D&D 5E Forget about the treasure and pricing system of 5E!

Hey there,

we are currently at the very end of the campaign "Princes of the Apocalypse". Our characters are level 13 and we have dozens of thousands of gold, but we don't know on what to spend our money. The treasure system is broken. Prices are even more broken. Gold is worth nothing, if you can't by anything useful for that. The only way to get rid of gold is, if your DM finds a way to "burn it all for some hypocritical reason" like offering you a Castle for an insane, unplausible amount of gold. If you don't believe me, read Angry GM's article.

In our case, we decided to give gold at least a tiny bit of usage and offer only magic consumables in a very limited amount for purchase. Therefore, the first problem we had to deal with was that there is A LOT of inconsistency between prices. We started using Sane Magic Item Prices to have more realistic prices that depend on the item's power, not its rarity. Though this system is far away from being perfect, it is much more consistent than RAW. Furthermore, I created Faerûn's Vendors - A flexible vendor system for magic consumables to provide a transparent ruling system that can easily be adjusted to fit for the DM's purpose.

But that's only one side of the coin. The other problem is that players accumulate hundrets of thousands of gold. During a 20 level campaign they are supposed to earn over 3.2 million(!!) GP. You don't believe me? Have a look at this article about game math. So, if you want to make buying items not only available, but also interesting, you need to force players to make decisions on what to spend their money. This is the other side of the coin: preventing characters from swimming within an insane amount of money, that allows them to buy anything they want to - regardless of the price. If you lower their treasure, they will buy items with care. And even if they have less coins, they will be satisfied, because their so hard earned money is worth more than ever before!

The questions is, how to distribute a reasonable amount of money to players. The DMG provides dozens of treasure tables for gems, art, items, consumables and, of course, gold. But as I said, the system is broken and therefore useless, because there is no reasonable relation between the millions of income adventurers are supposed to earn by RAW and those trivial lifestyle costs. Concerning this, I want to quote a passage from the Angry GM's article, I already mentioned:

Angry GM said:

Where D&D does f$&% up is in presenting money treasure as important. Because that’s an outright f$&%ing lie. And it confuses the hell out of poor GMs. And, worse, it forces GMs to do unnecessary work. The thing is, many GMs crack open that DMG and find the chapter on treasure and they try to hand out treasure according to the rules and keep everything balanced because the game seems to suggest they have to. But that’s wasted work because the treasure itself has no value. It isn’t important. It’s paperwork for the sake of paperwork.

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Applying rules for treasure distribution that are obviously broken is even worse than applying no rules at all. @Vonklaude posted a treasure table that estimated the average amount of treasure handed to the players while applying the rules of the DMG. I already mentioned that the amount earmed by a party during their 20 level career is 3.2 million GP by RAW. Within this thread we talked about adjusting this insane amount by applyng lower multiplicators between the differet tier levels. That would allow the DM to lower the outcome to an amount that better fits his idea of treasure distribution (e.g. the default multiplicator is 10. If you lower it to 5 the characters would only earn ~500.000 GP in their career).

It felt good for a moment, but after I thought about it for a while I asked myself: Why on earth should I ever fix a broken system for treasure distribution that is related to a pricing system that is also broken? The answer was: It makes no sense at all. A pricing system that sells Glue for 50.000+ GP, but a Sentinal Shield for only 100-500 GP is ridiculous. So, fixing the treasure distribution won't solve the problem, because it is related to the pricing system that is also broken.

After all that, I agree to Angry GM that the whole treasure distribution system is a lie and not worth the work. Firstly, if I need to spend so much work to adjust a system, only to match my personal idea of treasure ditribution, I can easily give away treasure by my own system. Secondly, if I already know how much I want to give away to my players, there is no reason to start calculating this amount to solely fit into a table of a broken system.

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In conclusion: If you also have problems with treasure distribution, I suggest to do the following:

1.) Become aware of how much treasure you want to distribute for each level. This depends on what you want your players to be able to afford. You also want to ask yourself, if there are some elements to "burn money" like building Strongholds, etc. Don't panic, now that you are using your own distribution, you will always be able to adjust the wealth of your group. In my case, I allow my party to buy a very limited amount of magic consumables. I looked up Sane Magic Item Prices and found out an amount that suits my purpose.

