> Maybe we've been talking past at other for the last message or 12;
> if you think that there exist valid "pretexts" for cementing wealth
> increases, why the arguments that the (seemingly only) "correct"
> way to increase wealth is by "spend the HPs"?
Umm, I think that the way the system works is to have the character as the active agent. It only measures the character, and what is explicitly stated about the character through such devices as the hundred words and keyword selection. So when the player spends an HP, the ACT, as it were, that occurs is that the character changes. This has no necessary relationship with anything that might be described as going on in the world during play.
This is where the AP analogy was introduced. Just as a change in AP models the "balance of advantage" rather than a specific act like a particular blow striking home, a change of Wealth is just a change of wealth rather than a change in some game-world property which is measured as wealth. In the AP case, the pretext for the change arises from player narration of character acts "I charge, raining blows at his head" and the mechanical change from the diced outcome. In the wealth case, the pretext is "any act which could plausibly represent a change in wealth" and the mechanical change is the expenditure of HP.
In each case, the system is not modelling the world; the system is defining the world. The acquisition of cows is just an excuse, a way to persuade the GM to let you spend your HP on wealth. If you choose NOT to persuade the GM, then those cows will eventually be lost or in other ways fail to make you richer. The GM would be perfectly within bounds to make something else happen - say, a barn burns down - to "explain" the fact that EVEN THOUGH the character has more cows, they DID NOT get any richer - because they did not spend an HP to increase wealth. This is something the player has told the GM through their choice of system behaviour; by implication, the GM is actively obliged to inflict some equivalent misfortune on a player who acquires cows without "paying for them" in systematic terms.
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