This game will be a parody of Robert Kiyosaki's board game combined with aspects of The Game of Life.
You win when your character and/or its descendants no longer have to work for a living.
Each game round will represent 1 year of life. Your characters will age accordingly. A round is divided into the following phases:
Game Sequence:Pre-year planning phase: Global Rolls to determine macroeconomic factors such as fiscal policy, interest rates (interbank), recessionary and expansionary periods.
Roll to apply any effects of health and other detrimental effects on your character.
Your character sets its goals and budgets for the year.
Job Phase:Personal rolls to determine effects of work performance on KPI. Critfails can result in retrenchments.
Rolls to determine strategic performance and health of character's workplace based on factors beyond the character's control. Again, critfails can result in joblessness even if you "did nothing wrong".
"Casual Spending" Phase:Determines effects of casual spending. At the beginning of the year, a player can direct their casual activities towards areas in life they want to improve. Like reducing stress, picking up a hobby, spending money on certain forms of entertainment, or even taking night classes. The more specific the player is on this, the better.
Rolls can also cause random effects in the course of the pursuit of casual life.
Investments Phase:Characters will be given the opportunity to buy investments of various types, tiered according to what they can afford. According to Robert Kiyosaki, passive income, financial freedom and the keys to happiness come from investment cashflows.
We will be doing our best to simulate realistic ROIs however.
Unforeseen Fun Stuff Phase:What it says on the can. If shit can happen, it will happen in this phase.
Planned Expenses:
Food:
$10 a day lets you live on subsistence in a first world country.
$20 a day is a comfortable budget for buying commercial crap from supermarkets and casual establishments.
$30 a day upwards is the minimum amount for only eating organic healthfoods.
Anything more has bonuses to health and prestige.
Clothing:
$500 a year can buy off the rack nonsense or working class clothes.
$2000 a year is the minimum for hand-made tailored work clothes.
Anything more is dealing with high-end brands and fashions with associated bonuses.
Stims: Legal Stims have a chance of improving work performance rolls.
$2 a day gets you shitty coffee from a fast food outlet.
$5 a day gets you commercial brands like Buckstars.
$100 a day lets you order real coffee from a supplier. But one needs to have a real brewing machine - which you can afford if you are drinking your caf like this.
You can buy more than one dose of stims a day to work on overdrive at the expense of health.
Rents: Shelter for unlanded plebs
$600 a month rents a hole in the wall somewhere or lets you SHARE a room.
$2000 a month rents a decent studio or a small apartment on the city outskirts.
It gets crazier as land values increase.
Transport:
$10 a day gives you access to Public Transportation or maintenance for a cheap bicycle.
$50 a day lets one take a taxi every day.
Or one can finance for a personal private transport vehicle. In which case we will also slap on expenses for fuel, maintenance and taxes.
Planned Miscellaneous Expenses:
What you plan to spend on for casual stuff and personal improvement. It can go over budget.
Your expenses will increase in a proportionate amount for each family member you add. You can however, make the kids wear off the rack crap and keep them out of sight.
It is the year 2016...
The Benefits of Ricardian Rents have been fully realized. If property is a wonderful investment, be assured that every rich person in your civilization has gotten there before you. Anything that transacts tends to have extremely high prices and very low yields.
The rest of you crabs in the Proletarian Bucket can play with new toys like structured investment products and derivatives. Nothing can possibly go wrong with this. Honest. (I may try to simulate stocks and bonds if the maths doesn't drive me crazy.)
Consumer inflation occurs at 5% per year, regardless of what happens to the interbank interest, investment returns... or your wages.
Character Mechanics:Known Variables:
The Cold hard cash:
Your character's liquid and non-liquid assets, long and short term liabilities...
And your character's cashflows.
Health - sort of known. We'll put some kind of descriptive on it. And a number that changes with one's diet and lifestyle. Each health level above 1 gives you a reroll on any dice roll that occurs during the year.
Health is the sum of one's:
Vitality - The spring in one's step and the light in one's eye.
Appetites - not just the physical appetites, but also the desire for new experiences.
Quality of Sleep - The more one need's the less healthy one is. Needing only 4-6 hours is the theoretical ideal for super-humans, according to eastern medicine.
Memory - When one grows older, memory should improve. Disease is the cause of memory loss, not age.
Humor - Don't take life seriously, you'll never get out of it alive.
