One of the things I've been running up against lately in my playtest games is handling wealth.
My system uses a weighted die system at character generation to determine someone's social/wealth class, with the options ranging from low-class/poor to upper-crest/very rich.

Any purchasing they do as of now has been abstracted between sessions and to their credit they have haven't purchased anything that would be unreasonable for their wealth status.
 the most expensive thing they ever bought was a one-thousand dollar thermal camera and gimble for it.

And while this is fine the problem is it basically means they have to play Mother-May-I every time they want to purchase anything, which is annoying.

So I'm trying to figure out a good wealth system to use that is abstract but still useful, instead of using exact dollar amounts and then trying to determine their weekly/monthly income is something that sounds stupid and not something I want to do either.

Quote from: Socratic-DM on July 13, 2024, 06:21:10 PMSo I'm trying to figure out a good wealth system to use that is abstract but still useful, instead of using exact dollar amounts and then trying to determine their weekly/monthly income is something that sounds stupid and not something I want to do either.

This is a regular issue in Call of Cthulhu games. It's supposedly handled by a roll on the "Credit Rating" skill, but that's really abstract and often comes down to a lot of hand-waving and GM fiat.

There's an underlying problem, though, that really comes down to how you want to handle the PCs' mundane lives and things like house, retirement, and so forth. Would an upper-middle-class PC really sell his home and retirement account, and spend it all on guns and dynamite chasing down cultists? I've played either side of this.

When I played in _Masks of Nyarlathotep_, our PCs basically did this. To save humanity, we had to go all around the world for months on end, so we quit our jobs, sold what we had, and turned into professional killers - killing cultists and stealing their money in order to keep the fight going. In some other CoC games, the PCs more-or-less kept their day jobs and had a side investigation every few weeks or months that kept them busy. Then there are Delta Green and related premises, where the PCs are agents who are hired to investigate the supernatural.

The best way to handle money depends some on how you want to handle the PCs bigger lives.

Quote from: jhkim on July 13, 2024, 08:00:05 PM

Quote from: Socratic-DM on July 13, 2024, 06:21:10 PMSo I'm trying to figure out a good wealth system to use that is abstract but still useful, instead of using exact dollar amounts and then trying to determine their weekly/monthly income is something that sounds stupid and not something I want to do either.

This is a regular issue in Call of Cthulhu games. It's supposedly handled by a roll on the "Credit Rating" skill, but that's really abstract and often comes down to a lot of hand-waving and GM fiat.

There's an underlying problem, though, that really comes down to how you want to handle the PCs' mundane lives and things like house, retirement, and so forth. Would an upper-middle-class PC really sell his home and retirement account, and spend it all on guns and dynamite chasing down cultists? I've played either side of this.

When I played in _Masks of Nyarlathotep_, our PCs basically did this. To save humanity, we had to go all around the world for months on end, so we quit our jobs, sold what we had, and turned into professional killers - killing cultists and stealing their money in order to keep the fight going. In some other CoC games, the PCs more-or-less kept their day jobs and had a side investigation every few weeks or months that kept them busy. Then there are Delta Green and related premises, where the PCs are agents who are hired to investigate the supernatural.

The best way to handle money depends some on how you want to handle the PCs bigger lives.

You beat me to it on all.

I haven't played Mask (a bucket list item), but that is a good way to look at that campaign. If you are in then you are all in and if you aren't then humanity dies at the hands of the Bloody Tongue/Black Pharo or which ever version of Nyarlathotep shows up. With that mindset does it matter if you keep your house IRA and the like. Humanity lives (but you are POOR) because of your sacrifice, or humanity goes splat to the will of the evil powers.

I do run DG (house ruled to include things from CoC including Credit Rating) and have had the players use the in between development phase to work on maintaining their employment finances etc - they have to make up for leaving work for a few days/weeks short notice - and it helps keep the game realistic. At least 1 development phase a year must be used on maintaining bonds and another on mundane work or things start to unravel. Oh yeah HRed it that if they do a phase working on occult things they also have to make a skill roll tied to their employment too to make sure they aren't slipping at work due to the corrupting influences of the evil things they are researching. Side note it was hilarious when the graduate archology student spent a phase studying some ole books they found, failed her sanity roll and then boloed her skill for her job and almost got fired etc. I ended up docking her credit rating with that.

