A couple of posts ago, I discussed economics in tabletop games, with some specific elements that focus on the ways that game-economics are like and unlike the study of real-life economics. This time around, I’m shifting the focus to LARPs. CI/Ro3 and Wildlands LARPs – the ones I have real experience with – have some very different setting assumptions from D&D, some of which are stylistic choices and some of which are elements of the medium. Those differences have a huge impact on economy.
Upkeep
LARPs often include granular upkeep mechanics – paying yearly upkeep on specific pieces of gear, for example. Wildlands is noted particularly for the challenge that upkeep represents, as the best sword most smiths could make is a four-event weapon, and many characters spend the first part of any event figuring out how they’re going to get a weapon for that event. This is a key part of the crushing squalor that so defines the Wildlands campaign. In CI/Ro3 campaigns, upkeep is a minor yearly cost, trivial for most players, and I like to think that players who couldn’t meet upkeep costs would have no difficulty getting other players to help them out.
When I started work on DtD, it struck me that Superior Quality weapons (in SI and KG) represented kind of an odd point in the rules: very expensive weapons that no longer required upkeep. The cost of applying Superior Quality would almost never pay for itself in the limits of a campaign, but it still seemed strange to me that the reward for having piles of money was an exemption from the upkeep system. Much more appealing, in terms of economic design, was the silvering of weapons: for an extremely high cost, characters could call silver for a mere four months – four events at absolute most, but more likely two. To this end, in Dust to Dust, wealthy characters can sink money into enchanting their gear, but those enchantments fade in three or six events. The more powerful enchantments carry their own cost, as well as the cost of lower-level enchantments that must be in place in order for the higher-level enchantments to be placed.
Consumable Items
This is a matter of stylistic difference more than anything, as there are LARPs (or proposals for LARPs) that go very light on consumable (or one-shot) items. In CI/Ro3 and Wildlands, though, there is extensive usage of various one-shot items for attacks, healing, defensive buffs, and a huge range of utility effects. Several production skills hang on producing large quantities of consumable items, and this throws a major wrinkle into all discussion of economy. Because players invest significant amounts of Character Points in these skills, however, they come to expect a competitive degree of combat functionality from them; this is a second area of major stylistic difference from tabletop games. In D&D, you generally wouldn’t have a character rely on alchemist’s fire or poison gases as her go-to weapon, but all the way from NERO Tyrangel to DtD, that is a significant character archetype.
On one hand, consumable items fill an upkeep-like role, with regard to the characters that do depend on them. Acid Dart formulations are (roughly) as necessary to a DtD combat alchemist as mana, spell slots, or whatever to a combat spellcaster, but each formulation costs money. The plus side is that the alchemist can purchase formulations from other characters, find them as loot, and stockpile them from event to event. It’s a delicate balance, and in SI, Wildlands, KG, and Eclipse, it depended on the income (see below, I have plenty to say about game income) of a whole team, not a single player, to support one or two brewers or alchemists (whatever the game’s terminology).
On the other hand, consumables in both LARPs and tabletop games can represent a way to turn in-play cash into a pre-defined amount of awesomeness, by spending even more consumable attack items than you otherwise would (that is, “going nova is fun”), making you more resistant to harm, getting you back into a fight sooner than you would otherwise, or improving your stats in any number of other ways. Compare a Troll’s Strength formulation to, say, a potion of bull’s strength in D&D. The whole point of the latter is that it is a stat increase (a kind of awesomeness) that was not paid for out of the wizard’s or cleric’s spell slots. It’s possible to look at LARP consumables in the same way: DtD’s Warding Glyphs carry the benefit of weakening every target of a particular kind that passes through a doorway, while the description of Eclipse’s Berzerk stim begins: “This drug causes the character to fly into a furious rage and become an unstoppable killing machine.”
