regulating high-income party's wealth via high expenses

[Kotori87]

Hi, folks! I am putting together a campaign making extensive use of airships. I've designed a wide variety of airships ranging from Liftwood sailing ships to hydrogen-filled zeppelins to steam-powered Floatstone Dreadnoughts. I am not thrilled with the ship combat and airship combat rules I've seen, so I will be using almost entirely house rules for ship-to-ship combat based on my own experience aboard real, full-size warships. Part of this will be that most airships are NOT destroyed in combat, merely disabled based on component/system damage hit tables and then captured via boarding, just like in the Napoleonic era. Given that an unequipped airship is a huge value, plus all of the weapons, crew, supplies, and cargo it must carry, capturing a single ship will clearly be a huge windfall for my players. And since I expect them to regularly get involved in ship-to-ship combat, they will probably have a very large income relative to their level.

I hope to offset this relatively huge income by having similarly large expenses. Ship maintenance, supplies, ammunition, crew pay, etc. For example, the most common shipboard weapons are "shock cannons", technological weapons whose ammunition uses the potion pricing formula for the lightning bolt spell.

What I'd like to know is, has anybody else tried regulating wealth using added expenses rather than limited income? Also, what sort of pricing would be fair for a 6 month loadout of supplies/ammunition/repair parts for a ship, drydock repairs on a heavily damaged ship, etc?

[Marespera]

You may want to consider getting rid of giving gold as a measure of wealth gained from capturing a ship altogether. I would suggest looking over the kingdom building rules in Ultimate Campaign, specifically the part that deals with BP ( Build Points ).

The idea with BP is that it is an abstraction representing about 4,000 gold in expendable assets, trade goods, raw materials and the like. As such BP are not easily converted into coin. Thus allowing you to keep WBL on par and still provide enough resources to keep things flying.

As for how much it would cost to maintain and repair an air ship, I would set that amount as a fraction of the total value of the ship. If you use say five percent of a ships total value as upkeep per month, a ship costing 80,000 gold would need roughly 4,000 gold or one BP. For major repairs I would adjust that percent based on how much the ship has been damaged.

[GM 1990]

Depending on your PCs they might feel "taxed to death", and resent getting the wealth in the first place if you're just taking 50k/mo back to keep the ship in order. Also, this may put them bankrupt if they don't capture a ship intact every x game sessions and you've already established their "by month costs" to run their own ship and they can't make the payments.

Also, even if it does interest you personally to build a logical economic system to keep player wealth in check it might end up using so much of your time that it becomes a little to much like IRL book-keeping - again player enjoyment might wane.

It sounds to me like the real goal of your campaign is to share the enjoyment of these cool vessels and transportation methods, as well as some really cool mid-air fights, ship boarding encounters/challenges, chases, etc. I would keep the focus on that, and try to avoid getting bogged down on economics.

Explain going in that you're going to follow the normal PF WBL charts, and the assumption is everything else ends up getting cashed out to pay the crew (who also help board right and would want a share), used for spare parts, replaces destroyed weapons on your own ship, etc etc. That way when you actually tell them that in the "loot" they acquire a +1 shock-cannon, they know its actually theirs to keep and put on the ship - otherwise they typically have to buy them.

Just my opinion on how I'd keep it focused on the campaign theme and not have to burn too much effort keeping the party wealth inside the normal parameters.

[BlackOuroboros]

So, what you are describing is pretty much how the game "Traveler" has handled it over the years; you need to get a mortgage on your ship and come up with payments. I found it to be tedious personally, but YMMV.

However, I think you are overestimating how much money your players will get for selling a ship because you are conflating the book value of a captured ship and the actual value of a captured ship. Remember that these ships have will invariably have owners who have a real vested interest in recovering them; be it a foreign power (if your players capture a military ship), rightful owners (if your players capture a pirate ship), or businesses (if your players capture a mercantile ship). In order to sell these ships, your players will likely need to get them cosmetically modified and sell them on the black market; both things that will drive down the value of the ship and increase the time it takes to sell them. For example, in Skulls & Shackles (the Paizo pirate AP) there weren't really rules on how to sell a captured ship, it was expected the players would seize the cargo and move on with their lives because trying to find a buyer for this ship was ultimately not worth the time and effort for doing so because there was no "Honest Stan's Previously Owned Vessels" store.

[Cevah]

Look at the Skulls & Shackles AP.

Ships in that AP are huge value items. Crew must be paid, which is a drain on the party.

The way to balance this it to count the ship as plot wealth and not party wealth. Party wealth affects how much magic each player has on them to make them uber. Plot wealth has no effect on combat, only on RP.

Also, the S&S ship combat is considered sub par. Fire As She Bears is considered better. Check out the S&S forum for that.

