Just to be clear, I made two (more or less) separate suggestions: firstly a Big Table relating wealth scores to actual negotiable goods "equivalents", in some at least vaguely illustrative fashion; secondly following on from Wulf's comment up augments, I mooted a possible variant on that that'd represent "diminishing returns" better. It was really the first that I was comparing directly to Oliver's suggestion.
> 1) allowing for variable value items. i.e., not every cow is worth a cow.
> A really good cow might be worth 3 1/2 times a different cow and it's easier
> to figure out using fixed numerical values.
Sure, not all cows are worth a cow (as it were). Nevertheless a Heortling would understand what you're trying to convey if you said "I'll offer you five cows for that boat". (More so than "That thing isn't worth the clacks it'd take to sink it, arguably.)
> 2) I don't like the abstractness of the proposed mechanism (If I understand
> it correctly, I apologize if I'm misinterpreting it). So I have a 5W wealth
> and my fellow party member has a 15 wealth. Now we found something worth 3
> wealth and we both want to try and use it to increase our wealth. We both
> want to add 3 to our wealth. It's easier for him to do it because his
> value's lower, that's good. But I can roll luckier and get it while he
> doesn't.
Your description is fairly accurate. Note that I did say the player _or the narrator_ would choose the desired augmentation size: if I were narrating it, and the rich player seemed to be "chancing his arm" unduly, I'd ask him what funky venture capital scheme it was he was investing those cows in that might have such a dramatic increase in his total wealth... (Alternatively you could make the size of the increase attempt automatic, by on of ye famous "divide by five and subtract a kludge konstant mechanics...)
> The advantage of wealth points are that it makes cross cultural comparison
> easier than equating value to a commodity. My sword, worth 10 points is
> worth a cow or 5,000 lunars. Yes, it takes colour away if you describe it
> that way but if you're already working from a cow=10 wealth points or
> whatever it's easy enough to still refer to items being worth so many cows
> while keeping calculations relatively easy. And totally removing luck if
> you want to.
Well, this is just as easily represented, and much better described, by observing that a cow is worth 200 guilders, and that there are 1.13 guilders to the Imperial, yadda-yadda... "Wealth points" is just relating one abstract quantity to another (the logarithmic rating and the "points" they correspond to"), which really is a little unsupportable: let's have one, or the other, but not both...
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