I don't know how everyone else plays, e.g. with or without money in their game. I like the prospect of having the PCs buy stuff, but having arbitrary prices, and a little box detailing current funds on hand just never sat right with me.
Low an behold, in the spur of the moment bartering situation the group of PCs found themselves receiving a sizable bounty and wanting to buy all sorts of goodies with it, and I devised a pretty fun way to play it out.
Each player got 3k in cash, this then translated to 3 "buying dice." Then, whenever the players wanted to buy something they rolled their buying dice against a standard difficulty number for the item they wanted to buy. I just used the invention table for reference.
Thus, one player wanted to buy an arc welding set, metal, and various tools to build some new armor. I put those items in the "sort of useful" category, difficulty number 6, and he had to roll his 3 buying dice and beat a 6. He did, and has successfully bought the items. I then said that when you successfully buy something you "spend" one of your "buying dice," so now we was down to 2 dice for buying.
This when on, until he successfully rolled for a few other items, and then gave 1 of his buying dice to another player as a loan. What resulted was the most fun session of buying items we have ever played! It wasn't just straight cash values for items, there was luck, which I said could be augmented by the Filthy Rich skill. If a player had 2 levels in Filthy Rich, then he gets +2 dice to his buying dice for a total of 5. Once he then spent all 5 of his dice, in the next session of buying (maybe the next game night) he would get his +2 dice back for filth rich.
Like I said, I don't know if money is a factor in any of ya'll's games, but I really like this system, and I think it fits with the spirit of OVA quite nicely. Enjoy.
Money, Buying, and Filthy Rich
Hmm! Very interesting idea, and very consistent with how many Abilities in OVA work. I may even include something like this in the Revised OVA. At least a less literal version. Dice representing specific sums of money sounds like great fun, but it's a bit too much of a special case to warrant including in the book.