Hi all,
new to the game and i have a question.
Are there ways to improve your Earnings during the game other than get the Investments talent?
I looked through the core manual but i didn’t find any other way.
Thank you in advance,
Alabaster.
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By the book, I don’t think there is any other way to increase Earnings after character generation other than how you describe.
I was thinking of a few alternatives for increasing Earnings you could house-rule, but anything you did for that would probably make the Investments talent useless. I could see maybe doing it by spending a large number of Assets maybe? Or if via role-playing and game events the character had increased his social class (from character generation on page 46).
I think I’d maybe use the same rules for “removal of a negative trait” on page 74. Basically it would cost the player 800XP and maybe some character actions like spending assets to determine that they have moved up the social ladder. Doing it this way would make it so that taking the Investments talent would still be worth taking, and much cheaper.
You can take 3 ranks in Investments though, I don’t see that many characters would need to increase their earnings past that.
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Hello, thank you for your reply.
To be honest, an unlucky player can start with a very low earnings but the 3 ranks in the talent are not that expensive. That said i’d like an alternative for the unlucky ones that want to became rich one day. But you made a really good point, because any other means must not render the talent useless and in my opinion the talent must remain the most convenient way and any other way just the “last resort” ones.
Thank you for the pointer, i will read that and talk about it with the GM.
Have a nice day.
I guess that if in-game they manage to secure a better work position their earnings should rise.
Just don’t make it too easy to secure promotion and maybe do require investment of XP to get it.
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I have been running a pair of campaigns based around the characters being Fixers rather than spies with no real ties to any governments or corporations and having fallen through the cracks of society so they need to make their own way, aka the player groups all got “fired” at the end of character creation and since then they have been on their own.
I set everyone to a default earnings rating that I thought was fair for the sort of story I wanted to tell (I believe they started at 2, “Demogrant”) and then as a group I have allowed them to progress from there.
The “rule” I have been using (partly inspired by the Corsair stuff from the Haqqislam book) is that for each successful job they the group earns 1 [CD] which they can then roll after the mission is complete. If they save up across a couple of missions, they will have more [CD] to roll. If they roll higher than their current earnings rating then it will increase by 1 (no matter how high above their current earnings it only goes up by 1 each roll). In addition, if a number of Assets equal to the number of players in the group are spent this roll can get a +1 modifier.
I usually give out Assets to represent the wads of cash and such the clients pay out. This increase in earnings isn’t really representing the individual cash they get paid, more the fame/infamy the group earns for successfully completing tasks, which in turn means more people seek them out to hire off-screen.
Once a roll has been made, pass or fail, the saved up [CD] are expended and they will have to start over. This gives a nice curve to their earnings progression.
In addition, if the groups fail in a task then this rating will possibly lower and for that a Single [CD] will be rolled and on an Effect the earnings will drop by 1, if they fail the next task then 2[CD] will be rolled and so on… my justification here is more or less the reverse of earlier, constantly slipping-up the jobs they take gives the group a bad name and people are less like to hire them.
My groups have managed to both get to an Earnings of 3 currently, aka Middle-class, though I suspect that number to change for one of the groups, soon.
Finally, despite the idea of this being a group-based Earnings rating, individuals in those groups do have the Investments talent which they can add to the earnings rating like usual.
About the only problem with this little system I have going is that I tend to run complex missions/story-lines that take a lot of sessions to get through so the groups haven’t made too many rolls, but for a more dynamic set of missions this system should give you a really nice back-and-forth on the rating. If Modiphius don’t come up with something better for use in a Mercenary/War-Market campaign then I’ll probably use this approach for that to should I ever run a TAG series.
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Nice campaign concept - and that sounds like an ideal Earnings system for freelancers. [yoink]