Income And Net Worth

 

In most Mythmaster campaigns, the characters are adventurers who have left the drudgery of their jobs aside to strike out into the world and make their fortunes. While many of them may maintain their relations and status within a faction, they are not typically being paid a monthly salary or an hourly wage. Understanding the basic economics of the game world and having an appreciation for the real value of a silver coin will inform your character's backstory and motivation.

Income

Sometimes a player might need to know how much money their character could earn by doing simple labour. Maybe the other members of their party are wounded or diseased and they decide to assist a farmer with the harvest in exchange for room and board while their friends rest and recover. Of course, what you are worth is not necessarily what you might be offered in terms of pay regardless of your skill; a blacksmith running their own shop in a country village can't afford to pay $25/hour to a player who happens to be a Grandmaster blacksmith from an important family when the vast majority of work they need to have done is making horseshoes, and sharpening axes. Regardless, it always helps to know where you stand in any negotiation.

Determining what a given character can earn as an hourly wage or an annual salary is a function of their Social Status and of their level of expertise in the primary Skill Field that they rely on to earn their living. An Apprentice blacksmith hammering out nails from scrap iron in a small country forge will make far less money than the Grandmaster blacksmith who operates the smithy of a great noble house and is responsible for forging their regal armour.

The following table indicates how much a character makes in combined wages and in-kind payment annually and hourly based on their level of mastery in the relevant Skill Field.

Payment In Kind

In most pre-capitalist societies, the majority of payment for labour was delivered not as wages, but as payment-in-kind. Payment-in-kind means most employers paid most of the wages of their workers in materials, finished goods, food, housing, training or other valuable offerings in place of cash. A master craftsperson might employ several apprentices, who they would train, and to whom they would provide room and board in lieu of direct cash payment for their work. Companion tradespersons, by contrast, would typically wander the countryside, offering their services across the region in exchange for room and board while they developed their skills and reputation and saved whatever cash they could. Eventually, they would aspire to settle down, open their own shop, start a family, and take on their own apprentices.

As a general rule, wage paid in cash for services or labour is only equal to about (Social Status -1) x 10% of what is earned, with the balance being paid in kind. For example, an SS3 - Lower Middle class basket weaver, working as an apprentice for a master basketmaker makes $5.63 an hour, or $45 per day. In most cases they would recieve only about 20% of that in cash, or $9 per day.

Even an Upper Middle class (SS5) master craftsperson who earns about $133 per day for their labour would typically only expect to receive about $53 of that in cash. If such a person were wandering through a village and offered to help the local smith for a few days, they may well recieve the cash, but the rest of the payment would be in room and board - which would be catered to apprentices and travelling companions of SS3 or SS4 - not to masters of SS5. Such an arrangement would therefore not make much sense for a serious master tradesperson in most circumstances.

This concept of payment-in-kind is important to take into account, as players whose charaters have trade skills might assume they can spend a few days working while passing through a town, making a lot of money and living comfortably while doing it. This is not precisely true because pre-capitalist societies are not structured around the fluid exchange of cash for services. While adventurers certainly can take the work (provided they are recognized and permitted to so in accordance with regional guild regulations) they will not receive nearly as much cash as is suggested on the tables above, and the accomodation may not be what they were hoping for or accustomed to.

Net Worth

In Mythmaster, you can be any character you imagine. Some characters might be very poor - with only the shirts on their backs - while others might be extremely wealthy. For a Destitute character (SS1), it might make sense that they start the game with only a few silver coins, but for a wizard of noble birth, who is in their sixties, and has served as advisor to a Great House for decades, starting with 'only' $50,000 makes little sense. Such a person might have a residence in the capital, fully furnished and appointed with the finest wares. Outside the city, they might have their own estate, with a manor home and many hectares of land. Those lands would probably have many buildings, including farmhouses, barns, stables, granaries and mills, as well dozens of head of livestock providing food and labour. Additionally, they would employ many staff, servants and workers to maximize the yield of those lands. This is where net worth comes in.

Your character's net worth is the total value of everything they own that they cannot easily liquidate in order to fund their new life as an adventurer. It includes everything from your home and land, to stores and livestock and other commodities, as well as shares of ownership in businesses or other investments.

To determine your character's total net worth, cross-reference their Social Status against the the number of Life Cycles they have lived on the table below.

Note that your net worth includes the value of homes or residences or large grants of land you may have received during the character creation process. For example, if you reached Rank 4 (Speculator) in a Merchant Company, you would have been given a $250,000 townhouse. This is considered to be included in your net worth, and indeed, probably represents most if it. If your listed net worth does not reach the value of such gifts that ought to be included in it, you may raise the value of your net worth to the combined value of all those gifts, then add (Social Status)% to the total.

High Net Worth

Sometimes a player will end up with a character with a very high net worth. While this does not mean they have more starting Assets, it might mean they have access to all sorts of resources, including servants, messengers, libraries, carriages, or other things that can give the entire party an advantage. At the same time, this degree of wealth might undermine the purpose of adventuring in the first place; why risk your life raiding a haunted tomb for a few thousand silver if you already have a million?

In general, if a party has several wealthy characters of high Social Status, the Director needs to structure the campaign differently; perhaps focusing it more on mysteries and politics. If a secret sect of necromancers within the Magical University have been conducting forbidden experiments in a haunted tomb, finding out who and why is more important than physically traveling there to chop up a bunch of ghouls. Mages protecting their foul secrets in the pristine halls of the Grand Academy are certainly as ruthless and dangerous as any wraith. Wealth and high Social Status are not exploits - they just open the door to new kinds of adventures.

Liquidating Net Worth

Regardless, by the luck of the draw or the fall of the dice, some players may end up with net worth of hundreds of thousands, or even millions that they would rather trade for a better suit of armour they cannot otherwise afford. Generally, the Director should discourage this by explaining to the player how their family and the livelihoods of others are dependent on their character maintaining their Social Status. When that fails, the rules for liquidating net worth into cash are as follows:

Calculate the difference between your current net worth and the net worth of a new, lower Social Status you will assume on the table above. You may then take 15% of that amount as cash, lowering your Social Status accordingly.

Purchasing Social Status

Raising your social status in a pre-capitalist society is not easy. The easiest way to do it is by rising through the ranks of a large and powerful faction, but if you manage to gather enough wealth, you can also invest your money to effectively buy a higher social status.

Just as your net worth can be liquidated into cash, reducing your social status, cash can also be used to purchase real assets, increasing your net worth and providing the opportunity to raise your social status. Note that 'real property' means things like land, buildings, furniture, livestock, and similar sorts of investments. A million silver pieces spent on personal weapons and armour and better adventuring gear is not real property in any sense.

The amount of money you need to invest in real property to inrease your social status is simply equal to the difference between your current net worth and the net worth of the new social status level you aspire to.

Social Acceptance

Changing ones social status, whether by liquidating assets or by investing in real property, does not necessarily grant a character acceptance into new social circles. In general, people of a given social status are reluctant to welcome new people into their social circles. This goes both ways. The manor lord who sold off his lands and houses to pay his debts will not be immediately welcomed by the carpenters and weavers at the local tavern. Neither will the battle-hardened berserker who won a dragon's horde and used it to buy a palace be immediately welcomed by the other land-holding nobles of the region. The extent to which players and the Director might want make gaining acceptance to new social circles a part of the game will vary from group to group.