>>Because he is getting the benefit of use. He could have chosen to >>"Trade in" the items for wealth directly if he wanted wealth.
If you and your friend both get a golden torc and some armbands, and you choose to wear yours and he chooses to trade his in for coins, which of you will be able to buy the Iron sword and breatplate from the weaponsmith?
Wealth indicates your purchasing power, and you can only buy items with "stuff" by getting rid of the stuff first.
>>> Individual items like cows, iron hauberks >>>etc., can be assigned numbers, e.g. a cow is worth 5 points.
>
> Well let's see because not every society uses Lunars and this is
> HeroWars not HeortlingWars?
Well Gold coins then if you want to be non-specific. The whole point, to my mind, of having a "wealth score" is precisely to avoid the book keeping necessary when you start giving everything a price and counting your clacks and bolgs...
> It's easy enough to assign a wealth value to a herd of cattle
Exactly. It only gets tricky when you want to assign a wealth value to a "Herd +1 cow" and a "Herd +2 cows" etc etc
and if you are going to allow a character to increase his wealth by raiding an exact number of cattle to accumulate sufficent "Wealth points" without tracking the birth and deaths of his existing herd then, as far as I can see you are adding complexity to one side of the equation but not the other and failing to provide a good "realistic" simulation or a good "abstract" system either
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