This is meant for modern and futuristic games, but could work for games set in the past as long as the characters are embedded in society. Like, they have jobs and money in the bank, they're not hobos whose wealth is all carried. For futuristic games consider using this with reputation network rules.
Treat wealth, mechanically, as working like an ability score. It has a raw value from zero to twenty (or thirty if your system allows that) and a modifier calculated like any other ability score modifier. It represents a combination of savings, non-adventuring income from whatever your day job is, and social class.
A wealth score of 10 roughly represents the average American, so monthly income of around five thousand dollars, net worth of around a hundred thousand.
However, because it combines income and savings, a person with a decent wealth score could theoretically have negative net worth combined with a good income, maybe. That happens with abstracted systems.
Generate a starting wealth score at character creation. If you want players to start out poor like in most games, they start with something like d4 wealth plus a few items. If you're fine with them starting out rich– and presumably getting rich isn't the object of the game– you can roll 3d6 like every other ability score. Or any other method. Up to you.
Wealth score goes down (usually temporarily, sometimes permanently) when you buy stuff, and up if you acquire enough money to raise it. It takes damage just like your ability scores can.
Super important note: You need to have guidelines for how many dollars wealth levels and purchases represent, and I provide them. That doesn't mean you should actually count dollar prices all the time, which defeats the whole point of an abstract wealth mechanic. Just view all of them as very approximate guidelines.
Super important note: You need to have guidelines for how many dollars wealth levels and purchases represent, and I provide them. That doesn't mean you should actually count dollar prices all the time, which defeats the whole point of an abstract wealth mechanic. Just view all of them as very approximate guidelines.
Making Purchases
Conceptually, there you can think of all purchases as falling into one of five categories.
Trivial purchases that will never be significant no matter how many you make. Putting a few bucks in the parking meter, buying a cheap fast food meal.
You can generally make as many of these as you want. If you abuse that, like by buying stiff for the whole group, these start to count as minor purchases instead.
Anything that costs up to (Wealth) dollars is trivial.
Minor purchases that you generally don't think twice about, but that would add up to being significant if you made them routinely. Eating at somewhat nicer restaurants, going to the movies, stuff like that.
A minor purchase here and there doesn't cost wealth. If you make (Wealth) minor purchases in quick succession– like within a week, or an adventuring session– your wealth score suffers one point of temporary damage.
Anything that is more than trivial and costs up to (Wealth squared) dollars is minor.
Significant purchases are things you can afford to pay cash for, but they're expensive enough that you do have to budget for them and make up for the cost by being frugal elsewhere. For middle-class people, electronics like phones, TVs, and laptops generally fall into this category, as do small vacations like a weekend ski trip within driving distance.
A significant purchase inflicts a point or more of temporary wealth damage.
Anything up to (Wealth cubed) dollars is significant and causes one point of temporary wealth damage.
Anything up to twice that much causes three points of temporary wealth damage, anything up to (wealth cubed times three) causes six points of temporary wealth damage, anything up to (wealth cubed times four) causes ten points of temporary wealth damage, and anything up to (wealth cubed times five) causes fifteen points of temporary wealth damage.
Temporary wealth damage means you've dipped into your savings, but not had to go into debt (or at least not serious long-term debt), nor sell of significant assets to finance your purchase. You just have to live frugally for a while to make up for your purchase. You can't make a purchase if the temporary wealth damage would take your wealth below zero.
Major purchases are things you can't afford to pay cash for. You either have to finance them with a loan, or sell off some investments to free up cash for them. Stuff like cars and homes usually fall into this category, as might a major vacation.
Major purchases permanently reduce your wealth score by a point.
Anything up to (Wealth to the fourth power, times five) dollars is a major purchase.
If you want to purchase something bigger than that, calculate how many dollars the next wealth level down is worth. Like if you're wealth 10, major purchase is 50k, but wealth nine is 32k, so dropping down from wealth 10 to wealth 8 would let you purchase something costing up to 82k.
Finally, there are things you just can't afford, period.
It's okay to be approximate with all of these numbers– the whole point of systems like this is to avoid having to actually count money. As long as you're not off by more than a factor of two, maybe three, this system works fine. If you're off by an order of magnitude then it breaks down.
Restoring Temporary Wealth Damage and Increasing Wealth
Temporary wealth damage "heals" at a rate of one point per month during downtime. During adventuring, you can heal it by acquiring cash equal to however much a significant purchase would be to you.
Increasing wealth is simply the reverse of making a major purchase. If you're at wealth 5, then buying your way up to wealth 6 will cost (6^4 x 5) dollars, or $6,480. Again, you can be very approximate with this and you don't need to make players count money. "A few thousand dollars" would be good enough in this example.
If you want your game to be a gritty realistic crime game like The Wire, then money has to be laundered before you can use it to buy up your permanent wealth score– but "dirty" money can still be used to restore temporary wealth damage.
But What About the Wealth Modifier?
The wealth modifier could get applied to rolls where your social class is important, like a test to get into some exclusive high-class club.
It would also apply when you're trying to use your money to accomplish something, but simply having money is necessary but not sufficient to succeed. Like if you want to systematically bribe a lot of people, it helps to have more money but it's still not guaranteed that you can find people to bribe or that they'll take a bribe.
Overall though, the modifier maybe won't get used much, but it's there if you need it.
But What About Billionaires?
If you've done the math then you've realized that even a wealth 20 individual has a net worth of only a few million dollars, and a wealth 30 individual has somewhere in the low tens of millions. There are two ways to portray higher wealth.
First, you could just let wealth get as high as it needs to, but stop increasing the modifier, or increase it more slowly, beyond a certain point.
Second, you could not use this system, and instead use a domain game mechanic to represent larger amounts of wealth. Beyond a certain point, a rich person's wealth is basically an organization unto itself. I prefer this method, and I'm working on a system for representing organizations that I'll share someday.
That said, this method is more than enough to get your party beyond the point where they'd either retire or move their focus to domain-level play.
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