Wizards are supposed to be rich, right?

[The Blue Elf]

There are other ways too make money, other then selling magic.They do sometimes try dirty deeds in order to get what they want for example, I remember a friend of mine casted Charm person on an NPC forced him the NPC to give him items, later killed the NPC. He even used threats of spell casting in order too gain wealth against his enemys. I really hated his Wizard Characters that person made. There is no stoping it other then the DM trys too send another Wizard too combat his Characters.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Yeah, after the clarification, it really sounds like your DM is ignoring the RAW for wealth by level, and you're feeling the pinch. I'd start off just by calling it to his attention: "Hey, the rules say that we should have X amount of GP wealth, but we only have Y. Is there a reason you're keeping us this poor? Cuz I gotta tell you, fido quests and such are fun and all, but it's all we've been doing, and it's not bringing in the bacon like it should."

If he becomes intractable, that's when you offer to run your own game and see what the group has to say about it.

But D&D is the sim fantasy business, the business is adventuring.

The RAW isn't written to treat adventuring as a business, but rather something like winning the lottery -- you loose, you die, you win, you get rich. It's more contest than business.

How many adventures involve getting something for somebody else so they can make money? How many involve escorting caravans? Most any adventure that doesn't stick it to the PCs by expecting them to do something out of the goodness of their heart, has them working for a patron.

Yeah, but eventually (especially when cusping high level, especially in a setting like Eberron where you're truly unique individuals at that level) you stop escorting caravans through the orc tribe's lands, and start tackling the orc tribe itself. You stop needing to get something for someone else, and start doing it for yourself. If you're 14th level, in Eberron, there's precious few other characters who can do what you do, and most of them are inaccessible. Guarding a caravan is something of a waste of your rescources.

That patron is probably making much more money than the players are collecting. However, the jump from working for a patron, and becoming the guy making the money, is a hard one for DM and players alike. Most DMs would rather not have the caravan guarded by the PCs be the PCs investment and business windfall. If it were, chances of the caravan ever reaching its destination or making a decent profit would be much less, I suspect. The adversarial DM shows up much more often in trying to keep the PCs broke than actually trying to kill them off.

Business bookeeping isn't exciting for a lot of people. The intricacies of fantasy economics aren't something the game is meant to dwell upon. They're a means to an end -- a way to get the PC's back into the dungeon, facing more vile threats.

Judging from the clarification, the OP feels he *has* to do this in order to profit, because the adventures aren't paying what they should be paying. In other words, he wants the adventure, too, but is finding that the adventure isn't giving him enough incentive to stay interested. And the DM isn't giving him other options to pursue his interest (probably because the DM assumes that 500 gp for a fido quest is just fine).

 

[Chiaroscuro23]

In general, you can't solve social problems through game mechanics. And this sounds like a social problem: the DM has an idea about how things should go that doesn't match your own. I know it sounds cliche, but the way to deal with this is to talk about it. Bring it up OOC: "Hey, do you not want my character to earn extra money for some reason? It's easy for him to do so with his skills and magic and I'd like him to have extra cash."

It really is trivially easy to get cash at high levels, and that can break the game (and the imaginary economy). I think it's alright for a GM to say that you can't use some rule exploit to get rich quick because the game's balanced around a certain amount of cash and he wants you to be in line with the wealth-by-level guidelines. In my eyes, that attitude's no worse than disallowing the spiked chain or Pun-Pun even if they're kosher under the RAW. It's no worse that not allowing some behavior to happen in game even if it's in character (the traditional examples are disgusting stuff like rape and torture, which are in character for some PCs, but I'm still not going to put up with 'em in my games.) The problem is in expressing it.

So my advice is to talk about it like people. Not confrontationally, not in character, and not in terms of what anyone's rights are. But in terms of why he's doing what he's doing, why you're doing what you're doing, and what you both want from the game.

 

[Li Shenron]

Though I would put this in the same category as all other decisions that a DM makes about player ideas - and in those cases a DM is never under any obligation to make things work. The only difference here is that the DM has fewer rules to back up his decision.

Let's check how many posters have written that the DM in question is BAD because it's not letting the player run a successful business

 

[taliesin15]

Are wizards supposed to be rich? This seems a spurious assumption to me. Many of the wizards in literature seem pretty humble--the Gray Mouser's hedge-wizard had very modest means (and was probably a mid-level mage in game terms). Gandalf, if he had wealth, certainly didn't flaunt it. None of the versions of Merlin seemed to sport rich trappings, aside from a few bits of jewelry. Math, the Welsh wizard, also seemed rather modest. It does well for a Wizard sometimes not to draw too much attention to himself, and same for Witches, which is the term I generically use for female Wizards, though the ones in Wizard of Oz certainly sport a bit of bling.