D&D 5E Deconstructing 5e: Typical Wealth by Level

Seems to me that the problem with 5e economy stuff is they tried to pull away from an accountant line item system and tried to go abstract but didn't have the gumption to go fully abstract, and ended up in this murky territory where nothing really makes sense when you look at it, but you can't look away because there isn't a way to just hand-wave it.

Imo they should just add a Wealth Level abstraction, like character levels. As you go up in wealth level you just have stuff, whatever you want to have, up to whatever your wealth level can support. You never need to track individual gold changing hands, it just gets tabulated like xp. Then some various wealth based options as your wealth levels go up, like having networks of business contacts, or a personal assistant, or a guild that works for you, etc. You could specialize in a wealth class or whatever.

Character level 3 but wealth class Noble 20 because I'm the 1st in line to the throne, need a legendary item? Yeah I can get that.
Character level 20 but wealth class hermit 3 because I'm a druid in the middle of a desert for the past 80 years, need anything besides some cactus juice or a pocketful of sand? Best keep walking friend.

They started down this road with backgrounds and quality of life guidelines and downtime activity but it needs a good one-two punch to really knock it into the full on abstraction side of things. This in between is just no good. Either my character just has what a character of their means and I don't need to micromanage anything because we're here to tell a story... or I need to track the pennies and we need to analyze local market impacts and availability within local markets and tracking supply chains and whatnot.

It'd make it super easy for DMs to manage issues by just regulating their characters wealth level to whatever is right for the story they're telling. IDK, that's my 2 cents.

Gold is integral to the D&D experience in my opinion.

Abstract wealth - like levels or treasure points - are mistakes that I think move D&D away from its roots.

CapnZapp said:

Gold is integral to the D&D experience in my opinion.

Abstract wealth - like levels or treasure points - are mistakes that I think move D&D away from its roots.

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Hey, we agree on something here.

D&D is an RPG. A role playing game. Characters play a role in a story. So do NPCs.

Let's say you're a rich NPC Shopkeep that wants to buy and sell magic items. A bunch of adventurers approach you and wish to sell some of the items they acquired on an adventure. Then you'll put them in your shop and sell them to other adventurers or rich folks. How do you settle on a price? They do not come with a prce tag. You might be able to track down what some magic items have been bought and sold for in the past, but then again, perhaps not.

The best real world equivalent would be buying and selling Art. How is art sold?

Option 1: The artist works with a gallery, sets their own prices, and the gallery takes a percentage (for showing, promotion, etc...)
Option 2: Auction.
Option 3: The artist sells directly.

The artist and gallery might work work appraisers that have an educated guess on what a buyer might pay for Art, but it is not going to be consistently accurate.

That leads to my approach to selling and buying items in 5E:

First of all, there are no 'shops' where you can buy powerful items. It just isn't a reasonable way for someone to sell them. Yes, potions, low power scrolls, and certain common/uncommon items (including a lot of homebrew items that are not aimed at adventurers per say, like a ring that casts unseen servant once per day and provides access to the mage hand cantrip - or a pair of earrings that allow a pair of people to cast the message cantrip back and forth) could be found in a store, on a shelf, because there are enough of them to establish a good idea on what a buyer might be able to pay - but more expensive items are sold n a barter system. It might be that they go to auction. It might be a negotiation between the buyer and seller directly.

How does that work? The NPC seller thinks about what they might get for the item. That would be an intelligence check (proficient for some NPCs wih skills). If it is good, the DM determines where and when another buyer woud come along at a price the DM thinks is fair for the item. If it is bad, the DM sets a price that is either too high or too low for the item for the NPC, and depending upon whether it is too high or too low, the object will either move faster or slower (perhaps after the proce goes down a bit).

Is that price actually fair? YES. But the DM pulled it out of their %$#$? YES. However, there is a seller out there that is willing to buy it at that price - the DM makes those other buyers up as they create the world.

But what if a PC is willing to pay more for it? Then the PC can negotiate for it. What if the PC is not willing to pay that price. Well, they can stll try to negotite the price down.

