On page 374 of BWG it reads “multi-dice bonuses may be spent, one or two at a time, across multiple rolls.” Does this mean that even if a character has 4D cash she may not spend more than 2D on a single test? Also, what if she has multiple 1D bonuses, may they be pooled on a test?
Lastly, suppose a player wishes to obtain 5D of cash, is it permissible to generate this cash 1D at a time in rapid succession? That is, may you test at Ob 2 five times in a row instead of Ob 10 once?
I’m pretty sure there is no cap on cash dice. If a player really wanted to throw down five case dice to try and buy a castle, go for it!
Second question: No. What Peregrine said. Although what if a character used five different skills? So five ob 2 tests, each with the same Intent (make money) but different Tasks. That might be allowable, but each test would have a risk of failure and it would take more in-game time.
In quick succession and 5 different skills. I would probably hesitate as a gm but might allow it. I might also be inclined still to make them linked tests to one big test to make 5d cash dice. I guess it would come down to in game circumstances and exactly how the intents were worded and what not.
Also transporting the 5D of Cash somewhere might well be a different adventure. 5D in Cash represents quite a large amount of money or goods, so if the castle you’re buying isn’t very near, getting the cash to the seller is not going to be easy.
Even if you’re not moving the cash, somebody might take a notice and try to grab some.
That is why I asked if multiple 1D cash bonuses could be pooled.
If multiple piles of cash can be used in a single roll then 5D and 1D+1D+1D+1D+1D behave the same mechanically, even though resources have more of an exponential scale (for example buying in bulk just adds 1 or 2 to Ob instead of multiplying it by ten or 100).
Also, the player wants to generate 5 different 1D cash pools to loan to his friends (as well as wanting to generate a big pile of cash for personal use). So can the 5 1D piles be raised in succession via Ob 2 rolls, or is a single 10 Ob roll more appropriate?
The character wants to loan money to his friends. Right. But, what is money in your shared world? No character has any amount of dice of money. No dice. The player has dice. What have the characters? All depends on the fiction.
Ask the player what his character wants to do to obtain such amount of money. He declares his Intent, the character Intent, and you, the GM, decides what mechanic to apply. If he wants to get the money slowly, gathering a little here and there, it will take several Intents and Tasks, generating many possibilities of failure (moving the story in unexpected directions) and perhaps making it a great deal of time. How much time he has to get the money? How important is for him to get such a large sum? What if it costs too much for him?
You, the group, are generating a vivid world of fantasy fiction. Forget the dice mechanics. Think in fictional terms. Then apply the right mechanic to move the story forward. If the character wants to generate cash dice… he is not thinking in the fictional world. He is missing the point.
If raising such a large sum of cash proves to be an issue, the GM could put a clamp on it by limiting cash generation to a ‘once-per-Resources-cycle’ kind of thing.
I also vote in the Let It Ride direction. You’re trying to accomplish your Intent in the fewest rolls possible - that’s in the rules. So if you want 5D cash dice, screw you, that’s an Ob 10. No, it’s not an Ob 2 rolled five times. It’s an Ob 10. It’s the job of the GM to manage these things.
You can generate cash again when the situation has changed significantly. So if you spend a month on a boat sailing from one place to another, no, you cannot get multiple “make cash” tests in that time. I’d allow one if they could explain how they made money on a boat.
If, however, you decide to go a-Viking during that month, that’s a different situation - though you’d probably be more likely to be Scavenging for those cash dice in that case. But the idea is there.
I think what we’re saying here is that you kill or run off the caravan’s guards and take what’s left behind: cash, goods, etc. The GM should have a value in mind. If he doesn’t, players should use their Scavenging skills to squeeze some money out of the cheap bastards.
I’ve been lurking on these forums for a while now (while enjoying the game thoroughly and also finding a lot of useful clarifications here), and I thought I’d add my first post. There was one thing mentioned in this post that I’m pretty interested in and which has come up in our game - how exactly do “cash dice” stack?
At first glance, it seems that these dice are just added into a pool and used individually as you wish. Thus, you can put a simple entry on a character sheet for cash dice, and add or subtract as you go. But, when considering that resource rolls do appear to be on some kind of gliding scale this really doesn’t make sense. Also, the visualization really doesn’t make sense. If one cash die is a small bag of silver, then five cash dice ought to be five small bags of silver? Then a dragon’s hoard would be so many cash dice you would never run out of them… and vice versa, if you have a dragon’s hoard for 10 cash dice, how come it only yields ten small bags of silver when split?
My own solution in game is to make the characters record each “treasure” separately, such as “bag of coins (2D)” and “Ruby (4D)”. This adds another complication, which is that some treasures are actually really hard to “split”. You only want to use 2D from your Ruby? Well, this merchant doesn’t have a sack of gold for 2 cash dice to give you as change, so you either use the whole gem or keep it…
There is still a problem with this, and that is splitting off dice from a larger pool. Would it be fair to let a player generate two single 1D “treasures” from one worth 2D? I guess it depends on how the scale for Resources is imagined. How have you guys solved it, if at all?