2.) Delete all gemstones and art objects from treasure. If you and your group care as less about that as my group does, don't think about it. Just do it. Gemstones and art objects are only useful to be converted into cash (except reviving diamonds). So, I suggest to make your DM life easier and don't care for it. Of course, if your players have fun in collecting art for their home base, you might want to go on with it - otherwise don't.

3.) Divide treasure up to several parcels and determine where you want them to be found in the advanture. Consider that you can always add potions and scrolls to your parcels as you want to. If you are running a official WotC campaign, you could also consider only to replace the amount of gold (including gems and art objects) and leave the rest of the treasure as it is. Just do it, as you wish to.

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Doing so is much easier than trying to hand out treasure according to the rules, only because you fear to break the game balance. There is no balance. Accept it. You will see that your DM life will become less complicated, because you can forget about those dozens tables that have made your life so hard.

Kind regards!

Unfortunately WotC has completely dropped the ball here.

They pretend magic items are "optional" and/or "rare" - in reality official modules are chock full of magic items.

The official guidelines for treasure hoards give out tens and hundreds of thousands of gold pieces, yet there are nothing to spend it on that doesn't require downtime (building castles etc). However, official modules often ask the player characters to save the world and "please hurry". This means no or little downtime is allowed or encouraged.

There is a huge mismatch here, that is perhaps the biggest systemic flaw with 5th edition. Google "D&D gold is worthless" and you'll see.

lkwpeter said:

So, there seem to be two problems:

1. There is a need for a consistent price system.
2. Gold treasure and the price system have to be mutually dependent.

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Of course there are - and so far WotC has completely gotten away with doing nothing in this area and offering no solutions. This is our fault as players - until we speak up, they don't need to give us any working solutions or make their own adventures match what their rules actually support. However, many players are still in complete denial and will not even acknowledge the existence of this problem!

In the 1e days I calculated the maximum treasure value given to the Demon and Devil Lords and a few other BBEG's in the Monster Manual, based on the treasure types that were assigned to them. Then I divided by the XP for these monsters. The ratio was approximately 3 GP per XP.
When I would run published adventures, I would always audit the treasure to make sure it did not exceed this ratio. As a result, the campaign always left the PC's pretty hungry for gold, with a just a few magic items between them. Never a "Monty Haul campaign", as it was called back in the day.
In 3e, there was a table that showed the expected GP to XP ratio - the ratio started at 1 for 1st level but ramped up to around 10 at 20th level. I still think capping at 3 GP per XP would have made for a grittier high level campaign, but I did not find DMing 3e to be fun past 12th level anyway.

My recommendation for 5e would be to use the Sane Magic Item Prices as a guideline, but apply the 3 GP to XP maximum ratio to treasure for all your adventures. Then tweak from there. It should turn magic items into rarer and more exciting treasure and take away the blasé attitude that PC's would have to oodles of gold.

I rarely see the mention of charity come up as a reasonable thing to do with excessive wealth. It's not for every PC, obviously, but most parties are composed of "good guys." It stands to reason they could dole out some (or most) of that treasure to needy causes.

Possession of wealth, rather than spending it on something "useful," can also be its own benefit. If it's known the PCs possess great wealth, it can attract attention from NPCs of varying stripes. This could open the door for new plot hooks; would-be thieves, entrepreneurs seeking investors, and aristocrats who otherwise wouldn't deign to glance at the PCs could provide interesting diversions from the main campaign, or serve to support it.

Regarding the sale or purchase of magical items, they are generally not open market items in my settings, per the guidance suggested by the developers. If a magical item is available for purchase, the seller sets the price based on his needs and motivations, not just the nature of the item. Setting can also skew prices. In a war-torn countryside, a +1 suit of chainmail is arguably worth more than an Ioun Stone of Charisma.

