WotBS D&D 3.5 Wealth per Level

I've been looking through WotBS and I'm not adding up appropriate wealth per level. Has this been previously addressed?

So a big problem is that wealth by level presumed you were fighting monsters.

NPCs have NPC gear. That skews everything. I think if you loot everything and sell it, you end up with way more wealth than PCs of that level should get. But when there are armies, the enemies are mostly people with gear.

NPC also tend to be easier opponents than monsters. Fear not, your players will have enough items/materials to overcome the challenges in WotBS. You should also add in the net worth of the Trillith boons (if your party manages to acquire them...)


For a note: My own players are quite used to a good supply of loot/items due to item abundancy in our previous campaigns (Planescape, a multi-dimensional 4e campaign and Way of the Wicked... ouch). So I've upped the NPC gear a bit, making the opponents tougher while simultaneously giving more shinies. I've also put them on an "item diet" due to the Shahalesti blockade in #3 in a way that they could not simply let the Lyceum craft anything they wanted due to a severe lack of crafting materials. War means shortage after all

When retooling The Scouring of Gate Pass for my customized Pathfinder-based conversion, I noticed that the treasure range was skewed, both high and low. In game play through the first half of the adventure, the player's choices skewed it low. For example, by choosing to treat the Shahahlesti agents (generally) as rivals to be outdone, but not enemies to be defeated and looted, they passed on a range of rewards. In addition, when dealing with some of the Black Horse mercenaries, they have felt more pressed for time, so they did not loot to the bare bones all their foes equipment, but just what they could readily gather. For example, they left the armor for the vast majorities of their foes behind rather than haul it around in the middle of the night hoping to find someone to sell it to before they started their 300 mile cross country trek.

I chose to compensate some by having the party's patrons in the Resistance provide them more than just instructions. When they stayed at the church of the Aquiline Cross, they were provided some gear to help them, including potions and healing kits. Depending on how your party works through events, you could include some extra rewards scaled up by and down by what you needed to keep your group at the appropriate level for your campaign.

The value of the trillith boons that can be gathered do really skew things from a "wealth by level" calculation, and more than just what they do to total wealth levels. The value of the boons generally jump your character's over the guidelines for their levels for a while. However, the boons are a double edge sword in this respect. While very powerful, they are also not suited to individual characters. By that, I mean that the d20 rules in general assume a combination of a stacking boost to a character's primary role and a distribution of defenses to shore up the character's weaknesses. As an example, a simple +1 magic weapon runs 2,000 gp. The first +2 attribute boosting items run 4,000 gp. The party that ends up with a +1 dagger in the hands of the wizard and a +2 Headband of Intellect on the fighter is not nearly as effective as the one where the wizard has the +2 Headband of Intellect and the fighter the +1 battleaxe, even though numerically these are about the same value.

The Boons let the party do amazing and interesting things, and really add to the story. I love them. But they do not specifically boost any character's profile, so calculating their relative value for effectiveness gets tough, in my opinion.

I am afraid that the work I am doing for adapting and converting the material will not directly help you. For one, I'm specifically reworking the gear to take advantage of the wide range of choices that are now available under the PFSRD than were available for the d20 SRD rules set. In the process, I am also specifically going for some gear that works for my party or makes them make interesting choices. For another, I am planning on having a few original scaling items using the Pathfinder Unchained guidelines. While the Living Blade of the First Tree makes an obvious conversion as a Wonder that way (and surprisingly easy to do), I am also going to have the Soul Shroud be a scaling item, as I think it too interesting in flavor to let it be discarded in the game.

Depending on where you are at, there are some points where different factions or group would have reason to reward or equip the party, and you can use those moments to re-balance the groups wealth and equipment through the campaign. While I mentioned one point in the first adventure, you could also have Councilman Menash do more in the first adventure. The ending points for the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th adventures puts the party at a point where they could receive patronage, boons, or sponsorship in the context of the story. You could even opt to have the Lyceum "issue" equipment for a mission, especially consumable gear, and then have it be reclaimed for other efforts in the war if unused, allowing you to boost or scale back some gear as you need.

thekwp said:

The value of the trillith boons that can be gathered do really skew things from a "wealth by level" calculation, and more than just what they do to total wealth levels. The value of the boons generally jump your character's over the guidelines for their levels for a while. However, the boons are a double edge sword in this respect....

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Speaking of swords, the Living Blade totally blows WBL out of the water. I was looking at letting one of the reincarnated characters take Fitz's blade (probably by seducing him), but realized that whoever got it wouldn't be able to afford anything else besides a loin cloth -- and only if they got it second-hand.

