Wealth Levels

From Sagataflwiki

Latest revision as of 08:44, 6 August 2011

During character creation, two Wealth Levels may be modified as Perks. These modifications affect only the character's starting condition and so there is nothing "sticky" about these choices.

The two things, or stats, that can be modified, are Equipment Wealth and Cash, both starting at a value of 3, and being sellable down to 1, or improvable up to infinity.

BELs for Equipment and Cash

The BELs (Base Economic Levels) for Equipment Budget and Cash are 40f (farthings) of cash, and 120f worth of equipment. These values are universal, applicable in all settings (so are all BELs).

1f, one farthing, is 1/4 of a silver penny or denarius, and about 1000 farthings makes up a Carolingan pound of silver (the Carolingan pound is a bit lighter than the present day Imperial pound - figure 2500 to 3000 farthings makes up a kilogram of silver). In a modern campaign, 1f is approximately 25 Danish kroner as of the year 2000, or X Euros, or Y Pound Sterling, or Z US Dollars (re-calculate reasonables values for XYZ, and consider upgrading DKK value for inflation).

The BECMs, or Base Economic Cost Multipliers,are world-dependent, however. For the Ärth 10th century historical fantasy setting, the BECM is 15 PP for Cash and 12 PP for Equipment. For each 15 PPS spent on Cash, the starting cash amount is multiplied by 4, and for each 12 PPs spent on Equipment, the starting Equipment Budget is multiplied by 4. In each case, each full BECM worth of PPs spent increases the relevant Wealth Level by 1, and each fraction of a BECM (any whole number of Perk Points) spent increases the Wealth leveland the amount of money appropriately.

Thus if a player opts to spend 45 PPS on Cash and 30 PPs on Equipment, his Cash Wealth goes up from 3 to 6, and his Equipment Wealth goes up from 3 to 5.5. Cash Wealth is simple, the x4 multiplier applied thrice, so that his character's Starting Cash is 2560f.

Applying the first two whole Wealth Levels to Equipment, we go from 120f to 1920f. In this case it is very simple because half a Wealth Level multiplies by x2, for a final Starting Equipment Budget of 3840f, but in other case, a calculator, spreadsheet or lookup table must be used (and the lookup table must be specific to the used BECM).

Using a calculator, for modest increases to either Cash Wealth, multiply by the 15th root of 4, raised to the Nth power where N is the number of PPs spent, and for Equipment, multiply by the 12th root of 4, raised to the Nth power where N is again the number of PPs spent. (Grab a calculator, use it to calculate the 12th root of 4, then raise the result to the 6th power. If your result is anything other thane exactly 2, you've made a mistake).

After 7 increases to either of the two Wealth Lvels, when a Wealth Level of 10 is reached, further Wealth Levels only multiply by x3 (not x4) up to the 15th Wealth Level. After that each Wealth Level only multiplies by x2 (so that for fractional Wealth Levels you take the 12th or 15th root of 2, and raise that to the Nth power).

As an example, purchasing 7 Levels of Equipment Wealth, in addition to the base 3, costs 84 PPs and gives the player slightly less than 2 million farthings (2 Mf, mega-farthings) to spend on starting equipment; 1000 (Carolingan) pounds of silver.

There are other BECMs, pertinent to other things (such as Monetary Income and Food Income), and other settings use different BECMs for Equipment and Cash. For instance in an early 13th century medieval fantasy setting, such as that of the Ars Magica RPG, the BECM for Equipment should probably be 8 (not 12) PPs and the BECM for Cash should be something like is 12 (not 15).

Selling down Wealth Levels

If a player wishes to sell down one or both of Cash and Equipment, during character creation, halve the BECM (and round down). This is the compensatory amount of PPs given for each full Level of Wealth. Neither Wealth Level may be sold down to less than one, and each Wealth Level below 3 reduces the amount of money by 5 (thus two full Levels reduces the amount from BEL to 1/25 of BEL).

Insert examples here

Rules details

These are more in depth rules. They are not optional, but clarify the above material.

