The best things in fantasy are free.
May. 11th, 2012 01:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinThe idea of consequences for different outcomes to encounters beyond "You beat the monsters. You get money and experience" or "The monsters beat you. You died." is intrinsic to the design of A Wilder World at just about every level. With every encounter having some kind of consequence, the concept of risk vs. reward takes on real weight, which means that some attention has to be given to making the rewards meaningful. Money isn't the only (or even main) measure of success in AWW, but it's a natural one to include.
Like everything else that goes into the game, the money system in A Wilder World was designed with specific goals in mind, and those goals have more to do with the kind of story that I want the game to be best suited for than anything else.
I'm going to point to how the question of money is treated in Avatar: The Last Airbender, as it's the fantasy series I watched most recently. The gang didn't have steady income. When they were rewarded with money or given a gift it was a big deal. There were episodes where the tightness of their fortunes was significant, when they spent their last coin or whatever, and times they had to rely on foraging. Toph didn't necessarily carry any more money than they did, but she was rich. Her family's name carried enough weight that she could use it as a passport in many situations, and could have used it as a credit card if she'd been so inclined.
The adventure never stopped because they were broke, and the writers never gave a sense that they were tracking how many coins of what denomination were in Sokka's power purse.
You see this kind of thing in TV shows and other media quite a lot. There's more talk about finances than there is actual finances. It matters if a character has money or doesn't, but in some respects it's like having ammo for your guns in D&D Gamma World: you either have it or you don't. If you have it, you can carefully nurse what you have indefinitely, or blow your whole wad at once.
In fact, the D&D GW approach to ammunition would be a great way to handle money in a game where money is supposed to be an easy-come, easy-go kind of thing, where you find and lose great fortunes on a regular basis, Fafhrd and Gray Mouser style. Or Captain Jack Sparrow style, to use a more modern example. It's something I considered using for A Wilder World, but ultimately rejected... it would tie the system to too specific a type of story and character. Some people like accumulating money as a way of measuring their character's success. Some characters have a specific goal or ambition that requires money. And some characters have wealth and status as part of their character, in the same way that others have skill with a sword or intellectual acumen as part of theirs.
What I wanted was a system that gave a meaningful difference to a character being wealthy or poor in a similar way to the fact that some characters are strong and some aren't, some are magic and some aren't, and so on. I wanted a system where the party's rising and (usually temporarily) falling fortunes could be tracked. I wanted a system where being a successful band of treasure hunters/mercenaries/pirates/whatever could bring about convenience and comfort but doesn't lend itself to grinding your way to godhood through buying/crafting expensive magical gear.
The revised edition of TSR's Marvel Super Heroes roleplaying game (FASERIP!) replaced the money system used in the original with a statistic, Resources, that represented a character's purchasing power. If you needed to buy something or pay for something in the course of an adventure, you made a Resources roll in much the same way that you might roll against Strength to see if you could lift something or Endurance to see if you could withstand something. If the roll were a certain amount of mismatched in either direction, it would either be automatic (Tony Stark having dinner at a fancy restaurant) or impossible (Peter Parker buying a fancy restaurant).
I believe there was a rule that you could only make one major purchase at your Resources level per in-game week or something similar, to represent the using-up of ready money and its steady replacement via regular income. However it worked, it was pretty simple and abstract.
It was a pretty good way to handle it, really. I mean, if you wanted to contrast Peter Parker's finances to Tony Stark's in terms of how it impacts their respective superheroics, it's not really that useful or interesting to track the dollars and cents of their respective incomes, savings, and holdings.
This kind of model works really well for a superhero game, which has different default assumptions than a fantasy adventure game. Superhero usually means modern world, with the complexities of the modern economy and most everybody can be assumed to have a day job that is not necessarily always relevant to their "adventuring" career in an interesting way. Fantasy adventure means that the world of finance is a good deal more straightforward, and if you had a "day job" it's usually part of your back story from before you left your hometown to spend the rest of your life being a professional treasure-finder.
