deep Space 9 where Quark or Nog has a large role in the plot).

2: Bragging rights are all well and good, but it is nice to have some sort of mechanical reward for players who go "above and beyond" when it comes to meeting optional objectives.


He knows that he lost his money without getting anything in return, and he knows that if he played by a normal system, that wouldn't have happened.

Why do you say the system is "abnormal?" In my experience the vast majority of games use an abstract resource system, if anything games where you count every copper only to blow it at ye olde' magic item shoppe are by far the majority.


If these are examples of things that have actually happened regularly in the fantasy role-playing games that you regularly play or run, and your players regularly lose all their money without being able to buy things, then this is an abstraction of those wealth systems, and you just haven't told him why his money disappeared this time, like you usually do.

But if going to the market / auction house on the wrong day doesn't usually take all the character's money, ...
If someone else buying the last one doesn't usually take away all his money, ...
If the cops don't take other people's money because they show up a day after they raid the black market, ...
If the fence doesn't usually short-change a character to bankruptcy, ...
if your players' characters don't usually have to give up all their money for somebody's medicine, ...
If the DMs don't usually tell the player that his character threw away his money splurging on a wild party, ...
If players don't often lose all their money to property taxes, ...
If there aren't usually famines that take away the adventurers' money for serfs that he never knew about before, ...
If characters' armor doesn't usually get worn out because the merchant didn't have the right sword, ...
If one character reminding a merchant of his dead son doesn't usually take away all the money from another character's money, ...
If not knowing a guy who can hook him up usually costs somebody all his money for no supplies, ...

... then this isn't an abstraction of the wealth system, it's a completely new way for the character to lose his money and not get anything in return.

Specifically, it sounds like the probability of a famine, party, worn-out armor, property tax, or other financial calamity goes way up if he tries to buy something rare. That isn't an abstract system; it's just silly.

It almost feels like you are setting up your own straw man here. You asked how I would justify the extremely unlikely situation where two identical characters came into the same town at the same time and both wanted to buy the exact same thing and one guy succeeded and the other guy failed. Ordinarily it is sufficient to say "You cannot find someone who is willing to sell you the item at a price you can afford" and be done with it.


Then decide what items are available and stick with it, and don't take away all his money because there isn't a vorpal weapon.

That is an insane amount of work for almost no pay off. And in the end it actually limits the player's options.



And again, no one is taking all of the character's money. The character has finite resources (among them money, time, and patience) which WILL be eroded in the undefined period of time they spend between adventures regardless of what they do. The player does not get to "save up" his money regardless of what he does. He gets to make X rolls, perhaps modified by the results of his previous adventure, and after next adventure he will get to make the same X rolls, modified by the results of that adventure.

Many OSR games do away with wealth entirely. The adventure ends with you flush with cash and descending into a hedonistic whirlwind of booze, feasts, and loose women, and then waking up at the start of the next adventure with your starting gear and a bad hang-over.

Are all of these systems inherently flawed?

If not why is it so wrong to only go part way into that system, giving the character a chance to hold onto something useful that they purchased while they were flush with gold?

oxybe
2017-01-02, 11:03 PM
I think the problem is you're not abstracting enough in the right areas and adding abstracting where it really isn't needed.

Someone mentioned the D20Modern wealth system as an abstract one. It's functional and I vaguely remember it so we'll work with that to begin with.

Each character has a Wealth value of N. This represents the whole of their assets: money, gems, artwork, land, gear, magic stuffs, etc... the character can move and trade around to get stuff. In D20 Modern, N usually only changes in a positive manner after a major windfall:

-Winning the lottery
-Getting away with a big heist
-A fat reward for a job done under the table
-A promotion within the company
-etc...

And only goes down when the character is trying to buy something or needs funds that generally exceed their normal means:

-Joe Average trying to buy a new car with cash
-Hospital bill after a serious accident
-Rebuild the house because something isn't covered by insurance and has to come from the pocket
-etc...

Outside of that? You can generally be assumed to procure objects with a cost value less then N as they're within your means.

Noting that an item or service of Value N doesn't mean that it's worth is equal to Wealth N, just that for a character of Wealth N, procuring such an object or service will requiring the liquidation of assets enough to bring his Wealth down to N-1 (or more, depending on the nature of the object/service)

Now this does require a change in your mindset: money is no longer an "object", but rather a "scope".

Basically go :

At wealth 0 you can afford X without taxing your resources
At wealth 1 you can afford Y without taxing your resources
At wealth 2 you can afford Z without taxing your resources
...

Until you have a good idea of the scope of things you can buy. You can also attach stuff like Lifestyles to a given Wealth value at that point. Someone who can buy a new car without denting their finances can probably afford a cheap lifestyle, but still be living it up with their fancy car and dining out nightly.

The thing with D&D is that it's always has a really poor use of money. I don't care about land management. I never did. I still don't. I found it far more boring then going out adventuring back in 2nd edition and that still holds true.

But in 2nd ed, once you had enough money to cover basic adventuring expenses, if you didn't care for that stuff, you were basically just sitting on piles of useless metal. outside of paying people to do stuff (which was basically as useful as the GM felt like it would be, so hit and miss) money had little use... you couldn't really do anything once you had the necessities.

there wasn't really any luxury items you could get going by the PHB.

at least in 3rd and 4th it was basically a resource for magic items, if only under another name.

in 5th ed it seems to have fallen back to the 2nd ed methodology of "money is basically useless once you have your gear"

So first I would recommend creating yourself a workable scope of items and services.

-Low end stuff like mundane gear and a stay at an inn are normal
-Low-average value stuff like quality of life magic items and a decent lifestyle
-Standard +1 magic items
...
-Stupid high : Spelljammer? Howl's Moving Castle? A Samsung Galaxy Note 7 that doesn't catch on fire?

Once you have that scope you can start figuring out how you're going to parcel out wealth to bring characters up to that quality of life or how it's going to affect your game world.

Note that I'm talking about being able to afford these items if they're available, not that they're always available. If you have to custom-order yourself a Spelljammer because "Kevin's Slightly Jammed Emporium" doesn't exist it might cause the value to go up, or if you're looking for a magic sword you may need to have a broker go through their and that takes time and money (note that in these cases the value cost would be added to the end price of the weapon, as part of the overall cost to get it rather then a constant drain).

Of course this is theoretical and brain fartings done quickly in an evening based off half-baked memories of a system I haven't played in forevers.

Jay R
2017-01-02, 11:18 PM
Anyone notice any big flaws with my proposed system or have any suggestions?

You have asked for our advice and opinion. I've offered what I have.


Any ideas on how to explain an abstract wealth system to someone who is stuck in the D&D warrior-accountant mindset and get them to understand and accept it?

He will understand and accept an abstract wealth system that lets him buy stuff. He will not understand and accept a system, concrete or abstract, that keeps him from buying stuff.

He knows it's an abstract wealth system. That's not his objection. It will never be his objection.

His objection is about the results, not the process.

In his mind the merchant had taken all of his money but failed to give him anything in return. You are trying to find a way to explain that that didn't happen. Since in fact his wealth is gone, and in fact he didn't get anything in return, you can't "explain" that taking all his money and giving him nothing in return didn't happen.

He will understand and accept an abstract wealth system. He will not understand a new system that makes his money go away and gives him nothing in return.

That's the problem. All his money went away and he got nothing in return. Concrete or abstract, simple or complex - he doesn't care. He cares that his money went away and he got nothing in return.

Good luck with your game.

Talakeal
2017-01-02, 11:34 PM
You have asked for our advice and opinion. I've offered what I have.



He will understand and accept an abstract wealth system that lets him buy stuff. He will not understand and accept a system, concrete or abstract, that keeps him from buying stuff.

He knows it's an abstract wealth system. That's not his objection. It will never be his objection.

His objection is about the results, not the process.

In his mind the merchant had taken all of his money but failed to give him anything in return. You are trying to find a way to explain that that didn't happen. Since in fact his wealth is gone, and in fact he didn't get anything in return, you can't "explain" that taking all his money and giving him nothing in return didn't happen.

He will understand and accept an abstract wealth system. He will not understand a new system that makes his money go away and gives him nothing in return.

That's the problem. All his money went away and he got nothing in return. Concrete or abstract, simple or complex - he doesn't care. He cares that his money went away and he got nothing in return.

Good luck with your game.

His money didn't go away though. That's what I am not getting.

To me its like a fighter who misses and then proclaims that his "strength went away" even though he is perfectly able to attack again on the following round.

shuyung
2017-01-03, 12:08 AM
His money didn't go away though. That's what I am not getting.

To me its like a fighter who misses and then proclaims that his "strength went away" even though he is perfectly able to attack again on the following round.


I tried running this system and one of the players just couldn't get into it. He tried spending all of his wealth looking for a single rare item and failed to find it, and afterwards he said that, essentially, in his mind the merchant had taken all of his money but failed to give him anything in return.


I tried to explain that his wealth score was not a tally of his bank account, but instead an abstract measure of how much liquid income he had to burn. Failing his roles simply meant that he could not find someone who had the item he wanted at a price he could afford before his liquid resources where exhausted by non-adventuring related expenses of maintaining his lifestyle and that he needed to go on another adventure to replenish his wealth before he continues his search, but he couldn't wrap his head around it.
These are contradictory statements you've made. On the one hand, you say the money didn't go away, but on the other you say he spent all his liquid resources.

Why don't we deal in concrete scenarios for a while. What are your players doing with their monetary resources, and what do you want them to be doing with their monetary resources? I assume it's all gear-related, because that seems to be what you're concerned with. You seem to have your players in a sort of environment where, like sharks, if they don't keep moving forward, they die.

Talakeal
2017-01-03, 12:22 AM
These are contradictory statements you've made. On the one hand, you say the money didn't go away, but on the other you say he spent all his liquid resources.


I didn't say he spent his resources, I said they were exhausted.

His resource might be money. It might be time. It might be the patience to continue shopping. It might be contacts. It might have been favors. Maybe he just didn't have any of the required resources in the first place.

The player gets X rolls per trip to town based on their social class. It doesn't matter what they "spend" their rolls on, they get the same number of rolls regardless of what they do. Using them all or saving them all has absolutely no effect on what happens to the character or their "money" in the future.


Why don't we deal in concrete scenarios for a while. What are your players doing with their monetary resources, and what do you want them to be doing with their monetary resources? I assume it's all gear-related, because that seems to be what you're concerned with. You seem to have your players in a sort of environment where, like sharks, if they don't keep moving forward, they die.

Sorry, what exactly are you asking? Are you talking about any given game in particular? Are you talking about what specifically happened during the session where we tried the new system? Are you asking about my experience with RPGs in general?

Vitruviansquid
2017-01-03, 12:38 AM
If you're happy with the system despite what your player says, you should just take his feedback, crumple it up, and throw it away.

shuyung
2017-01-03, 01:11 AM
I didn't say he spent his resources, I said they were exhausted.

His resource might be money. It might be time. It might be the patience to continue shopping. It might be contacts. It might have been favors. Maybe he just didn't have any of the required resources in the first place.

The player gets X rolls per trip to town based on their social class. It doesn't matter what they "spend" their rolls on, they get the same number of rolls regardless of what they do. Using them all or saving them all has absolutely no effect on what happens to the character or their "money" in the future.

"Liquid resources" has a very specific meaning. If you don't mean that, don't use the phrase. "Exhausted" in the context of "liquid resources" also has a very specific meaning. If you don't mean that, don't use the word.


Sorry, what exactly are you asking? Are you talking about any given game in particular? Are you talking about what specifically happened during the session where we tried the new system? Are you asking about my experience with RPGs in general?
You created this thread because you have a problem. In the ensuing discussion, you haven't actually defined your problem. The chain of events, as near as I can tell, went about like this: You didn't like what your players were doing. You made a change. At least one of your players didn't like the outcome of the change. You posted here. What were your players doing that you don't like? Do you know why your players are doing it? If you would like to be specific in your answers, that would probably help. If you don't want to be specific, then the responses you receive probably won't help you.

Now, if you're not looking for help, but just sympathy, that's different.
There, there.

Fri
2017-01-03, 01:21 AM
I tried to explain that his wealth score was not a tally of his bank account, but instead an abstract measure of how much liquid income he had to burn. Failing his roles simply meant that he could not find someone who had the item he wanted at a price he could afford before his liquid resources where exhausted by non-adventuring related expenses of maintaining his lifestyle and that he needed to go on another adventure to replenish his wealth before he continues his search, but he couldn't wrap his head around it.




This.

This is where your explanation fails basically. I get what you're trying to do. You're trying to make "wealth" similar to skill, the higher his "wealth" is the easier chance he got what he want, same with how accuracy or strength work in other part of the game basically. The higher your "strength" the more chance you'll be successful to push the big boulder.

The problem is that there's disconnect between your explanation on how it work. You might misunderstood what "liquid income" mean, or you might explain it wrongly to either us or him. I could see how the system might work, but you need a better/different explanation, basically.

Basically the simplification of your idea is, the fighter has say, +5 wealth. He want to buy rare sword. He roll 1d20+5 against DC say, 25 to buy rare sword. If he succeed, he got it. If he "miss" the roll, that means he failed to get the sword this time, but there's actually no change on his wealth. He just not got any chance to buy it this time, but he can buy it again next time.

Here's where the disconnect happen. First of all, liquid wealth means money, and when you say "he used up all of his liquid wealth" in most people's head it means he used up all his money, despite how his "wealth" score doesn't decrease. Maybe you think the "wealth" score is non-liquid investment like bank deposit or land or whatever, and he can't use it to buy rare items. Maybe he instantly deposit all the goblin loots and moldy lich underwear to investment bank or something that he can't debit instantly. But that's not what he or some other people think. And what it means for "failed wealth roll check," and what the hell is even a "wealth roll check, "you/we need better explanation for that.

Just change the "wealth roll check" explanation. I'm not sure how though, because the system is kinda too abstract at this point. Maybe say that it's him going around the market trying to find someone who want to sell him the rare sword he want with the amount of gold he have. Failure means he can't find any.

But here's a problem. Even if he succeed, his wealth doesn't decrease. So basically wealth check means "amount of money he can spend without reducing his lifestyle?" What if he want to reduce his stashed wealth/lifestyle to get that sword. That's what adventurers do. They don't hoard money in investment. The sword is their investment.

That's why the afromentioned abstract wealth in d20 modern or what else work better. Wealth score is the amount of money you can spend to maintain your current lifestyle, and you can reduce it to buy rare things.

So for example, if your wealth rating is 4, that means you can go around eating in expensive tavern, renting good inn, buying standard adventurer health care, without needing to roll anything (it's the lifestyle you can afford). Then, if you want to get something beyond what you can comfortably spend, like, bribing a king, or buying a boat you can either roll against wealth check to see if you manage to find something that's in your comfortable range (cheap discounted boat, cheap discounted king), or slash your wealth rating, you pay beyond your comfortable range and you're poorer now. You can't eat in expensive tavern or sleep in good inn anymore, you have to eat in cheap drinking holes and sleep in barns. At least until you somehow increase your wealth rating anymore. That's how to fix this rule I think.

Talakeal
2017-01-03, 01:35 AM
"Liquid resources" has a very specific meaning. If you don't mean that, don't use the phrase. "Exhausted" in the context of "liquid resources" also has a very specific meaning. If you don't mean that, don't use the word.

Sorry, in the future I will try and be more pedantic with my definitions :P



You created this thread because you have a problem. In the ensuing discussion, you haven't actually defined your problem. The chain of events, as near as I can tell, went about like this: You didn't like what your players were doing. You made a change. At least one of your players didn't like the outcome of the change. You posted here. What were your players doing that you don't like? Do you know why your players are doing it? If you would like to be specific in your answers, that would probably help. If you don't want to be specific, then the responses you receive probably won't help you.

Now, if you're not looking for help, but just sympathy, that's different.
There, there.

You make it sound like the problem was something my players did (or more accurately my perception of their actions) rather than a fundamental flaw in how economics are approached in certain simulationist RPGs.

There was no single event, no single behavior, no single player, no single campaign, no single group, no single game system. The problem was that the rules of RPGs that use economic systems like (but not limited to) D&D 3.5 require far too much micromanagement of resources, far too much math, and actively punishes players who want their characters to spend wealth on anything but upgrading their gear and want to spend their free time doing anything but grubbing for cash. That isn't realistic, and it isn't fun for either the players or the Game Master.

If I was looking for feedback on my specific system I would have posted it in full rather than giving a few abstract details.

I was instead hoping that people would have some more generic thoughts on abstract systems in general rather than simply crapping on the very concept, and specifically how to describe them in ways that don't make players feel like they are being "robbed".

What would I be needing sympathy over? That my test rules needed testing and weren't perfect out the door? That one of my player's wasn't comfortable with the concept? The people in this thread are being FAR harsher than any of my players were, in fact said player's reaction to the new rules was actually the highlight of the evening, he did an impression of a shop-keeper who takes everyone's money and then throws them out of his store that literally had the group rolling on their sides and tearing up with laughter.

Fri
2017-01-03, 01:39 AM
Nobody are crapping on abstract wealth system though. In fact people (and me) mention abstract wealth system that does work.

Talakeal
2017-01-03, 01:39 AM
This.

This is where your explanation fails basically. I get what you're trying to do. You're trying to make "wealth" similar to skill, the higher his "wealth" is the easier chance he got what he want, same with how accuracy or strength work in other part of the game basically. The higher your "strength" the more chance you'll be successful to push the big boulder.

The problem is that there's disconnect between your explanation on how it work. You might misunderstood what "liquid income" mean, or you might explain it wrongly to either us or him. I could see how the system might work, but you need a better/different explanation, basically.

Basically the simplification of your idea is, the fighter has say, +5 wealth. He want to buy rare sword. He roll 1d20+5 against DC say, 25 to buy rare sword. If he succeed, he got it. If he "miss" the roll, that means he failed to get the sword this time, but there's actually no change on his wealth. He just not got any chance to buy it this time, but he can buy it again next time.

Here's where the disconnect happen. First of all, liquid wealth means money, and when you say "he used up all of his liquid wealth" in most people's head it means he used up all his money, despite how his "wealth" score doesn't decrease. Maybe you think the "wealth" score is non-liquid investment like bank deposit or land or whatever, and he can't use it to buy rare items. Maybe he instantly deposit all the goblin loots and moldy lich underwear to investment bank or something that he can't debit instantly. But that's not what he or some other people think. And what it means for "failed wealth roll check," and what the hell is even a "wealth roll check, "you/we need better explanation for that.

Just change the "wealth roll check" explanation. I'm not sure how though, because the system is kinda too abstract at this point. Maybe say that it's him going around the market trying to find someone who want to sell him the rare sword he want with the amount of gold he have. Failure means he can't find any.

But here's a problem. Even if he succeed, his wealth doesn't decrease. So basically wealth check means "amount of money he can spend without reducing his lifestyle?" What if he want to reduce his stashed wealth/lifestyle to get that sword. That's what adventurers do. They don't hoard money in investment. The sword is their investment.

That's why the afromentioned abstract wealth in d20 modern or what else work better. Wealth score is the amount of money you can spend to maintain your current lifestyle, and you can reduce it to buy rare things.

So for example, if your wealth rating is 4, that means you can go around eating in expensive tavern, renting good inn, buying standard adventurer health care, without needing to roll anything (it's the lifestyle you can afford). Then, if you want to get something beyond what you can comfortably spend, like, bribing a king, or buying a boat you can either roll against wealth check to see if you manage to find something that's in your comfortable range (cheap discounted boat, cheap discounted king), or slash your wealth rating, you pay beyond your comfortable range and you're poorer now. You can't eat in expensive tavern or sleep in good inn anymore, you have to eat in cheap drinking holes and sleep in barns. At least until you somehow increase your wealth rating anymore. That's how to fix this rule I think.

Again, I wasn't aware that liquid resources had such a precise meaning and I didn't think too hard when I wrote it. I am not sure what term one would use to mean nebulous resources which the character has on hand at the moment.

The rules absolutely do have ways to temporarily or even permanently reduce one's wealth score to acquire things they couldn't normally afford, but again I was just posting a brief summary in my IP.


If you're happy with the system despite what your player says, you should just take his feedback, crumple it up, and throw it away.

No, I am not perfectly happy with the system, I am sure it has problems, hence the need for play-testing. But that specific piece of feedback seems to be more a problem with presentation than content.


Nobody are crapping on abstract wealth system though. In fact people (and me) mention abstract wealth system that does work.


Does it have a solution to the problem of a player wanting "one of everything?". Because that is the real root of the problem, I need some sort of system to stop the character from simply buying (or at the very least looking for) a single copy of every possible item in the world every session.

Fri
2017-01-03, 01:48 AM
I've actually also decided that this kind of abstract wealth is how I'd like money to be dealt with in all of my games except if bean counting is specifically the premise.

Like, there's this one campaign I really have a fond memory of, the Stars Without Numbers campaign where we're playing as crew of a ship doing odd jobs in space, and we do have to count everything. Our ship's mortgage, our ammuntion, our fuel, our food, our ship repair, etc. We're supposed to pay mortgage every month, do routine maintenance check whenever we land. We were wondering how to actually split our income from missions, do we each get some amount, or should we get "salary" and put the rest of the money to a pool for ship maintenance and mortgage, etc. We even joked how we need actual accountant for all this. And since it's the specific premise, I found it really cool and fun.

But other than that? Abstract wealth rule all the way.



Does it have a solution to the problem of a player wanting "one of everything?". Because that is the real root of the problem, I need some sort of system to stop the character from simply buying (or at the very least looking for) a single copy of every possible item in the world every session.


Well, if I read it right, the system I mentioned, solved it right? He either could try to roll with his current wealth to see if anyone would sell the rare sword without reducing his lifestyle (and if the roll fails, that means he fail that), or slash his wealth and make himself poorer but making sure he got the sword. But that means he's poorer now, and definitely can't afford to get other rare items.

Talakeal
2017-01-03, 01:50 AM
I quite like the resource system in Torchbearer (a game revolving around looting dungeons).

It's a dice pool system, 4-6 on each d6 is a success, 1-3 is a failure. Buying something has a target number of successes you need. So if someone was trying to buy a bundle of torches it would be an obstacle 1 resources test. If someone has 3 resources they'd roll 3d6 and if one of those dice was a 4+ then they'd succeed at buying the torches. Additionally, if you fail the roll the GM can choose to give you what you wanted anyway, but permanently reduce your resources score by the margin of failure. So if you rolled 2 successes vs an ob4 plate armour then the GM could give you the armour but reduce your resources by 2 as you spend all your wealth on it.

What loot does is add a temporary bonus to your resources score for one roll. So if you had a brooch worth 5d of treasure you'd add 5d6 to whatever your base resources score is for that one roll. Loot also insulates you from your resources score being reduced for that roll. So if you spent 2d of treasure on the roll then you negate up to 2 points of resource reduction.

Resources go up by making resources rolls. You need a number of successes equal to your current resources score, and a number of failures equal to your resources score -1 and then your resources go up by 1. So the way the game works out is that you get richer by going to dungeons, getting loot, and using that loot to buy things. And if you're not careful then you can easily bankrupt yourself back down to a broke ass adventurer again.

So in this example, loot gives you a bonus for one roll, pass or fail, right?

How does Torchbearer handle the mental disconnect of losing your loot but getting nothing in return?

Zombimode
2017-01-03, 04:05 AM
I'm a bit supprised that your bad experiences with non-Abstract wealth Comes from playing D&D 3.5. Because this game is set up in a way that mundane expenses don't really matter. If you look at the Prices of the gear that the PCs actually want and compare that to the costs of living and travelling you'll see that those don't Play in the same league.

In pretty much all my Groups we almost never bother with day-to-day expenses. Sometime I will cross of 10 or 20 Gold from my characters purse to "cover the expenses", but it simply doesn't matter. Even if you would compare the wealth of a PC that never pays anything other then actual Equipment to someone who meticulously calculates all the expenses, the difference would be measured in dozens of GP in contrast to the thousands of GP that the Equipments costs. Heck, depending on skills and abilities like Perform, Profession and Craft, some PCs might even come ahead (but then again only for a couple of dozens GP).

So, my conclusion is, like it is sadly alway in your case, the Problem is not the game but your Players.

Yukitsu
2017-01-03, 04:30 AM
So in this example, loot gives you a bonus for one roll, pass or fail, right?

How does Torchbearer handle the mental disconnect of losing your loot but getting nothing in return?

From my reading of that system, that would be incredibly unlikely since you would reduce your permanent wealth, insulated by the loot value and still get the item. It doesn't make any sense modelling any economic system to lose the loot and not gain anything in return since that's not how economic systems work. Losing wealth without gaining something only represents gambling, poor investments or being robbed.

Koo Rehtorb
2017-01-03, 05:03 AM
So in this example, loot gives you a bonus for one roll, pass or fail, right?

How does Torchbearer handle the mental disconnect of losing your loot but getting nothing in return?

Okay so in Torchbearer on any failed roll the GM has two options, a conditional success or a twist.

A conditional success means you do the thing you were trying to do, but you take a condition in the process, something that penalizes you down the road until you can get rid of it. "You make the death defying leap across the chasm, but it takes everything you have and leaves you Exhausted." For resources there's an extra special condition called Tax which, as I described before, permanently lowers your resources if you don't have enough treasure to insulate you from it. If someone spent a bunch of treasure on buying an item I'm usually inclined to give them a conditional success which means they DO get the thing in return. "You buy the thing, but a long day spent haggling with rude merchants has left you Angry."

A twist means that you don't get the thing you wanted and something bad happened, that may or may not have stopped you from getting the thing you wanted. "You fail to pick the lock and set off the spike trap in the process." If a GM is feeling particularly cruel they can use a twist to eat your loot and give you nothing in return, though I'd use this choice sparingly. The way to justify it in game would be something like "You buy the rations, but by the time you get around to eating them you find that they're infested with maggots and inedible." or even "As you're haggling with the shopkeeper someone picks your pocket and when you go to pay him you find your purse is gone."

Satinavian
2017-01-03, 05:59 AM
No, I am not perfectly happy with the system, I am sure it has problems, hence the need for play-testing. But that specific piece of feedback seems to be more a problem with presentation than content.No one beside yourself here knows how your system works. Even your sketched explaination got misunderstood and needed clarification.

There can't be any useful discussion or useful feedback for your system here.

Does it have a solution to the problem of a player wanting "one of everything?". Because that is the real root of the problem, I need some sort of system to stop the character from simply buying (or at the very least looking for) a single copy of every possible item in the world every session.Which is some completely new problem - which doesn't exist in any real system. Every system somehow limits what a player can purchase. Doesn't matter if abstract or old fashioned bean counting.

Or is your problem that abstract systems often allow to purchase cheep stuff without repercussion and thus cheap stuff becomes unlimited ? Well, yes. That is the point. Characters are rich enough that money limitation for any sensible supply of cheap stuff are not really a limit anymore.

hifidelity2
2017-01-03, 07:10 AM
We use a semi abstract system in most of our games

Once the party get above the struggling level then the DM asks what life style the players want to have – from peasant to Lord. They then assign (or they system has) accost / month for that life style and just deducts that money from each party member each month – very simple record keeping. The life style can go up as the players get richer, or down if they have problems

Any can then use any leftover cash for the purchase of unique items (magic etc)

If they party chose to have different life styles then they will be in different inns etc

Also if you don’t live to a certain life style then you maybe shunned by the higher levels of society. Also certain professions may require a certain level of life style

RazorChain
2017-01-03, 09:39 AM
It is very dependent on the game you are running


In Exalted wealth doesn't much affect the setting or the characters as they won't be buying relics but find them so the only things money will buy are props and manpower that doesn't really influence the game much. If a Solar needs a sword, he'll just take it.

In WoD it is the same thing, counting pennies doesn't matter if you are wealthy enough than you can reasonably buy a gun or a car or whatever. If a vampire needs a gun...he'll just take it.


Then you have systems like D&D and Cyberpunk where everything hinges on your gear and if you don't have that 10' pole or cybereye with lowlite vision then you want to know how much it costs.


If the PC is trying to buy a magic item it indicates that you are playing a system that advocates penny pinching and if the players find resource management fun then you should run Banks & Accountants 2nd edition for them instead.

EvilCookie
2017-01-03, 10:15 AM
Perhaps:
Guy B went to the market / auction house on the wrong day.

Makes sense, but guy B should lose no wealth (or definitely less than guy A)




Someone else (perhaps his own party member) just bought the last one.

Sure, merchants can run out of stock, but guy B should lose no wealth (or definitely less than guy A)




The cops raided the black market fence before guy A could get there.

Ok, that actually sounds interesting, the world seems active, but guy A should just walk away whistling and keep all his wealth or have trouble with the law.




The fence who bought his treasure short-changed buy B.

Sure, but guy B should in that case have the weapon, or some kind of say in what he does after that.
My players rarely decide "Oh, someone robbed us (or tricked us), I guess we will just let him go"




The cops raided the black market fence before guy A could get there.
The fence who bought his treasure short-changed buy B.

If this is actually the same quote, it makes sense that guy B spent more money, but both of them should have the weapon




Guy B's friend came down with the plague and needed to borrow money for medicine.

And guy B had no say in giving him the money? Did his friend rob him? From my experience, players kinda dislike when a GM tells them "Oh yeah, your friend was sick so your character decided to give him money for medicine." The usual response to that is "Can you please let me play my character?"




Guy B's came into town and, flush with dungeon money, decided to splurge on a wild party and now can't quite scrape together enough funds.

This again seems like the GM telling the player what his character did. I mean sure, if player B says guy B threw a party, by all means, tell him he spent all his money, but otherwise its kind of a **** move.



Property taxes are do on guy B's family farm.

Could make sense. If of course everyone else pays property taxes on their assets, there is a consequence of not paying, it is know when the tax must be payed, it is know how big the tax is and you make the whole tax system.




There is a famine and the serfs who live on guy B's land can't pay their taxes.

Allright, less income for him. His wealth should be stagnating, and if he has living expenses dropping.
The point that the famine hit only one household is a bit weird, but its fantasy.




Guy B's notices his armor is worn out and needs to be repaired before he thinks about buying a new weapon.

Again, shouldn't the player decide about what his character thinks? What if he decides to disregard his armour in favour of the weapon?




Guy A reminded the merchant of his dead son and so he let him have a sword that he normally wouldn't be able to afford.

Yep, makes sense and a nice flavour story.




Guy A knows a guy who can hook him up. Its a shame guy B didn't think to ask.

It's a shame you didn't think to ask player B did he think to ask.
And besides, B should literally lose no wealth from not asking the guy that knows a guy.




Are you actually saying that giving the players a chance rather than just saying "NO!" is actually hurting the players and making the game less fun for them?

Yes, if you say no, if the players know what is possible and what isn't (without randomness involved) it is much easier for them to plan things or to look forward to things




Ultimately it is a dice game. Things are going to be random. You might throw out your biggest spell only to have the bad guys all roll nat 20s on their save. You might critical hit an opponent only to roll 1 on the damage dice. You might seek out a blessing which gives you a reroll on a crucial task only to have the second roll turn out worse than the first. You might buy an expensive scroll only to botch your use magic device check and roll a mishap. You can have a brilliant tactical plan and then miss every attack roll.

Exactly! Those are some of the ****tiest feelings in TTRPGs. The moments when you thing "Screw this, why did i even bother." Why add more of those moments to your game willingly?




To serve as a soft punishment without ending the campaign. Players who surrender can be robbed or ransomed rather than being killed, and players can use potions or other consumable items to turn defeat into victory for a monetary cost.

I do believe you can do this in standard DnD. Actually i believe it's pretty standard, but might just be my games.


Because it just...
This is a great explanation

Jay R
2017-01-03, 11:23 AM
His money didn't go away though. That's what I am not getting.

To me its like a fighter who misses and then proclaims that his "strength went away" even though he is perfectly able to attack again on the following round.

You said that he can't go to another shop on his next round.

"...he needed to go on another adventure to replenish his wealth before he continues his search."

This is not like a fighter who missed but is perfectly able to attack again on the following round. This is like the fighter who missed and therefore cannot attack again until another adventure's worth of encounters.

If he is in town, but not allowed to buy things, then in his mind, he doesn't have money. In essence, he's only allowed to try to buy things a set number of times. If, after failing to buy the rare object, he can't buy other things instead, then it isn't how wealth works in any game I've played. I suspect that it's not how wealth works in any game he's played, either.

The only way I could justify the effects of this system is if they have to leave town in one hour. They can only visit four shops, whether they find anything to buy or not.


Sorry, in the future I will try and be more pedantic with my definitions :P

Not more pedantic. Try to be more correct.


Again, I wasn't aware that liquid resources had such a precise meaning and I didn't think too hard when I wrote it. I am not sure what term one would use to mean nebulous resources which the character has on hand at the moment.

Liquid resource is the correct term for money you can spend immediately. There is no term to describe money in hand that you aren't allowed to spend.

GloatingSwine
2017-01-03, 11:48 AM
I think the problem is that you called the system "wealth" but bundled a lot of other non-wealth things into what you called the "resources", like the character's willingness to continue looking for the item which are actually in the purview of the player not your system.

Also, possibly, that you called it abstract when it isn't really, you just changed the prices of everything to a much much smaller range. In an actually abstract system the fiddly small costs of day to day living disappear entirely. In your system where each time unit/purchase attempt drains one point of liquid wealth you haven't abstracted anything, you've just made the price of a night at the inn and a meal the same as the price of a sword, and players still have to do accounting on both.

You might be conceptualising it as "Character gives up looking for item, still has money", but your players aren't because you didn't explain it well enough (and frankly they decide when they give up shopping), so your player thought "I spent all my money and got nothing".

Telling them it's an abstract wealth system when it actually isn't either thing, it's RNGesus goes shopping contributed to that misconception.

Thrudd
2017-01-03, 12:20 PM
I think abstract wealth works for many games. The situation where it doesn't work/isn't appropriate is where a large part of character advancement is purchasing upgraded gear. If the players are expecting to peruse a menu and select items as the reward for completing adventures, and the game operates on this premise, then you should not randomize their ability to do that.

In a game where upgraded gear is only found, not purchased, or gear upgrades are not important at all, then it is fine to abstract. In this case, the best way is to allow the purchase of desired character-defining equipment at character creation, with build points or chosen from a list available to each class. The game presumably operates on the assumption that this equipment will be all that is needed for the duration, for the most part. Any small, mundane goods required for survival can be assumed to be available. Spending time role playing in town haggling with merchants for things just isn't something that will ever happen in this game. There should be nothing significant available purchase.

If you're going to abstract wealth and item availability as well, then the entire down time period must be abstracted. The players do not get to know exactly what their characters are doing during this time, they give an overall goal and you roll to see if it is accomplished within a certain time frame.

Factors that need to be accounted for - cost of the item, commonality of the item, size/type of settlement being searched, amount of time spent searching/waiting for the right people/materials.

Cost of item can be expressed in wealth categories or levels- everyday goods can be available to poor and higher wealth levels. No roll needed, if you have the required wealth level, you can afford the item.

The real limiting factor, then, is availability. Commonality provides a base percentage to represent how likely it is to find such an item on any given day. The settlement type gives a modifier to this percentage. The amount of time spent looking/waiting is another modifier.

Each category of item should have a different rate at which it becomes more likely to be found as time passes- common items like an axe, if it isn't available right away, will likely be available relatively soon. A rare item could also become more likely to appear the longer you search, but only slightly moreso.

There should always be a maximum percentage for each type of item, regardless of passage of time and settlement size. You can't just declare that you'll wait as long as it takes to find the item. Maybe after 1 month of searching, you've hit the maximum chance to find something. Every month thereafter it will be the same percent chance.

If players want a custom made item from a crafter, that should be allowed. Roll to see if such a crafter is available, then determine the wealth level required for the requested item. If the player has the required wealth level, determine the amount of time required to craft, and at the end of that time the player gets the item.

The number of things a character can do/search for in a given period of time should be limited. Basing that on a roll modified by wealth level or just straight on a wealth level number makes sense, or just make it a flat number per person, per item type. IE, Five common items, two uncommon items, one rare item per person per week. If you have servants, then that increases how many things you can possibly procure at a given time.

Wealth level can increase due to finding large treasure hoards or gaining new income sources, or decrease due to spending on exceptionally expensive things.

Players should know, in this system, that the game won't be majorly impacted by their ability to purchase specific items. They don't need to worry about trying to work this system to get the best sword and armor so they can fight the dragon. The best items are things they need to find on adventures, not buy in shops. You will not take away their characters' ability to function because of random rolls, they always have all the arrows and knives and rations and rope that would be expected of adventurers.

GloatingSwine
2017-01-03, 12:47 PM
Players should know, in this system, that the game won't be majorly impacted by their ability to purchase specific items. They don't need to worry about trying to work this system to get the best sword and armor so they can fight the dragon. The best items are things they need to find on adventures, not buy in shops. You will not take away their characters' ability to function because of random rolls, they always have all the arrows and knives and rations and rope that would be expected of adventurers.

Part of the point of an abstract wealth system is everyone agreeing not to deal with the fiddly small stuff and focus on the really shiny treasure.

So yeah, players don't even have to think about "do I have arrows", or ropes, or can afford to spend a night at the inn, or any of the other adventuring trivia, they just do.


Part of the reason you'd use an abstract system after all is that there are several orders of magnitude in difference between the price of even relatively basic adventuring gear and the price of daily life.

darkmammoth
2017-01-03, 12:54 PM
OP, what you described is something done similar to wealth in Atlantis The Second Age (Khepera Publishing version). It maybe worth a look at to see how they manage wealth which is treated somewhat like a stat.

Komatik
2017-01-03, 01:23 PM
Strike! has a pretty good system for that IIRC. It has income levels and determines purchase price as a level, so eg. a car is whatever to Bill Gates but a project to the working class man. He can still buy it though, but not a palace. Has a single-use lump sum bonus system as well.

CharonsHelper
2017-01-03, 02:09 PM
Abstract wealth systems can work, though some of them don't.

From everything I've gleaned from this thread - yours doesn't.

Talakeal
2017-01-03, 04:42 PM
I'm a bit supprised that your bad experiences with non-Abstract wealth Comes from playing D&D 3.5. Because this game is set up in a way that mundane expenses don't really matter. If you look at the Prices of the gear that the PCs actually want and compare that to the costs of living and travelling you'll see that those don't Play in the same league.

In pretty much all my Groups we almost never bother with day-to-day expenses. Sometime I will cross of 10 or 20 Gold from my characters purse to "cover the expenses", but it simply doesn't matter. Even if you would compare the wealth of a PC that never pays anything other then actual Equipment to someone who meticulously calculates all the expenses, the difference would be measured in dozens of GP in contrast to the thousands of GP that the Equipments costs. Heck, depending on skills and abilities like Perform, Profession and Craft, some PCs might even come ahead (but then again only for a couple of dozens GP).

So, my conclusion is, like it is sadly alway in your case, the Problem is not the game but your Players.

Again, its not any one bad experience, just a general distaste for wealth systems that try (and fail) to be simulationist. They hurt RP, they invite exploiting / rules lawyering, and they require a lot of pointless math and book keeping.

The only game I have ever seen where it was actually a big immediate problem at the table was a Shadowrun game (which I was a player in) and nobody in the party would spend a single dime they didn't have to except on equipment upgrades, and we all ended up sleeping in crack houses and living off of cold ramen noodles because they system had high prices for both daily expenses and equipment and limited funds.


From my reading of that system, that would be incredibly unlikely since you would reduce your permanent wealth, insulated by the loot value and still get the item. It doesn't make any sense modelling any economic system to lose the loot and not gain anything in return since that's not how economic systems work. Losing wealth without gaining something only represents gambling, poor investments or being robbed.

I don't think that is right. If I decide to, say, quit my job and spend all of my time driving around and visiting every antique store in America looking for one specific ultra rare item, I am going to have to give up and go back to work at some point unless I was filthy stinking rich to begin with.


No one beside yourself here knows how your system works. Even your sketched explaination got misunderstood and needed clarification.

There can't be any useful discussion or useful feedback for your system here.
Which is some completely new problem - which doesn't exist in any real system. Every system somehow limits what a player can purchase. Doesn't matter if abstract or old fashioned bean counting.

Or is your problem that abstract systems often allow to purchase cheep stuff without repercussion and thus cheap stuff becomes unlimited ? Well, yes. That is the point. Characters are rich enough that money limitation for any sensible supply of cheap stuff are not really a limit anymore.

I am not looking for mechanical feedback on the specific system, it is too rough and untested at this point. I am looking for ideas on how other games handle this problem, people's general opinions on them, and how I can "rationalize" a system where players have finite attempts to look for items without feeling like they are being robbed.

Also, from my reading of Exalted, the wealth system is just "You can have whatever you want!" so long as it falls within your price range. There is only a very narrow band of things that have a cost, anything above that level is just "NOPE!" and anything below that is literally unlimited.


Makes sense, but guy B should lose no wealth (or definitely less than guy A)
Sure, merchants can run out of stock, but guy B should lose no wealth (or definitely less than guy A)
Ok, that actually sounds interesting, the world seems active, but guy A should just walk away whistling and keep all his wealth or have trouble with the law.
Sure, but guy B should in that case have the weapon, or some kind of say in what he does after that.
My players rarely decide "Oh, someone robbed us (or tricked us), I guess we will just let him go"
If this is actually the same quote, it makes sense that guy B spent more money, but both of them should have the weapon
And guy B had no say in giving him the money? Did his friend rob him? From my experience, players kinda dislike when a GM tells them "Oh yeah, your friend was sick so your character decided to give him money for medicine." The usual response to that is "Can you please let me play my character?"
This again seems like the GM telling the player what his character did. I mean sure, if player B says guy B threw a party, by all means, tell him he spent all his money, but otherwise its kind of a **** move.
Could make sense. If of course everyone else pays property taxes on their assets, there is a consequence of not paying, it is know when the tax must be payed, it is know how big the tax is and you make the whole tax system.
Allright, less income for him. His wealth should be stagnating, and if he has living expenses dropping.
The point that the famine hit only one household is a bit weird, but its fantasy.
Again, shouldn't the player decide about what his character thinks? What if he decides to disregard his armour in favour of the weapon?
Yep, makes sense and a nice flavour story.
It's a shame you didn't think to ask player B did he think to ask.
And besides, B should literally lose no wealth from not asking the guy that knows a guy.


I never said these were DM pronouncements from on high. I said they were possible explanations. They could come from the player, the DM, a collaboration of the group, random dice charts, or just state the facts and let everyone at the table picture the specifics however they like.

Also, the system does allow for success with complications, so something like refusing to buy medicine for a sick family member could be a perfect example of that.

Its funny, in my other thread I am having a very similar argument about whether dice should be allowed to influence player actions during downtime. I don't think it is completely unreasonable, but I do think it should be up to the player to determine how their character goes about it. For example, wasting all of your money indulging in vices depends on the character; my character in Mage is pretty repressed and wouldn't much care for whores and booze and feasts, but she does have a martyr complex and often gives away more money than she can afford.


Exactly! Those are some of the ****tiest feelings in TTRPGs. The moments when you thing "Screw this, why did i even bother." Why add more of those moments to your game willingly?


/shrug. Its a dice game. Some things will always be random. Sometimes that's good, sometimes that's bad. I just find the idea that core D&D 3.5 is the gold standard for randomness and that any game that doesn't have precisely the same level of randomness is bad to be somewhat hard to swallow.

I know most people are pessimistic and like to focus on the negative, but any chance of bad luck is counteracted by good luck. For example, in my system you could (potentially) luck out and find that vorpal sword at first level, while in D&D 3.5 there is absolutely




You said that he can't go to another shop on his next round.

"...he needed to go on another adventure to replenish his wealth before he continues his search."

This is not like a fighter who missed but is perfectly able to attack again on the following round. This is like the fighter who missed and therefore cannot attack again until another adventure's worth of encounters.

If he is in town, but not allowed to buy things, then in his mind, he doesn't have money. In essence, he's only allowed to try to buy things a set number of times. If, after failing to buy the rare object, he can't buy other things instead, then it isn't how wealth works in any game I've played. I suspect that it's not how wealth works in any game he's played, either.

The only way I could justify the effects of this system is if they have to leave town in one hour. They can only visit four shops, whether they find anything to buy or not.



Not more pedantic. Try to be more correct.


Liquid resource is the correct term for money you can spend immediately. There is no term to describe money in hand that you aren't allowed to spend.

Thanks for sticking with the thread Jay R! I know I can be a little defensive and abrasive about things like this, it comes from being raised in a household with parents who are overly critical and love to argue, and I appreciate your continued willingness to put up with my crap.


Pedantic and correct usually goes hand in hand in my experience. For example, if a beetle lands on me and I say "Eww! A bug!" I am incorrect, but it would be rather pedantic to point it out.

I am not talking about money that you are not able to spend. The limited rolls represents a vast array of nebulous recourses. The primary resource that someone is using up shopping is time. They are also running out of patience and stamina, shops they haven't visited, the good will of the local merchant community, contacts to hit up, dates when the auction is running, risking getting caught visiting the black market, expiring goods, and yes cash. Also keep in mind that a lot of the transactions are conducted through barter rather than currency, so it is fully possible to end up trading one thing for something else that is equally worthless to you in the hopes of trading it to someone else for something you do need, but that not panning out.

I was looking for a collective word for all of these resources, while also assuring the person that they were not completely bankrupt, they still had plenty of non-liquid assets back home.



OP, what you described is something done similar to wealth in Atlantis The Second Age (Khepera Publishing version). It maybe worth a look at to see how they manage wealth which is treated somewhat like a stat.

Awesome. I will look it over. If there a free version somewhere you can point me to? I have been buying a lot of games recently and just coming out of the holidays I find my own resources depleted.


Abstract wealth systems can work, though some of them don't.

From everything I've gleaned from this thread - yours doesn't.

It works fine mechanically. There are still some bugs to work out in testing, but overall it does a fine job of achieve its goals of getting players their expected equipment levels, valuing resource management during the mission, rewarding extra success and punishing failure, valuing crafting and mercantile skills, allowing people to RP their lifestyle however they want without having their combat effectiveness dinged for it, and being quick and easy to use with a minimum of bookkeeping or math.

Its just that conceptually people don't like or can't rationalize the fluff / crunch disconnect of not being able to hoard their money for the future if they can't or won't buy something this adventure.

GloatingSwine
2017-01-03, 05:08 PM
The primary resource that someone is using up shopping is time. They are also running out of patience and stamina,

The players decide when they're running out of patience for shopping, not you and not the dice. If they can't buy the first thing they wanted that should in no concievable way deplete their available resources to buy anything else. None of your justifications make sense and half of them (ie. these are bought at auction or on the black market) would have to be explicitly laid out in advance and probably roleplayed if you're going to use them.

That's why your system didn't work (and it didn't, you are here posting this because it didn't, your players rejected it immediately, the first time they tried it, that's a thing that doesn't work).

Your system was not an abstract wealth system, it just made everything cost the same and imposed a ridiculous money sink on the players.

braveheart
2017-01-03, 05:20 PM
I like the general idea put in play here, however if add one "fix" to it that would have helped your player, provide the option to invest multiple points into a single roll, adding to the % chance for success with each additional point spent, this way a player could spend 10 of their points to turn a 5% roll into a 50% roll, this allows players to choose to what extent they will play the luck game, and probably would have saved your player from his grief experience.

Talakeal
2017-01-03, 05:36 PM
I like the general idea put in play here, however if add one "fix" to it that would have helped your player, provide the option to invest multiple points into a single roll, adding to the % chance for success with each additional point spent, this way a player could spend 10 of their points to turn a 5% roll into a 50% roll, this allows players to choose to what extent they will play the luck game, and probably would have saved your player from his grief experience.

Already in the system, although it is actually even more generous as you do it after the roll rather than before.


The players decide when they're running out of patience for shopping, not you and not the dice. If they can't buy the first thing they wanted that should in no concievable way deplete their available resources to buy anything else. None of your justifications make sense and half of them (ie. these are bought at auction or on the black market) would have to be explicitly laid out in advance and probably roleplayed if you're going to use them.

That's why your system didn't work (and it didn't, you are here posting this because it didn't, your players rejected it immediately, the first time they tried it, that's a thing that doesn't work).

Your system was not an abstract wealth system, it just made everything cost the same and imposed a ridiculous money sink on the players.

Those were all possible justifications for how the extremely unlikely scenario Jay R laid out could have come about. None of them make sense? Not one? Seriously? There is only one vorpal sword in town and the other PC already bought it is impossible for you to wrap your head around? Seriously?

ONE of my players didn't like the system when it was described to him because of the fluff crunch disconnect. The other players were fine with it, and once we got into the game the player who didn't like it was fine with the results.

How on Earth do you get that everything costs the same or that there is a money sink when the whole point of the system is that it doesn't deal with hard currency values? It might look like a money sink or everything costing the same if you just look at a single roll in isolation, but if you look at averages over time more expensive items still take more "resources" to acquire and the overall wealth AND gear value of the players significantly increases.

So are you saying that it is a violent affront to the very core of RPGs to have each adventure take a set amount of time, and that RPGs which do this are not real RPGs that should all be tossed in the trash bin? If you were to run a D&D 3.5 campaign would you be ok if I was playing a character who wanted to spend years of downtime crafting items between every adventure?

GloatingSwine
2017-01-03, 05:59 PM
Those were all possible justifications for how the extremely unlikely scenario Jay R laid out could have come about. None of them make sense? Not one? Seriously? There is only one vorpal sword in town and the other PC already bought it is impossible for you to wrap your head around? Seriously?


That doesn't explain why the second PC can't buy a different thing though.

Your system prevents him from doing that.


How on Earth do you get that everything costs the same or that there is a money sink when the whole point of the system is that it doesn't deal with hard currency values? It might look like a money sink or everything costing the same if you just look at a single roll in isolation, but if you look at averages over time more expensive items still take more "resources" to acquire and the overall wealth AND gear value of the players significantly increases.

You're giving out loot with set values, and attempting to purchase a thing costs one value point. This is not an abstract wealth system, it's just a claw machine that costs 1GP with a random roll as to whether you get the thing you wanted or nothing.

Abstract wealth systems are exactly that. Abstract. If you have wealth 5 and you want a thing of value 5, you get the thing because you can afford it. If you want a thing with value 10 you don't get the thing because you can't afford it. Job done, no messing. And even if you buy a value 5 thing you still have wealth 5. If you go looking for a value 5 thing and this town doesn't sell it, you still have wealth 5.


So are you saying that it is a violent affront to the very core of RPGs to have each adventure take a set amount of time, and that RPGs which do this are not real RPGs that should all be tossed in the trash bin? If you were to run a D&D 3.5 campaign would you be ok if I was playing a character who wanted to spend years of downtime crafting items between every adventure?

No, I'm saying you organise with your players how long the downtime is and that determines how long they have to do their shopping if there is reason to have a fixed limit (if all your players want to take a few years off for downtime, why is it a problem? Many adventure series have gaps of a year or more between installments.) not how many tokens the GM decided to give them for the fairground attractions this adventure.

Talakeal
2017-01-03, 06:34 PM
Ok, let me present a thought experiment:

Most people are objecting to the idea of a limited number of rolls, correct?


So let's take a standard D&D 3.5 scenario.

The players go into town and decide to look at what magic items they have.

There are tens of thousands of possible low level magic items in the game, and any community of above 2,000 people will potentially have them by RAW.

How would one go about determining the towns inventory without:

A: Creating a town with more magic items than people.
B: Making a system where magic items are so rare that the player's will never find anyone who has what they need.
C: Resorting to unrealistic metagaming and just declare by DM FIAT that the players just so happen to find exactly what they need and little else for sale.



No, I'm saying you organise with your players how long the downtime is and that determines how long they have to do their shopping if there is reason to have a fixed limit (if all your players want to take a few years off for downtime, why is it a problem? Many adventure series have gaps of a year or more between installments.) not how many tokens the GM decided to give them for the fairground attractions this adventure.