Starting Equipment

Starting Equipment is anything that reasonably can be purchased on the market, including several sets of clothes (unless the player is okay with his character walking around naked) of a Quality appropriat to the character's social status (or a higher or lower social status than he actually has, if he's deliberate about it), adventuring and crafts equipment, weapons, armour, mounts and slaves (excepting slaves purchased as Allies and mounts that are somehow magically bound to the character - an intelligent mount can also be purchased as an Ally).

The main exception is basic home furnishings, which are included in the Home Perk, if the character has that. Note the availability of equipment packages (such as various personal basics and camping gear packages) and of skill equipment kits (such as a Lockpicking kit or a Disguise kit), greatly simplifying the equipment purchase process

Equipment Budget not spent during character creation is lost, although for inexperienced players the GM may allow them to allocate a small amount of farthings to things their characters have had along all along, and which are obviously relevant to their character concept, but which the player could no think about during character creation. The presence of Skill Equipment Kits does much to alleviate the need for GMs to make such allowances, though, and there is also the Lucky Pockets Luck Trait.

Starting Cash

Starting cash can be in the form of actual coins (current or ancient), hack-silver, pieces of precious metal other than silvery, and jewelry, including non-set precoous and semi-precious stone (but note that in the 10th century, precious stones could not be cut faceted at all, save perhaps via the use of magic).

Divide the cash between various categories, such as generic silver coins and hack-silver (include ancient coinage here), coins of specific lands (write the name of each realm and how many farthings the character has in that denomination), and items of jewelry, which are covered in further detaul below.

Atomic cash

Especially in technologically primitive settings, it's realistic and common to carry much of one's cash in the form of jewelry. It's also less attractive for players since such items of jewelry cannot easily be divided into smaller pieces (hence the greek word "atomic" which means indivisible), although on the other hand there's almost no such thing as hack-gold, and in most places gold coins are highly exotic. So gold jewelry is a much easier to carry alternative to silver coins and hack-silver (some GMs may also want to give an almost-automatic -1 RD bonus to any attempt to use the Bribe skill to bribe with gold instead of silver, at least when the target is a commoner or slave. Gold has always had a certain allure).

It's quite reasonable for a player to take many identical pieces of jewelry, for instance 7 silver arm rings and 8 gold arm rings all of average weight.

There's an increase in commercial value, for such jewelry items, as long as they are not hacked up into pieces, and for the sake of simplicity every NPC should respect this standard, both those who are connoisseurs of goldsmithing and those who are crude barbarians.

The increase is 20% for reasonably crafted metal jewelry, e.g. copper, bronze, brass, silver, gold, and perhaps even iron or tin, that a capable smith has shaped with some tender love and care. For very well-shaped jewelry where the Decoration skill was used, the increase is instead 30%, and for jewelry that is crude but still better than raw ingots, the increase is 10%.

As an example, a player may want to purchase, during character creation, 4 gold arm rings each worth 4000f. He pays only 3333f for each, and records them on his charcter sheet as 4x gold arm ring 4000f(a) each, using the f(a) to designate that this particularly entry of cash is in "atomic" form, and that if divded it drops down to its raw metallic value of 3333f/ring.

Later a table will be added here, with many ready-to-use examples of metallic jewelry.

Characters in modern campaigns can also have atomic wealth, such as the Rolex arm watch often used as a bribe in movies, although this must not get silly, such as a character owning 20 Rolex watches (unless he has, since his backstory, been in the habit of handing them out as bribes).

Commodities

Players aso have to purchase starting commodities with Wealth rather than wht Equipment Budget. A Commidity is something that one can reasonably expect to sell for the same price that one paid for it, such as a sack of flour, or 120 large barrels of red wine, or a cow, although ae may gradually affect the price (a female slave will start dropping in market value as she ages, while red wine may become more valuable).

Commodities are almost always something you either use to make someting else out of (you make bread out of flour, and you make people temporarily inebriated by gving them red wine to drink), or something you exploit (like you exploit a male slave for physical work, or a sheep for its wool), and so it is in most cases fairly obvious to figure out whether any desired item shold be purchased with Equipment Budget or with Cash.

