As I mentioned, 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. 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.
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 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.
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 suggestion 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 only 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.
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!