I like the idea that players voluntarily remove cash from the economy in order to exceed their normal limits. This is the other half of the idea that led to Forge Magic, which is either high-ticket upkeep (if you treat the benefits as “mandatory”) or a long-duration consumable. I believe this is not true of NERO Tyrangel, but in Wildlands and all games of the CI/Ro3 family, permanent magic items (above and beyond times-per-day items) are very rare and almost never for sale or trade. A player might gain one of these very rare permanent magic weapons from a major plotline; about the only other way to gain one is to inherit it from another character dying or retiring. (Weapons taking on heirloom status is pretty cool.) SI introduced a system for crafting weapons with minor enchantments, using Essential Elements; this was cool, but there were very few top-end Weaponsmiths and Armorsmiths over the course of the game. KG used a reduced list of possible enchantments (corresponding with its shorter list of magical materials). Even at the end of each campaign, these items were uncommon. Though their powers were permanent, they were not indestructible the way actual magic weapons tended to be, and Break or Destroy effects (especially as part of an Inferno) grew increasingly prevalent in the latter parts of those campaigns.
How Value Enters the Economy
Income in the boffer LARPs with which I am familiar – Shattered Isles, King’s Gate, Eclipse, Dust to Dust, and NERO Wildlands South – comes from a variety of sources. The Chimera/Rule of 3 family of games all have an Increased Wealth Advantage, representing a steady external source of income. This Advantage costs starting build, but is generally recognized as highly beneficial. Each campaign also has a Talent called Craft (SI, KG, DtD), Profession (Eclipse), or Craftsman: Other (NERO), which allows the character to define a source of earned income that pays a small amount of money, but increases with higher levels of the skill. Craftsman goes so far as to both scale with level and increase to a better scaling rate upon mastery, in NERO’s 9th edition rules.
Beyond these abilities, money comes from looting enemies killed in combat, finding treasure in a module, and getting rewarded by NPCs. The rain does not fall equally on all players, though; some players don’t remember to search kills, while others have no kills whatsoever – and there are opportunists out there as well. The old conventional wisdom was that front-line fighters got the bulk of the treasure, simply because they were in position to search kills once they were down. Healers – who in many games have the least capacity to survive anywhere near the front lines – rely on the generosity of the front line for any of that combat loot. Especially in NERO, where players can spend in-play cash to train and earn more XP, players addressed this through team dynamics: the fighters are the money-makers, but the healers keep them going, so the fighters fund the healers’ XP. (Admittedly, I never played a PC in any NERO campaign, so I’m going on anecdotes here.) In CI/Ro3 games, as mentioned, it takes a team to keep a brewer going; the next step of this idea came in Eclipse, in which the whole playerbase funded a team of Med Techs through in-play donations, and those Med Techs consistently provided for the whole playerbase in the campaign’s toughest battles.
The element that sets boffer LARPs apart from tabletop games here is not the team-like approach, but the differing approaches to wandering monsters and the reliance on money for primary character functions. I think there’s also a way to look at the economic cycle as stockpiling consumable resources by using them as sparingly as possible during “normal” conditions, spending those resources to survive the climactic (possibly season closer) battles. I’m not sure this is a common behavior, but it does interest me to imagine linking the economy to the narrative cycles of buildup, climax, and resolution.
It’s possible to make money from Production skills, but more difficult than one would imagine. The problem is that one often makes goods that one wishes to use rather than sell, and it’s awfully hard to set a competitive profit margin such that one can sell a portion of the product and use the rest without taking a loss. DtD has tried to ease this, but I don’t believe that I have the perspective to comment on the results yet. For skills that do not make consumable items, and for skills that make healing items, the “frontier community” feel of boffer LARPs means that characters are nigh-constantly facing mortal danger, and charging even a reasonable profit margin for a weapon when the wielder will use it to save the smith’s life can feel churlish. (Also, characters don’t need new weaponry often enough to keep the smith busy – another reason for Forge Magic to be as it is.)
