Re: Money....

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_...>
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2004 19:11:30 +0100


On Mon, Jul 12, 2004 at 08:47:18PM -0400, kwinland_at_... wrote:
> Hero Wars had a large cost chart with wealth-level difficulties, but this was
> not reprinted in HQ. Does everyone keep track of coinage and wealth?

IMO you in essence are going to have to track one, _or_ the other. OT1H, one might ditch a wealth (ability-based) system entirely, and simply list 'wheels and lunars' (or indeed, cattle and sheep) -- game-world wealth in explicitly game world terms. On the other, one might use a system like HW's (or the hand-wavinger version in HQ, or some refinement of either, but at any rate with the Wealth number being the actual determinant of prosperity/spending power). Tracking _both_ is going to simply give you the downsides of both approaches, and the advantages of neither, and add the 'consistency problem' in to boot. (Tracking neither is a possible option, if economics are of no interest at all.)

The Wealth rules in HW were a great idea in theory, but not ideally worked out in practice. The main problem was that the wealth table was screwy in detail, and not systematisable in any sense. I don't have it in front of me, but my recollection is that some of the numbers were just plain bonkers, especially relative to each other. And it'll tell me how difficult it is to obtain one cow -- but not a 100 head of cattle, for example. But both of these are readily fixable, at least if one has a model of the economic system one is actually trying to relate it back to.  

> When players stumble upon/find wealth, do you roughly describe it (a pouch of
> silver, an antique scroll-case, and some unworked amber), or do you go into
> more detail (a pouch of 30 L, a scroll-case worth 140 L, and a chunk of amber
> worth 50 L)?

This is in one sense subsidiary to the above (if I'm tracking 'pennies', I rather have to value all wealth in such terms), but in another sense is a matter of desirable level of game-world particularisation of the description. After all, if the 'value in pennies' has no gamemechanical  function, then it's only being elaborated to give a verisimilitudinous 'sense' of what's happening. (If your players, for example, were to find it unsatisfactory if you told them, "You successfully raid the Venyr for a bunch of cattle." "Great! How many did we get?" "Hrm. Enough to cement about a +3 increase in your Wealth for 1 HP." "Uh, great. So... how many did we get?")  

> How does one handle wealth *increase*? The old HW rules had you converting
> 1/10 or so of the wealth difficulty to the character's wealth attribute for 1
> hero point. Does this seem to much?

It seems rather, mistaken in principle. A much better idea IMO, in various respects, would be something more analogous to the 'buying' rule, but in reverse. That is, you in some sense try to 'beat' your old wealth with the wealth of the item, in order to get an increase, with the degree of victory translating into the size of the increase. Then one can figure in use of HP in terms of modifying this roll (with the standard bump-up rule or otherwise), to give you some chance of improving your wealth 'incidentally', and a significantly greater chance if you're willing to spend narrative resources on it.

Cheers,
Alex.

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