How do you do wealth in a modern setting?

how do you do wealth in a modern setting?

if you treat money like its treated in fantasy games, the players will dress and act like murderhobos

Liquid capitol and investments.

Net worth does not directly translate to buying power. Bank accounts with only a couple hundred thousand or million, garages with expensive cars, property, hidden vaults with valuables and criminal networks. At some point it's not about how much you have, it's what your assets can do for you. Guns and fancy cars are easy to get. Military hardware is not.

Wealth stat
Purchases have levels
If < PC/party wealth level purchase just happens
If > wealth level then roll
Success = purchase just happens
Failure = purchase happens and wealth is lowered

Tracking actual money is a huge bother for very little flavor. Why play a game when the game is about balancing your check book? And it is easily hacked in a game.

Play Grand Theft Auto V

Notice how despite most of the cast being quite wealthy they still pretty much have to steal most of their equipment? Turning over a convenience store, you just need a gun. It doesn't matter how rich you are, you simply just can't go out and buy a military transport chopper. You gotta steal it, negotiate or con it.

What happens when I beat a dude up and take his wallet? Does my wealth go up? Can I just buy an infinite amount of things if my wealth is high enough?

>What happens when I beat a dude up and take his wallet? Does my wealth go up?
I imagine wealth levels are logarithmic.
Wealth 1 might have ten dollars to its name, wealth 2 a hundred, wealth 3 a thousand, and so on. To go up a wealth level, you'd need to get enough money for it to make you ten times richer (say) than you were before.
Also, this assumes you have an income of some sort, so really what you want to be doing is improving your average income over time.

You can break it pretty easily. Like most mechanisms it comes apart when you try to defy its purpose.

It is not intended to track single events but to make social strata like income part of the game.

I'd subtract monthly expenses like rent or car payments directly from the income, ie the wealth level. Then assume any mundane purchases like coffee, a bus ticket, or new pants eat up the remaining income. Because I don't want to deal with it that is covered without any roll. And if a character spends above their pay grade then it's not just unaffordable, but it risks over stretching their finances, which then affects all purchases for the rest of the month.

How do you deal with having a ton of money when it would be unreasonable for your amount of income?

Most games that have a wealth score you can "buy" anything equal or lower for basically free. The GM is the one in charge, and can say that X is unavailable. You also have to buy your wealth score with build points or the like, and some systems make Wealth very expensive. Personally, I really like it. It assumes that players have enough wealth to buy food, clothes, pay rent, maintain supplies. I also add that you can only purchase something above your wealth score once a week ( representing a paycheck of some kind).

It works out really well, and as long as my players don't try to abuse it, we all don't have to keep track of this shit.

So, you'd be replacing a granular system with another granular system? You'd still need to keep track of how much money you earn to see if you hit one of the breakpoints or not. Not to mention that it'd make small cash rewards pointless at higher levels.

The entire point of the system is to keep track of money. If you're fiating 90% of purchases, why even have a system in place at all?

fiat is not a verb, and the concept doesn't apply. It is faster and easier than tracking money, and it distracts less from the game. At the same time it isn't entirely arbitrary and follows an inner logic which somewhat resembles personal finances as experienced in the modern world.

Why resolve anything with rules really, if rule 1 always applies?

How is it faster an easier?
>I wanna buy a gun.
>Cool, it costs 50$
>Player subtracts 50$ from their total
vs.
>I wanna buy a gun
>Cool, roll a wealth check
>Player rolls a wealth check and might have to subtract from total

It seems about the same to me, except the wealth system is incredibly easy to abuse. Actually, d20 Modern did this exact thing, and everyone thought it was awful. What changed?

That -is- the system in place for some games. It frees up that extra time rolling up gold and loot, my players never fight over money or the value of items. It's a simple, streamlined way to represent in inflow and outflow of funds. On top of that, the systems that use this are like Mutants & Masterminds. You pay for your wealth score with a limited resource and don't track much, as opposed to D&D where you micromanage your funds, but have greater freedom to buy what you want.

>I want to get breakfast and watch the other patrons.
a) okay
b) that's -um- 3 coppers, please subtract those from your assets

>I want to get an elaborate breakfast to impress my buests
a) roll
b) that's -um- two silver pieces, please subtract those from your assets
>How many silver per gold?
a) [moved on by now]
b) 10, but they don't have change and the money changer only opens on market days.

>I need a pack of frangible rounds, a pack of squash heads, and some large FMGs for my rifle.
a) okay
b) [starts flipping pages]

Seriously, have you ever played an RPG before?

I think it depends on your players. Some might enjoy the financial management side. Others just want to get into the game and worry less about resource management.

Remember the advantage of being a human controlling a game over a computer is that you can adapt to your players.

I'd take it on a case by case basis and use some common sense.

If your delta green agent is a doctor, sure he can free up 600 bucks for a glock from the local gun store. No roll or whatever required. Unless he's on the run with only cash on hand, then you go to murderhobo economics.

If he's a multimillionaire, then almost nothing is off limits, though large purchases like a yacht might take a few days to clear the bank. The only thing that might be hard for him to wrangle up would be illegal weapons, drugs, human slaves, etc.

If he's a joe sixpack working construction, then all that really matters is what he's got in his checking account and what's in his wallet. His index funds and savings bonds from grandpa don't mean squat unless he wants to leverage everything he's got to free up cash, and that could take a few days. If he doesn't work for weeks because he's off fighting space vampires, he's going to be living off his credit cards, and might only have a month or two before he's broke--and then you're dealing in straight cash again.

I'd even turn it around for PCs too affluent for their own good. They'd have to take care to stay anonymous when making larger purchases. Otherwise they would be harassed by entrepreneurs smelling a deal. If the purchase is remarkable enough, like crates of guns and ammo, maybe a blogger gets interested. Of course someone with money will have their people to use as straw man. But those people have interests, too.

Monthy Salary

That's mostly because GTAV doesn't have the system from Saints Row where you can call in a car you own to your location

Bruning Wheel Resource stat.
>Abstract representation of general income, wealth, favoures owed etc.
>Roll Recource Pool vs obstacle to see if character can affort something.
>Additional liquid assets give one-use bonus di(c)e to the roll.
>Succesful roll also works towards getting higher permanent Resource stat. (Spend money to make money)
>Failed roll means you overextend, temporarily dropping the stat.
>Continued failing permanently drops the stat.

Wait Veeky Forums dont add consequences to their players actions?

No, we just passively aggressively complain after letting players run our games themselves.