If Tony Stark or Peter Parker recovers a cache of jewels or specialized equipment from a den of thieves, it's evidence, whereas Bjorn Axehammerer and Glenfog Mistyglade would regard the equivalent in their world as spoils.
Still, if a fantasy adventure game is not trying to simulate all the little fiddly bits of reality, is it really worth it to count every copper coin? If there isn't a whole simulated economy to spend the coins in and if de-facto leveling up by purchasing or crafting newer and better magical equipment isn't part of the game, then money just becomes another way of keeping score. And if you define adventurers primarily as treasure hunters (and there's nothing wrong with that, as a character motivation or the raison d'etre for a group), then keeping score can be important.
So A Wilder World takes a middle of the road approach, between the TSR MSH game's stat-based money and the D&D-style coin counting.
The value of treasure that you find in the course of an adventure is counted, in a very simple and general fashion. The basic unit is 1 Tr, which stands for "Treasure" but also represents "a trifling sum of coins" or "an interesting trinket". Treasure can also be spent mid-adventure in various ways: tipping a beggar, spending a night at an inn to get a good night's rest and recovery instead of roughing it. A typical adventure will include a chance to spend treasure in the middle of it to get healed up a bit, and/or ways to spend it to bypass danger... in other words, spending the money you find along the way will usually be a way of arriving at the finale in better condition. Or to put it another way, the better you are at fighting and/or avoiding harm, the more money you can make it out of an adventure with.
The treasure that survives to the end of the adventure can also be spent on later adventures, but it can also be "cashed in" like experience points for a stat called Group Wealth. Group Wealth functions something like the Marvel Super Heroes stat described above. It's a measure of the party's social status and major purchasing power.
Bribing beggars to help improve (or worsen) their memories might cost you a point of Treasure; bribing the jailer of a repressive city-state into releasing your friends would call for a Wealth Check. Such Wealth Checks would also cost treasure, with the amount depending on how you roll... it's understood that this does not represent the absolute cost of the service being negotiated, but rather the immediate pinch on your pocket.
Both Wealth and large amounts of Treasure in reserve generate a stat called "Resources", which is like pocket money for future adventures. Resources refill themselves at the start of an ordinary adventure and can't be saved. Points of Resources can either be spent like Treasure in the course of an adventure, or used before it to purchase additional expendable items (like potions and scrolls) or equipment like additional weapons or ordinary mounts.
Yes, equipment that's not part of your character's abilities isn't just bought once... it costs the group Resources to maintain. The sword of your ancestors can be with you from the start of your character's adventuring career until the epic conclusion and beyond, but if you're just buying a sword somewhere it's assumed that it gets damaged and needs to be repaired or replaced from time to time. The Resource cost doesn't necessarily mean that you're buying a new sword every time you go out and face the world... it abstractly represents the fact that sometimes, you do.
Likewise, whether or not you use up a potion or scroll or amulet in the course of an adventure, you don't get anything extra for the next adventure. It's not that they all go bad or suffer breakage or whatever. Resources is not a concrete measurement of money but an abstract representation of your party's... well... resources.
If buying all your equipment again every time sounds convoluted, it's really not. You don't actually have to go through the rigmarole of giving things back and then buying them again. As long as the group's Resources don't decrease and you have no need of changing equipment out, you can just proceed from one adventure to the next with the same equipment lists.
I said above that you spend Treasure to "level up" your Group Wealth. There's also such a thing as Personal Wealth, which functions almost identically, except it belongs to an individual character. You get it the same way you get physical or mental strength: spending points from a pool during character creation and advancement. It has a caveat attached to it that it's more situationally useful than other things that go in the same slot: you're equally strong or smart whether you're in the middle of a city or a barren desert, but money matters less the further from civilization you are. The expected starting Wealth for most characters is 0.