A good example of using credit rating in the girls DG rating is when they got their new mission one of them had a hotel room paid for by the FBI but the rest had to fend for themselves. So I had one of them roll for their credit and they got an extreme success. So, I gave them rooms for a long term rent in a safer part of town so there is a lot less chance of their cars being broken into at night getting a random trouble with gangs at night etc - well until the mess up and let the cultists know they are hunting them, after that all bets are off -

Another good way CoC uses credit rating is a daily spending allowance of 'pocket money' . The higher rating the more you can spend each day with no questions asked. Low CR then good luck buying gas getting food and then that first aid kit to patch up your buddy who got stabbed by the cultist (hope you have a good stealth when you try and steal it since you can afford it). But if you have a good high CR then sure you can buy everyone a meal top off the rental so you don't have to worry about running out of gas trying to race away from the murder scene, and yeah you have that good advance nearly trauma level first aid kit for when (not it) things go bombshell .

That said despite the mechanic you use for your rules, wealth will be nebulous. If they need a car or plane ticket or what ever. It will be easier for someone rich to get one (or a good comfortable one) than it will be for a poor working class slob (yes we do have a rental for your short notice but looking at your credit rating we only have a geo metro .... v Oh yes sir I see you are on our gold card list unfortunately since it is short notice, the only Cadillac CT we have available does not have Corinthian leather seats. We apologize for the inconvenience) . So make it a skill or a stat or what ever fits and have them make needed checks at key moments or to spice up the game.

d20 modern had a odd sort of abstract credit/wealth system too.

So did TSR's Marvel Superheroes. You had a resource rating.

I found that an interesting question, so I thought a bit about it and thought this would be a decent skeleton of such a system.

1)   Characters have a wealth rating, which would be a power of 10:  1,10,100,1000,10k,100k, 1M, etc

2)   It's assumed that they have a job or investments that provide some income, and expenses that go with their lifestyle, so adventuring expenses usually aren't a big part of their monetary situation

3)   They can get anything with a price below the step lower than their wealth rating without impacting their financial situation.  E.g. if your rating is 100k you can purchase things that cost $9,000 or so without problem.  This assumes you don't do silly things like buy 500 cars for 9k each.

4)      They can buy one thing per month that costs between their rating and the next lower rating without impacting their financial situation, so the guy with a 100k rating could buy a 50k car each month.  If a character buys more than one item in this range per month, his rating drops one step.

5)   You can buy one thing that costs between your wealth wealth rating and the next one up, but that lowers your wealth rating by one step.  E.g. if your rating is 10M and you buy a G650, you now have an airplane and your rating is 1M.

6)   You can achieve a rating by acquiring cash equal to two steps above that rating.  So if you loot $1M and get it into into the bank/investment accounts, your rating goes up to 10k.

I haven't tested it of course, but it seems to give concrete guidance and be simple enough to use in play

In Advenced MSH they shifted resources into a resource feat system (not the same thing as wotc feats) so items had a rating and you did your check to see if you could buy the item. Only one check per week. And could not try to buy things over your resource rating unless could pool with another character.

d20 Modern's resource system is similar. But without the week wait time.

Abstract wealth and hand waving work fine for CoC because wealth doesn't really matter that much for the most part during play.  It's very easy to make a character that is wealthy or even very wealthy because it doesn't really matter very much.  Being rich doesn't really help you with any of the game's actual challenges.  It could matter for a campaign like Masks where the characters travel a lot but only if the GM decides to make it matter and no one makes a dilletante character with a high credit rating to make it irrelevant.  That's what happened both of the times I ran Masks.  For a lot of campaigns where scenarios are separated by weeks or months of downtime, it doesn't really matter at all. 