This last point probably isn't helpful since your post implies magic items are market items in your setting. The "Sane Magic Item Prices" document seems reasonable at a glance, and is something I might also use if I were inclined to treat magic items as such.

lkwpeter said:

So, there seem to be two problems:

There is a need for a consistent price system. Like the upper example (Glue vs. Sentinel Shield) has shown, it's not enough to calculate item prices by rarity, because there are legendary crap items and also powerful items that are uncommon.
Gold treasure and the price system have to be mutually dependent. Even if items are perfectly calculated among themselves, it's important to make sure that a price that is meant to be "high" really is hardly affordable. Therefore, you have to make the amount of gold treasure dependend from prices. Otherwise you run the risk that the group has too much money, so it can buy anything or the other way around.

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The flaw is yours: I see no mention of charging the PCs for food and rent. Do they still live with their parents?

Consistent prices would be nice, but D&D 5 was founded on Rulings, Not Rules. I guess that means that they expected GMs to come up with their own consistent, fair rates of gold awards...

Putting the bizarre economics of D&D in the DM's hands is really unfair. Unless you're some kind of economics expert, ironing out how much stuff should cost and how much money you should be earning by adventuring is a Herculean labor.

Now characters generally start out with armor 1-2 AC points less than the best non-magic armor. If you wear heavy armor, your first upgrade is (admittedly away from book) something like 400-500 gp. The second is, what, 1500 gp?

This isn't magic, this is something the system expects you to buy. It's a literal milestone for characters. But let's think about this. So if every Fighter is intended to wear plate...he has to earn 1500 gp.

Wait a minute. Let's look at lifestyle costs. You can live like a Trump on what, 10 gold a month? 120 gp a year (assuming 12-month years in a campaign). 1500 gp is enough money for you and 12 of your friends to live that way for a year (or you can live like a boss hog for 12 years).

Who is selling plate armor? Who is making it? Who is buying it? How can this stuff exist in every major city so every Fighter can snag it before leaving Tier 1?

Worse, how can this stuff, which is only 2 AC above the armor every Fighter can start with for free, be so expensive? How does one justify that? That's not even getting into all the armor monsters have (which is of course, cannot be used or sold)...take a closer look at what monsters get equipped with, and when they start showing up with various expensive armors.

Plate armor that costs 1500 gp and is also readily available means that one suit sold is enough to let you live comfortably for decades- a given smith only has to crank out a few of these in his lifetime. But there's apparently a huge market for the stuff, which means there are either a lot of smiths trying to win the "sell 3 suits of plate armor" lottery, or there's a legion of 4th level Fighter types who have the money to buy it...

Where is this money coming from? How has the economy not crashed to the point that buying a dagger requires you to spend 1000 gp or something equally ridiculous?

And then you have the problem of +1 armor. Why, it costs 500 gp, regardless of what armor type it is. Adamantine Full Plate? 500 gp...hold on a minute!

Sure you could say "well you shouldn't be buying and selling magic items in the first place" but armor made out of adamantine isn't really magic...it's just armor made out of rare materials...but then again, how much should +1 armor cost?

500 gp more than regular armor? Seems dubious, since AC 17 heavy armor is like 450 gp and AC 18 armor is three times that....for only 500 more that would be a steal...

And this is just armor, go look at your PHB equipment list and really start asking how many elephant vendors there could really be. It's a mess, there's no real logic involved in how much anything costs, any prices quoted are just...arbitrarily set.

Fixing all of this and making a game world seem remotely logical is a huge task for anyone, and if professional game designers won't do it, who can reasonably ask a DM to?

James Gasik said:

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I am really sorry, since you seem well-reasoned and well-intentioned James, but now you're hijacking the thread.

No rpg has ever come close to giving what you seek, a fully realistic economy. Certainly never a fantasy game like D&D.

And that's not what the thread-starter is asking for anyway.

We want a playable economy. Not a realistic one.

I'd like to please ask the thread not to go down the rabbit-hole that is "realism in fantasy gaming". So very many threads has lost their way that way, and none of them have ever come up with any kind of resolution.

No, let's instead focus on discussing the OP's original misgivings.

There at least we can hope for better official support down the line, if us customers wake up and start demanding it.

