H&I: Wealth Problems

[SpaceMonkey]

Hi All

I was wondering how you all handled Wealth in your games of Honor and Intrigue.

As much as I can appreciated Bashmans decision to leave that part largely out of the game, my players would probably feel more motivated as pirates if they actually got some booty out of all this piracy.

I don't really want pages upon pages of item cost lists (though if anyone knows of any for the 17th Century Caribbean that would be awesome ), and so I naturally gravitated to the optional Acquiring Wealth rules on page 116.

Sadly, these rules kinda break down once you start splitting the treasure. Even an amazing Weath 10 treasure horde can only be split between a maximum of 18 people before it is reduced to 0 Wealth, and yet many ships back then had a very large crew.

I know that accurate crew numbers were not included in these rules, so I work on a very rough idea of (Ship Size squared) multiplied by 20. This would give the ships the following number of crew members.

Size - Crew
1 - 20
2 - 80
3 - 180
4 - 320
5 - 500

If my players had a size 2 pirate vessel, how would they split the booty between 80 crew members?

Any ideas? Do some people do this differently?

Any and all advice is most welcome!

[BASHMAN]

Give the "nameless faceless crew" 1-2 shares of the booty. All of the officers (the PCs) get 1 share each. The Captain gets 2 shares.

That's the easy way out.

The harder way is to abandon the Wealth Rules (maybe use them to generate starting money) and actually count coins.

This is what I've been doing in my own campaign. Characters begin with Wealth Levels, which are translated into actual money (silver coins) at the start of the game. After that, they spend X number of coins for whatever they buy or sell.

I just use the equipment list from other RPGs to set the prices. You can find such lists online allover the place (so it felt unnecessary to include them in the rule book).

In a seagoing campaign, tracking wealth may be part of the fun, as this adds resource management (feeding the crew and paying them would be an important part of the ship's expenses).

[SpaceMonkey]

May I ask which other RPG list it is you use?