Quote from: yosemitemike on July 14, 2024, 09:04:04 AMAbstract wealth and hand waving work fine for CoC because wealth doesn't really matter that much for the most part during play.  It's very easy to make a character that is wealthy or even very wealthy because it doesn't really matter very much. 

COC also tends to assume that the characters have a day job and therefore an income. That could pose a problem for adapting the system to a game that doesn't assume the same.

It really depends on the genre; modern actually tells us very little.

- For a Supers setting wealth is basically just fluff... an explanation for various tech-based characters' gear or a complication for a Spidey-type whose rent is due.

- For a Spy/Military setting, something like mission assignment resource points is probably more useful than any sort of wealth determination. The agency almost certainly has a budget that would dwarf anyone outside a Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark, the only question is which parts of it you're allowed to access.

- Urban Fantasy is going to highly variable to who the PCs are supposed to be in the setting and how much the expected challenges overlap with the mundane utility of wealth. Experienced wizards and centuries old vampires are probably best handled with some sort of wealth rating and a general assumption they can easily have any item worth less than that rating, but need some sort of in-game action to get anything above it.

- Something more like "teens discover they're [insert supernatural type here]" would probably need something more concrete (and also benefit from the setting being a particular period, a la Stranger Things, vs. a generic present where your price guide and available tech will be obsolete before the book is even released). Ordinary folks suddenly have their world upended is one of those situations where things like the cost of bus fare, hotels, and groceries (not to mention anything they need to buy due to their new condition) and how they're going to acquire more resources is probably going to be a key component of the games.

Basically, there is no one size fits all answer... it comes down to which genre in the modern world you're looking at.

Quote from: yosemitemike on July 14, 2024, 09:04:04 AMAbstract wealth and hand waving work fine for CoC because wealth doesn't really matter that much for the most part during play.  It's very easy to make a character that is wealthy or even very wealthy because it doesn't really matter very much.  Being rich doesn't really help you with any of the game's actual challenges.  It could matter for a campaign like Masks where the characters travel a lot but only if the GM decides to make it matter and no one makes a dilletante character with a high credit rating to make it irrelevant.  That's what happened both of the times I ran Masks.  For a lot of campaigns where scenarios are separated by weeks or months of downtime, it doesn't really matter at all. 

I guess this is a good point to address, which is the themes and setting, I'm running a playtest for my own game, the idea of the game is you play normal folks forced to confront the supernatural, street level monster hunters so to speak, the game assumes you are not playing military trained types or superheroes or anything of that sort.

Which I guess is kind of like COC, but different time period and assumptions as well.

Quote from: Socratic-DM on July 14, 2024, 03:09:30 PM

Quote from: yosemitemike on July 14, 2024, 09:04:04 AMAbstract wealth and hand waving work fine for CoC because wealth doesn't really matter that much for the most part during play.  It's very easy to make a character that is wealthy or even very wealthy because it doesn't really matter very much.  Being rich doesn't really help you with any of the game's actual challenges.  It could matter for a campaign like Masks where the characters travel a lot but only if the GM decides to make it matter and no one makes a dilletante character with a high credit rating to make it irrelevant.  That's what happened both of the times I ran Masks.  For a lot of campaigns where scenarios are separated by weeks or months of downtime, it doesn't really matter at all. 

I guess this is a good point to address, which is the themes and setting, I'm running a playtest for my own game, the idea of the game is you play normal folks forced to confront the supernatural, street level monster hunters so to speak, the game assumes you are not playing military trained types or superheroes or anything of that sort.

Which I guess is kind of like COC, but different time period and assumptions as well.

With that in mind, I'd suggest picking a specific place and time for your setting.

The main reason you need abstract wealth in many modern games is that "modern" could be anything from the 1980's to 2024 depending on when you actually play it.

Wages, costs and what is even available for purchase have varied wildly over that time. I remember back when supposedly supertech game settings made computers with 4 MB of RAM and personal communicators (voice-only) extremely expensive in terms of "Equipment Points."

These days a basic smart phone could do everything those items did and light-years more and wouldn't even be counted in the equipment point discussion... they're just ubiquitous now.