The system is built on the assumption that each adventure takes roughly a month of in character time and consists of an adventure phase in the wilderness and a recovery phase in town.

You can shake this up a bit, and there are rules in the game for doing so, for taking extended periods of downtimes, or multiple adventures back to back, or adventures in town, or the like; and the players and the Game Master are perfectly free to use these rules as guidelines for any sort of in depth economic or time management system they like, but that isn't the default assumption.


That doesn't explain why the second PC can't buy a different thing though.

No it does not. Jay R asked about the situation where to identical characters both wanted to buy an identical item and lived identical life styles and one was able to afford it and the other way not. I gave explanations for that question, not justifications for why you are only allowed a finite number of rolls per session.


You're giving out loot with set values, and attempting to purchase a thing costs one value point. This is not an abstract wealth system, it's just a claw machine that costs 1GP with a random roll as to whether you get the thing you wanted or nothing.

Looked at in isolation, yes. Making a single roll for a single rare item and succeeding at it is kind of like winning the prize at a claw machine. Consider that incredible good fortune, like finding a rare first edition book at a yard sale. Such a roll is incredibly unlikely, and an equally good roll when looking for a more common item would almost certainly give the player some additional reward for a critical success.

But when you look at it over time what would be more likely is: "You need to roll a 37 for a vorpal sword, you rolled a 29, which means that after a long day of browsing stores and haggling you can find a merchant who will give you the vorpal sword in exchange for only 8 units of treasure."



Abstract wealth systems are exactly that. Abstract. If you have wealth 5 and you want a thing of value 5, you get the thing because you can afford it. If you want a thing with value 10 you don't get the thing because you can't afford it. Job done, no messing. And even if you buy a value 5 thing you still have wealth 5. If you go looking for a value 5 thing and this town doesn't sell it, you still have wealth 5.
.

That is both untrue and incredibly boring. I have played several games where you have to "roll resources" to see if you can acquire something and I have played some where you have a limited number of actions during downtime. While not an RPG, Eldritch Horror's system works almost exactly like what you describe as a "claw machine" and is widely considered to be a very good game.

So you are saying that a game with a binary "You can always afford it for free! Congratulations!" or "You can never afford it no matter what, sucks to be you!" is objectively more fun, more realistic, and more fair than one where there is a chance to go either way which can be influenced by both player and character skill?

Also, again, you have it backwards. Wealth determines how often you roll. Your roll NEVER influences your wealth.

Talakeal
2017-01-03, 06:58 PM
I think abstract wealth works for many games. The situation where it doesn't work/isn't appropriate is where a large part of character advancement is purchasing upgraded gear. If the players are expecting to peruse a menu and select items as the reward for completing adventures, and the game operates on this premise, then you should not randomize their ability to do that.

In a game where upgraded gear is only found, not purchased, or gear upgrades are not important at all, then it is fine to abstract. In this case, the best way is to allow the purchase of desired character-defining equipment at character creation, with build points or chosen from a list available to each class. The game presumably operates on the assumption that this equipment will be all that is needed for the duration, for the most part. Any small, mundane goods required for survival can be assumed to be available. Spending time role playing in town haggling with merchants for things just isn't something that will ever happen in this game. There should be nothing significant available purchase.

If you're going to abstract wealth and item availability as well, then the entire down time period must be abstracted. The players do not get to know exactly what their characters are doing during this time, they give an overall goal and you roll to see if it is accomplished within a certain time frame.

Factors that need to be accounted for - cost of the item, commonality of the item, size/type of settlement being searched, amount of time spent searching/waiting for the right people/materials.

Cost of item can be expressed in wealth categories or levels- everyday goods can be available to poor and higher wealth levels. No roll needed, if you have the required wealth level, you can afford the item.

The real limiting factor, then, is availability. Commonality provides a base percentage to represent how likely it is to find such an item on any given day. The settlement type gives a modifier to this percentage. The amount of time spent looking/waiting is another modifier.

Each category of item should have a different rate at which it becomes more likely to be found as time passes- common items like an axe, if it isn't available right away, will likely be available relatively soon. A rare item could also become more likely to appear the longer you search, but only slightly moreso.

There should always be a maximum percentage for each type of item, regardless of passage of time and settlement size. You can't just declare that you'll wait as long as it takes to find the item. Maybe after 1 month of searching, you've hit the maximum chance to find something. Every month thereafter it will be the same percent chance.

If players want a custom made item from a crafter, that should be allowed. Roll to see if such a crafter is available, then determine the wealth level required for the requested item. If the player has the required wealth level, determine the amount of time required to craft, and at the end of that time the player gets the item.

The number of things a character can do/search for in a given period of time should be limited. Basing that on a roll modified by wealth level or just straight on a wealth level number makes sense, or just make it a flat number per person, per item type. IE, Five common items, two uncommon items, one rare item per person per week. If you have servants, then that increases how many things you can possibly procure at a given time.

Wealth level can increase due to finding large treasure hoards or gaining new income sources, or decrease due to spending on exceptionally expensive things.

Players should know, in this system, that the game won't be majorly impacted by their ability to purchase specific items. They don't need to worry about trying to work this system to get the best sword and armor so they can fight the dragon. The best items are things they need to find on adventures, not buy in shops. You will not take away their characters' ability to function because of random rolls, they always have all the arrows and knives and rations and rope that would be expected of adventurers.

This system is almost exactly what I am doing bar a few details, indeed it is precisely the highlighted portion of your post which people are objecting to.

The Extinguisher
2017-01-03, 08:46 PM
Your option C seems pretty reasonable. The player gets what they want, you dont spend a bunch of time making item tables, and the game can continue to more interesting stuff than economics.

The problem with trying to impose real economies on adventure-and-loot games is that they wouldnt actually work. The scale between an average citizens wealth and an adventurer has to be high enough to justify the danger, and a player introducing that much wealth into a system that wasnt there before (bringing the dragons hoard into town) would irreparably damage it. And why would your players want normal means of money when they spend more on gear for one mission then they could earn in a lifetime of another profession.

More importantly though, trying to redesign a system needs more impetus then realism. Good gameplay is always more important than realism. If you have specific issues with how players are using a system, then thats the place to start, and can often be solved in system or with slight modifications. The system is there because it playtested well for the feel of the game. If they are hoarding too much, give them lots of reasons and opportunities to spend money of stuff they want. If you dont like how they spend their downtime, dont give them downtime. Remove them from their homebase so they dont have time to settle.

I'm not saying redesigning systems is bad, but it should serve gameplay and experience before it serves realism. If everyone is having fun in the flat, inconsistent economies of a game, then thats okay.

Thrudd
2017-01-03, 09:50 PM
This system is almost exactly what I am doing bar a few details, indeed it is precisely the highlighted portion of your post which people are objecting to.

I suppose the misunderstanding might be related to time-tracking. In a given period of time, a single person can do only so many things, that's perfectly logical. However, there is/should be nothing stopping the players from spending more time searching for goods if they want to. If this week there are no potions to be found, perhaps next week there will be, and spending that extra time should be the players' decision (probably with some effect on the subsequent or ongoing events which they are taking a break from).

Talakeal
2017-01-03, 10:05 PM
Your option C seems pretty reasonable. The player gets what they want, you dont spend a bunch of time making item tables, and the game can continue to more interesting stuff than economics.

The problem with trying to impose real economies on adventure-and-loot games is that they wouldnt actually work. The scale between an average citizens wealth and an adventurer has to be high enough to justify the danger, and a player introducing that much wealth into a system that wasnt there before (bringing the dragons hoard into town) would irreparably damage it. And why would your players want normal means of money when they spend more on gear for one mission then they could earn in a lifetime of another profession.

More importantly though, trying to redesign a system needs more impetus then realism. Good gameplay is always more important than realism. If you have specific issues with how players are using a system, then thats the place to start, and can often be solved in system or with slight modifications. The system is there because it playtested well for the feel of the game. If they are hoarding too much, give them lots of reasons and opportunities to spend money of stuff they want. If you dont like how they spend their downtime, dont give them downtime. Remove them from their homebase so they dont have time to settle.

I'm not saying redesigning systems is bad, but it should serve gameplay and experience before it serves realism. If everyone is having fun in the flat, inconsistent economies of a game, then thats okay.

Which is exactly what I thought I was doing. Replacing a slow, clunky, barely functional system that tries (and fails) to simulate a real economy with one that makes less sense from a "realism" perspective but works much better as a game mechanic.

But, people apparently can't stand the fluff disconnect, so I decided to play to the crowd and rewrote it so that you can try for as many items as you want but each one only once. It is actually significantly more random and harder for a player to get the item they actually want this way, and it is easier to abuse so I had to put in a note about the GM being able to veto perceived abuses, which I don't like to do, but I did remove the "shop-keeper took mah monies!" fluff / crunch disconnect.

You know, this is one of the very few times in history when I have had to give way for not being simulationist enough.

Xuc Xac
2017-01-04, 12:02 AM
I am not talking about money that you are not able to spend. The limited rolls represents a vast array of nebulous recourses. The primary resource that someone is using up shopping is time. They are also running out of patience and stamina, shops they haven't visited, the good will of the local merchant community, contacts to hit up, dates when the auction is running, risking getting caught visiting the black market, expiring goods, and yes cash.

There's the main problem I have with this system. You say wealth represents all these things and also cash. But "cash" is the only thing that gives them more wealth points. A goblin's purse doesn't contain extra time for shopping. A dragon's hoard doesn't contain black market contacts and stamina, does it?

Your wealth points go up when you find treasure and go down when you spend time and energy or say something to irritate a merchant or, yes, maybe spend some cash.

Knaight
2017-01-04, 12:23 AM
Which is exactly what I thought I was doing. Replacing a slow, clunky, barely functional system that tries (and fails) to simulate a real economy with one that makes less sense from a "realism" perspective but works much better as a game mechanic.

Here's the thing - this is far from the first abstract wealth system. It's the other abstract wealth systems that people are likely to implicitly compare it to, and compared to those other systems it comes across as clunky.

The Extinguisher
2017-01-04, 12:51 AM
Which is exactly what I thought I was doing. Replacing a slow, clunky, barely functional system that tries (and fails) to simulate a real economy with one that makes less sense from a "realism" perspective but works much better as a game mechanic.

But, people apparently can't stand the fluff disconnect, so I decided to play to the crowd and rewrote it so that you can try for as many items as you want but each one only once. It is actually significantly more random and harder for a player to get the item they actually want this way, and it is easier to abuse so I had to put in a note about the GM being able to veto perceived abuses, which I don't like to do, but I did remove the "shop-keeper took mah monies!" fluff / crunch disconnect.

You know, this is one of the very few times in history when I have had to give way for not being simulationist enough.

Fair enough. I've never found stock RPG loot mechanics to be overly simulational though. Sure you're exchanging coins for things, but in actual play it functions like more points to put into character customization, similar to skills.

Which is why I don't see a problem with just letting your players have things they want. Gear is an important part of the character, and shouldn't be restricted. Or at least, should be restricted like you might restricted a feat or prestige class.

So you're increasing abstraction on a number basis, but the real abstraction at the heart of the system is the ubiquity of the gear
(That being said the numbers are pretty abstract too, given that your GP total is in terms of actual gold coins and gems and silver goblets and other valuables things you find on adventures. It's just very granular (this might be the wrong word) in its abstraction)

GungHo
2017-01-04, 11:51 AM
In D&D (or a game like it) you have a static economic model that doesn't function. It assumes a market that is totally static and stable for centuries with no supply and demand or market fluctuations. There are no recessions. There is no inflation. There is no regional changes. The market is so static that you can simply state flat values for gems and use them as spell components. High level wizards can create arbitrarily high amounts of wealth. Dragons hoard oceans of currency. Every small town has dozens of each type of mundane weapons and armor and low level potion just floating around in hammer space waiting for a PC to buy them. NPCs have drastically less wealth than PCs of equal level. Major Artifacts are completely impossible to buy no matter how much money you through at them.
It's not a functioning economic model because it's not an actual economy and wasn't intended to be. In D&D, GP is just another resource to manage, like HP, spells, and magic items. Some resources are more fungible than others. You grant GP with the intent of it being transformed into magic items, because hoarding it is meaningless, and real estate management is in a different book. Rather than giving you an item directly, I am giving you a gift card.

Segev
2017-01-04, 02:16 PM
Other Wealth Systems to examine:

d20 modern has one that sounds similar to yours; you may wish to examine it. It's available on a d20 modern SRD, I believe.

White Wolf's Resources system is one I like for this kind of purpose, too: you have a certain rating in "resources," and you can generally - as long as the GM doesn't think you're going overboard - afford any item or service rated at least one lower than your resources rating. So a "resources 3 purchase" is an item which anybody with resources 4 or more could buy as many of as they want (within reason). You can ALSO buy things with ratings equal to your resources rating, but doing so temporarily reduces your overall resources rating by 1. Somebody might be able to buy new cars all the time but have to watch his spending for a while after buying a new private jet, for example.

Problem solving of this sort in general, however, really needs to focus on not just the problem you perceive yourself to be trying to solve, but on what your ideal outcome would be. What is it you want to accomplish?

If I am reading your opening post right, then you're seeking to streamline their economic interactions on piddling stuff. They should be unconcerned about in-town expenses, and not seeking to spend every waking moment off-screen doing something economically enriching. The wealth they have should exist solely as a marker of adventure income and be useful mainly to buy new gear.

(If that's not what you're looking to achieve, please post what it is your ideal end situation would be. Ignore mechanics, tell me what you want to see players and their characters doing in-game and in setting/narrative terms.)

To achieve this, I would recommend simply telling them that they can't make more money than they spend in town, and that their living expenses can be ignored. Just fluff whatever expenses they want, and any work they do for NPCs "off screen" happens to pay for their living expenses. They'll then focus on their adventure-earned gold for adventure-related purchases. It won't stop them from haggling for top dollar on every item they sell, but really, should it? If you don't like that, what do you WANT to see them doing with items they sell?

Talakeal
2017-01-04, 06:04 PM
So I talked the system over with my players and thought about it, and had a few thoughts:

First off, I am looking at the system using probabilities and averages over time. Players, and no few people on the forum, are instead looking at it and fixating on the most unlikely (and usually bad for them) scenarios and assuming they will occur regularly or in a vacuum.

For example, imagine in real life I told you:

Bob is obsessed with getting a new car.
In January Bob scrimps and saves and purchases nothing but essentials, living on tap-water and ramen.
In February Bob scrimps and saves and purchases nothing but essentials, living on tap-water and ramen.
In March Bob scrimps and saves and purchases nothing but essentials, living on tap-water and ramen.
In April Bob scrimps and saves and purchases nothing but essentials, living on tap-water and ramen.
In May Bob scrimps and saves and purchases nothing but essentials, living on tap-water and ramen.
In June Bob scrimps and saves and purchases nothing but essentials, living on tap-water and ramen.
In July Bob buys a new car.

You wouldn't assume "OMG bob lost all his money every month and then in July he found a new car on sale for only 100 dollars!" Instead you would assume that he was saving up all of his disposable income until he could afford the new car.

"Saving up" for a big ticket item can explain away almost all of the scenarios where someone would be unable to get the rare item they wanted and still "lose all their money". Now, because of the nature of the system there is a fair bit of randomness built in (although not so much as a straight roll, player skill and additional treasure can tweak the odds), but this can easily be justified by the randomness of life. Prices and incomes fluctuate all the time, and lots of unexpected expenses come up. In the above example, maybe Bob got the car in March because his uncle died and left him some money, maybe he has to wait until November because he broke his leg and had to take a few months off work and live off his savings.


Also, if one is playing the system "correctly" (meaning in the most rewarding and reasonable manner) you would buy the easy to come by essentials first and then use whatever was left over to hope to "strike it big" and get a rare item. If you choose (and it is your choice) to spend all of your rolls on an extremely rare item you will almost certainly get it sooner, but at the expense of everything else, just like Bob in the above example.

But this is all fluff and dressing. The system should more or less boil down to:

Sir Bob walks into town with three bags of gold, a winter wolf pelt, and a jeweled chalice.

(Some dice rolls).

Sir Bob leaves town with a suit of masterwork chainmail and a pair of healing potions.

At that point it is fairly easy for the GM and the players to work out a satisfying narrative for how that would have gone down. There will, occasionally, be weird things like Bob leaving town with far more or less "value" than he entered town with, but a reasonably creative group of people shouldn't have too much trouble coming up with a plausible explanation that doesn't stomp on anyone's agency or verisimilitude.


Here's the thing - this is far from the first abstract wealth system. It's the other abstract wealth systems that people are likely to implicitly compare it to, and compared to those other systems it comes across as clunky.

Is what I posted really clunky?

All items have a difficulty based on their availability and value.
At the end of each session players can roll a number of dice equal to their wealth score + any bonuses for treasure they found earlier in the session.
If the dice rolled for an item exceeds its difficulty the player gets the item.

That seems pretty streamlined and straightforward to me. Sure there are some parts that I didn't post that have some rough edges to be worn off during play-testing, but overall I think the complaint with the system is a fluff / crunch disconnect rather than any perceived clunkiness.



Other Wealth Systems to examine:

d20 modern has one that sounds similar to yours; you may wish to examine it. It's available on a d20 modern SRD, I believe.

White Wolf's Resources system is one I like for this kind of purpose, too: you have a certain rating in "resources," and you can generally - as long as the GM doesn't think you're going overboard - afford any item or service rated at least one lower than your resources rating. So a "resources 3 purchase" is an item which anybody with resources 4 or more could buy as many of as they want (within reason). You can ALSO buy things with ratings equal to your resources rating, but doing so temporarily reduces your overall resources rating by 1. Somebody might be able to buy new cars all the time but have to watch his spending for a while after buying a new private jet, for example.

Problem solving of this sort in general, however, really needs to focus on not just the problem you perceive yourself to be trying to solve, but on what your ideal outcome would be. What is it you want to accomplish?

If I am reading your opening post right, then you're seeking to streamline their economic interactions on piddling stuff. They should be unconcerned about in-town expenses, and not seeking to spend every waking moment off-screen doing something economically enriching. The wealth they have should exist solely as a marker of adventure income and be useful mainly to buy new gear.

(If that's not what you're looking to achieve, please post what it is your ideal end situation would be. Ignore mechanics, tell me what you want to see players and their characters doing in-game and in setting/narrative terms.)

To achieve this, I would recommend simply telling them that they can't make more money than they spend in town, and that their living expenses can be ignored. Just fluff whatever expenses they want, and any work they do for NPCs "off screen" happens to pay for their living expenses. They'll then focus on their adventure-earned gold for adventure-related purchases. It won't stop them from haggling for top dollar on every item they sell, but really, should it? If you don't like that, what do you WANT to see them doing with items they sell?

I have been doing that. Tons of time and effort still goes into book keeping and players trying to loot everything that isn't nailed down. I don't like the time or the effort having to go through a spreadsheet of loot at the end of every session and then calculate how much the players can get for every individual thing they found that they can sell. I also have to worry about "exploits" based on crafting or magically conjuring items and then selling them for more than was put into them for an infinite money loop. I also have players who hoard their money and never buy consumables or items that aren't "best in slot" which makes the rest of the party have to carry them and be below their own wealth level that just frustrates everyone.

The whole micro-managing wealth system just isn't for me. It fails in every way, it isn't fun or fair mechanically and it doesn't actually simulate any sort of realistic economy or income system.

Segev
2017-01-04, 06:09 PM
I have been doing that. Tons of time and effort still goes into book keeping and players trying to loot everything that isn't nailed down. I don't like the time or the effort having to go through a spreadsheet of loot at the end of every session and then calculate how much the players can get for every individual thing they found that they can sell. I also have to worry about "exploits" based on crafting or magically conjuring items and then selling them for more than was put into them for an infinite money loop. I also have players who hoard their money and never buy consumables or items that aren't "best in slot" which makes the rest of the party have to carry them and be below their own wealth level that just frustrates everyone.

The whole micro-managing wealth system just isn't for me. It fails in every way, it isn't fun or fair mechanically and it doesn't actually simulate any sort of realistic economy or income system.
Okay. That tells me what you don't like. That doesn't tell me what the ideal situation would be. I, in fact, don't see how your system solves these problems.

What is it that you want a system to accomplish? Not "how do you want it to work?" but "What would your players be doing if their behavior was ideal, in your opinion?"

We can help you come up with a wealth system that will encourage that ideal behavior, but first you need to know what it is you want them to be doing.

shuyung
2017-01-04, 06:30 PM
I have been doing that. Tons of time and effort still goes into book keeping and players trying to loot everything that isn't nailed down. I don't like the time or the effort having to go through a spreadsheet of loot at the end of every session and then calculate how much the players can get for every individual thing they found that they can sell. I also have to worry about "exploits" based on crafting or magically conjuring items and then selling them for more than was put into them for an infinite money loop. I also have players who hoard their money and never buy consumables or items that aren't "best in slot" which makes the rest of the party have to carry them and be below their own wealth level that just frustrates everyone.

The whole micro-managing wealth system just isn't for me. It fails in every way, it isn't fun or fair mechanically and it doesn't actually simulate any sort of realistic economy or income system.
What a number of us have asked, and you still haven't answered, is "Why are your players doing that?". There comes a point where a player ignores certain tiers of loot. It's like how Bill Gates, by the math, doesn't have any reason to pick up a Benjamin. If your players aren't hitting those inflection points, why not? What are you doing that's encouraging them to continue with the behavior?

Why are you worried about exploits into infinite money? The point of money is to get the things you want. Anyone with the capacity to create infinite money can basically just create the things they want, instead.

If players hoarding money to realize a power spike is a problem, the way to address it is to figure out why they're doing it. Is there something about the game they're in that incentivizes them to engage in that behavior? Do they expect that every X adventures, they need to have increased Y stats or else they're going to bite it?

Talakeal
2017-01-04, 06:39 PM
What a number of us have asked, and you still haven't answered, is "Why are your players doing that?". There comes a point where a player ignores certain tiers of loot. It's like how Bill Gates, by the math, doesn't have any reason to pick up a Benjamin. If your players aren't hitting those inflection points, why not? What are you doing that's encouraging them to continue with the behavior?

Why are you worried about exploits into infinite money? The point of money is to get the things you want. Anyone with the capacity to create infinite money can basically just create the things they want, instead.

If players hoarding money to realize a power spike is a problem, the way to address it is to figure out why they're doing it. Is there something about the game they're in that incentivizes them to engage in that behavior? Do they expect that every X adventures, they need to have increased Y stats or else they're going to bite it?

The character's shouldn't have infinite money. That is a failure on both a simulationist and gamist level. But the more complex and hard coded the rules get the easier it is to find an exploit that allows it, and if the rules allow it you then have to step in and create an arbitrary limit for each individual gaming group about how much is too much, and that is always going to lead to a long argument which I would rather avoid.

Segev
2017-01-04, 06:52 PM
The character's shouldn't have infinite money. That is a failure on both a simulationist and gamist level. But the more complex and hard coded the rules get the easier it is to find an exploit that allows it, and if the rules allow it you then have to step in and create an arbitrary limit for each individual gaming group about how much is too much, and that is always going to lead to a long argument which I would rather avoid.

You've still not answered what I consider the most important question: What SHOULD they be doing? What is it you WANT wealth to accomplish, and how do you want players (and their characters) to behave with it?

Knaight
2017-01-04, 06:54 PM
The character's shouldn't have infinite money. That is a failure on both a simulationist and gamist level. But the more complex and hard coded the rules get the easier it is to find an exploit that allows it, and if the rules allow it you then have to step in and create an arbitrary limit for each individual gaming group about how much is too much, and that is always going to lead to a long argument which I would rather avoid.

Infinite money is a largely theoretical thing even in the games that have it, it's not really something worth being that concerned about. What you describe isn't even infinite money - it's a straightforward way of crafting things adding value, which is something that probably should be happening. However, the amount of money made by this is then limited by something else - maybe it's crafting time, maybe it's storage for a mercantile system, etc. The only way to get infinite money out of those is by putting infinite time in, and infinite time is a resource nobody has.

Talakeal
2017-01-04, 06:56 PM
You've still not answered what I consider the most important question: What SHOULD they be doing? What is it you WANT wealth to accomplish, and how do you want players (and their characters) to behave with it?

I thought I already did a couple days ago.

Three-fold goals:

1: A way to make characters who invested in crafting skills or mercantile skills to feel rewarded.
2: A way to provide a power boost to characters who play smart and meet bonus objectives without permanently unbalancing the game.
3: To have a soft loss condition. Players who "lose" can be robbed or ransomed instead of killed or enslaved, and they can utilize consumables to turn a loss into a win for a small financial cost.

As far as the setting; it has heavy themes of colonialism and inequity. Wealth, technology, power, and responsibility are all inexorably linked. Not having any wealth system or reward for being rich hurts the themes of the setting. Having everyone playing "hobos with shotguns" and scrimping for every penny they can find also hurts the themes of the setting.


Infinite money is a largely theoretical thing even in the games that have it, it's not really something worth being that concerned about. What you describe isn't even infinite money - it's a straightforward way of crafting things adding value, which is something that probably should be happening. However, the amount of money made by this is then limited by something else - maybe it's crafting time, maybe it's storage for a mercantile system, etc. The only way to get infinite money out of those is by putting infinite time in, and infinite time is a resource nobody has.

Well, most game systems have some exploit which allows a moderately optimized character to have effectively infinite money.

But yes, time is a resource, but I was told pretty bluntly a few pages back that it isn't one that a DM / game designer has any right to limit.

Segev
2017-01-04, 07:00 PM
Three-fold goals:

1: A way to make characters who invested in crafting skills or mercantile skills to feel rewarded.
2: A way to provide a power boost to characters who play smart and meet bonus objectives without permanently unbalancing the game.
3: To have a soft loss condition. Players who "lose" can be robbed or ransomed instead of killed or enslaved, and they can utilize consumables to turn a loss into a win for a small financial cost.

As far as the setting; it has heavy themes of colonialism and inequity. Wealth, technology, power, and responsibility are all inexorably linked. Not having any wealth system or reward for being rich hurts the themes of the setting. Having everyone playing "hobos with shotguns" and scrimping for every penny they can find also hurts the themes of the setting.


What do you expect them to do with the rewards they get from 1 and 2, other than pay for 3?

I ask this without trying to be sarcastic or leading, but your complaints about what they were doing seemed to amount to "they were trying to get money, and weren't spending it the way I wanted them to." On what should they spend it? How should they earn it?


Well, most game systems have some exploit which allows a moderately optimized character to have effectively infinite money.

But yes, time is a resource, but I was told pretty bluntly a few pages back that it isn't one that a DM / game designer has any right to limit.
You can limit "infinite gold" exploits by simply saying that the rules are baselines and assume that the activity of players hasn't distorted the economy. Declare the economy distorted when they start abusing it beyond what you want, and explain that, no, nobody is interested in buying another 50 lbs. of iron; they already have all the iron they need from when you sold it before.

And time can absolutely be limited, but it has to be done by in-game, sensible means. The party can take downtime when they like, but the world keeps moving around them. What opportunities might they miss while frittering their time away? If these opportunities are not more lucrative than what they're doing in town, then examine why what they're doing in town is so lucrative or reconsider the reward value of the opportunities.

Threats are also a thing. If they're running a scheme that involves buying raw goods, crafting them into finished products, and selling them (not really all that shocking a thing to be doing), then something which threatens their supply of raw goods (perhaps pirates sinking too many ships, if you want to pursue pirates as an adventure point) will give them reason to be interested in going out and dealing with a problem.

Talakeal
2017-01-04, 07:15 PM
What do you expect them to do with the rewards they get from 1 and 2, other than pay for 3?

Basically, the game assumes that players will periodically upgrade their equipment. The way it is balanced these upgrades will give them roughly a +1 bonus to all their rolls every twenty adventures. Players who invest heavily in crafting or mercantile skills will get it slightly faster and those who fail to meet their objectives or use a lot of consumables will get their slightly slower.

What is annoying is having the players micromanage every little thing for almost no benefit. I do not enjoy having to spend an hour out of every game describing in precise detail exactly what equipment every single enemy has and telling them how much it is worth and then RPing them haggling with a merchant to get the full value just so that they can upgrade their equipment every 19 sessions instead of 20, and I don't think the players enjoy it either, they are just doing it because it is what the system rewards.

Likewise when it comes to lifestyle, I want the players to be able to RP their life-style however THEY want. Currently the rules punish anything but a hobo who spends every waking moment crafting items or looking to do odd-jobs and spends every penny upgrading his gear. IF the player wants to play that guy they should be able to, but the game should not punish every other character type.

Its like, imagine if, the rules of the game said "Anyone who addresses the GM as anything other than "High exalted master of the game by whose grace alone our character's survive the night," suffered a -10 penalty to their next dice roll." That is a stupid rule and no one enjoys saying it, but they do it anyway because they don't want the -5 penalty to their dice roll. If I were to amend the rules and say "Guys, chill out. Call me whatever you like, I am not going to give you a -5 penalty," that is making the game faster and freer for everybody, I don't think it is a case of the DM lashing out at the players for "not playing the way he wanted them to play".

shuyung
2017-01-04, 08:23 PM
Basically, the game assumes that players will periodically upgrade their equipment. The way it is balanced these upgrades will give them roughly a +1 bonus to all their rolls every twenty adventures. Players who invest heavily in crafting or mercantile skills will get it slightly faster and those who fail to meet their objectives or use a lot of consumables will get their slightly slower.
Actually, the game doesn't assume that. What the game does is explicitly direct the GM to ensure the players have at least a fair chance of success. How the GM goes about meeting that goal is up to the GM. If the environment you have created encourages the players to act in a certain way, then that's how they're going to act, until you change the environment, not a mechanic.

You continue to fall back on the claim that "the system does this" or "the rules do that", which is both false and disingenuous. You are causing the behavior you don't like.

Segev
2017-01-04, 08:36 PM
Basically, the game assumes that players will periodically upgrade their equipment. The way it is balanced these upgrades will give them roughly a +1 bonus to all their rolls every twenty adventures. Players who invest heavily in crafting or mercantile skills will get it slightly faster and those who fail to meet their objectives or use a lot of consumables will get their slightly slower.What system are you running? I had thought it was one of your own design from prior posts in other threads, but I may be confusing you with other posters now. It SOUNDS like D&D 4e or something similar, from this quoted block.


What is annoying is having the players micromanage every little thing for almost no benefit. I do not enjoy having to spend an hour out of every game describing in precise detail exactly what equipment every single enemy has and telling them how much it is worth and then RPing them haggling with a merchant to get the full value just so that they can upgrade their equipment every 19 sessions instead of 20, and I don't think the players enjoy it either, they are just doing it because it is what the system rewards.Then don't take that time, if you don't like it. Tell them that the enemy gear comes to X gp and that's what the merchants will buy it for. Be clear OOC that you're not interested in getting into fine detail about what they had. Whatever they have, it's worth X amount of gp.


Likewise when it comes to lifestyle, I want the players to be able to RP their life-style however THEY want. Currently the rules punish anything but a hobo who spends every waking moment crafting items or looking to do odd-jobs and spends every penny upgrading his gear. IF the player wants to play that guy they should be able to, but the game should not punish every other character type.This would require rules relating to how more luxurious/expensive lifestyles provide some sort of benefit. This is strong homebrew territory, and I'd be happy to brainstorm with you on it, but it'll add complexity, not remove it.


Its like, imagine if, the rules of the game said "Anyone who addresses the GM as anything other than "High exalted master of the game by whose grace alone our character's survive the night," suffered a -10 penalty to their next dice roll." That is a stupid rule and no one enjoys saying it, but they do it anyway because they don't want the -5 penalty to their dice roll. If I were to amend the rules and say "Guys, chill out. Call me whatever you like, I am not going to give you a -5 penalty," that is making the game faster and freer for everybody, I don't think it is a case of the DM lashing out at the players for "not playing the way he wanted them to play".The trouble is that your players are fighting to keep it because they feel that it IS giving them benefits they want.

So the solution is to give the benefits without having to do all that micro-management.

This won't touch the lifestyle choices, but one way to handle downtime would be to say "you get X gp per week of downtime for having ABC skill at Y rank" or what-have-you. Just make it flat, and tell them that they'll get this amount, period, as trying to over-work themselves will lead to shoddier work and less pay per unit time, so it works out the same overall. Or whatever justification you want.

The solutions to your problems are mainly in simply not playing with the nitty-gritty rules at all. If your players indicate they don't like this, ask them why. Find out if it's really that they enjoy the haggling and money-tending, or if they just don't trust you to be fair if they don't play it out like that. The latter is a serious problem. The former is addressed by apologizing and saying YOU don't enjoy that aspect of the game, and then trying to figure out a way to get what they like about it without forcing you to run a game you don't enjoy.

Telok
2017-01-05, 02:24 AM
I'm suffering something similar to Tal but from the player's perspective. In our d&d game we just finished up a really big dungeon. We went up two to three levels and have a big haul of loot. Since our edition assumes a magic mart style of play we all need to sell off our current gear and buy new sets.

I'm playing a wizard. If I play in character I'll send one item off to be upgraded, spend a week or two buying and copying spells, and then blow my remaining time and money on drugs and trying to create a kangaroo-shark species. But if I do that my AC, attacks, and saves won't go up like they're supposed to (frankly I'm already behind and am just coasting through on the power of the class so I can RP more) and I won't have all the spells the party needs. Which tends to lead to the game's fail condition, make a new character or de-level.

So I'm expected to micromanage money, rewarded for playing out of character, and have a spreadsheet to juggle time and expenses so that I can keep playing my character. Not fun.

Yeah, a decent abstract wealth system would be nice.

Talakeal
2017-01-05, 02:34 AM
What system are you running? I had thought it was one of your own design from prior posts in other threads, but I may be confusing you with other posters now. It SOUNDS like D&D 4e or something similar, from this quoted block.

I pretty much only ever run homebrew systems anymore. I would like to find time to run a WoD game or a D&D game (but not 4E GAH!), but I just have so little access to players anymore that I almost always have to have my sessions serve double duty as playing for fun and play-testing something I am working on.


The trouble is that your players are fighting to keep it because they feel that it IS giving them benefits they want.

I wouldn't say they are fighting to keep it. One guy just couldn't get his head around how you could fail to get the item you wanted and still "lose wealth" with nothing in return. There wasn't really a "fight".


Actually, the game doesn't assume that. What the game does is explicitly direct the GM to ensure the players have at least a fair chance of success. How the GM goes about meeting that goal is up to the GM. If the environment you have created encourages the players to act in a certain way, then that's how they're going to act, until you change the environment, not a mechanic.

You continue to fall back on the claim that "the system does this" or "the rules do that", which is both false and disingenuous. You are causing the behavior you don't like.

What the heck are you talking about?

I don't know how you could tell me explicitly what the rule-book says when you don't even know what system I am running, but even if you are going with the Playground standard D&D 3.5 I can't see anything about "explicitly direct the GM to ensure the players have at least a fair chance of success," but I do see plenty of talk about how a monster of CR X will be a good challenge for PCs of level X, and how an encounter of CR Y is expected to use up Z percentage of the party's resources, and charts with "expected wealth by level," so it certainly seems to me that the game rules do in fact assume a rough level of power and wealth for characters of a given level.

Now, I think you are trying to say that I can simply keep reducing the difficulty of any game I run until the players no longer feel any need to optimize, which, while technically true, is going to leave the game devoid of any challenge or consequence to player actions, and I don't think anyone is going to have fun in such a scenario.


OP, what you described is something done similar to wealth in Atlantis The Second Age (Khepera Publishing version). It maybe worth a look at to see how they manage wealth which is treated somewhat like a stat.

Borrowed my friends copy of Atlantis. Yeah, it is indeed almost exactly like what I am doing, up to and including the dreaded "failed to get the item and still lost money" that is so galling.

Thrudd
2017-01-05, 11:48 AM
I think the best solution for the optimizing mindset and the money hoarding for "best in slot" equipment is to seriously limit the options for doing so. No magic items for sale, or those that are are lesser and random. No spells for sale, unless they are low level. There should be no reliable way to optimize beyond mundane equipment.

The players will still seek the best possible equipment for their characters, but they will probably have that quite early on- no need for complex wealth systems or for micro managing huge sums of cash. Powerful characters get that way by adventuring and finding spells and artifacts, or by defeating other people that possess those things. They should be rare enough that even a "non-optimal" magic item should be coveted.

Seeking out a person or a shop where a specific magic item is for sale is pointless, players shouldn't even know what magic items exist in the game, outside of those their characters have seen or heard of.

Spells for wizards are recovered, not purchased. At best, if they find another wizard with a spell they want, they can negotiate a trade for it- but I would generally have a strict "magic for magic" policy that most magic users would adhere to. Give me a spell I want, or a magic item, I'll give you a spell you want.

Crafting magic items should be limited to high levels, be experimental, unreliable and vastly time consuming- like months of research and experimentation for each item, that also requires access to a specialized laboratory and possession of certain high level spells.

Segev
2017-01-05, 12:25 PM
I'm sorry, Talekeal, but I feel like we're still dancing around the issue. I'm sensing conflicts in what you say you want and what you say you don't want, so I'm having trouble picturing what your ideal player behaviors would be.

Can you please try an exercise and write out a list of requirements that an ideal wealth system would fulfill, including "players should NEVER do [list of things]," "players should RARELY do [list of things]," "players should SOMETIMES do [list of things]," and "players should (almost) always do [list of things]?"

As an example, if I read you right, "Players should sometimes play crafters or merchants."

Then, we can build a system with these guidelines:

"Sometimes" things need to be rewarded in the wealth system sufficiently that it's a valid option, but not so seriously that it's the optimal way to play the system.

"Never" things need to always be fruitless or counterproductive to the goals of the players (generally, "have more/better game mechanics").

"Rarely" things should be difficult and not terribly profitable, but still occasionally useful in some circumstances.

"Always" things should be easy, probably the default, and should be trivially profitable. They're the main, straight-forward use of the system.

shuyung
2017-01-05, 02:20 PM
What the heck are you talking about?

I don't know how you could tell me explicitly what the rule-book says when you don't even know what system I am running, but even if you are going with the Playground standard D&D 3.5 I can't see anything about "explicitly direct the GM to ensure the players have at least a fair chance of success," but I do see plenty of talk about how a monster of CR X will be a good challenge for PCs of level X, and how an encounter of CR Y is expected to use up Z percentage of the party's resources, and charts with "expected wealth by level," so it certainly seems to me that the game rules do in fact assume a rough level of power and wealth for characters of a given level.

Now, I think you are trying to say that I can simply keep reducing the difficulty of any game I run until the players no longer feel any need to optimize, which, while technically true, is going to leave the game devoid of any challenge or consequence to player actions, and I don't think anyone is going to have fun in such a scenario.

I am playing the odds. I have read many DM/GM/Storyteller/Marshall guides. Some are their own dedicated references, some are a few self-contained chapters in a larger comprehensive rulebook. Down the line, what they all have in common, the first topic they cover, is what it means to be the controller of the game. And in that piece all of them take great pains to instruct the potential game master to make sure the players are enjoying the game, are challenged by the game, and are treated fairly by the game. Which system you are using, commercial or homebrew or some mixture, is irrelevant to the theory of being a good game master.

And all of this is besides the point, because what you've been doing this entire discussion is focusing on a single tangential point in every post you've responded to so that we've all gone off into the weeds. You are refusing to answer the big picture questions any number of us have posed to you, for reasons known only to yourself. Good luck in your future endeavors.

Talakeal
2017-01-05, 02:54 PM
I am playing the odds. I have read many DM/GM/Storyteller/Marshall guides. Some are their own dedicated references, some are a few self-contained chapters in a larger comprehensive rulebook. Down the line, what they all have in common, the first topic they cover, is what it means to be the controller of the game. And in that piece all of them take great pains to instruct the potential game master to make sure the players are enjoying the game, are challenged by the game, and are treated fairly by the game. Which system you are using, commercial or homebrew or some mixture, is irrelevant to the theory of being a good game master.

And all of this is besides the point, because what you've been doing this entire discussion is focusing on a single tangential point in every post you've responded to so that we've all gone off into the weeds. You are refusing to answer the big picture questions any number of us have posed to you, for reasons known only to yourself. Good luck in your future endeavors.

Ok, so you say that the book does not say something it does say, and then say that is "explicitly" says something it does say, because you are "playing the odds" and making an assumption, and then have to gall to call me disingenuous?

Look, I am trying to answer your question, but you seem to be trying to use a "Socratic method" where instead of actually saying what you are trying to say you are hoping I will say it for you.

I legitimately don't know what this big question I am dancing around is, and I have done my best to answer.

You keep saying vague things like "what are your players doing and why?" and I am trying to give specific useful answers. It seems like you either want me to say something vague like "Because any game has an optimal strategy and if there is any element of challenge in the game players will try and utilize it" or something self deprecating like "Because I am a table DM / rules designer and don't know how to reward the behaviors I want," neither of which are actually helpful in the conversation.

Could you please give me a direct question that I can give you a direct answer to rather than nebulous philosophical statements that can be taken a dozen ways?


I'm sorry, Talekeal, but I feel like we're still dancing around the issue. I'm sensing conflicts in what you say you want and what you say you don't want, so I'm having trouble picturing what your ideal player behaviors would be.

Can you please try an exercise and write out a list of requirements that an ideal wealth system would fulfill, including "players should NEVER do [list of things]," "players should RARELY do [list of things]," "players should SOMETIMES do [list of things]," and "players should (almost) always do [list of things]?"

As an example, if I read you right, "Players should sometimes play crafters or merchants."

Then, we can build a system with these guidelines:

"Sometimes" things need to be rewarded in the wealth system sufficiently that it's a valid option, but not so seriously that it's the optimal way to play the system.

"Never" things need to always be fruitless or counterproductive to the goals of the players (generally, "have more/better game mechanics").

"Rarely" things should be difficult and not terribly profitable, but still occasionally useful in some circumstances.

"Always" things should be easy, probably the default, and should be trivially profitable. They're the main, straight-forward use of the system.

I don't know, typically the longer a post is the less likely it is to be read, let alone receive a response.

See, the system I know what my goals are (and if you really want I will list them) and the system I have meets all of them, it just has a few disconnects between the crunch and the fluff which the players don't like, and people don't like the possibility of failing to get anything. And I actually don't feel so bad anymore, because looking at the various other systems people have linked in this thread, almost all of them have something similar.

At this point I think I am just going to patch the system so that the odds of losing money and getting nothing in return are diminished but raise the base costs to offset it, but if you really want to help me brainstorm I will make a more detailed post with what I have and what my goals are, as I really do appreciate the effort on your part.

Segev
2017-01-05, 03:32 PM
I don't know, typically the longer a post is the less likely it is to be read, let alone receive a response.

See, the system I know what my goals are (and if you really want I will list them) and the system I have meets all of them, it just has a few disconnects between the crunch and the fluff which the players don't like, and people don't like the possibility of failing to get anything. And I actually don't feel so bad anymore, because looking at the various other systems people have linked in this thread, almost all of them have something similar.

At this point I think I am just going to patch the system so that the odds of losing money and getting nothing in return are diminished but raise the base costs to offset it, but if you really want to help me brainstorm I will make a more detailed post with what I have and what my goals are, as I really do appreciate the effort on your part.

Thing is, you know what your goals are, and you THINK the system you have SHOULD result in players behaving the way you want...but they aren't. This tells me that there's some factor in the system you have which is encouraging behavior that you don't want.

Alternatively, your players don't understand the system.

Dissociated mechanics can be tricky to teach to players if they are not used to them. Frankly, if rolling and failing to get something multiple times costs all their wealth, and they still have nothing, I don't blame them for being frustrated. If they really were saving up for it, then:

a) They could take what they'd saved and spend it on something else if they had a new opportunity arise, and
b) they'd have a higher chance (by your "roll to buy it" system) each time they failed, since they were saving up towards it.

Instead, your examples seem to indicate that Bob, who rolled and blew all his wealth for 8 months before buying a +1 sword, saved and saved and saved and ultimately spent all he'd saved (with no ability to raid it for more living expenses) while Fred, who rolled better on the first try for the same +1 sword (but initially had the same bonus) bought it for 1/8 the cost (if not less) that Bob did.

Worse, if I'm understanding what you've outlined of it correctly, each time you fail, you DECREASE your chances of getting the item next time you roll, because your decreasing wealth means you have lower bonuses to your rolls. So Bob saving up is actually less likely to afford it than if he'd NOT saved up.

That's assuming the "ran out of wealth trying to buy it means you're saving up for it" is the fluff you're really assigning.

Talakeal
2017-01-05, 04:10 PM
Thing is, you know what your goals are, and you THINK the system you have SHOULD result in players behaving the way you want...but they aren't. This tells me that there's some factor in the system you have which is encouraging behavior that you don't want.

Alternatively, your players don't understand the system.

Dissociated mechanics can be tricky to teach to players if they are not used to them. Frankly, if rolling and failing to get something multiple times costs all their wealth, and they still have nothing, I don't blame them for being frustrated. If they really were saving up for it, then:

a) They could take what they'd saved and spend it on something else if they had a new opportunity arise, and
b) they'd have a higher chance (by your "roll to buy it" system) each time they failed, since they were saving up towards it.

Instead, your examples seem to indicate that Bob, who rolled and blew all his wealth for 8 months before buying a +1 sword, saved and saved and saved and ultimately spent all he'd saved (with no ability to raid it for more living expenses) while Fred, who rolled better on the first try for the same +1 sword (but initially had the same bonus) bought it for 1/8 the cost (if not less) that Bob did.

Worse, if I'm understanding what you've outlined of it correctly, each time you fail, you DECREASE your chances of getting the item next time you roll, because your decreasing wealth means you have lower bonuses to your rolls. So Bob saving up is actually less likely to afford it than if he'd NOT saved up.

That's assuming the "ran out of wealth trying to buy it means you're saving up for it" is the fluff you're really assigning.

I haven't actually seen any behaviors yet. We used the system once, the players bought some potions, and one player made a display of hypothetically "wasting all his money" trying and failing to find a rare item and then did a (hilarious) comedy bit narrating the outcome in a ridiculous manner.

The only problem appears to be the "disassociation" and the fact that players fixate on the worst possible scenario rather than the likely scenario or an unlikely scenario that benefits them.

No, wealth never goes down for purchases. Your wealth score only determines how often you can make rolls to look for an item. Your wealth score does not increase or decrease from making rolls, you merely don't get anything when your roll failed and have to wait until your next roll to try again.

I don't want to keep track of fiddly modifiers; the system assumes average rolls and your chance does not go down or up. For example, if you roll once a month and you have a 20% chance of getting the item, it should take you about five months of "saving" before you get it. It might be sooner, which can be narrated as a discount or a sudden windfall, or longer which can be narrated as a lack of availability or a random financial setback eating into your savings; but if you keep trying you will get the item sooner or later.

In your Bob and Fred example, maybe Fred really did pay 1/8 the price because he knew a guy who could get it wholesale, or found someone who had an extra car and desperately needed cash right now, or maybe the car dealer owed Fred a favor. More likely Fred just has more money. He might have a better job, rich parents, better investment skills, or he might have won the publisher's clearing house sweepstakes. Or maybe rather than selling his box of baseball cards on e-bay for 50 bucks like Bob did, Fred looked through them carefully and found that he had a rare rookie card that was worth more than the car he wanted to buy.

Again, abstract system, plays and DM can work together to justify it however they want, there are plenty of plausible explanations if your look for them, but the system (appears to) work fine mechanically.*


*But, based on feedback, I am going to try and make it less random and find a way to remove the illusion of using up all your money without getting anything in return because even if they work fine mathematically they are apparently psychologically disheartening.

GloatingSwine
2017-01-05, 05:02 PM
*But, based on feedback, I am going to try and make it less random and find a way to remove the illusion of using up all your money without getting anything in return because even if they work fine mathematically they are apparently psychologically disheartening.


Why even have the randomness though?

Any nontrivial item an adventurer want probably has to be made for them, Vorpal Swords aren't just lying around on some dusty backstreet pawn shop's shelf or in a country town's sunday market. Decide when they're going to a town what level of artisans and artificers it has, say "you can buy items up to wealth X here". If you want to be particularly granular and characterful you can say "a particularly fine weaponsmith-artificer lives here, you can buy weapons up to wealth Y but the rest of the town is Y-2"

Players have a wealth level, they can buy anything up to their wealth level. They just get it, no rolls, no messing about, they just get the thing. If you want to give them burnable loot give them a token that they can exchange for an item of "your wealth +1" when they go to a suitably prosperous town. Don't bother tracking trivial loot at all, that's implicit in their existing wealth. Wealth should only change in extreme circumstances.

You might think "but my players will buy infinity vorpal swords", but so what?* They don't get anything for having infinity vorpal swords, the economy is abstract so they can't sell them for a profit.

Talakeal
2017-01-05, 05:13 PM
Why even have the randomness though?

Any nontrivial item an adventurer want probably has to be made for them, Vorpal Swords aren't just lying around on some dusty backstreet pawn shop's shelf or in a country town's sunday market. Decide when they're going to a town what level of artisans and artificers it has, say "you can buy items up to wealth X here". If you want to be particularly granular and characterful you can say "a particularly fine weaponsmith-artificer lives here, you can buy weapons up to wealth Y but the rest of the town is Y-2"

Players have a wealth level, they can buy anything up to their wealth level. They just get it, no rolls, no messing about, they just get the thing. If you want to give them burnable loot give them a token that they can exchange for an item of "your wealth +1" when they go to a suitably prosperous town. Don't bother tracking trivial loot at all, that's implicit in their existing wealth. Wealth should only change in extreme circumstances.

You might think "but my players will buy infinity vorpal swords", but so what?* They don't get anything for having infinity vorpal swords, the economy is abstract so they can't sell them for a profit.

Threefold:

1: It is a (math light) benefit for investing in mercantile skills. Crafting skills also become proportionately less valuable in a post scarcity system.
2: Players have a small chance of good fortune and can potentially get items which are above their power level.
3: Consumable items need to burn resources to function. Infinity vorpal swords may not break the game, but infinity healing potions will, and if the players can get infinity vorpal swords why wouldn't they also be able to get infinite copies of the much cheaper potions?

Newtonsolo313
2017-01-05, 05:21 PM
I haven't actually seen any behaviors yet. We used the system once, the players bought some potions, and one player made a display of hypothetically "wasting all his money" trying and failing to find a rare item and then did a (hilarious) comedy bit narrating the outcome in a ridiculous manner.

The only problem appears to be the "disassociation" and the fact that players fixate on the worst possible scenario rather than the likely scenario or an unlikely scenario that benefits them.

No, wealth never goes down for purchases. Your wealth score only determines how often you can make rolls to look for an item. Your wealth score does not increase or decrease from making rolls, you merely don't get anything when your roll failed and have to wait until your next roll to try again.

I don't want to keep track of fiddly modifiers; the system assumes average rolls and your chance does not go down or up. For example, if you roll once a month and you have a 20% chance of getting the item, it should take you about five months of "saving" before you get it. It might be sooner, which can be narrated as a discount or a sudden windfall, or longer which can be narrated as a lack of availability or a random financial setback eating into your savings; but if you keep trying you will get the item sooner or later.

In your Bob and Fred example, maybe Fred really did pay 1/8 the price because he knew a guy who could get it wholesale, or found someone who had an extra car and desperately needed cash right now, or maybe the car dealer owed Fred a favor. More likely Fred just has more money. He might have a better job, rich parents, better investment skills, or he might have won the publisher's clearing house sweepstakes. Or maybe rather than selling his box of baseball cards on e-bay for 50 bucks like Bob did, Fred looked through them carefully and found that he had a rare rookie card that was worth more than the car he wanted to buy.

