Employment

If you're like me, a data fiend, it is easy to get wrapped up in the minutiae of your PC's lives.  One item that's become quite relevant as this campaign has rolled forward has been how much money the party has available, and how fast they are accumulating more.  The ComStar personnel have finally settled into the acceptance that rescue is not coming, and they've been slouching long enough.  As such, they decided on the eve of the game's first major time jump to find work during that period.

None of them were willing to enlist with the Word of Blake or TerraSec, which made their major Career skill (Soldier) rather irrelevant.  At Clark's suggestion, Alex and David became pest hunters, shooting mule deer and the like for local ranchers.  They each make about 50 C-Bills a week doing that.  Both of them seemed very happy with the choice.

Shin was more inclined to use his tremendous bulk to do construction work.  As unskilled labor, I took the Administrator pay from A Time of War and halved it, to 320 C-Bills a month, or about 80 C-Bills a week.  He also seems quite content in his role.

After adjusting for taxes, house, utilities, and such (which only Clark and Simon are paying, since the ComStar personnel are mooching off of Clark), it turns out that while Clark still has the highest net income in the group (more than any other two combined, in fact), Simon has now fallen to the lowest income in the group, having only 118 C-Bills of spending money each month.  Even the lowly Alex and David are keep 140.  So far this hasn't come up, and Simon has the advantage of having his own home if things at the ranch become untenable for any reason, so he hasn't complained.

The practical upshot is that the party has a budget of a bit over 1,400 C-Bills a month to play with.  They obviously aren't buying a BattleMech on that kind of money, but they have been looking into ways to stretch their funds.  I find this one of the most rewarding elements of this kind of open-ended play; watching players try to do the most with what they have.

One of their plans most recently was to lease an AgroMech and retrofit it to be a small BattleMech.  This proved beyond their means (and demonstrated to me how hard it is to find out how much an AgroMech costs on short notice) but it was an interesting aside that the players had a lot of fun with.

If we get more tails of creative accounting, I'll be sure to post them.