If you want your PC's to be normal folks then normal money concerns are going to be an important part of conveying that. Setting a specific time period (say the 70's, 80's or 90's or 00's) lets you fix the cost and availability of goods and wages off what they were at that point in time and lets you have a more concrete wealth system that can have fallout from needing to spend $500 on an emergency situation.

Just my two cents on it.

Abstracting wealth in a fantasy setting just doesnt really work or feel right.

Closest might be Basic MSH which combined the two. You had an overall abstract resource rating. But purchases could and would deduct from your rating and you could spend yourself into a lowered rating. I actually liked the older version as it was more versatile.

Quote from: Socratic-DM on July 14, 2024, 03:09:30 PM

Quote from: yosemitemike on July 14, 2024, 09:04:04 AMAbstract wealth and hand waving work fine for CoC because wealth doesn't really matter that much for the most part during play.  It's very easy to make a character that is wealthy or even very wealthy because it doesn't really matter very much.  Being rich doesn't really help you with any of the game's actual challenges.  It could matter for a campaign like Masks where the characters travel a lot but only if the GM decides to make it matter and no one makes a dilletante character with a high credit rating to make it irrelevant.  That's what happened both of the times I ran Masks.  For a lot of campaigns where scenarios are separated by weeks or months of downtime, it doesn't really matter at all. 

I guess this is a good point to address, which is the themes and setting, I'm running a playtest for my own game, the idea of the game is you play normal folks forced to confront the supernatural, street level monster hunters so to speak, the game assumes you are not playing military trained types or superheroes or anything of that sort.

Which I guess is kind of like COC, but different time period and assumptions as well.

One more plus for CoC is that they have put out different timeframe focused books. In them they adjust the wealth rating for that setting. I have some but not all of them. There is the normal 1920s, the gaslight and then the wild west cowboy (which I just realized is basically for the same timeframe just different locations society norms ...) for the 1880ish, modern 1990s, and 2 or 3 others I can't think of off the top of my head.

That said

Quote from: Mishihari on July 14, 2024, 03:10:52 AMI found that an interesting question, so I thought a bit about it and thought this would be a decent skeleton of such a system.

1)    Characters have a wealth rating, which would be a power of 10:  1,10,100,1000,10k,100k, 1M, etc

2)    It's assumed that they have a job or investments that provide some income, and expenses that go with their lifestyle, so adventuring expenses usually aren't a big part of their monetary situation

3)    They can get anything with a price below the step lower than their wealth rating without impacting their financial situation.  E.g. if your rating is 100k you can purchase things that cost $9,000 or so without problem.  This assumes you don't do silly things like buy 500 cars for 9k each.

4)      They can buy one thing per month that costs between their rating and the next lower rating without impacting their financial situation, so the guy with a 100k rating could buy a 50k car each month.  If a character buys more than one item in this range per month, his rating drops one step.

5)    You can buy one thing that costs between your wealth wealth rating and the next one up, but that lowers your wealth rating by one step.  E.g. if your rating is 10M and you buy a G650, you now have an airplane and your rating is 1M.

6)    You can achieve a rating by acquiring cash equal to two steps above that rating.  So if you loot $1M and get it into into the bank/investment accounts, your rating goes up to 10k.

I haven't tested it of course, but it seems to give concrete guidance and be simple enough to use in play

NICE ! I think that could work. Simple clean I might have to yonk it and modify it.

If your concept for the game is that money will matter for almost all the players, tracking it in some sort of abstraction but more concretely can be interesting.

I'd suggest going with either playing cards or some sort of chips/tokens.
Certain colours/suits can represent more permanent assets that yes, could be liquidated but would be very hard to recover.
Every week/month or for special incidents you can randomly draw a card/token. Some special events can make you lose a card/token. But mostly you'd be spending at the closest value you can to the value the GM picks (overspent? guess you had some other costs this week.)

With playing cards, you could randomize pc starting wealth by dealing out X number of cards to each.

Best of luck with the game development and continued testing!

In Dragon Storm we used pennies. Worked because the PCs rarely had much coin on them ever.

Totally would not work if coin was more available.