Again, abstract system, plays and DM can work together to justify it however they want, there are plenty of plausible explanations if your look for them, but the system (appears to) work fine mechanically.*


*But, based on feedback, I am going to try and make it less random and find a way to remove the illusion of using up all your money without getting anything in return because even if they work fine mathematically they are apparently psychologically disheartening.
But adventurers don't spend there time saving for stuff they kill twenty gobilins go into town buy some **** and leave, your model may work well for normal people but not people who have a stable income source but adventurers can make hundreds of gp in a day adventuring but can barely make any money when they are in town. you need to consider that when you model wealth. ultimately in a standard village there is often only a blacksmith and a general store to buy stuff from. they either have what you want or they don't at a nice fixed price. FIXED PRICE:smallfurious:. People who do work jobs generate income at a FIXED RATE. nobody is gonna want to stiff the person in with a sword longer then there arm and muscles the size of there head. but here is my 2 cents make it a wealth based check with a so to say"purchase dc" where the adventurer can use more of there "wealth" to make the check easier until there is a 100% chance BUT you have to make a sucessful gather information, investigation or perception check first

Talakeal
2017-01-05, 05:33 PM
But adventurers don't spend there time saving for stuff they kill twenty gobilins go into town buy some **** and leave, your model may work well for normal people but not people who have a stable income source but adventurers can make hundreds of gp in a day adventuring but can barely make any money when they are in town. you need to consider that when you model wealth. ultimately in a standard village there is often only a blacksmith and a general store to buy stuff from. they either have what you want or they don't at a nice fixed price. FIXED PRICE:smallfurious:. People who do work jobs generate income at a FIXED RATE. nobody is gonna want to stiff the person in with a sword longer then there arm and muscles the size of there head. but here is my 2 cents make it a wealth based check with a so to say"purchase dc" where the adventurer can use more of there "wealth" to make the check easier until there is a 100% chance BUT you have to make a sucessful gather information, investigation or perception check first

Why do you say there is a fixed price for goods? Even in the modern world I can go to five different stores and find five different for the exact same item from the exact same manufacturer, and if I look online or travel to a store in a different part of the world I might find drastically different prices. And what those prices will be are constantly in flux over time. And that is in a modern world with mass production and standardized currency. In an ancient world where most trade is done on credit or barter and most goods are made by hand I can see tremendous fluctuations.

But yeah, if I have a fixed price for items, I also have to have a fixed price for loot. And at that point it isn't really an abstract system at all anymore.

Yukitsu
2017-01-05, 05:52 PM
Why do you say there is a fixed price for goods? Even in the modern world I can go to five different stores and find five different for the exact same item from the exact same manufacturer, and if I look online or travel to a store in a different part of the world I might find drastically different prices. And what those prices will be are constantly in flux over time. And that is in a modern world with mass production and standardized currency. In an ancient world where most trade is done on credit or barter and most goods are made by hand I can see tremendous fluctuations.

But yeah, if I have a fixed price for items, I also have to have a fixed price for loot. And at that point it isn't really an abstract system at all anymore.

You only see major differences in price on small ticket items, not expensive ones. If the system is supposed to mimic a real economy but cut out the nickels and dimes of it, then it doesn't really matter if purchases under certain values are different from store to store (though they should generally be in very similar price ranges).

As you get to higher price items however, the difference in cost that I can get away with lowers. For example, it's possible for me to sell chocolate bars for about 20 cents while another store sells them for 2 dollars. I've seen price differences for very small purchases of that sort from time to time. However, I could not sell a car for 600 dollars new when everyone else is selling them for 6,000 because I'd be making a loss on every sale. Nor could I sell them for 60,000 since my competition would cream me. As the gap closes when you get to this price range, an abstracted system should say "OK, you could save about 500 dollars but since that's not a significant percentage of the purchase we're giving it to you at the same wealth score."

An example is D20 modern's wealth system. An Aston Martin costs as much as a prop plane does even though they have a huge difference in price between them. At that point, tens of thousands of dollars in price difference is ignored to speed up play and to avoid accounting.

Newtonsolo313
2017-01-05, 05:59 PM
Why do you say there is a fixed price for goods? Even in the modern world I can go to five different stores and find five different for the exact same item from the exact same manufacturer, and if I look online or travel to a store in a different part of the world I might find drastically different prices. And what those prices will be are constantly in flux over time. And that is in a modern world with mass production and standardized currency. In an ancient world where most trade is done on credit or barter and most goods are made by hand I can see tremendous fluctuations.

But yeah, if I have a fixed price for items, I also have to have a fixed price for loot. And at that point it isn't really an abstract system at all anymore....first of all d&d is set in a world with currency that might not be indicative of that time period but it is what it is. but the diffrence is that if you go to the same store five times you are going to be able to buy that stuff at the same price. and there isn't gonna be many stores you would probably lucky if you found one store in that small farming village which is having trouble with a goblin infestation in the old mill to the south.

here is a hypothetical activity
lets say a player wanted to buy the following items(from the srd)
Sealing wax 2sp
Shovel 2gp
mess kit 2sp
400 sack 4 gp(1 cp each)
bell 1 gp
what would you roll to buy these things

GloatingSwine
2017-01-05, 06:03 PM
Threefold:

1: It is a (math light) benefit for investing in mercantile skills. Crafting skills also become proportionately less valuable in a post scarcity system.
2: Players have a small chance of good fortune and can potentially get items which are above their power level.
3: Consumable items need to burn resources to function. Infinity vorpal swords may not break the game, but infinity healing potions will, and if the players can get infinity vorpal swords why wouldn't they also be able to get infinite copies of the much cheaper potions?

Any halfway successful set of adventurers can buy as many healing potions as it is functionally possible for them to consume in an adventure though. Average per-encounter treasure is enough to buy one or two level appropriate healing potions. Remember that in an abstract wealth system you don't deal with that per-encounter treasure. That ebb and flow of killing monsters and taking their stuff and spending it on monster-killing supplies is what the PC's abstract wealth score is.

They might go mad with the power and carry fifty healing potions each for the first session, then they'll figure out they only actually used two in total and won't bother.

Talakeal
2017-01-05, 06:10 PM
Any halfway successful set of adventurers can buy as many healing potions as it is functionally possible for them to consume in an adventure though. Average per-encounter treasure is enough to buy one or two level appropriate healing potions. Remember that in an abstract wealth system you don't deal with that per-encounter treasure. That ebb and flow of killing monsters and taking their stuff and spending it on monster-killing supplies is what the PC's abstract wealth score is.

They might go mad with the power and carry fifty healing potions each for the first session, then they'll figure out they only actually used two in total and won't bother.

Then there is no game, flat out. You completely remove the strategic element by doing that. And if you remove the strategic element then the players can be as stupid as they want with no consequence, which also removes the tactical element. The only possible way to actually challenge the players is to put them into a harrowing situation where a TPK before they have the chance to recover is a very real possibility, and that is going to brutally end the game sooner as the later.

Newtonsolo313
2017-01-05, 07:09 PM
Then there is no game, flat out. You completely remove the strategic element by doing that. And if you remove the strategic element then the players can be as stupid as they want with no consequence, which also removes the tactical element. The only possible way to actually challenge the players is to put them into a harrowing situation where a TPK before they have the chance to recover is a very real possibility, and that is going to brutally end the game sooner as the later. not really because the cheap healing potions heal 2d4+2 damage which often actually less damage then what a character is going to take on a given turn if they can buy that many potions, and the characters have to either us an action or a bonus action(if they are a rogue) to drink it meaning that they give up the chance to do damage to heal themselves which is strategy

Talakeal
2017-01-05, 07:14 PM
not really because the cheap healing potions heal 2d4+2 damage which often actually less damage then what a character is going to take on a given turn if they can buy that many potions, and the characters have to either us an action or a bonus action(if they are a rogue) to drink it meaning that they give up the chance to do damage to heal themselves which is strategy

In combat sure. But the moment they get to take a break the party can just chug all they want, which makes any damage they took during the combat meaningless. The same is true for spell-casting if the character's have scrolls and wands to cover all of their casting needs.

This means that the only resources anyone actually needs to care about are spells for which scrolls / wands / pearls of power are beyond their ability to obtain and death or other effects which cannot be cured by potions the party can obtain.

Which means that players don't really have try and conserve resources (except for very high level spells) and as long as they can avoid encounter ending effects they really don't have to try in combat anymore save for the (hopefully rare) occasional fight which has a realistic chance of TPKing a full strength party.

Honestly this is starting to sound like 4E D&D (actually a bit more so, that game at least has healing surges to track), so if that is your cup of tea go for it, but I enjoy being challenged on both a tactical and strategic level.

It also blows caster non-caster discrepancy further apart as the only reason you might have previously had to use a mundane was greater longevity. For example, why bother with a rogue when scrolls of knock and detect trap or limitless?

oxybe
2017-01-05, 07:32 PM
Give us the system.

At this point we're going back and forth without fully knowing how the system in question works other then back and forth snippets.

You say it works but for your player (the people whom it matters) it doesn't.

Letting us see the system, warts and all, will let us better digest where the player's disconnect may be coming from.

Talakeal
2017-01-05, 08:02 PM
Give us the system.

At this point we're going back and forth without fully knowing how the system in question works other then back and forth snippets.

You say it works but for your player (the people whom it matters) it doesn't.

Letting us see the system, warts and all, will let us better digest where the player's disconnect may be coming from.

One player is having a problem with one facet of the system. I am not sure it is fair to say that means the "system doesn't work."

For example, I don't like that fact that a 4E Fighter or 3.5 War-blade can only remember so many moves at a time and periodically forgets lower level abilities. This doesn't mean that the system doesn't do what it is intended to do, it merely means that my priorities and suspension of disbelief don't fully line up with those of the designers.

But, sure, here you go:

Purchase
Complex Action (Mulligan)
Difficulty: Varies
This ability is used to procure equipment for the character or their comrades. To use this ability the character must have access to a suitable marketplace, although they might be able to use the social skill to find someone willing to make a deal in a region where the desired goods are not normally up for sale.

The difficulty to use this ability depends on the quality of the item which is sought after, higher quality objects are hard to find and it is even harder to talk the sellers out of their exorbitant asking prices. The difficulty to procure an item is normally equal to its creation difficulty (see Chapter Five), but might be modified based on local availability.

Using this ability incurs an amount of debt equal to the desired object's weight in stones +1 regardless of success of failure. Debt incurred on a failure can be explained by any number of misfortunes, but most likely simply represents saving up for an item that is normally outside of the character's price range; after all there is nothing stopping you from trying again and getting the item once you have dedicated a little more income towards its acquisition.

As characters grow in power and experience they build up stores of wealth as well as contacts, trust, and the skills to get the job done. As a result the character's essence score has some effect when attempting to use the purchase ability.

For every point by which the character's essence score exceeds the item's quality they can either apply a +5 bonus to their business test or choose to procure multiple copies of the item without a corresponding increase in debt. One level difference is normally enough to equip an entire team, while each additional level increases the number of items procured by a factor of ten.

If the item's quality is equal to the buyers essence score they can simply buy the item outright by declining to haggle and simply making an offer the merchant can't refuse. After failing to procure an item they can choose to invoke double the usual number of debts and still receive the item.

For every point by which the item's quality exceeds the buyer's essence score the total debt incurred by this ability is doubled. This effect applies exponentially for items whose quality exceeds the buyers essence score by more than one.

Critical Success:
The character is able to get a great deal by calling in a favor, finding a desperate or ignorant seller, or by pulling a clever scam. They do not acquire any debt for using this ability.

Fumble:
The character falls victim to a devious scam and accrues double the normal amount of debt.

Let me know what other rules you need me to post to give it a bit more context.

Knaight
2017-01-05, 08:06 PM
Essence and debt mechanics could probably stand to be explained a bit. With that said, the core of the issue seems to be how you incur debt if you fail regardless - this happening when you just see an item, find it is too expensive, and don't get it seems all sorts of iffy.

The Extinguisher
2017-01-05, 08:14 PM
Then there is no game, flat out. You completely remove the strategic element by doing that. And if you remove the strategic element then the players can be as stupid as they want with no consequence, which also removes the tactical element. The only possible way to actually challenge the players is to put them into a harrowing situation where a TPK before they have the chance to recover is a very real possibility, and that is going to brutally end the game sooner as the later.

Just don't let them get infinite healing potions. Tell them no. Just because something is exploitable in the system doesn't mean you have to let your players do it.

oxybe
2017-01-05, 08:31 PM
How does Debt interact with Wealth? How is Debt removed? How does one accrue Wealth or at least how much Wealth is one assumed to accrue over a period of time (can you gain it passively by doing mundane jobs, or is it only obtained through large windfalls, a la adventuring, and how much could one be assumed to get or have on hand at a given time)?

What is "buyers essence" and how is this determined?

What are different examples of Items of various quality or how is it determined?

What is the roll in question? Is it something like D&D, [dice roll]+[modifier] VS [target number]? I think you mentioned it was homebrew?

Newtonsolo313
2017-01-05, 08:53 PM
One player is having a problem with one facet of the system. I am not sure it is fair to say that means the "system doesn't work."

For example, I don't like that fact that a 4E Fighter or 3.5 War-blade can only remember so many moves at a time and periodically forgets lower level abilities. This doesn't mean that the system doesn't do what it is intended to do, it merely means that my priorities and suspension of disbelief don't fully line up with those of the designers.

But, sure, here you go:

Purchase
Complex Action (Mulligan)
Difficulty: Varies
This ability is used to procure equipment for the character or their comrades. To use this ability the character must have access to a suitable marketplace, although they might be able to use the social skill to find someone willing to make a deal in a region where the desired goods are not normally up for sale.

The difficulty to use this ability depends on the quality of the item which is sought after, higher quality objects are hard to find and it is even harder to talk the sellers out of their exorbitant asking prices. The difficulty to procure an item is normally equal to its creation difficulty (see Chapter Five), but might be modified based on local availability.

Using this ability incurs an amount of debt equal to the desired object's weight in stones +1 regardless of success of failure. Debt incurred on a failure can be explained by any number of misfortunes, but most likely simply represents saving up for an item that is normally outside of the character's price range; after all there is nothing stopping you from trying again and getting the item once you have dedicated a little more income towards its acquisition.

As characters grow in power and experience they build up stores of wealth as well as contacts, trust, and the skills to get the job done. As a result the character's essence score has some effect when attempting to use the purchase ability.

For every point by which the character's essence score exceeds the item's quality they can either apply a +5 bonus to their business test or choose to procure multiple copies of the item without a corresponding increase in debt. One level difference is normally enough to equip an entire team, while each additional level increases the number of items procured by a factor of ten.

If the item's quality is equal to the buyers essence score they can simply buy the item outright by declining to haggle and simply making an offer the merchant can't refuse. After failing to procure an item they can choose to invoke double the usual number of debts and still receive the item.

For every point by which the item's quality exceeds the buyer's essence score the total debt incurred by this ability is doubled. This effect applies exponentially for items whose quality exceeds the buyers essence score by more than one.

Critical Success:
The character is able to get a great deal by calling in a favor, finding a desperate or ignorant seller, or by pulling a clever scam. They do not acquire any debt for using this ability.

Fumble:
The character falls victim to a devious scam and accrues double the normal amount of debt.

Let me know what other rules you need me to post to give it a bit more context.
Wait why is the debt equal to the weight in stones, that would make certain items(barrels chests portable rams) incur more debt than others that cost more(healing potions, spyglasses(also who the hell thought spyglasses should be worth 1000gp:smallfurious:))

Xuc Xac
2017-01-05, 08:58 PM
Using this ability incurs an amount of debt equal to the desired object's weight in stones +1 regardless of success of failure. Debt incurred on a failure can be explained by any number of misfortunes, but most likely simply represents saving up for an item that is normally outside of the character's price range; after all there is nothing stopping you from trying again and getting the item once you have dedicated a little more income towards its acquisition.


What happens if I decide I don't want that item anymore and I would rather spend my savings on something else?

Talakeal
2017-01-05, 09:05 PM
How does Debt interact with Wealth? How is Debt removed? How does one accrue Wealth or at least how much Wealth is one assumed to accrue over a period of time (can you gain it passively by doing mundane jobs, or is it only obtained through large windfalls, a la adventuring, and how much could one be assumed to get or have on hand at a given time)?

What is "buyers essence" and how is this determined?

What are different examples of Items of various quality or how is it determined?

What is the roll in question? Is it something like D&D, [dice roll]+[modifier] VS [target number]? I think you mentioned it was homebrew?

Your wealth score is determined by your social status and your standing in the eyes of your past employers. It will typically be measured from 10-20. Every "unit" of treasure you find adds +1 to your wealth score for the rest of the month.

A character can accrue a number of debts each month equal to their wealth score. There is no penalty for debts and they refresh at the end of every moth.

A character's essence score is a "soft leveling mechanic" like Arete in Mage or Rank in Werewolf. All players start with an essence score of 1 and increase their score by +1 every twenty sessions.

Item quality is rated from -2 to +5. A -2 spear would be something like a stick with a pointy stone tied to the end while +5 would be something like Gae Bulg.

The roll is indeed d20 + modifier vs. difficulty. The difficulty is going to be 15 + quality * 5. Scores are rated from 1-30 (with numerous ways to get rerolls or temporary bonuses) and a starting party face will probably have a business skill modifier of between +10 and +20.



Just don't let them get infinite healing potions. Tell them no. Just because something is exploitable in the system doesn't mean you have to let your players do it.

Ok, but if there is no printed rule the group still needs to establish a house rule to avoid arguments.

How many potions is "acceptable?"

And doesn't such an arbitrary limitation cause further headaches? Being unable to trade infinite vorpal swords for infinite healing potions is, if anything, a bigger fluff / crunch disconnect than only being able to make a finite number of roles in a given amount of time.


Essence and debt mechanics could probably stand to be explained a bit. With that said, the core of the issue seems to be how you incur debt if you fail regardless - this happening when you just see an item, find it is too expensive, and don't get it seems all sorts of iffy.

Agreed. This is exactly the problem my player had.

But I just can't think of an alternative that allows the players to "retry" on a failure and / or that has some sort of prohibition on players spending outrageous amounts of time looking for every item in the book every session in the hopes of finding a great deal.

Although now that people have shown me numerous examples of "good" abstract wealth systems that have the exact same feature I am feeling a lot better about the decision, though I still tweaked the system to make it less random.


(first of all strategic and tactical are synonyms)(also the damage healed is like the equivalent to two magic missles)(for the sake of this argument im assuming spells the can buy are limited to 2nd level)
except they do have to expend their resources and this way they expend MORE
since they don't take as many short or long rests which means they still use up their action surges, ki points, and spells fighting enemies they just don't have to worry about low level spells .

Maybe in common usage, but in more precise terms "tactics" refers to short term plans such as what moves you will take in a battle while "strategy" refers to long term plans and resource management.

If they have infinite potions / scrolls / wands they then using them doesn't expend anything, they still have more than they could ever possibly use.

I was specifically talking about 3.X in my example, but even in 5E why would they bother using ki or action surges or whatnot on non "boss" battles when they have unlimited HP and spells?


What happens if I decide I don't want that item anymore and I would rather spend my savings on something else?

Up to you. Maybe you decided to spend your savings on an item you did want?

Explaining the dice results in a narrative fashion is for you and the DM to work out.

The games rules do not allow you to hoard money from previous adventures directly, although the increasing effect of essence on wealth is in part represented by past savings, and if you want a more dramatic effect you can use saved money as a justification for spending XP to raise your social class and base wealth score.


Wait why is the debt equal to the weight in stones, that would make certain items(barrels chests portable rams) incur more debt than others that cost more(healing potions, spyglasses(also who the hell thought spyglasses should be worth 1000gp:smallfurious:))

Common stuff like barrels and chests is free.

The encumbrance system is fairly abstracted as well; potions are cheap and weightless, most one handed weapons and tools weight one stone, most two handed weapons and tools weight two stone, and the only things that weigh more are going to be heavy armor or war machines.

Newtonsolo313
2017-01-05, 09:22 PM
Your wealth score is determined by your social status and your standing in the eyes of your past employers. It will typically be measured from 10-20. Every "unit" of treasure you find adds +1 to your wealth score for the rest of the month.

A character can accrue a number of debts each month equal to their wealth score. There is no penalty for debts and they refresh at the end of every moth.

A character's essence score is a "soft leveling mechanic" like Arete in Mage or Rank in Werewolf. All players start with an essence score of 1 and increase their score by +1 every twenty sessions.

Item quality is rated from -2 to +5. A -2 spear would be something like a stick with a pointy stone tied to the end while +5 would be something like Gae Bulg.

The roll is indeed d20 + modifier vs. difficulty. The difficulty is going to be 15 + quality * 5. Scores are rated from 1-30 (with numerous ways to get rerolls or temporary bonuses) and a starting party face will probably have a business skill modifier of between +10 and +20.




Ok, but then we still need to establish a rule. How many potions is "acceptable?" And doesn't such an arbitrary limitation cause further headaches? Being unable to trade infinite vorpal swords for infinite healing potions is, if anything, a bigger fluff / crunch disconnect than only being able to make a finite number of roles in a given amount of time.



Agreed. This is exactly the problem my player had.

But I just can't think of an alternative that allows the players to "retry" on a failure and / or that has some sort of prohibition on players spending outrageous amounts of time looking for every item in the book every session in the hopes of finding a great deal.

Although now that people have shown me numerous examples of "good" abstract wealth systems that have the exact same feature I am feeling a lot better about the decision, though I still tweaked the system to make it less random.



Maybe in common usage, but in more precise terms "tactics" refers to short term plans such as what moves you will take in a battle while "strategy" refers to long term plans and resource management.

If they have infinite potions / scrolls / wands they then using them doesn't expend anything, they still have more than they could ever possibly use.

I was specifically talking about 3.X in my example, but even in 5E why would they bother using ki or action surges or whatnot on non "boss" battles when they have unlimited HP and spells?



Up to you. Maybe you decided to spend your savings on an item you did want?

Explaining the dice results in a narrative fashion is for you and the DM to work out. The games rules do not allow you to hoard money from previous adventures directly, although the increasing effect of essence on wealth is in part represented by past savings, and if you want a more dramatic effect you can use saved money as a justification for spending XP to raise your social class and base wealth score.



Common stuff like barrels and chests is free.

The encumbrance system is fairly abstracted as well; potions are cheap and weightless, most one handed weapons and tools weight one stone, most two handed weapons and tools weight two stone, and the only things that weigh more are going to be heavy armor or war machines.... they don't have infinite hp because the action economy makes it impossible to use potions that way but it does seem to alter the dynamic somewhat... question in this system do characters just pick out whatever non combat equipment they want/need and then roll for the other stuff or do they just get the standard set when generating characters
EDIT: wait so if i get a whole dragonhoard that doesn't carry over to my next adventure despite the fact that i have enough money to never work again a single day of my life?

Talakeal
2017-01-05, 09:26 PM
... they don't have infinite hp because the action economy makes it impossible to use potions that way but it does seem to alter the dynamic somewhat... question in this system do characters just pick out whatever non combat equipment they want/need and then roll for the other stuff or do they just get the standard set

They have infinite HP out of combat, which means they don't really have to worry about taking (non-lethal) damage in combat as it doesn't have any lasting effect.

I would need to look up on where the line is, but under normal circumstances players don't have to worry about acquiring things like clothing, food, ammunition, lamp oil, or furniture.

Newtonsolo313
2017-01-05, 09:43 PM
They have infinite HP out of combat, which means they don't really have to worry about taking (non-lethal) damage in combat as it doesn't have any lasting effect.

I would need to look up on where the line is, but under normal circumstances players don't have to worry about acquiring things like clothing, food, ammunition, lamp oil, or furniture.

my suggestion is to put the cut off at 25 gp(for non combat equipment) because thats when the stuff starts being useful and not just standard gear like holy water flasks or acid
when it comes to combat equipment charge for the stuff based off simple vs martial or heavy vs light
armor is tough maybe don't charge for leather, scalemail and full chain but for the stuff after it to preserver the armor balance

CharonsHelper
2017-01-05, 10:44 PM
They have infinite HP out of combat, which means they don't really have to worry about taking (non-lethal) damage in combat as it doesn't have any lasting effect.

I would need to look up on where the line is, but under normal circumstances players don't have to worry about acquiring things like clothing, food, ammunition, lamp oil, or furniture.

1. I'm not sure how big of a deal that is. D&D 3.x basically worked that way past the first couple levels, with a minor cost for the wand of cure light wounds.

2. Just have a cost in time to pick stuff up. Handwave cheap mundane stuff - but have all magic gear cost 1hr to buy each (and outside of a city - there's a limit to how many they can purchase at one time since they a small town might only have a few).

oxybe
2017-01-05, 11:16 PM
Your wealth score is determined by your social status and your standing in the eyes of your past employers. It will typically be measured from 10-20. Every "unit" of treasure you find adds +1 to your wealth score for the rest of the month.

A character can accrue a number of debts each month equal to their wealth score. There is no penalty for debts and they refresh at the end of every moth.

A character's essence score is a "soft leveling mechanic" like Arete in Mage or Rank in Werewolf. All players start with an essence score of 1 and increase their score by +1 every twenty sessions.

Item quality is rated from -2 to +5. A -2 spear would be something like a stick with a pointy stone tied to the end while +5 would be something like Gae Bulg.

The roll is indeed d20 + modifier vs. difficulty. The difficulty is going to be 15 + quality * 5. Scores are rated from 1-30 (with numerous ways to get rerolls or temporary bonuses) and a starting party face will probably have a business skill modifier of between +10 and +20.

It seems like your gains temporary at worst and at best simply a vessel to roll for potential loot in the short run, while your finances are never in any danger... Inability to permanently raise (or lower) your wealth does lead me to question "why (would my character) adventure in the first place (as opposed to settling down and practicing a safer profession)?"

If I'm not adventuring for wealth and such rewards from adventuring don't matter in the long run, why should I care for them?

noting the difficulty score, an average wealth of 15 (assuming your range) means the character can just keep rolling for a +4 quality item (DC31) on a monthly basis and obtain it with 20% chance, noting that a +5 item is along the lines of something

Why would a character go out and adventure with the dangers that involve and not just sit at home for 5-6 months and get themselves a Gaebolg, Minor from the safety of their living room. Or not worry about items and just do something safer because adventuring doesn't seem to be a profitable trade.

Games like 3rd ed and 4th ed D&D restrict those items in what is effectively monetary scopes. a +1 item is something most beginner adventurers can afford pretty early on, but a +2 or +3 one requires saving up funds and spending it all in one place or getting a significant windfall early on. Once you start dealing in +2 or +3 items on a regular basis, your character's wealth bracket has taken a rather large jump.

Same with something like Shadowrun and other games that are gear dependent: Characters that are dealing in Alpha grade cyberwear (think military grade, not yet out in the field, hush-hush stuff) on a regular basis have wealth at their disposal that beginner runners cannot fathom.

Those characters adventure out in dangerous areas and locales and see profit from doing so. They're able to buy themselves a better life or anonymity.

I'm not particularly seeing why characters would go and adventure in your system if the profits from doing so are fleeting at best.

Talakeal
2017-01-05, 11:20 PM
2. Just have a cost in time to pick stuff up. Handwave cheap mundane stuff - but have all magic gear cost 1hr to buy each (and outside of a city - there's a limit to how many they can purchase at one time since they a small town might only have a few).

That was kind of the intent, but people equate time with money or say that the DM has no right to limit how much time they can spend shopping.

CharonsHelper
2017-01-05, 11:25 PM
That was kind of the intent, but people equate time with money or say that the DM has no right to limit how much time they can spend shopping.

Not arbitrarily, no. But most of the time you can't spend weeks shopping when the evil warlord (or whatever) is of laying waste to the countryside. You've got hero-ing to do!

Talakeal
2017-01-05, 11:30 PM
It seems like your gains temporary at worst and at best simply a vessel to roll for potential loot in the short run, while your finances are never in any danger... Inability to permanently raise (or lower) your wealth does lead me to question "why (would my character) adventure in the first place (as opposed to settling down and practicing a safer profession)?"

If I'm not adventuring for wealth and such rewards from adventuring don't matter in the long run, why should I care for them?

noting the difficulty score, an average wealth of 15 (assuming your range) means the character can just keep rolling for a +4 quality item (DC31) on a monthly basis and obtain it with 20% chance, noting that a +5 item is along the lines of something

Why would a character go out and adventure with the dangers that involve and not just sit at home for 5-6 months and get themselves a Gaebolg, Minor from the safety of their living room. Or not worry about items and just do something safer because adventuring doesn't seem to be a profitable trade.

Games like 3rd ed and 4th ed D&D restrict those items in what is effectively monetary scopes. a +1 item is something most beginner adventurers can afford pretty early on, but a +2 or +3 one requires saving up funds and spending it all in one place or getting a significant windfall early on. Once you start dealing in +2 or +3 items on a regular basis, your character's wealth bracket has taken a rather large jump.

Same with something like Shadowrun and other games that are gear dependent: Characters that are dealing in Alpha grade cyberwear (think military grade, not yet out in the field, hush-hush stuff) on a regular basis have wealth at their disposal that beginner runners cannot fathom.

Those characters adventure out in dangerous areas and locales and see profit from doing so. They're able to buy themselves a better life or anonymity.

I'm not particularly seeing why characters would go and adventure in your system if the profits from doing so are fleeting at best.

A +4 one handed tool would cost a starting character 16 debts and would require a difficulty 35 business test. This is pretty hard, but it is doable.

The 10-20 wealth is a rating for a team of exceptional people. It is not something which an individual could accomplish just by sitting on their butt unless they came from an exceedingly wealthy background. As to why they are adventuring, well, why would anyone who isn't concerned with getting rich quick adventure? That is up to the player to decide. Maybe the adventure came to them, either in the form of raiders attacking their lands or a crazy old hobo who claimed he knew your mother coming to the door and asking you to participate in an armed robbery with him and thirteen of his midget friends.

Yukitsu
2017-01-06, 12:53 AM
A +4 one handed tool would cost a starting character 16 debts and would require a difficulty 35 business test. This is pretty hard, but it is doable.

The 10-20 wealth is a rating for a team of exceptional people. It is not something which an individual could accomplish just by sitting on their butt unless they came from an exceedingly wealthy background. As to why they are adventuring, well, why would anyone who isn't concerned with getting rich quick adventure? That is up to the player to decide. Maybe the adventure came to them, either in the form of raiders attacking their lands or a crazy old hobo who claimed he knew your mother coming to the door and asking you to participate in an armed robbery with him and thirteen of his midget friends.

I'd point out the latter came with a 14th share of an unimaginable amount of wealth which was a major motivator for them doing anything at all and that was the only thing they could really offer to the guy who didn't want to live in the place they were going to sack.

I think you need to more accurately formalize what wealth ratings go up and down from and also make certain that it does go up at a proper rate as the party accumulates wealth but given your description, wealth should more accurately be referred to as "wages" and the system should work off that. If it were consistent wages, the system begins to make a little more sense but even then it isn't a particularly sensible system if you are trying to represent an economy in action. As an example, if I wanted to I could easily blow a million dollars in a day if I really wanted to (and had that much money). An adventurer might easily be someone that simply has a million dollars at hand and it's not hard to imagine it all being gone in the morning after. In your system, that isn't modeled. What it models accurately is me working a 9-5 and having a set amount of wealth that I can expend in a certain time frame with things I can or cannot functionally afford during that time period.

Edit: Also, maybe pick a word other than "debt" which as far as I can tell means something very different from what is intended there.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 01:05 AM
I think you need to more accurately formalize what wealth ratings go up and down from and also make certain that it does go up at a proper rate as the party accumulates wealth but given your description, wealth should more accurately be referred to as "wages" and the system should work off that. If it were consistent wages, the system begins to make a little more sense but even then it isn't a particularly sensible system if you are trying to represent an economy in action. As an example, if I wanted to I could easily blow a million dollars in a day if I really wanted to (and had that much money). An adventurer might easily be someone that simply has a million dollars at hand and it's not hard to imagine it all being gone in the morning after. In your system, that isn't modeled. What it models accurately is me working a 9-5 and having a set amount of wealth that I can expend in a certain time frame with things I can or cannot functionally afford during that time period.

Edit: Also, maybe pick a word other than "debt" which as far as I can tell means something very different from what is intended there.

Oh, there are formalized rules for what wealth represents, they just aren't in the rules for buying stuff. But no, I am most certainly not trying to simulate an economy in any way.

Wealth fluctuates quite a bit, and it isn't a long term thing. You social class can modify your wealth, but the only things that actually provide steady income are free lance jobs and finding treasure.

For example, my group currently has a wealth rating of zero. They are all commoners and so they have no base income, they received no reward because they literally attacked and killed the "quest giver" (and then fled town before they could loot him), and failed to find any of the hidden treasures that I had placed in the scenario. They are currently destitute and needing to draw upon their savings just to survive.

But, after the next session, they are potentially going to loot a treasure ship, and if they actually manage to crack its vault (and get the treasure back to shore) they might have a wealth rating of 30-40.


The 10-20 is merely an average; social class can act as a buffer, but what you do during the game (and how well you do it) is the major component of wealth and it can turn around in an instant.

Yukitsu
2017-01-06, 01:11 AM
Oh, there are formalized rules for what wealth represents, they just aren't in the rules for buying stuff. But no, I am most certainly not trying to simulate an economy in any way.

Wealth fluctuates quite a bit, and it isn't a long term thing. You social class can modify your wealth, but the only things that actually provide steady income are free lance jobs and finding treasure.

For example, my group currently has a wealth rating of zero. They are all commoners and so they have no base income, they received no reward because they literally attacked and killed the "quest giver" (and then fled town before they could loot him), and failed to find any of the hidden treasures that I had placed in the scenario. They are currently destitute and needing to draw upon their savings just to survive.

But, after the next session, they are potentially going to loot a treasure ship, and if they actually manage to crack its vault (and get the treasure back to shore) they might have a wealth rating of 30-40.


The 10-20 is merely an average; social class can act as a buffer, but what you do during the game (and how well you do it) is the major component of wealth and it can turn around in an instant.

To understand this system at all, as with just the buying rules, we need to understand the way that money goes up or down since functionally that's what your system is trying to abstract. The buying itself is bothering people who are asking you about the system because we don't understand how money goes up or down and we also don't know how loot or purchasing plays into that.

Thrudd
2017-01-06, 01:29 AM
How about the other angle. What if, instead of declaring a specific item they want to purchase (and which is unlikely to be there, wasting their time), the player asks what IS available if they are willing to spend a week (or whatever time period they want) searching merchants, black market, etc. This seems like a sensible approach when it is clear that what they want is unlikely to be found in a reasonable amount of time. The system should be able to randomly generate some items of different rarity/wealth values.


I still think that the best solution to the issue of money hoarding and equipment optimizing, which seems to be driving the desire for abstract wealth rules, is to simply eliminate the possibility of such optimizing. If money doesn't equal combat effectiveness and tactical advantage, then it won't occupy you or your players' attention. Low powered and consumable magic items should be the rarest and most expensive things anyone can find for sale or craft themselves (at great cost and time). This should greatly reduce the shopping mini-game that can occupy so many hours.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 01:33 AM
To understand this system at all, as with just the buying rules, we need to understand the way that money goes up or down since functionally that's what your system is trying to abstract. The buying itself is bothering people who are asking you about the system because we don't understand how money goes up or down and we also don't know how loot or purchasing plays into that.

Its pretty simple, but I will give you the long version:

At character creation a PC can buy up their social class for abuilding points (out of 100) per increase. Each point thus spent increases the character's base wealth score by one. A player can also raise their social class over the course of play for XP, but this usually requires some sort of in game justification.

The players then receive income, in some combination of rewards and treasures, which should total between 10 and 20 units per session.

For example, the player characters might be hired to deal with some bandits. The local marshall offers to pay them a bounty worth 3 units just for the attempt, 3 more if they successfully drive the bandits off, 3 more if they kill the bandits, and 3 more if they bring in the bandit's leader alive. Then the party might be able to find 5 units worth of treasure in the bandit's vault if they can bypass the locks and traps, and they might be able rescue a hostage whose family will pay for their safe return. There might also be a side mission or some other hidden treasure around.

Basically depending on how the players do they should get 10-20 units of treasure out of it, although if they royally screw up they might get less (or none at all).

They might also incur debts (what would be a better term in your opinion?) over the course of the mission, for example hiring a guide, bribing a guard, resupplying in hostile territory, chartering a ship, etc.

At the end of the mission they add up their social class, rewards, and treasures, and subtract their debts. This is their wealth score.

During their downtime they can then accumulate a number of additional debts equal to their wealth score with no negative consequences.


There are also a few ways to modify wealth using player skills, for example character with the transmutation skill can turn spell points into treasures, those with the gambling skill can wager treasures, and artists can use the crafting rules to increase the value of treasure.


How about the other angle. What if, instead of declaring a specific item they want to purchase (and which is unlikely to be there, wasting their time), the player asks what IS available if they are willing to spend a week (or whatever time period they want) searching merchants, black market, etc. This seems like a sensible approach when it is clear that what they want is unlikely to be found in a reasonable amount of time. The system should be able to randomly generate some items of different rarity/wealth values.


I still think that the best solution to the issue of money hoarding and equipment optimizing, which seems to be driving the desire for abstract wealth rules, is to simply eliminate the possibility of such optimizing. If money doesn't equal combat effectiveness and tactical advantage, then it won't occupy you or your players' attention. Low powered and consumable magic items should be the rarest and most expensive things anyone can find for sale or craft themselves (at great cost and time). This should greatly reduce the shopping mini-game that can occupy so many hours.

Randomly generating everything that is available would take forever and be of almost no benefit. Especially when the players can simply travel (or send a letter of enquiry) to markets in a thousand different lands.


Yeah, removing wealth entirely is an option, but it is a bit like shooting the patient to cure the disease. As I said, I want crafters and merchants to be viable character concepts, and wealth allows you to have small rewards or punishments for performance during the adventure.

Yukitsu
2017-01-06, 01:51 AM
I'd call it costs. Debts accrue when you are not paying people and owe them money but in this system is appears more to be anything which you can pay back immediately.

That aside, "debt" shouldn't accrue for failed attempts at purchase as that system makes no economic sense. Prices should not fluctuate as wildly as your system allows in the event of failure for large ticket items and if the player abandons the idea of purchasing the item, the idea that debt has somehow been accrued in some manner makes no valid sense. The speed at which debt accumulates for failure to purchase and the penalty for failure is frankly kind of horrific. Like, price spiraling like this only happens during periods of mass hyperinflation, the fact that it seems to be happening to individuals rather than the economy as a whole makes the whole system even more confusing.

Think about it this way. If a debt unit amounts to a certain amount of money, and I fail to buy a car this month, I'm now down thousands of dollars with no car. Next month, I fail again. If I'm representing this as saving up, I'm now trying to buy a car that has a market value of 6,000 dollars but for some reason I have to pay 18,000 dollars which clearly makes no sense.

To more accurately model this, a failure could accrue a single point of debt and these compound until the player succeeds at purchasing the item at which point they pay stones + 1 + previous failures but if they are doing so, I would rule that they use the extra money and resources to find the item now rather than later. If I say that the current price is too high, or that I want to shop for another deal, make me wait that extra amount of time but reset the cost bracket.

The failure scaling is absolutely silly with the current model as far as my understanding of it goes, especially if it also requires the player wait extra time to acquire the item. If you absolutely need to punish players for trying and failing and want to punish them further than lost time or lost income you could potentially have them be robbed on a 1 but I'd make that into an encounter personally. Either social with a swindler or combat with a thief.

And that aside, but your system just is a cash system but one with very large value currencies as far as I can tell. It doesn't look to me like it's abstracting money, just adding a random table to purchasing and changing the prices so that they're extremely high. For example, I get paid 10 units of wealth instead of 10000 gold and I pay 5 units of wealth to get a 5 stone item rather than 5000 gold to buy it, but with random chance thrown into the purchasing process which may increase the cost of it.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 03:06 AM
I'd call it costs. Debts accrue when you are not paying people and owe them money but in this system is appears more to be anything which you can pay back immediately.

To me "cost" implies something that has to be paid up front, while debts in this system remain floating and are "paid off" at the end of the session.


Think about it this way. If a debt unit amounts to a certain amount of money, and I fail to buy a car this month, I'm now down thousands of dollars with no car. Next month, I fail again. If I'm representing this as saving up, I'm now trying to buy a car that has a market value of 6,000 dollars but for some reason I have to pay 18,000 dollars which clearly makes no sense.

Ok, say the car costs 4 debt units and you need to roll a 17+ to procure it. If a debt unit has an approximate value of 1,000 dollars (and units are never anywhere close to that specific) that would mean that you will pay approximately 5,000 dollars for it after haggling (as it will take you, on average, 5 tries to get it). Thus one could assume that a character who rolls once a month is, on average, putting away 1,000 dollars into their savings, and will, on average, be able to buy the car after five months. However; if he rolls well, one can assume he got lucky (got a great deal on the car and / or had a sudden influx of cash) while if he rolls poorly one can assume that he got unlucky (say he couldn't find one for sale at a reasonable price on the car and / or had a run of bad fortune that ate into his savings).



And that aside, but your system just is a cash system but one with very large value currencies as far as I can tell. It doesn't look to me like it's abstracting money, just adding a random table to purchasing and changing the prices so that they're extremely high. For example, I get paid 10 units of wealth instead of 10000 gold and I pay 5 units of wealth to get a 5 stone item rather than 5000 gold to buy it, but with random chance thrown into the purchasing process which may increase the cost of it.

So, it seems to me that you are looking at the system far more literally then I intended and then proclaiming that is doesn't make sense when looked at so literally.

The value of "units of treasure" and of "debt" fluctuate wildly. And I don't mean that the market changes (although that is certainly part of it) I mean that the demand for and condition of each item varies, as does what people can get for it.

For example, if I bring in three wolf pelts that are worth "2 units" each, well the local fur trader might be stocked up or desperate to buy, he might not have enough to afford them but will still give what he can, maybe one of the pelts is infested with lice, damaged in battle, or has a rare pattern that makes it worth an inordinate amount. Further, maybe the local fur trader is a really stingy trader with a knack for haggling, or maybe he is a gullible fool with no business sense. Maybe the PC is just tired and doesn't feel like haggling that day and accepts the first offer.

Also, what a "unit" means slowly grows over time. For example a new character will typically get about 10 units of treasure per session for killing goblins for bags of silver, but a legendary hero might get 10 units of treasure a session for slaying a dragon and winning a mountain full of gold.

When the players are buying big ticket items they are almost certainly not doing it at a market, but dealing with a private collector or buying it at auction. Really rare collectibles seldom have a solid market value. For example a quick glance at the history of the Hope diamond shows that it has been bought and sold many times at many different prices, the lowest more than ten times less than the greatest.



To more accurately model this, a failure could accrue a single point of debt and these compound until the player succeeds at purchasing the item at which point they pay stones + 1 + previous failures but if they are doing so, I would rule that they use the extra money and resources to find the item now rather than later. If I say that the current price is too high, or that I want to shop for another deal, make me wait that extra amount of time but reset the cost bracket.

Wait, so are you saying that when I fail a roll I have to pay 1 debt immediately and then pay the same debt over again when I buy the item? That is actually more harsh than I intended, did you mean I subtract previous debt from the cost of the item? If so, I thought about doing that, but keeping track of changing modifiers for long periods of time is exactly the kind of book keeping that I am trying to avoid; instead I am trying to set the value based on average rolls and then using in character good or bad fortune to explain anomalous results (such as in the car example above).



The failure scaling is absolutely silly with the current model as far as my understanding of it goes, especially if it also requires the player wait extra time to acquire the item. If you absolutely need to punish players for trying and failing and want to punish them further than lost time or lost income you could potentially have them be robbed on a 1 but I'd make that into an encounter personally. Either social with a swindler or combat with a thief.

The time and money are the same currency. You don't actually spend wealth; rather each month you can accrue a number of debts equal to your wealth score. Time and money or inexorably link, they are abstracted together into the same resource.

I need to have some penalty for failed rolls otherwise the optimum move for players would be to simply shop for infinite amounts of everything and then back out of every purchase except for the ones one which they achieved a critical success. In that case I have, essentially, removed the random element entirely (and made mercantile skill meaningless in the process) and just replaced it with an (extremely low) flat cost system with hours of pointless rolling as a barrier to entry.

It would be kind of like being in junior high again and spending all afternoon rolling up AD&D PCs and tossing them unless they had multiple natural 18s.


But the penalty IS in time/money. What do you mean by a punishment beyond time / money?

Yukitsu
2017-01-06, 03:13 AM
The time and money are the same currency. You don't actually spend wealth; rather each month you can accrue a number of debts equal to your wealth score. Time and money or inexorably link, they are abstracted together into the same resource.


This is where the system stops making sense. Don't do this. Unless you also raise player's wealth scores when they are given large amounts of time, you are not properly linking these resources together in a way that functions and even if you do, it's not a worthwhile trade of linking them together. Time should be represented by in game time and opportunity cost, in other words the time cost is time. Time needs to be a different currency for the system to be functional. For any system at all to be functional.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 03:20 AM
This is where the system stops making sense. Don't do this. Unless you also raise player's wealth scores when they are given large amounts of time, you are not properly linking these resources together in a way that functions and even if you do, it's not a worthwhile trade of linking them together. Time should be represented by in game time and opportunity cost, in other words the time cost is time. Time needs to be a different currency for the system to be functional. For any system at all to be functional.

I don't know, I have played a lot of games where time and money go hand in hand. Admittedly most of them are board games or skirmish games, like eldritch horror or Mordheim, but d20 modern and Dark Heresy seem to work in the same manner as well, and they are all solid functioning systems with (imo) no more of a fluff / crunch disconnect than the standard D&D economy.

Also, I really think it makes sense in real life. Time is money is a very common expression after all. I know that, for example, if I really want something I can save money by waiting for a good deal and then pouncing on it. If I want a rare collectible I can buy it outright from an online dealer for a small fortune, or I can spend a few months or years lurking around garage sales and potentially pick it up for pocket change.

GloatingSwine
2017-01-06, 03:36 AM
They might also incur debts (what would be a better term in your opinion?) over the course of the mission, for example hiring a guide, bribing a guard, resupplying in hostile territory, chartering a ship, etc.

At the end of the mission they add up their social class, rewards, and treasures, and subtract their debts. This is their wealth score.


The point of an abstract wealth system is that you specifically do not do these things.

The point of abstract wealth is that you don't deal with trivial expenses or income. You can either afford something or you can't, and if you can't maybe there are ways you can address that.

Players don't incur living expenses in an abstract wealth system, because their wealth pays for all that.

Yukitsu
2017-01-06, 03:51 AM
I don't know, I have played a lot of games where time and money go hand in hand. Admittedly most of them are board games or skirmish games, like eldritch horror or Mordheim, but d20 modern and Dark Heresy seem to work in the same manner as well, and they are all solid functioning systems with (imo) no more of a fluff / crunch disconnect than the standard D&D economy.

Also, I really think it makes sense in real life. Time is money is a very common expression after all. I know that, for example, if I really want something I can save money by waiting for a good deal and then pouncing on it. If I want a rare collectible I can buy it outright from an online dealer for a small fortune, or I can spend a few months or years lurking around garage sales and potentially pick it up for pocket change.

While I'm not overly familiar with dark heresy, Mordheim, eldritch horror, and D20 Modern don't actually directly equate money and time. In D20 modern the system gives you a fixed wealth that remains the same no matter how much time passes and which has equivalent buying power from one moment to the next. In Mordheim you have to pay people as time passes as wages which is why your system makes some sense in a wage scale rather than loot system, but you get your money in discrete chunks. Yes, they do try to model flooding the market somewhat but they don't specifically have a time resource included in the system other than limits to the number of actions you can take in the market per turn. In other words, a different measure for time that's distinct from wealth. In Eldritch horror, while time is valuable, you exchange time to get money at your discretion. That's a vast difference from saying that time and money are equivalent, it merely shows that you can spend time to get money.

What is common to those systems is that time is valuable (though I find that a bit debatable in d20 modern honestly). It's kind of dangerous to assume that both are directly equivalent since they aren't. It's merely an expression used by people to say that they can be working and earning money with their time. That doesn't mean that an unemployed person (such as an adventurer that isn't adventuring) loses money when they lose time. They were going to lose that time either way, them trying to buy something changes nothing about that fact.

And if you're talking about what you are doing in real life, debt should drop the longer you spend looking for something. In the game system you have, since debt accrues on a failure to purchase, that doesn't seem to be true. If you want to model that concept of time and currency relating, you can deliberately take longer to find an item to reduce the debt cost associated with buying that item.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 04:00 AM
The point of an abstract wealth system is that you specifically do not do these things.

The point of abstract wealth is that you don't deal with trivial expenses or income. You can either afford something or you can't, and if you can't maybe there are ways you can address that.

Players don't incur living expenses in an abstract wealth system, because their wealth pays for all that.

Say's who?

A system is only abstract if it doesn't keep track of resources at all?

So if I am playing a game and my character has a card with "Money" printed on it and at any time I can trade that card for one that has "Bullets" printed on it, that is no longer an abstract system?

I can think of a dozen games, most of which have been linked in this thread, that I would label as "abstract wealth systems" but still have some concept of exchanging currency for goods and services.

Edit: And no, to be clear, in my system you do not pay for trivial expenses or for living expenses. I am not sure what I said that gave you the impression that you did.


In Eldritch horror, while time is valuable, you exchange time to get money at your discretion. That's a vast difference from saying that time and money are equivalent, it merely shows that you can spend time to get money.

The eldritch horror system was actually what I took most of my inspiration from.

Your character has an influence score.

Once per turn you can choose to roll influence to purchase a single item.

You roll a number of dice equal to your influence score. If the total number of successes equals or exceeds the value of the item you get it. Otherwise you wasted your turn for nothing.


My system was almost identical except that you could divide the dice between several purchases if you chose to.

The player in question got "mad" because to prove how weird the system was he spent all of his dice trying to acquire a super rare item, failed all of the rolls, and then proclaimed that because he couldn't then turn around and buy something else the shopkeeper must have taken all of his money and given him nothing in return.

Yukitsu
2017-01-06, 04:34 AM
The eldritch horror system was actually what I took most of my inspiration from.

Your character has an influence score.

Once per turn you can choose to roll influence to purchase a single item.

You roll a number of dice equal to your influence score. If the total number of successes equals or exceeds the value of the item you get it. Otherwise you wasted your turn for nothing.


My system was almost identical except that you could divide the dice between several purchases if you chose to.

The player in question got "mad" because to prove how weird the system was he spent all of his dice trying to acquire a super rare item, failed all of the rolls, and then proclaimed that because he couldn't then turn around and buy something else the shopkeeper must have taken all of his money and given him nothing in return.

Didn't realize eldritch horror removed the money mechanic used in Arkham horror. I have to say however that I agree with your player. Simply losing all your money on trying to buy something is actually nonsense. What is happening in Eldritch horror is that you don't have any money at all however, and for a moneyless system where you are not actually buying anything it can be considered workable. However, when there is money involved it stops making sense. Part of the system for eldritch horror is that the influence stat is semi-permanent and failing or succeeding at acquiring items doesn't change your influence score in general. However, it does appear that your wealth drops when you buy items in your system which is where the disconnect happens. Influence in eldritch horror doesn't appear to be you buying anything, it's you asking to be given things which may have an element of you being wealthy to it, but seems to transcend actually paying for anything.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 04:46 AM
Didn't realize eldritch horror removed the money mechanic used in Arkham horror. I have to say however that I agree with your player. Simply losing all your money on trying to buy something is actually nonsense. What is happening in Eldritch horror is that you don't have any money at all however, and for a moneyless system where you are not actually buying anything it can be considered workable. However, when there is money involved it stops making sense. Part of the system for eldritch horror is that the influence stat is semi-permanent and failing or succeeding at acquiring items doesn't change your influence score in general. However, it does appear that your wealth drops when you buy items in your system which is where the disconnect happens. Influence in eldritch horror doesn't appear to be you buying anything, it's you asking to be given things which may have an element of you being wealthy to it, but seems to transcend actually paying for anything.

Wealth does not drop when you buy items in the downtime between adventures.


