Choosing the “hyperelite” background in Eclipse Phase starts you off with +10,000 credits (as opposed to 5,000 for most other starting backgrounds). I appreciate that game balance must be maintained, but nevertheless it strikes me that the hyperelite PC is not nearly as wealthy as they should be. Here are some of my musings on dealing with hyper-wealth, both from an in-game perspective, and from an meta-game perspective.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has an excellent analogy to explain the difference between statistical sets which follow a bell curve, versus statistical sets which follow power laws. The tallest people in history, the 1% 0.00000001%, are over 2.25 meters tall. Less than 2 times the median adult height. By contrast, the wealthiest people in history, the 1% 0.00000001%, are multi-billionaires. That is, they possess about a million times that of the median American (even more if you consider the median wealth of any person on Earth, American or otherwise). If things like a person’s height followed power laws, the tallest man in history would stand several times beyond the Earth-Luna distance.
This is, of course, a fact the Occupy Wall Street/”We are the 99%” movement has seized on. In Eclipse Phase, in the Inner System, I imagine the differences in wealth can be even more drastic. Multi-trillionaire post-human immortals.
One mechanical suggestion to reflect wealth inequalities would be to have character points buy not linear increases in wealth (+5000 or whatever) but exponential increases in wealth (*1.05 or whatever). This is, for instance, how GURPS handles wealth.
In-game, however, I can think of several reasons the hyper-wealthy would either not be on a “typical” Firewall mission, or, if they were, would not have full access to their wealth:
If a truly hyperelite was, indeed, part of Firewall, Firewall would benefit more from that greatest superpower: money. Why send your hyperelite to infiltrate down the abandoned space elevator onto TITAN-infested Earth when Firewall could gain much more by having them strategically funnel credits to “in-field” agents? “Oh, hey, Mr. John Q Firewall, sucks that you can’t afford that sweet reaper morph, but fortunately Firewall agent Bruce Wayne was feeling in a generous mood today, so here’s an extra 100,000 credits to help you blow up TITANs”.
Hyperelites tend to be self-serving and inhuman. If it benefited them to betray Firewall, they would have no qualms against it. Whereas a typical agent, if they attempted to expose Firewall, would not be empowered enough to get very far, a multi-trillionaire has much better chances. Firewall could, of course, attempt to recruit “mere” multi-millionaires (as opposed to multi-trillionaires), and perhaps that is what the hyperelite background is supposed to represent.
Title of this section is a silly pun on “liquid assets” and “frozen assets”. So assuming your typical hyperelite PC is a mere multi-millionaire, that still gives them a lot of assets to bring on missions, right? Except that they might have a lot of their wealth sunk into “non-adventuring gear”. It’s like the heuristic from GURPS where players playing PCs in a modern setting should expect to spend 80% of their assets on “non-adventuring gear”. Their three mansions, their lifetime memberships to the swankiest nightclubs in New Shanghai, whatever: it doesn’t do much good while being chased by headhunter bots at the bast of the Kilimanjaro elevator. Also, making “withdrawals” might not be that simple: what if the police become suspicious that they are using all these transactions to fund terrorism (and I suppose many Martian police would consider Firewall to be just that)? What if the player is playing a young scion of the hyperelite, and the money is really in a trust fund watched over by a caretaker AGI?
Here, I think the solution is to make a Networking: Hypercorp check to acquire things. This would represent the character using money they already possess, but routing the money in such a way as to not look suspicious/trying to unload less-liquid assets/et cetera.