>>>Because he is getting the benefit of use. He could have chosen to
>>>"Trade in" the items for wealth directly if he wanted wealth.
>>
>> So if I have a golden torc and some armbands I'm not richer than my
>> friend who doesn't? Same thing really.
>>
>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.
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. The ownership of items that could be sold to buy stuff does affect your wealth rating. If I'm a starting Humakti with an iron sword and shield I could technically have a better starting wealth than another starting warrior because of my valuable belongings (probably not much because I wouldn't sell them) AND because my word would be expected to be better. (Though I don't know what a Humakti is borrowing money for).
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. Another little gem in the rules that reads great but cause tons of problems if over analysed.
>>>> Individual items like cows, iron hauberks
>>>>etc., can be assigned numbers, e.g. a cow is worth 5 points.
>>
>> >Hmm, why not call them "Lunars" and have done with it?
>>
>> 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...
What kind of gold coin? A big Yelmic one, or a small Kralatorelan one? I agree with the desire to avoid counting clacks and bolgs, I'm sorry if I ever gave the impression that I favoured that. All I was suggesting was a modification to the wealth system that would allow for easy changes to wealth by adding or subtracting things. Of course I failed to account for the nontangible aspects of wealth so it obviously has to be rethought or scrapped.
>> 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 I don't care for the approximation attempt using augments. That's a personal bias I agree but if you use it you have to spend a lot of time thinking up work around's for accumulating treasure and raided goods. Is this a +1 augment or a +2 and for who? To me that's extra complexity not ease of play. You don't have to calculate/account for every bit of loot characters get just the more valuable stuff.
>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
Obviously you could take into account some sort of mechanism to affect your wealth if you're going to pay any extra attention to it at all. It wouldn't be my first instinct to drag economic factors into it but if that's what someone likes well to each their own. Wealth points don't have to be strict sale cash value of an item (though here it starts getting more complicated) 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. Of course you could say that things like cows or swords you could sell can be a set wealth or twice that as a sale. That's pretty much abstracted.
As I said earlier I'm going to have to re-evaluate the whole business with my re-reading of the description of wealth. It obviously can't be just a wealth = wealth points due to the intangible factors. Now how to factor those in...
Oliver
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