Wealf, Innit? (Patreon)

One of the incredible privileges of working on this project is getting to look at all our assumptions (or, as many as we’re aware of at least), everything we inherit from our history as roleplayers and ask “why do we do it this way?” “What other ways are there to do this?” And “What is the best thing for this game?”

Hey folks, Matt Colville here! The core gameplay loop appears to be settling down which means we can build out the rest of the game, which James is working on now! This includes…well, everything except fighting monsters. We think stuff like…Renown might and should matter. What about Social Station? Can you decide to start the game as a noble? Could you…become a noble later?

Renown is probably real, ‘social station’ I was just using as an example. We’ll see if it matters in this game. It’ll probably be something you can choose as an option.

But something that comes up over and over is…money. How much do you start with? What can you do with it? How much do you earn adventuring? 

This led to a patented MCDM “What Is The Purpose Of This?” meeting where James and I get into a discord call and talk about, in this instance, Wealth in RPGs. What’s it for? How do other games deal with it? How should we deal with it?

Wealth touches a lot of different things. Can you…buy a castle? Pay to have a castle built for you? Hire a retainer? Buy potions of healing. Are there magic shops in the world? So it’s another one of those features where depending on which thread you pull, it unravels in different ways.

The two main tensions we grappled with were;

Treasure hordes seem like a pretty classic part of fantasy gaming.

And

Heroes don’t really worry about gold. 

You can see the problem. 😀

Back in the 1970s, that first RPG…it didn’t model anything. There was no fiction you could point at and say “It’s like that.” You could sort of point to Conan or Fafhrd and say “Like that” but even then, it’s a pretty rough approximation. I read those original Conan stories (I liked them!) and while there’s a ton of cool stuff in there, I don’t remember Conan ever saying “I need to go on an adventure, because I need another 27 gold to afford a….”

Right? All of us can think of examples in fiction where heroes go into a store to gear up, but these are dramatic scenes. They exist to tell us something about the character, establish some tension, foreshadow something. Those movies or comics or whatever aren’t about the heroes spending money. They aren’t about the money. 

Does that mean our game just doesn't have treasure hoards? Dragons sleeping on giant piles of gold? Would people even notice if they had fun saving the world and leveling up and finding new items, but there were no giant piles of gold?

Maybe. Maybe not. 

Our game takes inspiration from heroic fiction but it is still a game. When we’re brainstorming we bounce back and forth between “are there any examples of this in fiction?” And “how do other games handle this?”

I challenged the idea that gold is really a thing at all in the heroic fiction that inspires us. James and I talked about the Lord of the Rings and he reminded me of that moment in The Hobbit where they find the Troll’s cave where there’s literally chests of gold in the back.

They don’t do anything with it though, they just hide it and agree to grab it on the way back.

But this started me thinking. I wrote my thoughts down in our Discord:

[I]n Middle Earth, money represents power. Greed. No one seems to care what The Lord Of The Rings is about but if it's about anything, it's about the idea that "Power is addictive and no one can be trusted with it."

Before he came up with the idea of the One Ring, he was already thinking about corruption. In the Hobbit it's the corrupting power of Greed. It's not just the Dwarves, almost everyone they meet in The Hobbit shows up at the end to fight over the Dragon's Horde.

Could the point of huge piles of gold in our game be to resist the urge to use it? Is our game heroic only because you fight and defeat monsters? Or might it also be about trying to avoid corruption?

I think it might be a little late in the day to add a moral dimension like this to our game. But that's too bad, because it might really elevate everything. 😄

So, that's probably a dead end, but I'm suspicious of any discussion about Literal Gold where we're not talking about power dynamics. 😄 That's the Marxist in me.

Apart from the larger question of "Do heroes get rich?" A la can there be an ethical billionaire, I wonder what wealth does to progression.

In other words; we know players look forward to Leveling Up, because they get cool new, more powerful options. 

Do they look forward to gaining more wealth? If so, why? Do we imagine players will see their wealth increase and say 'finally I can afford Foo!'?"

This is where my head is at right now. It's not obvious to me players will CARE about increasing their wealth, except in the abstract ("it's nice to have a lot of money"). Maybe they will! But when I think about what players look forward to, I don't see them getting excited because they can finally "afford" something.

Right? In other words; the fiction that inspires us does not feature heroes who track how much money they have so they can afford things. AND the game we’re imagining is not ABOUT “I don’t have enough gold for [thing], we need more loot.”

We absolutely think gear is part of the game, including getting, finding, better gear as you adventure. But is that the same as saying the game is about whether you can afford something? Saving up gold just so you can buy something you’ve coveted? I don’t think it is. 

We want players to be able to make things (crafting) or unlock new lore (research) and there may be a monetary component there? But again, it just seems really weird to imagine your heroes scrimping and saving and hoarding every electrum piece so they can “afford” something. That does not sound like behavior any of us expect players to exhibit.

Having agreed on this, I stepped away from the Discord and just spent some time thinking about the historic use of wealth in RPGs. I am not an expert on these things, I do not study them in an academic environment, but I’ve played a lot of games and been paid to think about game design, so I took a stab at it.

As far as I can tell (and I can hear the sound of people rushing to their keyboards to come up with exceptions and edge cases 😀) there are three basic ways in which wealth is used in RPGs.

Money. The AD&D model where many if not all things in the PHB and DMG had a monetary value associated with them (which causes ENORMOUS debates. Axe of the Dwarvish Lords? 55,000gp! That’s how much you could sell one for, does that mean therefore you could BUY one for some multiple thereof? Presumably, if there are buyers, there’s a market. Much ink was spilt trying to explain away that reasoning). We don’t think this is our game. Really, the only games I’ve ever played that used money this way were various incarnations of or responses to AD&D.

