Alien RPG - Alternate Wealth System
Making money fun to deal with in a hypercapitalistic space hell.
In 2024, I ran a year long, 30+ sessions Alien RPG Campaign.
I had spent the year past playing different systems in short bursts and one shots, looking for a way to tell stories with my more fragmented and busy group of friends. We played Mork Borg, Primal Quest, Into the Odd, and we also played Alien RPG's core book one shot, Hadley's Hope.
The long term solution for a long term story was an episodic game people could jump in and out during slow months or fast months, and it worked quite well - both the campaign and the solution!
The system doesn't get enough credit for its long term format. Granted, Cinematic Mode was amazing, accessible and explosive; their OneShot structure game fit the universe like a glove, and PCs would drop like flies. But the core book Campaign Mode had different Party Job Types, Planets, aliens besides Xenos, a space station, deep ship building systems... The complete package in a single book.
My one concern was Money. The system had what we can only describe as a realistic system: you get credits, things cost credit. The concept of counting the 5 credits for a drink, or the 20 credits for a sleep pod. Well, that didn't excite me, to say the least.
So I proposed a system agnostic narrative solution:
You have a accumulated wealth measured from 1 to 10, roughly proportional to a 1 to 10 digit number total wealth. Draw 10 squares in your sheet to fill out.
A 5/10 wealth stat means you roughly have 10000-99999 dollars.
Having the stat reach the number of digits of an item allows you to buy it.
Once you reach 7/10, you can buy a million dollar plasma cannon for your ship.
You roll a number of die equal to the digit of the good. Any number of 1s on the dice reduces your stat by one. Add whole purchases together as a single number.
In that case, you will roll 7d6 for the million bucks cannon. If any of the dice is a 1, you spend a Wealth to adquire it. Not rolling a 1 represents your managing skills to keep your Wealth intact; on the other hand, the bigger the purchase, the harder it is to manage it into your liquidity.
Purchases of 2 tiers below your current Wealth are not rolled; they are too low to impact your Wealth in any meaningful way.
A 100 dollar gun would lead to a 3d6 roll, for example. With your 7/10 Wealth, you don't need to worry. After all, you are a millionaire.
That was everything I had at the time, and typing it out again, it held incredibly well. But there are surely concerns one could find on a more gamified table.
Like sharing. A PC with 5 wealth could just buy any number of 3 cost weapons for their poorer party member. Or even, they could all consider a single pocket, so the wealth accumulated would be higher faster, making more stuff instantly "free".
But those things didn't really happen enough - or even, they were not exploited - to be codified.
The PCs were jaded space mercenaries fighting for their own skin and did eventually grow fond of each other enough to care and help; but by then, almost all of them had they own reserves made of successful, morally ambiguous missions. None of them really looked at the system and thought "it can be bent", instead taking it for the narrative representation it meant.
Which, if you ask me, is the only possible way for someone to design anything. People shouldn't write expecting it to be exploited out of its own function. You can't do a legal contract with a counterparty acting in bad faith.
This also allowed for missions to have crystal clear objectives: bring the evil scientist alive instead of dead? Morally questionable, but you get 2 Wealth instead of 1. And ho boy, that push from 5 into 6, and 6 into 7; that could really make the difference on that ship upgrade.
And there was this moment, deep into 20 sessions, that made me sure this system worked.
The Players had to seek the help of a coward, pathetic self interested drunkard. The Party loathed him, but they needed him.
The man ask them to buy him a good bottle of drink for this favor. And they said no, for they didn't want to spend a cent on him.
To them, it was cheap enough it wouldn't change their Wealth; essentially free. It would solve their immediate problem in a mechanically painless way. And yet, they didn't.
And that's pretty cool.