Why average wealth by level is a good thing.

[Ainamacar]

(Long post ahead. The TL;DR version is that I think we should decouple character power from item power and use their total to determine "level." Doing this right would have some pretty big effects on a system, some of which I discuss below.)

I'd go even further: Many special abilities cannot be balanced. Some because they are only powerful when used correctly so their power varies with the user. Some because they are only powerful in certain situations or against certain enemies.

In fact, I think a perfectly balanced game would only have +X items that you automagically get as you level up. That would be boring.

The "automagic" part is critical for making it possible to balance, because if the item is missing then all the balance assumptions go out the window. (A game where a player can have a mathematically assumed weapon or the parallel defensive item, but not both, would probably turn out very strangely even if everything were a +X item). However, giving items an automagic bonus is also mechanically indistinguishable from just giving that bonus to the character in the first place. If we can't tell our magic items from ourselves, aren't we missing the point?

In general I think the notion of WbL is a net improvement over the case where there is no guidance at all. But although it has some weaknesses noted in other posts (e.g. temptation to entitlement), in my opinion its largest weakness is that, at the level of the game system it assumes wealth should be coupled in any way to inherent character power. Besides creating some unfortunate obstacles for running a variety of games (since there is a "right" amount of treasure regardless of genre, setting, DM time constraints, etc.) this encourages players to think of treasure as part of character advancement, rather than as part of the world from which it came.

In my opinion the best course of action is to treat "level" as made up of the character and their equipment separately. There are various ways one might try this, but in the end it is probably a variation on assigning an effective increase in character level due to the equipment present. Systems like D&D where lots of things tend to change with level would probably need to flatten out a bit, because there is such a difference between a 1st level creature with a vorpal sword and a 10th level one with a normal sword that no system of separating character level and item level could do it justice. In fact, what makes the +X items more-or-less easy to balance in 3e and 4e is that they are assumed. Remove the assumption of their presence and the strong effect on d20 rolls, and they become quite difficult to balance. So, in the sort of system I'm proposing, ditching the +X items in favor of those with special effects may be the better move both for balance and for flavor.

Other benefits I can imagine:

• The party can more easily support characters at a variety of inherent levels (a poor but diligent wizard traveling with some spoiled rich kid, replacing dead PCs)
• Across campaigns, the kind of challenges you can handle isn't so strongly correlated to character level, except by choice. Monster design and ease of changing them has a larger impact here, of course.
• Giving monsters magic items could be handled more easily than in 3.5 or 4e. Sometimes I don't want to make the monster better, I just want to give it stuff it can use. (In 3.5 I sometimes had players roll random treasure before an adventure. If good stuff came up, the monsters used it instead of leaving it in a chest.)
• If there isn't a schedule for finding magic items, there is less chance of entitlement issues. And even for players that don't have the entitlement issues as such, knowing magic items are coming can kill some of the anticipation.
• The DM can feel a lot more free to put magic items where they should fit in the world.
• Or the DM can roll treasure randomly with less trepidation -- assuming this hypothetical system is careful not to put its equivalents of artifacts (which could be a +5 sword) on the tables.​
• If the party loses all its equipment in a fire, the game goes on without needing lots of rejiggering.

In 3.5 I eventually got rid of all the stat enhancing magic items and went to an inherent system, and was much happier for it. (That this was around the time the Magic Item Compendium came out, which made it easier).

More recently, I've been designing and playing a homebrew system (using character points instead of levels) that treats magic items along the lines I've described above. Unfortunately, as we're currently playtesting in a very low-magic setting, the effect of magic items on our character's power is basically ignorable. (If it were D&D we'd be about 15th level, with about 1 magic item per character). Nevertheless, decoupling inherent power from magic equipment power is something I want to give a lot more attention to in the future. I don't expect it to be easy, regardless of the game, but I do expect it to be worth it.

 

[Dausuul]

(Long post ahead. The TL;DR version is that I think we should decouple character power from item power and use their total to determine "level." Doing this right would have some pretty big effects on a system, some of which I discuss below.)

I like this idea. I think it could be done in 3E, though it'd be tricky; I can pretty well see already how it could be done in 4E. (A rough estimate suggests that a +2 sword would be worth approximately +1 level in 4E, though I'd have to crunch the numbers to be sure.)

...In fact, I really like this idea. I think this is the right way to do magic items. We get the best of both worlds: The ability to adjust the "wealth level" of our campaigns to suit our own tastes, and the ability to know how game balance will be affected.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

Trailblazer's analysis of 3e's "Spine" showed that the "Big Six" is really not that important to a character keeping up with monsters' difficulty. Excluding the Big Six completely results in the PCs still being acceptably effective by most measures.

