The Infinity RPG by Modiphius has absolutely the best, most detailed money system of any game I’ve played. It gets a lot of grief for being complicated and difficult, but the moment I realized what it was, I was impressed. It represents the realities of living in a modern, finance powered economy. It also maps exactly to the other stress tracks, Vigour, Resolve, and Firewall, in the game. In the modern world, the sorts of people that most player characters are don’t live on a cash basis. They have bank accounts, incomes, investments, they have credit cards and all of the trappings of modern finance.
Characters have Earnings which represent a sort of financial Armor with Cashflow acting as a Stress track, Shortfalls are financial Wounds and Assets are equivalent to one time bonuses. Meanwhile purchases that characters might make have Costs, Tariffs, and Maintenance and are made harder to source according to their Restriction value.
There are a lot of proper nouns in that paragraph, let’s break them down.
- An item’s Restriction determines the difficulty of a Lifestyle test to find it for sale (to source). The test for finding an item is decreased by spending more time looking for it and spending Assets to grease the wheels of commerce gains you extra d20, up to the normal maximum of 5 dice.
- The Cost of an item is a fixed amount with a variable component with a lot more added based on the item’s Tariff. Cost is increased by the Tariff multiplied by the number of Effects that come up on the dice.
- Example: a pistol might have a cost of 3+3N T2. This means that the item costs 3 plus the results of 3 Combat Dice and has a Tariff of 2. C So on average the dice will come up with a 1 or 2, without an Effect, but we all know how randomly that Effect can come up, or more often not. This would result in an average cost of 4 or 5, but it could go up as high as 9 if the character is extremely unlucky.
- Extra successes on the Lifestyle test to source an item can be used to reduce the Cost by one each.
- Earnings are subtracted from the Cost of an item.
- Any remaining Cost is subtracted from the character’s Cashflow.
- If the character’s Cashflow is reduced by 5 or more, or reduced to 0, the character suffers a Shortfall. Characters can suffer more than one Shortfall at a time, and accumulate up to 4 of them.
- Example: if a character with Cashflow of 5, and Earnings of 3 buys something that Costs 8 or more they will suffer two Shortfalls. The Earnings will reduce the Cost to 5, which is applied to Cashflow, both reducing it by 5 and to 0, resulting in two Shortfalls.
- Cashflow is generally replenished each game session.
- A Shortfall increases the difficulty of any attempt to source items or to improve their financial situation.
- A character must make a Lifestyle test and spend an Asset to recover from a Shortfall or to recover Cashflow. The difficulty is base 0, plus any Shortfalls. Success recovers 2 Cashflow or removes one Shortfall. Momentum can be spent to recover 2 Cashflow or 1 Shortfall. Assets may be used to get more dice for the test.
- Having a 0 Cashflow, as long as the character doesn’t have 4 Shortfalls, does not prevent the character from buying item. Though buying any items with a net Cost over Earnings will cause a Shortfall.
- Once an item is bought it might have a Maintenance cost, this reduces Earnings on a one for one basis until the item is no longer owned by the character.
- Selling items work in reverse. With a Lifestyle test to find a buyer with a difficulty one higher than the items Restriction. The items Cost is determined the usual way, except that Tariffs reduce the item’s Cost and the character’s Earnings also reducing the item’s Cost. Any leftover Cost (income in this case) is added to the character’s Cashflow, if five or more Cost is leftover it can be made into an Asset instead, up to two Assets may be gained on a sale.
That all sounds pretty complicated when I lay it all out like that, but it’s not really that bad. Anything that Costs less than your Earnings is basically cheap enough for you to ignore its Cost. Which means that you don’t have to worry about tracking every last credit your character might have, but big purchases are important.