Capacity for giving - Not the same as generosity. This is your ability to commit and assert oneself, the ability to give yourself away.
Clarity and Precision of Thought and action: Being able to think and work quickly is a sign of health.
Spirituality... - A healthy person is someone who gets everything he wants.
Job position and social standing.
It is proven that one's physical health and psychology improves (or suffers) automatically with any changes in social status. A young Lion who wins control of a pride undergoes changes in his biology that make him stronger, while the ousted male will rapidly deteriorate. In this same way, positions in human society also have the power to impart biological changes on those who hold them. Social stigmas can also inflict very real changes on one's chemical makeup.
Social standing gives extra dice rolls to reflect one's confidence and power.
Education:
It is certainly possible for one to succeed in life without a degree... as long as one doesn't apply for an executive position in a public listed company where the directors have shareholders to answer to.
Arbitrary Variables:
Character traits and conditions:
Describe what you like, and we can add bonuses and penalties accordingly.
Characters can also develop negative traits.
In character creation, every positive trait you add will result in a random negative trait. An example of a serious negative trait would be a criminal tendency, anti-social behavior or some form of pathology. A less serious negative trait could be a chronic health or mental problem that might be managed with treatment.
There may be extreme traits with extreme consequences. If you create a character with Einstein's brain or with a face that can launch a thousand ships, I'll roll on demonology references for the negative traits until I find something fun. It should be challenging to play a genius or a character that excels very strongly in one area, because of the imbalance it produces in nature.
Stuff like EQ and IQ can have numbers slapped on them. IQ is measured in 15 points per standard deviation above and below a norm of 100. A +1 on a d6 die is half a standard deviation.
Maslow's Hierachy of needs: Physiological, Security, Social, Recognition and Self-Realization. Not meeting any of these can drive a person insane.
Fill in the details. You have a relatively blank check...
But all characters start from lower-middle class backgrounds with mundane parentage and mundane connections/peerage. They are also 18 years of age.
Name:Gender:Describe key traits of your character that might help him/her in life:State Your Character's Desired Education Level:State your character's desired Industry:Other bio stuff goes here... what has your character done before reaching adulthood?:Deploying the Character:Pre-Career Education phase:We roll for high-school GPAs, and add your character's other skills, hobbies and traits into the mix.
Your character can then choose between the following education paths, according to their abilities and stomach for pre-career debt. All student loans are installment free until the course of study is over, of course.
Technical College - $10,000 per year for 2 years
Diplomas and 1 year associate degrees - $5,000 for 1 year
Some kind of community college degree - around $10,000 for 3 years
An Honors degree from a prestigious university - $20,000 upwards per year for 4 years. Also requires illustrious high-school resumes and perfect academics.
Post Graduate Degrees - adds another 2 to 6 years of study. Upwards of $60,000 a year if done with a prestigious university.
Career paths with high barriers of entry - namely Engineering, Law, Accountancy and Medicine, require degrees from prestigious universities. The rest of the population can make do with the mass-education bullshit.
We then roll for performance. Dropouts are possible on critfails. Students can choose to work to support oneself at the expense of academic performance, or take on even more debt for living expenses.
If a student survives all this, we take the sum of his performance and stick a piece of paper to his name. A player can overwork a character to improve the odds and get more negative traits and imbalances stuck on them when the character graduates.
And then, the character is expected to get a job and play the game of life. We will add years to the character's starting age if it goes through any post-highschool education.
Marriages and breeding:Characters can choose to marry at any time, and usually get a spouse near their own station in life. If a character so happens to succeed at Gold-Digging, or is a high-flying executive who falls for a secretary (I'm looking at you, Tony Stark), they will suffer the associated social stigmas that come with such behavior.
A character who dies without an heir will lose everything. Extremely desperate characters can adopt children from the third-world, or orphans from the lowest classes of society.
Fertility is based on a balance of probabilities of a character's health and personality. Contraception for the sake of family planning is possible, but should it fail, any child born will suffer some effects from being an unwanted accident.
Weird traits and behaviors can be hereditary.
Game Pace: 1 round per week, each round consisting of the above 5 phases. I will take 4 players first, and see if I can cope with that.
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Topic: Cashflows - The Cosmic Comedy of LIFE and Corporate Servitude (3/4 players) (Read 2912 times)