Out of curiosity, if I had a rule that said if you find a bag of gold you get plus one to all wealth rolls for the remainder of the session, and then you chose not to buy anything that session, would you consider it equally ridiculous?

Yukitsu
2017-01-06, 04:53 AM
Wealth does not drop when you buy items in the downtime between adventures.


Out of curiosity, if I had a rule that said if you find a bag of gold you get plus one to all wealth rolls for the remainder of the session, and then you chose not to buy anything that session, would you consider it equally ridiculous?

By my reading of this, you accumulate debt whether you pass or fail a test to buy an item as per "...Using this ability incurs an amount of debt equal to the desired object's weight in stones +1 regardless of success of failure. Debt incurred on a failure can be explained by any number of misfortunes, but most likely simply represents saving up for an item that is normally outside of the character's price range; after all there is nothing stopping you from trying again and getting the item once you have dedicated a little more income towards its acquisition."

Which then infers a loss of wealth as per "At the end of the mission they add up their social class, rewards, and treasures, and subtract their debts. This is their wealth score."

It doesn't matter when this happens in the chain of events, this is a loss of wealth. If you mean in that you can maintain purchase power, that's only half true. In practice anyone using this system has to realize that they are likely to rapidly enter negatives if they continue trying to buy anything.

If you mean debt acquired when buying items does not then lead to the later equation, A) you need to not use debt interchangeably in both instances and B) you need to work out the implications of the ability to buy things without it costing any money.

And yes, that would be equally ridiculous since that should be identical to what is in their typical wealth so segregating it makes the system more complex, not less so.

And even still from my reading of this it feels like a cash system where each point represents larger amounts of money than would normally be the case. Yes, the prices suffer massive deflation as time goes on but that's something that cash can do.

GloatingSwine
2017-01-06, 05:01 AM
Say's who?

A system is only abstract if it doesn't keep track of resources at all?

So if I am playing a game and my character has a card with "Money" printed on it and at any time I can trade that card for one that has "Bullets" printed on it, that is no longer an abstract system?

No. It's a concrete resource system with a really narrow range of values.

You haven't abstracted anything, you've just changed the prices of everything and put in a random element where it is minimally useful and maximally annoying.



The player in question got "mad" because to prove how weird the system was he spent all of his dice trying to acquire a super rare item, failed all of the rolls, and then proclaimed that because he couldn't then turn around and buy something else the shopkeeper must have taken all of his money and given him nothing in return.


And he's exactly right. That's exactly what happened to him. He spent all his money and got nothing, because one roll is one money, because you decided for some hare brained reason that not buying things costs the same as buying them. If I walk into a game store and decide I don't want anything the staff don't mug me for fifty quid for the time taken.

It's not an abstract system and it makes no sense.

And no, don't give me living expenses, there is no way an adventurer can rack up living expenses that even dent the value of his starting equipment. The finest inn in the biggest city? It's a coachhouse for merchants. People with real money don't stay in inns, they own a townhouse if they're going to go to that city. Your average Paladin is wearing the price of buying the best inn in town as his nice shiny plate (and having that plate implies having a certain level of wealth to have acquired it and to maintain it). Your average Rogue can acquire the price of a night there in a few minutes of idle theft.

Yukitsu
2017-01-06, 05:08 AM
Wait, so are you saying that when I fail a roll I have to pay 1 debt immediately and then pay the same debt over again when I buy the item? That is actually more harsh than I intended, did you mean I subtract previous debt from the cost of the item? If so, I thought about doing that, but keeping track of changing modifiers for long periods of time is exactly the kind of book keeping that I am trying to avoid; instead I am trying to set the value based on average rolls and then using in character good or bad fortune to explain anomalous results (such as in the car example above).


To go back to this, I would alter it so that I may choose to pay the normal debt that you had assigned to the item +1 for each failed test to immediately get the item. If I say that that's too much I lose nothing because I'm not buying anything.

In your system as is written if I fail to buy, for example, a car, I immediately accrue the price of a car in debt. I then try again next month and fail again, again accruing the entire price of a car as debt. At this point I realize I'm bankrupt and stop trying since I know I can't afford to pay off the debts I've accrued. I don't have a car and have somehow spent 12,000 dollars. This clearly does not model reality.

In my system, I go to the car lot and hope for a car priced at a certain amount but they'll only sell it this month at that certain amount +1 unit. I can either buy it at that price now or come again later or shop around for another month.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 05:20 AM
In your system as is written if I fail to buy, for example, a car, I immediately accrue the price of a car in debt. I then try again next month and fail again, again accruing the entire price of a car as debt. At this point I realize I'm bankrupt and stop trying since I know I can't afford to pay off the debts I've accrued. I don't have a car and have somehow spent 12,000 dollars. This clearly does not model reality.

The value of the car is not 6,000 dollars.

The value of the car, after haggling, is equal to (the average value of a wealth unit) * (the car's weight in stones +1) * (the average number of rolls required to get the car).

So, if a wealth unit equals 1,000 dollars, and a car weighs 5 stone, and I need a 17+ to acquire it, that means that the cars average price is about 25,000 dollars.

If I acquire the car after five rolls (more or less the statistical average) this means I ended up paying about 25,000 dollars.

If I acquire it sooner I got lucky and either found an incredible discount, got a sudden windfall of money that allowed me to make the purchase early, or some other good fortune.

If I acquire it later, I got unlucky. I either couldn't find the car for sale for a normal price, had an unexpected expense come up and eat into the money I already paid for the car, or something else bad happens that stopped me from getting the car on time.


No. It's a concrete resource system with a really narrow range of values.

You haven't abstracted anything, you've just changed the prices of everything and put in a random element where it is minimally useful and maximally annoying.



And he's exactly right. That's exactly what happened to him. He spent all his money and got nothing, because one roll is one money, because you decided for some hare brained reason that not buying things costs the same as buying them. If I walk into a game store and decide I don't want anything the staff don't mug me for fifty quid for the time taken.

It's not an abstract system and it makes no sense.

And no, don't give me living expenses, there is no way an adventurer can rack up living expenses that even dent the value of his starting equipment. The finest inn in the biggest city? It's a coachhouse for merchants. People with real money don't stay in inns, they own a townhouse if they're going to go to that city. Your average Paladin is wearing the price of buying the best inn in town as his nice shiny plate (and having that plate implies having a certain level of wealth to have acquired it and to maintain it). Your average Rogue can acquire the price of a night there in a few minutes of idle theft.

Sorry, I must have missed the time when the twin goddesses of gaming terminology descended from the heavens and proclaimed that abstract could only refer to a mechanics within a very specific range of abstraction.

The system makes a reasonable amount of sense if you look at it using averages rather than soecific snapshots in isolation. If you want a more in depth explanation look at the car example I posted above.

At this point I can't help but feel that you just want to insult me and call me names, so there really isn't much of a point to continuing. In my defense I would like to point out that this isn't an original idea on my part, and it is a working component of many other good games including but not limited to Eldritch Horror, Dark Heresy, and Atlantis the Second Age, and I thought it would be a fun addition to my system which cut out book keeping and turned shopping between adventures into a fun little mini-game, but clearly that isn't the case.


To go back to this, I would alter it so that I may choose to pay the normal debt that you had assigned to the item +1 for each failed test to immediately get the item. If I say that that's too much I lose nothing because I'm not buying anything.

Still not quite sure if I follow you.

It looks like you are saying that the price goes up the more I fail?

Like if I fail once I can just buy the item outright without a roll by spending one extra debt, but if I have already failed twice it will take the two?

GloatingSwine
2017-01-06, 05:42 AM
If I acquire it later, I got unlucky. I either couldn't find the car for sale for a normal price, had an unexpected expense come up and eat into the money I already paid for the car, or something else bad happens that stopped me from getting the car on time.

There's your problem.

You can't use that as an excuse because whatever that unexpected expense was in a roleplaying game should be an event the player roleplays through not something you make up as an ex post facto rationalisation as to why not buying something costs money.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 05:49 AM
There's your problem.

You can't use that as an excuse because whatever that unexpected expense was in a roleplaying game should be an event the player roleplays through not something you make up as an ex post facto rationalisation as to why not buying something costs money.

Wait, what the heck?

You went from saying it cant be explained and makes no sense, to saying the it can be explained, but the GM has no right to narrate what happens?

I don't know about you, but the GM narrating why events unfolded the way the dice said they did is a pretty core mechanic of every RPG I have ever played in.

And yes, it isnt done with as close a spotlight as most rolls because it is supposed to be a quick mini game between adventures rather than a major focus, which is exactly why i called it an abstract system.

GloatingSwine
2017-01-06, 05:56 AM
Again, that is your oppinion. There are tons of good roleplaying games that leave it up to the players to determine the results of the dice sfter the fact, and declaring that they arent real RPGs as a result is just a particularly pompous appeal to the no true-scotsman fallacy.

You're not leaving it up to the players though, you're imposing a cost on them and telling them "you figure out why you got screwed over".

In a system where there's still no good reason to use a random roll at all. It's ****ing shopping, it's not a dramatic confrontation, there's no point putting a risk of failure (with imposed costs) on ****ing shopping!

Why do you want to have players randomly rolling to see if they can buy something? What does it add to the game?

The problems are plainly evident, everyone keeps telling you them over and over, so what are the benefits?

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 06:04 AM
You're not leaving it up to the players though, you're imposing a cost on them and telling them "you figure out why you got screwed over".

In a system where there's still no good reason to use a random roll at all. It's ****ing shopping, it's not a dramatic confrontation, there's no point putting a risk of failure (with imposed costs) on ****ing shopping!

Why do you want to have players randomly rolling to see if they can buy something? What does it add to the game?

The problems are plainly evident, everyone keeps telling you them over and over, so what are the benefits?

It allows the business skill to be useful without complex math.

It allows players the opportunity to aquire rare items without the bookkeeping. Instead of saving up for twenty sessions to aquire a rare item they instead have a 1 in 20 chance to aquire it each session. Same end results (on average) just less to keep track of.

And actually only a couple of people have been getting super offended by the idea, just a couple, most people have said "why dont you do it more like this other good rpg that I dont realize does the exact same thing".

The system is balanced on both ends by the way. While you (and most people for some odd reason) keep focusing on pcs being "screwed over" by having to wait a little longer, do keep in mind that there is an equal chance that you wilget the item that much sooner instead.

Also, I edited my previous post to be less snarky and and more incredulous.

GloatingSwine
2017-01-06, 06:32 AM
It allows the business skill to be useful without complex math.

Business skills are rare special cases, why would you want them to be present in every purchase ever? In the vast majority of instances the players want to walk into a shop, hand over money, and walk out with a desired item. Why do they need to roll a dice to make that happen? If they want to haggle that's a simple opposed roll with the shopkeeper that might get them a bit of a discount.

People aren't getting offended by the idea, they're getting exasperated by the fact you brought this system to the forum ostensibly for critique and then get super defensive about it whenever anyone tells you that there are problems with it.


It allows players the opportunity to aquire rare items without the bookkeeping. Instead of saving up for twenty sessions to aquire a rare item they instead have a 1 in 20 chance to aquire it each session. Same end results (on average) just less to keep track of.

It's not less to keep track of though, it's actually more to keep track of because the player has to track the number of rolls they're given per adventure and make sure they spend them all because they can no longer save up. And they need to work out the probability of acquiring basic supplies like healing potions so they know how many rolls to spend on those before they can start trying to spend anything on desired upgrades.

And they have to roll a dice every time they do it rather than just writing a slightly smaller number on their character sheet.



I don't know about you, but the GM narrating why events unfolded the way the dice said they did is a pretty core mechanic of every RPG I have ever played in.

But most events which subtract money from players (which all your rationalisations have to do if they need to explain why the player can't buy something else) need to be events that are not just narrated by the GM but are actually played through and need to make sense.

You can't just narrate to the Barbarian that he got mugged in the street and that's why he can't spend the money he wanted to spend on his masterwork battle axe on a +1 loincloth of charisma. That's a combat encounter that should probably end up with him having more money that he started with not less.

You still cannot logically explain why failing to buy something costs money.

Templarkommando
2017-01-06, 07:06 AM
Admittedly, I didn't read too much of this thread before commenting, but I'm just hoping to help out. The wealth system that you're talking about sounds a lot like the wealth system from D20 Modern. I personally didn't like the system very much, but if you're looking for a starting point on something like that, it might be worth a look.

NichG
2017-01-06, 07:46 AM
I also think this misses the point of an abstract wealth system. This is more along the lines of taking a concrete wealth system and adding money drains and taxes. The reason I say that is because you still end up tracking your fluctuating wealth level in some detail - it fluctuates through these rolls and through gaining treasure, etc. But if you had a maintenance or tax system it'd be the same thing - your on-hand wealth just becomes a random variable balancing between your random income and your constant depreciation.

Personally, I don't really care for that. It has all the downsides of gold-piece counting, but adds onto it a sort of uselessness of wealth. In such a system, I'd basically try to convert my wealth to the most expensive redeemable corporeal things that I could have a 95% success rate on acquiring; I'd then use those corporeal things as the wealth tokens when dealing with others (e.g. I'd sell them off to gain a temp boost to my wealth and then attempt to buy the thing I want, or I'd give them as gifts and try to RP getting the items I want rather than using the merchant system, etc). In doing so, I'd probably increase my effective gear value by 25% or so over a player who actually tried to use your system the way you intend. To me, that's a sign of bad system design.

If you want to prevent players from worrying about penny-pinching, you can't do it by making careful stewardship of wealth even more important (e.g. by implementing a system with lots of gotchas for not doing something very specific in how you spend it). You have to make a system in which players are not punished for not worrying. That's the advantage of most abstract wealth systems that use a constant level.

For example, a system like the following: if you have a Wealth score of 4, you can freely buy person-scale quantities of anything with a value of 4 or less without worrying that in the future it might affect your ability to buy something else. You can stay at the Cost 4 Inn instead of the Cost 2 Inn because it actually doesn't matter mechanically - it's a pure RP decision (but if you have to stay at the Cost 5 Inn to maintain appearances, you'd need to find someone else to foot the bill). In such a system, even if you use your Wealth 4 to buy a bunch of Cost 4 jewelry, there's nothing you can do to convert that pile of Jewelry into a Wealth 5 score - if you try to buy more stuff than normal by selling that jewelry... it's still Wealth 4 scale. Treasure then is either enough to permanently increase your (or the party's) Wealth, or it isn't and doesn't matter. For example, a dragon's hoard might have 4 shares at an effective Wealth score of 7. Anyone who claims a share of it is raised to Wealth 7 if they were below, otherwise their Wealth is totally unaffected. Claiming all 4 shares also puts you to Wealth 7. You could also have individual valuable treasures that permit a single purchase at a given Wealth level, but aren't as efficiently converted to permanent Wealth improvement (this diamond can be exchanged with a wealthy collector for a single Cost 8 object, or it can permanently raise one person's Wealth to 6). If you want that kind of system to model scrimping and saving in order to buy very expensive things, you can make it so that a character can permanently lower their Wealth by 1 rank in order to buy something 1 rank more expensive.

I think it works best if the Wealth scores are very granular, can't be additively or situationally buffed at all, and correspond to something like an order of magnitude difference between them. So Wealth 1 would be like having 1cp on hand, while Wealth 5 is like having 100gp on hand whenever you want it and Wealth 10 means you can buy small countries. That way you get less dissonance when players have the inevitable idea of 'I keep dipping into my pocket for that copper piece until I have 10000 of then, then cash it out to buy an expensive item'.

Segev
2017-01-06, 09:36 AM
Out of curiosity, if I had a rule that said if you find a bag of gold you get plus one to all wealth rolls for the remainder of the session, and then you chose not to buy anything that session, would you consider it equally ridiculous?

Absolutely.

Where did my bag of gold go? Did it evaporate? It would make more sense as a one-shot item (or set of one-shot items) that gave +x to my next n rolls. Of course, that's starting to sound an awful lot like it is just a bag of gp I can spend, which removes the abstraction.

The way you address "infinite healing potions" in a system like the Resources one in White Wolf is that, past a certain number, "a bunch of healing potions" is actually one category higher in cost.

To really make it concrete but abstract, you could modify it to say that n+1 purchases within [time period] of Cost Rating n counts as a single Cost Rating n+1 purchase.

So if the time period for refresh is monthly, and "1 health potion" is a Cost Rating 2 purchase, for example, buying 3 health potions in 1 month would be a single Cost Rating 3 purchase. A character with Wealth 3 would be temporarily reduced to Wealth 2 from that burden.

This would effectively make Wealth N able to buy 1 Cost Rating N purchase per month, and one purchase of each rating lower, OR buy N+1 Cost Rating N-1 purchases, and then one purchase of each rating lower than N-1. Etc.

Gamable, but stable. Let people with appropriate Craft skills make items for a Cost Rating 1 lower than they could buy them. Let people with Mercantile skills make bonus purchases that don't count against their monthly limits based on their rating in the skill. Or maybe they can roll on it, and a success gets them +1 Wealth for that month (based not on actual liquid assets, but on deals they can broker this month which will let them stretch their income for the month that much further, before the opportunity fades).

Treasures are one-off Wealth Ratings. This won't prevent hoarding, but you can let them combine hoarded Treasures in the same pattern that Cost Ratings count as purchases. Two "Treasure 1s" become one "Treasure 2." Three "Treasure 2s" become one "Treasure 3." If they ever have a Treasure rating equal to one greater than their Wealth rating, they can buy an increase in their Wealth rating (representing investments and other "lifestyle improvement" purchases that make steady income easier).

In this way, you discourage hoarding beyond a certain point; treasures will build up, combine, and become rolled into the wealth rating as they climb. So if players hoard, they only hoard to a certain point before it becomes just part of their wealth.

PhoenixPhyre
2017-01-06, 10:08 AM
I've been reading this thread and came up with a compromise system that tries to meet all the criteria.

Goals
• Minimal bookkeeping
• Crafting and business skills are valuable
• Minimize chances of infinite items or “roll until you make it”
• No punishment for failing to buy an item

Basic assumptions
Characters have a wealth score (W >= 1). This represents their immediately available cash flow. Items have a complexity score (C >= 1). This represents the nominal time required to acquire the item for someone whose wealth score is equal to the complexity. Purchasing non-trivial items can only be done during downtime. Each period of downtime lasts a varying number of days. Different areas may have different maximum complexities available.

Purchasing items
For basic purposes, characters are guaranteed to be able to purchase any item where W >= C. The time cost is f(C-W) days, minimum of 0. f(C) is a function that can be set for the individual setting and relates the (adjusted) complexity to the days of downtime needed to find it (availability).

Example 1
For a person of W = 1 (subsistence farmers, for example), finding food (C = 1) takes their entire day. For a person of W = 100 (the richest man alive), finding food takes no time at all. For most adventurers (W > 1), finding food is trivial.

If C > W (but still below the region’s cap), one of two things can happen (player’s choice):
1. The player can purchase the item outright by permanently reducing their wealth by C – W. This represents liquidating productive assets. This takes the normal time f(C) days.
2. The player can try to find it cheaper by narrating what steps they take to find it. This controls what skill modifier (S) is used for the check in this step. This attempt could be haggling (Business), contacts, social status, intimidation, etc. The player then makes a check (1d20 + W – C + S) against some DC. A success allows them to purchase it without permanent reductions in wealth. A critical success gives a discount on the time. A failure means that no reduction in time or cost was possible. The player can back out of a failure (not paying a wealth cost and not getting the item) or pay the wealth cost for the item (and acquire it), but the time f(C) was wasted regardless.

Effects of Treasure & Crafting
Treasure (T) can act in one of two ways:
1. The treasure can give a bonus on a single purchase equal to the value of the treasure.
2. Players can bank the treasure to permanently increase their wealth by 1 point for every N points of treasure (N > 1).

Crafting skills allow players to trade time for purchase bonuses at a favorable rate. One day spent crafting gives temporary wealth = g(S) for the rest of the downtime (bankable like treasure).

Notes:
This meets the criteria as follows:
• No rolls are required unless the player wants to. Wealth requires explicit actions to diminish. DMs can strip players of wealth (if they’re outlawed and have to flee the area, etc).
• The cost function f(C) could be as simple as linear (time = C + constant) or as complex as you wish.
• Crafting and business help by either increasing wealth (in exchange for time) or by increasing the range of available items.
• Buying items costs time, time is finite. I’d set a minimum time involvement for more powerful items (magic items, potions, etc) regardless of the character’s wealth. This represents special ordering (as in not-off-the-shelf items).
• The only way to lose out is by trying to buy items with C > W and failing the rolls. This only costs time (or wealth if they choose to acquire the item).
Wealth goes up by saving or by crafting.

Does this meet the criteria? Is it simple enough? Comments?

Newtonsolo313
2017-01-06, 10:09 AM
Wait if i have the right impression what the OP is trying too fix is that his players killed there own questgiver and make the optimal amout of money possible

i don't think you can solve that by giving them an abstract wealth system they don't understand and starting them off with no money at all and then suddenly giving them a tremendous fortune. your players are murderhobos and forcing them to appreciate an abstract model of the economy is not going to change that

Storm_Of_Snow
2017-01-06, 10:29 AM
If you want to prevent players from worrying about penny-pinching, you can't do it by making careful stewardship of wealth even more important (e.g. by implementing a system with lots of gotchas for not doing something very specific in how you spend it). You have to make a system in which players are not punished for not worrying.
Or where they are actually punished for overly-worrying about it :smallwink: - if they're in a tavern, nursing a single pint of low quality ale each and eating the cheap stew the landlord makes from last weeks leftovers, wearing old, badly patched clothing, anyone looking for someone to do a task will assume they're not very good, and instead approach the group drinking the better quality/imported beer, having plates of roast chicken or whatever delivered to their table and dressed more flamboyantly, or if they do get the quest (maybe they're the only adventuring group in the tavern and the patron's desperate), their payment will be a lot lower than it otherwise might be and any attempts to bump it up will fail.

Takes money to make money, after all. :smallamused:

Or they have to make more frequent checks to avoid the effects of illness, recovery from injuries is longer and so on (poor quality food, clothing that leaves them more affected by the elements, cheap beds or bedrolls that don't really allow them to rest and recuperate, going to badly trained or incompetent doctors and so on), merchants either overcharge them for goods/services, try and rip them off if the PCs are selling something (it might be stolen, which means the buyer will have to launder it somehow - assuming they're even willing to take that risk, or the buyer assumes they're broke and want money quickly, so they'll take a lower amount) or outright refuse to serve them because they think they're too low class (think of what happens to Julia Roberts character in Pretty Woman). Even to the point where their weapons and armour become less effective or are outright destroyed because they've been scrimping on things they need for proper maintenance.

Probably worth asking each player individually why they're not spending though (might just be they've played something like some of the Elder Scrolls games and pretty much never bought anything except a starter house to horde everything, so they've no idea they're supposed to), and don't do anything without repeatedly warning the players beforehand about it.

Newtonsolo313
2017-01-06, 10:53 AM
Probably worth asking each player individually why they're not spending though (might just be they've played something like some of the Elder Scrolls games and pretty much never bought anything except a starter house to horde everything, so they've no idea they're supposed to), and don't do anything without repeatedly warning the players beforehand about it.
Exactly its better to communicate to the players when they are acting like that and get them out of that "warrior accountant mindset" instead of changing the rules and royally screwing them over

GloatingSwine
2017-01-06, 01:40 PM
Or where they are actually punished for overly-worrying about it :smallwink: - if they're in a tavern, nursing a single pint of low quality ale each and eating the cheap stew the landlord makes from last weeks leftovers, wearing old, badly patched clothing, anyone looking for someone to do a task will assume they're not very good, and instead approach the group drinking the better quality/imported beer, having plates of roast chicken or whatever delivered to their table and dressed more flamboyantly, or if they do get the quest (maybe they're the only adventuring group in the tavern and the patron's desperate), their payment will be a lot lower than it otherwise might be and any attempts to bump it up will fail.

Thing is though the difference between the cheapest and most expensive ale will be about double.

And the party's starting equipment will be at least two orders of magnitude more expensive than it.

You really can't model that kind of trivial expenses on the same scale as adventuring equipment, let alone treasure. It's like being able to afford to buy a house outright but still somehow only being able to afford to eat at Greggs rather than a restaurant.

Newtonsolo313
2017-01-06, 02:33 PM
Thing is though the difference between the cheapest and most expensive ale will be about double.

And the party's starting equipment will be at least two orders of magnitude more expensive than it.

You really can't model that kind of trivial expenses on the same scale as adventuring equipment, let alone treasure. It's like being able to afford to buy a house outright but still somehow only being able to afford to eat at Greggs rather than a restaurant.

I think he was suggesting throwing that system away and using normal Dnd rules instead of grappling with this monster of a system the OP was suggesting

Yukitsu
2017-01-06, 02:34 PM
The value of the car is not 6,000 dollars.


Start at "the car costs 6000 dollars" and then at that point, see if your system can accurately model its purchase. If it can't, it's disconnected from reality and isn't abstracting the process of purchasing. The price of a car cannot vary as wildly as you're trying to model.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 05:01 PM
Start at "the car costs 6000 dollars" and then at that point, see if your system can accurately model its purchase. If it can't, it's disconnected from reality and isn't abstracting the process of purchasing. The price of a car cannot vary as wildly as you're trying to model.

Yes, if you look at it with different assumptions than it was written for the system doesn't make sense. It was written assuming average rolls equal the item's average cost, not the best possible scenario.

That would be like saying "I am going to assume that in D&D a critical hit represents actually hurting my foe and anything else is fatigue from a near miss. When I shoot an arrow at a blind man standing 10 paces away, why do I hit him less than 5% of the time? And why does he still suffer fatigue from a shot that he didn't bother to dodge because he didn't see it coming?"



I think he was suggesting throwing that system away and using normal Dnd rules instead of grappling with this monster of a system the OP was suggesting

I am not sure I would qualify the system as a "monster." While it is longer than something like White Wolf's "You have anything below resource level nothing beyond it" it doesn't seem any longer or more complicated than d20 modern or Dark Heresy or Atlantis the Second age or some of the other systems that are listed here.


Exactly its better to communicate to the players when they are acting like that and get them out of that "warrior accountant mindset" instead of changing the rules and royally screwing them over

Breakable rules create problems at every table they go to. It is far easier to have working rules than for every DM to have the same conversation with the players at every table they play at. Besides, I don't really fault players for making the most optimal moves. Unless they are intentionally going out of their way to twist wording or find weird edge cases I pretty much follow the principle of "don't blame the player, blame the game."

Also, again people fixate on the worst possible scenario. The system won't "royally screw" anyone over barring the kind of bad luck that wouldn't come up unless you played nonstop for a million years, with anything even remotely resembling normal rolls the players will have significantly more wealth than under the old system.


Wait if i have the right impression what the OP is trying too fix is that his players killed there own questgiver and make the optimal amout of money possible

i don't think you can solve that by giving them an abstract wealth system they don't understand and starting them off with no money at all and then suddenly giving them a tremendous fortune. your players are murderhobos and forcing them to appreciate an abstract model of the economy is not going to change that

Nah, I came up with this system months ago. The players killing their quest giver was after testing out the wealth rules and didn't affect it. Not that this party really cares, they are the equivalent of a monk, a sorcerer, and a favored soul, none of which have a big need for money.


Absolutely.

Where did my bag of gold go? Did it evaporate? It would make more sense as a one-shot item (or set of one-shot items) that gave +x to my next n rolls. Of course, that's starting to sound an awful lot like it is just a bag of gp I can spend, which removes the abstraction.

The way you address "infinite healing potions" in a system like the Resources one in White Wolf is that, past a certain number, "a bunch of healing potions" is actually one category higher in cost.

To really make it concrete but abstract, you could modify it to say that n+1 purchases within [time period] of Cost Rating n counts as a single Cost Rating n+1 purchase.

So if the time period for refresh is monthly, and "1 health potion" is a Cost Rating 2 purchase, for example, buying 3 health potions in 1 month would be a single Cost Rating 3 purchase. A character with Wealth 3 would be temporarily reduced to Wealth 2 from that burden.

This would effectively make Wealth N able to buy 1 Cost Rating N purchase per month, and one purchase of each rating lower, OR buy N+1 Cost Rating N-1 purchases, and then one purchase of each rating lower than N-1. Etc.

Gamable, but stable. Let people with appropriate Craft skills make items for a Cost Rating 1 lower than they could buy them. Let people with Mercantile skills make bonus purchases that don't count against their monthly limits based on their rating in the skill. Or maybe they can roll on it, and a success gets them +1 Wealth for that month (based not on actual liquid assets, but on deals they can broker this month which will let them stretch their income for the month that much further, before the opportunity fades).

Treasures are one-off Wealth Ratings. This won't prevent hoarding, but you can let them combine hoarded Treasures in the same pattern that Cost Ratings count as purchases. Two "Treasure 1s" become one "Treasure 2." Three "Treasure 2s" become one "Treasure 3." If they ever have a Treasure rating equal to one greater than their Wealth rating, they can buy an increase in their Wealth rating (representing investments and other "lifestyle improvement" purchases that make steady income easier).

In this way, you discourage hoarding beyond a certain point; treasures will build up, combine, and become rolled into the wealth rating as they climb. So if players hoard, they only hoard to a certain point before it becomes just part of their wealth.

Won't this just have the effect of the most efficient course being to hoard absolutely everything and spend nothing for the first ten or so sessions, then splurge and equip the whole party with end game gear and then never worry about money again accept to buy consumables?


Admittedly, I didn't read too much of this thread before commenting, but I'm just hoping to help out. The wealth system that you're talking about sounds a lot like the wealth system from D20 Modern. I personally didn't like the system very much, but if you're looking for a starting point on something like that, it might be worth a look.

I looked at it, it is similar but I don't much care for it either. Atlantis the Second Age seemed to be closer to my style and doing the same thing I am trying to do, but it has the same problem of "DM took mah money and gave me nothing in return!" that is making people so mad, so I don't think that is a good idea either.



People aren't getting offended by the idea, they're getting exasperated by the fact you brought this system to the forum ostensibly for critique and then get super defensive about it whenever anyone tells you that there are problems with it.

As I said to JR, I apologize for getting defensive, it is just my nature. I really do appreciate all the feedback I have gotten as it has given me a lot of new ideas. However, when I have people like you calling my ideas hare-brained or completely ridiculous or Shuyung getting mad at me for not giving a straight answer to a question he never actually asked it gets a bit frustrating.


You still cannot logically explain why failing to buy something costs money.

The item costs more than you currently have, if you decide to keep saving up you should be able to afford it in a month or two works just fine as a logical explanation in 90+% of cases.

Let me ask you a question: Say I was playing bog standard D&D where you had to save up your treasure for several adventures to buy a big ticket magic item.

Then I added a system which randomly fluctuated market prices in an effort to model a real economy, and then another table which randomly simulated periodic life events which might cost or give you income such as inheritance or illnesses.

Would this not be more realistic than standard D&D's fixed prices for equipment and living expenses? And would it not have the exact same effect as my system does?


But most events which subtract money from players (which all your rationalizations have to do if they need to explain why the player can't buy something else) need to be events that are not just narrated by the GM but are actually played through and need to make sense.

You can't just narrate to the Barbarian that he got mugged in the street and that's why he can't spend the money he wanted to spend on his masterwork battle axe on a +1 loincloth of charisma. That's a combat encounter that should probably end up with him having more money that he started with not less.

Again, I have to ask if you really believe this. I mean sure, if you go into big convoluted or out of character explanations I can see needing to RP it, for for something like "the town furrier is overstocked and overworked. It turns out those pelts you brought into town aren't going to sell for as much as you had hoped," do you really need to derail the game with an epic quest to find a buyer who will pay top dollar?



It's not less to keep track of though, it's actually more to keep track of because the player has to track the number of rolls they're given per adventure and make sure they spend them all because they can no longer save up. And they need to work out the probability of acquiring basic supplies like healing potions so they know how many rolls to spend on those before they can start trying to spend anything on desired upgrades.

And they have to roll a dice every time they do it rather than just writing a slightly smaller number on their character sheet.
.

Overall the system is quicker and more to keep track off. The specific act of rolling is slower than D&D, but is significantly faster (and less math intensive) than the haggling rules I had where you would roll an opposed business test with a merchant and receive a discount based on the results.


But the real idea is to allow players to save up for big ticket items without actually having to pinch every penny by using average rolls over time rather than coin counting. If before on average it would take you 10 sessions to get the big bad magic sword, you now have a 10% chance each session regardless of how much of a skinflint you are. Same result (on average) but without needing the player to stress out about every little expenditure.

GloatingSwine
2017-01-06, 05:19 PM
The item costs more than you currently have, if you decide to keep saving up you should be able to afford it in a month or two works just fine as a logical explanation in 90+% of cases.


No, that doesn't explain why your money went away (which is what your chances to roll are, they are money). You tried to buy something and now you don't have the resource you tried to buy it with. It's gone, you can't do anything else with it.


Let me ask you a question: Say I was playing bog standard D&D where you had to save up your treasure for several adventures to buy a big ticket magic item.

Then I added a system which randomly fluctuated market prices in an effort to model a real economy, and then another table which randomly simulated periodic life events which might cost or give you income such as inheritance or illnesses.

Would this not be more realistic than standard D&D's fixed prices for equipment and living expenses? And would it not have the exact same effect as my system does?

No, because if under that system you couldn't afford something you could buy something else. My decision to look at the price of a thing it turns out I couldn't afford had no effect on my ability to buy anything else. That's what your system does and that's one of the things everyone here is querying for which you have not come up with an explanation, only ex post facto rationalisations that would be deeply unsatisfying in play.


Again, I have to ask if you really believe this. I mean sure, if you go into big convoluted or out of character explanations I can see needing to RP it, for for something like "the town furrier is overstocked and overworked. It turns out those pelts you brought into town aren't going to sell for as much as you had hoped," do you really need to derail the game with an epic quest to find a buyer who will pay top dollar?

Yes, because that's another ex post facto rationalisation which doesn't work when you're talking about a party unless it affects all of them (because they all have even shares of the same loot). Which your system cannot produce, three people can take turns "selling furs to the furrier" (by trying to buy something) and he's only overstocked for the second one, the first and third are fine.

Stop even trying ex post facto rationalisations and come up with a genuine logically sound explanation for why money goes away when you don't buy something with it.


Overall the system is quicker and more to keep track off. The specific act of rolling is slower than D&D, but is significantly faster (and less math intensive) than the haggling rules I had where you would roll an opposed business test with a merchant and receive a discount based on the results.

But the actual abstract systems mentioned here are even faster, and simpler, and much more logically consistent.


But the real idea is to allow players to save up for big ticket items without actually having to pinch every penny by using average rolls over time rather than coin counting. If before on average it would take you 10 sessions to get the big bad magic sword, you now have a 10% chance each session regardless of how much of a skinflint you are. Same result (on average) but without needing the player to stress out about every little expenditure.

Coin counting is just basic arithmetic though? It's faster than this, it requires no rolling, and the player can intuitively see at all times how close to the desired thing they are and if they decide they want something else instead they can buy that at any point during the process (those "unexpected costs" you ex post facto rationalise become actual parts of play which players decide for themselves).

Actual abstract wealth systems are even faster, because you just have a number and if your number is good enough you get the thing you wanted and you don't have to do anything to or with your number except in exceptional cases.


Yes, if you look at it with different assumptions than it was written for the system doesn't make sense. It was written assuming average rolls equal the item's average cost, not the best possible scenario.

That would be like saying "I am going to assume that in D&D a critical hit represents actually hurting my foe and anything else is fatigue from a near miss. When I shoot an arrow at a blind man standing 10 paces away, why do I hit him less than 5% of the time? And why does he still suffer fatigue from a shot that he didn't bother to dodge because he didn't see it coming?"

The fundamental assumption of rolling to hit in combat is that the target is either actively (or passively via armour) trying to stop you hitting it. (At least hitting it hard enough to cause damage).

That's why a random roll makes sense in that situation, it's an opposed thing.

Who is trying to stop the player shopping?

Yukitsu
2017-01-06, 05:24 PM
Yes, if you look at it with different assumptions than it was written for the system doesn't make sense. It was written assuming average rolls equal the item's average cost, not the best possible scenario.

That would be like saying "I am going to assume that in D&D a critical hit represents actually hurting my foe and anything else is fatigue from a near miss. When I shoot an arrow at a blind man standing 10 paces away, why do I hit him less than 5% of the time? And why does he still suffer fatigue from a shot that he didn't bother to dodge because he didn't see it coming?"


Narrow the range between the average, best and worse case scenarios for item cost. The variance is too high.

Segev
2017-01-06, 05:31 PM
Won't this just have the effect of the most efficient course being to hoard absolutely everything and spend nothing for the first ten or so sessions, then splurge and equip the whole party with end game gear and then never worry about money again accept to buy consumables?

Nope. Even if that's what they choose to do with specific "treasure" rewards, the monthly wealth purchases they could make don't get "better" by waiting. The incentive there is to use the wealth as fast as possible.

Might want to put breaks on that by suggesting that Wealth only recovers one level per month, if depleted. i.e., if you make a Cost 3 purchase and only have 3 Wealth, then a Cost 2 purchase with your reduced 2 Wealth, so now you're at 1, it takes one month to get back to 2, and another to get back to 3.

Or maybe it doesn't recover at all, and Treasure is the only route to building it back up.

Players can use Treasure for a quick fix right now, or save (hoard) it until they can raise permanent wealth.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 05:46 PM
No, that doesn't explain why your money went away (which is what your chances to roll are, they are money). You tried to buy something and now you don't have the resource you tried to buy it with. It's gone, you can't do anything else with it.



No, because if under that system you couldn't afford something you could buy something else. My decision to look at the price of a thing it turns out I couldn't afford had no effect on my ability to buy anything else. That's what your system does and that's one of the things everyone here is querying for which you have not come up with an explanation, only ex post facto rationalisations that would be deeply unsatisfying in play.



Yes, because that's another ex post facto rationalisation which doesn't work when you're talking about a party unless it affects all of them (because they all have even shares of the same loot). Which your system cannot produce, three people can take turns "selling furs to the furrier" (by trying to buy something) and he's only overstocked for the second one, the first and third are fine.

Stop even trying ex post facto rationalisations and come up with a genuine logically sound explanation for why money goes away when you don't buy something with it.



But the actual abstract systems mentioned here are even faster, and simpler, and much more logically consistent.



Coin counting is just basic arithmetic though? It's faster than this, it requires no rolling, and the player can intuitively see at all times how close to the desired thing they are and if they decide they want something else instead they can buy that at any point during the process (those "unexpected costs" you ex post facto rationalise become actual parts of play which players decide for themselves).

Actual abstract wealth systems are even faster, because you just have a number and if your number is good enough you get the thing you wanted and you don't have to do anything to or with your number except in exceptional cases.



The fundamental assumption of rolling to hit in combat is that the target is either actively (or passively via armour) trying to stop you hitting it. (At least hitting it hard enough to cause damage).

That's why a random roll makes sense in that situation, it's an opposed thing.

Who is trying to stop the player shopping?

Will respond to your individual points in a bit.

Quick question, as you clearly don't like the way I am using "abstract", could you please tell me what word you would use to describe a system like Atlantis: The Second Age or d20 Modern where you have a vague wealth score rather than a concrete money total, items have difficulties to purchase rather than listed costs, and you need to make a roll to purchase a big ticket item, and if you fail need to wait a set amount of time before trying again?

GloatingSwine
2017-01-06, 06:02 PM
Will respond to your individual points in a bit.

Quick question, as you clearly don't like the way I am using "abstract", could you please tell me what word you would use to describe a system like Atlantis: The Second Age or d20 Modern where you have a vague wealth score rather than a concrete money total, items have difficulties to purchase rather than listed costs, and you need to make a roll to purchase a big ticket item, and if you fail need to wait a set amount of time before trying again?

Those actually are abstract because they don't contain a spendable currency. Failing to purchase something in D20 modern doesn't reduce your wealth score, only purchasing something of higher value than your wealth score does that, and you can take 20 on the roll if you have a lot of time (and the amount of time you have is also not determined by your wealth score as you say your system models, again for no adequately explained reason, but by what the group is doing).

Your wealth in D20 modern isn't a spendable currency, it's an inherent property of your character. That's what abstract wealth means, it means you don't track currency characters just have an ambient level of wealth.

Your system has a spendable currency. Loot in adventures gives you rolls to purchase which are spent whether you succeed or not. That's a concrete system, each roll is one point of money, it costs one point of money to gamble on an item you want. It's not even really more abstract than existing GP (which already abstracts the values of non-money goods), it just vastly compresses all the values and makes purchasing probabilistic for no adequately explained reason.

Knaight
2017-01-06, 06:05 PM
Quick question, as you clearly don't like the way I am using "abstract", could you please tell me what word you would use to describe a system like Atlantis: The Second Age or d20 Modern where you have a vague wealth score rather than a concrete money total, items have difficulties to purchase rather than listed costs, and you need to make a roll to purchase a big ticket item, and if you fail need to wait a set amount of time before trying again?

That's an abstract system. Your system is also an abstract system. The problem is that your system is a really bad abstraction that causes all sorts of bizarre nonsense. You'll notice in something like d20 Modern the failure only prevents you from buying that specific object, and it doesn't reduce your wealth in the process. Wealth is only reduced if and when you actually buy something, and even then only when that something is expensive, and because of that the system is at least baseline functional. Your system is broken, and needs to be replaced. Fortunately, a player noticed that, proving both that playtesting is worth doing and that it can work.


Those actually are abstract because they don't contain a spendable currency. Failing to purchase something in D20 modern doesn't reduce your wealth score, only purchasing something of higher value than your wealth score does that, and you can take 20 on the roll if you have a lot of time (and the amount of time you have is also not determined by your wealth score as you say your system models, again for no adequately explained reason, but by what the group is doing).
There are ways to merge spendable currencies and abstract wealth though. Chronica Feudalis comes to mind - you have a certain wealth in general, but you can also have things of particular value outside that wealth that you can use as an alternate revenue source. Your personal wealth is temporarily depressed by buying things, but if you don't buy things it will come back to its previous level; that one bag of gold you found won't. Said bag of gold then has a rating, from d4 to d12. Whenever you use it you roll against the purchase price (assuming you're buying something significant enough to warrant a roll), and it can go down, dropping a die rating. The higher the die rating the lower probability of this happening.

This is clearly abstract - you don't have a countable money supply, you have a rated one. It's also a decent abstraction, though the way its abstracted does mean that it only holds up well for a comparatively narrow monetary range.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 06:14 PM
Those actually are abstract because they don't contain a spendable currency. Failing to purchase something in D20 modern doesn't reduce your wealth score, only purchasing something of higher value than your wealth score does that, and you can take 20 on the roll if you have a lot of time (and the amount of time you have is also not determined by your wealth score as you say your system models, again for no adequately explained reason, but by what the group is doing).

Your wealth in D20 modern isn't a spendable currency, it's an inherent property of your character. That's what abstract wealth means, it means you don't track currency characters just have an ambient level of wealth.

Your system has a spendable currency. Loot in adventures gives you rolls to purchase which are spent whether you succeed or not. That's a concrete system, each roll is one point of money, it costs one point of money to gamble on an item you want. It's not even really more abstract than existing GP (which already abstracts the values of non-money goods), it just vastly compresses all the values and makes purchasing probabilistic for no adequately explained reason.

Even the most abstract systems I have ever played like Exalted 3E still have some form spendable currencies. Exalted and d20 modern absolutely allow you to find "treasure" and spend it for a temporary boost to your wealth / resource score.


That's an abstract system. Your system is also an abstract system. The problem is that your system is a really bad abstraction that causes all sorts of bizarre nonsense. You'll notice in something like d20 Modern the failure only prevents you from buying that specific object, and it doesn't reduce your wealth in the process. Wealth is only reduced if and when you actually buy something, and even then only when that something is expensive, and because of that the system is at least baseline functional.

I would call it an abstract system as well. The problem is that Swine does not, he says that mine is not an abstract system and keeps saying things like "In a TRUE abstract system," so I am asking him what term he would prefer I would use so we can switch to that and drop all the sophistry and arguing about terms.

Also, your wealth score does not drop on a failed roll in my system. Instead during each period of down time you get a number of rolls based on your wealth score each downtime. The number of rolls is an abstract concept based on savings, liquid income, time, patience, owed favors, contacts, etc. Your wealth score does not change if you pass, fail, fumble, critical, or just plain don't bother make these rolls.

Atlantis the second age does decrease wealth if you fail to find the item.
d20 Modern requires that you spend time shopping for an item. Regardless of whether or not you get that item, the amount of time never goes down and you do not get that time back.
IIRC Dark Heresy gives you a finite number of requisitions rolls over time, and if you fail one you don't instantly get to try and requisition something else in its place.

Shackel
2017-01-06, 06:14 PM
Why not just make the cap of the rolls time-based and run on a D20 Modern-esque wealth system where failure doesn't somehow drop your wealth for some reason? As the price grows higher, you get less rolls per day/time period meant to represent the relative rarity of these items in the first place.

It still gives an artificial barrier that can lead to annoying corner cases like one player getting the +1 sword they wanted on day 1 and the other needing to wait 5 weeks, but it at least gives a suitably abstract IC reason. If you want to horde potions, fine, it's completely within your wealth level, but you'd have to wait.

You can then have modifiers based on the marketplaces themselves, where smaller ones have a lower limit before rolls become limited, whereas larger ones allow more rolls per day due to the wide number of places you can look. In places like a Paris or Moscow full of tens of thousands of people even in Medieval to Renaissance times, your only real limitation is your patience.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 06:15 PM
Why not just make the cap of the rolls time-based and run on a D20 Modern-esque wealth system where failure doesn't somehow drop your wealth for some reason? As the price grows higher, you get less rolls per day/time period meant to represent the relative rarity of these items in the first place.

It still gives an artificial barrier that can lead to annoying corner cases like one player getting the +1 sword they wanted on day 1 and the other needing to wait 5 weeks, but it at least gives a suitably abstract IC reason. If you want to horde potions, fine, it's completely within your wealth level, but you'd have to wait.

That is exactly what I do. Your ratio of wealth to how rare the item is determines how often you can make the roll.

Failing rolls does not decrease your wealth.

Yukitsu
2017-01-06, 06:16 PM
That is exactly what I do. Failing rolls does not decrease your wealth.

You need to clarify this as failing rolls grants debt yes?

And debts are later subtracted from wealth yes?

I don't care that it's not immediate that's irrelevant.

CharonsHelper
2017-01-06, 06:21 PM
That's an abstract system. Your system is also an abstract system. The problem is that your system is a really bad abstraction that causes all sorts of bizarre nonsense. You'll notice in something like d20 Modern the failure only prevents you from buying that specific object, and it doesn't reduce your wealth in the process. Wealth is only reduced if and when you actually buy something, and even then only when that something is expensive, and because of that the system is at least baseline functional.

I'll also note that while d20 Modern's system isn't terrible and makes a decent baseline, it isn't great either. How much your wealth can drop is too random for my taste, and the costs of things are way too graded. Systems which have that many slight changes in gear etc. (all of the different kinds of pistol etc.) all with different costs, along with having up to +5 masterwork, probably shouldn't have abstract wealth systems at all.

Abstract systems tend to work better when you want to steam-line purchase of basic gear while having kingdom/ship wealth be relatively quick. Frankly - I'm dubious of how well they could work in a standard fantasy dungeon crawl style RPG.

GloatingSwine
2017-01-06, 06:24 PM
Also, your wealth score does not drop on a failed roll in my system. Instead during each period of down time you get a number of rolls based on your wealth score each downtime. The number of rolls is an abstract concept based on savings, liquid income, time, patience, owed favors, contacts, etc. Your wealth score does not change if you pass, fail, fumble, critical, or just plain don't bother make these rolls.

Right, but there's no reason to link the number of rolls you can make to your wealth score. Doing that is what makes it a concrete money system where each roll is one point of money. Doing that is what makes anyone who uses the system equate making a roll to spending wealth, it's why everyone keeps telling you that your wealth reduces when you fail to buy something, because you've shackled these two completely independent things together for no reason and the effect of that is that failing to win at the claw machine that is your purchasing roll cost you money.

In D20 modern you can make as many rolls as you want for an item provided the downtime is long enough and the length of the downtime is completely independent of your wealth score or anyone else at the table's. You can even take 20 on the roll to guarantee you get anything you could possibly succeed at if you have long enough.

Additionally in D20 modern anything with a value less than your current wealth score you get automatically with no roll, no time taken, and no reduction in wealth.

Additionally to the additionally, your system should also give different probabilities of successful purchase for every item in every town, unless a sleepy farmer's market in a provincial town has the same chance of selling you a Vorpal Sword as the city famous for its mage-artificers, which means you don't even get the benefit that the 1GP claw machine model of shopping would initially seem to give you that you don't have to write out fiddling price lists.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 06:26 PM
You need to clarify this as failing rolls grants debt yes?

And debts are later subtracted from wealth yes?

I don't care that it's not immediate that's irrelevant.

Debts incurred in the field affect wealth. You are not going to be shopping for a rare big ticket magic item in the field.

During each period of downtime you can freely absorb a number of debts equal to your current wealth score without affecting your wealth rating in any way.

Yukitsu
2017-01-06, 06:28 PM
Debts incurred in the field affect wealth. You are not going to be shopping for a rare big ticket magic item in the field.

During each period of downtime you can freely absorb a number of debts equal to your current wealth score without affecting your wealth rating in any way.

Use different words in both cases as using the equivocally makes the system poorly written.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 06:29 PM
Right, but there's no reason to link the number of rolls you can make to your wealth score. Doing that is what makes it a concrete money system where each roll is one point of money. Doing that is what makes anyone who uses the system equate making a roll to spending wealth, it's why everyone keeps telling you that your wealth reduces when you fail to buy something, because you've shackled these two completely independent things together for no reason and the effect of that is that failing to win at the claw machine that is your purchasing roll cost you money.

In D20 modern you can make as many rolls as you want for an item provided the downtime is long enough and the length of the downtime is completely independent of your wealth score or anyone else at the table's. You can even take 20 on the roll to guarantee you get anything you could possibly succeed at if you have long enough.

If I have ten million dollars to burn and I want to buy a rare antique I can just find someone who has one for sale and make them an offer they can't refuse.

If I have a hundred dollars to burn and I want to buy a rare antique I will need to wander around looking at yard sales, estate sales, auction houses, and antiquarians hoping to find someone who happens to have the item I need and not realize how valuable it is.

Both are possible and realistic.

Which one do you think will take longer?



Use different words in both cases as using the equivocally makes the system poorly written.


That was kind of the point of my OP. My system is written in a way that makes it sound like you are being robbed for failure, and I was hoping people could give me advice on how to phrase it so it sounded better.

Instead everyone seemed to jumped on the "It can't be justified! It is a bad system and you are bad for liking it!" bandwagon, which (even if accurate) isn't really helpful.

GloatingSwine
2017-01-06, 06:38 PM
If I have ten million dollars to burn and I want to buy a rare antique I can just find someone who has one for sale and make them an offer they can't refuse.

If I have a hundred dollars to burn and I want to buy a rare antique I will need to wander around looking at yard sales, estate sales, auction houses, and antiquarians hoping to find someone who happens to have the item I need and not realize how valuable it is.

Both are possible and realistic.

Which one do you think will take longer?


Not the answer to the question. In your model only having 100 dollars doesn't mean you have to spend longer looking, it means you have to stop looking faster and go and beat up some orcs and can't use your 100 dollars for anything else in the meantime either (and you would have 100 dollars after you beat up the orcs whether you spent the last 100 dollars or not, unless the orcs had a few bucks for you to loot.)

Yukitsu
2017-01-06, 06:39 PM
That was kind of the point of my OP. My system is written in a way that makes it sound like you are being robbed for failure, and I was hoping people could give me advice on how to phrase it so it sounded better.

Instead everyone seemed to jumped on the "It can't be justified! It is a bad system and you are bad for liking it!" bandwagon, which (even if accurate) isn't really helpful.

