Cash on the barrel head

From a forum post I made earlier in response to a question about price lists in Star Wars gaming...
---------
I think prices in Star Wars are best handled like this:

"It costs more money than you have. You'll have to sell something big like your landspeeder to pay for it. Or do a favor for a local crimelord/politician/aristocrat/etc. that will lead to adventure (or, at the very least, some hijinks)."

or

"You'll have to pay for that." "Ok, here's some cash. Now, on with the adventure!"

Paying for something is either a plot point like paying for a high-speed, down-low ride on the Falcon or buying Anakin from Watto (in which case the actual amount doesn't really matter) or it's just a throwaway bit of color like tossing some credits on the bar and saying "Sorry for the mess" after slicing off a customer's arm or shooting a bounty hunter. The action and adventure should never grind to a halt because the PCs need to argue about who had the steak and who had the salad when they divide their lunch bill.
---------

I included some mention of this in Impressions. It seems that counting credits is a holdover from the early days of D&D copper counting. In most settings that inspire gaming settings (or, at least, the ones that inspire me), money doesn't really matter. It might be a key motivator for the characters, but the actual amount of cash they have never matters. The crew of Serenity needs money to keep the ship flying; Han Solo needs a big score to pay off his debt to Jabba; Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser need fat sacks of loot to pay for wine and wenches; Dr. Jones needs to sell his latest artifact finds in order to fund his next expedition; and so on. In all of these cases, it never matters how much money is involved beyond vague descriptions like "a massive debt" or "a major haul" or "enough to limp to the next planet and look for more work". What is gained by counting the pennies?

In my old college gaming days, I have only a few vague memories of adventures where counting money was important:

• In one particularly excellent impromptu AD&D2 session, the adventure began with the PCs being hired--one by one--for 5 gold pieces each to act as caravan guards for a really shady merchant. I remember this because we all thought 5 was pretty cheap but the GM (an odd fellow named Straka) explained in an aside that 5gp was a lot of money in his setting. I happened to negotiate a better deal and got promised 10gp. The actual amount didn't matter. The important thing was that we were getting a suspiciously great wage and I was getting double. (We never did get paid anyway.) 
• In the long-running D&D game (run by the inimitable Alan), penny-pinching was the order of the day. Everyone hated it but Alan demanded exact accounting so our good comrade Kevin took it upon himself to squeeze every last drop out of the treasure that we could get. I think he took it as a personal challenge to keep the party from getting cheated by any NPCs who might overcharge or rob them. My fondest memories of that game are just of hanging out with the other players and chatting while Kevin and Alan haggled over every little thing the party wanted to buy. They seemed to like it even though it frustrated them. Looking back, we probably should have just said "Hey, let's just assume that we always get a fair price unless otherwise specified. If there's a greedy merchant or thief who wants to rip us off or rob us, let us know and we'll play out that negotiation or robbery attempt. The rest of the time, let's just skip it." 
• In a short-lived AD&D2 campaign (run by Grote), we effectively "won". In the introductory adventure, Grote wanted to give us each a magic item appropriate to our class or background as our reward for completing the adventure instead of just some random treasure. I don't remember what my character (Skank Mcgonigal) got, but I think Sir Roderick Lanternjaw the paladin got some kind of shield or sword. Our friend, Sellers, was playing some kind of third-party Alchemist class that we found in a pamphlet in our gaming club's library. Sellers got a philosopher's stone for his reward and then he revealed that it was much more efficient than normal because of his class' special abilities. When we calculated how much base metal he could transmute into gold, it turned out to be a ludicrous sum beyond the wildest dreams of avarice. We went from struggling adventurers one day to wealthier than kings the next. We decided to buy titles from the king and fund an expedition to colonize a new territory for our country. We hired an army of soldiers, laborers, farmers, engineers, and even some wizards, then we set sail and started to build a town and a castle and we set about taming the wilderness. Money was no longer an issue but we still had a lot of fun and motivation and adventure. We couldn't instantly solve our problems with the money but we quickly gave up on asking if we could afford things. We all agreed that there was no point in keeping track of our money anymore. Instead of asking if we could afford things, we had to ask "how long will it take?" That was usually more interesting anyway. 

In all my gaming experiences where money came up, the exact amount never mattered. We got enough to keep going (or enough to get going for character's motivated by greed who need something to lure them into action) or we got enough to completely change our situation. It wasn't always as drastic as buying our own country, but sometimes it was just something like "for the next season, we're going to hobnob with the middle class and sleep in our own beds and eat delicious meals at the inn".

Redoing Core Rules examples

(I've been having some trouble connecting to Blogger. I can see my dashboard and stats, but I can't see the blog pages (mine or anyone else's) unless I connect with my smartphone. I'm using wifi tethering to make this post from my laptop.)