Getting Money Out of the Economy
So some players will be flush with cash, while others will look at weapon and armor maintenance costs as a serious burden, possibly even out of reach. As with any haves-and-have-nots situation, it makes some odd things happen; with the extra money to pour into “more awesomeness,” there’s a great chance that net income improves. Once this happens, the plot committee probably wants to do something to suck money out of the economy and restore some balance. (Because of the greater number of players, this has even more in common with the concepts behind federal monetary policy than tabletop GMing.) Since taxation is not a going concern, the idea is to make sure there are high-ticket items worth wanting, the expenditure benefits more than just that one player, or the expenditure resolves an off-camera problem (such as, say, dipping one’s toe in domain-management gameplay). In games that use metal coinage, there’s an even stronger need to keep currency returning to Plot’s hands: the props are too expensive to readily replace, but treasure can’t keep going out until some of it comes back in. A gambit by one player or group to hold all the money just by physically possessing all the props is something I see as metagaming and poor sportsmanship, since in-play there is no comparable limit to how much coinage can show up in the world.
Introducing high-ticket items that are worth wanting can be a problem, especially if those high-ticket items provide a permanent benefit. In-play auctions in which characters sink hundreds of (denomination) into rare and valuable items are often breaches of the normal world-law that permanent magic items are not for sale. A permanent magic weapon generally means that the wealthy character will quickly gain even greater levels of wealth. This can be a problem with temporary enchantment as well, but at least the character will have to pay again in the future. Additionally, such auctions are large in-town encounters that reward the characters who have already been rewarded. It’s tough to do in such a way that characters with only “average” amounts of money can enjoy the encounter as well. The good side is that, if collusion between the players is sufficiently discouraged, you might be able to get one wealthy player or team of players to make sure that the interesting item costs absolutely as much as possible.
A variant of the above is a research system: using a large pile of money to speed up research hastens a process that the player could complete just by taking more time. I only know the back-end details of the DtD research system, of course, and I can’t discuss those in much depth here, but most proposals for systems that I’ve seen in other games include a significant monetary factor. All that’s necessary to keep this going is to make sure there’s a nigh-endless list of more things to want. To this end, I’ve always liked having one list of spells, production items, and so on in the rulebook, and another that is to be discovered in-play. This is an idea I fully support introducing into tabletop games as well, but for some reason new crunch of this kind in splatbooks is usually treated as common knowledge.
Anyway. The idea of the expenditure benefiting more than one player might take the form of securing a shipment of supplies that will be widely distributed – perhaps a 24-hour-duration item that can’t be stockpiled, or something like that. The point here is that if the expenditure makes the wealthy character look awesome for generosity and the rest of the characters look awesome by its inherent benefits, that’s win-win. The only (potential) downside is the risk of anti-climax if the benefit makes an encounter go too easily. Any interpretation of “buying off an opponent” might fit into this category.
Off-camera benefits can be a hard sell, since it relies so heavily on the consensual-reality nature of things to feel like the benefit exists. On the other hand, if done right, the wealthy character pays in-play money to feel cool without disrupting anyone else’s gameplay. In a sense, it’s a lot like buying a cosmetic item or companion pet in an MMO: the game balance needle doesn’t budge, but everyone walks away happy. If the game has a fully-developed domain management system, as some games have had, the purchase has mechanical benefit, but I think it’s pretty acceptable for domain management to be highly wealth-driven. (Also, I’ve never given even serious consideration to how to balance a competitive domain management game.)
In general, I like to see games give players an interesting variety of low-, mid-, and high-ticket items to want that are still part of the game’s balance assumptions. Here I have to give Eclipse a lot of credit; the game embraced its nature as a science fantasy game and included a huge range of electronic and mechanical widgets (nothing is as much of a game-changer as walkie-talkies), as well as weapon and armor upgrades, and attached a steep upkeep cost to many of them in the form of power packs. The idea of buying something cool that benefits the whole playerbase is there as well: the workbenches that double every crafter’s production points are not cheap to replace. It certainly would have been possible for one player or team to keep that all to themselves, but that hasn’t come to pass so it hasn’t needed solving. That said, I suspect that the players who benefit most also contribute the most to its replacement.