Admittedly, the fact that the blade scales by PC level probably mean as it's not worth quite as the book says, at least at the moment, but it's still a very valuable item for the party for many levels. I figure at some point they'll pick it up from Fitz one way or another.

I think the Tattoomancy feat was created by the authors specifically to have a way to equip all the humanoid NPCs without overloading the PC's with wealth.
I use that mixed w/ some actual items for them so enemies at least give the PCs something. I also make use of my own houseruled Vow of Poverty (TL;DR version: doesn't cost any feats nor give any bonus feats, any alignment can take it, and you get "essence" at each level equal to the WBL expected at the start of that level to allocate to enhancing your gear; major downside is you can't get or use any expendable items like scrolls, just per day stuff like eternal wands), which is often used by Ragesian Inquisitors and Forsakers (I made a new version of the PrC, too).

I have found that even with the existence of the magic tattoo "cop out," grunt humanoid NPCs are often vastly below the wealth they're supposed to have in gear, with the important NPCs largely being the exception, which in turn makes them weaker than their CR indicates (on top of the fact that IMO, other than for straight-classed casters, the CR = class levels thing is not a fair assessment), which you can ameliorate by either giving them some more tattoos or giving them another non-caster class level.

As for the Living Blade...it goes to a martial, so presumably it will just help him/her in the long run to stay on par w/ the casters. If you have more than one non-caster in the party, you should probably come up with a trinket for them as well (much later on they'll get a pretty nice one, though...). When they were figuring out loot after getting the Blade and finally reaching a magic shop, I gave the guy who received the Blade half a share. I didn't want to give him nothing else and then he can't buy stuff he might need, and at those low levels, the Blade's only worth several thousand anyway, so he wasn't effectively getting much more than the others. At the time...obviously its value has grown over the levels...

StreamOfTheSky said:

I think the Tattoomancy feat was created by the authors specifically to have a way to equip all the humanoid NPCs without overloading the PC's with wealth.

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That's pretty good. Despite having seen that one a number of years back, I never considered it in that light before.

In most adventures, you can reasonably predict what resources and wealth the party will acquire. Maybe they will avoid an encounter, or miss a secret door, but in general you have a fairly good estimate. One of the story elements that I find so appealing in War of the Burning Sky is the shifting nature of opponents and allies; how the war makes the party have difficult choices about who is an enemy, and who merely a rival that could be an ally in the next stage. In my campaign for example, the party ended up treating most of the Shahalesti spies as a rival faction but not outright enemies. Thus, they did not take any gear from them, baring Larion.

This looks to be a theme that will continue in future adventures, and this element makes the distribution of resources very difficult for me to predict. Some elements are obvious -- they are going to get just about everything they can from forces directly in the service of Ragesia, but the choices they make about the rest will become more difficult.

My solution is going to be fine tuning rewards from other sources as they move through the adventures, and adjusting the wealth available as a reward for certain encounters as I convert them. For the above example, I chose to compensate the party by having the Resistance provide them a few additional resources before they left town. I'm already committed to some pretty serious retooling of the adventure. This solution doesn't really help Epiphanis for his campaign, though.

thekwp said:

That's pretty good. Despite having seen that one a number of years back, I never considered it in that light before.

In most adventures, you can reasonably predict what resources and wealth the party will acquire. Maybe they will avoid an encounter, or miss a secret door, but in general you have a fairly good estimate. One of the story elements that I find so appealing in War of the Burning Sky is the shifting nature of opponents and allies; how the war makes the party have difficult choices about who is an enemy, and who merely a rival that could be an ally in the next stage. In my campaign for example, the party ended up treating most of the Shahalesti spies as a rival faction but not outright enemies. Thus, they did not take any gear from them, baring Larion.

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Same here. My group is very prone to solving problems diplomatically. They "looted" Larion since they wanted him to look convincingly beaten up so that his "betrayal" wouldn't look to suspicious to his Shahalesti superiors. The other Shahelesti forces were pretty much unharmed and unlooted - despite the fact that one of my PCs hates the Shahalesti government to the core. I don't want my players to feel like they are missing out something by solving problems without violence, so adding items as a reward is a definite must for me.

My solution was adjusting story rewards. Adventure endings are usually a great opportunity to put your characters to a certain target wealth level.
And I agree that the Living Blade is pretty hard to balance - I made a similar "item" (he's trillith-bound and the Trillith occupys his headband slot) for my second player which progresses in strength as he gains levels to even out the impact.