On character wealth an d game balance

Greenfield · Apr 10, 2017

My game group's campaign is on hiatus until Memorial Day (it's an annual thing), and we're taking the opportunity to do some review and rebalancing of the characters.

Some of you may recall me griping/grousing about DMs in our multi-DM campaign pouring huge amounts of wealth into the game. My character just recently hit 9th level which means, by the table in the DMG, that his wealth should be around 36,000.

To put that in scale, another table on the available wealth in downs, a few pages later in the book, says that a Large City will have about 40,000 it can spend to buy loot from characters. So yeah, there's a huge wealth difference between PCs and the rest of the game world. Completely different scales.

That being said, my character's magical and alchemical gear (but not mundane stuff like clothes, horse and saddle, backpack etc) valued out at a bit over 83,000. That's a bit over twice a "large city", and roughly 80% of "Metropolis". Oh, and over twice what it should be.

The DM scheduled to take the reins when we return has asked us to send in our wealth lists, so he can review and perhaps trim a few things.

I did, and then volunteered to provide a more balanced version of that list for him.

And here's where the fun begins. He said that I had made a mistake, that I had valued my gear at book prices, not resale value, and that we always scaled based on resale value. That means that anything other than cash and gems is essentially half price. In other words, the price cap is doubled.

How do you count wealth in your games? Book price? Resale price?

Do you count items the character could make at production cost?

Do you use the Wealth by Level table at all? (I know a lot of games that don't.)

Dandu · Apr 11, 2017

I always thought it was by book price myself.

S'mon · Apr 11, 2017

It's supposed to be by book price not resale. OTOH 3e class balance generally *improves* the more/better items the PCs have, so doubling WBL not necessarily a bad idea.

Celebrim · Apr 11, 2017

a) It's book price, not resale price.

b) D&D economy by the book has always been a mess from a realism perspective, dating back to 1e when Gygax created one economy to punish the PC's and another economy for NPC's based on historical realism. I could write pages on what it takes to fix it.

c) In every version of D&D, you couldn't really speak about balance or challenge across tables because differences in available equipment have always made such a huge difference in survivability and capability. Depending on the gear, in 1e AD&D a party at 10th level could dispatch everything in the game with ease, or else at 16th level might still struggle to stay alive against tier X encounters (and probably never reached that level in the first place). Same sort of things implies to 3e for a party that lacks crafting feats.

d) In your case, doubled wealth is probably equivalent to +1 ECL.

e) I'm very old school, and though I play a variant of 3.X, I don't use the wealth by level tables at all. Players have the opportunity to find treasures I think are cool and appropriate to the dungeon, and I try to follow the rule that resources that the players need to meet challenges they are expected to face are out there somewhere. Whether they ultimately find these items is up to them (my current group is terrible at looting). I maintain only a lose hand on wealth, both because it's not wealth that's actually dangerous but fungible wealth and because wealth is a particularly terrible marker of utility - as any CharOp board quickly reveals. You can improve the relationship between utility and wealth compared to the default RAW, but you probably can never make it perfect.

Igwilly · Apr 11, 2017

Well, yeah, it’s the book price, not resale price.

I’ve faced this question, too: 1e books specifically tells you the prices there are hyper-inflated by a sudden burst of money coming in. “Oh my, those adventurers found a huge pile of cash! Put two zeroes on those prices! No, to the right, not left!” Which kind of makes sense, but complicates the game – and its extrapolation – too much.

I would love to know if anyone here has a full-thought out fix to economy for 2e or 4e, but here’s what I’ll be using – inspired heavily by Final Fantasy:

1) Convert 1 gp -> 1 gil.
2) Only follow the important prices: magic items, craft costs, spell research, anything that actually is relevant to the average adventuring party.
3) Limit the number of magic items players can equip at once. I’m talking about 5-6. Carried items are another matter, but it shouldn’t be terribly easy to un-equip one and equip other.
4) Decide how much magic is prevalent in your world, and make the rest of prices with that as a guideline. If your world is full of magic items, things like an inn room or a meal should be more costly. If magic is rarer then the prices can be lower. Good sense is vital here.
5) The actual coinage system is up to you, but I wouldn’t actually make gold pieces worth 1 gil. Perhaps silver or copper ones.
Honestly, I haven’t actually used this yet, but I plan to, and I think it’s a good plan. I would love more feedback on this, though.

Edit: I just remembered that, in 2e, you usually cannot buy magic items, but the idea still holds.