Okay, I think I’m done for now. This is the part where I open the floor to commentary.
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At KG, we did one major off-screen expenditure that I can recall (there may be more) – the grain shipment to Gondal. We priced it high – almost double the going rate for that volume of grain (something like 27 tons) per the game's Appraisal system. The total came to about 80 crowns. And while it wasn't the easiest to see, it did have a huge effect on Gondal making it through the cataclysm. It was one of the major components to resolving the shaman/naran conflict in a peaceful way (in my mind at least).
On the other end… it took 2 years at SI for me to afford a suit of 3 point armor, between two players. And most of that came from having a Craft skill to make money.
Jakoby is on the production end, and I can safely say I'm not flush with money. I think right now (because I have had several paying customers for high value items) I am at around 2 events worth of cash – as in if I just spent my production on stuff for me, I could spend out all of my money in two games. Spending money on rare resources just doesn't seem to ever work for me – I cannot accumulate the thousand credits or more that they seem to go for, nevermind whatever the 'so rare it has no set price' stuff will go for (looking at you, Durite and Quanta-629).
Forge Magic as a long term, higher cost consumable is a really great idea. I am interested to see what it is like in 3 years or so.
I really enjoyed the time it took to get my Tidal Clay Daggers in KG. It was a process and you got to make them and use your weaponsmithing which was cool. They were probably my prize possession in that game.
Also if it wasn't for NPC funding and some help from PCs I a could never afford my alchemy costs each event in KG.
I'll be honest. I don't pay much attention to LARP economics other than getting and spending cash during the actual event. How much I start with or end with each event is irrelevant. So for me it's important to have some mechanic to earn and spend money within a single event, if I'm going to participate in the economy at all.
I would actually like to see more non-combat ways to earn money during a LARP event. Especially since in Ro3, the presence of increased wealth is sort of a baseline rate… What you get for top end increased wealth each event winds up defining the average- it can't represent real wealth, because then players can buy and sell more than plot is really prepared for them to have early on. The ability to buy money with buttons affects that as well. So once we've accounted for that, while loot dros are hit or miss, they're still Probably the best way to earn money.
There are some things we've talked about doing for production characters that might make a bit more of an IP difference, though, like having NPCs put in for large orders of crafted goods.
Of course the amount of money one gets for the highest level of increased wealth isn't that much, especially after a game has been going on for a while- as an example, 100 credits at Eclipse (IW 5) is enough to pay the materials cost for either a medium gun or an armored fist or two short swords. And early on that might have been a decent haul, but now it is an amount that is routinely wagered in poker games, or might be able to "buy a round on me" at a reasonably full bar.
I'd also like to see some more non-com ways to earn cash, but I'm also at a loss as to how to introduce it in a manner that would actually see adoption- Selling crafted goods seems dodgy, as every crafted thing a person sells is one that is not used by the PC's, which might make people hesitant to do it (plus it will artificially set the market rate for certain items)
Maybe objects d'art? you could come up with some method of letting people create non-game affecting items, sink X amount of cash/MU into it and end up with a value of Y, where the ratio of Y:X depends on the level of a crafting skill and/or profession. So perhaps a talented smith could take 10 gold worth of silver ore and gems and make a statue/icon/etc worth 20 gold- This item could then be bought by NPC merchants or even Interested PC parties. If you wanted to further encourage this kind of activity, you could even come up with IG uses for such items- perhaps aligning said idol as your focus would have some minor benefit- (allow you to swap one bone after your initial draw or some such) Or it could be used to further develop a totem display or even be the base material for PC crafted magic items.
