In the Ample Basic Rules Book we introduced what you could
call a ‘cashless’ wealth system. Using the Wealth Advantage, we tracked
individual character’s money without keeping track of every single coin or
credit. While this may work for some games (especially games that have little
need for money to be anything but an abstract) it doesn’t work for all genres.
As stated in the BRB; each system offered up for use is optional, and games
masters are encouraged to pick and choose which ones to include and which ones
to modify or ignore. The first campaign setting offered by Audio Samurai Games –
Atlas City Almanac - uses the Wealth System as written in the BRB, but future
settings will use modified versions to show how they can tweaked.
In the fantasy setting (which is still a work-in-progress)
we do away with the Wealth System all together and stick to a more traditional coin
based system. What we’re going to discuss today though, is the modified Wealth
System we’re using for the Sci Fi setting of Galaxy’s End.
Modified Wealth System
In this system, we combine individual credit ratings with
the Wealth Advantage – characters keep track of their own credits and choose to
invest Advantage points in Wealth. The Wealth Advantage represents an overall
assessment of a character’s, or an organisation’s, financial standing. It
represents their income and available assets, rather than how many credits they
have in their pockets. The Advantage is used during character generation to
determine how many credits a starting character has available, and is used
during play once per game session to grant a cash injection to the character.
Aside from these uses, Wealth is used during larger purchases and business
transactions, such as Starship buying, shipping cargo and mining.
The Advantage can be used as a group pool of resources
available to the entire party, as well as funding for businesses and
organisations.
Complexity
For this system, as well as the fantasy setting coin based
system, this leaves a gap in one of the uses of the Craft Skill; normally the
Cost and Availability of an item are added together to give the number of
successes needed to create an item. Without a Cost value expressed as points of
Wealth, however, this won’t work. Instead, we introduce ‘Complexity’ in place
of the old Cost value. Add this to Availability to get the number of successes
needed for a Crafting Skill check. In the case of the fantasy setting, where we
aren’t using Availability either, Complexity can be used in place of both (and thus
get a higher value – Cost + Avail).
Food for thought, at any rate, for any budding campaign
creators out there using Ample.
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