> >Wealth indicates your purchasing power, and you can only buy items
> >with "stuff" by getting rid of the stuff first.
>
> I quote :
>
> "The wealth rating represents not only the cash (or goods) on hand,
> but also the ability to borrow small sums of money, ease of getting
> credit, reputation for honest dealing, and other nontangible sources
> of wealth." HW
> pg 36
>
> So wealth is not just your purchasing power.
Except that, basicly it is... A higher wealth means you can buy more stuff, whether it is by spending cash in hand, liquidising assets, calling in previous loans or borrowing from friends, family or moneylenders. Despite the above description, I would certainly penalise an attempt to substitute "Wealth" for a trait like Honsety or trustworthiness. (maybe not so much if the player specified he was paying a large surety...)
> It's a great definition but it makes it even harder to account for
>adding a cow to your herd since that wouldn't necessarily affect your
>word or anything like that.
On the one hand, yes this is true, but that's because the wealth rating isn't about adding a cow to your heard, or finding a golden hat-pin in the street. The whole point of the system is to do away with the accounting aspect altogether.
On the other hand, the more cows you own, the more you can lend to people who owe you favours, or the easier it will be for you to repay loans without leaving yourself destitute
> What kind of gold coin? A big Yelmic one, or a small Kralatorelan
>one?
Does it matter? You want to assign a "Wealth point" value for everything - Why not make it a cash value and have done with it?
>I agree with the desire to avoid counting clacks and bolgs, I'm sorry
>if I ever gave the impression that I favoured that.
When you are busy designing accounting systems and giving everything a value, and assigning each wealth rating a range of values then I don't realy see how this is any different from counting clacks and bolgs. The idea just doesn't fit with the way that HW works. Quite apart from the fact that wealth ratings almost certainly overlap (ie there is no discrete point at which wealth 14 suddenly becomes wealth 15) look at the way that HW works for purchasing items - You roll a simple contest between your wealth and the resistance ("cost") of the item - you may get it without reducing your wealth, or your wealth may be reduced if you are over-extending your budget.
So if a farmer has a herd of 20 cows and goes to market to buy more cows he could end up extending the size of his herd without reducing his wealth, or he may reduce his wealth to acquire more cows. Neither of these methods really fit in with a scheme of assigning a "wealth Points total" for each cow and trying to tie those wealth points to the farmers wealth rating
> You don't have to calculate/account for every bit of loot
> characters get just the more valuable stuff.
>
That's exactly my argument. The HW Wealth rating ignores individual items and just gives an overall indicator - That's why you don't have to say "The chest contains 5000 lunars, 34 wheels, 18 Rubies, 42 saphires and 17 emeralds" just "The chest contains about 5 Wealth of loot" - (In actual fact you are probably better off just saying "It's full of coins and gems" and leaving it at that - at the end of the adventure you can assign a wealth increase appropriate to the loot bought out - "OK you ransacked the Treasury - You can each raise your wealth by (up to) 4 points for 1HP" or whatever...)
> a cow could be worth a certain amount as a herd member on an ongoing
>basis say 6 or 20 as a one shot sale. But this is getting too damn
>complicated.
Yep. Far better to abstract - Someone with one cow is not very wealthy. Someone with a small herd is reaonably well off, and someone with a large herd is very rich. A small herd +1 cow is still a small herd, so if you go out and capture a cow in a raid and you were reasonably well off before, then, hey! you still are. Providing your Wealth rating is within the "reasonably well off" bracket then it is accurately reflecting the size of your (increased) herd.
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