Buying The Gear That Defines Your Character. This is another popular use of money in RPGs. Lots of games I’ve played and enjoyed used money this way. These are usually skill-based games (as opposed to class-based) and your character's special abilities all come from their gear. These games usually have what is effectively a catalog in them somewhere, featuring all these cool things you can buy, each with some dope ability. All the cyberpunk games work this way. Ooh I can get bionic eyeballs! Ooh a better deck to hack with! Ooh look at this dope-ass motorcycle!

Most science fiction RPGs work like this, including Star Wars! Prices effectively act as level constraints. A Blue Star Plasma Rifle costs 935,000 credits, so you can’t afford one until you’ve adventured long enough to earn that kind of dough, which is mechanically equivalent to saying “at level 13 you can choose a….” 

Rarely do you “level up” in these kinds of games. Experience points are spent to improve skills and buy other character perks, and you earn money doing jobs (usually “contracts”) and buy cool equipment that gives your hero the kinds of special abilities magic weapons or spells, or class abilities or feats grant in a d20 Fantasy game.

I like games like this a lot! But I don’t think that’s our game. Luke never says “I just need to do one more job and I can afford….” He just sells his landspeeder to buy passage offworld and complains about it. So it’s clear the world of Star Wars cares about money, but the heroes of that 1977 movie are not mercenaries, completing contracts so they can afford a bigger ship. I think it’s true that all Star Wars RPGs assume the players want to play what are essentially Traveller characters in the world of Star Wars, rather than Fairy Tale heroes (literally a princess, a farmer, a wizard, and a scoundrel) overthrowing the Evil Empire as we see in the movie Star Wars. It might be an interesting exercise to imagine what a “Star Wars RPG” would look like if you assumed the players wanted to actually invent and play heroes like we saw in that movie, doing the things the heroes in that movie did. It would probably look a lot like FGU’s Flash Gordon & the Warriors of Mongo from (perhaps not coincidentally) 1977.

Character Perk: Rich. This is the last way I can think of that money is used in RPGs. You can, in character creation, just decide your hero is Rich. Games like this usually give you some number of points to spend on perks, and “Wealthy” or “Rich” is just another one. Most Superhero games work like this. Tony Stark doesn’t go out adventuring in order to find piles of cash so he can save up and buy another suit of Iron Man armor. He just is rich. He’s rich as soon as we meet him! In fact, it’s reasonable to say it is a defining character trait. It informs how he behaves more than having any mechanical benefit in the movies or comics. He never solves a problem by spending money.

In games like this, wealth just acts as a key to certain locks, and gives the player a lot of fun playing through the power-fantasy of having money. It’s fun to tell the Director “I buy the hotel.” For players raised exclusively in a D20 Fantasy environment, especially those editions where you could just BUY magic items? This is a pretty challenging idea. They assume IF their hero has gobs of money, they can go buy a magic carpet or a holy avenger.

But Superhero games don’t work that way. There IS no catalog of gear or items to buy. Everything cool your hero can do is a “power” that you create. And mostly the only thing to DO in superhero games? Is fight other superheroes. Much like d20 Fantasy “fighting monsters” games. 

So that’s the trick! Money in these games doesn’t mean anything because there are no magic items to buy, no bionic implants to purchase. If your character has Bionic Legs? That’s because you bought them with Character Points during Character Creation. That’s the ONLY way to get Bionic Legs in a superhero game!

SINCE money doesn’t unlock ANY mechanical boons…you as the Director are free to just give it away! All it does is let that player “act rich.” Enjoy the fantasy of being rich. When I ran Birthright (my favorite AD&D setting) I thought it would be fun to let the Wizard player inherit a literal fortune from their mentor at level 1. They were amazed! They assumed starting at level one with millions of gold pieces would break the game!

But there were no “magick shoppes” in my version of Birthright. His character had no ambitions that money could satisfy except, free spell components? Sure! Go crazy! 

The reality is, in games like this, the problems the heroes face cannot be solved with money in the first place. You can’t bribe Orcus, or Khan, or Darth Vader. The player enjoys a brief period where they splurge and buy an apartment in the city or whatever, hire some staff. But this lasts only a fraction of a session after which they just get to “act rich.”

Again, like Tony Stark, “wealthy” just becomes a character trait. It doesn’t mean they can just bribe the guards. The guards might not be bribable! But it lets them play a character who might try it, since money means so little to them. 

And, even for the Director, it’s fun to let the players spend a lot of money on something to show off.

Is this how money works in our game? Well…it seems like the most appropriate option! Money won’t help you defeat Ajax, though it might help you buy your way into the kinds of meetings where you could use Negotiation to get some allies! 

Will there be dragons sleeping on piles of gold in this game? I don’t think so. If so, it’s because the director thought it would be a fun way to give the heroes the “Wealthy” trait. There should be rewards for defeating monsters; XP, Magic Items, Lore, etc….

But is this a game about your hero scrimping and saving every copper piece so they can afford a cloak of elvenkind? Is that what heroes are about?

We don’t think so.

So, how does this manifest itself in the actual rules? I’m not sure, James may already have some idea, but under this model it would be a choice you make during character creation. One option from a list. Choosing “wealthy” means you don’t get to choose some other option. And it mostly just acts as a roleplaying hook for your character. It’s cosmetic. 

A character like Tony Stark actually probably uses his Fame rating more often than his Wealth perk anyway. 😀

Thanks for reading folks, until next time…

Peace, out!