/cevah

[Wolfsnap]

It's okay for the PCs to be wealthy, if you limit them in other ways. If you give them unlimited wealth AND unlimited access to purchase whatever magic they like, then you have a problem. However, if most magic is NOT available for purchase then that forces them to either:

- Quest for magic, which drives the plot and becomes a great springboard for adventure

- Craft the magic, which may also require questing for components materials

How much cooler will that +2 keen longsword be if the party had to research how to make it, quest for a basilisk tooth to grind up and smelt into the blade, and trap a salamander's blood in a magical gem for the hilt.

[Dave Justus]

Wolfsnap wrote:

How much cooler will that +2 keen longsword be if the party had to research how to make it, quest for a basilisk tooth to grind up and smelt into the blade, and trap a salamander's blood in a magical gem for the hilt.

This is fine in moderation, but the game expects each PC to have a pretty good number of magic items.

After the 3rd quest for a cloak of resistance +1 and the 2nd for a +1 ring of protection while Bob is still queued up to get flaming on his +1 sword and Phil had been waiting for 3 levels to get +1 on his shield, it gets pretty old.

[Wolfsnap]

Dave Justus wrote:

This is fine in moderation, but the game expects each PC to have a pretty good number of magic items.

Well, the reliance on unsexy, generic "+1 more" items is a whole other topic. There are ways to award that stuff without resorting to the party having to buy it at magic-mart, and ways to run your game so that such items less essential.

[Jiggy]

Honestly, this is part of why I switched to a system where in-universe currency is NOT also used as a character advancement metagame structure. In games like 5E, wealth is wealth. In games like Pathfinder, wealth is The Other XP Track. :/

[Kotori87]

I will take a look at the Fire As She Bears rules. Sounds like it may have some good ideas. I will discuss the idea of ship expenses with my players, and see what they think. The original idea was not to charge them for the ship itself (no monthly payments for the ship), but to include expenses for ship repairs, consumables, and other important features. This is based on a privateer-ish model, with the players being the owners of the ship and, while free to pursue their fortunes, must support the ship from pocket. If they don't like the idea, or it proves unmanageable, I could always have them accept commissions in a Navy and send them on a state-funded voyage of exploration, a la USS Enterprise from Star Trek.

[Claxon]

I prefer to use the concept of "Magical Encumbrance". You're character can have unlimited wealth. But can only use an amount of magical items equal to your WBL.

If you are interested I can post a link to a more detailed description.

[Matthew Downie]

I think it's very optimistic to believe that the players will be split their wealth between magic items and airship maintenance in the desired proportion. "We'll skimp on airship weapons to buy nice shiny things. If we get attacked, the sorcerer will destroy the enemy airship with fireballs."

Either use BP for airship building, or use one of the many no-magic shop systems. (Inherent bonuses, etc.)

[Just a Mort]

Use automatic bonus progression, so no one's buying the big six, and halve their treasure - it goes to maintain their airship.

[Ryan Freire]

Wolfsnap wrote:

It's okay for the PCs to be wealthy, if you limit them in other ways. If you give them unlimited wealth AND unlimited access to purchase whatever magic they like, then you have a problem. However, if most magic is NOT available for purchase then that forces them to either:

- Quest for magic, which drives the plot and becomes a great springboard for adventure

- Craft the magic, which may also require questing for components materials

How much cooler will that +2 keen longsword be if the party had to research how to make it, quest for a basilisk tooth to grind up and smelt into the blade, and trap a salamander's blood in a magical gem for the hilt.

Not any cooler, not any cooler at all. In fact most games I've had where gm's run it like that you might as well not take crafting at all because the main plotline will almost never let you stop long enough to do this quest to do all this wonky shit THEN put in the time required to actually do the enchanting. It works in campaigns where the pc's toddle from dungeon to dungeon but the instant there's an overarcing story with any kind of timeline to it pfft. Time that would be spent enchanting is spent figuring out how to catch unicorn farts in a riddle and then questing to find a flatulent unicorn.

Its basically denying item crafting without actually coming out to deny item crafting.

[Wolfsnap]

Ryan Freire wrote:

Not any cooler, not any cooler at all. In fact most games I've had where gm's run it like that you might as well not take crafting at all because the main plotline will almost never let you stop long enough to do this quest to do all this wonky s~$# THEN put in the time required to actually do the enchanting. It works in campaigns where the pc's toddle from dungeon to dungeon but the instant there's an overarcing story with any kind of timeline to it pfft. Time that would be spent enchanting is spent figuring out how to catch unicorn farts in a riddle and then questing to find a flatulent unicorn.

Its basically denying item crafting without actually coming out to deny item crafting.

Unicorn farts are nothing to sneeze at.

I run a sandbox game where the plot is player-driven. Obviously your mileage may vary.