It is a bad system, it doesn't dramatically reduce the time required to purchase things and it's not particularly good at abstracting any real economy or purchasing pattern.

First off, wealth can stay the same, that's fine.

Use the term costs and profit while adventuring with net profit being the amount added to wealth.

Purchasing should have two dimensions that are semi-related. Time and wealth. Every check against your wealth reduces your time which is a fixed sum related to the time you are giving your players or which they are willing to take. Time is reduced no matter how the purchasing progresses, but wealth remains static. Having more money should not allow an individual to try to buy more things than having less money so wealth should not allow someone to spend more time on purchasing.

Wealth may even be better named purchasing power but wealth probably has enough connotation.

Knaight
2017-01-06, 06:43 PM
I'll also note that while d20 Modern's system isn't terrible and makes a decent baseline, it isn't great either. How much your wealth can drop is too random for my taste, and the costs of things are way too graded. Systems which have that many slight changes in gear etc. (all of the different kinds of pistol etc.) all with different costs, along with having up to +5 masterwork, probably shouldn't have abstract wealth systems at all.

There's a reason I used the term "at least baseline functional". I've seen a fair few abstract systems, and d20 Modern is one of the worst.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 06:47 PM
It is a bad system, it doesn't dramatically reduce the time required to purchase things and it's not particularly good at abstracting any real economy or purchasing pattern.

Again, that is your opinion. I don't have enough play-testing data to tell one way or another in this specific instance, but in other games that I have played that used the same mechanic I found it significantly more enjoyable than the D&D model. Simply stating "You're ideas are bad is called non-constructive criticism and doesn't help anyone.


Use the term costs and profit while adventuring with net profit being the amount added to wealth.

Purchasing should have two dimensions that are semi-related. Time and wealth. Every check against your wealth reduces your time which is a fixed sum related to the time you are giving your players or which they are willing to take. Time is reduced no matter how the purchasing progresses, but wealth remains static. Having more money should not allow an individual to try to buy more things than having less money so wealth should not allow someone to spend more time on purchasing.

That is essentially what I am doing, I am just trying to streamline it into a single system where you don't have to keep track of multiple variables over the course of multiple sessions.

But again, I am not sure how having enough money to just place an order and pay the tab doesn't mean you have more time for shopping than someone who is barely squeaking by and needs to clip coupons, consider each purchase carefully, waiting for things to go on sale, and always be shopping around for the best deal.

Yukitsu
2017-01-06, 06:49 PM
That is essentially what I am doing, I am just trying to streamline it into a single system where you don't have to keep track of multiple variables over the course of multiple sessions.

But again, I am not sure how having enough money to just place an order and pay the tab doesn't mean you have more time for shopping than someone who is barely squeaking by and needs to clip coupons, consider each purchase carefully, waiting for things to go on sale, and always be shopping around for the best deal.

Because your system already includes that with wealth failure. If the poorer person fails more checks which is the only thing that wealth should be used against, that player is spending time chunks to fail. The person who passes faster, passes with less time chunks spent.

GloatingSwine
2017-01-06, 06:53 PM
But again, I am not sure how having enough money to just place an order and pay the tab doesn't mean you have more time for shopping than someone who is barely squeaking by and needs to clip coupons, consider each purchase carefully, waiting for things to go on sale, and always be shopping around for the best deal.

1. If you're playing a medievalish fantasy RPG none of those concepts operate anyway.

2. The person who has to be careful about what they buy doesn't lose money if they don't buy anything. For your analogy to be appropriate then wealth would have to accumulate until something was purchased no matter how many rolls were used. They don't, which is why people say that your system charges people money for not buying things.

The person who only has 100 dollars a month disposable income has 200 dollars next month if they don't spend it this month. In your system they only have 100 dollars next month no matter what they spend this month.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 06:56 PM
There's a reason I used the term "at least baseline functional". I've seen a fair few abstract systems, and d20 Modern is one of the worst.

Hey Knaight, you are a smart guy and level headed guy who is not overly concerned with "hard simulation" in games, right? (Not sarcastic, that is my actual impression of you).

How would you work a system which, at the end of each session, allows a player to choose a single item which they couldn't ordinarily afford and have a chance to receive the item at no cost, preferably with

A: the chance being based on the ratio of the item's rarity to the character's buying power / social class,
B: without having to keep track of and factor in the results of rolls made during previous sessions, and
C: can be explained as some combination of good fortune and saving up.

That is essentially what I am trying to do with the part of the system that everyone is objecting to.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 06:58 PM
1. If you're playing a medievalish fantasy RPG none of those concepts operate anyway.

2. The person who has to be careful about what they buy doesn't lose money if they don't buy anything. For your analogy to be appropriate then wealth would have to accumulate until something was purchased no matter how many rolls were used. They don't, which is why people say that your system charges people money for not buying things.

The person who only has 100 dollars a month disposable income has 200 dollars next month if they don't spend it this month. In your system they only have 100 dollars next month no matter what they spend this month.

The only time the system functions in that manner is if someone obsessively goes after one single rare item at the exclusion of everything else. I have no problem internally rationalizing that as someone who is saving up all of their disposable income towards buying that one thing and is afraid to buy anything else lest they lose out on their opportunity to buy the item they want when it becomes available.

Yukitsu
2017-01-06, 06:59 PM
Hey Knaight, you are a smart guy and level headed guy who is not overly concerned with "hard simulation" in games, right? (Not sarcastic, that is my actual impression of you).

How would you work a system which, at the end of each session, allows a player to choose a single item which they couldn't ordinarily afford and have a chance to receive the item at no cost, preferably with

A: the chance being based on the ratio of the item's rarity to the character's buying power / social class,
B: without having to keep track of and factor in the results of rolls made during previous sessions, and
C: can be explained as some combination of good fortune and saving up.

That is essentially what I am trying to do with the part of the system that everyone is objecting to.

What we need is for you to more accurately formalize how the players acquire things they can ordinarily afford which is what is offending so many people.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 07:02 PM
What we need is for you to more accurately formalize how the players acquire things they can ordinarily afford which is what is offending so many people.

Go to a market.
Roll a business roll with a DC based on the item's quality.
If you succeed you are able to work out a good deal and get the item and incur debt units equal to its value.
If you fail you aren't able to work out a good deal and can choose to either go without the item or buy it and incur debts equal to double its value.

GloatingSwine
2017-01-06, 07:11 PM
The only time the system functions in that manner is if someone obsessively goes after one single rare item at the exclusion of everything else. I have no problem internally rationalizing that as someone who is saving up all of their disposable income towards buying that one thing and is afraid to buy anything else lest they lose out on their opportunity to buy the item they want when it becomes available.

You internally rationalise it that way, but that's not how your system models it. Your system does not give the person who is "saving up" increasing chances to acquire the thing as their price range increases, so blatantly no saving up is actually occurring.

The logic of what your system actually does is different from what you rationalise it as.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 07:13 PM
1. If you're playing a medievalish fantasy RPG none of those concepts operate anyway.

2. The person who has to be careful about what they buy doesn't lose money if they don't buy anything. For your analogy to be appropriate then wealth would have to accumulate until something was purchased no matter how many rolls were used. They don't, which is why people say that your system charges people money for not buying things.

The person who only has 100 dollars a month disposable income has 200 dollars next month if they don't spend it this month. In your system they only have 100 dollars next month no matter what they spend this month.

Again, really?

So you can't imagine a scenario like A:

The great and wealthy knight Sir Richington tells his seneschal "Write a letter to my second cousin the Duke of Cambria, son of the great swordsman Sir. Hacksalot, and heir to the Hackmaster +12. Tell him that if he were to lend me the use of his father's sword that simply hangs above his mantleplace collecting dust that I would be willing to fully finance his war with the neighboring kingdom of Badguyvia."

Vs. Scenario B:

A poor but skilled mercenary swordsman walking out of a tavern after losing a dual to a better armed knight and saying "Well, I definetly need to get a better weapon. I only have about 200 gold pieces to my name, and that sure isn't enough to buy a Hackmaster. But, maybe if I visit the black market I can find one on the cheap, robbers often knock off rich guys or loot ancient tombs and don't realize the quality of the weapons they take. Then again, I could also check around to see if I can find that strange shop run by the creepy old man; it will take some doing as the shop isn't ever in the same place twice, but he normally can sell pretty good gear on the cheap; maybe I will get really lucky and find one that isn't cursed this time!"


You internally rationalise it that way, but that's not how your system models it. Your system does not give the person who is "saving up" increasing chances to acquire the thing as their price range increases, so blatantly no saving up is actually occurring.

The logic of what your system actually does is different from what you rationalise it as.

This is true.

That is why I say it is abstract.

The model works correctly if the dice follow a probabilistic distribution. If it doesn't, the GM (or the PC) needs to go into "author stance" and explain WHY the character got unusually (un)lucky this time.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 07:20 PM
The fundamental assumption of rolling to hit in combat is that the target is either actively (or passively via armour) trying to stop you hitting it. (At least hitting it hard enough to cause damage).

Then why can I still miss a stationary and unarmored target? If have a decent hit bonus this will probably ony be on a "1" but that is still 5% of the time, and if the target is far away, has cover, or is a small target it could be a very hard shot indeed.

But my point was not to argue about what D&D AC and HP models (that horse is already jelly in the ground), but to point out that if you come at a system with different assumptions about what the dice rolls represent than the designers do you are going to get weird results.

GloatingSwine
2017-01-06, 07:20 PM
No, know why?

When you buy a sword you don't buy it off a shelf, you go to a smith, give him money, and he makes your sword. A lot of the cost and time of getting stuff is invariant because it's dependent on the production cost and time not the time you spend browsing.

Why?

Because swords are expensive, the metal's expensive and the smith's time's expensive and he's not going to sit there making swords in case someone might buy one, he's going to make things to order when they're ordered.

That goes quadruple for the sort of big ticket items your fantasy adventurer is buying because those are often going to be magical and so you're looking at an artificer's time and probably some pretty exotic components that aren't going to just get used up for a magical bauble that maybe nobody wants. Artificer's gotta eat and making something nobody buys doesn't put food on the table.

And that still doesn't explain why the mercenary went through all that trouble, didn't find a sword, and didn't have twice as much money next time he went looking after his next campaign, him having saved up this time.



This is true.

That is why I say it is abstract.

The model works correctly if the dice follow a probabilistic distribution. If it doesn't, the GM (or the PC) needs to go into "author stance" and explain WHY the character got unusually (un)lucky this time.

It's also why everyone else says it's bad. You abstracted the wrong things in the wrong ways and the system is still functionally a concrete money system. It's logically backwards from all the ways people expect purchasing to work, doesn't model things people actually want a wealth system to model (like "saving up"), and puts chances of failure and costs of failure where they have no business being.

You say the model "works", but it only works if you accept all the rationalisations you're making for all the illogical things it does, and given how immiedately obvious its failure modes are nobody has been willing to do that, hence you being the only person arguing in favour against what has turned into quite the dogpile, which should be giving you a clue that it doesn't actually work in the sense of being a good set of game rules that people will want to engage with.

The GM does not go into author stance and explain to a PC why his coin purse is suddenly empty unless you want to be one of those GMs who will randomly tell players "You got pickpocketed, I didn't roll for this, didn't let you roll any kind of perception check for it and it's not an encounter and there's nothing you can do about it".

Shackel
2017-01-06, 07:27 PM
That is exactly what I do. Your ratio of wealth to how rare the item is determines how often you can make the roll.

Failing rolls does not decrease your wealth.


Debts incurred in the field affect wealth. You are not going to be shopping for a rare big ticket magic item in the field.

During each period of downtime you can freely absorb a number of debts equal to your current wealth score without affecting your wealth rating in any way.

Well according to your own system you're acquiring debt by making the roll at all... so, yeah. Yeah, you're taking some kind of monetary hit, and if you're not all you would have to do is rename "Debt".

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 07:29 PM
The fundamental assumption of rolling to hit in combat is that the target is either actively (or passively via armour) trying to stop you hitting it. (At least hitting it hard enough to cause damage).

Then why can I still miss a stationary and unarmored target? If have a decent hit bonus this will probably ony be on a "1" but that is still 5% of the time, and if the target is far away, has cover, or is a small target it could be a very hard shot indeed.

But my point was not to argue about what D&D AC and HP models (that horse is already jelly in the ground), but to point out that if you come at a system with different assumptions about what the dice rolls represent than the designers do you are going to get weird results.


No, know why?

When you buy a sword you don't buy it off a shelf, you go to a smith, give him money, and he makes your sword. A lot of the cost and time of getting stuff is invariant because it's dependent on the production cost and time not the time you spend browsing.

Why?

Because swords are expensive, the metal's expensive and the smith's time's expensive and he's not going to sit there making swords in case someone might buy one, he's going to make things to order when they're ordered.

That goes quadruple for the sort of big ticket items your fantasy adventurer is buying because those are often going to be magical and so you're looking at an artificer's time and probably some pretty exotic components that aren't going to just get used up for a magical bauble that maybe nobody wants. Artificer's gotta eat and making something nobody buys doesn't put food on the table.

And that still doesn't explain why the mercenary went through all that trouble, didn't find a sword, and didn't have twice as much money next time he went looking after his next campaign, him having saved up this time.

Ok, you are approaching the game from not only a different level of abstraction than I am but an entirely different setting outlook. A core part of most fantasy is that old stuff is better than new stuff. That was the core theme of Lord of the Rings; and in a Sword and Sorcery setting like Conan or mine you have a world where the people who understood how to make stuff are at the bottom of the ocean.



And again, I keep explaining it to you and Yukitsu over and over again.

He is probably saving up for the sword, and he probably does have twice as much money, but as the system is an abstract one that doesn't care precisely how much money he has; simple probability states that if he keeps saving money and spending time looking for the sword he will get it sooner rather than later; if the dice say it is sooner it is because he got lucky; if the dice say it is later it is because he got unlucky, but assuming an average distribution of rolls he will find most objects in about as long as the worth of the item / the value of his income * the time he spends looking for it.

I get that you either don't like or can't understand that rationalization. But some people can and do. It clearly makes sense to the authors of other games that use it. It makes sense to the people in this thread that don't have a problem with it or suggested I use it without realizing that I already was using it, it made sense to 2/3 people in my gaming group, and I was even able to explain it to my non-gamer brother and roommate just to see.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 07:31 PM
Well according to your own system you're acquiring debt by making the roll at all... so, yeah. Yeah, you're taking some kind of monetary hit, and if you're not all you would have to do is rename "Debt".

Basically, during each period of downtime you can ignore a number of things that would normally accrue debt equal to your current wealth rating.

Changing the name to something else just seems a bit clunky; but yeah, that is exactly the kind of advice I was hoping for when I made this thread, thanks :)

GloatingSwine
2017-01-06, 07:32 PM
Ok, you are approaching the game from not only a different level of abstraction than I am but an entirely different setting outlook. A core part of most fantasy is that old stuff is better than new stuff. That was the core theme of Lord of the Rings; and in a Sword and Sorcery setting like Conan or mine you have a world where all of the people who understood how to make stuff are all at the bottom of the ocean..

But in D&D you don't find that ancient better stuff in a flea market you find it in the hoard of that dragon you bravely slew/cunningly robbed/insert interaction here.

You get the really cool stuff from adventure not shopping.

CharonsHelper
2017-01-06, 07:35 PM
There's a reason I used the term "at least baseline functional". I've seen a fair few abstract systems, and d20 Modern is one of the worst.

Out of curiosity - what are some of the best? I'm working on an RPG system, and I'm currently debating between abstract & concrete wealth systems.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 07:36 PM
But in D&D you don't find that ancient better stuff in a flea market you find it in the hoard of that dragon you bravely slew/cunningly robbed/insert interaction here.

You get the really cool stuff from adventure not shopping.

In old school D&D that is true.* In more modern games you visit the "magic mart" and simply buy the rare magic items which are guaranteed to be available in any decently sized city for a fixed price.



You know, at this point I think this thread would have been a lot more productive if I had just lied and said in my OP "I have recently started playing Atlantis: The Second Age, and the game is going great except for one thing. My players really don't like how if they fail a wealth roll their wealth score goes down and they still don't get the item as they feel that the mechanic doesn't realistically model how wealth works. I would prefer to play the game by RAW as I am trying to minimize house-rules, so can people give me some ideas as to how I can explain the system to the players or narrate the events in a way that doesn't appear to rob them of their agency or violating the narrative?"




*And god, you want to talk about a random claw machine? In pre 3E D&D gold was all but useless, you could never buy or sell magic items, and if the DM was playing the game straight all of the treasure was generated by tables. Now THAT is random.

GloatingSwine
2017-01-06, 07:43 PM
Yeah, but you still got the magic item. You could do something with it, even if it was trade it for a different one in your colour.

Your system has all the wrong abstractions and puts costs for failure into parts of the game that do not benefit from them. That's why people are calling it bad. It's logically backwards, its failure modes are obvious from simple inspection, and it doesn't work in the sense of being a good set of rules that people want to engage with.

Shackel
2017-01-06, 07:45 PM
Basically, during each period of downtime you can ignore a number of things that would normally accrue debt equal to your current wealth rating.

Changing the name to something else just seems a bit clunky; but yeah, that is exactly the kind of advice I was hoping for when I made this thread, thanks :)

Then, yeah, it accrues debt, and no, it shouldn't in the first place. It's best to have the act of buying something within reach detached from debt altogether; thus you can still have all the reasons that you listed before for any disparity, but it's not that you've run out of money as much as you have opportunities that particular day.

The only things that decrease an abstract wealth score, in my opinion, should be reaching beyond the bounds of your current level. If a Wealth score of, say, 10, is equivalent to 3,000gp, going for a +1 sword worth 2,200 should lower your score and only when you get it.

EDIT: Or lowering your wealth score/purposefully accruing debt to give yourself more rolls. In this case, it is player choice that they lose money for failure.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 07:53 PM
Yeah, but you still got the magic item. You could do something with it, even if it was trade it for a different one in your colour.

Your system has all the wrong abstractions and puts costs for failure into parts of the game that do not benefit from them. That's why people are calling it bad. It's logically backwards, its failure modes are obvious from simple inspection, and it doesn't work in the sense of being a good set of rules that people want to engage with.

Are you talking about 3.X or OD&D?

Because in OD&D if your DM didn't roll a magic item you got nothing.

In 3.5 you just couldn't afford magic items that were outside of your price range. There was no chance for a level 5 PC to buy a staff of the magi (barring some crazy TO shenanigans or GM fiat).

GloatingSwine
2017-01-06, 07:54 PM
You know, at this point I think this thread would have been a lot more productive if I had just lied and said in my OP "I have recently started playing Atlantis: The Second Age, and the game is going great except for one thing. My players really don't like how if they fail a wealth roll their wealth score goes down and they still don't get the item as they feel that the mechanic doesn't realistically model how wealth works.


Except that's not how Atlantis works, it ties the number of rolls you can make to your Intelligence+3 not your wealth score, (one of the critical problems we keep returning to is that this makes everything else not make sense to anyone but you) and the wealth penalty on failure is only a -1 penalty to the difficulty to repeat attempts to buy the same thing, if you fail a wealth roll and go and buy something else instead your roll is unaffected.

Your wealth is only reduced on a critical failure which can only happen if your starting bonus to buy the item was 0 or lower because it's on the final result not the roll (ie you know and accept it as a risk going in and only on certain purchases not every purchase).

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 07:57 PM
Except that's not how Atlantis works, it ties the number of rolls you can make to your Intelligence+3 not your wealth score, (one of the critical problems we keep returning to is that this makes everything else not make sense to anyone but you) and the wealth penalty is only a -1 penalty to the difficulty to repeat attempts to buy the same thing, if you fail a wealth roll and go and buy something else instead your roll is unaffected.

Your wealth is only reduced on a critical failure which can only happen if your starting bonus to buy the item was 0 or lower because it's on the final result not the roll (ie you know and accept it as a risk going in and only on certain purchases not every purchase).

But you still only get a finite number of attempts. IF you try and fail to get any of the items you roll for you don't get any items that session.

Likewise if you obsessively try and find one rare item to the expense of everything else you will (assuming bad rolls) not get the item AND lose wealth.



Then, yeah, it accrues debt, and no, it shouldn't in the first place. It's best to have the act of buying something within reach detached from debt altogether; thus you can still have all the reasons that you listed before for any disparity, but it's not that you've run out of money as much as you have opportunities that particular day.

The only things that decrease an abstract wealth score, in my opinion, should be reaching beyond the bounds of your current level. If a Wealth score of, say, 10, is equivalent to 3,000gp, going for a +1 sword worth 2,200 should lower your score and only when you get it.

EDIT: Or lowering your wealth score/purposefully accruing debt to give yourself more rolls. In this case, it is player choice that they lose money for failure.

Wait, what? Something that normally accrues debt not accruing debt still accrues debt? I don't follow.

Yukitsu
2017-01-06, 08:06 PM
Wait, what? Something that normally accrues debt not accruing debt still accrues debt? I don't follow.

It's a little difficult to suss out what "debt" means in terms of buying anything. Since you claim it has no impact on wealth it does seem to be questionable as to where that debt is and what it's doing.

As you have written, I buy something that's worth say, 5. I get 6 debt since it's weight +1, and now I have 6 debt. This debt doesn't seem to do anything or indicate anything since it never impacts my wealth but I'm still accumulating debt.

GloatingSwine
2017-01-06, 08:12 PM
But you still only get a finite number of attempts. IF you try and fail to get any of the items you roll for you don't get any items that session.

Right, but it isn't tied to your wealth, it's tied to your character's ability to time manage assuming a fixed interval of downtime (based on their intelligence). Not how I'd choose to do downtime, I'd involve the players in deciding how long they're going to spend in town and base their available purchasing time on that.

By tying the number of chances you get to your wealth, you are implicitly making one point of wealth represent one unit of money. That's the logical consequence of your system. No matter what rationalisations you make, that relationship is a mechanical result of the system tying together two things which should not be tied together.

And the potential for temporary wealth reduction in Atlantis is a consequence which only applies to certain purchases which the player is able to know ahead of time and the chances of success are modifiable by other decisions and roleplaying the player can engage in (like building a relationship with the seller for increased chances of success). Additionally this can work in Atlantis because already extant in your bonuses and penalties to purchasing rolls is the pereception of you as a buyer. A critical failure on a wealth roll in Atlantis temporarily reduces the willingness of shopkeepers to deal with you, represented by a wealth penalty, and this is already mechanically present in the system.

Shackel
2017-01-06, 08:18 PM
Wait, what? Something that normally accrues debt not accruing debt still accrues debt? I don't follow.

As in, the system does mean you're now accruing debt, but it shouldn't. Mind you, you're "ignoring" a certain amount of debt, but the term itself is misleading. Having a limited number of rolls representing opportunity isn't the worst thing, but the misunderstanding just comes in how it is treated as being actually detrimental to try the rolls and fail.

Hence, if you ask me, the solution being to just detach the idea of having limited rolls from the idea of debt in the first place.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 09:19 PM
Right, but it isn't tied to your wealth, it's tied to your character's ability to time manage assuming a fixed interval of downtime (based on their intelligence). Not how I'd choose to do downtime, I'd involve the players in deciding how long they're going to spend in town and base their available purchasing time on that.

By tying the number of chances you get to your wealth, you are implicitly making one point of wealth represent one unit of money. That's the logical consequence of your system. No matter what rationalisations you make, that relationship is a mechanical result of the system tying together two things which should not be tied together.

And the potential for temporary wealth reduction in Atlantis is a consequence which only applies to certain purchases which the player is able to know ahead of time and the chances of success are modifiable by other decisions and roleplaying the player can engage in (like building a relationship with the seller for increased chances of success). Additionally this can work in Atlantis because already extant in your bonuses and penalties to purchasing rolls is the pereception of you as a buyer. A critical failure on a wealth roll in Atlantis temporarily reduces the willingness of shopkeepers to deal with you, represented by a wealth penalty, and this is already mechanically present in the system.

Ok, so are you saying that a system where you represent shopping with a finite number of rolls per unit of time which can result in (with extremely bad luck) not getting anything during that period of time is not an innately bad system?

Newtonsolo313
2017-01-06, 09:51 PM
What even is the point of this thread anymore you ask for help finding flaws and then get defensive when we do find them. There's not even a point arguing about it. it's your fricking game do whatever the hell you want.

Shackel
2017-01-06, 09:57 PM
Ok, so are you saying that a system where you represent shopping with a finite number of rolls per unit of time which can result in (with extremely bad luck) not getting anything during that period of time is not an innately bad system?

I know you're not referring to me in particular but, to be perfectly honest, although I'm trying to provide some help on how to make it more manageable I'm not very fond of the idea. It just seems like frustration for frustration's sake, and while it's arguably more realistic, it's not really the fun kind.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 09:58 PM
What even is the point of this thread anymore you ask for help finding flaws and then get defensive when we do find them. There's not even a point arguing about it. it's your fricking game do whatever the hell you want.

I actually asked for general thoughts on abstract wealth systems and specific help for how I can present one specific aspect which works from a mechanical aspect but causes some narrative disconnect. This "flaw" was not found by you or anyone else on this forum, it was actually the impetus for me making the post in the first place.

I expected people who enjoyed games with similar mechanics to help me find ways to better present it or smooth of the edges; instead it has been mostly people who hate such mechanics telling me that they are indefensible and I am a fool for even trying.

oxybe
2017-01-06, 10:06 PM
Here are the d20 modern rules for wealth (http://www.systemreferencedocuments.org/resources/systems/pennpaper/modern/smack/wealth.html)

Our theoretical character, Ronald Rump, has a wealth modifier of +14. In addition to allowing him basically free rein to getting anything of value equal or lower without worrying of it affecting his purchasing power, he also lives an affluent lifestyle

Setting up a situation: getting a call from his buddy Kev Bush that **** is going down in Bartertown USA, Ronald gets himself a cheap plane ticket across the country, rents himself a car, goes off to a specialty store and buys himself an undercover (ie armoured) vest and a cheap pistol and rolls into Bartertown to meet up with Kev.

None of this stuff requires Ronald's player to roll or worry about wealth mechanics because the wealth system abstracts it to "character's wealth is X. Things with a value of =>X don't dent the character's total wealth."

only things with a cost higher then their wealth and/or a purchase DC of 15 or higher would put a dent on a player's ability to buy things down the road.

This is abstraction of wealth. Now, D20 modern has issues. It's very fiddly with the "prices" and "wealth" scores instead of keeping things to a tighter and more consistent scope, has the D&D problem of shopping lists with minute changes in value of items that are functionally very similar yet still different costs, and the loss you take from big ticket items is FAR too variable IMO. the "DC 15" thing also feels kinda arbitrary.

But it's at least functional.

Setting aside d20Modern in particular, in an abstract wealth system you still do care how much money the character has... the exact number doesn't really matter but it's still important to know at least the scope of much assets they can easily move around and that's number you abstract. You figure out the scope of his purchasing power is and anything that falls within or below that scope is inconsequential to him.

We're talking scope as in "This character is in the middle class, they have somewhere between $30,000 and $75,000". We don't care if the exact number is 34,000 or 65,000. just that they're the middle class and the things our theoretical character can afford all the things normally associated with the middle class. Trying to obtain anything outside of that, IE trying to live outside of your middle class means, would cause potential issues to the character's wealth.

None of this affects the actual availability of the items in question, which just hit me as the problem with your system: It's not a Wealth system. It's a Shopping system. I was finally able to wrap my brain around how it heavily abstracts supply & demand/item availability, with a character's personal wealth being only tangential to the ability to acquire objects, but leaves it all heavily influenced by RNG and bundled under "Wealth", which is where the disconnect, I believe, comes from.

The difference between D20Modern and your system is where it focuses.

in D20Modern, the focus is on the character's wealth and the scope of stuff he can simply get. At wealth 14 he can simply afford stuff without worry. It showcases the character's wealth as he's not impacted making those purchases where other characters, like Mike Rushmore who's got a wealth of 8, who would have difficulty making those purchases. The mechanics showcase a character's wealth.

In your system, you're abstracting the supply and demand of a given item. A character's personal wealth is only tangential at best in this system as it's focus isn't on the character's purchasing power but rather the item's rarity. It has little to nothing to do with your character's wealth but rather it abstracts the shopping process, but is disguised (or at least explained as) wealth whereas in reality it's "Shopping".

Now I also vehemently disagree that supply and demand works that way, but that's a separate issue.

The disconnect the player is getting is that you've sold him a Shopping system as a Wealth system, and when he failed at shopping it comes off as failure to manage money, and thus comes off as "I've wasted all my money" to the player.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 10:20 PM
Here are the d20 modern rules for wealth (http://www.systemreferencedocuments.org/resources/systems/pennpaper/modern/smack/wealth.html)

Our theoretical character, Ronald Rump, has a wealth modifier of +14. In addition to allowing him basically free rein to getting anything of value equal or lower without worrying of it affecting his purchasing power, he also lives an affluent lifestyle

Setting up a situation: getting a call from his buddy Kev Bush that **** is going down in Bartertown USA, Ronald gets himself a cheap plane ticket across the country, rents himself a car, goes off to a specialty store and buys himself an undercover (ie armoured) vest and a cheap pistol and rolls into Bartertown to meet up with Kev.

None of this stuff requires Ronald's player to roll or worry about wealth mechanics because the wealth system abstracts it to "character's wealth is X. Things with a value of =>X don't dent the character's total wealth."

only things with a cost higher then their wealth and/or a purchase DC of 15 or higher would put a dent on a player's ability to buy things down the road.

This is abstraction of wealth. Now, D20 modern has issues. It's very fiddly with the "prices" and "wealth" scores instead of keeping things to a tighter and more consistent scope, has the D&D problem of shopping lists with minute changes in value of items that are functionally very similar yet still different costs, and the loss you take from big ticket items is FAR too variable IMO. the "DC 15" thing also feels kinda arbitrary.

But it's at least functional.

Setting aside d20Modern in particular, in an abstract wealth system you still do care how much money the character has... the exact number doesn't really matter but it's still important to know at least the scope of much assets they can easily move around and that's number you abstract. You figure out the scope of his purchasing power is and anything that falls within or below that scope is inconsequential to him.

We're talking scope as in "This character is in the middle class, they have somewhere between $30,000 and $75,000". We don't care if the exact number is 34,000 or 65,000. just that they're the middle class and the things our theoretical character can afford all the things normally associated with the middle class. Trying to obtain anything outside of that, IE trying to live outside of your middle class means, would cause potential issues to the character's wealth.

None of this affects the actual availability of the items in question, which just hit me as the problem with your system: It's not a Wealth system. It's a Shopping system. I was finally able to wrap my brain around how it heavily abstracts supply & demand/item availability, with a character's personal wealth being only tangential to the ability to acquire objects, but leaves it all heavily influenced by RNG and bundled under "Wealth", which is where the disconnect, I believe, comes from.

The difference between D20Modern and your system is where it focuses.

in D20Modern, the focus is on the character's wealth and the scope of stuff he can simply get. At wealth 14 he can simply afford stuff without worry. It showcases the character's wealth as he's not impacted making those purchases where other characters, like Mike Rushmore who's got a wealth of 8, who would have difficulty making those purchases. The mechanics showcase a character's wealth.

In your system, you're abstracting the supply and demand of a given item. A character's personal wealth is only tangential at best in this system as it's focus isn't on the character's purchasing power but rather the item's rarity. It has little to nothing to do with your character's wealth but rather it abstracts the shopping process, but is disguised (or at least explained as) wealth whereas in reality it's "Shopping".

Now I also vehemently disagree that supply and demand works that way, but that's a separate issue.

The disconnect the player is getting is that you've sold him a Shopping system as a Wealth system, and when he failed at shopping it comes off as failure to manage money, and thus comes off as "I've wasted all my money" to the player.

A few minor quibbles, but overall I strongly agree.

My OP was asking how I can reframe the system so that it sounds like "shopping" rather than "wealth management," as you put it.


Furthermore, the problem only comes up if the players are doing something really weird that would also cause huge problems in a standard game. Specifically refusing to buy cheaper items until they have procured a super rare and expensive item.

For example, in D&D 3.5 if the players are refusing to spend any money until they can buy a +10 sword because they want the +10 sword as soon as possible and don't want to spend money on anything else, they will start getting into real trouble around level 8 or so because they are still levels off from being able to afford +10 weapons but are not going to have the tools they need to defeat CR 8 monsters.

exelsisxax
2017-01-06, 10:36 PM
A few minor quibbles, but overall I strongly agree.

My OP was asking how I can reframe the system so that it sounds like "shopping" rather than "wealth management," as you put it.


Furthermore, the problem only comes up if the players are doing something really weird that would also cause huge problems in a standard game. Specifically refusing to buy cheaper items until they have procured a super rare and expensive item.

For example, in D&D 3.5 if the players are refusing to spend any money until they can buy a +10 sword because they want the +10 sword as soon as possible and don't want to spend money on anything else, they will start getting into real trouble around level 8 or so because they are still levels off from being able to afford +10 weapons but are not going to have the tools they need to defeat CR 8 monsters.

Then your OP didn't address the real problem: your system is inherently flawed in mechanics, not in framing. Many people have posted in this thread why your rules are A: not abstract B: solve nothing and C: discourage player agency. People have also gone on to both link to an describe in detail other systems that are both abstract and functional. You have refused all critique. Why'd you even ask for thoughts if you disregard everything anyone tries to tell you?

And if your players do that, so what? Let them die if it gets that bad. You can't metagame your players into buying items along the power curve you want with good rules(just look at 3.pf WBL outcomes) but you don't even have that. You still, throughout this entire thread, have yet to identify a single specific problem that you want to address. "my players don't buy the items I think they should" isn't even an OOC problem. It's a "get over it" kind of thing. Stop trying to micromanage your players.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 11:01 PM
Then your OP didn't address the real problem: your system is inherently flawed in mechanics, not in framing. Many people have posted in this thread why your rules are A: not abstract B: solve nothing and C: discourage player agency. People have also gone on to both link to an describe in detail other systems that are both abstract and functional. You have refused all critique. Why'd you even ask for thoughts if you disregard everything anyone tries to tell you?

Let me go through your post line by line rather than trying to mutilate a quote box.

1: Why do you say the system is flawed in mechanics? On paper it seems to do exactly what I want it to do and meets my every goal for the system.

2: People have claimed that my rules were "A: not abstract B: solve nothing and C: discourage player agency". As people have disagreed. In general I find that claim to have some merit, but when taken as an absolute it is objectively wrong.

3: People have linked other systems. I have read them and absorbed the feedback. Many of these systems have the exact same "fatal flaw" that my system does.

4: What do you mean refused all critique? I have rejected statements that were absolute and / or insulting such as "Your system doesn't function at all!" but sentiments like "players focus on the worst possible case," or "people don't like randomness" are valuable insights.

5: I asked for general thoughts on abstract wealth and for ideas on how to present what I have. Tearing it to shreds and telling me I am being stupid and bossy for even trying to change what's not broken isn't helpful.

6: I have rewritten the system twice already based on feedback in this thread and will be doing so again tonight. I would hardly call that disregarding everything.

Also, it helps me figure out what the problem is. I am trying to go for a middle ground between a fully abstract "nobody has any wealth" system and a simulationist "fixed economy where every CP matters" system to come up with something where only major expenses really matter and windfalls provide a short term boost in power but without permanently altering the scope of the game. The problem appears to be that players don't like the idea of having to use their resources whether or not it will provide a permanent benefit, and I need to put some serious thought into how to satisfy those desires.


And if your players do that, so what? Let them die if it gets that bad. You can't meta-game your players into buying items along the power curve you want with good rules(just look at 3.pf WBL outcomes) but you don't even have that. You still, throughout this entire thread, have yet to identify a single specific problem that you want to address. "my players don't buy the items I think they should" isn't even an OOC problem. It's a "get over it" kind of thing. Stop trying to micromanage your players.

Are you sure you would hold the 3.X rules up as an example of "good" rules? Because I sure don't share that view.

And again, this is what I am saying about non-constructive criticism. Saying "I don't even have that" is a completely baseless and insulting claim. How do you know what I have or what its quality is?

And are you saying I need to "get over it" or that my players do?

Because the whole issue was my players saying "If we don't buy any basic gear and only try and buy items that are well outside of our price range the system will steal all of our money and not give us anything in return," which is apparently seen as a huge crime in my system but in the "good" system of D&D 3.5 would be just as stupid and self destructive for the players.


The "problem" I am trying to address is I don't want the optimum move for players to be to play as utter misers and hoard all of their money and spend hours out of every gaming session going over itemized lists of every item they could possibly round up for sale. So I am trying to make a system that is significantly more forgiving by using abstract probabilities to determine buying power rather concrete and unforgiving absolutes.

oxybe
2017-01-06, 11:06 PM
They're trying to get the +10 item over the common or mundane ones because you've basically put it on the table as available.

You've put Checkov's +10 Gun on the table, in front of the PCs, whether you admit it or not. They want to use that gun, but your RNG supply and demand system, under the guise of wealth, is refusing them and upon refusing them and making a player feel like he's broke, because his "Wealth" is no longer accessible after trying to get an item.

Now they're doing this, very specifically, because you've told them they can.

Instead of deciding "this shop has X, Y and Z for sale" you're letting RNG handle it. THIS IS YOUR PROBLEM.

If you don't want people looking to use the gun, don't put it on the scene, directly (Merchant Bill has this item for sale) or indirectly (Merchant Bill may or may not have it for sale).

You're trying to absolve yourself of responsibility in managing the gear players have access to by hiding it behind RNG, but when a player uses the system as written (IE: tries to play to the RNG) and fails to get anything, It's not specifically the player's fault if he's left undergeared.

He could've been left undergeared even if the went for the items with a better frequency, RNG being what it is (and trust me... I play F2P games with a gacha system, the one I've stayed with the longest has a rather forgiving system, and we're talking ones with a 1-2% chance at the good stuff.).

We don't know how it could've been if your player went the other direction. We'll never know.

But what I do know, is that the player did nothing wrong. He played the game as you put it in front of him, but as flavoured he feels his character is now broke and has nothing to show for it. If he's in trouble by level 8 because he's been using the game systems as presented and is now undergeared, it's partially his fault for shooting for the moon, but part of the blame lies on the designer for telling him the moon is a possible target and not stopping him from doing so.

Talakeal
2017-01-06, 11:33 PM
They're trying to get the +10 item over the common or mundane ones because you've basically put it on the table as available.

You've put Checkov's +10 Gun on the table, in front of the PCs, whether you admit it or not. They want to use that gun, but your RNG supply and demand system, under the guise of wealth, is refusing them and upon refusing them and making a player feel like he's broke, because his "Wealth" is no longer accessible after trying to get an item.

Now they're doing this, very specifically, because you've told them they can.

Instead of deciding "this shop has X, Y and Z for sale" you're letting RNG handle it. THIS IS YOUR PROBLEM.

If you don't want people looking to use the gun, don't put it on the scene, directly (Merchant Bill has this item for sale) or indirectly (Merchant Bill may or may not have it for sale).

You're trying to absolve yourself of responsibility in managing the gear players have access to by hiding it behind RNG, but when a player uses the system as written (IE: tries to play to the RNG) and fails to get anything, It's not specifically the player's fault if he's left undergeared.

He could've been left undergeared even if the went for the items with a better frequency, RNG being what it is (and trust me... I play F2P games with a gacha system, the one I've stayed with the longest has a rather forgiving system, and we're talking ones with a 1-2% chance at the good stuff.).

We don't know how it could've been if your player went the other direction. We'll never know.

But what I do know, is that the player did nothing wrong. He played the game as you put it in front of him, but as flavoured he feels his character is now broke and has nothing to show for it. If he's in trouble by level 8 because he's been using the game systems as presented and is now undergeared, it's partially his fault for shooting for the moon, but part of the blame lies on the designer for telling him the moon is a possible target and not stopping him from doing so.

Keep in mind, this wasn't actually something that came up in play.

This was the player saying: Hold on, I think I see a problem in the game. Let's do a hypothetical shopping session and pretend that I only want "super high end item," and then he failed every roll as he had less than a 5% chance of succeeding on each, and then said "See, the game steals all your money and gives you nothing in return if you play like this!"


Also, I know "the forum" is not one unified hive mind, but haven't people on this thread been saying the opposite for a while now. I distinctly remember people telling me "if your players have a problem fix them, not the rules," several times and responding something along the lines of "they are just doing what they feel to be the most optimal move, don't hate the player hate the game."

Now you are saying you can't blame a player for suboptimal play, blame the rules.

Which is kind of a weird pickle, because someone who was optimized for commerce actually could get the +10 gun within a few tries. I don't know, it feels kind of like trying to balance a system around a 3.5 wizard who wants to fight with full plate and a great sword because he saw the fighter doing it and then being told the game doesn't function and needs to have close combat removed.

NichG
2017-01-06, 11:56 PM
Because the whole issue was my players saying "If we don't buy any basic gear and only try and buy items that are well outside of our price range the system will steal all of our money and not give us anything in return," which is apparently seen as a huge crime in my system but in the "good" system of D&D 3.5 would be just as stupid and self destructive for the players.

The "problem" I am trying to address is I don't want the optimum move for players to be to play as utter misers and hoard all of their money and spend hours out of every gaming session going over itemized lists of every item they could possibly round up for sale. So I am trying to make a system that is significantly more forgiving by using abstract probabilities to determine buying power rather concrete and unforgiving absolutes.

And what I and other posters are trying to point out to you is that the system that you proposed not only fails at solving this problem, it actually makes the problem worse.

You're creating a fiction for yourself which you use to explain how you came up with the system, and then you're assuming that because you came up with that fiction, that is what will drive the reasoning and optimization activities of your players. Your focus on the narrative presentation of the system shows that. You're saying 'because I can tell X and Y kind of story using this system and those stories seem to be sensible stories, I expect my players will also do similar things with the system'. Then you're surprised when the players and posters in this thread tell you that actually they don't believe your story and would instead do Z, the very thing that you created this system to try to stop!

You're too close to your own creation here and you seem to be more invested in defending it and justifying it than actually fixing it or understanding how others see it. How you see your system is irrelevant - what matters is how the players see it, because it's their behavior you want to shape.

For that, I'd suggest stripping away every single bit of narrative fluff and look at it as pure numbers. This is what a player who is invested in the outcomes of the game rather than just listening to what you tell them will eventually learn to perceive.

- In a concrete system, each character has X of something. They can obtain more of that thing as part of play, and X increases based on what they obtain. X does not change on its own. X can be converted into permanent game-mechanical advantages (buying items) based on a panel of presented options (what is purchaseable). These advantages can sometimes be converted back into (less) X.

- In your system, each character has X of something every unit time (purchase rolls). Events can happen which change the number of X available in one interval. X can be expended to attempt to gain permanent game-mechanical advantages, but there is a failure chance based on the value of X. After the time has passed, all expenditures and benefits revert and X returns to its base value.

The behavior you are trying to prevent is 'players hoard resources and will not expend them on RP things or small purchases'. But in your system, there is even more reason for players to avoid spending resources on frills and RP stuff than in the concrete example system! With the high granularity of purchases and the use-it-or-lose-it nature of bonuses, the optimal behavior is either to find some kind of permanent receptacle for that temporary wealth with a high probability of success, or to exploit the high variance nature of the random rolls to shoot for an item that would not normally be affordable (for example, if there's an item that costs 10000gp and you get 100gp per session, then you can save for 100 sessions and get it or just buy other stuff; but if there's an item with a 1% success rate and you have nothing else you really want - just frills and RP things - then you might as well spend all your rolls on that 1% chance).

Compare with something like d20 Modern, which looks more like:

- Each character has a rating X. They can treat all game mechanical bonuses (items) whose rating is <=X as available to choose from and swap between at any given time, but advantages are associated with certain slots and at any given time they may only gain advantage from one in each slot.

In this case, there is no opportunity cost to spending wealth on frills or RP things. This kind of system succeeds at what you're trying to accomplish.

Regardless of whether your system is intrinsically 'a good system' or 'a bad system', it's clearly a bad system for what you want it to accomplish.

Talakeal
2017-01-07, 12:42 AM
And what I and other posters are trying to point out to you is that the system that you proposed not only fails at solving this problem, it actually makes the problem worse.

You're creating a fiction for yourself which you use to explain how you came up with the system, and then you're assuming that because you came up with that fiction, that is what will drive the reasoning and optimization activities of your players. Your focus on the narrative presentation of the system shows that. You're saying 'because I can tell X and Y kind of story using this system and those stories seem to be sensible stories, I expect my players will also do similar things with the system'. Then you're surprised when the players and posters in this thread tell you that actually they don't believe your story and would instead do Z, the very thing that you created this system to try to stop!

You're too close to your own creation here and you seem to be more invested in defending it and justifying it than actually fixing it or understanding how others see it. How you see your system is irrelevant - what matters is how the players see it, because it's their behavior you want to shape.

For that, I'd suggest stripping away every single bit of narrative fluff and look at it as pure numbers. This is what a player who is invested in the outcomes of the game rather than just listening to what you tell them will eventually learn to perceive.

- In a concrete system, each character has X of something. They can obtain more of that thing as part of play, and X increases based on what they obtain. X does not change on its own. X can be converted into permanent game-mechanical advantages (buying items) based on a panel of presented options (what is purchaseable). These advantages can sometimes be converted back into (less) X.

- In your system, each character has X of something every unit time (purchase rolls). Events can happen which change the number of X available in one interval. X can be expended to attempt to gain permanent game-mechanical advantages, but there is a failure chance based on the value of X. After the time has passed, all expenditures and benefits revert and X returns to its base value.

The behavior you are trying to prevent is 'players hoard resources and will not expend them on RP things or small purchases'. But in your system, there is even more reason for players to avoid spending resources on frills and RP stuff than in the concrete example system! With the high granularity of purchases and the use-it-or-lose-it nature of bonuses, the optimal behavior is either to find some kind of permanent receptacle for that temporary wealth with a high probability of success, or to exploit the high variance nature of the random rolls to shoot for an item that would not normally be affordable (for example, if there's an item that costs 10000gp and you get 100gp per session, then you can save for 100 sessions and get it or just buy other stuff; but if there's an item with a 1% success rate and you have nothing else you really want - just frills and RP things - then you might as well spend all your rolls on that 1% chance).

Compare with something like d20 Modern, which looks more like:

- Each character has a rating X. They can treat all game mechanical bonuses (items) whose rating is <=X as available to choose from and swap between at any given time, but advantages are associated with certain slots and at any given time they may only gain advantage from one in each slot.

In this case, there is no opportunity cost to spending wealth on frills or RP things. This kind of system succeeds at what you're trying to accomplish.

Regardless of whether your system is intrinsically 'a good system' or 'a bad system', it's clearly a bad system for what you want it to accomplish.

Thank you. This is very helpful and constructive feedback. Could we please have a conversation about this? I will do my best not to get defensive, which shouldn't be too hard if you keep to this pleasant but no nonesense tone.

While I agree with the principles of what you are saying, there are a few things I don't understand.

First off, what do you mean "You're creating a fiction for yourself which you use to explain how you came up with the system?" It sounds like you are saying that I created the system more or less in a vacuum and now my mind is playing tricks on me to justify the time spent creating the system by retroactively imagining problems for it to solve that never existed in the first place. But, that's just my best guess, could you please elaborate?

Second, afaict the system works exactly the way I want it to when stripped of all the flavor.

My system, as I see it is: Each session X starts at zero. Depending on the events of the game X will increase by some variable amount based on player skill. At the end of the session players can spend X for permanent bonuses in future sessions. They can either play modestly for small but guaranteed bonuses, or gamble for a larger bonus that they might not get, with odds based on factors Y and Z. It is up to the player to determine which odds are acceptable / most efficient for them. Bonuses are permanent, but X will reset to zero at the start of the next game.

To me this works exactly how I want it to (barring some specific math hiccups to be sanded over in play-testing.

People seem to object to the system because they either: a: don't like the idea of gambling for something big and then losing, b: don't like how the "fluff" compares to their image of how economics works when bolted onto the barebones mechanics, or c: don't like that they can't game the system by spending a lot of time hyper analyzing minutia or drastically altering their play-style. Some of these people seem to be unsure about which of the three reasons is the one that makes them not like it, or they don't recognize those three and just say the math doesn't work, which afaict is factually untrue. But, I really can't tell what other people think or why, only that the system makes them really mad and I am terrible about asking people questions about how they feel and just shutting up and listening without getting defensive.

Third, I don't follow the logic about why the system creates the problems it is trying to solve. Could you please explain it in more detail?

I think you might be misunderstanding me (please forgive me if I am wrong). In this system "frills" and "RP things" are totally free. The only thing that costs money is upgrading one's equipment*. The ideal play, imo, is that you buy all of the equipment which you can reasonably afford without any risk, and then once you have that taken care of you should then "shoot the moon" for that 1% item.

But again, I don't have a problem with players deciding to gamble for those 1% things first and then pick more realistic purchases second; but I find that a double edged sword. If they gamble and win (unlikely) everything is fine. If they gamble and lose they will have harder time and will blame me for making a bad game. If I simply tell them that they must spend their money in a more practical manner they tell me I have no right to dictate what they do with their money and I am stomping on player agency.

This is kind of the pick my poison choice I run into; and I am pretty sure that if you look back through the thread you can find people very vociferously shouting me down for each of those three options.


Anyway, thank you very much for your thorough and well thought out analysis of my problem and I am really looking forward to your response.

*Technically you can also buy consumables and temporary advantages like hiring mercenaries or bribing guards, but I consider those to be "expenses" rather than rewards.

Telok
2017-01-07, 01:09 AM
Tal, I think you're using words like 'wealth' and 'debit', not just differently from some of the other people in here, but differently within your system. I get a vibe that the wealth/debit stuff of the downtime town shopping includes factors like time, patience, and luck, but that the character wealth score doesn't include those. I could be wrong.

What might help is to, for testing and discussion, use abstract labels. Drop all the wealth, debit, purchasing language and replace it with other labels.

So let's see if I understand. Characters have attributes A, B, and C. During downtime a character can pursue a course of action in parallel with and independent of all his other downtime activities. The character gets a maximum number of tests equal to A + B? The player chooses the difficulty of these tests and that difficulty is modified by attribute A, more A makes for easier tests. For each test attribute C increases, when it equals A the character can make no more tests. Success, failure, and the margin of each dictate how much attribute C increases at the end of each test. If the test succeeds then there is no change beyond the increase in C. If the test fails then the player can choose to decrease A (or B? not sure) and increase C in order for the test to count as a success, the amount of reduction depends on how much the test failed by. At the end of every downtime B and C are zeroed out and the character has to go do story stuff before the next downtime.

I get your basic desire, most modern game "economies" reward players for having thier character live in a gutter, wear rags, eat bugs, and rob everyone they meet during downtime. Because that most benefits their character during uptime. You want a character's social, business, and creative abilities to matter but in most games they either don't matter or threaten to break the game.

Now I have to go manage imaginary money on a real spreadsheet if I want to keep my current character. Yuck.

Edit: Reading what was posted as I typed I think part of the problem is that people are making assumptions about how the math and randomness of the system function on pretty much no info. I'd suggest building a table and doing an actual statistical analysis of your averages and extremes. Then write a little one paragraph summary and/or make a chart about how to work the system to your advantage. Package that with the system and see how it looks.

NichG
2017-01-07, 01:30 AM
Thank you. This is very helpful and constructive feedback. Could we please have a conversation about this? I will do my best not to get defensive, which shouldn't be too hard if you keep to this pleasant but no nonesense tone.

While I agree with the principles of what you are saying, there are a few things I don't understand.

First off, what do you mean "You're creating a fiction for yourself which you use to explain how you came up with the system?" It sounds like you are saying that I created the system more or less in a vacuum and now my mind is playing tricks on me to justify the time spent creating the system by retroactively imagining problems for it to solve that never existed in the first place. But, that's just my best guess, could you please elaborate?