So, this past week, I didn't have much time to spend on the things I wanted to do. Some nights I only had 20 minutes or so to do some editing. I'm trying to trim the core rules down to be clearer to understand and easier to present. I'm looking at things that I wrote a long time ago when I started. I thought that this section was done but now that I look at it again with fresh eyes, I can see that many of these examples are just terrible. I need to redo a lot of them. They have too much going on; they don't focus only on the point that needs to be illustrated. I think I wanted to show the example cases in a larger context, but now I realize that it's better to have a more focused example to just make the point clear. Also, some of them are just not very interesting situations.

I'm having trouble visualizing how I want to lay this section out. I want to make it a little more graphical rather than just blocks of text. But how do I lay this out to fit everything on the page that should go together? It's hard to do. I'm thinking of using some mind-mapping or diagramming software to try laying things out in a simple flowchart or something, but I might just go completely low tech with it. I learned layout back in the days of light boxes when "cut and paste" literally referred to scissors and glue. I'm thinking of just printing things out, cutting them up, and arranging things on my floor to plan how I want to lay them out before using my layout software to make the digital pages. Doing things fully digitally would be nice, but it's just too hard with a small landscape laptop screen and a touchpad. A big monitor (or two) and a decent mouse (or better yet, some kind of stylus and tablet) would make this a lot easier but I don't have the work space for a setup like that. I don't even have a desk!

During my recent attempt to redo the character sheet, I discovered that I don't like the damage system. The damage system has been there since the beginning in a provisional "good enough for now and I'll sort it out later" form but I don't like it now that I really look at it. I've got an idea forming in my head right now for how I'd like to handle it, but it's not solidified yet. Maybe that will be next on my "To Do" list after I clean up the examples and settle on the layout for the core rules section. I already know how I want to handle healing, but I need to sort out the damage system before I can do the healing in detail.

I'm starting to wonder if I'm just being a perfectionist and fretting too much over little things.

Spent the day fighting with websites that wouldn't load properly because the Google API server has been down. Most of my Blogger dashboard isn't working yet, so this is just a quick post to say that I'm still working. I'll try to do a real post tomorrow about what I did today in between hitting the "reload" button on my web browser.

Back on track

I've been making some minor progress on collecting some more art. Here and there, I've been compiling a list of small tweaks (minor additions or clarifications) and big changes (eliminating or combining major sections that might be kind of redundant). I've also wasted a couple of weekends being unproductive or just distracted by other things, so I'm going to try a new productivity technique called "Don't break the chain". Hopefully, that will help me get things done a little more quickly. The basic idea is that I'll do something useful every day and post it here. If I miss a day, I'll "break the chain" and... uh. I'll wear a scarlet P for Procrastination on my chest or something. (I'm still not sure about the penalty, but keep an eye on this space for daily updates.)

I'm still here

I just want to make a quick update to let everyone know that I'm still here. I had to make an emergency trip to the US (nothing serious, just an urgent business matter that couldn't wait) and then when I got back I went for an interview for a new full-time job that I've been doing for a few weeks now in addition to my regular part-time work. For the first week, I had a cold so I was either at work or unconscious. My laptop began to disintegrate so I had to get a new one and I've been busy installing new software and transferring my files. I think I've only managed to do a couple paragraphs in the Powers chapter for the Impressionist system since my last update. I'll try to get something posted soon.

I've been working on the divination powers, so I'll try to put up a post soon about those. As a GM, I was always leery of allowing useful divination powers to PCs because they can ruin mysteries and spoil surprises, but I've had a realization that things don't have to be that way. That will be the topic of my next post. I going to risk setting a date here and say that it will be posted in the next 30 to 72 hours.

Wooden Pencil Sketches

This blog is called Wooden Pencil Sketches because I started it to chronicle the development of Van Gogh, a system designed to be "sketchy". It's supposed to have enough detail to give you a solid impression of the action without bogging everything down with minute details. At first I was just thinking of using this as a place to make quick development notes, like sketches of new ideas. I chose "Wooden Pencils" because I've been using a wooden pencil to make notes on scrap paper when I get an idea. I used to use a pen for everything, but I've been using some nice pencils that we had lying around the house. It reminds me of an old Ghanaian friend who used to write everything in pencil and he would say, in his booming African voice, "I love writing with a pencil! It feels so good!"

The blog's been up for a couple of weeks now and I've got only one official follower, but my "Stats" page tells me that I'm getting a lot of visitors from around the world: mostly the US and UK, but also Canada and Europe. It's a rather interesting feature that tells me a lot about the traffic to the blog, but it doesn't tell me the most important thing: What do you think of what you're reading? If you don't feel like leaving a comment, please just click the "thumbs up/down" buttons to give me a general idea of what you think. If you have more specific comments, that's great too.