Greenfield
Adventurer
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.)
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.)