The game's default rules assume that there is no problem with handling money as a group and that the group cares about money. Easy variant rules are included for the cases where either of those assumptions are wrong. The "no one cares about money" rule works a lot like the D&D Gamma World ammo rule mentioned above, and is sufficient for cases like Avatar: The Last Airbender, where the gang is not in the habit of chasing treasure, and cases like the aforementioned rogues who are not in the habit of keeping it.
Like everything else that goes into the game, the money system in A Wilder World was designed with specific goals in mind, and those goals have more to do with the kind of story that I want the game to be best suited for than anything else.
I'm going to point to how the question of money is treated in Avatar: The Last Airbender, as it's the fantasy series I watched most recently. The gang didn't have steady income. When they were rewarded with money or given a gift it was a big deal. There were episodes where the tightness of their fortunes was significant, when they spent their last coin or whatever, and times they had to rely on foraging. Toph didn't necessarily carry any more money than they did, but she was rich. Her family's name carried enough weight that she could use it as a passport in many situations, and could have used it as a credit card if she'd been so inclined.
The adventure never stopped because they were broke, and the writers never gave a sense that they were tracking how many coins of what denomination were in Sokka's power purse.
You see this kind of thing in TV shows and other media quite a lot. There's more talk about finances than there is actual finances. It matters if a character has money or doesn't, but in some respects it's like having ammo for your guns in D&D Gamma World: you either have it or you don't. If you have it, you can carefully nurse what you have indefinitely, or blow your whole wad at once.
In fact, the D&D GW approach to ammunition would be a great way to handle money in a game where money is supposed to be an easy-come, easy-go kind of thing, where you find and lose great fortunes on a regular basis, Fafhrd and Gray Mouser style. Or Captain Jack Sparrow style, to use a more modern example. It's something I considered using for A Wilder World, but ultimately rejected... it would tie the system to too specific a type of story and character. Some people like accumulating money as a way of measuring their character's success. Some characters have a specific goal or ambition that requires money. And some characters have wealth and status as part of their character, in the same way that others have skill with a sword or intellectual acumen as part of theirs.
What I wanted was a system that gave a meaningful difference to a character being wealthy or poor in a similar way to the fact that some characters are strong and some aren't, some are magic and some aren't, and so on. I wanted a system where the party's rising and (usually temporarily) falling fortunes could be tracked. I wanted a system where being a successful band of treasure hunters/mercenaries/pirates/whatever could bring about convenience and comfort but doesn't lend itself to grinding your way to godhood through buying/crafting expensive magical gear.
The revised edition of TSR's Marvel Super Heroes roleplaying game (FASERIP!) replaced the money system used in the original with a statistic, Resources, that represented a character's purchasing power. If you needed to buy something or pay for something in the course of an adventure, you made a Resources roll in much the same way that you might roll against Strength to see if you could lift something or Endurance to see if you could withstand something. If the roll were a certain amount of mismatched in either direction, it would either be automatic (Tony Stark having dinner at a fancy restaurant) or impossible (Peter Parker buying a fancy restaurant).
I believe there was a rule that you could only make one major purchase at your Resources level per in-game week or something similar, to represent the using-up of ready money and its steady replacement via regular income. However it worked, it was pretty simple and abstract.
It was a pretty good way to handle it, really. I mean, if you wanted to contrast Peter Parker's finances to Tony Stark's in terms of how it impacts their respective superheroics, it's not really that useful or interesting to track the dollars and cents of their respective incomes, savings, and holdings.
This kind of model works really well for a superhero game, which has different default assumptions than a fantasy adventure game. Superhero usually means modern world, with the complexities of the modern economy and most everybody can be assumed to have a day job that is not necessarily always relevant to their "adventuring" career in an interesting way. Fantasy adventure means that the world of finance is a good deal more straightforward, and if you had a "day job" it's usually part of your back story from before you left your hometown to spend the rest of your life being a professional treasure-finder.
If Tony Stark or Peter Parker recovers a cache of jewels or specialized equipment from a den of thieves, it's evidence, whereas Bjorn Axehammerer and Glenfog Mistyglade would regard the equivalent in their world as spoils.
