12 to Midnight

Originally posted July 16

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This is the part where you keep me honest. Between swim lessons for the kids, a church vestry meeting, and a slew of other stuff, I’ve made very little headway on the plot points this past week. Fortunately, we’re still making progress in other areas. Ed has made refinements to character creation, wealth and spending, and several other chapters. He has also started going through all the Midnight Tales written thus far and looking for tie-ins to the plot points. I suspect most will directly tie in without much difficulty.

Last week I spent a few paragraphs talking about some of the ways we are evoking the feeling of college life at ETU, such as through final exams and the choosing of extra-curricular activities. There’s one other aspect of college life that I didn’t get to talk about, and I think it’s worth a post of its own.

One of the things many of us can remember about college life is never having enough money for the things we wanted or even needed. For most of us, it was the first time we were living on our own and sometimes those lessons on budgeting were hard-learned. In other settings tracking money is a distant concern. Heck, some GMs hand-wave it altogether. In Degrees of Horror, we think wealth (or the lack thereof) is one of the many things that is evocative of the setting. At the same time, we don’t want the game to become a class in accounting. We think we’ve struck a balance with your Semester Allowance.

Your Semester Allowance is the amount of spending money you get at the beginning of each semester. Maybe it comes from your parents, maybe from student loans or scholarships. The reasoning is up to you. If you take the Poor hindrance or engage in certain expensive extra-curricular activities it is below average, or you can take the Rich or Filthy Rich edges or land a job to increase it.

The key point is that your Semester Allowance assumes that your tuition, on campus meal plan, dorm housing, and transportation are already covered. That means you only have to deduct off-campus expenses like eating out, buying equipment, going on dates, etc. So far in playtests we’ve found that this works really well. In fact, Ed ran a game for some friends in which one of the characters had to borrow money from one of the other heroes so he could take a girl (NPC) out on a date. That sounds like college life to me! By the same token, those who choose to increase their Semester Allowance (generally at the expense of taking other edges or activities) will find that it is actually a useful advantage. Can you really say that the same holds true in most of the campaigns you’ve played?

Now, that’s our vision for how wealth works in Degrees of Horror. Some groups may absolutely not want to deal with money at all. If you want, you can still choose to hand-wave most of the issues with spending and tracking your money. That’s a conversation among the GM and the group during character creation, so that players know not to take one of the hindrances that makes me chuckle every time I think about it.

Fickle Cash Flow
Your parents sent you to ETU to study and get a degree, not waste their money. If you fail a Final Exam, decrease your Wealth by one category as they cut back your allowance.