In the full GURPS rules, your Cost of Living scales with Tech Level and Status. Dungeon Fantasy RPG doesn't really have Tech Level (it's all Tech Level: Olden Days a.k.a. Tech Level 3 plus whatever your GM thinks is cool). It doesn't really have Status either. (Obviously the king has higher status than a commoner, but it's all abstract, not a stat on your sheet.) So does a PC's Cost of Living stay $150/week forever?
Well, it can if they really want it to. The Miserliness [-10] disadvantage is available, if you want to play Warren Buffet, a multibillionaire who still lives in a regular house in Omaha and drives an Oldsmobuick. Most rich people want to spend at least some of that money on fun stuff though. So in addition to the useful things like magic armor and healing potions, it's reasonable to spend money on comfort items like a house or a horse or a servant. Or security items like banks and guards.
In DFRPG Arden Vul, the town of Gosterwick has two full-service inns, the middle-class Yellow Cloak Inn and the fancy Stunned Acolyte Inn. I ruled that the standard PC Cost of Living gets you a shared room (two or three PCs to a room) at the Yellow Cloak Inn and three meals per day in the common dining room. If you want to eat most of your meals in the upper class dining room, or have a single room or a suite, cost of living goes up. If you want to stay at the Stunned Acolyte, it goes up more. If you want the Archon's Suite at the Stunned Acolyte, you can spend a ton.
There's another inn within the ruins of Arden Vul itself, the Inn of the Broken Head. It's not as nice as the Yellow Cloak, let alone the Stunned Acolyte, but its location makes everything more expensive. (All the supplies need to be brought up the Long Stair via mule train, with the teamsters paid hazard pay because of the dragon in the area.) So if a PC wanted to live there full time, they'd pay full cost of living to sleep in a shared bunkroom with strangers, or double for a private room (if one were even available).
Ioannes got himself in trouble with the Yellow Cloak Inn for a critical failure making Continual Light stones, that ended up accidentally casting Continual Darkness on his bedding and freaking out a maid. So he and Vael decided to move to an apartment at the Arcane Practitioners Club, which explicitly allows spellcasting. And later, the other PCs decided to join them there. This initially only cost the regular cost of living, plus the reasonable APC membership fee ($13 per week each). However, at some point Lyssandra and Pelteon decided that having lower-class adventurer tenants was too annoying, as they did things like drag monster corpses through the hallways. So they decided to renovate their eight small apartments into four double-sized luxury apartments and charge double the rent. With only four apartments available, they planned to offer their four least annoying tenants (not the PCs) the first opportunity to lease one -- but Vael subverted that strategy by giving Lyssandra a valuable magic item in exchange for a two-year lease on all four apartments. So now she's stuck with monster-corpse-hoarding assassin-attracting fireball-trap-owning tenants for a while longer, and has to keep putting up passive-aggressive signs about New Club Rules every time they do something she didn't think she needed to put in the rules before. But they're paying double their previous cost of living.
In addition to increasing the cost of necessities, players can decide they have more things they want to buy. At some point the PCs bought a mule to help haul things to and from Arden Vul. I think they only actually used the mule two or three times, but it cost a couple thousand silver up front, and it costs $30 per week to board and feed at Sakeon's Horse Market. Recently they hired an employee, Basil, to help take care of their secret base in the Beacon and the two unusual people (a holographic projection of an alien AI psychologist, and an animated statue head of a Thothian librarian) who live there. Basil works pretty cheap, only $100 per week, but they also pay $75 per week for his room and board. And another $100 per week to keep food stocked in the Beacon. The burn rate keeps slowly rising. And then there's the eccentric stuff, like Ioannes paying Feal the druid $100/week for a Beast Speech spell so he can not only talk to his cat (that's free), but get answers back.
Of course, even relatively rich PCs can't always afford everything they want. Uvash wanted to build his own church of Zodarrim in Gosterwick, but the price was beyond his current level of funds, so that might have to wait a while. Maybe if they defeat a dragon and take its hoard...
No comments:
Post a Comment