Passive Income
How do you handle players securing passive income? Like a hawker crew having their loyal guys sell from a steady supply in a secure turf to regular customers?
Passive Income
Passive Income
7 thoughts on “Passive Income”
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Probably treat that like the gambling den, where you roll and subtract the current heat?
I assume, separate from an ability or claim for extra coin like “A Little Something on the Side” or “Gambling Dens”, that the crew’s general “walking around” money comes from the small, everyday crime. It’s only when the crew does a big job that the coin come flooding in.
Expenses tend to expand until you reach an equilibrium in Doskvol, it seems. You rise in tier or lifestyle or status, need more cash to keep up your fancier digs and pistols and arcane implements and security, you squander money because if you were good with it you’d have “A Little Something on the Side”. And at the end of the day the books just come back to 0. Just treading water, unless you expand and make a play for bigger and better things…
You don’t track passive expenses, so passive income isn’t tracked either.
If you want your drug corners to be a thing, grab them as a claim (take them from someone else), generating coin like a Drug Den.
In this example, if the Hawkers have a gang, they could also send the gang out to do something and make a quality roll to see how it goes, as in the using a cohort example on p97.
The more profit/surplus is coming in, the more lax, demanding, and wasteful your people and system will also inevitably become, so it’s most likely just a wash except where story reasons spotlight changes, windfalls, or losses out of the ordinary (ie the scores, downtime, and other PC activity).
Also, I’d say “the Hawkers’ guys selling on their turf” is already how a Vice Den claim works. If the Hawkers want to expand that out of an existing Vice Den, or set up some new method of sales distribution (drug corners don’t really seem to be the norm in Duskvol), then you’d be looking at a new Claim, like John says.
From what I understand, the core reason that there isn’t support in the game track passive income and expenditures is because these interactions are generally highly tedious and the structure of the game is designed to build up to highly cinematic scenes. So if you’re talking about a run of the mill trade off to establish your supply train, if that becomes important for something other than claiming territory then it could appear in game as a flash back rather than a core scene.
I said before that these types of interchanges are generally tedious. This tedium, though, is with the expectation of a specific degree of financial solvency and frequency of interchange. If, however, you wanted to play a game that specifically focused on the desperation and poverty of those who are on the very bottom run of society in Duskvol (say a game in which your characters are more on the socio-economic level of the kids in The Wire), then exchanges of coin at every instance and level become suddenly very important, because all exchanges of money become active exchanges.
A thought: To do this, you could run a game in which one coin is equal to one week of very basic living expenses (some place with a roof over your head, where you won’t die of exposure, one meal a day, does NOT include things like paying off other groups or buying gear); each mission takes one week to plan and execute; downtime always costs one coin; if players forgo resting and eating then they take levels of damage and penalties to actions until they compensate for this, or die; etc. This allows for a setting in which players are acting out of extreme desperation in order to make ends meet.
Overall the mission based structure of the game can be maintained, but to do this would require a monetary system that breaks Coin into fractions of the unit (and sub fractions, i.e. decimal or sexigesimal tiers of units) in order to properly track, and really only serves it’s purpose of interacting with this type of resource management if every single minute expenditure is tracked (did all of the crew members eat today? or is someone saving a bit to make ends meet?). Which is doable, but will have repercussions on several other aspects of the game and ultimately make for a pretty deep hack.