EZ money!

How I've been handling wealth in my EZD6 campaign

As I’ve said in a number of my posts and podcast episodes so far, I’m very much enjoying using EZD6 to run my—at time of writing—ongoing campaign set in a strange fantasy world with elements of magitech and the Wild West, however there are a few things that to me are essential parts of the old-school experience that seem to have been sacrificed in EZD6 for the purposes of speeding up the game. One of these elements is money/currency, there’s not really a system baked into the game for tracking money and expenditures by default; you start off with a wealth level and some rough guidelines for what that allows you to easily get hold of, but that’s about it, the rest is left down to GM fiat.

This is fine if you’re looking to run a quick tournament game or you’re not really too fussed about tracking money and expenditures in your game, for me though, omitting it creates some difficulties, since I’m used to the OSR style of gaming where you get XP for gold and the reward of obtaining money is that it both tracks your progress and is used as an incentive to get out and explore dungeons. In order to bring this into my games I have adapted some ideas that were posted by user Kese on the EZD6 Discord.

In EZD6 you have 6 levels of wealth:

Using the rules posted by Kese each item has a cost level:

When players want to buy an item the Rabble Rouser (GM) sets the cost level of the item and rolls a number of D6 equal to the cost level, they then note the highest result. The player then rolls a number of dice equal to their wealth level and takes the highest result of their roll.

If the player’s roll is…

• LESS THAN the GM’s roll then they can’t afford the item.

• EQUAL TO the GM’s rolls then they purchase the item but lose a wealth level.

• MORE THAN the GM’s roll then they purchase the item, but their wealth level does not change.

In my game I have introduced the notion of COIN PURSES, abstract units of wealth that can be found as part of treasure hauls or that can be received as payment for undertaking missions and such like.

I do not let players use Karma points (a pool of points players have in EZD6 to manipulate dic rolls) when it comes to wealth rolls, however a single coin purse can be spent to avoid losing a wealth level if the player’s roll for purchasing is equal to the GM’s and two coin purses can be used to make a one-off purchase if otherwise the PC would not be able to afford it.

This isn’t a perfect system and it still fades money more into the background than I would like, but it’s been useful as a method of bringing currency back into my EZD6 games a little without having it taking centra-stage.