I'd love to see more ways to make money besides fighting or modules. This is not a useful post, as I'm not really sure of a good one. I have seen some people use craft skills in clever ways to make money. Making real world things out of their craft items (pretty much taking advantage of an oop crafty advantage you have, or a willingness to antique), also using their research skill to help people do research, while charging what they would have made crafting (brilliant). This is of course Dust to Dust. The other game I play – Eclipse, well, I don't play a character that cares about money. I don't search often, I don't go on paying jobs – I don't actually notice the money so much.
I have tons more… maybe later 🙂
@Christopher,
Those daggers were right badass, in fact. =)
@Bocaj,
It's interesting to me how differently people approach LARPing and engagement. Your way of playing wouldn't work for me, and mine wouldn't work for you. =) As long as you're having fun, all is well!
@Kainenchen,
It hardly bears mentioning to you that I'm willing to listen to ideas on other forms of income and other things to convince players to buy, but maybe a few other people reading this comment won't automatically know. 😉
Five crowns per event becomes 25-30 crowns a year. I see it as one of the best Advantages in the game, possibly to the point that someone interested in in-game wealth would need to justify not starting play with it. At this point in Eclipse, though, I sometimes forget both my Increased Wealth and my production actions – I kind of feel like IW3 and my levels of production are a drop in the bucket. That, and I'm just plain forgetful.
I should, at some point, write about the role of Buttons as local RMT currency. Boy, is that a whole other post.
Forgot to click link to have follow up email sent- clicking now!
Incidentally George, that is part of my point- thing ate priced so that increased wealth won't be that much, relatively, in the long run.
Hmm, I could see a system with more kinds of loot. That could only be used for Object d'art.
So you have craft: tanner. Wolves come out and get killed. People loot these wolves and get normal loot. You as a player know that your craft: tanner skill allows you to skin wolves and turn them into leather goods that you can sell.
Basically, create a wealth stream that can only be accessed by someone with a craft/production skill (game balance may vary). Then the "front-line fighters" get their loot, but as they don't have craft skills (in general), there would still be loot leftover for production characters.
Needs refinement, but I think something like that could work pretty well. Helps work on the problem of only the front-line fighters making money during events.
@Rev. Dr. G.,
There are plenty of events in which 100 credits/5 crowns from IW 5 is the sum total of a character's income. See also: bad luck, or "the rain does not fall equally." At this point in Eclipse, I am pretty sure (others would know better) that that's more than enough to stand your round at the 4th Gate.
Making money with production skills, straight out, is already allowed. "For each BGA used, you earn four (4) silver towers or dinars per level of the skill." The value conversion you're talking about – turning 10g in ore into 20g in art – is how Jewelcrafting worked in SI and KG, and… yeah, no. The extremely wealthy players mentioned in the post usually got there with at least some help from Jewelcrafting. Worked ores and cut gems were really only ever purchased by NPCs, since the non-Jewelcrafter PCs couldn't afford the objets d'art in the first place.
@Veaya,
My one other answer for how money could be introduced into the game – off the top of my head, anyway – is not perfect, but it's connected to something you mentioned to me in chat – and Christopher mentioned in his above post. NPC patrons paying PCs to complete certain tasks sounds great, and very well could be, except for basically two (not insoluble) problems.
1. Assigning a large number of missions to PCs is a significant plot workload, since there's also considerable writing and staging that goes into making the mission possible to complete – especially if the mission is not overt PvP.
2. There's a lot more room to dispute whether this is a correct assessment of the problem, but the players who are most able to make contact with NPCs to receive patronage are most likely the ones who are already deeply involved and getting entangled in lots of goings-on.
Really, there are two kinds of players who have Poverty Issues. The first is the wallflower/new player. If any kind of NPC patronage exists, these are the ideal players for it. The second is the deeply involved, highly active player who is simply low-combat or high-cash-outlay – as with Adam's comment, for example. These people generally don't need (but would still enjoy playing) such a system – but you run the risk of exacerbating the divide between "insider" and "outsider" players. So targeting and constant recalibration are everything. 😉
Economy in LARP is one of those things I've had as a facination for almost a decade now – hey, I've got a business degree, and I have to do something with it.
