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| Poverty as a plot device? | | |
|  Streetline | Apr 27, 10:31pm | Hello Roleplayers,
After many hours of enjoying Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo, I had an idea for my own games. For those unfamiliar with these shows, they're both basically about an unlikely band of wanderers and miscreants who are tying to accomplish some greater goal...on a budget. My question is this: in these two shows, poverty plays a pretty big role and helps bring out character and plot development. Does anyone know how this can be applied to RPG games? I ask because I feel like keeping the PCs poor to make the plot more interesting is counterintuitive to the "kill the monsters and take their stuff" mentality. Has anyone gamed with a group of deadbeat PCs? Does anyone have any advice on how it could be pulled off? |
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Sponsor |  psychicpsamurai | Apr 28, 9:12am | Rent. Upkeep for their headquarters, if they have one. Stick them in a very large city where they need a handful of gold just to go to another neighborhood (ala New York city). If they're in a guild, all kinds of politics and palm-greasing goes on. Maybe just make it a given that they always end up losing money, like a plot device, behind the scenes?
Oh oh, I know, they're being chased by a group of debt collectors through all of their adventures! |
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Sponsor | | CastorQuinn | Apr 29, 4:08am | Interesting idea Streetline (again - you keep doing this *grin*), and one I'd never considered.
I like Psam's idea, that poverty is really a function of your wealth compared to the cost of living in your current location. In the D&D world, if adventurers had an average of 100gp on them at any given time but were getting about in a fabulously exclusive part of town where 100gp wouldn't even buy you a good set of clothes to wear to the next function, they would be poor by comparison to the company and area they were active in. However they could always choose to mix with the 'average' sector of society, so they wouldn't exactly be poor, not in the way that they are in Cowboy Bebop, for instance.
Again in D&D, another option might be to use the "no buyer" rules on magical items, which says that outside of large cities there simply are no merchants or independent buyers with sufficient money and inclination to by magical items the adventurers find in their travels. Put your adventurers in an area populated with small towns and give them treasures that are exclusively very expensive gems, magical items or trash (1gp weapons and armour in general disrepair, foodstuffs that can't be sold without hiring on as a merchant, animal skins in a town where one third the adult population are hunters and tanners, thereby devaluing the items). The net result is that your characters will have access to magical items that they find, but no way to make actual physical cash beyond the tiny amounts they can raise from basic work and low-level loot - which should be just about the amount they require just to book rooms, buy food and get their equipment repaired. They'll effectively be poor, but reasonably well equipped.
Psam's idea about expenses is also good. Say your characters owe a powerful NPC a lot of money, so that they end up having to give most of the money they earn straight to him. Again, net result is no money.
Choice of enemies and encounters is another option. Say your characters are involved in an arc where they fight nothing but evil plants, dire animals and insects, all under the control of a circle of evil druids. None of those things give much in the way of loot, so there you've taken the loot out of the equation all together. Grateful townspeople may let the heroes stay in the inn for free, or maybe the heroes are on the outskirts of a large town where the people don't care about the threat, and so aren't inclined to be charitable.
Another option might be to play in a poverty-stricken area. If everyone is poor except for a few nobles with their mansions, everyone else is starving because the land is barren and there's no crops or water or chance to earn money, then the whole campaign would be devoid of a real economy. |
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| Poverty as a plot device? | | |
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