Tim Ellis:
> > > just "The chest contains about 5 Wealth of loot"
> >
> > And you can't really say that, either (unless we have a mechanism,
> > say something like Julian's, or like the "warped augments" idea,
> > or _something_ at least) to add wealths together.
> >
>
> You can, I suppose, if you know what the current wealth of the player
> is "There is enough treasure to raise your wealth to 3W" or "If you
> shared it out you'd each get enough to rise one Wealth level" -
> although that's not much help outside of your own specific game.
And it's not much help in arriving even at those. One can deal purely in the abstract values, but it's a pretty pass if not only do the players not have a ready handle on how much wealth in game world terms "3W" is, but the narrator that's telling them this doesn't really know either...
> You could, I suppose say "Were you to buy it on the open market you'd
> need to pit your wealth against a resistance of 17w" - but that might
> give an over inflated idea of the amount of gain to be gotten from
> selling it...
It would, and more to the point you can't _do_ anything with this value, game-mechanically. This is why I suggested a "wealth table" quantifying sample values against "total worth", with a related mechanism for buying things, and for adding wealth values together.
> They should have recovered enough treasure to raise wealth by 3 points
> (if currently under 2), 2 points (if between 3 and 11) or one point
> (12 to 1w).This requires spending 1hp to cement.
>
> If they took (treasure A) add 1 point to all categories and include
> one point for wealth 1w to 7w. They also get the flaw "Hunted by Black
> Fang Brotherhood" at 12 (or increase an existing flaw by 1 point) at
> no cost, once they discover it is missing!"
And you don't think a more generic mechanic would be more useful than this? It's a sad pass when "abstractly" specifying the value of a bunch of stuff is considerably more wordy than "concretely" specifying it.
> As Jeff says above, encourage them to be less focussed on money and it
> becomes less of an issue... (yes, I know it's not a perfect answer,
> sorry.)
It's not that it's much of an issue in my games (I'm not sure I've had a player notice they _had_ a wealth rating yet, much less try and tot up their cows and imperial coins), it's that I think it's a fishy and incomplete game mechanic, and because this is the rules list, which in theory is the place for fixing such things, rather than resigning ourselves to them, isn't it? (I have to ask this, as often it seems to have much of the latter character.)
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