My very best regards to you, James,

Zapp



Sent from my C6603 using EN World mobile app

Thanks for your answers! I absolutely agree to @CapnZapp and @James Gasik. I think it's undeniable that there is a lack of consistency/rules.

Actually, my hope was that we would be able to find something like a rule of thumb to give any DM an idea of how to handle item distribution. Therefore, I guess we have to seperate the whole issue into different pieces/steps:

Step 1: Setting consistent prices
First of all, prices have to be dependend among themselves, so that there is at least a tiny bit of consistency. I searched Google for about an hour and didn't find anything useful besides Sane Magic Item Prices. This is far away from being perfect, but the suggested prices are more reasonable than the ones in the DMG, because they are calculated by item power, not rarity. So, this step is already done.


Step 2: Adjusting treasure distribution
Going out from consistent prices (step 1), the DM can orientate himself on a rough gold-item-ratio. For example, he now knows that if he hands out the amount of 100G, the party will be able to buy 2x Potion of Healing or 1x Potion of Poison. The distributed amount is calcuable (what it wasn't before, because it was simply impossible to find out what 100G is actually worth).

Now there are two possibilites to set the amount of gold treasure per encounter (including gems).

a) Distribution based on decision:
The DM takes a look at the encounter and asks himself "How much do I want to reward the party for that encounter?". Because he has a gold-item-ratio, he does not need to pick a vague gold amount anymore. He instead is able to answer his question in many different ways. He might come to the conclusion that the encounter should be rewarded with an amount of gold that is worth 1x Superior Healing Potion + 1x 3rd level Spell Scroll. So, he hands out the amount of 450 + 200 = 600 GP. Of course, he could also directly hand that Superior Health Potion and a certain spell scroll to the party. But the idea behind distributing gold is, that the party is able to choose their spell scroll themselves or save gold to buy a more valuable item at a later time. Nevertheless, this should only be an example. Of course, it's absolutely imaginable that he does it either way. So, the advantage is that both ways (distributing consumables directly or gold) are legitimate whereas in the default system of the DMG gold is something abstract, because there is no gold-item-ratio.

b) Distribution based on encounter XP:
Like @Gansk suggested, another possibility is to base the amount of gold treasure on encounter XP. This would be especially useful when running official WotC campaigns, because any encounter is listed with XP, so the DM doesn't have to ask himself over and over again, what he wants to distribute. He simply divides the amount of XP by a fixed number. And if there is some extra loot like potions or scrolls, he substracts their value from the total amount of gold treasure. Unfortunately, this requires some math, because you would have to set the ratio between XP and gold. Is there somebody experienced and willing to do this? Furthermore, it would be perfect to have three different divisors, so the DM can easily adjust the wealth of the group: one divisor for "default loot", one for "reduced loot" and one for "increased loot".

Both variants are not perfect (which seems impossible without an economy system). But they give back a meaning/purpose to gold, what seems much better than giving away thousands of gold pieces, yet there is nothing to spend them on.

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Side note: Of course, if you decide to offer magic items others than consumables for purchase, the amount of gold treasure has to be higher as if players were only able to buy comsumables. Actually, this is very tough, because the DM needs to have a very clear idea of which items should be affordable for the group. I noticed, that most DMs do not offer "real" magic items for purchase. So, maybe this problem isn't something we have to deal with in first place.

Regards!

I think these may be of interest:

http://dmdavid.com/tag/what-is-the-...in-a-fifth-edition-dungeons-dragons-campaign/

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?437937-Magic-Item-Math-of-5e

http://oldguygaming.com/5e-encounters-per-level

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?271808-Wealth-Per-Level-Guidelines

I'll admit I've had to completely ignore the books for how to handle wealth in my 5E campaigns thus far. I keep the wealth to more nominal numbers and then create positive outlets for that wealth. Last campaign, in example, I had a character create (from the ground up) an orphanage that would train the children to farm and be self-sustaining and get them off the streets and out of crime and the like, and give them vocational skills for the adult life. That drained the entire party's coffers as he wracked up debt after debt to his friends to accomplish his goals. If I had used the books, he'd just splash a few thousand gold around from his monumental personal stash and it would've been boring and dull.