Grogg of the North · Apr 11, 2017

I've always done WBL as book price. When you create a 9th level PC, you have 36,000 GP to spend on gear that your character has acquired somehow. You don't buy wands at 50% so why would you value your gear at 50%? Also, to some degree, having 36,000 GP to spend on gear means that a DM should never assume or make a PC need an item worth more than that to continue the quest.

This may be a contributing factor to your wealth balance issues. How does the rest of the rotating DMs do it? Maybe there is a disconnect?

Greenfield · Apr 11, 2017

Several of us have touched on an interesting point: The workability of the WBL table itself.

An example given was the 9th level PC whose wealth should be about 36,000. A 7th level PC should be about 19,000. By the WBL, that is.

Is that enough for the level? I know, it varies from game to game. Some like to keep PCs hungry, and/or run low-magic games. Others like to let the players flex their in-character muscles a bit more.

But over all, is that table a good guideline in 3.5? As was pointed out, several items were re-priced between 3.0 and 3.5, but the table wasn't adjusted.

And what about spell books?

Basic book (empty) costs 15 gp. After that every spell uses a page per spell level (one page minimum), and each page costs 100 gp to scribe.

A Wiz starts with all the PHB Cantrips, which means 18 pages of the book are used, at 100 gp per page.
They start with 2 1st level spells, plus one per Int bonus (probably three, on average), for another five.

That's 2,300 gp of book before they go on their first adventure. 1st level characters are supposed to have 900, by the book. 2nd levels get 2,700.

Now, add two 1st level spells when the PC actually hits 2nd level, at 100 gp per page, and the book is 2500 of their 2700 total.

Yeah, I know the book is "free" to starting characters, and adding those spells is also "free", but that's what it would cost to replace it. That one item is going to be a hefty chunk of their budget for most of their career.

And the price goes up geometrically. At 3rd and 4th levels add 400 gp in value, then 600 at 5th and 6th.

Fighters need their (pricey) magic armor and weapons.

Thinking of Rogues and such, should there be a discount for enchanting leather and studded leather armors? Otherwise the Rogue either falls by the way-side, in therms of AC, or gets priced out of the market. In either case, they cease to be a combat-ready class.

So, does the table need a "by class" adjustment? Does it work at all?

Teemu · Apr 11, 2017

Greenfield said:
To put that in scale, another table on the available wealth in downs, a few pages later in the book, says that a Large City will have about 40,000 it can spend to buy loot from characters. So yeah, there's a huge wealth difference between PCs and the rest of the game world. Completely different scales.

That being said, my character's magical and alchemical gear (but not mundane stuff like clothes, horse and saddle, backpack etc) valued out at a bit over 83,000. That's a bit over twice a "large city", and roughly 80% of "Metropolis". Oh, and over twice what it should be.

You've misunderstood the rules. That particular gold amount is the limit that a single item may cost in the settlement, ie you can't buy an item costing more than 40,000 gp in a large city, or an item worth more than 100,000 gp in a metropolis. There's another formula to determine how much cash or wealth a community has, and for small cities and above there's practically no limit to the amount of cash available. For example, a large city with a population of 20,000 has wealth totaling about 40 million gp. A metropolis of 60,000 inhabitants would have 300 million gp.

Grogg of the North · Apr 12, 2017

Spellbooks are special. One of the last PCs I played recently was a wizard. The DM did a spot check (tee hee) on our wealth to see how we were compared to the tables. If I counted my spellbook I was overwealthed. If I didn't I was underwealthed. Wizards, by design, seem to be massive time and gold sinks.

Rogues are glassy. Giving them a discount on armor gets into a weird area. Why the rogue and not the ranger? Both are limited to light armor. So is the bard. What if I multiclass? If I go Fighter 4/Rogue 1 do I get the discount?

If I wanted to multiclass, which table for WBL should I look at? And if the tables are broken up by role, lets say melee, support, range and magic what table does a cleric or druid get to use?

I think any sort of adjustment to the wealth by level tables is going to open a can of worms. It is a problem, I must admit, that I am not capable of even beginning to tackle.

ccs · Apr 12, 2017

As others have said, book price.

As for the WBL chart? I don't really use it. Sometimes this means that you end up with more $/wealth than you "should have" according to the chart. Well, so what? I'm the DM. I'm fine with you having the items I handed out. If I wasn't? Then you wouldn't have found them.... And the $? You won't be spending it on anything I don't want in the game atm.
Most of the time characters in my games are short by the WBL charts - because the players don't loot everything possible, miss stuff, & I don't move treasure forward that they've missed.