I think that one thing that will always be scarce, insofar as it relates to spaceships, is time. Materials are plentiful, energy is cheap, and manufacturing is easy, but that last point comes with an asterisk. It's easy to manufacture components fairly cheaply, but when it comes to assembling large-scale things such as spacefaring vehicles time is one of the main "costs" that increases very rapidly.If we want to change things up, I think a good analysis of a economy starts with "What is scarce?"
construction time only scales linearly as ship volume increases exponentially
This, as the specific idea proposed, seems great and helpful as an OOC guide article. Creating item pages on the wiki is already a daunting task, so having what is essentially a cheat sheet available for writers who do not want to research what a handgun or yacht (for space) might cost would be great. It's an idea worth pursuing.I would like to work with members of the community to build such a list- essentially a list of item categories and what the general pricing of an item in that category would be.
I feel like this is a bit too complex and gamified for my tastes personally, since you then need a progression mechanic to allow PCs to grow in wealth and a rate at which that can happen. I'd refer you again to my admittedly very rough suggestion of roughly three categories of products with self-contained price ranges and a price jump between each. It's fairly rough intentionally, since it can be flexible that way, and is more based on how often individual PCs tend to buy these kind of things out-of-pocket.Then you just attach that to the existing DRv3 tier system. New folks start out at Tier 1 or whatever and can buy things that are reasonable for that tier. A common item of that type would have an equivalent price tier. If it's something advanced, then you can bump its price tier up and act like it costs as much as a common item of some higher tier.
I included a mention of "loans" which Raz seemed to take some objection to, but that's just an alternative method to saving for a while in roleplay, or saving up your prestiege points. Moneylending is just a part of society, and has been since long before capitalism. There's nothing particularly Kuvexian about it, and I'd be shocked if every single spacefaring nation didn't have some kind of mechanism for the extending of credit for purchases.Things like guns, clothes, food, appliances, basic vehicles and other types of things you can reasonably expect a person to be able to buy easily are going to be fairly cheap, in my opinion. They're simple and easy to make en-masse, and these are the types of things individual PCs most often need to buy for themselves, and should be priced appropriately so that players don't need to fret over affording a gun they like. I figure this ranges from dozens to hundreds of KS, maybe a thousand or two for really nice equipment.
Next you've got things like power armor, more high-end vehicles, mechs, high-end hardware/equipment, shuttles, small starships (upper tier-9, lower tier-10) and housing. These are expensive for an individual PC to buy, but feasible with saving for a while or a loan from some institution. Fairly explainable, but a big investment to be protected. I figure this ranges from ten(s?) of thousands to maybe a hundred or two hundred thousand on the high end.
Finally, you've got the big stuff, starships and stations and... whatever else we think of that belongs here. These things stand apart from pretty much everything else, few PCs are ever going to buy these types of products and they're traditionally only purchased by governments or large NGOs due to their high costs and/or operating costs. They're going to probably be really expensive, hundreds of thousands to millions of KS.
Rank | Description |
---|---|
Feeble | Unemployed, fixed income |
Poor | Freelancers, students, Yamatai UBI |
Typical | Salaried employment, Star Army Enlisted pay |
Good | Professional, middle class, Star Army Junior Officer Pay |
Excellent | Small business, Avengers' pay, Star Army Senior Officer Pay |
Remarkable | Large business, upper class, Star Army Flag Officer Pay |
Incredible | Small corporation, millionaire |
Amazing | Large corporation, small country |
Monstrous | Billionaire, multinational corps |
Unearthly | Major country, mega-corporation |
I'd personally relate the first 3/4 (Feeble-typical or good) levels to the first category of products I mentioned, the next 3/4 (Good-remarkable) to the second category, and the last four (Incredible and up) to the final category I mentioned. This is admittedly again a rough judgement but I'm thinking of how rich you'd need to be to buy those kinds of products without much thought.Marvel Super Heroes RPG's Resource Feats
Looking at the systems, I do like how marvel does it better than d20. We could probably just yoink the parts of the chart we need. I don't like hard numbers. So, something like this.
Rank Description Feeble Unemployed, fixed income Poor Freelancers, students, Yamatai UBI Typical Salaried employment, Star Army Enlisted pay Good Professional, middle class, Star Army Junior Officer Pay Excellent Small business, Avengers' pay, Star Army Senior Officer Pay Remarkable Large business, upper class, Star Army Flag Officer Pay Incredible Small corporation, millionaire Amazing Large corporation, small country Monstrous Billionaire, multinational corps Unearthly Major country, mega-corporation
While I agree that the abstraction can help, I do think that details such as pay rates and discrete prices are important for SARP's verisimilitude. I think that any categorization we discuss here and end up using should be for the purpose of making it incredibly easy for people making a page to set a price in KS or DA or DS or whatever. Character wealth is, I think, the more odd one out when it comes to things we track (or rather don't).SARP has done a good job of abstracting other things (damage, damage resilience, etc), so pricing items and tracking wealth feels weird.
Why not just tidy this up and finish it? Looks like it's been worked on recently and was already a collaborative thing based on the version history. It's basically what was proposed in the first post without all of this extra unrelated discussion about adding character money mechanics. All it really needs is a few more examples and to have that massive struct table (which looks like it was there to pull examples from) taken out.(Take a look at this old WIP Price Index that Wes made, it's probably a decent starting point for whatever this ends up turning into)
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