The one exception is living commodities, where the distinction typially is that if there are few in number and they are well defined, such as a single mount or a few, or a small number of slaves that service the character in various way, then they are Equipment, but if there is a large quantity of vaguely defined living beings, like 28 female slaves aged 15-17 Years Q4, or 14 horses Q6, then they're probably intended for re-sale (or gifts/bribes) rather than for personal use, and so shold be bougfht as Equipment. The exception to this is if the character has a large Unit or otherwise a large household. A warlord can well make use 28 attractive slave girls to keep his many warriors entertained, for instance.

Advice

A player who knows the setting can make better choices about Starting Wealth. A Sagatafl campaign is much more likely to take place in a realistic world, than in D&D-land, so there will not be Adventurer's Shoppe's in every village, where one can purchase high-end weapons and armour and other equipment. Instead, opportunities to purchase high-Quality gear are rare, serving to encourage players to buy what they want during character creation where everything that is commercially available in the character's Home Range can be bought.

Cash is flexible, in that it gives the character the freedomt to adapt his equipment loadout to changing circumstances. He can't rely on finding a seller of high-Quality swords, but if he finds that he needs a war axe, he can reasonably expect to be able to travel to find a weaponsmith willing to make and sell an ordinary-Quality war axe to him. Cash is also useful for bribes and for travel expenses (food, shelter, mounts, passage on ships). Cash should be sold down only if the character is reasonably self-sufficient and is unlikely to need to make any later purchases (e.g. mount or armour).

Equipment is attractive to buy up, but note carefully that used equipment is non-trivial to re-sell. Finding a buyer in the first place is difficult in a primitive economy such as Ärth's, and re-sale value can be anything from 60% to 1% (yes one percent).

There is also no "sticky" effect for Cash, or for Equipmet purchased during character creation. Any world contains NPCs with less than stellar respect for private property, and if they have reason to assume they can get away with robbing a wealthy PC, then they should realistically attempt to do so. (A tip: The best defence against being thusly victimized is to have lots of friends, or at least look like one has a lot of friends. The second best defence is to look like an absolute badass, one who eats highwaymen for breakfast - raw!)

Please note

It is perfectly legal to sell down Cash and use the compensatory PPs to buy up Equipment during character creation (this is known as "doing the Eco-Shuffle"). The reverse is equally legal.

The world

It is an inevitable fact that in any setting, except the very most primitive and the very most advanced, everyone is not equally wealthy. The Wealth Level system facilities the creation of NPCs from any economic strata, from the lowest of the low, to the starkly affluen (purchasing 22 Levels of Wealth of either kind gives a multiplier of approximately 398 million. If that's not enough, simply go higher).

Design Notes

Allowing the player to define his character's economic situation with some precision is definitely a desing priority, and liberates players from the narrow-minded and heavy-handed assumptions so often made by other RPG designers. Having the system scale to infinity is good, but a recent change (as of August 2011) was that after certain Wealth Level breakpoints the multiplier would be reduced. This decision was made based on a conservative impulse ("better be careful"), and may be mildened or revoked entirely based on analysis or playtesting. It is expected to be perfectly playable and entirely reasonable as-is, though.

Initially Sagatafl used the denarius, d, as the unit of monetary account, but a denarius is really too coarse-grained for small incidental purchases. While most such incidental purchases are supposed to be combined into Moonly or monthly Lifestyle "packages", it is still annoying to have to mess around with fractions, and even half-pennies was not sufficiently fine-grained, so eventually it was decided to utilize the farthing as the unit of monetary account, thereby starkly reducing the use of fractions and decimals.

Quick mini-glossary

BELBase Ecnomic Levels, universal starting point values for, among other things, Starting Cash and Starting Equipment Budget.
BECM Base Economic Cost Multipliers, the setting-specific Perk Point costs for Levels of various (economic) things.
f farthing, historically 1/4 of a penny-coin (a denarius). Approximately 240 pennies were supposed to make up one Carolingan pound of silver (a "modern" pound is somewhat heavier, and pennies were ofte cut into quarters (farthings) or into halves
kf a kilo-farthing, 1000 farthings.
Mf, Gf, Tf and Pf used for large amounts of money, a million farthings, a billion (1000^3) farhtings, a trillion (10^12) farthings, and 10^15 (a million billion) farthings, repectively.

See also

Include links here, to other articles that are highly pertinent to the subhject matter of this one. Remember
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Table to use