How do you make a decent way in-game for a character to be much richer than the others without being unbalanced?

How do you make a decent way in-game for a character to be much richer than the others without being unbalanced?

Don't give them extra money. Instead, offer them the equivalent of a line of credit. That way, you can do small things like make them able to enter any social event or book rooms at any inn, that kind of thing, that illustrates a highly affluent way of life.

Do what everyone else does with superpowers (which being filthy rich effectively is): pit them against what they aren't good at. Superman had plenty of challenges put before him that couldn't be solved by being strong enough to punch mountains into gravel.

Limit their access to said funds via some arbitrary contrivance like an allowance or a set amount of spending permitted per a set amount of time due to a fear of destabilizing a market. (We are only allowed to sell X amount of product at Y price to keep diamond prices artificially high)

Limit the supply of people willing to take their money. Have their money be considered "dirty" because of something they or their family did, meaning no one wants to deal with them or handle their money at risk of being killed or something.

Limit the supply of an item to the point where no amount of money will be enough (food and medicine to the starving and ill is worth an infinite amount of money due to immediate need)

Mommy and Daddy are giving them a strict allowance. they want their dear precious child to stop playing adventurer, come home, settle down and have some kids with an affluent noble of equal or greater standing. Tightening the purse strings is the first passive aggressive step in bringing the child home.

step two is bounty hunters

I want Karin to laugh at my dick.

You're a real shitty GM if your answer to a player making a character strong in something is to cuck from them their character's strengths that they paid for.

They can spend character building resources on higher levels of the Wealth advantage or whatever the system calls it.

Not play a game where wealth is everything?

All the money in the world won't improve her hit points

It could buy her a hundred burly dudes with hit points though

But what would she do with all these burly dudes?

Just let them have the cash.
Everything they buy has to be the best. 60gp per glass of wine . 200gp for a shirt. 800gp for a normal sword because it looks nice.

please them for money. It just never ends

Add additional hoops, but let money jump through some of them. For example, a VIP treasure auction where high quality items can only be purchased by trading other treasures of equivalent value, but you have to put down a large deposit of money just for an invitation.

This way the player's wealth is doing something for them, but they still have to rely on themselves to ultimately profit.

>paid for.
Nobody said they were spending limited chargen points on being super rich.

That wasn't in the op.

If they're not giving anything up for it and just want to be rich, having downsides like bounty hunters coming after you or obligations that must be met to keep the gravy train flowing is one way to balance it.

Doesn't work with games where characters scale off money (through strong equipment or whatever).

old World of Darkness handled money pretty well through Backgrounds, but over there it's considerably more difficult to abuse having money.

Either way, it has to be standardized and it's also important that you don't have +10 Sword of the Flaming Gods of the Eagle in your game, otherwise you have to block it from being bought (makes no sense), forbid it from being used by lower levels (weird, but better I guess), or just ... Ok I had a third point but I no longer remember it.


If an expensive sword is not all that different from a common sword, having money becomes, then, a narrative advantage rather than just making you too strong. You won't be stronger than other players, but you get to do fun stuff or perhaps do stuff that would otherwise be out of reach (an expensive bribe, getting expensive tickets to something exclusive, sleeping at the VIP room, etc).

all his wealth is tied up in investments, and so has only as much liquid assets to spend as the others

however he can, at the DMs discretion, find free lodging or transport or servants

In a game, a price tag is just an obstacle to stop the players from having something they aren't supposed to have yet. So if the price tag is no longer an obstacle, make the item unavailable. Powerful items, regardless of setting, usually are hard to come by anyway. It doesn't matter if you can afford to buy an Apache helicopter, if you can't find one for sale.

Another thing they may do is try to hire large numbers of NPCs to do work for them, which can be just as bad or worse than overpowered items. Sometimes you can also control this with availability. If not, you have to scale up and abstract situations. If they hire 500 mercenaries to attack a bandit camp, there will just have to be 500 bandits as well, and then the NPCs are all busy fighting each other, and they still do the exact same adventure, while their hirelings become background noise. It often works to mention this to them, and they will usually just get the point and give up on it.

No-one said anything about getting it all for free either, idiot.

Generally, by forcing them to sacrifice in other areas such as skill (like shadowrun).

Alternatively, by not letting money play a THAT important role in the game.

>If not, you have to scale up and abstract situations. If they hire 500 mercenaries to attack a bandit camp, there will just have to be 500 bandits as well, and then the NPCs are all busy fighting each other, and they still do the exact same adventure, while their hirelings become background noise. It often works to mention this to them, and they will usually just get the point and give up on it.
That's... a pretty bad way of handling things? If there are five hundred of them, that's no longer bandits, that's a rebel army or something, with everything that implies. It would be better to just let them do that. Hiring all those mercenaries costs much more than the reward for getting rid of the bandits would have been, there's no experience to be gained for hiring people and telling them to deal with the problem, moving on to the next part of the adventure.

