Assets - Wealth

I love loot. My characters tend to turn out the corpses of every hobgoblin they come across. I bring a mule with me to battle so I can carry the chain mail of dead hobgoblins back to town and resell it. However, I'm not collecting coins so I can swim in my money bin. I love the meaning of loot. The meaning of a Magic Item is pretty clear, but what about all those currency and fungible art objects? If it's just a running tally until my character can by the latest "power up" from a designated vendor, where's the added value from the table top experience as opposed to a video game? I'm not just greedy for coin - I'm greedy for the power of the purse!

Lifestyle Expenses

“Drive sports cars, date movie stars, buy things that are not for sale... who knows, Master Wayne? You start pretending to have fun, you might even have a little by accident.” – Alfred, Batman Begins

Different tiers of lifestyles are a fact of life. Some people are waited on hand-and-foot and others are begging in the street. "Meet at the Inn," type adventurers tend to start out counting every copper and pursuing life-threatening escapades for meager bounties. Then at some point that dynamic fades out while PCs are looting dragon hordes and destroying armies of undead. The idea of ditching the rustic tavern scene for something a bit more upscale has come up in Living Greyhawk and Dungeons and Dragons, 5th Edition but it's always come across as more of a tax than a benefit to me. The number-crunching gets absurd too - an adventurer idling or retiring in style after killing a couple of dragons is untenable due to constant drain while NPC expenses are hand-waved. I replace that paradigm with the idea of a sustainable lifestyle. Peasants, merchants, and sell-swords have the assets to keep up their lifestyle, and so should PCs. If a character has a sufficient Wealth rank his or her sustainable lifestyle automatically increases.

Operating Budget

"Some assets work for money, others believe in a cause. The most effective incentive though is a combination of the two." - Michael Westen, Burn Notice

One the advantages of Wealth is that it makes it easier to generate an income. While other assets provide more concrete models for estates and businesses (and adventure hooks), Wealth levels can be squeezed for a certain baseline of income per week. The part that overruns lifestyle expenses can provide a basic weekly budget for the adventurer out on the town. This might be used to cover a few non-incidental purchases, grease the right palms, or help the struggling poor. These are the kind of expenses that are constrained by a short-term budget, but aren't relevant to carry week-to-week or episode-to-episode. Just know your limits and you shouldn't need to muss up your character sheet.

Capital Expenses

"Pay a man enough and he'll walk barefoot into Hell." - David Xanatos, Gargoyles

These are the one-time expenses I'm the most familiar with in a swords-and-sorcery RPG. You pile up a bunch of GPs and you buy something with them. Most commonly it's a "power-up" like a scroll to scribe into your spell book or a magic sword. From time-to-time it might be a pricey service like a Restoration or Regeneration spell. However, with an Assets system there's a lot more than usual to buy. Money can buy a lot of things - land, buildings, and employees are pretty common. That's the core premise of things ranging from setting up a small shop to a huge castle and sprawling demesne. You could also spread around money to cultivate things like contacts, allies, favors, glory, or even buy a political office. These all represent large, one-time outlays of cash for value you can't easily convert back into coins. In a wealth system you can liquidate one of more ranks of Wealth to finance these sorts of expenses.

Spare Change

"Laws are a tedious business and counting coppers is worse." - Robert Baratheon, A Game of Thrones

There comes a time in every successful adventurer's career where keeping track of the extra silver pieces you tipped to loosen the bartender's tongue just isn't worth it. You want to buy a couple of vials of oil for your lantern? I (the DM) don't want to waste the precious seconds of game time marking down that gold piece. (You're a 9th level Wizard, Harry - why are you even using an oil lantern in the first place?) Rather than micromanage expenses that's are out of scope for your character's assets, certain Wealth ranks provide you the benefit of just waiving these petty expenses away for the rounding errors they've become. Come to think of it, you should probably let the peasant children loot the loose coins from your couch cushions on the holidays.

Rough Tiers - Wealth by Rank

So here is my rough draft of a Wealth tier system for Byzantine Age. Prices are given in Double-Denarius, a silver coin with the equivalent purchasing power of a Gold Piece in the standard D&D setting. I suppose you could even assign a negative value in this Asset to represent squalid poverty or crushing debt of some sort if a character's situation called for it.

• Rank 0: Sustain a Modest Lifestyle indefinitely 
• Rank 1: Ignore expenses less than 1dd (1GP D&D)
• Rank 2: Budget of 10dd/wk
• Rank 3: Sustain a Comfortable Lifestyle indefinitely
• Rank 4: Ignore expanses < 10dd (10GP D&D) 
• Rank 5: Budget of 100dd/wk 
• Rank 6: Sustain a Wealthy Lifestyle indefinitely 
• Rank 7: Ignore expenses < 50dd (50GP D&D) 
• Rank 8: Budget of 500dd/wk 
• Rank 9: Sustain an Aristocratic Lifestyle indefinitely 
• Rank 10: Ignore expanses < 100dd (100GP D&D)