Great White Games/Pinnacle Entertainment Group

[shinryu]

So I've been considering how to deal with a mostly-moneyless Wealth management system, how to build cyborgs or other augmented characters in SWD with minimal difficulty, and sort of tangentially how one would handle the Summon Ally power for weird science, presuming the "ally" was in fact some nasty clanking automaton, say, with a more permanent physical form than the typical summoned critter. My thoughts for the group's consideration: Gear Points.

The idea is to try and use the equivalent Power Point costs of powers or racial abilities to form rough costs for gear, implants, and/or that more permanent Ally. As an example:

A standard pistol is roughly a Bolt, so one Gear point. A rifle, on the other hand, has a bump in range and damage (typically double range). Doubling the range is effectively Farsight, and we'll let the damage be incorporated into that cost, so it's four Gear points. An assault rifle adds the additional RoF from Bolt, so another 2 points for 6. A machine gun would have much more ammo capacity, so using the +2 cost for +10 power points from the racial abilities, that's (for 100 rounds/roughly 30 "bolts") an additional +4 for a total cost of 10 Gear points. You can do this for other gear pretty easily: binoculars might give the +2 to Vision rolls as the +1 racial ability, while a recoil compensator is the equivalent of Rock and Roll, so a Seasoned edge for 3 more points. etc. It's rough but I think mostly works out. Even a car works out pretty well:

Move 10 (2 points) + Speed Power (affects 5 people) 6 points + Armor Power (affects 5 people) 7 points is a total of 14 points, probably pretty reasonable. Another 6 points for a sports car (double the speed, again), though you could price a two seater at 2 + 4 + 6 for 12 in total.

What does this buy you?

1) Abstraction: For character creation, you can assign a certain number of Gear Points and figure that the gear characters buy will roughly work out. You can give out money in terms of Gear Points, or if you're using a rolled Wealth system you could use the cost as a modifier to the Wealth roll to acquire items (say, half the gear point cost as a penalty to the roll, or use the point cost as the TN) and give out bonuses to Wealth rolls. This might also work well as a Streetwise difficulty (6 seems about right to get an assault rifle, 10 for a machine gun?. Car should be easier than 14, though, it's certainly not a perfect match).

2) For characters with bought powers (say, implants), this gives you a way to construct them pretty easily as well. Is it Gear, a Racial Ability, or a Power? Use those costs. Figuring a +2 ability is the equivalent of a Novice edge, you could assign say 5 racial points to be distributed with each level of a hypothetical Cyborg Edge, but with an attendant -2 or -3 in penalties as for Racial Hindrances. There might be some cases where you might waive that, but I think that's balanced.

3) Right now, if I understand Summon Ally for Weird Science, you basically have to figure out equivalent point/rank cost for whatever you'd like to build (is my buddy the T800 here a Veteran or Heroic rank Ally?), hump it around till you need it (though a benevolent GM might allow it to be self-motivated enough to get around out of combat or other stressful situations), then start it up with the attendant point cost, and hope its Power Points hold out through whatever you need it to do. (so, typically, it runs for about 30 seconds to maybe three minutes max).

The alternative would be to use the Power Points the power would normally have to construct your new buddy as if they were Gear Points. Figure you start with D4s in all attributes and no skills and build the Ally up from there. Does it fly? 2 points. Does it have Marksman? 3 points. I don't think this would get out of hand since you'd need to buy skills and attributes up as well, and of course you could give it Hindrances for extra points. Presumably for attributes or skills past the listed in the table you'd just add extra points (so say 4 points for a D12 in a skill, or 6 for an attribute). This also works nicely for building gear point costs for things like customized drones or personal cyberdecks in settings where those are present. I think it works.

Thoughts? It seems like an obvious, elegant solution to the problem.

[The One]

I think that if you're gonna start costing things in an abstract "points" system, you might as well stick to $ prices, otherwise all you're doing is reducing the numbers to a different scale.

A simplier option is to track wealth as a die type, and then apply penalties for the roll based on the overall value. E.g. buying a gun might be a straight roll, buying a starship would attract a -8 penalty
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