That negotiation consists of opposed charisma (persuasion - or possibly deception) checks. If the PC is willing to pay 30% more than the sellers other future buyer, they might lose this heck and just settle on a price higher than the price the other buyer would pay. If they win, they might negotiate the seller down a bit below that price (as the seller doesn't actually know that a buyer will come to them).

What if the PC is not willing to pay the price that the NPC has established? Well, if they win the charisma check, they might still talk the NPC down in price. If not, then no agreement will be reached.

I've been using variations on this idea for a long time. Some of the labels have changed, but the core idea has been there since the 80s.

* Prices are subjective, not absolute. DM sets what an NPC is willing to pay/accept.
* Wares are rare.
* Do a check for the seller to establish a price.
* Do an opposed check for the buyer and seller to negotiate prices.

CapnZapp said:

Gold is integral to the D&D experience in my opinion.

Abstract wealth - like levels or treasure points - are mistakes that I think move D&D away from its roots.

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I actually agree too, but if they're going to add as much abstraction as they already have, they should finish the job. 5e feels like splitting the lane on a two way street. Right now you get abstraction baked in but still stuck with specifics that are free-floating, without context, and aren't tied to anything that makes the slightest bit of sense.

I guess that's just my general 5e criticism, that it uses a lot of fuzzy-abstract logic that fails to make sense if you ever stop to think about what's happening. It isn't just in the economy side of things, it is pervasive with this edition.

Random example: Adamantine armor makes crit hits not crit you. Seems, fine.. except, does that mean that critical hits are always weapon strikes against your armor? Wait.. why would an adamantine chain shirt stop a maul hit to your face from critting you? It all breaks down if you try to look at it in anything other than weird abstraction.

I guess it is fine in some areas but the economic side is where it is absolutely the worst. It really feels like someone was sleeping on the job instead of writing a functional magic item system and are now trying to political talk us into believing they're even giving us a system. I just think that if we are stuck being in abstraction-land, we should have a proper abstraction based system so we can just ignore the ridiculous farcical issues that the current half-baked system is constantly generating.

But if I was steering the vehicle, I'd swerve us back into the realism lane, where everything has well thought out pricing and we had multiple guidelines for high/low fantasy item distribution curves as well as high/low power games within that framework. So yeah, totally agree with you.

For worlds where magic item selling is not a thing, than wealth abstraction is fine.

If magic sales is a thing...than now gold = character power, and you have to give that proper accounting.

Stalker0 said:

For worlds where magic item selling is not a thing, than wealth abstraction is fine.

If magic sales is a thing...than now gold = character power, and you have to give that proper accounting.

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That is not true. See my post above.

Just role play it out.

Figure out as a DM what the 'other' option is, use an ability check for the seller to determine how well they can anticipate that, and then use opposed charisma checks to handle how well they negotiate with each other.

It works whether you as a DM decide a +2 mace would sell for 500, 1000 or 2000 gp elsewhere. Nothing breaks.

jgsugden said:

That is not true. See my post above.

Just role play it out.

Figure out as a DM what the 'other' option is, use an ability check for the seller to determine how well they can anticipate that, and then use opposed charisma checks to handle how well they negotiate with each other.

It works whether you as a DM decide a +2 mace would sell for 500, 1000 or 2000 gp elsewhere. Nothing breaks.

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Your system still assumes a pc pays gold for magic items. If you are not accounting for how much gold a pc has, than regardless of negotiation, they can get “tons of items”.

For total abstraction one could adopt the wealth system from d20 Modern. http://spellbooksoftware.com/d20mrsd/wealth.html

I did the same calculations and I got some different numbers. This is based on the assumption that the party will only get one treasure hoard every adventuring day, and that every level takes 2 adventuring days after the first 2. I calculated the chance of getting gems along with the coins.

Not sure where that 140 gp / level at Tier 1 came from for you, and I'd be interested in comparing notes.

Starting Gold: