Board Thread:Midian Ideas/@comment-24302820-20180112153254

Here are some more things that we're working on for Conquest. I won't bore you with the workup this time, because we have a lot to cover. I'll just get to the fucking monkey.

The basic cost of living for a lower class person is 500f a month. This works out to 150f in taxes, the same in food, and 200f for rent. For most people, this wouldn't leave much else in the piggy bank (after 60f for tithes, you'd only have enough for a couple pints of beer a day). Doubling this gives you +2 on social checks and saving throws. Each subsequent doubling (from 1000f to 2000f, et cetera) is another +2 bonus. Yes, you can do half-levels for an odd-numbered bonus.

This works going backwards as well. Living very cheaply (urban poor) is half of the cost, but you're sharing a small rat-infested flat with roommates, skipping meals (and not getting good ones when you do eat), and generally having to make do as much as possible. This causes a -2 on saving throws and social checks. Spending fuck-all (hobo beggar) is a -4 penalty, and a sure path to starvation.

One option to avoid freezing to death in a cardboard box is to live off of the land. If you don't own the land (and if you had that kind of money, you'd be sleeping indoors) you run the risk of getting caught by the owner or the law. To replicate this mountain man living, you can use the appropriate survival skill. Were this an actual job, it would earn around 400f a month. But, even though it's not, we can still use it as a guide for how well you can survive in the wilderness. Roll a skill check every month. A simple success gets you the equivalent of 400f worth of food and shelter. You won't live well (it's called 'survival' after all, not 'livin' the sweet life') but you hopefully won't starve or freeze to death. Every point of additional success beyond the target value of ten gets you another 20% (80 florins) worth of surviving. If you roll well enough, you can support more people. Conversely, rolling poorly subtracts that same 20% from your baseline 400f worth as privation takes hold.

The 500f per month figure is intended to be a simple number that's easy to math. It's so you don't have to track meals, road tolls, postal costs, or things like that. Just cut the cost of living from your income, and be done with it. If you don't want anything special, just stick with the baseline 500f figure.

These figures assume maintenance of an existing lifestyle. Should your lot in life change significantly, for better or worse, you'd need to spend money to move to a different house, wear different clothes, et al. to properly make use of this new lifestyle. You can also purchase a new lifestyle outright, for example, if you are maintaining an alter ego, or you want an emergency hideout. A lower class lifestyle costs 3000f, middle class costs five times as much, or 15,000f, and upper class jumps another five times, to 75,000f. These are basically six times your cost of living.

All of the above also assumes that you are sticking close to home most of the time. Living in hotels and eating out every night is expensive. As a rule of thumb, increase your costs of living by six times for life on the road, if you are actually staying in proper accommodations.

You don't have to pay anything for the standard of living that you start out with. You already have all of that stuff. You don't really get anything special with any lifestyle. That is, you don't get a free horse as part of being middle class, or servants for upper. Those are separate expenses. What the increased costs of living cover are things like better clothing that gets replaced more often, fresher food and more of it, a nicer neighbourhood, and your social standing.

Another thing that you can do with costs of living is with wealth dice. For an additional 200f each, per month, you get another wealth die to make small purchases without having to worry about counting pennies. Wealth dice are 1D12s, with successes on 6+. If you succeed on the roll you can buy something worth up to one guilder without needing to track expenditures separately. Once the cost of an item starts climbing up to where you're dropping gold on it, it is significant enough to keep track of how much you spent. You can roll your full wealth dice once per day. Further rolls on the same day, whether to buy something else or to reroll a failed check, reduce the number of dice in your pool by one. For example, Talania hates math, and has more money than some churches, so she spends 2000f a month on wealth dice. She can then roll 10D12 for purchases of up to a guilder. Should she fail to roll six or higher on any of these dice--but she wants to keep drinking anyway--she can reroll, but now only has nine dice for the rest of the day for whatever else she wants to spend them on. 