HELP!!! Monetary System in World of Darkness!

[mr.farche]

I'm confused as to how the monetary system in World of Darkness works. Can I only buy stuff with the Resources merit, or can I have a job and just save up money? If I can save up how many dots do I get a month? Is this determined by the Storyteller? Is there any sort of starting money like in D&D? Is it not possible to buy things of a certain dot price if you don't have that high of a resource merit level?

If you can answer any of these questions or tell me where to look and in which books to find the answers I would greatly appreciate it.

[Kesnit]

Everyone is assumed to have enough money to put a roof over their head and pay their bills, even without a dot in Resources. The more dots, the more "liquid assets" you have (or you can say you put that money into a larger house, or servants, etc).

[Semidi]

Resources are one of those things that rely heavily on the ST. Think of the dots in resources as a rough guide to the disposable income of your character. 0 dots means that you can't buy anything more than basic survival stuff (pay the rent, keep the lights on, phone bill, food, and pay for the bus). 1 dot means you have $500.00 bucks a month in disposable income.

I, as an ST, generally use this rule: you can come into game with any equipment (within reason) which has a price equal to or lower than your recourse dots. Exceptions can be made if it makes sense with a back story or you have other skills to acquire those items (e.g. stole it and the person has a few dots of larceny).

I tend to not let players save up money unless they explicitly tell me that's what they're doing. And if they want an item with more recourse dots than they have sometimes I'll let them pay it off over a few months depending on what it is and who's selling it.

This is all just based off of the base book where it talks about the resource merit and my own house ruling.

[mr.farche]

So basically you need at least one resource dot to buy any equipment? also could you "save up" for an Item costing 1 resource dot if you have no resource dots? also say you have a resource score of 3 does that mean that you could conceivably have many 3 dot items from your backstory?

[Satyr]

Not necessarily. Ressources are a stand-in for regular, reliable income and activa. This may be a steady job (let's face it - there are not many vampires with a day job, and werewolves tennd to freak out lesser beings like humans), racketeering or blackmailing money, a large and profitable portfolio, whatever. You can't save money to increase your ressources- that's just managing the ressources you already have. To increase your ressources, you need to get an increase of income - get a new job, take over another gang's territory, something like that. You can have equipment which you couldn't usually afford, but that is rare - think of a guy who lives in his car, but owns a scarring arsenal of military-grade weapons in his trunk.
Ressources can be a high-maintainance background, and pretty much occupy a lot of your character's time to secure them - if you work a standard 40 hour week, there is not much time to battle the Wyrm, spin intrigues against the city's primogens or search for the philosopher's stone.
I found the best way to deal with money was mostly to handwave it. Characters have as much money as their ressources roughly indicate, and are usually politely asked to play ths out. If they are spending too much, they risk that their ressources background may drop (borrowing money from a loan shark, and paying back with interest, or something like that).

[taltamir]

don't over think it...
lets say you start play with a werewolf/vampire who has 0 dots in it... you could say he bags groceries at walmart during the night and uses it to pay rent and buy food...
he cannot afford to buy anything. But you could just go out on your first mission and rob a bank, or take over a gang, or use vampire mind control to make a rich 90 year old (gender of your choice) marry you, or search for buried treasure, or loot an ancient crypt, or do something that will give you money.
Once you start getting lots and lots of money (assuming you actually perform missions meant to get you money), you could say you invest it (say, buy enough stocks in intel, microsoft, google, etc to get a steady income from dividends)

[Riffington]

If you are carefully saving up your money month to month, you should be buying a dot of resources.
If you rob a bank and get lots of money, you have a choice. You can use that as an excuse to buy resources (and take serious care of your money), or you can skip that step. If you skip it: easy come, easy go. Money flows into your life and through your life and again out of your life.

[Darrin]

Money and purchasing power are greatly abstracted in WoD. There may be rules for what you can or can't buy based on your dots in Resources (I'm not sure which version of the rules you're using), but buying things in WoD usually boils down to two things:

1) If it's something a person with your resources would reasonably be capable of owning or purchasing, you either already have it or can go get it without much fuss. In most WoD games, shopping expeditions are usually handwaved to get to more interesting events.

2) If it's something you reasonably couldn't buy easily, then it's probably an Important Plot Point and you just roleplay how you go about getting it: favors, bribery, extortion, blackmail, "applied theories on the creative redistribution of wealth", and so forth. If it's something really important to the plot, then the Storyteller will provide some means to attain it. Follow the trail of plotcrumbs.

Beyond that, if you want to start the game with something unusually expensive that doesn't fit the Resources that would go with your character concept, there may be another Background attribute you can purchase to represent a family heirloom, an artifact you discovered, or maybe an emergency trust fund bequeathed by a distant relative. If all else fails, buy a Contact/Ally that has access to the item and is willing to let you "borrow" it for special occasions.

If you're seriously worrying about how much money your character makes per week/month/etc. then you're probably not approaching a WoD game in the right frame of mind.

[mr.farche]

Thank you all for the responses they helped immensly