Still, if a fantasy adventure game is not trying to simulate all the little fiddly bits of reality, is it really worth it to count every copper coin? If there isn't a whole simulated economy to spend the coins in and if de-facto leveling up by purchasing or crafting newer and better magical equipment isn't part of the game, then money just becomes another way of keeping score. And if you define adventurers primarily as treasure hunters (and there's nothing wrong with that, as a character motivation or the raison d'etre for a group), then keeping score can be important.
So A Wilder World takes a middle of the road approach, between the TSR MSH game's stat-based money and the D&D-style coin counting.
The value of treasure that you find in the course of an adventure is counted, in a very simple and general fashion. The basic unit is 1 Tr, which stands for "Treasure" but also represents "a trifling sum of coins" or "an interesting trinket". Treasure can also be spent mid-adventure in various ways: tipping a beggar, spending a night at an inn to get a good night's rest and recovery instead of roughing it. A typical adventure will include a chance to spend treasure in the middle of it to get healed up a bit, and/or ways to spend it to bypass danger... in other words, spending the money you find along the way will usually be a way of arriving at the finale in better condition. Or to put it another way, the better you are at fighting and/or avoiding harm, the more money you can make it out of an adventure with.
The treasure that survives to the end of the adventure can also be spent on later adventures, but it can also be "cashed in" like experience points for a stat called Group Wealth. Group Wealth functions something like the Marvel Super Heroes stat described above. It's a measure of the party's social status and major purchasing power.
Bribing beggars to help improve (or worsen) their memories might cost you a point of Treasure; bribing the jailer of a repressive city-state into releasing your friends would call for a Wealth Check. Such Wealth Checks would also cost treasure, with the amount depending on how you roll... it's understood that this does not represent the absolute cost of the service being negotiated, but rather the immediate pinch on your pocket.
Both Wealth and large amounts of Treasure in reserve generate a stat called "Resources", which is like pocket money for future adventures. Resources refill themselves at the start of an ordinary adventure and can't be saved. Points of Resources can either be spent like Treasure in the course of an adventure, or used before it to purchase additional expendable items (like potions and scrolls) or equipment like additional weapons or ordinary mounts.
Yes, equipment that's not part of your character's abilities isn't just bought once... it costs the group Resources to maintain. The sword of your ancestors can be with you from the start of your character's adventuring career until the epic conclusion and beyond, but if you're just buying a sword somewhere it's assumed that it gets damaged and needs to be repaired or replaced from time to time. The Resource cost doesn't necessarily mean that you're buying a new sword every time you go out and face the world... it abstractly represents the fact that sometimes, you do.
Likewise, whether or not you use up a potion or scroll or amulet in the course of an adventure, you don't get anything extra for the next adventure. It's not that they all go bad or suffer breakage or whatever. Resources is not a concrete measurement of money but an abstract representation of your party's... well... resources.
If buying all your equipment again every time sounds convoluted, it's really not. You don't actually have to go through the rigmarole of giving things back and then buying them again. As long as the group's Resources don't decrease and you have no need of changing equipment out, you can just proceed from one adventure to the next with the same equipment lists.
I said above that you spend Treasure to "level up" your Group Wealth. There's also such a thing as Personal Wealth, which functions almost identically, except it belongs to an individual character. You get it the same way you get physical or mental strength: spending points from a pool during character creation and advancement. It has a caveat attached to it that it's more situationally useful than other things that go in the same slot: you're equally strong or smart whether you're in the middle of a city or a barren desert, but money matters less the further from civilization you are. The expected starting Wealth for most characters is 0.
The game's default rules assume that there is no problem with handling money as a group and that the group cares about money. Easy variant rules are included for the cases where either of those assumptions are wrong. The "no one cares about money" rule works a lot like the D&D Gamma World ammo rule mentioned above, and is sufficient for cases like Avatar: The Last Airbender, where the gang is not in the habit of chasing treasure, and cases like the aforementioned rogues who are not in the habit of keeping it.