Without getting too wordy – though I suspect I will by the time this is done – there is no such thing as a viable, long-term LARP economy. It doesn't exist. It falls apart at a fundamental level built around core mechanics before it can ever even get started.
Economics relies on the idea that money and goods flow within parameters defined by the limits of the reach of commerce. In a working economy, a 'money unit' is functionally equivalent to time combined with training and risk. An unskilled laborer works for a day at plowing a field, and goes home with $2/hour. He has to work 100 hours to afford an iPhone – he trades his labor for dollars, and those dollars are used to buy the produce of someone else's labor. Dollars are a cypher for the value of his time.
LARPs don't have this mechanic. Instead, a LARP has a limited pool of items on which money can be spent, and a limited means of aggregating that money from the environment that is neither dependent on nor tied to a person's 'labor' relative to risk – whatever your LARP incentivizes will be the set of skills that makes the most coin.
Plus, LARP artifically limits the influx of NPC production – in an effort to make player production valuable, NPCs don't really produce anything in any serious quantity. This is equivalent to price controls (or even protective tariffs, depending on staff's take on NPC production) – and has the same chilling effect on the flow of money.
It all leads to extreme inflationary pressure – at NERO, for instance, 2cp of production can sell upwards of 1GP, provided you can find someone interested in buying it. Something the game artificially values at 2sp goes for 5-10GP simply because inflationary pressures have caused the money supply to spiral out of control in the hands of veterans.
It gets worse, this division between the haves and the have-nots over time, simply because the mechanisms designed for new players to have a foothold in the economy fail as age'd and wealthy characters drive core prices out of the design scope of these basic mechanics. Back massages pay gold, not copper … but newbies only earn copper. If massages are a gold, how much is a new sword?
I can imagine mechanics that can solve the problem – upkeep mechanics that peg you at a certain standard of living, food prices for a game that require in-game money alongside the real dollars necessary to keep the tavern running, NPC goods freely available for reasonable prices from off-camera vendors, large-scale investments in property or projects as allowed in core mechanics – but most LARPs as currently written don't have this kind of control.
Without a nod to the larger world, though, economies don't really happen… and LARPs are almost always kept in microcosm.
Personally, I like the way FoD/Fractured does it: Monsters tend to not have loot (or if they do, it's not much), modules might earn you a modest income, but if you want to be rich you have to put your money where your mouth is and invest build points in Mercantile (or at least Survival 3, which gets you Harvest Game; some crafters make okay incomes as well, and Performance is also another secondary option). Fighters, having chosen to invest most or all of their resources into combat skills, tend to be poor…the characters who buy the money-making skills are far better off, financially speaking.
Over the last several years, I've found that I don't like having fighters control the money supply with looted monsters/modules. Fighters already get to look cool at the event kicking ass; IMO, they shouldn't be making more money than the guy who has put his build points into being the Entitled Rich Guy.
Something touched on by V's comment, but I think could be noted more fully, is that one of the sure ways to make money in game is to directly invest out of play money in something that is consumable and desirable, but which also has a low real world cost.
In short, you sell food at the game. Be it a bar, running a tavern, or whatever else, I've seen it work in East Coast games, and have heard similar comments in how that's a sure way to make money in West Coast ones.
Inc Wealth definitely seems to be the baseline if you want to have money, and I mostly use mine to make sure that my weapons are all superior quality. I know it may not seem like it works out to some people, but the upkeep system is a hassle if you are a casual player. Items require maintenance on a real world schedule (ie once a year), and if you are the type who can't make every game, then you're paying for weapons which will get far less use than other people's. Also, all those extra games you are missing is money you aren't making with your advantage for by looting. There have additionally been times at games when the crafters who had the skill to maintain things either weren't around, or had used all their production up on other things, or wanted to hugely mark up the costs.