Based on how you've been discussing your system with other posters in this thread, it seems like the primary things you're concerned about are the narrative justification of the system and its realism. You've explained and justified the system by telling specific stories, and showing how you think your system models them correctly. This suggests to me that at some level you think 'the system is fine, but the reason that players aren't reacting the way I expect is because they need to be convinced that its realistic or narratively consistent'. That is, you're implicitly acting under the assumption that the thing which will shape player behavior is the narrative told around the system, not the system itself.

But to me, this is incoherent with how you started the thread, and with trying to solve the issue by making a system. When you try to adapt behavior by making a system, that's the kind of action taken when it's the optimization and game mechanical behaviors of the players that are leading to problems. So as I read the conversation so far in this thread, you've kind of said 'well, I had a mechanical problem, I proposed a mechanical solution, it was met with some resistance, so now I'm going to talk about how it makes narrative sense and that should make it okay, right?'.

The 'I'm going to talk about how it makes narrative sense...' bit happened once you found that most of the posters in the thread also didn't like your system. But it's not really logically connected to why you said you did this in the first place. That's what reads as a sort of defensive blindness to me - you started from a consistent and reasonable plan, implemented something you thought followed from that plan, but then once you got a lot more pushback than you expected it reads as though you abandoned those initial goals as indefensible and instead retreated towards points you could make more strongly (about the narrative consistency and realism of the system), but points which were in turn less relevant to your initial motivations.



Second, afaict the system works exactly the way I want it to when stripped of all the flavor.

My system, as I see it is: Each session X starts at zero. Depending on the events of the game X will increase by some variable amount based on player skill. At the end of the session players can spend X for permanent bonuses in future sessions. They can either play modestly for small but guaranteed bonuses, or gamble for a larger bonus that they might not get, with odds based on factors Y and Z. It is up to the player to determine which odds are acceptable / most efficient for them. Bonuses are permanent, but X will reset to zero at the start of the next game.

To me this works exactly how I want it to (barring some specific math hiccups to be sanded over in play-testing.

Here we have to be careful. Is your motivation 'make a system according to this equation' or is it to create a certain set of behaviors and tendencies in your players? Ultimately, my understanding from your first post is that you want to change something about player behavior, not just try out a particular mechanical idea. So when you evaluate if the system 'works exactly the way you want', you have to evaluate that with regards to how people react to hearing your system, not whether it accurately transcribes what's in your head.

When I read the flavor-stripped version of the system, the action that I would undertake as a player would be to find a way to effectively stockpile X through an exchangeable proxy resource. That is to say, my gut reaction to your system is to figure out a way to circumvent it and hoard things anyhow. Any sort of detailed argument I make is not me trying to prove to you that the system makes me react this way, but rather its me trying to explain why I have this reaction so that you can understand the difference in thought between yourself and other players who are reacting in an unexpected manner.



People seem to object to the system because they either: a: don't like the idea of gambling for something big and then losing, b: don't like how the "fluff" compares to their image of how economics works when bolted onto the barebones mechanics, or c: don't like that they can't game the system by spending a lot of time hyper analyzing minutia or drastically altering their play-style. Some of these people seem to be unsure about which of the three reasons is the one that makes them not like it, or they don't recognize those three and just say the math doesn't work, which afaict is factually untrue. But, I really can't tell what other people think or why, only that the system makes them really mad and I am terrible about asking people questions about how they feel and just shutting up and listening without getting defensive.

Third, I don't follow the logic about why the system creates the problems it is trying to solve. Could you please explain it in more detail?


This has to do with whether a system shapes behavior via punishment or enticement. Punishment generally corresponds to things which increase uncertainty, lower agency/control, outright deny or remove resources, or add tedium or busywork. For example, saying 'now, instead of just buying something with your money, you have this other thing and you have to roll and it might work or not' is pretty much strictly disadvantageous to the player.

The natural reaction to punishment-based systems is to find ways to avoid them. If a game presents a save-or-die situation, a rational player will try to find ways to not enter into that situation in the first place rather than just saying 'okay, I accept that I have a 20% chance of death here, lets get on with it'. Part of that in your system is that there's a sense of 'if I don't handle the money right at this very moment, I will permanently lose out on something'. That feeling of danger of accidentally being screwed over by making a wrong choice drives a much stronger, much more stringent optimization response. In my case, hearing your wealth system, my gut reaction was 'I need to figure out a way to not use this system but still retain the advantages of wealth, because this system does not favor me'. My solution was to attempt to find an alternate form of hoarding - in other words, doubling down on what you were trying to prevent.

Other abstract wealth systems don't create this feeling because they actually offer something comparatively better than I had before - e.g. they entice players to use them, rather than punish players for mis-using them. The reason is, I gain the ability I didn't have before to not have to worry about small expenditures. The system bribes me, in a way, by saying 'you might lose the ability to save up for big-ticket items as carefully as before, but in exchange you now don't have to think about the small stuff whatsoever'. By extending an advantage, the system makes me more willing to accept the indirect disadvantages. By downplaying or removing opportunity costs, the system tells me that its safe for me to just go along with things and try it out, because I can't suffer any kind of permanent setback for using it incorrectly or failing to use it in a particular optimal way. So it creates less drive to optimize, and less frission overall.



I think you might be misunderstanding me (please forgive me if I am wrong). In this system "frills" and "RP things" are totally free. The only thing that costs money is upgrading one's equipment*. The ideal play, imo, is that you buy all of the equipment which you can reasonably afford without any risk, and then once you have that taken care of you should then "shoot the moon" for that 1% item.

But again, I don't have a problem with players deciding to gamble for those 1% things first and then pick more realistic purchases second; but I find that a double edged sword. If they gamble and win (unlikely) everything is fine. If they gamble and lose they will have harder time and will blame me for making a bad game. If I simply tell them that they must spend their money in a more practical manner they tell me I have no right to dictate what they do with their money and I am stomping on player agency.

This is kind of the pick my poison choice I run into; and I am pretty sure that if you look back through the thread you can find people very vociferously shouting me down for each of those three options.


When you say 'totally free', do you mean 'no roll' or 'no debt'? If it's 'no debt', then the order can't matter. So if the order matters, that suggests to me that it isn't actually free, it's just being presented as if it's free (but with a hidden opportunity cost, which is being discovered by some players and thereby is leading to resentment).

Knaight
2017-01-07, 02:12 AM
Out of curiosity - what are some of the best? I'm working on an RPG system, and I'm currently debating between abstract & concrete wealth systems.
I'd look at REIGN and Chronica Feudalis - less because they're the best, and more because certain aspects of them in particular are really well designed. They're not bad though, with one having some cool mechanics for the influence of organizational wealth in abstract ways and the other having some interesting depletion mechanics.


Hey Knaight, you are a smart guy and level headed guy who is not overly concerned with "hard simulation" in games, right? (Not sarcastic, that is my actual impression of you).

How would you work a system which, at the end of each session, allows a player to choose a single item which they couldn't ordinarily afford and have a chance to receive the item at no cost, preferably with

A: the chance being based on the ratio of the item's rarity to the character's buying power / social class,
B: without having to keep track of and factor in the results of rolls made during previous sessions, and
C: can be explained as some combination of good fortune and saving up.

That is essentially what I am trying to do with the part of the system that everyone is objecting to.

It depends on how the rest of the system is set up. If this is happening at the end of each session though, then I assume the game is deliberately structured such that each session ends (and probably begins) in a place of civilization, where these things are accessible. The no cost requirement is an odd one - it can be worked around, but dropping it would probably make a better game. As for good fortune and saving up, this again gets iffy. The obvious method given the probable session structure would be to slide it in where lower levels of simulation are expected - character advancement. At the end of a session you get whatever the standard end of session stuff is (assuming that you use that and not a system like encounter XP), and you also get access to Fleeting Deals*. You pick an item to search for, roll for availability (which can include luck, mercantile skill, contacts, item rarity, etc.), and then roll for discount. Because it's a fleeting deal, you'll need cash on hand to buy it - this is a bit of abstraction that isn't usually done, but given your particular goals having both Wealth (general resources) and Money (immediately liquid resources) could be a good idea, with Wealth being self regenerating to some extent (holdings that make money, money loaned out, etc.) and Money not being. If you have the Money to buy it, you can buy it and them immediately replace your Money from your Wealth because you're in town**.

Still, this represents a system to try and achieve some goals I'm not super enthused with. It generally meets them, but it also gets into the matter of whether or not randomness should be in the character advancement system at all, and while I'm not into mechanical simulation at all costs adding more rules that introduce oddities and reduce simulation doesn't sit too well with me.

*This would probably work better as a black market mechanic, but that's a whole different kettle of fish.

**This is only there for the 0 cost requirement. I'd probably just drop that requirement entirely, although keeping Money and Wealth separate might be worth doing, just because of the time scales involved and because there's potentially some interesting decision making between growing your wealth or keeping money on hand.

GloatingSwine
2017-01-07, 05:28 AM
Ok, so are you saying that a system where you represent shopping with a finite number of rolls per unit of time which can result in (with extremely bad luck) not getting anything during that period of time is not an innately bad system?

No. But the time part is probably a bad thing to abstract into a statistical measure, especially in D&D where a lot of the game is about the time management of action economy and that's in the player's hands.

You can say to your players "the process of finding, haggling for, and purchasing an item takes a few hours so you can make two nontrivial purchases per day of downtime, how long do you want to spend in downtime?

They agree among themselves, and the maximum number of rolls they can make are set by the time they the players are willing to spend.

Xuc Xac
2017-01-07, 11:37 AM
Finding a rare item and buying it should be separate things. If you have more wealth, you can try to find it faster by hiring people to help you look but that should be the player's decision and not just "the dice say you blew a bunch of resources in looking but couldn't find one in your price range".

Segev
2017-01-07, 05:05 PM
Ok, so are you saying that a system where you represent shopping with a finite number of rolls per unit of time which can result in (with extremely bad luck) not getting anything during that period of time is not an innately bad system?


I know you're not referring to me in particular but, to be perfectly honest, although I'm trying to provide some help on how to make it more manageable I'm not very fond of the idea. It just seems like frustration for frustration's sake, and while it's arguably more realistic, it's not really the fun kind.

I think the issue with it is that, if I go shopping for, say, a new car, and I don't find one in my price range this month, I can take whatever I was going to spend in a down payment and turn around to buy a new computer, and I can do that on the very last day of the month. But by what I understand of this system, my trying hard to find a car - going out and test driving them, putting up with annoying calls and targeted ads as I search online, speaking to salesman after salesman - my actual available funds at the end of the month are lower than they were at the beginning. The down payment I was saving is gone, and it's now harder for me to succeed on buying that computer because I don't have the start-of-month wealth that represented the down payment before.

As to what you're trying to model...as has been said, you're encouraging people to find ways to hoard their once-per-month chunk of resources so they can stockpile and save for bigger purchases down the line.

If I understand what you're saying correctly, you want only "big, rare" purchases to be rolled for. Most things they just get? Is that right? I'd invert the "sought-for/roll" order. HAve them roll once. Their roll determines what rarity of item they can find. Let them pick one item of that rarity. Gets the randomized distribution of what rarity of items they can find you want, avoids their frustration at getting "nothing." They always get something.

Talakeal
2017-01-07, 11:51 PM
First off, I want to thank Knaight and Phoenixphyre very much for their long detailed suggestions; I have saved them and will spend some time carefully looking over them before responding.


Finding a rare item and buying it should be separate things. If you have more wealth, you can try to find it faster by hiring people to help you look but that should be the player's decision and not just "the dice say you blew a bunch of resources in looking but couldn't find one in your price range".

Yeah. The dice are an abstraction of what happens. The player can narrate it however their like, the dice just know that in general the more resources you have to burn the easier it will be to find the items you need, and being able to pay higher prices means that there is a higher potential selection available.


No. But the time part is probably a bad thing to abstract into a statistical measure, especially in D&D where a lot of the game is about the time management of action economy and that's in the player's hands.

You can say to your players "the process of finding, haggling for, and purchasing an item takes a few hours so you can make two nontrivial purchases per day of downtime, how long do you want to spend in downtime?

They agree among themselves, and the maximum number of rolls they can make are set by the time they the players are willing to spend.

In D&D yes. I handle downtime in a far more "gamist" manner than D&D.


I think the issue with it is that, if I go shopping for, say, a new car, and I don't find one in my price range this month, I can take whatever I was going to spend in a down payment and turn around to buy a new computer, and I can do that on the very last day of the month. But by what I understand of this system, my trying hard to find a car - going out and test driving them, putting up with annoying calls and targeted ads as I search online, speaking to salesman after salesman - my actual available funds at the end of the month are lower than they were at the beginning. The down payment I was saving is gone, and it's now harder for me to succeed on buying that computer because I don't have the start-of-month wealth that represented the down payment before.


The problem is that the system doesn't allow you to "mechanically" save up resources. Instead it simulates saving up with the law of averages, you will probably use up some of your rolls each session failing to find a big ticket item before you actually strike gold, representing put away some portion of your money until the day when you can find one for a price that you can afford.

If a person really wants to save up for a car IRL they will (probably) continue to save up for it and not buy the computer.

Narratively, to me, blowing all my rolls on a rare item can be explained by saving up for a big ticket item and refusing to spend anything until I have it. By the law of averages the system will give it to me eventually if I keep on saving, just like in real life. The more I save the faster it is likely to happen. But if every month that I can't buy a new car I blow all my savings on a new computer, but then I still get the car one month, that actually seems LESS realistic to me. Sure it can be explained with a sudden windfall, but it tries my suspension of belief more than simply saying "I have been saving up for a while."

Mechanically, If I don't somehow "punish" failure, the optimum move for all players is to always ask for the "car", and then if they fail to find it then ask to instead buy a different model of car or some equally big ticket item and keep on rolling until they succeed. In all likelihood they will ignore small purchases entirely, equipping the team with +5 Lucerne Hammers rather than +1 long sword because they failed the roll for a +5 longsword and then just went down the weapon list rolling for +5 versions of everything.


If I understand what you're saying correctly, you want only "big, rare" purchases to be rolled for. Most things they just get? Is that right? I'd invert the "sought-for/roll" order. HAve them roll once. Their roll determines what rarity of item they can find. Let them pick one item of that rarity. Gets the randomized distribution of what rarity of items they can find you want, avoids their frustration at getting "nothing." They always get something.

That's a very good idea. A single roll it way too random, however. Maybe I can figure out some way to nip the roll entirely; however that might not be random enough (and might require more math than I am comfortable with).

Also, it doesn't really solve the "fatal flaw" of the system; if a player wants their "+10 sword" and refuses to purchase anything until they get it the system works the exact same way. If you do a single roll, say "you can afford up to a +9 sword" then the same obstinate and literal player would have previously burned all of his rolls looking for the +10 sword will instead say "I pass on the +9 sword, I am saving up for the +10 sword. I will choose to buy nothing and then feel robbed by the system when I don't get a huge bonus to next session's roll for a +10 sword!"

NichG
2017-01-08, 01:26 AM
The problem is that the system doesn't allow you to "mechanically" save up resources. Instead it simulates saving up with the law of averages, you will probably use up some of your rolls each session failing to find a big ticket item before you actually strike gold, representing put away some portion of your money until the day when you can find one for a price that you can afford.

If a person really wants to save up for a car IRL they will (probably) continue to save up for it and not buy the computer.

Narratively, to me, blowing all my rolls on a rare item can be explained by saving up for a big ticket item and refusing to spend anything until I have it. By the law of averages the system will give it to me eventually if I keep on saving, just like in real life. The more I save the faster it is likely to happen. But if every month that I can't buy a new car I blow all my savings on a new computer, but then I still get the car one month, that actually seems LESS realistic to me. Sure it can be explained with a sudden windfall, but it tries my suspension of belief more than simply saying "I have been saving up for a while."

Well, for one thing, it doesn't actually simulate this. If it were simulating this, it should take me twice as long to buy something twice as expensive, ten times as long to buy something 10x as expensive, etc, right?

If we assume its 1d20+Wealth against a DC, and that cost and DC are linear, will this be true? Lets consider a character with Wealth 9, for example. They have a 100% chance of buying a cost 10 item, and a 5% chance of buying a cost 29 item. That means it takes them 20 times as long to buy the cost 29 item as it does to buy the cost 10 item. If the cost 10 item is valued at 10 units, that means that the cost 29 item is effectively valued at 200 units, not 29. A cost 30 item would, for that person, be valued at an infinite price, and a cost 28 item would be valued at 100 units. If the character's wealth changes by 1, it also changes the relative values of all the goods, often by very large amounts near the upper end. If the number of attempts I get scales with my Wealth, then that adds other weirdness in terms of assigning absolute values to goods, but it leaves the relative values all unchanged.

So again, given this system, what I would do is to try to buy things with a cost that gives me a 100% chance of success, and then at a later date attempt to trade those for a 1-time bonus to my Wealth check to buy the high ticket item. In other words, I would try to invent a proxy currency. Because if I'm trying to save up for 10 sessions, I get much more purchasing power on high-ticket items by doing that than by taking my chances with the dice. If a natural 20 always succeeds, it's even worse - it means that the maximum cost of any purchaseable item in the game is always effectively just 20*(Current Wealth+1), so I might as well always aim for the most valuable item in the game every single time starting from 1st level and just ignore my actual Wealth score.

If I'm really trying to game this system, a low-Wealth character and high-Wealth character can conspire together to get better results on a set of items they want to buy than if either character was doing the purchasing on their own. So low-Wealth characters can actually sell their poverty to higher-Wealth characters as a resource. The way this works is, lets say a Wealth 3 character wants to buy an item with Cost 16, and a Wealth 6 character wants to buy two items at Cost 7. The Wealth 3 character should offer to attempt to buy the Wealth 7 items (which on average costs him 2/0.85 = 2.4 rolls) in exchange for the Wealth 6 character buying the Cost 16 item (which costs him an average of 1/0.55 = 1.8 rolls). If the Wealth 3 character tried to buy the Cost 16 item directly, it would cost him on average (1/0.4 = 2.5 rolls), and the Wealth 6 character would require 2 rolls to make their purchase. So just by conspiring to buy eachothers' shopping lists, the poor character can save the rich character 0.2 rolls and the rich character can save the poor character 0.1 rolls. This isn't a huge difference, but it points to some of the absurdities that can happen.

Segev
2017-01-08, 01:35 AM
That's a very good idea. A single roll it way too random, however. Maybe I can figure out some way to nip the roll entirely; however that might not be random enough (and might require more math than I am comfortable with).Why is a single roll too random? This is at the end of each buying period. And they get something no matter what they roll.


Also, it doesn't really solve the "fatal flaw" of the system; if a player wants their "+10 sword" and refuses to purchase anything until they get it the system works the exact same way. If you do a single roll, say "you can afford up to a +9 sword" then the same obstinate and literal player would have previously burned all of his rolls looking for the +10 sword will instead say "I pass on the +9 sword, I am saving up for the +10 sword. I will choose to buy nothing and then feel robbed by the system when I don't get a huge bonus to next session's roll for a +10 sword!"

One of us is not communicating what they mean to the other. Possibly both. I'm going to try to address this concern with what I was picturing, and hope it at least helps.

What I was proposing was that each player would roll once. Using the same system you had before to determine if they could get the item they wanted based on its rarity, determine the maximum-rarity item that this roll could have successfully gotten. The player then chooses any item of that rarity or lower that he successfully obtained.

There's no sense of loss from rolling and failing, so players won't feel like they got "robbed" expending multiple "rolls" and the money they mentally associate with them for nothing. There's nothing to save up, and no way to "waste" rolls looking for higher-rarity items, so there's no reason at all not to take either the +9 sword or something of equal rarity. (If they're holding out for the +10 sword, they can take a +9 wings of flying or whatever is on the +9 sword's table.)

Satinavian
2017-01-08, 02:21 AM
I think you might be misunderstanding me (please forgive me if I am wrong). In this system "frills" and "RP things" are totally free. The only thing that costs money is upgrading one's equipment*. The ideal play, imo, is that you buy all of the equipment which you can reasonably afford without any risk, and then once you have that taken care of you should then "shoot the moon" for that 1% item.
But that would be stupid. Buying things they can afford because they are really cheap still costs a shot at the big expenses everytime. The optimal way to play your system would be to use all rolls exclusively on big ticket items and then use survival skills for things like food and pillaging for things like clothes and simple tools.

Everytime players spend a trivial amount of money they think "That has cost me one of my trys for the uber-sword this session". That is utterly detrimental to enticing them to make small purchases. And if they already are real cheapskates with a classical wealth system where it doesn't really save them that much money, your problems will get signioficantly worse in your system where being a Scrooge will them get the best equippment in the rules after some time.


If you really want to make trivial purchases more enticing, it is a really bad idea to limit numbers of purchases. I really don't understand how you could get to your system when "Instead of buying one hoderate/high cost item the players should more often buy 100 items of everyday use or basic supply qualities" was part of your goal. Limiting numbers of purchases was the worst thing you could do.

Limiting number of purchases of really rare items is not uncommon and usually works, but also limiting numbers of purchases of common items and linking that leads to all sorts of problems.

Talakeal
2017-01-08, 04:10 AM
@Telok and NichG: I have read your posts, but don't have the time to respond tonight. I will type up an in depth response tomorrow. Thanks!


When you say 'totally free', do you mean 'no roll' or 'no debt'? If it's 'no debt', then the order can't matter. So if the order matters, that suggests to me that it isn't actually free, it's just being presented as if it's free (but with a hidden opportunity cost, which is being discovered by some players and thereby is leading to resentment).

Totally free. No rolls. No debt. No wealth modifications. No limits. If you have access to a suitable market place and it is something that someone of your economic status could conceivably acquire you just get it, no questions asked. Now if you want something really weird, like a poor medieval dirt farmer of Masai tribesman wanting to acquire an ornate golden throne for their hut we might RP out how they acquire such a thing as part of the adventure, but it shouldn't actually cost them anything.

Likewise supplies are generally completely free. Food, equipment repairs, clothing, containers, beverages, ammunition, lamp oil, etc. All of this is free is the player has access to a market; they might occur a small debt if they need to resupply in the field and don't have access to such a location or want something significantly out of the ordinary like fruit from the tree of life or silver bullets to kill a werewolf.

The only things you should be having to purchase are upgrades for your adventuring equipment and adventuring related expenses like potions or hirelings.



But that would be stupid. Buying things they can afford because they are really cheap still costs a shot at the big expenses everytime. The optimal way to play your system would be to use all rolls exclusively on big ticket items and then use survival skills for things like food and pillaging for things like clothes and simple tools.

Everytime players spend a trivial amount of money they think "That has cost me one of my trys for the uber-sword this session". That is utterly detrimental to enticing them to make small purchases. And if they already are real cheapskates with a classical wealth system where it doesn't really save them that much money, your problems will get signioficantly worse in your system where being a Scrooge will them get the best equippment in the rules after some time.


If you really want to make trivial purchases more enticing, it is a really bad idea to limit numbers of purchases. I really don't understand how you could get to your system when "Instead of buying one hoderate/high cost item the players should more often buy 100 items of everyday use or basic supply qualities" was part of your goal. Limiting numbers of purchases was the worst thing you could do.

Limiting number of purchases of really rare items is not uncommon and usually works, but also limiting numbers of purchases of common items and linking that leads to all sorts of problems.

As I mentioned above, mundane stuff is totally free. You are correct in that if you have a crafter in the party it is almost certainly better to have them craft whatever gear they are capable of making instead of trying to buy it; this is working as intended.

When I am talking about common gear vs. rare gear I am talking about stuff like getting a +1 sword vs. a +5 sword.

If a character can get +1 items 50% of the time and they can get +5 items 1% of the time optimal play would, in my opinion, be to get the +1 sword first. Sure it costs you some rolls, but you will have a +1 sword. Just like in D&D where a +1 sword costs 2,000 gp and a +5 sword costs 50,000 gp; if you neglect to buy a +1 sword you will get your +5 sword 2% sooner, but you will have to go without a magic weapon while you accumulate that remaining 48%.

I may need to tweak the numbers for the system during play-testing, but ideally average RNG will get a player who devotes the same percentage of their wealth towards acquiring an item roughly the same amount of time to get; although the system does err in favor of the PCs to help mitigate bad luck.

Satinavian
2017-01-08, 08:16 AM
As I mentioned above, mundane stuff is totally free. You are correct in that if you have a crafter in the party it is almost certainly better to have them craft whatever gear they are capable of making instead of trying to buy it; this is working as intended.well, that is important and makes your system significantly less horrible.

But all your arguing pages ago that you want to avoid the players being able to buy infinit amounts of supplies led to people assuming that supplies had to be purchased via the wealth system.

When I am talking about common gear vs. rare gear I am talking about stuff like getting a +1 sword vs. a +5 sword.

If a character can get +1 items 50% of the time and they can get +5 items 1% of the time optimal play would, in my opinion, be to get the +1 sword first. Sure it costs you some rolls, but you will have a +1 sword. Just like in D&D where a +1 sword costs 2,000 gp and a +5 sword costs 50,000 gp; if you neglect to buy a +1 sword you will get your +5 sword 2% sooner, but you will have to go without a magic weapon while you accumulate that remaining 48%.Correct.

But how do the chances change ? If the +5 swords is at 1% and the +1 Sword at 50%, the +5 sword is simply worth 50 +1 swords. Then you forget those old 2000GP and 50000GP numbers, the average rolls are the new prices.

And a new problems comes in. The +5 sword is not actually more affordable to a higher level party than a lower level party. In fact, the better the equipment of the group is, the less interesting it becames to go for the rarer items. The optimal strategy is trying to minimize the number of equipment upgrades over the career. Which again is not really what you want.

Your system would work significantly better if the chance to get items of rarer quality would increase in time. Then it becomes better to try to get the really expensive items later and it becomes more attractive to get the level appropriate stuff. That requires some heavy number crunching to make sure the sweet spot fof item quality is where you want it to be.



Also don't introduce random stuff and then only count averages. That is misleading as outliers are common and can really ruin your balancing. Your system also guarantees high standard deviations.

PhoenixPhyre
2017-01-08, 09:23 AM
One thing I'd like to see is an actual (all the numbers) simulation of a few relevant purchases. I think this would help us not get bogged down by false assumptions. Let's take the following scenarios:

1. An adventurer has wealth equal to the cost of a +1 weapon. What would it cost him (rolls/time/wealth changes/etc) to acquire one?
1a. Now add a normal amount of treasure. How does that affect things?

2. An adventurer has wealth equal to the cost of a +1 weapon. What would it cost him (rolls/time/wealth changes/etc) to acquire a +5 weapon?
2a. Again, add treasure.

I'm being vague as to the numbers since I don't have a good sense of what the OP's number scales really mean. How important is a +1? What are the DC's? etc. @Talakel, when you have the time, I'd appreciate you filling in the numbers for your system for comparison sake.

For comparison, I've put in spoilers the results for my proposed system. The numbers listed under assumptions can change--they're just a simple set of numbers to show the system.


Character is Wealth 5
+1 item is Complexity (Cost) 5
+5 item is Complexity (Cost) 10
The time cost is equal to the complexity
The DC for the rolls is 10
The total of treasure + skills is smaller than permanent wealth. For these purposes, I'm assuming that this is 4 (for the biggest change possible).




Scenario 1: He pays cash. Wealth doesn't change. Total cost: 5 days of time.
Scenario 1a: Assuming he has bargaining skills + treasure of 4 points
He pays cash. Wealth doesn't change. Total cost: 1 day of time (4 day reduction from treasure/skills)



Scenario 2:
Rolls 1d20 + 5 - 10 = 1d20 - 5 vs DC 10. Must roll 15+ to succeed (30% chance).
On success: Cost: 10 days. No wealth change.
On failure:

Either: Cost: 10 days, Wealth decreased by 5 (now 0)
Or: Cost 10 days, no wealth change, did not acquire item.


Scenario 2a: Again, 4 points of treasure + skills. His effective wealth is now 9
Rolls 1d20 + 9 - 10 = 1d20 - 1 vs DC 10. Must roll 11+ to succeed (50%).
On success: Cost: 10 days. No wealth change.
On failure:

Either: Cost: 10 days, Wealth decreased by 1 (now 4). 4 points of wealth loss absorbed by treasure/skills.
Or: Cost 10 days, no wealth change, did not acquire item.

Talakeal
2017-01-08, 07:09 PM
Based on how you've been discussing your system with other posters in this thread, it seems like the primary things you're concerned about are the narrative justification of the system and its realism. You've explained and justified the system by telling specific stories, and showing how you think your system models them correctly. This suggests to me that at some level you think 'the system is fine, but the reason that players aren't reacting the way I expect is because they need to be convinced that its realistic or narratively consistent'. That is, you're implicitly acting under the assumption that the thing which will shape player behavior is the narrative told around the system, not the system itself.
Pretty much, yeah.

But to me, this is incoherent with how you started the thread, and with trying to solve the issue by making a system. When you try to adapt behavior by making a system, that's the kind of action taken when it's the optimization and game mechanical behaviors of the players that are leading to problems. So as I read the conversation so far in this thread, you've kind of said 'well, I had a mechanical problem, I proposed a mechanical solution, it was met with some resistance, so now I'm going to talk about how it makes narrative sense and that should make it okay, right?'
The problem I have had was mechanical and narrative in nature. The solution was mechanical and narrative in nature. The players objected to it on narrative rather than mechanical grounds.

The 'I'm going to talk about how it makes narrative sense...' bit happened once you found that most of the posters in the thread also didn't like your system. But it's not really logically connected to why you said you did this in the first place. That's what reads as a sort of defensive blindness to me - you started from a consistent and reasonable plan, implemented something you thought followed from that plan, but then once you got a lot more pushback than you expected it reads as though you abandoned those initial goals as indefensible and instead retreated towards points you could make more strongly (about the narrative consistency and realism of the system), but points which were in turn less relevant to your initial motivations.
Mechanically I believe the system works as intended (barring some mechanical roughness to be smoothed out in testing). The pushback has almost been entirely narrative in nature (or a vague sense of "anything random is bad because what if I get screwed"), so I have been trying to refine and develop my narrative arguments for how the system could work.

Admittedly, I didn't have strong narrative explanations for the system. It was more of a "this system has the overall same effect as the previous system, except it is slightly more random," therefore you can use whatever narratives you would use to explain the same events in the previous situation, with some added randomness (which to me is not unrealistic, because hey, irl, **** happens.)
After seeing so much pushback (again, almost all of it narrative) I have been trying to refine my arguments and think of more specific and concrete explanations for how the system could work, which has also led to some refinement of the system.


Here we have to be careful. Is your motivation 'make a system according to this equation' or is it to create a certain set of behaviors and tendencies in your players? Ultimately, my understanding from your first post is that you want to change something about player behavior, not just try out a particular mechanical idea. So when you evaluate if the system 'works exactly the way you want', you have to evaluate that with regards to how people react to hearing your system, not whether it accurately transcribes what's in your head.

Players will generally go for whatever behavior is most optimal for them. If the optimum lies a little outside of what is fun for them they will usually choose one or the other and grumble a bit. If it lies far outside what is fun for them they will leave the game.

I was trying to create a much broader range of "optimum" behaviors to encompass more fun.

It is not a critique or attempt to modify the behavior of any one player or group of players, merely players in general, by changing what constitutes optimum play.


When I read the flavor-stripped version of the system, the action that I would undertake as a player would be to find a way to effectively stockpile X through an exchangeable proxy resource. That is to say, my gut reaction to your system is to figure out a way to circumvent it and hoard things anyhow. Any sort of detailed argument I make is not me trying to prove to you that the system makes me react this way, but rather it's me trying to explain why I have this reaction so that you can understand the difference in thought between yourself and other players who are reacting in an unexpected manner.


So again, given this system, what I would do is to try to buy things with a cost that gives me a 100% chance of success, and then at a later date attempt to trade those for a 1-time bonus to my Wealth check to buy the high ticket item. In other words, I would try to invent a proxy currency. Because if I'm trying to save up for 10 sessions, I get much more purchasing power on high-ticket items by doing that than by taking my chances with the dice. If a natural 20 always succeeds, it's even worse - it means that the maximum cost of any purchasable item in the game is always effectively just 20*(Current Wealth+1), so I might as well always aim for the most valuable item in the game every single time starting from 1st level and just ignore my actual Wealth score.

You can kind of do this. Mostly by stockpiling potions which give a bonus to business rolls or which allow the party transmuter to cast more spells (as transmuters can turn lead into gold and effectively convert spell points into wealth). But that isn't very efficient, and you are going to lose some resources at each step.

In general I would still worry about buying equipment that is good enough for the moment before going for something that is going to be better but take longer to acquire.

But once you get to that latter step and have the necessary skills in the party to turn an occasional big roll from a gamble to a certainty, go for it. If you feel more comfortable; it shouldn't break the game in any way as you aren't going to be getting items noticeably faster or make the rest of the group have to spend noticeably more time and effort on book keeping.


This has to do with whether a system shapes behavior via punishment or enticement. Punishment generally corresponds to things which increase uncertainty, lower agency/control, outright deny or remove resources, or add tedium or busywork. For example, saying 'now, instead of just buying something with your money, you have this other thing and you have to roll and it might work or not' is pretty much strictly disadvantageous to the player.

People, as a rule, are irrational and bad at probability. They will get addicted and waste fortunes buying lottery tickets and playing slot machines that pay out, and they will refuse clearly optimal choices that have a chance of randomness.
But if I changed an employee's wage from 6.25$ an hour to 2d6$ an hour they will make more money in the long run simply because the average roll on 2d6 is 7 and if they are working a 40 hour a week job their profits will almost certainly average out over so many rolls.
In fact, just used a dice rolling program to simulate a hundred 40 hour weeks and not one of them paid less than they would get making 6.25 an hour.


The natural reaction to punishment-based systems is to find ways to avoid them. If a game presents a save-or-die situation, a rational player will try to find ways to not enter into that situation in the first place rather than just saying 'okay, I accept that I have a 20% chance of death here, let's get on with it'. Part of that in your system is that there's a sense of 'if I don't handle the money right at this very moment, I will permanently lose out on something'. That feeling of danger of accidentally being screwed over by making a wrong choice drives a much stronger, much more stringent optimization response. In my case, hearing your wealth system, my gut reaction was 'I need to figure out a way to not use this system but still retain the advantages of wealth, because this system does not favor me'. My solution was to attempt to find an alternate form of hoarding - in other words, doubling down on what you were trying to prevent.

I guess. I don't really have a response to that, if you are going to do something that you don't find fun and doesn't increase your rewards, all I can really say is that maybe dice based systems aren't for you.


Other abstract wealth systems don't create this feeling because they actually offer something comparatively better than I had before - e.g. they entice players to use them, rather than punish players for mis-using them. The reason is, I gain the ability I didn't have before to not have to worry about small expenditures. The system bribes me, in a way, by saying 'you might lose the ability to save up for big-ticket items as carefully as before, but in exchange you now don't have to think about the small stuff whatsoever'. By extending an advantage, the system makes me more willing to accept the indirect disadvantages. By downplaying or removing opportunity costs, the system tells me that its safe for me to just go along with things and try it out, because I can't suffer any kind of permanent setback for using it incorrectly or failing to use it in a particular optimal way. So it creates less drive to optimize, and less friction overall.

That's is both the intent, and as far as I can tell the execution, of the system as I have it.


Well, for one thing, it doesn't actually simulate this. If it were simulating this, it should take me twice as long to buy something twice as expensive, ten times as long to buy something 10x as expensive, etc, right?

If we assume its 1d20+Wealth against a DC, and that cost and DC are linear, will this be true? Let's consider a character with Wealth 9, for example. They have a 100% chance of buying a cost 10 item, and a 5% chance of buying a cost 29 item. That means it takes them 20 times as long to buy the cost 29 item as it does to buy the cost 10 item. If the cost 10 item is valued at 10 units, that means that the cost 29 item is effectively valued at 200 units, not 29. A cost 30 item would, for that person, be valued at an infinite price, and a cost 28 item would be valued at 100 units. If the character's wealth changes by 1, it also changes the relative values of all the goods, often by very large amounts near the upper end. If the number of attempts I get scales with my Wealth, then that adds other weirdness in terms of assigning absolute values to goods, but it leaves the relative values all unchanged. .

One of the reasons I made it an "abstract" system is that I didn't want to try and figure out how much a given item is worth because without a mass market industrial economy that isn't really possible.

Let's just say that a +5 sword will take 50 times the "effort" for an adventurer to acquire as a +1 sword. It is some combination of time, money, persistence, and hard work.

At auction Excalibur is going to fetch unfathomable more at market than 50 swords which are merely "made from high quality steel but otherwise ordinary," but it is possible that someone who has 50 men-at-arms to equip would find the 50 swords more valuable, or that a hoard which could be exchanged for a +1 sword could be defeated by an adventurer with 1/50th the experience of the hero who defeats the dragon whose hoard could by Excalibur. [/QUOTE]


If I'm really trying to game this system, a low-Wealth character and high-Wealth character can conspire together to get better results on a set of items they want to buy than if either character was doing the purchasing on their own. So low-Wealth characters can actually sell their poverty to higher-Wealth characters as a resource. The way this works is, let's say a Wealth 3 character wants to buy an item with Cost 16, and a Wealth 6 character wants to buy two items at Cost 7. The Wealth 3 character should offer to attempt to buy the Wealth 7 items (which on average costs him 2/0.85 = 2.4 rolls) in exchange for the Wealth 6 character buying the Cost 16 item (which costs him an average of 1/0.55 = 1.8 rolls). If the Wealth 3 character tried to buy the Cost 16 item directly, it would cost him on average (1/0.4 = 2.5 rolls), and the Wealth 6 character would require 2 rolls to make their purchase. So just by conspiring to buy each others' shopping lists, the poor character can save the rich character 0.2 rolls and the rich character can save the poor character 0.1 rolls. This isn't a huge difference, but it points to some of the absurdities that can happen.

It is a team game. It is assumed you will pool all of your income and let the party face do all of the buying and selling.
I cannot see any situation where it would be beneficial to split the rolls between two people on a regular basis; but if it occasionally comes up, sure, why not?


Tal, I think you're using words like 'wealth' and 'debit', not just differently from some of the other people in here, but differently within your system. I get a vibe that the wealth/debit stuff of the downtime town shopping includes factors like time, patience, and luck, but that the character wealth score doesn't include those. I could be wrong.

What might help is to, for testing and discussion, use abstract labels. Drop all the wealth, debit, purchasing language and replace it with other labels.

So let's see if I understand. Characters have attributes A, B, and C. During downtime a character can pursue a course of action in parallel with and independent of all his other downtime activities. The character gets a maximum number of tests equal to A + B? The player chooses the difficulty of these tests and that difficulty is modified by attribute A, more A makes for easier tests. For each test attribute C increases, when it equals A the character can make no more tests. Success, failure, and the margin of each dictate how much attribute C increases at the end of each test. If the test succeeds then there is no change beyond the increase in C. If the test fails then the player can choose to decrease A (or B? not sure) and increase C in order for the test to count as a success, the amount of reduction depends on how much the test failed by. At the end of every downtime B and C are zeroed out and the character has to go do story stuff before the next downtime.

Close.
Characters have a wealth score dictated by the events of the previous mission (income + expenses, modified by social class), let's call this value A.
Characters have a business skill. Let's call this value B.
Items have a value, based on their weight +1. Let's call this C.
Items have a rarity based their quality. Let's call this D.
During downtime players can roll for whatever items they like. This test is B against C. If they succeed on the roll they get the item, if they fail the do not.
Regardless of success of failure, one the sum of all the D values for the items rolled for equal A downtime ends.

Character's also have an essence score, let's call this E.
If E>D characters receive a bonus to B equal to five times E minus D.
If E=D characters can choose to subtract D from A and still get the item on a failed roll.
If E<D the items C is multiplied by 2(D-E)

Next session A is zeroed out and then recalculated based on the events of that session.


I get your basic desire, most modern game "economies" reward players for having their character live in a gutter, wear rags, eat bugs, and rob everyone they meet during downtime. Because that most benefits their character during uptime. You want a character's social, business, and creative abilities to matter but in most games they either don't matter or threaten to break the game.

Now I have to go manage imaginary money on a real spreadsheet if I want to keep my current character. Yuck.
Pretty much.


Edit: Reading what was posted as I typed I think part of the problem is that people are making assumptions about how the math and randomness of the system function on pretty much no info. I'd suggest building a table and doing an actual statistical analysis of your averages and extremes. Then write a little one paragraph summary and/or make a chart about how to work the system to your advantage. Package that with the system and see how it looks.
I am going to post some more concrete details for Phoenix Phyre.


And a new problems comes in. The +5 sword is not actually more affordable to a higher level party than a lower level party. In fact, the better the equipment of the group is, the less interesting it becomes to go for the rarer items. The optimal strategy is trying to minimize the number of equipment upgrades over the career. Which again is not really what you want.
As a character advances their business scores will get higher, item values will go down as they are calculated based on the character's essence scores, and the players will have a lot more skills and abilities which can be used to generate more wealth or to modify / reroll the tests to get items.

The optimal strategy is trying to minimize the number of equipment upgrades over the career. Which again is not really what you want.
Note sure I follow you here. What does this mean?
AFAICT the optimal strategy is to upgrade your gear to +1 quality (+2 if you have a business whiz in the party), then to +3, then to +4, and then to +5.


Your system would work significantly better if the chance to get items of rarer quality would increase in time. Then it becomes better to try to get the really expensive items later and it becomes more attractive to get the level appropriate stuff. That requires some heavy number crunching to make sure the sweet spot for item quality is where you want it to be.

Agreed.




Also don't introduce random stuff and then only count averages. That is misleading as outliers are common and can really ruin your balancing. Your system also guarantees high standard deviations.
Discounting the possibility of deviations is dumb I agree, but I don't really know how you could analyze a system without looking at averages as baseline. Extreme deviations are really rare and unlikely, but possible in any dice game.
Frankly if I was looking at deviations I wouldn't be worrying about economics. I would be a lot more worried about a combat where all the monsters roll nothing but crits and the PCs don't make a single save, that can ruin a game much quicker than one of the players having to wait until the "appropriate" level to acquire that rare magic sword he has been looking for and failing to find for the last six levels.


One thing I'd like to see is an actual (all the numbers) simulation of a few relevant purchases. I think this would help us not get bogged down by false assumptions. Let's take the following scenarios:

1. An adventurer has wealth equal to the cost of a +1 weapon. What would it cost him (rolls/time/wealth changes/etc) to acquire one?
1a. Now add a normal amount of treasure. How does that affect things?

2. An adventurer has wealth equal to the cost of a +1 weapon. What would it cost him (rolls/time/wealth changes/etc) to acquire a +5 weapon?
2a. Again, add treasure.

I'm being vague as to the numbers since I don't have a good sense of what the OP's number scales really mean. How important is a +1? What are the DC's? etc. @Talakeal, when you have the time, I'd appreciate you filling in the numbers for your system for comparison sake.

For comparison, I've put in spoilers the results for my proposed system. The numbers listed under assumptions can change--they're just a simple set of numbers to show the system.


Character is Wealth 5
+1 item is Complexity (Cost) 5
+5 item is Complexity (Cost) 10
The time cost is equal to the complexity
The DC for the rolls is 10
The total of treasure + skills is smaller than permanent wealth. For these purposes, I'm assuming that this is 4 (for the biggest change possible).




Scenario 1: He pays cash. Wealth doesn't change. Total cost: 5 days of time.
Scenario 1a: Assuming he has bargaining skills + treasure of 4 points
He pays cash. Wealth doesn't change. Total cost: 1 day of time (4 day reduction from treasure/skills)



Scenario 2:
Rolls 1d20 + 5 - 10 = 1d20 - 5 vs DC 10. Must roll 15+ to succeed (30% chance).
On success: Cost: 10 days. No wealth change.
On failure:

Either: Cost: 10 days, Wealth decreased by 5 (now 0)
Or: Cost 10 days, no wealth change, did not acquire item.


Scenario 2a: Again, 4 points of treasure + skills. His effective wealth is now 9
Rolls 1d20 + 9 - 10 = 1d20 - 1 vs. DC 10. Must roll 11+ to succeed (50%).
On success: Cost: 10 days. No wealth change.
On failure:

Either: Cost: 10 days, Wealth decreased by 1 (now 4). 4 points of wealth loss absorbed by treasure/skills.
Or: Cost 10 days, no wealth change, did not acquire item.



Ok, let's do this.

At the start of downtime the party calculates their wealth based on the events of the mission.
It is equal to income - debt modified by social class.

Income is usually base 10 for simple completing the quest. You get bonuses for finding hidden treasures or completing additional objectives.

Debt is incurred from things like buying consumables, restocking in hostile territory, buying passage on a ship to skip encounters, bribing people, botching crafting rolls, or paying off fines / random if you really mess up.

Social class can be increased through the system's equivalent of feats and gives a small permanent bonus to wealth. This bonus is usually small, no more than 1 or 2, but sometimes people will choose to play Bruce Wayne and fund the whole team, giving access to vast resources in exchange for personal power.

The average wealth rating for the party is going to be about 15, and will follow a more or less bell shaped curve, with less than 10% of sessions ending with the team having a wealth of less than 10 and less than 10% of sessions ending with a wealth of more than 20, those with a rating of less than 0 or more than 30 are all but unheard of barring some very weird circumstances.

Characters with the gambling, artists, or transmuter skills can modify wealth by risking or converting other resources into wealth. Exact numbers are hard to summarize and vary greatly based on party makeup and dice rolls, but should be small.

Each item has a quality and a value.

The item's value is based on its weight, both of these values are generalizations.
1: Potions, clothing with a utilitarian function such as camouflage or armor, exotic ammunition
2: Tools. One handed weapons. Shields. Light armor. Helmets. Lanterns.
3: Two handed weapons. Medium armor. Tower shields.
4: Heavy armor. Most mounts and vehicles.

Quality is rated from -2 to +5.
Players begin the game with a full load out equipment that has no quality modifier.

All players have a business score rated from 1-30.
A starting party face will probably have a value of between 10 or 20 depending on individual build, and they will probably increase their score by about +1 every ten sessions.

To buy an item during downtime the party selects an item, chooses one person to be their representative, usually the one with the highest business score, and then has them roll the test.

The difficulty is equal to 15 + 5x the item's quality.

The roll is made by rolling a d20 and adding the character's business score.
If the result is greater than the difficulty they get the item, if the result is lower than the difficulty they don't get the item, if the result is actually equal to the difficulty they succeed with a complication.
If the result exceeds by more than 20 they get a critical success, they get the item and something good happens. Exactly what I am not sure atm.
If the result fails by more than 20 they fumble, they do not get the item and something bad happens. Exactly what I am not sure atm.
1s and 20s explode.
It is possible for multiple characters to assist one another and average their rolls, but unless the party has multiple merchant / social characters this is generally detrimental and serves to produce results which are lower but more consistent.
There are various spells and abilities which can give a character a bonus or a reroll to the test. These are generally rare and minor, but as the party increases in power they will have an easier time acquiring them and devoting them where they want them.


Players have an Essence score, a sort of soft "level" mechanic. All PCs start with an essence score of 1 and increase it every 20 sessions.

For every point by which their essence score exceeds the desired item's quality they can either add a +5 bonus to their business roll or multiply the quantity of item's they receive on a success by a factor of 10.
If the character's essence score equals or exceeds the quality of the item they wish to acquire they can choose to turn a failure into a success, although doing so doubles the item's effective value, effectively counting against their total number of rolls twice.
Every point by which the item's quality exceeds the character's essence exponentially doubles its value.

Once the group has attempted to acquire a number of items with a total value equal to their current wealth score they shopping phase is over until the next period of downtime.

Attempting to acquire an item in the field follows much the same procedure, but requires the character be able to find a suitable market and acquires debt equal to the item's value on a successful roll.


And there is the system in a nutshell. Please let me know if you have any follow up questions or need some additional details / clarifications.


The intent is that players will slowly upgrade their gear. Progression is designed for a maximum of 100 sessions. Players will start with +0 gear, and will slowly upgrade it one step at a time (or maybe 2 at a time if they are really good / lucky or have a character in their party who is a business whiz / super rich). By session 20 they should have all +1 gear with an odd bit of +2 gear, by session 40 all +2 with an odd bit of +3, by session 60 all +3 with an odd bit of +4, by session 80 all +4 with an odd bit of +5, and by session 100 all +5 gear.

Well, this may be the longest post I have ever written. Thank you all for taking the time to read it.

PhoenixPhyre
2017-01-08, 08:14 PM
Pretty much, yeah.

Ok, let's do this.

At the start of downtime the party calculates their wealth based on the events of the mission.
It is equal to income - debt modified by social class.

Income is usually base 10 for simple completing the quest. You get bonuses for finding hidden treasures or completing additional objectives.

Debt is incurred from things like buying consumables, restocking in hostile territory, buying passage on a ship to skip encounters, bribing people, botching crafting rolls, or paying off fines / random if you really mess up.

Social class can be increased through the system's equivalent of feats and gives a small permanent bonus to wealth. This bonus is usually small, no more than 1 or 2, but sometimes people will choose to play Bruce Wayne and fund the whole team, giving access to vast resources in exchange for personal power.

The average wealth rating for the party is going to be about 15, and will follow a more or less bell shaped curve, with less than 10% of sessions ending with the team having a wealth of less than 10 and less than 10% of sessions ending with a wealth of more than 20, those with a rating of less than 0 or more than 30 are all but unheard of barring some very weird circumstances.

Characters with the gambling, artists, or transmuter skills can modify wealth by risking or converting other resources into wealth. Exact numbers are hard to summarize and vary greatly based on party makeup and dice rolls, but should be small.

Each item has a quality and a value.

The item's value is based on its weight, both of these values are generalizations.
1: Potions, clothing with a utilitarian function such as camouflage or armor, exotic ammunition
2: Tools. One handed weapons. Shields. Light armor. Helmets. Lanterns.
3: Two handed weapons. Medium armor. Tower shields.
4: Heavy armor. Most mounts and vehicles.

Quality is rated from -2 to +5.
Players begin the game with a full load out equipment that has no quality modifier.

All players have a business score rated from 1-30.
A starting party face will probably have a value of between 10 or 20 depending on individual build, and they will probably increase their score by about +1 every ten sessions.

To buy an item during downtime the party selects an item, chooses one person to be their representative, usually the one with the highest business score, and then has them roll the test.

The difficulty is equal to 15 + 5x the item's quality.

The roll is made by rolling a d20 and adding the character's business score.
If the result is greater than the difficulty they get the item, if the result is lower than the difficulty they don't get the item, if the result is actually equal to the difficulty they succeed with a complication.
If the result exceeds by more than 20 they get a critical success, they get the item and something good happens. Exactly what I am not sure atm.
If the result fails by more than 20 they fumble, they do not get the item and something bad happens. Exactly what I am not sure atm.
1s and 20s explode.
It is possible for multiple characters to assist one another and average their rolls, but unless the party has multiple merchant / social characters this is generally detrimental and serves to produce results which are lower but more consistent.
There are various spells and abilities which can give a character a bonus or a reroll to the test. These are generally rare and minor, but as the party increases in power they will have an easier time acquiring them and devoting them where they want them.


Players have an Essence score, a sort of soft "level" mechanic. All PCs start with an essence score of 1 and increase it every 20 sessions.

For every point by which their essence score exceeds the desired item's quality they can either add a +5 bonus to their business roll or multiply the quantity of item's they receive on a success by a factor of 10.
If the character's essence score equals or exceeds the quality of the item they wish to acquire they can choose to turn a failure into a success, although doing so doubles the item's effective value, effectively counting against their total number of rolls twice.
Every point by which the item's quality exceeds the character's essence exponentially doubles its value.

Once the group has attempted to acquire a number of items with a total value equal to their current wealth score they shopping phase is over until the next period of downtime.

Attempting to acquire an item in the field follows much the same procedure, but requires the character be able to find a suitable market and acquires debt equal to the item's value on a successful roll.


