Resources
Overview
- Found In: M20 page 322, V20 page 116.
- Available To: All characters.
- In Character Generation: Purchasable as standard Background.
- After Character Generation: Raised through methods below.
- Purchasable When Becoming: No
- Limitations: A rating of 5 is the maximum.
Resources refers to your character's spending power.
| Score | Starting Money | Starting Equipment | Free Vehicles | Free Housing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | $50 | 1 weapon, 1 piece of armor, 1 gun* | Bicycle | No housing |
| 1 | $1,500 | 2 weapons, 2 guns*, 2 pieces of armor | Motorcycle or cheap car | SRO or your vehicle |
| 2 | $5,000 | 2 weapons, 2 guns*, 2 pieces of armor | Car or motorcycle | SRO, studio apartment, or one-bedroom |
| 3 | $10,000 | 2 weapons, 2 guns*, 2 pieces of armor | A nice car | Small or medium home, or an apartment |
| 4 | $25,000 | 2 weapons, 2 guns*, 2 pieces of armor | Up to 4 vehicles, each can be fancy (sports cars, etc.) | Medium or Large home |
| 5 | $125,000 | 2 weapons, 2 guns*, 2 pieces of armor | Any vehicle, such as a yacht or a personal helicopter | Mansion or below |
(*) Requires Firearms 1 or higher.
WORK IN PROGRESS, NOT YET IMPLEMENTED
Money vs Wealth: Resources is an abstraction of wealth and your character's capability to maintain their lifestyle. Money, used to purchase new items or trade for favors, bribes, and so on, comes from the starting money value, downtime actions, and as plot rewards or incentives from NPCs or other PCs. Unlike with our previous system, money can be saved up and is NOT a 'use it or lose it' at the end of each month.
Money through Downtime: As with our hunt system, we want to provide characters and players several options for making money through a system which emphasizes tradeoffs and interesting choices. Thus, we will have methods that have risk/reward tradeoffs. The initial system will support 'standard' jobs only, and we will iterate to add 'criminal/seedy' jobs, 'fame' based jobs, 'making money with magick', and 'making money with my legions of ghouls and old age' later. Higher resources and certain new merits may make it easier to make money with downtime actions.
Debt: Characters can take the Debt flaw to get some extra starting money, though may be saddled with monthly asks for 'interest' from the debt collectors.
Maintenance costs: Each item comes with a maintenance cost. The most expensive vehicle and house, if it is within the resource constraints of the table above, will not count against those maintenance costs. If a character's maintenance costs go beyond the value provided by their Resources score, the difference will be taken from the character's saved money. If this takes a character below 0 money, the code will force the character to sell their most expensive item. Please note, however, these monthly costs are an abstraction as a game design aspect. They are not intended to be a realistic representation of what it actually costs to have a particular item, and so staff will not process requests to make a particular item's maintenance cost less than whatever the equipment system says it costs to maintain.
Purchase Costs: Each item has a purchase cost. Although a given product may be available at various prices in real life, the purchase cost of a particular item in the equipment system is always the purchase cost because the Equipment system is not intended to be a direct representation of real life. Lowering the purchase cost is possible through methods such as theft or using Contacts, Allies or Influence to find a deal.
END WORK IN PROGRESS SECTION
In Character Generation
Resources is a standard Background bought with Background dots, Freebies, and Starting XP.
When you create a character and pick a Resources score, you will be asked to set a note called "resources" on your character. In this note, please disclose how your character achieves this stable income. The following salary ranges are implied with the resources scores and thus your explanation will need to be appropriate to the rating you take:
- One: Minimum wage.
- Two: Decently skilled trade or professional salary ($60K to $100K)
- Three: Professional/management level salary, or a high-paying field like tech. ($120K+)
- Four: Doctor-lawyer territory ($300K+).
- Five: Easily a millionaire. ($1.5 million+)
Note For Vampires: Vampires who hold a job are valid concepts but please make sure the reasoning behind how they manage to only work during the moonlight hours is actually believable. A security job, for example, is believable. A job at a retail store is not. Vampires who have Resources 5 and have been undead so long that their mortal alias would be dead require at least 1 dot of the Alternate Identity background.
After Character Generation
Acquiring massive amounts of money will result in staff giving you that amount of money in your equipment but it will not result in a dot of Resources on its own. Resources is interpreted as consistent income. If you have a gigantic windfall of several thousand dollars, you could use some IC financial savvy in order to invest it in such a way that you do have stable income, but if you're, say, a petty thief who scored hella dosh and don't have finances or financial connections, it remains a windfall (that you can still spend, you just can't convert it into Resources).
- Find An IC Employer: If a character wishes to employ you, you can use their employment as justification. You can try to find a player character to employ you, or you can send in a +request to staff saying "Hey, Jimmy is going to try to find work as a <whatever>" and work it out with staff. The Resources score that you can buy will be determined by the nature of the job and the pay, as above. If someone hires you as a barista, for example, this is great for a Resources 1 spend. If someone hires you as a software engineer or consultant, this would be good for a Resources 2 or 3 spend.
- Find Some Steady Source Of Income: A nine-to-five is not the end all be all means of income. So long as you can orchestrate a situation where you are getting paid ICly and there is no reason to doubt that this stream of income will dry up, this counts. For example, if you turned to the criminal life, you could take over a few corners of a drug operation, establish a chop shop, pick up a ghoul you bleed for cash, or take over an extortion ring. This can be performed as an Influence action or can be performed through a series of scenes on screen.