Not everything can be solved with abundance of money. You can certainly buy body armor and automatic weapons from some black market dealer, but moving around in public clad in SWAT gear is practically guaranteed to cause more problems than it solves. You can certainly solve some problems by bribing the right people, but if you try to solve EVERY social problem like that, you'll end up in prison - some people just can't be bribed and will cause trouble if you try. Sure, IN THEORY you can have someone cast a 9th level spell for you by paying them enough money. In practice, just finding someone who can cast the spell you want can be an adventure by itself, and you'd better hope they don't mind being bothered. Not to mention that someone that powerful probably doesn't have much need for cash, so they may well require an alternative form of payment(which may well be an adventure in itself). And so on.

>Not everything can be solved with abundance of money.
Wrong. Anything that is capable of being solved can be done so with enough money. Most of the time it involves hiring professionals to do it for you. Money is the ultimate super power.

Would money work as a superpower in a post-scarcity or barter economy?

>post-scarcity
The equivalent of money in such a setting would probably be social influence but that's a whole other discussion.

>barter
Of course. Money is just standardized bartering chits. Just substitute dollar bills with barterable items and it holds true.

The fact that you have to go for such drastic and niche examples kind of proves my point though.

>Wrong. Anything that is capable of being solved can be done so with enough money.
Okay. How do you get a permission to walk around with (fully functional)assault rifles in a first world country? How do you bribe someone who can just turn lead into gold if he really needs more gold? How do you get rid of a shoggoth living in the sewers?

>How do you get a permission to walk around with (fully functional)assault rifles in a first world country?
In my country it's literally just a case of paying for a very expensive license. There's no legal way to do it but with money.

>if he really needs more gold
...buy him lead I guess. I don't really understand this one. If he can make gold why does he need it?

>How do you get rid of a shoggoth living in the sewers?
By hiring a mercenary company to systematically kill everything down there. If that fails hire occultists and/or sorcerer to research how to banish it.

>...buy him lead I guess. I don't really understand this one. If he can make gold why does he need it?
The point is that he doesn't have any use for money, because he can just make gold if he needs any? Are you being intentionally dense?

Why does he really need more gold if he can make gold? I have to assume you made some sort of typo.

I need more context. What am I bribing him to do?

>Why does he really need more gold if he can make gold?
3/10 got me to reply.

Not that user but OP clearly stated that he seeks to balance tho difference out. That clearly implies that character either didn't invest enough *put your character upgrade metacurrency here* to make it viable. Who's raging idiot now?

As my answer to OP goes - firstly play a game that don't put much emphasis on gear. There are plenty of games that dknt involve much gearing, assuming that character skills are way more important than their tools.

Then do a campaign that focus on a challenges that cant be solved by just throwing money at them

In the Dresden Files game I understand that they charge Chargen points for a character being wealthy.

In a lot of systems being wealthy costs points that you could put into something else for your character

Dude same. Like I fantasize about Karin sitting on my face and laughing at my tiny dick as she tenderly dominates me

>Okay. How do you get a permission to walk around with (fully functional)assault rifles in a first world country?
In the US? Go somewhere that open carry of long rifles is legal
In Canada? Hire some people to beat you to the brink of death a few times, use that as a way to prove to the government that you need a license to carry a firearm, and get one

Those are the only two I know about, but both are real and they're possible with enough money

I solved this with an easy solution.
My games are usually D&D 3.5. I run a high mortality game every once in awhile and one of the choices a character can take is being from a wealthy family. they start with great armor and weapons and a bit of gold to boot (maybe a few oddball other perks depending on the situation), but they take penalties to Consitution and Wisdom from leading a "sheltered" upbringing. always a minus 2 to each.
My players love it and its just balanced enough to really want it, but always question it. I usually have one player take it each campaign.

Make wealth an attribute, feat, character trait or other system equivalent instead of tracking it separately. There's a number of games where "Wealthy" is in the same category of character traits as "Well-connected" or "Knowledgable" or similar.

One current character I'm playing is a very wealthy noble, however, while I was off at wizard school, my family's estate was attacked and my father and brother were killed. So I have a lot of money, but most of it is going to repairing my estate and lands (all my peasants crops were razed etc) while I hunt down the killers. I do have very rich, fancy clothes, a few non-combat servants that follow me around and take care of my horse, and meals and shit like that, but all in all, my wealth is just part of my character's backstory and flavor, I'm not using it to garner any game play advantage, other then being the party "face" whenever we have to deal with other nobility, since I know how to talk to them, and when I can produce documents showing my nobility they take me a little more seriously then they would peasants like the rest of the party I'm playing with.

You play a system where being richer is an option a character can take, at the downside of not taking something else.

Just make the rich party member white and the poor ones negros. Negros are used to being poor.
Then again, the white PC would never be able to relax, what with all the thievery of the negro PCs going on.
...
I just don't think it'll work

I did this in a game of WoD. My character was basically a rich ass manager in a big firm after climbing his way to the top of the organization, one day he awoke to the fact that magic was really and he found himself at the bottom rung of an entirely new social ladder of mages. The revelation broke him, and he stopped working, but his wife, also very successful, still made a ton of cash. She put him on an allowance, and it eventually became more of a hinderance because he was constantly at odds with the rest of the party seeking to exploit it further, which distanced him from his wife more and more each time they were successful.

You make wealth and gear comparatively not important. Or in other words, stop playing DnD.

>decent way in-game for a character to be much richer than the others without being unbalanced?

Make that the character's main power, while everyone else gets to be good at actually doing stuff.