And there is the system in a nutshell. Please let me know if you have any follow up questions or need some additional details / clarifications.



Ok, I have two responses now that I've worked through the math. First mechanics: I've made the following assumptions about a party that's new enough to find +1 valuable, but seasoned enough to be able to afford them. Please correct me if any of these seem way off. I'm assuming about 20 sessions.


Party wealth of 16. This is right at the average.
+1 sword has quality 1, value 3 (weight 2 + 1)
+5 sword has quality 5, value 3
The party's face's business skill is 17 (15 + 2 added for sessions)
The essence of the party is 2
The DC for the +1 item is 20 (15 + 5*1)
The DC for the +5 item is 40 (15 + 5*5)




The +1 item is a guaranteed purchase: adding 5 to the business skill because the essence = quality + 1 implies that the business skill is 23. Only a crit fail (if those exist) can prevent the purchase. The party can buy 5 of them per shopping trip.

The +5 item is completely impossible to get without a 20 on the roll. The highest possible roll at 1d20 + 17 is 37 (about that of a +4 item), so the party would need to roll a minimum of 20 (first roll) + 3 (second roll) This is a 4.25% overall chance. Also, 2^3 = 8, so the value of the item would be 24, which is greater than the wealth. The party could acquire a single +4 item with 10% probability, spending 12 of 16 wealth on that single item. To get a single +5 item, the party's essence score would have to be 3 with a (modified) business skill of 20 (although that would only allow a 5% chance of acquisition). A safer bet (50%) would be to have a business skill of 30. This would require about 100 sessions (start with 20, + 1 each 10 sessions).

Now on less mechanical terms. This is my honest take on it--not an attack.
Ouch. My head hurts. I would not find this system enjoyable at all. It's complicated (many different independent scores that affect things in granular ways), it's not entirely coherent--why is value related to weight? It's not abstract--it's very picky and concrete in some areas, and vaguely abstract in others. It requires a dedicated party face to optimize business skill and then channels everything through him. The only part that's in the players hands (and not by much) is how much income they bring back from missions. That means that there are very few decision points for players to make meaningful choices.

From a narrative point of view, it seems designed to tell a single story in a very forced sense. Seeing this system doesn't make me think "saving up for a big purchase" because there's no carry-over. I can't decide that I want a higher chance next downtime--everything resets when we leave town. There's no room for players to make narrative choices. No "I know someone who knows someone"--only the party face can be involved (or it makes things exponentially worse). It forces the party to do all their shopping together and move in lockstep. It seems like it was built mechanically first (to fit a particular statistical model) and then justified with fluff.

Verdict: I would rather play with a copper-counting, pay for every arrow DM than with this system. It has none of the benefits (low overhead, primarily) of an abstract system, and none of the benefits (high verisimilitude) of a fully concrete system, while having the flaws of both.

I apologize if I come across as hostile--I've tried to cut all sugar-coating. As a DM, it would be easy to run. That's because the difficulty is entirely on the party's side of the table.

Talakeal
2017-01-08, 11:10 PM
Huh.

Well, thank you for taking the time to look over the system and do the math.

Obviously I vehemently disagree with your conclusions, if I didn't the system never would have made it off my notepad before being tossed in the wastepaper basket, but I still value the feedback.

I can't really argue with you on the subjective stuff, but I am pretty sure the system is objectively faster and less math / bookkeeping intensive than any edition of D&D that has a magic item economy.

Likewise I don't know why weight and cost being correlated is weird to you; it seems perfectly logical to me that the bigger something is the more materials and time will need to go into making it. Again, if you look at D&D equipment lists and compare similar items there is an extremely strong correlation between cost and weight of similar items, great swords cost and weight more than bastard swords, which cost and weigh more than long swords , which cost and weigh more than short swords, which cost and weigh more than dagger.

I am, however, really curious by what you mean that it is "only meant to tell a single story" or "cuts out player choices". I have never really found upgrading my equipment to be a source of stories or choices, just tedious book keeping between systems. Could you please elaborate and through across a few examples so I know what type of thing I need shoot for?

NichG
2017-01-09, 01:31 AM
Sorry, I have to concur, this is really a mess. Especially with that x10 acquisition on excess Essence rule. Especially with that, groups of characters or parties working together to exploit the system can utterly break it.

With the system as stated, what I should optimally do in a game using this system is to form a league of aligned adventuring parties, sorted by their Essence and Business scores. Each party buys items with optimal DCs given those factors, and then they barter those items with each-other. A single roll by a party with X Essence/Y Business can be given an objective value in a marketplace like that, and can be used to instantiate a proxy currency. Additionally, this currency can be accumulated (whereas Wealth cannot be), meaning that groups whose immediate needs fluctuate can benefit from banking resources into the market. Basically, the optimal action is that I should do a fairly vast and tedious amount of accounting to convert this back into a gp-based system.

Here's how it works. Lets say all parties have 15 wealth, 15 business, and my merchant league has a few parties at every Essence level from 1 to 4. The highest number I might have to hit would be a 25 on the d20, for a Quality 5 item with no +5 bonuses from excess Essence. This has a 4% chance of success with exploding d20s.

I can now use this to make a table with the Quality of the item on one axis and the Essence on the other, showing the average number of items acquired per roll based on taking the optimum between the +5 bonuses or the x10 multiplier. Actually, it turns out you should always take the x10's in this range.



Essence\Quality
-2
-1
0
1
2
3
4
5


1
1000
100
10
0.8
0.55
0.3
0.05
0.04


2
10000
1000
100
8
0.55
0.3
0.05
0.04


3
100000
10000
1000
80
5.5
0.3
0.05
0.04


4
1000000
100000
10000
800
55
3
0.05
0.04



Notice a few things here? One is that the numbers become really insane when Essence gets even a little bit high. The other is that at the high DCs, everyone basically has the same chance to make the check regardless of their Essence. So if the low Essence people roll for the valuable items and trade them to the high Essence people for a much broader range of less-valuable items, both end up wildly ahead. Even in this range, its going to be a huge effect. Lets assume no one wants anything below +1 quality (since everyone starts with +0).

For an Essence 1 party, they average 0.8 +1 items per roll. For an Essence 4 party, they average 800 +1 items per roll. So lets have the Essence 4 party spend a single (averaged) roll getting +1 items. They then give a bunch of Essence 1 parties these items in exchange for those parties making a roll on a +5 item on their behalf. Lets be generous, and say that the Essence 4 group gives each Essence 1 group 25 items per roll - essentially, 40x what the Essence 1 parties would receive on their own. In exchange, they obtain 32 rolls on the +5 item - each of which has the same probability of success as their own roll. So both groups effectively gain a ~x30 to their purchasing power by making this deal. If you had an Essence 5 group, it would become more like x300.

Talakeal
2017-01-09, 01:41 AM
Sorry, I have to concur, this is really a mess. Especially with that x10 acquisition on excess Essence rule. Especially with that, groups of characters or parties working together to exploit the system can utterly break it.

With the system as stated, what I should optimally do in a game using this system is to form a league of aligned adventuring parties, sorted by their Essence and Business scores. Each party buys items with optimal DCs given those factors, and then they barter those items with each-other. A single roll by a party with X Essence/Y Business can be given an objective value in a marketplace like that, and can be used to instantiate a proxy currency. Additionally, this currency can be accumulated (whereas Wealth cannot be), meaning that groups whose immediate needs fluctuate can benefit from banking resources into the market. Basically, the optimal action is that I should do a fairly vast and tedious amount of accounting to convert this back into a gp-based system.

Here's how it works. Lets say all parties have 15 wealth, 15 business, and my merchant league has a few parties at every Essence level from 1 to 4. The highest number I might have to hit would be a 25 on the d20, for a Quality 5 item with no +5 bonuses from excess Essence. This has a 4% chance of success with exploding d20s.

I can now use this to make a table with the Quality of the item on one axis and the Essence on the other, showing the average number of items acquired per roll based on taking the optimum between the +5 bonuses or the x10 multiplier. Actually, it turns out you should always take the x10's in this range.



Essence\Quality
-2
-1
0
1
2
3
4
5


1
1000
100
10
0.8
0.55
0.3
0.05
0.04


2
10000
1000
100
8
0.55
0.3
0.05
0.04


3
100000
10000
1000
80
5.5
0.3
0.05
0.04


4
1000000
100000
10000
800
55
3
0.05
0.04



Notice a few things here? One is that the numbers become really insane when Essence gets even a little bit high. The other is that at the high DCs, everyone basically has the same chance to make the check regardless of their Essence. So if the low Essence people roll for the valuable items and trade them to the high Essence people for a much broader range of less-valuable items, both end up wildly ahead. Even in this range, its going to be a huge effect. Lets assume no one wants anything below +1 quality (since everyone starts with +0).

For an Essence 1 party, they average 0.8 +1 items per roll. For an Essence 4 party, they average 800 +1 items per roll. So lets have the Essence 4 party spend a single (averaged) roll getting +1 items. They then give a bunch of Essence 1 parties these items in exchange for those parties making a roll on a +5 item on their behalf. Lets be generous, and say that the Essence 4 group gives each Essence 1 group 25 items per roll - essentially, 40x what the Essence 1 parties would receive on their own. In exchange, they obtain 32 rolls on the +5 item - each of which has the same probability of success as their own roll. So both groups effectively gain a ~x30 to their purchasing power by making this deal. If you had an Essence 5 group, it would become more like x300.

So are you getting fifteen different DMs to agree to run fifteen different games all set in the same continuity or is this a single group running fifteen different games at the same time?

Seriously though, of course an abstract system (or heck even a the most hard core simulationist system) breaks when you strictly apply it to NPCs.

NichG
2017-01-09, 02:35 AM
So are you getting fifteen different DMs to agree to run fifteen different games all set in the same continuity or is this a single group running fifteen different games at the same time?

Seriously though, of course an abstract system (or heck even a the most hard core simulationist system) breaks when you strictly apply it to NPCs.

If I tried this in a game, I'd expect the DM to get upset. I wrote it because I expected you to get upset about it. The reason I'd expect a DM (or you) to get upset is that this kind of merchant league is obviously hugely different than what they intended this system to encourage me to do. It doesn't look anything like the narrative behind it, it goes against the intended objectives, etc. It's also something which is totally reasonable for me to come up with as an actor in a world following those rules.

In other words, when your players are telling you 'I don't know why, but I hate this thing', maybe this should be a hint to you as to why. Because it's obvious that 'playing along' is strictly detrimental to them, even awful, and totally discarding the narrative and type of behavior you say you want is actually the thing to do given the system.

This is why I'm telling you, you need to seriously listen when people are telling you there's something wrong with your system. You keep saying 'I'm sure it does what it wants'. Do you actually want the kind of behavior I just described?

Talakeal
2017-01-09, 02:51 AM
If I tried this in a game, I'd expect the DM to get upset. I wrote it because I expected you to get upset about it. The reason I'd expect a DM (or you) to get upset is that this kind of merchant league is obviously hugely different than what they intended this system to encourage me to do. It doesn't look anything like the narrative behind it, it goes against the intended objectives, etc. It's also something which is totally reasonable for me to come up with as an actor in a world following those rules.

In other words, when your players are telling you 'I don't know why, but I hate this thing', maybe this should be a hint to you as to why. Because it's obvious that 'playing along' is strictly detrimental to them, even awful, and totally discarding the narrative and type of behavior you say you want is actually the thing to do given the system.

This is why I'm telling you, you need to seriously listen when people are telling you there's something wrong with your system. You keep saying 'I'm sure it does what it wants'. Do you actually want the kind of behavior I just described?

I literally don't know what that argument even means.

I am less angry and more amused / confused; that's not exploiting the rules that is just flat out ignoring both the letter and the spirit.

The "world" doesn't follow those rules. The game follows those rules. And by the rules of the game, you aren't allowed to have multiple parties in the same game. Its like saying "Monopoly is a bad game because the car could just run over the dog instead of paying his hotel bills!"

Your argument is like saying "3.5 is the worst RPG of all time, even worse than FATAL. This is because if you have a group of six DMs and one player the game won't work as intended. And that is why you need to fix the problem of linear fighters / quadratic wizards." The premise, warrant, and conclusion to the argument seem to be completely unrelated.

And again, even if you absolutely hate dice and flat out ignore the random aspect of the system and always just buy things at double cost, it is still more generous than the existing system, so I am not sure why playing along is detrimental or awful.

Also, none ever my players ever said they "hated the system" or "didn't know why," that is just false. One player said he felt like the system was robbing him in one very specific situation and that I needed to put some work into fixing that one situation.

Satinavian
2017-01-09, 02:53 AM
People, as a rule, are irrational and bad at probability. They will get addicted and waste fortunes buying lottery tickets and playing slot machines that pay out, and they will refuse clearly optimal choices that have a chance of randomness.Not everyone is bad at probabilities and many many more people never buy lottery tickets or find slot machines interesting. Forcing that stuff on your players will not necessarily provide more fun. What is more, those that really are bad at statistics will not use your system in any sensible way.


But if I changed an employee's wage from 6.25$ an hour to 2d6$ an hour they will make more money in the long run simply because the average roll on 2d6 is 7 and if they are working a 40 hour a week job their profits will almost certainly average out over so many rolls.
In fact, just used a dice rolling program to simulate a hundred 40 hour weeks and not one of them paid less than they would get making 6.25 an hourYou could calculate the chance to be worse off exactly, That is the sum of 80W6. But most people wouldn't bother and instead calculate the variance (which comes trivially from the single dice variance) and use a Gaussian table or something.

But with the same average the random wage would be worse because it can't be planned for. Which is why all of the finance industry puts a price tag on "risk" in addition to considering the averages.

Thanks for the system explaination. That helps a lot.


Note sure I follow you here. What does this mean?
AFAICT the optimal strategy is to upgrade your gear to +1 quality (+2 if you have a business whiz in the party), then to +3, then to +4, and then to +5.No, that is not optimal at all. That is just what you want them to do.

Upgrading items step by step is literally the least amount of power gain you can have per upgrade. And it costs the same amount of rolls as upgrading several steps at once for the same end item. It would be far far better to start shooting for +5 from the beginning or going for +4 from the beginning (with the intend to never get 5 with this particular item and use further rolls for different characters/item sets) or at worst go +2, then +5 if you think you might not survive with basic equipment until you have managed the roll.

So yes, the whole stuff is worse than 3.5 (with its "can be further enchanted and you only pay the difference" and its wealth per level) in getting you the player behavior that you want. That is not that surprising because the 3.5 rule designers wanted the same thing, that players increase stepwise with the odd rare treasure thrown in here and there.


The only thing that can save your system is the essence rule. Essence makes it significantly easier to buy level appropriate items. Really the essence thing changes the system completely and is the only rule bit at all that makes the kind of upgrade process you want a viable strategy. When you sketched you system earlier in the thread, this was missing and thus everyone told you that your system can't possibly work. With essence, it can work.

Slightly annoying is that essence works better to simulate wealth than your actual wealth score does. Wealth is a linear wealth progression, essence is an exponential wealth progression. In the same way rarity works better as price than the value of the item does. Both things are part of the reason why your narrative explainations didn't really fit.






Discounting the possibility of deviations is dumb I agree, but I don't really know how you could analyze a system without looking at averages as baseline. There is math for that. How familiar are you really with statistics ? If you don't know, what a variance or a standard deviatin is, i really suggest you look it up. That scratches the bare minimum a rules designer should know. If you do know this stuff already, there are things like the Poisson distribution, multinomial distributions, basic combinatoric, higher momentums, Markov processes, correlations, attractors and the central limit theorem which might be worth at least a glance.

Not every rule designer needs to be a statistician, but, well, statistics is helpful in handling randomness.




Likewise I don't know why weight and cost being correlated is weird to you; it seems perfectly logical to me that the bigger something is the more materials and time will need to go into making it. Again, if you look at D&D equipment lists and compare similar items there is an extremely strong correlation between cost and weight of similar items, great swords cost and weight more than bastard swords, which cost and weigh more than long swords , which cost and weigh more than short swords, which cost and weigh more than dagger.Really ? How many +4 rings can a +4 full plate buy ?

it is not a good move to couple weight and price when different material and different production techniques are involved or when the price comes from enchantments and heavier items don't store more magic. But that is a separate problem and just a price list issue, nothing necessarily linked to your wealth system.




Seriously though, of course an abstract system (or heck even a the most hard core simulationist system) breaks when you strictly apply it to NPCs. The problem here is not PC and NPC, it is mixing a wealth system with exponential scale and a classical linear scaling bartering system. If you apply an abstraction sometimes and not at other times and then exploit the inconsistancies willfully then the fault lies not with the rules.

Knaight
2017-01-09, 04:05 AM
Likewise I don't know why weight and cost being correlated is weird to you; it seems perfectly logical to me that the bigger something is the more materials and time will need to go into making it. Again, if you look at D&D equipment lists and compare similar items there is an extremely strong correlation between cost and weight of similar items, great swords cost and weight more than bastard swords, which cost and weigh more than long swords , which cost and weigh more than short swords, which cost and weigh more than dagger.


It's roughly correlated at best though. You point out the sword line, but on the other hand consider the spyglass, the amazing lock, and the bedroll. The bedroll is by far the largest, it's also by far the cheapest. The correlation is loose enough that just dropping it entirely and evaluating stuff on a case by case basis would probably work better.

As for the rest of it - the system is all sorts of screwy, and it made it off your notepad because if you don't actually do the math and look at it it looks superficially reasonable. Coming up with systems that turn out to be iffy and need to be scrapped is routine - I have a fairly sizable computer folder of rejected mechanics, and that's without even getting into the scattered notebooks. There's some die-number/die-size attribute-skill linkage stuff that turned out not to work, there was my difficulty dice roll-them-all-under mechanic with a variable skill score that turned out to have a screwy failure curve, there's at least four* attempts at getting a functional thoroughly mechanized spirit-binding magic system for Fudge that haven't panned out, so on and so forth. Heck, I have a few hundred lines of MATLAB code for a tactical combat system which runs a bunch of calculations, and those hundred lines revealed that the system behind it was generally screwy and it had to be dropped.

This is one of those systems. The Essence quantity multiplier doesn't work. Among other things, the +5/Essence, x10/Essence, and +5/+1 Quality effectively make the value of things of higher quality exponential to a kind of ridiculous degree. The high quality gear is worth literally ten million times as much as the low quality gear. On top of that, the 20 range of the die and established link between +5 and x10 via Essence makes a die range cover four orders of magnitude. A maximum roll gives you almost 10,000 times as much buying power as a minimum roll (6309.6 times, more precisely). This is clearly ridiculous.

Fortunately, that number is also really easy to tweak. Define 3 variables, A, B, and C. A is the die bonus one Essence gives (so, currently +5). B is the item number multiplier one essence gives (currently x10). C is the range of the dice (currently 19, from 20-1), but can also be used to compare any two differences. The implicit wealth gap thus works out to: B^(C/A), assuming that essence and quality stay equivalent. So, lets fiddle with some numbers. I'll assume the d20 is set in stone, but it's worth noting that while the maximum difference is 19 the average magnitude of the difference between 2 rolls is about 6.36**.

So, lets use those to numbers for C consistently. For now, I'll leave the +5 in place and just vary the x10, changing B. Thus we'll be looking at Maximum Spread and Typical Spread for different multipliers.
x1: 1, 1. Obviously this doesn't work too well.
x2: 2.4, 13.9
x3: 4.0, 65.0
x4: 5.8, 194.0
x5: 7.7, 453.0
x6: 9.8, 905.7
x7: 11.9, 1627.0
x8: 14.1, 2702.4
x9: 16.3, 4427.9
x10: 18.7, 6309.6

I see two trends here. One is that for the typical roll any multiplier is actually pretty reasonable, the other is that it gets out of hand quickly. At x10, having enough to reliably buy a candy bar ($1, guaranteed) also means that there's an off chance you can afford college tuition for a semester. How I wish this were true. So, time to mess with B: That +5/Essence on a d20 is causing issues here. I'll also leave the x1 through x10 in, but this time lets bump it to +10/Essence, with quality being similarly bumped.
x1: 1, 1. Obviously this doesn't work too well.
x2: 1.5, 3.7
x3: 2.0, 8.0
x4: 2.4, 13.9
x5: 2.8, 21.3
x6: 3.1, 30.1
x7: 3.4, 40.3
x8: 3.8, 52.0
x9: 4.0, 65.0
x10: 4.3, 79.4

I like these numbers a lot better, and at the higher end of the range they still work fairly well for windfalls. The typical fluctuation is fairly reasonable across the board, and the high end fluctuation stays put. Now, time to talk user end: x10 is much, much easier to use than the rest of these. x2, x4, x8, and x5 are then not too terrible, the rest pretty much suck to deal with. x7 in particular is miserable. A table could alleviate this, but I'm a big believer in avoiding tables whenever possible. So lets play with that +10 now, keeping the x10 in, and try to get some behavior. I'm not duplicating the whole 1 to 20 range I used in my code, but I can summarize it. At the low end the oscillation is just obscene, which is to be expected, with highlights being six orders of magnitude on typical fluctuation. It levels out pretty dramatically as things go on. There's a bit of a sweet spot from about 9 to 15, with between 5.1 and 2.65 times typical fluctuation and 129.1 and 18.5 times max fluctuation. If you must keep this system, pick a number in that range. I used GUI Octave to run the math here, it's a freeware version of Matlab. The code is below, run the top section to vary multiplier and the second to vary bonus.

clc
clear
B = 10; %The bonus provided by one point of essence.
C = [6.35714285714,19]; %The dice range.
Max=10; %Maximum multiplier tested
WealthSmall=zeros(1,Max)
WealthLarge=zeros(1,Max)
for A = 1:Max %The batch multiplier.
WealthSmall(A) = A.^(C(1)./B);
WealthLarge(A) = A.^(C(2)./B);
end
disp(WealthSmall)
disp(WealthLarge)

clc
clear
A = 10; %The bonus provided by one point of essence.
C = [6.35714285714,19]; %The dice range.
Max=20; %Maximum multiplier tested
WealthSmall=zeros(1,Max)
WealthLarge=zeros(1,Max)
for B = 1:Max %The batch multiplier.
WealthSmall(B) = A.^(C(1)./B);
WealthLarge(B) = A.^(C(2)./B);
end
disp(WealthSmall)
disp(WealthLarge)

Note that this fundamentally doesn't prevent Essence from being a better wealth indicator than wealth is, but as each point of Essence is basically five points of wealth (among other things) that's inecitable. I'd decouple it from the multiplier though, and just have a x10 multiplier come from a +whatever increase in purchase difficulty.

*Organization has never been one of my better skills, so these documents sometimes just vanish into the ether. That throws counts off sometimes for things which I've iterated extensively.
**Linear interpolation of anydice data. There are all sorts of issues with using this measure, but rather than get into those weeds I figure I might as well just present that data and acknowledge that there are reasons to avoid it.

PhoenixPhyre
2017-01-09, 08:03 AM
Huh.

I am, however, really curious by what you mean that it is "only meant to tell a single story" or "cuts out player choices". I have never really found upgrading my equipment to be a source of stories or choices, just tedious book keeping between systems. Could you please elaborate and through across a few examples so I know what type of thing I need shoot for?

I'll try to be as clear as possible. The system tries to do two different things that don't coexist very well.

One type of system models the idea that shopping (and thus purchased gear) isn't important, in which case a strongly abstract system (either you can buy it in whatever quantity you need or you can't) works well. Better gear is either not a part of the system at all (some of the superhero games fit this mold) or is exclusively found on adventures. Either way, "going shopping" doesn't take any time or optimization or thought, really.

The other type of system (speaking broadly) thinks that logistics are important. In this type of a system, counting costs and having predictable costs is important. In these systems, the decision "can I afford it" is relatively straight-forward. If value(current gear) + coin > cost (new gear), then I can afford the item. Otherwise, no. I can save up between adventures, I can try to haggle, I can do many different things to either more-quickly purchase a piece of gear or to maybe avoid needing it at all. This is what I mean by "player choice." The player has many different mechanisms to interact with the subsystem (including ignoring it entirely by playing a sorcerer).

Your system has neither of these properties. It's very crunchy--the "can purchase" decision is a function of 5 variables, all of them independent from each other. It mixes linear and exponential scales (which makes interactions between the variables non-linear and really really complicated). This all tells me that shopping is a major part of the world. It's a mini-game that needs to be optimized for (by having the highest possible business skill). However, the only one who can interact with this subsystem is the party face. Anyone else trying to "go shopping" will make the party as a whole exponentially less successful by splitting the wealth of the party. Since I don't play faces...this locks me out of this whole mini-game entirely. There's nothing I can do during downtime to assist (other than crafting, which by your own admission doesn't change what you can buy but only how much you can buy). More income (wealth) should mean that I can purchase better stuff, not just more of the same quality. You've got duplication in your numbers--business skill and wealth both oppose quality and value, just in strange ways.

Conversely, the prices aren't fixed and predictable. I can't make any decisions for the future--it all depends on the results of the last mission and the dice. This is unsatisfying to me and imbalanced between those who are strongly gear dependent (traditionally martial types) and those who are less gear-dependent (traditionally magical types). Of course, if everyone is equally gear dependent (due to the rest of the game system), then this particular objection is less valid.

On the other hand, it's not a fully concrete system. Everything depends on luck...and lots of luck. I can't save up, since everything resets to zero. I can't play a character who has a goal of saving up to buy a tavern and retire, because I can't save anything. It's designed to tell the story of a group of adventurers who spend their "off-duty time" carousing and spending all their cash. They're living hand-to-mouth even when they're pulling in whole town incomes in an adventure (the problem with mixing linear and exponential scales). This is what I meant by "only meant to tell a single [type of] story." It precludes many other types of character types--they're mechanically unfit. It forces the party to work together as a single unit here--increasing the chances of squabbling. Pooled wealth systems only work if everyone agrees on all the purchases. Otherwise it gets painful. Been there (in game and IRL), done that. Don't want it again.

As an aside, if it's important (for the system's math to work) that the party has the appropriate bonuses at the appropriate "levels", just bake that into the system like 4e did with the "inherent bonus" option. This lets them choose between items that actually do something, rather than being on the upgrade treadmill. The system as it stands is simply a level gate--below essence X you can't buy item Y--above essence X you can buy any number of item Y.

If you're comparing "book-keeping" to 3.X and crafting custom items, then sure. Those rules were more like guidelines anyway and weren't designed well. The difficulty there was entirely on the DM's side of the table (pricing). Once the price was fixed, the can-buy/can't-buy decision was simple comparison. Everything had fixed prices that never changed. Comparing to a crappy system is, as they say, a low bar to clear.

NichG
2017-01-09, 08:36 AM
I literally don't know what that argument even means.

I am less angry and more amused / confused; that's not exploiting the rules that is just flat out ignoring both the letter and the spirit.

The "world" doesn't follow those rules. The game follows those rules. And by the rules of the game, you aren't allowed to have multiple parties in the same game. Its like saying "Monopoly is a bad game because the car could just run over the dog instead of paying his hotel bills!"

Your argument is like saying "3.5 is the worst RPG of all time, even worse than FATAL. This is because if you have a group of six DMs and one player the game won't work as intended. And that is why you need to fix the problem of linear fighters / quadratic wizards." The premise, warrant, and conclusion to the argument seem to be completely unrelated.

I'm trying to really make it clear where the incoherence is, since I and a lot of other people have been repeatedly telling you about it in words with you just saying 'I believe my system does not have this problem'. By putting it in numbers and showing just how ridiculous things can get, I was hoping to make it really crystal clear what's wrong, so we don't keep going in circles of 'your system is broken', 'nuh-uh, I believe it's fine'.

But okay, you say that doesn't follow the rules because the only people using this system are the PCs.

I'm not a stranger to that kind of thing, but for an economics system - which is a social agreement, basically - that would really make me boggle. We're talking about the emergent conventions associated with totally mundane, reasonable actions, just repeated at scale. If you block that and force abstraction, you're cutting out a ton of what to me should be completely reasonable actions for a PC to propose. That's a huge cost.

Do NPCs not buy items? When you buy an item, is it impossible to give it to another person? If I offer an NPC something they want in exchange for something else, will they say 'sorry, you've given things to too many people this week, I can't accept it?' or what? How does this system give me the ability to form expectations about what is and isn't reasonable?

If you asked me to put fluff to this stuff, I'd make up something about forming items directly from a person's soul (though I'd wonder why having low Essence doesn't grant a penalty just as high Essence grants a bonus). To me, this is not an economic (or 'wealth') system or even a model of one - it fails to fulfill the fundamental expectations that make wealth behave as wealth.

And there's still the problem that what you want to be reasonable and the message that the system is giving me are opposite of each-other, so I'm likely still going to go and roll for that +5 item every game, never upgrade my basic stuff unless I get it, and make you pull out your hair over it even if we agree on the actual exact phrasing of the rules.

Wouldn't it just be better if you just said 'here is the upgrade path I think is reasonable, every 5 sessions or when you find treasure you get a +1 upgrade, the maximum upgrade level you can have on an item is your Essence +1, and if you have debts you have to pay upgrades to remove the debts first before you can get anything'?

Knaight
2017-01-09, 09:07 AM
I'll try to be as clear as possible. The system tries to do two different things that don't coexist very well.

One type of system models the idea that shopping (and thus purchased gear) isn't important, in which case a strongly abstract system (either you can buy it in whatever quantity you need or you can't) works well. Better gear is either not a part of the system at all (some of the superhero games fit this mold) or is exclusively found on adventures. Either way, "going shopping" doesn't take any time or optimization or thought, really.

The other type of system (speaking broadly) thinks that logistics are important. In this type of a system, counting costs and having predictable costs is important. In these systems, the decision "can I afford it" is relatively straight-forward. If value(current gear) + coin > cost (new gear), then I can afford the item. Otherwise, no. I can save up between adventures, I can try to haggle, I can do many different things to either more-quickly purchase a piece of gear or to maybe avoid needing it at all. This is what I mean by "player choice." The player has many different mechanisms to interact with the subsystem (including ignoring it entirely by playing a sorcerer).

There is some room in between these - I haven't seen it done with things like a standardized seven gear qualities, and there's a reason for that. It is also generally much coarser grained, again with good reason. Generally, you get a system along these lines:

You have a handful of notable wealth classes: Usually between 5 and 10. The only exception I can think of in a good game here is REIGN, and that's only when you take the wealth scale and organizational treasure scale used for things like provinces and nations and look at both at once. You can just buy things under your wealth class, as long as you stay under a multiplier, doing so doesn't change your wealth. For expensive purchases at your wealth class you'll generally have to roll, a success means you get the item, a failure means you get the item and your wealth class goes down. For purchases above your wealth class, a success means you get the item and your wealth class goes down, a failure means that you can't afford the item even with the sort of expenditure that permanently reducing your wealth class matches.

This can work with gear increases mattering, particularly when expensive gear is treated as expensive. If you're in a period where a suit of mail costs as much as a house, then yeah, getting enough money to buy it could be a big deal. If your gear upgrade is something like buying a bigger space ship, a similar thing can apply. It hits a particular mix - unless you're really broke, most gear won't matter. The money exchanged that we care about are the big chunks, and the day to day can be glossed over.

Moving back to the system that spawned this thread: There is already something like that there. Essence, and in particular its x10 Copies feature maps pretty well to this. If you can plausibly buy 1000 copies of something at all, then buying 1 is pretty insignificant. Currently there is more than a 1000 times variation, so that's not actually the case (and that's a problem, patches were discussed above but I'd recommend scrapping the system entirely). There's also mechanics in place where Essence gradually increases, so I assume a standard wealth increase is supposed to be part of that.

I'd also look to a different part of the d20 system here: Size Categories. This seems odd, but bear with me: There's a fairly small range (Fine->Colossal 3e style is only 9 categories) of sizes, and each size covers a big chunk. An 8' 501 pound giant and a 16' 3999 pound giant both fit within the Large category. The scale is approximately exponential, much the same as wealth. Then, within the sizes you have the rest of the creatures stats for fine tuning; that 8' giant is going to be weaker and less tough than that 16' giant.

The same thing could be applied here. You have a certain number of wealth categories. As you want 7 upgrade levels, 7 wealth categories work pretty well. As you have a -2 through +5, the first two will be variations on poor, the last five variations on rich. I'll be borrowing from d20 Modern here, mostly because they took all the good terms:
Broke - Poor - Comfortable - Prosperous - Affluent - Wealthy - Rich - Opulent*.

Below your wealth category, everything is effectively free. Buying a bundle of items (x10) bumps them up one wealth category, that does make the richest 10 million times richer than the poorest, but that's not unrealistic. Within a wealth category is where the rolls come in - roll a 1d20 vs. Purchase Difficulty, where more expensive bits of gear can be put higher on the d20 scale. Maybe armor is generally more expensive than weapons or whatever; the weight categories could be used here with the term "weight" stripped out. That 1d20 is where things like crafting, business skill, etc. come in. If the roll is successful, the wealth category stays the same, otherwise it is temporarily depressed and now you have to scrounge. Things like fleeting loot could also be included in these rolls, as a one time bonus (that obviously isn't spent if you don't buy anything, and that only counts if you're buying something in the same wealth class). Want to buy something one wealth class up? You can try, but there purchase DC is 20 higher, and succeeding causes wealth class to permanently drop. Still, it's early access to a higher class of item, and hopefully with it you can get the sort of loot needed to restore your previous wealth.

If you have loot below your wealth class, it goes away - subsumed into your current wealth. Loot above your wealth class can be used to attempt to permanently raise it. I'm seeing a deliberate use of essence here for wealth, so I'd just tie the single adventure loot to the wealth class that corresponds to essence.

*There's a part of me that wants to include the terms "loaded" and "filthy rich", but they don't work too well.

Segev
2017-01-09, 11:28 AM
Given that this system is exclusive to the PCs, what happens if the PCs try to do what NichG suggests, and find other adventuring groups? Let's say the PCs are at the higher end of Essence, and go to low-Essence parties to offer them those 25 +1 items in exchange for them going shopping on the PCs' behalf for a +5 item.

What do you, as GM, have happen?

Remember, the PCs are essentially hiring multiple NPC groups to do their shopping for them. If you did use the same system for these NPCs, you'd have the NPCs make that roll for each group, as NichG outlined. Since the NPCs don't use that system, how do you determine whether the NPCs can find the item(s) requested? Does this method have the same chance of success per unit time/wealth spent "shopping" as if they did use this system?


I keep focusing on what you WANT players to do for much the same reason NichG and others keep telling you what the optimal behavior they see within your system is: systems don't necessarily do what the designer thinks they do, in terms of optimality. Because players will constantly try to get the most out of a system, at least insofar as they can be bothered to have interest in learning the system. If they misjudge optimality, they may go the "wrong" way on it, but they'll be trying. (They also will tend to be frustrated if their efforts make them worse off.)

And $2d6/hour's variance is such that, unless you enjoy your job enough to not get frustrated and quit after a bad roll or two, it will be valued less than $6.50/hour, even though it'll average out, usually, to $7/hour. Because the randomness is undesirable. It's harder to plan for, and leads to risk of unsatisfactory pay checks.

If it weren't a teen doing it for pocket money, it could be outright disastrous, in fact.

ImNotTrevor
2017-01-09, 03:03 PM
I would honestly look to things like Apocalypse World and Dungeon World for ways to abstract your equipment sets.

In AW, you have Barter. (Essentially your wealth.)
In 1e, 1 Barter is basically sufficient wealth (including both stuff to literally barter with and local currency) that is sufficient to last you for 1 month or 1 major purchase.

Whenever an in-game month passes, you lose 1 Barter. Whenever you try to buy something, there's a roll involved with 3 levels of success.



When you go into a holding’s bustling market, looking for some particular thing to buy, and it’s not obvious whether you should be able to just go buy one like that, roll+sharp. On a 10+, yes, you can just go buy it like that. On a 7–9, the
MC chooses one of the following:
• it costs 1-barter more than you’d expect
• it’s available, but only if you meet with a guy who knows a guy
• damn, I had one, I just sold it to this guy named Rolfball, maybe you can go get it off
him?
• sorry, I don’t have that, but maybe this will do instead?
[On a miss, no dice. Can't get it.]


Yes, there are a bit more narrative-oriented bits here and it's got more outcomes involved than D&D, but it should work with tweaking. Here's me full set of tweaks:

Each character gets Wealth from their adventures. The amount is based on the difficulty, and is done per-character. Roguish types should be able to make some kind of check to sneak off with one additional Barter.
Wealth is totalled up at the end of the adventure, plus any particularly outstanding items that remain separate.

When characters go to buy, we have a mechanic that emulates the ones above. If it is a small trinket item, it costs no Wealth until you're buying a lot. Then it costs Wealth. (DM draws this line based on what's reasonable. Getting 20 candles without spending Wealth is fine. Getting 100 might not be.)
If the item is bigger-ticket, you engage the rule:
On a success, they get the item for the amount of Wealth you'd expect. (Perhaps 1 Wealth per +1 bonus, etc. Would require fine-tuning of math but should be pretty common sense stuff.)
On a failure they choose:
Lose no Wealth and don't get the item,
Or lose +50% more barter (minimum 1, round up) and get the item anyways.

For things like simple tools, offer items like this:
Adventurer's Kit:
This item has 5 charges. Spend a charge to just so happen to have the item you need right now in the kit. Write down what Item that is. It is part of the kit permanently.

Have that cost 1 barter and limit them to carrying one at a time. (Yes, this does encourage them to buy a new Adventuring kit every new adventure. Which isn't a bad thing.)

Throw in a Potions and Poisons kit that allows for most basic potions and poisons to also be drawn forth because they just so happened to be in there, costing probably 2 barter, and then a couple other kits and you could pretty much breeze through the Inventory part entirely.

This is a rough framework and not a detailed system, but it should be a fairly solid springboard for better ideas.

Talakeal
2017-01-10, 04:56 PM
Not everyone is bad at probabilities and many many more people never buy lottery tickets or find slot machines interesting. Forcing that stuff on your players will not necessarily provide more fun. What is more, those that really are bad at statistics will not use your system in any sensible way.

You could calculate the chance to be worse off exactly, That is the sum of 80W6. But most people wouldn't bother and instead calculate the variance (which comes trivially from the single dice variance) and use a Gaussian table or something.

But with the same average the random wage would be worse because it can't be planned for. Which is why all of the finance industry puts a price tag on "risk" in addition to considering the averages.

Thanks for the system explaination. That helps a lot.

No, that is not optimal at all. That is just what you want them to do.

Upgrading items step by step is literally the least amount of power gain you can have per upgrade. And it costs the same amount of rolls as upgrading several steps at once for the same end item. It would be far far better to start shooting for +5 from the beginning or going for +4 from the beginning (with the intend to never get 5 with this particular item and use further rolls for different characters/item sets) or at worst go +2, then +5 if you think you might not survive with basic equipment until you have managed the roll.

So yes, the whole stuff is worse than 3.5 (with its "can be further enchanted and you only pay the difference" and its wealth per level) in getting you the player behavior that you want. That is not that surprising because the 3.5 rule designers wanted the same thing, that players increase stepwise with the odd rare treasure thrown in here and there.


The only thing that can save your system is the essence rule. Essence makes it significantly easier to buy level appropriate items. Really the essence thing changes the system completely and is the only rule bit at all that makes the kind of upgrade process you want a viable strategy. When you sketched you system earlier in the thread, this was missing and thus everyone told you that your system can't possibly work. With essence, it can work.

Slightly annoying is that essence works better to simulate wealth than your actual wealth score does. Wealth is a linear wealth progression, essence is an exponential wealth progression. In the same way rarity works better as price than the value of the item does. Both things are part of the reason why your narrative explainations didn't really fit.





There is math for that. How familiar are you really with statistics ? If you don't know, what a variance or a standard deviatin is, i really suggest you look it up. That scratches the bare minimum a rules designer should know. If you do know this stuff already, there are things like the Poisson distribution, multinomial distributions, basic combinatoric, higher momentums, Markov processes, correlations, attractors and the central limit theorem which might be worth at least a glance.

Not every rule designer needs to be a statistician, but, well, statistics is helpful in handling randomness.



Really ? How many +4 rings can a +4 full plate buy ?

it is not a good move to couple weight and price when different material and different production techniques are involved or when the price comes from enchantments and heavier items don't store more magic. But that is a separate problem and just a price list issue, nothing necessarily linked to your wealth system.



The problem here is not PC and NPC, it is mixing a wealth system with exponential scale and a classical linear scaling bartering system. If you apply an abstraction sometimes and not at other times and then exploit the inconsistancies willfully then the fault lies not with the rules.

Not everyone is bad with probability true, but it is my understanding that most people, even if they intellectually know the odds, will act as if the extreme results were far more likely than they are.

I find it weird that people who hate randomness are playing dice games, but those people can simply ignore the randomness and pay double cost for everything. (In my previous post I have it set so that is only things at your essence level but I have already changed the rules for you can do it with anything).

Randomness absolutely does have a cost, that is why I erred in the PCs favor.


Are you sure that upgrading step by step is bad? Have you actually run the math on it? Because the way it seems to me on paper, most parties will be flat out unable to buy +5 equipment off the start, and they are extremely unlikely to ever get a piece of +4 gear. +3 is doable is they are optimized for wealth, but most parties will be stuck buying +1 with the occasional +2. I need to run some more play testing to tell for sure, but if you see something in the math that I am missing I would love to hear about it (not sarcastic, it is fully possible I missed something and if that is the case I would like to know).

This is just the rules for buying stuff. You absolutely can upgrade or enchant items once you buy them.

Essence does better represent wealth than wealth, that is true. Wealth is a measure of how flush you are with "liquid resources" (which might be favors, or trade goods, or something else instead of cold hard money) at any given moment, while Essence is your place in the world. For example, if someone had a law degree and was a partner in a high power law firm that would mean more to me when I was issuing them a line of credit than how much they currently had in their checking account.


I don't know as much statistics as I would like. I took all the statistics classes I could in college, but they usually had jack**** to say about probability, rarely spending more than one week a semester on it and I am a very hands on learner and have a visual learning disability so it is pretty hard for me to learn something just by buying and reading a textbook on my own. I am always eager to learn more.


Rings are treasure. Full plate is equipment. Treasure has no listed value, the exchange rate is worth whatever the DM thinks is appropriate.


It's roughly correlated at best though. You point out the sword line, but on the other hand consider the spyglass, the amazing lock, and the bedroll. The bedroll is by far the largest, it's also by far the cheapest. The correlation is loose enough that just dropping it entirely and evaluating stuff on a case by case basis would probably work better.

As for the rest of it - the system is all sorts of screwy, and it made it off your notepad because if you don't actually do the math and look at it it looks superficially reasonable. Coming up with systems that turn out to be iffy and need to be scrapped is routine - I have a fairly sizable computer folder of rejected mechanics, and that's without even getting into the scattered notebooks. There's some die-number/die-size attribute-skill linkage stuff that turned out not to work, there was my difficulty dice roll-them-all-under mechanic with a variable skill score that turned out to have a screwy failure curve, there's at least four* attempts at getting a functional thoroughly mechanized spirit-binding magic system for Fudge that haven't panned out, so on and so forth. Heck, I have a few hundred lines of MATLAB code for a tactical combat system which runs a bunch of calculations, and those hundred lines revealed that the system behind it was generally screwy and it had to be dropped.

This is one of those systems. The Essence quantity multiplier doesn't work. Among other things, the +5/Essence, x10/Essence, and +5/+1 Quality effectively make the value of things of higher quality exponential to a kind of ridiculous degree. The high quality gear is worth literally ten million times as much as the low quality gear. On top of that, the 20 range of the die and established link between +5 and x10 via Essence makes a die range cover four orders of magnitude. A maximum roll gives you almost 10,000 times as much buying power as a minimum roll (6309.6 times, more precisely). This is clearly ridiculous.

Fortunately, that number is also really easy to tweak. Define 3 variables, A, B, and C. A is the die bonus one Essence gives (so, currently +5). B is the item number multiplier one essence gives (currently x10). C is the range of the dice (currently 19, from 20-1), but can also be used to compare any two differences. The implicit wealth gap thus works out to: B^(C/A), assuming that essence and quality stay equivalent. So, lets fiddle with some numbers. I'll assume the d20 is set in stone, but it's worth noting that while the maximum difference is 19 the average magnitude of the difference between 2 rolls is about 6.36**.

So, lets use those to numbers for C consistently. For now, I'll leave the +5 in place and just vary the x10, changing B. Thus we'll be looking at Maximum Spread and Typical Spread for different multipliers.
x1: 1, 1. Obviously this doesn't work too well.
x2: 2.4, 13.9
x3: 4.0, 65.0
x4: 5.8, 194.0
x5: 7.7, 453.0
x6: 9.8, 905.7
x7: 11.9, 1627.0
x8: 14.1, 2702.4
x9: 16.3, 4427.9
x10: 18.7, 6309.6

I see two trends here. One is that for the typical roll any multiplier is actually pretty reasonable, the other is that it gets out of hand quickly. At x10, having enough to reliably buy a candy bar ($1, guaranteed) also means that there's an off chance you can afford college tuition for a semester. How I wish this were true. So, time to mess with B: That +5/Essence on a d20 is causing issues here. I'll also leave the x1 through x10 in, but this time lets bump it to +10/Essence, with quality being similarly bumped.
x1: 1, 1. Obviously this doesn't work too well.
x2: 1.5, 3.7
x3: 2.0, 8.0
x4: 2.4, 13.9
x5: 2.8, 21.3
x6: 3.1, 30.1
x7: 3.4, 40.3
x8: 3.8, 52.0
x9: 4.0, 65.0
x10: 4.3, 79.4

I like these numbers a lot better, and at the higher end of the range they still work fairly well for windfalls. The typical fluctuation is fairly reasonable across the board, and the high end fluctuation stays put. Now, time to talk user end: x10 is much, much easier to use than the rest of these. x2, x4, x8, and x5 are then not too terrible, the rest pretty much suck to deal with. x7 in particular is miserable. A table could alleviate this, but I'm a big believer in avoiding tables whenever possible. So lets play with that +10 now, keeping the x10 in, and try to get some behavior. I'm not duplicating the whole 1 to 20 range I used in my code, but I can summarize it. At the low end the oscillation is just obscene, which is to be expected, with highlights being six orders of magnitude on typical fluctuation. It levels out pretty dramatically as things go on. There's a bit of a sweet spot from about 9 to 15, with between 5.1 and 2.65 times typical fluctuation and 129.1 and 18.5 times max fluctuation. If you must keep this system, pick a number in that range. I used GUI Octave to run the math here, it's a freeware version of Matlab. The code is below, run the top section to vary multiplier and the second to vary bonus.

clc
clear
B = 10; %The bonus provided by one point of essence.
C = [6.35714285714,19]; %The dice range.
Max=10; %Maximum multiplier tested
WealthSmall=zeros(1,Max)
WealthLarge=zeros(1,Max)
for A = 1:Max %The batch multiplier.
WealthSmall(A) = A.^(C(1)./B);
WealthLarge(A) = A.^(C(2)./B);
end
disp(WealthSmall)
disp(WealthLarge)

clc
clear
A = 10; %The bonus provided by one point of essence.
C = [6.35714285714,19]; %The dice range.
Max=20; %Maximum multiplier tested
WealthSmall=zeros(1,Max)
WealthLarge=zeros(1,Max)
for B = 1:Max %The batch multiplier.
WealthSmall(B) = A.^(C(1)./B);
WealthLarge(B) = A.^(C(2)./B);
end
disp(WealthSmall)
disp(WealthLarge)

Note that this fundamentally doesn't prevent Essence from being a better wealth indicator than wealth is, but as each point of Essence is basically five points of wealth (among other things) that's inecitable. I'd decouple it from the multiplier though, and just have a x10 multiplier come from a +whatever increase in purchase difficulty.

*Organization has never been one of my better skills, so these documents sometimes just vanish into the ether. That throws counts off sometimes for things which I've iterated extensively.
**Linear interpolation of anydice data. There are all sorts of issues with using this measure, but rather than get into those weeds I figure I might as well just present that data and acknowledge that there are reasons to avoid it.

The system isn't for stuff like bedrolls, that is just free or included in a "kit". You are really only looking at stuff like weapons, armor, potions, and skill tools.

The x10 value modifier is something I have been using for literally decades because it makes the math super simple. It is a bit of an abstraction, but it honestly doesn't seem that weird to. If you are comparing a +5 item to a -2 item, you are literally comparing a legendary weapon of kings and heroes passed down through the generations and made by a legendary smith and imbued with power by the gods themselves to sharpened sticks and stones. If a character had the wealth and prestige to acquire one I can't see it taking too much trouble to acquire the other.

While in the real world we don't have legendary magical swords, I think you would find that there are indeed pieces of military hardware that cost ten million times what others cost, for example a Nimitz class aircraft carrier costs the navy roughly 10.5 billion dollars to make while a k-bar combat knife retails for about 70 bucks.

I will admit that the system for buying items below your essence level is the most vague and least thought out part of the system because it isn't something players are likely to do very often. I would say the swinginess probably has less to do with actual value and more to do with finding someone who has that much inventory to move at any given time along with the problems in distributing it.

But yeah, that part of the system is very rough and will almost certainly need revision.

Thank you very much for taking out the time to write out the crunchy parts of this post, again I have saved it and will study it when I get the chance.

Knaight
2017-01-10, 07:03 PM
The x10 value modifier is something I have been using for literally decades because it makes the math super simple. It is a bit of an abstraction, but it honestly doesn't seem that weird to. If you are comparing a +5 item to a -2 item, you are literally comparing a legendary weapon of kings and heroes passed down through the generations and made by a legendary smith and imbued with power by the gods themselves to sharpened sticks and stones. If a character had the wealth and prestige to acquire one I can't see it taking too much trouble to acquire the other.

The big issue is the x10 and +5 link. I have no issue with the price range*, I do have an issue with wealth fluctuation to the tune of four orders of magnitude on a per roll basis. That's where everything went way off, and that's what needs to be fixed if you keep the existing system. I still recommend going back to the drawing board.

*I wouldn't attempt to ground it in realism based on modern expenditures, because that argument is full of holes, but genre convention has your back here.

IreliVent
2017-01-10, 10:52 PM
Ok, I'm going to ignore the 8 pages of people nit-picking a system they don't have the full rules for and try to address Talakeal's initial questions of why his players feel like the system cheats them out of money and how he can make it more more palatable to them.

Your players feel like the system can cheat you out of money because it can. If you bring home a bunch of treasure and fail all the bonus rolls it gives you then that treasure just evaporated without you gaining anything and that feels REALLY bad. Even if that's a highly unlikely thing to happen the fact that it even can happen is going to bug people. See normally you pretty much only ever lose treasure as a result of your own actions, either you spend it or it's lost, stolen or destroyed as a result of your own poor choices. Players have been heavily trained to think of money as something that only ever goes away because of your own choices. No one minds missing an attack roll because all it cost you was time, it would have disappeared if you hadn't used it and you get more next round anyways. You also can't hoard attacks to use them at a later date for more effect, but hoarding money to get a larger effect at a later date is a fundamental part of many games.

In summary collecting treasure and gaining nothing from it feels bad and implementing a system where this can happen will feel like the GM is adding rules that can screw over the PCs for no reason, even if the rules will result in on average increasing what the PCs are able to buy. The problem isn't that buying things is random, it's that collected treasure has a chance to evaporate into nothing just because you rolled badly.

So how do you make the players feel good while still solving the problem of them living like mud-hobos just because it's the optimal way to gain gear and make non-adventuring skills like craft and profession matter a little more?

Simple, since your system seems to already be solving the latter two problems, all you have to do is make treasure collected while adventuring always have a permanent effect. Obviously you can't have every piece of loot the players sell permanently increase their wealth score but I've though of some potential ways to give collected treasure permanent effects that hopefully shouldn't take too much work to implement/shouldn't break everything.

