ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Don't know what to do with your cash?
Maybe this will help you!
The following tree could be unlocked/obtained by either a new escort, or rather, a new unique NPC that will reward you with the tree after defeating it.

Money tree (pun unintentionally intended)

1) Pilfer Gil: when used at a target humanoid, you will steal some gold from it. High cooldown. Cooldown decreases with level. At level 5, you have a small chance to steal a gem from the target. Higher level monsters yield more money / better gems.

2) Throw money: Enter the amount of money to be thrown at a target. The target will be hit with SQRT(#money*25(cunning)), or in other words, the mathematical average of the amount of money thrown, and twenty-five times your cunning. I might be somewhat off there, but I tried preventing it from becoming overpowered this way.
At level 3, it will confuse your target for 3 turns. At level 5, it becomes a ball, radius 2.

3) Transmute: when using this talent, choose an item that can be sold to a shop, and it will be transmuted into 10% (at level 1) to 30% (at level 5) of it's monetary value instantly.

4) Bribe: Pay 10 + 2 times the target humanoid's level in gold pieces to have a 50% (at level 1) to 100% (at level 5) chance of converting the target to your side for a while. Duration scales with cunning. Does not work on unique, and mindless creatures.

Pilfer Gil? Since when did this become Final Fantasy...? :P

I was contemplating a Cunning / Trickery tree for rogues that would involve Coin Toss, for fun more than anything.

Money loses significance way too early in the game. I notice a number of stop-gap measures in place that try to buffer against this in various ways, but I don't see them really addressing the devaluation of money through the game.
Here is my rant, in a compact, easily consumable form:
*Items are way too cheap, and value is scaled poorly: base material for weapons should scale by a factor of 5 or 10 at each step, more for the high-end stuff.
*Sell anything you want: you can only get 5% of value from a store. (unless you have the money talent tree with haggle or something).
*Make values for rings/amulets more dependent on affect than base value. A copper ring of kick ass +5 is better than a voratun ring of kick ass +4.
*Make shops able to custom certain kinds of armor with special properties, if you bring them materials they need... I think this is a class benefit of a class I have not yet played, and I'm pretty sure that some people would question making it available outside the class, but for the right price, its the kind of thing you can actually balance out OK. The class skill lets you do yourself up in gear, the service lets you pick one or two pain points and break your bank to fix them.
*Love the idea of buying hirelings. Raise your own army! Then you can add leadership skill trees: "You rally your companions with a furious bellow!" Make the cost of the hirelings a leech on your bank account! Seems like a natural for the Sun Paladins.

Crap, im late for work

shooth

I'm pretty sure the whole buying and selling and shops thing is being changed around again anyway in the next beta, so it's probably best to wait and see how that affects how much money we end up with.

I'd really like to see the ability to steal from shops but it's hard to balance and make it funny. Also stealing items from monsters in this game doesn't seem that useful. Although tossing the money to distract or actually hurt would be funny (like Assassin's creed).

Hirelings could be nice but they should be paid daily or something like that, or they're abusable, the price based on the level, the max level based on the actual character. They should help but not be equal or better than the real hero, or it gets boring and ugly.