Seriously, to avoid the tags hassle, I'd scape up to pay the superior cost on every tagged item I have – my camera gear, radios, etc. Sadly, you can't do that on everything.
I completely came in with an SQ weapon, because I find maintaining stuff more an annoying hassle than anything else, not to mention really kind of obscure, as far as where it's mentioned in rules… you kind of have to know you need to do it and how, and it was never one of those things properly explained anywhere that I could find.
Which reminds me, I have an armored fist I forgot to maintain last event. I need an SQ fist. But yes, Kate, I am so very with you there. 😛
On Superior Quality: as others have already touched on, the real reason for removing maintenance was because maintenance is a pain in the ass. It's fiddly, bookkeeping bullshit that no one actually enjoys. As a means of removing money from the game system, it's not terribly effective. As a means of keeping smiths in work, it's slightly moreso (though you end up without having to do any maintenance for months, and then doing nothing but for a couple of months straight). We intended system that 1) was not strictly cost-effective, so that you spent more on the item than you would ever save in maintenance, so it was a more effective, albeit one-time, money sink; 2) gave smiths something /interesting/ to do, rather than just maintaining the same gear over and over, and 3) put a lot more quasi-magical items into the game, which let players feel cool because they had cool equipment that did cool things, with enough different options that everyone wasn't walking around with identical gear.
On consumable items, specifically offensive in nature: the Director of CI admitted late in the life of the first SI campaign that he had never really wanted Brewing to be a viable combat skill, and he had only thrown Voldari Fire (and its bigger brothers) into the system as a bone to those who wanted to focus on Brewing and still have some amount of personal defense capability. Unfortunately, I think that backfired, because instead of viewing it as a bone, it was seen as legitimizing the concept of the 'Brew caster', and the game (and subsequent games) were expected to support that as a viable concept.
Personally, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the 'Brew caster' concept, but I do know that the Director at the time didn't want it and regretted it. I do think that there is something inherently wrong with the idea that it /must/ be a valid concept, and that it's the responsibility of the game to support it for those characters who choose to pursue it. Every game I have ever played saw 'brewing' (names vary) used as a sort of mundane magic, a spellcasting without spells, and that does lead to the expectation that someone who goes down that skill path will be able to compete, for lack of a better word, with the more traditional spellcasters. At this point, I would be interested in seeing a game where offensive brewing (or the Combat Alchemist, as you put it) isn't a concept, either because those offensive creations simply don't exist, or because they aren't feasible, for reasons economic or otherwise (getting hit with a fire spell, for instance, causes your entire inventory of Brewer's Fire to go off at once).
As far as getting money into PCs' hands, this is something we've discussed many times. I still don't have a good answer. I play a front-line fighter in DtD, and I'm dirt poor. I had to borrow the three silver lumps it took to silver my mace, because I couldn't afford to buy them (and don't get me started on the new silvering rules). For the first three events, the total wealth I had earned that didn't come from Craft skills or Increased Wealth was 2 silver (and I don't mean two lumps of silver, I mean 2 silver coins). So, yeah, that's a thing. I don't know what you're going to do to fix that, but do it quick!
Points you get for volunteering are also a really good way to boost money. I know that this impacts game economies in interesting fashions, but specifically for someone like Jorge, who doesn't search and probably gives all his money away – it's a great way to not actually be poor. And it's easy to come up with good reasons why you'd have it.
Granted, not everyone has enough points for that, but I did that at Nero – and it was so worth the trade for me. To be able to have the money to give away, without having to search.
For Brandes point about patronage – it being easier for outgoing players to get, it might be neat to hire those outgoing players to find the 'hidden talent'. It is hard for a quiet pc to talk to an npc who isn't in town very long, but pc's don't have that drawback, and can go seek out those quiet folks.