1. In addition to granting a bonus roll, every X bonus rolls worth of treasure collected permanently increases your wealth score by 1. you'd need to balance how much total treasure it takes to increase your wealth score yourself and probably rebalance other things that increase your wealth score to work alongside this system, but it changes "I spent all my bonus rolls trying to get this rare item and got nothing, I guess the shopkeeper stole my dragon hoard" to "I spent all month trying to get this rare item but couldn't find one I could afford so I shrugged and invested my money in local businesses/put it in a savings account to earn interest/spent it going to fancy parties to build political capital.

2. Bonus rolls don't go away unless they succeed. This ones pretty simple, if a bonus roll from treasure collected while adventuring fails to give you an item, instead of going away you get to roll it again during your next month of downtime. This can keep repeating until the bonus roll succeeds or the campaign ends. This one probably just needs you to change the difficulty of checks to acquire items to account for all the extra rolls the players will be getting.

3. Make things slightly less abstract. It seems like having a "wealth score" that makes all non-adventuring stuff you might reasonably be able to acquire free would solve the mud-hobo problem by itself. make wealth checks only determine whether you find the item for sale and let players hoard and spend gp normally on adventuring related expenses. maybe give players with higher wealth scores a certain amount of extra gp per month on top of what they collect by adventuring and let players buy an item on a failed roll at a markup based on how much they failed by and get a discount if they succeed by a large margin. This one might take a bit more work to implement depending on how much content you've already made based around wealth rolls being used to buy things that would have to be changed.

TL;DR collecting treasure and then getting nothing from it due to bad die rolls feels really bad and you should implement systems that ensure successfully collected treasure always results in permanent gains if you want your players to feel less bad. Your system seems more or less fine otherwise.

Segev
2017-01-11, 11:23 AM
As the post before mine reiterates, it sounds like Talakeal's players are upset that they're getting nothing for the wealth they spent that time period. Even if that's an inaccurate mapping of what Talakeal intends his system to represent, that's the mapping they associate.

I think both the flawed mapping AND the "shopping time" mapping that I think Talakeal has said was his goal are better met by inverting the "pick item to shop for -> roll to see if you can find it" order of operations. "Roll to see what items you can find -> Pick an item on the list of what you could obtain," seems both to better simulate shopping ("I was hoping to find a +5 shield, but this +2 lance is the best I found...so I got it") and wealth-expenditures ("I was hoping I could find a wagon, but all I could afford was this horse, so I got that").

And it will resolve the "the system cheated me out of wealth" problem: the players get something out of it every time.

Talakeal
2017-01-11, 03:24 PM
I'm trying to really make it clear where the incoherence is, since I and a lot of other people have been repeatedly telling you about it in words with you just saying 'I believe my system does not have this problem'. By putting it in numbers and showing just how ridiculous things can get, I was hoping to make it really crystal clear what's wrong, so we don't keep going in circles of 'your system is broken', 'nuh-uh, I believe it's fine'.

But okay, you say that doesn't follow the rules because the only people using this system are the PCs.

I'm not a stranger to that kind of thing, but for an economics system - which is a social agreement, basically - that would really make me boggle. We're talking about the emergent conventions associated with totally mundane, reasonable actions, just repeated at scale. If you block that and force abstraction, you're cutting out a ton of what to me should be completely reasonable actions for a PC to propose. That's a huge cost.

Do NPCs not buy items? When you buy an item, is it impossible to give it to another person? If I offer an NPC something they want in exchange for something else, will they say 'sorry, you've given things to too many people this week, I can't accept it?' or what? How does this system give me the ability to form expectations about what is and isn't reasonable?

If you asked me to put fluff to this stuff, I'd make up something about forming items directly from a person's soul (though I'd wonder why having low Essence doesn't grant a penalty just as high Essence grants a bonus). To me, this is not an economic (or 'wealth') system or even a model of one - it fails to fulfill the fundamental expectations that make wealth behave as wealth.

And there's still the problem that what you want to be reasonable and the message that the system is giving me are opposite of each-other, so I'm likely still going to go and roll for that +5 item every game, never upgrade my basic stuff unless I get it, and make you pull out your hair over it even if we agree on the actual exact phrasing of the rules.

NPCs shop off screen. They have whatever equipment the GM thinks is appropriate for them. If you want to trade with an NPC go ahead.

The idea that economics don't have to follow the same rules for PCs and NPCs isn't a new one, go to the D&D section of the boards and you will find hundreds of threads talking about how the D&D setting doesn't make sense if you follow the rules literally, and the most common response is because the rules are about 3-6 adventurers exploring a dungeon and killing the monsters within and therefore don't need to simulate the entire world.

Also, to give a more concrete example of using the same logic in D&D: In 3.X all magic items have a fixed cost. You sell items for half of this. Why on Earth would PCs ever put up with this? Why wouldn't they just find other adventuring parties and agree to split the difference and sell everything to each other at 75% value?


Wouldn't it just be better if you just said 'here is the upgrade path I think is reasonable, every 5 sessions or when you find treasure you get a +1 upgrade, the maximum upgrade level you can have on an item is your Essence +1, and if you have debts you have to pay upgrades to remove the debts first before you can get anything'?

Maybe. That system would work fine if you didn't have anyone who wanted to use any of the skills or backgrounds that affect wealth. Indeed, if no one in the party wants to pick up any of the skills that affect wealth that is almost exactly how the system does work*. And it removes the possibility of getting something outside of your means.

*The only real difference being that everything costs the same, so you are better off just upgrading your weapons and armor to essence +1 before upgrading any of your other gear to essence +0.

Alent
2017-01-11, 04:09 PM
NPCs shop off screen. They have whatever equipment the GM thinks is appropriate for them. If you want to trade with an NPC go ahead.

To ask a question- what's wrong with making them do their regular shopping off screen?

Just tell the group something like "I am not the Ironforge Auction house, I will not sit here and give you shopping list after shopping list after shopping list after shopping list after shopping list anymore. Shopping now happens between sessions, I will E-mail/PM everyone a list of what items the vendors have available and what categories of item crafters and what their caster level limits for crafting are. Reply with your purchases and commission requests, every session will start with the party having wrapped up their shopping so that we can begin roleplay."

Then because you don't enjoy this part of the game, find a tool to generate the vendor lists, generate something like 5 or 6 sets for each vendor and pick the one that looks the most reasonable to you.

It seems to me you're going way out of your way to get the desired result- I respect that, I'm doing my own excessive load of work to fix the same economic problems you mentioned in the paragraph after what I quoted. (I go in the opposite direction in my own fix where I've developed an abstract economy system to simulate the global flow and consumption of goods, but make the market level stuff an exercise in excel since I enjoy that.) I just mention it as the problem you're facing is one that can potentially be fixed by instating new table etiquette instead of a new economic system.

Also, I was once told that as abstract wealth D20 systems go, FantasyCraft has a really good one. I haven't had a chance to investigate it for myself yet, but it apparently has a "Lifestyle" stat that determines social strata, perhaps that could help structure the social side of your campaign's class conflict?

Talakeal
2017-01-11, 04:13 PM
I'll try to be as clear as possible. The system tries to do two different things that don't coexist very well.

One type of system models the idea that shopping (and thus purchased gear) isn't important, in which case a strongly abstract system (either you can buy it in whatever quantity you need or you can't) works well. Better gear is either not a part of the system at all (some of the superhero games fit this mold) or is exclusively found on adventures. Either way, "going shopping" doesn't take any time or optimization or thought, really.

The other type of system (speaking broadly) thinks that logistics are important. In this type of a system, counting costs and having predictable costs is important. In these systems, the decision "can I afford it" is relatively straight-forward. If value(current gear) + coin > cost (new gear), then I can afford the item. Otherwise, no. I can save up between adventures, I can try to haggle, I can do many different things to either more-quickly purchase a piece of gear or to maybe avoid needing it at all. This is what I mean by "player choice." The player has many different mechanisms to interact with the subsystem (including ignoring it entirely by playing a sorcerer).
You are making a lot of assertions here that I don't necessarily agree with.

First off, there are a lot of (maybe most) RPG systems which fall between these two extremes.

Second off, I don't know why logistics and long term planning are vital to a game. It might be part of a specific person's fantasy for the game, say a need for financial security that they don't have IRL, but I don't see why it needs to be important to every game.

For fluff purchases and lifestyle expenses my system goes full on "abstract".

For upgrading adventuring gear I am trying to go for a hybrid approach.

Now, except for saving up between adventures my system allows you to do all of the things you list as choice except for mechanically saving up.
But as I have repeatedly said, repeatedly trying to roll for a rare item is effectively the same; you the ignore cheaper and more immediate purchases to get a more expensive item at a later date. The only real difference is that you make the players make the variance roll at the time rather than the DM doing it when he is rolling up monster treasure.


Your system has neither of these properties. It's very crunchy--the "can purchase" decision is a function of 5 variables, all of them independent from each other. It mixes linear and exponential scales (which makes interactions between the variables non-linear and really really complicated). This all tells me that shopping is a major part of the world. It's a mini-game that needs to be optimized for (by having the highest possible business skill). However, the only one who can interact with this subsystem is the party face. Anyone else trying to "go shopping" will make the party as a whole exponentially less successful by splitting the wealth of the party. Since I don't play faces...this locks me out of this whole mini-game entirely. There's nothing I can do during downtime to assist (other than crafting, which by your own admission doesn't change what you can buy but only how much you can buy). More income (wealth) should mean that I can purchase better stuff, not just more of the same quality. You've got duplication in your numbers--business skill and wealth both oppose quality and value, just in strange ways.

It might look crunchy if you aren't familiar with the system, but it really isn't. I mean, five variables sound like a lot, but look at how many variables just go into a simple attack roll in D&D.

Your complaints about needing a party face are less about the wealth system and more about the style of game. Imagine if you rewrote that paragraph but replaced "shopping" with "traps" and "face" with face with "rogue".
Some games, like 4E, want everyone in the party to be involved in everything 100% of the time, other games allow people to take turns in the spotlight. My system is one of the latter. There is nothing wrong with the former, but they are very different and mostly incompatible design goals.
Also, while you may not be shopping, you should still have something to do during downtime. About a third of all the skills in the game have a downtime use (more if you count ritual spells cast by wizards); if you choose not to take any of them and then are bored during downtime that is kind of your own fault.

What do you mean "which by your own admission doesn't change what you can buy but only how much you can buy"? The by your own admission part makes it sound like some horrible incrimination, but is it really that weird that you don't craft unique items that for some reason aren't available for sale anywhere in the world?
Crafting is a completely different way of accessing gear, and the amount and availability will be totally different. What more would you expect?



Conversely, the prices aren't fixed and predictable. I can't make any decisions for the future--it all depends on the results of the last mission and the dice. This is unsatisfying to me and imbalanced between those who are strongly gear dependent (traditionally martial types) and those who are less gear-dependent (traditionally magical types). Of course, if everyone is equally gear dependent (due to the rest of the game system), then this particular objection is less valid.

Again, personal preference. If you like to have long term control and concrete plans it is not a system for you. For someone like myself who enjoys freedom and flexibility when it comes to finances systems like this are a godsend.


On the other hand, it's not a fully concrete system. Everything depends on luck...and lots of luck. I can't save up, since everything resets to zero. I can't play a character who has a goal of saving up to buy a tavern and retire, because I can't save anything. It's designed to tell the story of a group of adventurers who spend their "off-duty time" carousing and spending all their cash. They're living hand-to-mouth even when they're pulling in whole town incomes in an adventure (the problem with mixing linear and exponential scales). This is what I meant by "only meant to tell a single [type of] story." It precludes many other types of character types--they're mechanically unfit.

This doesn't strike me as accurate.
Why can you not be saving up to buy a tavern and retire? And what says you have to carouse and spend all of your cash? Those are both possibilities suggested by the text, neither one is forced or denied.
You absolutely can save up to by a tavern. Why couldn't you?
Imagine trying to tell that story in D&D; I say I am saving up for a tavern but if 100% of my income doesn't go to upgrading my gear I am being mechanically punished for it. So instead I will say that I am investing in my gear and hoping it doesn't get lost or destroyed in my adventures, then when I choose to retire I will sell it for half of what I put into it (at best), and then hope that I never need to come out of retirement, say to defend my inn from a rampaging dragon, because I have no adventuring gear left.

Now, what you might be asking is, why can't I game the system by claiming I am saving up all of my money for a tavern and then one day "changing my mind" and raiding my savings to buy a +10 sword for a mechanical bonus on the purchasing table.



It forces the party to work together as a single unit here--increasing the chances of squabbling. Pooled wealth systems only work if everyone agrees on all the purchases. Otherwise it gets painful. Been there (in game and IRL), done that. Don't want it again.

If your party can't or won't work together you have bigger issues than shopping.
Just because you pool wealth for investment purposes doesn't mean you can't split the rewards. For example, I imagine if you ever played a 3.5 game with crafting in it people didn't take redundant skills and feats, that's just wasteful. I would wager that you simply had the (hypothetical) guy with craft arms and armor make weaponry for the entire party and the guy who had craft wondrous item made miscellaneous gear for the entire party.


As an aside, if it's important (for the system's math to work) that the party has the appropriate bonuses at the appropriate "levels", just bake that into the system like 4e did with the "inherent bonus" option. This lets them choose between items that actually do something, rather than being on the upgrade treadmill. The system as it stands is simply a level gate--below essence X you can't buy item Y--above essence X you can buy any number of item Y.

Already went over this many times, but I will do so again:
1: I want merchants and crafters to be viable player archetypes.
2: I want mechanical incentives for going above and beyond the call of duty or finding treasure.
3: It allows a perfect disincentive for bad play without ending the game. Having to buy a bunch of healing potions instead of upgrading gear hurts, but not as much as wiping the party and ending the game.
4: From a narrative perspective the setting is about power, wealth, and inequality. For the storyline to work better equipment has to exist.



If you're comparing "book-keeping" to 3.X and crafting custom items, then sure. Those rules were more like guidelines anyway and weren't designed well. The difficulty there was entirely on the DM's side of the table (pricing). Once the price was fixed, the can-buy/can't-buy decision was simple comparison. Everything had fixed prices that never changed. Comparing to a crappy system is, as they say, a low bar to clear.
The problem is that due to the nature of the forum 3.5 is the one system almost everyone here understands. You said that the system is slow and clunky and that you would prefer to play under the most copper counting-est DM available, which to me meant you were inviting a comparison to D&D.

Talakeal
2017-01-11, 05:04 PM
There is some room in between these - I haven't seen it done with things like a standardized seven gear qualities, and there's a reason for that. It is also generally much coarser grained, again with good reason. Generally, you get a system along these lines:

You have a handful of notable wealth classes: Usually between 5 and 10. The only exception I can think of in a good game here is REIGN, and that's only when you take the wealth scale and organizational treasure scale used for things like provinces and nations and look at both at once. You can just buy things under your wealth class, as long as you stay under a multiplier, doing so doesn't change your wealth. For expensive purchases at your wealth class you'll generally have to roll, a success means you get the item, a failure means you get the item and your wealth class goes down. For purchases above your wealth class, a success means you get the item and your wealth class goes down, a failure means that you can't afford the item even with the sort of expenditure that permanently reducing your wealth class matches.

This can work with gear increases mattering, particularly when expensive gear is treated as expensive. If you're in a period where a suit of mail costs as much as a house, then yeah, getting enough money to buy it could be a big deal. If your gear upgrade is something like buying a bigger space ship, a similar thing can apply. It hits a particular mix - unless you're really broke, most gear won't matter. The money exchanged that we care about are the big chunks, and the day to day can be glossed over.

Moving back to the system that spawned this thread: There is already something like that there. Essence, and in particular its x10 Copies feature maps pretty well to this. If you can plausibly buy 1000 copies of something at all, then buying 1 is pretty insignificant. Currently there is more than a 1000 times variation, so that's not actually the case (and that's a problem, patches were discussed above but I'd recommend scrapping the system entirely). There's also mechanics in place where Essence gradually increases, so I assume a standard wealth increase is supposed to be part of that.

I'd also look to a different part of the d20 system here: Size Categories. This seems odd, but bear with me: There's a fairly small range (Fine->Colossal 3e style is only 9 categories) of sizes, and each size covers a big chunk. An 8' 501 pound giant and a 16' 3999 pound giant both fit within the Large category. The scale is approximately exponential, much the same as wealth. Then, within the sizes you have the rest of the creatures stats for fine tuning; that 8' giant is going to be weaker and less tough than that 16' giant.

The same thing could be applied here. You have a certain number of wealth categories. As you want 7 upgrade levels, 7 wealth categories work pretty well. As you have a -2 through +5, the first two will be variations on poor, the last five variations on rich. I'll be borrowing from d20 Modern here, mostly because they took all the good terms:
Broke - Poor - Comfortable - Prosperous - Affluent - Wealthy - Rich - Opulent*.

Below your wealth category, everything is effectively free. Buying a bundle of items (x10) bumps them up one wealth category, that does make the richest 10 million times richer than the poorest, but that's not unrealistic. Within a wealth category is where the rolls come in - roll a 1d20 vs. Purchase Difficulty, where more expensive bits of gear can be put higher on the d20 scale. Maybe armor is generally more expensive than weapons or whatever; the weight categories could be used here with the term "weight" stripped out. That 1d20 is where things like crafting, business skill, etc. come in. If the roll is successful, the wealth category stays the same, otherwise it is temporarily depressed and now you have to scrounge. Things like fleeting loot could also be included in these rolls, as a one time bonus (that obviously isn't spent if you don't buy anything, and that only counts if you're buying something in the same wealth class). Want to buy something one wealth class up? You can try, but there purchase DC is 20 higher, and succeeding causes wealth class to permanently drop. Still, it's early access to a higher class of item, and hopefully with it you can get the sort of loot needed to restore your previous wealth.

If you have loot below your wealth class, it goes away - subsumed into your current wealth. Loot above your wealth class can be used to attempt to permanently raise it. I'm seeing a deliberate use of essence here for wealth, so I'd just tie the single adventure loot to the wealth class that corresponds to essence.

*There's a part of me that wants to include the terms "loaded" and "filthy rich", but they don't work too well.

Ok, so the system I have been using was pretty similar to that.

Let me explain how it evolved into what I am experimenting with now:

Basically, every item was worth 10x more than the same item of one step lower quality.

The wealth rewards slowly scaled over time, so that every 20 sessions your average income would increase by a factor of ten.

Then I realized that spawned a lot of annoying book keeping and math, so instead I switched to abstract "treasure units" and then said that what constitutes a treasure unit for a low level character is not the same as a high level character.

By just chopping the last digit off of all prices every time the character's essence score increased I would have the exact same effect but with much more manageable numbers.

The problem is that if players essence score went up their existing wealth would have to be divided by ten. This LOOKS bad and the players would throw a fit (and insist on dragging fractional currency around with them forever). If existing money didn't diminish but prices did the optimal strategy would be to spend as little as possible and then have enough money to fully upgrade everyone's gear each time their essence increased, which is both unrealistic and not fun.

So I realized that I could make a game that ignored this problem and was generally more forgiving by having currency cleared at the end of each session.

That led to the problem of players being unable to save up for big ticket items, so I added in the random factor to simulate saving up; if you squirrel away a little money each session and devote it to a big ticket item you will (on average) get it in the same amount of time. But then that doesn't feel like saving, it feels like being robbed, even though it usually works out exactly the same in the long run.


Given that this system is exclusive to the PCs, what happens if the PCs try to do what NichG suggests, and find other adventuring groups? Let's say the PCs are at the higher end of Essence, and go to low-Essence parties to offer them those 25 +1 items in exchange for them going shopping on the PCs' behalf for a +5 item.

What do you, as GM, have happen?

Remember, the PCs are essentially hiring multiple NPC groups to do their shopping for them. If you did use the same system for these NPCs, you'd have the NPCs make that roll for each group, as NichG outlined. Since the NPCs don't use that system, how do you determine whether the NPCs can find the item(s) requested? Does this method have the same chance of success per unit time/wealth spent "shopping" as if they did use this system?


I keep focusing on what you WANT players to do for much the same reason NichG and others keep telling you what the optimal behavior they see within your system is: systems don't necessarily do what the designer thinks they do, in terms of optimality. Because players will constantly try to get the most out of a system, at least insofar as they can be bothered to have interest in learning the system. If they misjudge optimality, they may go the "wrong" way on it, but they'll be trying. (They also will tend to be frustrated if their efforts make them worse off.)

And $2d6/hour's variance is such that, unless you enjoy your job enough to not get frustrated and quit after a bad roll or two, it will be valued less than $6.50/hour, even though it'll average out, usually, to $7/hour. Because the randomness is undesirable. It's harder to plan for, and leads to risk of unsatisfactory pay checks.

If it weren't a teen doing it for pocket money, it could be outright disastrous, in fact.

Mechanically? I would do nothing.

Narratively, I would simply say that "Ok, you are using your treasure to invest in upcoming adventurers. Then if a roll came up good I would say the gambit paid off, if it didn't I would say that the adventuring party died, disbanded, or went rogue.

From a fiction perspective, a new adventuring party is incredibly unlikely to ever see a +5 item. They will almost certainly die or disband first, and if they do luck out and find an item of such power and rarity I would imagine most of them would simply find a way to renege on their agreement and hide it from the party, kind of like how miners will sometimes smuggle a rare gem out of their work place rather than turn it over to the mine's owner.

If the parties want to use a middle man I would actually say they are better off simply purchasing a hireling to act as a middle man, a talented artisan or broker can make up for the parties shortcomings in those areas for a modest fee and is totally rules legal.




Also, all RPG economic systems can be broken stupid easy by determined players, even if you don't break the rules. The conclusion that "the rules are bad/unfun because player's can exploit/break them to twist the setting does not logically follow in any way.

For example, let's take 3.5 and Exalted, examples of opposite ends of the spectrum.

In Exalted all items have a wealth rating. If you have a resources score higher than the items wealth rating that you can get the item trivially. This means that as long as there as a single altruistic resources five person in any given region you are living in a post scarcity society. They have unlimited access to unlimited amounts of everything that has a rating of four or less, so why not give it away, it is literally free to do and garners massive favor. Now, then, since the only items that have value are those which require resources 5, why would anyone ever have a score of 1-4? It is literally pointless! They just get limited access to what they already had unlimited access to! They only way to improve one's station is to get to resources 5 so you can finally get a piece of the pie!


Now then, by RAW in 3.5 D&D any town with a population above 2,000 is likely to have any mundane or magical item with a value of less than 3,000gp available for purchase. There are literally tens of thousands of permutations of magic items with a value of less than 3,000gp, and if the DM is playing by the RAW almost all of them will be available for purchase in this one little town. So then, why would anyone ever go into a dungeon? Why wouldn't you just burgle / raid this small town?
By RAW it has more wealth in it than all the dungeons you will ever visit! Also, because if the inequities in adventurer and monster wealth, by far the most profitable line of work compared to the danger is for high level parties to forget clearing dungeons and simply farm lower level parties, preferably while they are on their way back from said dungeons.


As for the wages, that requires you to be a very specific level of bad with money. Good enough to be able to survive on lower average wages, but not good enough to bank half of the extra income to cover a bad week.

For example, let me generate a random sample:

Assuming you get one paycheck every two weeks and work 80 hours a week:

$541
$572
$560
$559
$575
$569
$539
$531
$577
$534
$548
$565

Now, in this six month period not once did your wages fall below the $520 dollars you were making before, and you are up by almost a full paycheck. If you simply invested half of these extra earning into a "bad roll protection fund" you could easily weather the worst wage droughts that probability can realistically throw at you.


To ask a question- what's wrong with making them do their regular shopping off screen?

Just tell the group something like "I am not the Ironforge Auction house, I will not sit here and give you shopping list after shopping list after shopping list after shopping list after shopping list anymore. Shopping now happens between sessions, I will E-mail/PM everyone a list of what items the vendors have available and what categories of item crafters and what their caster level limits for crafting are. Reply with your purchases and commission requests, every session will start with the party having wrapped up their shopping so that we can begin roleplay."

Then because you don't enjoy this part of the game, find a tool to generate the vendor lists, generate something like 5 or 6 sets for each vendor and pick the one that looks the most reasonable to you.

It seems to me you're going way out of your way to get the desired result- I respect that, I'm doing my own excessive load of work to fix the same economic problems you mentioned in the paragraph after what I quoted. (I go in the opposite direction in my own fix where I've developed an abstract economy system to simulate the global flow and consumption of goods, but make the market level stuff an exercise in excel since I enjoy that.) I just mention it as the problem you're facing is one that can potentially be fixed by instating new table etiquette instead of a new economic system.

Also, I was once told that as abstract wealth D20 systems go, FantasyCraft has a really good one. I haven't had a chance to investigate it for myself yet, but it apparently has a "Lifestyle" stat that determines social strata, perhaps that could help structure the social side of your campaign's class conflict?

Several reasons:

For one thing, players won't do it. Few players are passionate enough about the games to be willing to do homework for them.

Second, it doesn't actually make the situation any less random, it is just a lot more work on my end to create the randomization.

Third, if there is nothing players want to buy they will still feel robbed by the system for not being able to save their money until next week when there is something to buy. If I allow them to save money, well then I can just throw out the randomness entirely and change the prices back from 2x per level of quality to 10x per level of quality (see above for why this is bad).

PhoenixPhyre
2017-01-11, 05:56 PM
Long post with many points made


I had a long post typed up replying to your replies but realized it came out much harsher than I intended. Instead, I'll simply mention one epiphany that I had that made me much less displeased with the system as presented.

The epiphany was this:
If I think of essence (in this context) more as reputation, the role of the essence parameter makes a whole lot more sense. At the level of rarity we're talking about (magical items, etc), purchasing one is much more a matter of finding a current owner willing to sell than it is about price.

A no-body off the streets is going to get shown the door if he inquires about a +5 item (unless a near-miracle occurs). A well-known mover-and-shaker will get shown right in and the collector will be much more willing to deal. The dealing would be much less about money than about favors/bartering/etc.

I'm still not too much of a fan of the mechanics, but the ideas make more sense to me if thought about that way. Higher essence means you've acquired a reputation as someone who can make waves at that level.

Talakeal
2017-01-11, 06:05 PM
I had a long post typed up replying to your replies but realized it came out much harsher than I intended. Instead, I'll simply mention one epiphany that I had that made me much less displeased with the system as presented.

The epiphany was this:
If I think of essence (in this context) more as reputation, the role of the essence parameter makes a whole lot more sense. At the level of rarity we're talking about (magical items, etc), purchasing one is much more a matter of finding a current owner willing to sell than it is about price.

A no-body off the streets is going to get shown the door if he inquires about a +5 item (unless a near-miracle occurs). A well-known mover-and-shaker will get shown right in and the collector will be much more willing to deal. The dealing would be much less about money than about favors/bartering/etc.

I'm still not too much of a fan of the mechanics, but the ideas make more sense to me if thought about that way. Higher essence means you've acquired a reputation as someone who can make waves at that level.

That is a major part of it, yes. That's why I made the analogy of extended a line of credit to a partner in a high powered law firm over some random hobo who has a higher balance in his checking account at this very moment for whatever reason.


I am really curious though, about what you meant about being unable to craft things that you can't buy, that kind of confused me.

Segev
2017-01-11, 06:16 PM
Exalted also has the rule in place that buying too many of a thing starts counting as a larger-Resources purchase (though they leave it up to the ST to decide when that point is hit).

I still say the easiest solution to satisfying your players with the system you've proposed is to let them roll first, then decide what item they want that could be obtained with that roll.

PhoenixPhyre
2017-01-11, 06:40 PM
That is a major part of it, yes. That's why I made the analogy of extended a line of credit to a partner in a high powered law firm over some random hobo who has a higher balance in his checking account at this very moment for whatever reason.


I am really curious though, about what you meant about being unable to craft things that you can't buy, that kind of confused me.

I never intended to say that. I have no clue what you're crafting system is like, so I was intending to simply bracket it and leave it aside. Throughout I was only intending to refer to the purchasing subsystem. I apologise if it came across differently.

On a side note, I think most of the"infinite items" shenanigans would be better handled by a DM saying "dude, wtf?" than by explicit rules. Makes the system simpler without really sacrificing anything important.

NichG
2017-01-11, 10:22 PM
NPCs shop off screen. They have whatever equipment the GM thinks is appropriate for them. If you want to trade with an NPC go ahead.

The idea that economics don't have to follow the same rules for PCs and NPCs isn't a new one, go to the D&D section of the boards and you will find hundreds of threads talking about how the D&D setting doesn't make sense if you follow the rules literally, and the most common response is because the rules are about 3-6 adventurers exploring a dungeon and killing the monsters within and therefore don't need to simulate the entire world.

Also, to give a more concrete example of using the same logic in D&D: In 3.X all magic items have a fixed cost. You sell items for half of this. Why on Earth would PCs ever put up with this? Why wouldn't they just find other adventuring parties and agree to split the difference and sell everything to each other at 75% value?


I won't really defend the 50% rule - lots of players hate it and feel that it steals value from them, and the smart ones figure out ways to use their loot rather than selling it because of that. I'd say the main difference is, when it comes to games I run, I'm not trying to use that 50% rule to accomplish something with respect to how the players are behaving. If they decide to ignore it and hoard all the +1 swords they find, that's fine by me. If they decide to trade items with other groups, that's fine by me as well. In terms of what the design purpose of that rule is (from my perspective), it's simply to put a value on serendipity versus customization, but there are other ways to do that as well which I generally make more use of.

The situation with your system is a bit different in that you're trying to achieve something specific by writing these rules. So I wouldn't settle for 'meh, they can just ignore it if they don't like it' in that case because that would mean that I've failed to actually create the change that I wanted.

(Actually, I could definitely see an adventuring guild in a D&D setting where rather than purchasing/selling items, there was a pool of 'unwanted loot' which you could get credit for putting items into and can use to borrow items from the pool. Makes perfect sense to me. Upside is better deals, downside is that they don't always have the exact item you want. If a player wanted to do this, I'd consider it a very clever thing to do given the system, and a potentially interesting source of character development. Opportunities manifest when there's a large party wipe in the east, a certain kind of magic item has started to appear more and more frequently in ancient ruins suggesting that someone might be putting them there/something fishy is going on, a merchant guild tries to undermine them, kingdom comes after them for a tax cut, etc.)



Maybe. That system would work fine if you didn't have anyone who wanted to use any of the skills or backgrounds that affect wealth. Indeed, if no one in the party wants to pick up any of the skills that affect wealth that is almost exactly how the system does work*. And it removes the possibility of getting something outside of your means.

*The only real difference being that everything costs the same, so you are better off just upgrading your weapons and armor to essence +1 before upgrading any of your other gear to essence +0.

Even without the skills, the party can just roll for +5's with all their rolls and hope for the exploding d20's, right? If the average modifier without putting specific effort into it is +15, that's a 4% chance per roll. So if they have 10 Wealth per session, that's about a +5 item every other session.

Talakeal
2017-01-12, 05:04 PM
Exalted also has the rule in place that buying too many of a thing starts counting as a larger-Resources purchase (though they leave it up to the ST to decide when that point is hit).

I still say the easiest solution to satisfying your players with the system you've proposed is to let them roll first, then decide what item they want that could be obtained with that roll.

Of course it has a common sense rule; my point was that weird exploits will come up in any system if you use the rules to do something they weren't meant to do and ignore common sense.

That is possible, although like I said it is super swingy. Also, I think the players will still get mad that their system "steals their money" if there is nothing they want to buy.



On a side note, I think most of the"infinite items" shenanigans would be better handled by a DM saying "dude, wtf?" than by explicit rules. Makes the system simpler without really sacrificing anything important.

Right, but you still get in to problems with that. The line is murky, there is a huge gray area between what is clearly a shenanigan and clearly using the system as intended, and if there is no printed rule you will have to find that line, which usually involves a lot of arguing and hurt feelings, and then figure out your own unwritten rule, it is far easier if the author could have just given you a clearer rule in the first place.


Even without the skills, the party can just roll for +5's with all their rolls and hope for the exploding d20's, right? If the average modifier without putting specific effort into it is +15, that's a 4% chance per roll. So if they have 10 Wealth per session, that's about a +5 item every other session.

To have a 15 business score without trying you would actually need to have the maximum possible charisma, including magical charisma boosting items, and this is pretty weird for someone who doesn't want to play the party face or make even the smallest investment.

And that assumes flat costs. In actuality a new party won't even get enough loot to roll for a +5 but once in a blue moon, and without specific investment in wealth or business I can see that strategy resulting in a party that goes 50 or 60 sessions without actually getting their item.

Even if it was one every other session, that still means that you are only getting 10 items every twenty sessions, which means that you are putting all of your eggs into one basket and leaving people with no consumables and no other equipment, which I don't think would be optimal in any normal situation.


The situation with your system is a bit different in that you're trying to achieve something specific by writing these rules. So I wouldn't settle for 'meh, they can just ignore it if they don't like it' in that case because that would mean that I've failed to actually create the change that I wanted.

I would say that virtually every rule in every RPG was trying to achieve something specific with its inclusion.

If people come to a dice game and are trying to avoid randomness, that is really a matter of personal preference rather than a failure of the rules. IMO trying to minimize randomness is a perfectly viable tactic, if not always the most optimal or most fun for every person / in every situation.


(Actually, I could definitely see an adventuring guild in a D&D setting where rather than purchasing/selling items, there was a pool of 'unwanted loot' which you could get credit for putting items into and can use to borrow items from the pool. Makes perfect sense to me. Upside is better deals, downside is that they don't always have the exact item you want. If a player wanted to do this, I'd consider it a very clever thing to do given the system, and a potentially interesting source of character development. Opportunities manifest when there's a large party wipe in the east, a certain kind of magic item has started to appear more and more frequently in ancient ruins suggesting that someone might be putting them there/something fishy is going on, a merchant guild tries to undermine them, kingdom comes after them for a tax cut, etc.).

Which sounds plausible, until you ask about overhead. Where are the items being stored? Who guards them? Who takes inventory? Who makes sure that no one takes more than their share? Who distributes them? What happens when everyone is depositing the same "worthless" items and taking the same "good" items? Who advertises the league and recruits members or tells them what is available?

In real life most businesses charge way more than double what they pay for the goods coming in yet still manage to fail to turn a profit.

It also assumes that there are enough like minded adventurers to form such a system. Most settings assume adventurers, particularly high level ones, are very rare and evenly distributed amongst the various alignments.

NichG
2017-01-12, 08:01 PM
To have a 15 business score without trying you would actually need to have the maximum possible charisma, including magical charisma boosting items, and this is pretty weird for someone who doesn't want to play the party face or make even the smallest investment.

And that assumes flat costs. In actuality a new party won't even get enough loot to roll for a +5 but once in a blue moon, and without specific investment in wealth or business I can see that strategy resulting in a party that goes 50 or 60 sessions without actually getting their item.

Even if it was one every other session, that still means that you are only getting 10 items every twenty sessions, which means that you are putting all of your eggs into one basket and leaving people with no consumables and no other equipment, which I don't think would be optimal in any normal situation.


Okay, +10 bonus and shoot for a +4 item then, which will still be 4%. There's a sweet spot at the border of the exploding d20 since you effectively get a free +10 on average if you hit that 20. And yes I'm assuming flat costs, because the system you posted explicitly had cost only depend on weight and quality was completely separated out.

Hyperspecialization is often an optimal strategy in many games - consider the term 'min-maxing'. Usually it comes about when other mechanics have a multiplicative effect on outcomes. For example, lets say you have one bonus +X to damage and another bonus +Y to defense. In order to kill your opponent before they kill you, you want the damage they do to you in the number of rounds it takes you to damage them to death to be less than your hitpoints. If normally they'd hit you, say, 30% of the time and every +1 to defense reduces that by 5%, then going from +0 to +1 is an increase in your survivability by 20% (if it took them 4 rounds to kill you, now it takes 4.8). Going from +1 to +2 is an increase of 25% (it now takes 6 rounds). Going from +2 to +3 is an increase of 33% (now it takes 8 rounds). Going from +3 to +4 is an increase of 50% (12 rounds). Going from +4 to +5 is an increase of 100% (24 rounds). So a +5 item is effectively 25 times as powerful as a +1 item, not 5 times as powerful. But as the difficulty increases and a +5 item becomes 'appropriate' (e.g. it keeps the enemy's to-hit zone around 30%), this advantage diminishes. So in this example its far better to try to get that +5 item early and sacrifice other small bonuses than it is to make a well-rounded character.

You can get the same thing with damage, if you aim at the point where you can kill an enemy in one round rather than in two rounds (which is equivalent to the +4 to +5 sweetspot in the above example). Often this is better than going for defense, because systems frequently have multiple defense modes that don't augment each-other (you optimized AC, but this guy uses touch attacks and that is rendered entirely irrelevant). On the other hand, generally speaking damage is damage and 'unsuitable' damage types are reduced but are still proportional to what you started with. Thus, you get glass cannons being a fairly frequent byproduct.

It's a general result that optimal strategies in linear systems can only lie on the extreme boundaries of the parameter range. So many systems will at least locally exhibit behaviors like this where they are approximately linear, going all-in on one resource as opposed to making a balance of many. It's one of the reasons to use nonlinear cost systems in game design, to force the optimal points to lie in the interior of the parameter space.



I would say that virtually every rule in every RPG was trying to achieve something specific with its inclusion.


Sure, but not every rule in every RPG is trying to achieve something that I am trying to achieve. So generally speaking, there's going to be lots of stuff in any given system that I feel free to go either way on and not push too hard, since my goals are often more specific (to my players, to my campaign, etc) than what the game designer was trying to do. I don't care much either way with the 50% resell rule, because I'm not invested in whatever the game designers were trying to accomplish with it.

Since you are invested in what the players do with your wealth system and with very specific target outcomes (your motivation to try to prevent hoarding), it's a different situation than e.g. if I'm sitting down to run D&D and I really don't care if the players resell or not because I'm more concerned at the moment with getting the fighter and wizard to play nice with each-other.



Which sounds plausible, until you ask about overhead. Where are the items being stored? Who guards them? Who takes inventory? Who makes sure that no one takes more than their share? Who distributes them? What happens when everyone is depositing the same "worthless" items and taking the same "good" items? Who advertises the league and recruits members or tells them what is available?

In real life most businesses charge way more than double what they pay for the goods coming in yet still manage to fail to turn a profit.

It also assumes that there are enough like minded adventurers to form such a system. Most settings assume adventurers, particularly high level ones, are very rare and evenly distributed amongst the various alignments.

Happily, all of this is up to the player who wants to make this idea into a reality to deal with. The player takes actions, and if he's missed a step somewhere then they (or the party) have to run around a bit to fix the problems that arise. Sounds like all sorts of kinds of game content to me.

Talakeal
2017-01-12, 11:35 PM
Hyperspecialization is often an optimal strategy in many games - consider the term 'min-maxing'. Usually it comes about when other mechanics have a multiplicative effect on outcomes. For example, lets say you have one bonus +X to damage and another bonus +Y to defense. In order to kill your opponent before they kill you, you want the damage they do to you in the number of rounds it takes you to damage them to death to be less than your hitpoints. If normally they'd hit you, say, 30% of the time and every +1 to defense reduces that by 5%, then going from +0 to +1 is an increase in your survivability by 20% (if it took them 4 rounds to kill you, now it takes 4.8). Going from +1 to +2 is an increase of 25% (it now takes 6 rounds). Going from +2 to +3 is an increase of 33% (now it takes 8 rounds). Going from +3 to +4 is an increase of 50% (12 rounds). Going from +4 to +5 is an increase of 100% (24 rounds). So a +5 item is effectively 25 times as powerful as a +1 item, not 5 times as powerful. But as the difficulty increases and a +5 item becomes 'appropriate' (e.g. it keeps the enemy's to-hit zone around 30%), this advantage diminishes. So in this example its far better to try to get that +5 item early and sacrifice other small bonuses than it is to make a well-rounded character.

You can get the same thing with damage, if you aim at the point where you can kill an enemy in one round rather than in two rounds (which is equivalent to the +4 to +5 sweetspot in the above example). Often this is better than going for defense, because systems frequently have multiple defense modes that don't augment each-other (you optimized AC, but this guy uses touch attacks and that is rendered entirely irrelevant). On the other hand, generally speaking damage is damage and 'unsuitable' damage types are reduced but are still proportional to what you started with. Thus, you get glass cannons being a fairly frequent byproduct.

It's a general result that optimal strategies in linear systems can only lie on the extreme boundaries of the parameter range. So many systems will at least locally exhibit behaviors like this where they are approximately linear, going all-in on one resource as opposed to making a balance of many. It's one of the reasons to use nonlinear cost systems in game design, to force the optimal points to lie in the interior of the parameter space.


Perhaps. Depends on the situation.

But generally I would say that if a character has a +5 weapon and no armor it just means the enemy will focus fire on him, and if a character has +5 armor and no weapon the enemy will just ignore him; and both are almost always clearly suboptimal compared to a party where everyone has +2 weapons AND +2 armor.


Happily, all of this is up to the player who wants to make this idea into a reality to deal with. The player takes actions, and if he's missed a step somewhere then they (or the party) have to run around a bit to fix the problems that arise. Sounds like all sorts of kinds of game content to me.

If that is what everyone is on board for sure. But not everyone is interested in (or capable of understanding) a game that simulates a complex economy well enough to simulate such a grand risky business venture. It is a lot easier to simply say "Selling things for half of what I pay for them is BS! I am just going to cut out the middleman and do all my deals directly for 75% value!" than it is to actually set up and manage a successful adventuring co-op.



Sure, but not every rule in every RPG is trying to achieve something that I am trying to achieve. So generally speaking, there's going to be lots of stuff in any given system that I feel free to go either way on and not push too hard, since my goals are often more specific (to my players, to my campaign, etc) than what the game designer was trying to do. I don't care much either way with the 50% resell rule, because I'm not invested in whatever the game designers were trying to accomplish with it.

Since you are invested in what the players do with your wealth system and with very specific target outcomes (your motivation to try to prevent hoarding), it's a different situation than e.g. if I'm sitting down to run D&D and I really don't care if the players resell or not because I'm more concerned at the moment with getting the fighter and wizard to play nice with each-other.

I don't care too much what the players do in any one game, if they are above or below the expected WBL I couldn't really care less. The problems arise when the players actively disrupt the game with money grubbing or start to bicker about how wealth is split up / feel that the game is unfair because of wealth disparity between players.


And yes I'm assuming flat costs, because the system you posted explicitly had cost only depend on weight and quality was completely separated out.

Not quite.


Every point by which the item's quality exceeds the character's essence exponentially doubles its value.

Satinavian
2017-01-13, 04:00 AM
I am pretty sure the optimal strategy in your system is something very similar to the following :

- roll exclusively for lv 5 items until you reach essence one. Than buy lv 1 items for most important slots. Use one roll for lv 0 consumables. Proceed rolling for lv 5 until you reach 2 essence. Buy or upgrade to lv 2 items for most important slots. Use 1 roll for lv 1 consumables. Optionally use one roll to get enough copies to fill a seconary slot for the whole group with level 1. Proceed rolling for lv 5 until you reach essence 3. Do the same thing again with numbers 1 higher until you reach essence 4. Then roll once for lv 3 consumables. skip upgrading to 4 and roll for lv 5 items until you reach essence 5. Proceed buying lv 5 items and lv 4 consumables.

There are a couple of unknowns that might change it a bit. Like how easy it is to get really high trade values or which lots exits or how crafting/upgrading works, but in the end the above will be pretty close to the optimal strategy.

You might notice there is still a mix of going for level appropriate and going for high end, but you won't see upgrades for one item quality until the stuff is seriously outlevelled and even the upgrade becomes cheap.

NichG
2017-01-13, 05:07 AM
Perhaps. Depends on the situation.

But generally I would say that if a character has a +5 weapon and no armor it just means the enemy will focus fire on him, and if a character has +5 armor and no weapon the enemy will just ignore him; and both are almost always clearly suboptimal compared to a party where everyone has +2 weapons AND +2 armor.


This is the kind of thing I hear GMs assert a lot but which is usually totally false. For whatever reason, there's a terrible habit in a lot of GMs to think to themselves: 'what I think makes sense in the fiction must be the optimal thing to do, therefore if I see anyone doing anything other than that, I can come up with counters to punish that and therefore make myself right'. You can also come up with strategies enemies can use against a uniform +2 party. Actually, its the same strategy: focus fire until one character dies/drops, then move onto the next.

The +5 armor character receiving focus fire is doing his job spectacularly well, because those attacks would actually be proportionately more dangerous to his fellow party-members.
Edit: Nm, misread. The +5 armor guy has to hog the field to do his job. That is to say, everyone else has to stand back and be inconvenient to attack.


If that is what everyone is on board for sure. But not everyone is interested in (or capable of understanding) a game that simulates a complex economy well enough to simulate such a grand risky business venture. It is a lot easier to simply say "Selling things for half of what I pay for them is BS! I am just going to cut out the middleman and do all my deals directly for 75% value!" than it is to actually set up and manage a successful adventuring co-op.


In which case, the player will find that the degree of success they have depends on their own personal investment into those details. Which is also fine. Either they're going to say 'I will sell for 75% by doing X, I'm willing to do X, so I'm taking my extra 25%!' or 'I will sell for 75% by doing X, I tried X but it didn't work like I thought, so I'm going to default back to not-selling or selling at 50%'.


Not quite.

...

Yes, this changes the math quite a bit. I'd have to rerun the numbers but this is going to be closer to the upgrade sequence you imagined.

Lorsa
2017-01-13, 09:09 AM
I was tired of the mindless penny-pinching that was going on in my game. Players were always living as cheaply as possible and grubbing for every penny, hoping to sell all of their used equipment for top value and wanting to lounge around in town between adventures making all the money they could by selling their services to NPCs "off camera".

So, I decided to implement a more abstract wealth system.

Basically players have a "wealth" score. The base value is determined by the character's social class, and it is then modified based on how much treasure the party has found over the last adventure. (This is an abstract system, so a goblin's coin pouch might be worth one, a winter wolf's pelt three, a bank vault ten, and a dragon's hoard fifty without worrying about exact values). They can further modify this score with certain skills and feats.

Then when the players are in town between adventures they can make a number of attempts to purchase items equal to their wealth score. Each attempt has a chance of success depends upon how rare and valuable the item is, so a long sword might have a 90% chance, a healing potion a 50% chance, and a vorpal sword a 5% chance.


I tried running this system and one of the players just couldn't get into it. He tried spending all of his wealth looking for a single rare item and failed to find it, and afterwards he said that, essentially, in his mind the merchant had taken all of his money but failed to give him anything in return.


I tried to explain that his wealth score was not a tally of his bank account, but instead an abstract measure of how much liquid income he had to burn. Failing his rolls simply meant that he could not find someone who had the item he wanted at a price he could afford before his on hand resources (be they time, money, patience, contacts, marketplaces, etc.) were exhausted either by the search or maintaining his lifestyle and that he needed to go on another adventure to replenish his wealth before he continues his search, but he couldn't wrap his head around it.


So, does anyone have any thoughts on running an abstract wealth system?

I know some games like Exalted and The One Ring use similar systems, does anyone have any experiences with them?

Anyone notice any big flaws with my proposed system or have any suggestions? (I can provide more specifics if needed).

Any ideas on how to explain an abstract wealth system to someone who is stuck in the D&D warrior-accountant mindset and get them to understand and accept it?

Thanks!

I'm sorry to say it again Talakeal, but as others have pointed out, you really need to get better at explaining what you mean. When reading this, I also understood it that the character's money had disappeared after a few failed rolls.

While abstract wealth systems certainly isn't a bad thing, perhaps yours needs a bit of work. Just as a small suggestion (I am sure others in this thread have had better ideas by now, but I don't have the time to read through it all), this is what I dreamed up during my coffee break:

Characters has two scores, Wealth and Liquid Resources. Wealth generates income while Liquid Resources is just a big pile of cash (the typical thing you should award after an adventure).

Both scores goes from 0 to 10.

Wealth will allow you, to every in-game month make the following purchases:

1 item of cost equal to wealth rating
3 items of cost one below wealth rating
8 items of cost two below wealth rating
infinity of items of cost three below wealth rating

Liquid Resources (LR) will allow you to make exactly 1 purchase at its rating, then they go to 0. Making a purchase at a cost level lower than its rating makes the rating drop by 1 point (regardless of cost). Liquid Resources are not cumulative, they need to be tracked individually (so still a bit of book-keeping, although less so).

LR will allow you to invest to increase your Wealth Rating (WR). Make an appropriate roll, such as Profession: merchant or Knowledge: economics.

Result table (assuming d20 here):
0-5: failure, decrease LR by 1.
6-15: success, gain "WR upgrade point" equal to the LR rating (and drop it to 0).
16+: better success, gain "WR upgrade point" equal to the LR rating x1.5 (and drop it to 0).

The WR increases follow the standard "cost for increase from X->Y equals Y 'upgrade points'" table.

Every 6 in-game months, make a roll of Profession: merchant, landlord or Knowledge: economics or whatever you find appropriate.

Result table (assuming d20):
0-5: loose [WR]/2 wealth upgrade points
6-10: no change in wealth
11-20: gain [WR]/2 wealth upgrade points
21-30: gain [WR] wealth upgrade points
31+: gain [WR]x1.5 wealth upgrade points

When entering a location, set a "maximum item level" depending on the size and economic factors of the location. When asking "is this item for sale here", roll a die with percentage determined according to the maximum item level following the table:

Highest item level at the location: 10% chance
Second highest item level: 30% chance
Third highest item level: 60% chance
All other levels: 100% chance

Note that [1 month of specific living standard] would count as 1 item, with 0 cost being a really poor living standard which will probably require Fortitude saves or somesuch not to get HP drain.


I am sure this has still some issues. It is just a 15 minute idea, but hopefully it can help you a little with figuring out where you want to go with your system.

Good luck.

Segev
2017-01-13, 10:33 AM
That is possible, although like I said it is super swingy. Also, I think the players will still get mad that their system "steals their money" if there is nothing they want to buy.

Less likely, honestly. Especially since anybody who'd think that way will likely pick up the most expensive item they can afford to use as a de facto "savings" currency, instead.

The trouble you're running into is that you're telling people that their "wealth" goes down on failed rolls. That is always going to make people think their money is being stolen. If you tell them they have one shopping trip, and can find items up to X 'cost' (rarity, weight, whatever), then that divorces the roll from an idea that the PCs lost money on the trip.

Knaight
2017-01-13, 11:06 AM
Perhaps. Depends on the situation.

But generally I would say that if a character has a +5 weapon and no armor it just means the enemy will focus fire on him, and if a character has +5 armor and no weapon the enemy will just ignore him; and both are almost always clearly suboptimal compared to a party where everyone has +2 weapons AND +2 armor.

It's easy to say this in theory, but there are all sorts of situations where focus fire is unfeasible. For instance, what happens when you have the guy with +5 armor blocking a position while someone with a +5 bow is shooting past them? Moving away from specifics, I'll just note that historically speaking troop homogeneity has been deliberately avoided. Tactics video-games deliberately avoid it as well. There's a real benefit to having distinct resources, so that you can put the specialists where the things that they're better at count for more and the things that they're worse at count for less.

Yukitsu
2017-01-13, 03:17 PM
Less likely, honestly. Especially since anybody who'd think that way will likely pick up the most expensive item they can afford to use as a de facto "savings" currency, instead.

The trouble you're running into is that you're telling people that their "wealth" goes down on failed rolls. That is always going to make people think their money is being stolen. If you tell them they have one shopping trip, and can find items up to X 'cost' (rarity, weight, whatever), then that divorces the roll from an idea that the PCs lost money on the trip.

I already mentioned that "wealth" while shopping should be called time, but he wasn't evidently interested in making that change since he thinks that wealthy people can make more shop checks than people who aren't wealthy.

CharonsHelper
2017-01-13, 03:32 PM
I just think that it's funny that the OP came here asking advice - and since then he's done little but get frustrated/defensive when people point out his system's issues. It's sort of a hybrid system between concrete & abstract - but it seems to have the worst of both worlds.