A big area of concern though is a PC's poor saves against catastrophic effects. Bringing up PCs poor saves to tolerable levels with Big Six items (especially resistance items) also results in making PCs good saves unacceptably great, virtually only-fail-on-20.

If you are going to go the low magic route, you should strongly consider an action point system that allows boosts to saves and/or action points to reroll a failed save for those save-or-die saves targeting a PCs poor save.

 

[FireLance]

I found wealth by level to create odd problems when characters died. If replacements were even close to the level of the dead character and entered with wealth, the next effect was to create way too much wealth in the game.

Conversely, one Mage's Disjunction was very hard to recover from (as wealth tended to be split evenly).

Arguably, the latter is not actually a problem with the wealth by level guidelines. You would face the same problem any time you destroyed the characters' equipment. What wealth by level would do is to give you an indication that the party might not be up to taking on equal-level challenges and that the DM might want to adjust the challenge level accordingly. Of course, an experienced DM would do that automatically, without the need for wealth by level guidelines, but an inexperienced DM might find the advice useful.

The former is a little trickier. The wealth by level guidelines do contribute to the problem in that it is assumed that a new high-level character would be appropriately equipped. This addresses certain issues, e.g. the new character can function at the expected level of effectiveness without requiring him to be someone that can make use of all the old character's equipment. The issue then becomes one of how to dispose of the old character's equipment. I recall advice in an old DMG (possibly the 1E DMG, so it isn't a new issue, either) that the equipment could be claimed by the old character's heirs. In any case, I suggest that the DM be upfront about it, and he can even use the wealth by level guidelines to argue that he is not taking the old character's equipment away from the party arbitrarily or on a whim.

 

[Hussar]

I found wealth by level to create odd problems when characters died. If replacements were even close to the level of the dead character and entered with wealth, the next effect was to create way too much wealth in the game.

Conversely, one Mage's Disjunction was very hard to recover from (as wealth tended to be split evenly).

I never did find a sweet spot for this mechanic. Right now I am DMing a Pathfinder adventure path and that has worked out okay but another character death (at these levels) would be an issue.

Yeah, I had that problem with character death as well. When I ran the World's Largest Dungeon, we had very, very frequent character death and replacement, which meant that you wound up with boatloads of extra items kicking around and "bury the guy with his loot" just never really floated all that well.

Solved the problem in that specific situation by having new characters morph into being from the corpse of the old character. Sort of a Doctor Who rebirth sequence (fueled by the fact that nothing can escape the Dungeon, so, there's all these spirits floating around - when someone dies, something else picks up the corpse and takes it for a drive - morphic resonance (thank you Terry Pratchett) changes appearance and equipment to suit).

It worked in that setting, but, I'm not sure how I'd deal with it in other, less wahoo settings.

 

[Ainamacar]

I like this idea. I think it could be done in 3E, though it'd be tricky; I can pretty well see already how it could be done in 4E. (A rough estimate suggests that a +2 sword would be worth approximately +1 level in 4E, though I'd have to crunch the numbers to be sure.)

...In fact, I really like this idea. I think this is the right way to do magic items. We get the best of both worlds: The ability to adjust the "wealth level" of our campaigns to suit our own tastes, and the ability to know how game balance will be affected.

Glad to see it got your neurons firing! In 4e the fact that items already have levels should help a lot. Big 3 items clearly have the strongest impact. For argument's sake let's say they are weighted equally. Other items should only count if they are actually worn or otherwise consistently useful. Consumables might need special consideration, so let's ignore them for now. I only played 4e for about a year, and never broke out of heroic tier, so bear with me.


With all the various math fixes (i.e. expertise feats) my understanding is that character attacks and defenses now go up about 1/character level, roughly matching what is happening with monsters. Without the big 3 items, these values are about 75% of their usual values for an otherwise fully equipped character of that level. As a rough guess, let's say that a naked character is 2/3 as strong as a character of their same level with a standard WbL load-out. So although naked 30th level characters have attack bonuses in the neighborhood of their 24th level counterparts, without any magic items they fall behind the curve a bit more, even considering the additional class powers. (This may be a poor assumption.) In the case at hand this would indicate magic items make up about 10 levels worth of power. The simplest estimate of the value of the big 3 is 6 levels, which would suggest valuing each big-3 item as level item/15 in the general case.

This leaves 4 levels for all other items. The character may very well have many items, but for simplicity's sake assume that their best 4 remaining items (that are not secondary big 3 items, consumables, etc.) make up the bulk of this additional power. So then 4 level 30 items divided by 30 is 4, which suggests valuing such items as level/30 in the general case. Although the average level of these 4 items probably lags behind the character's level, it also doesn't include the potentially many lower level items they have. Counting only the best 4 items will hopefully tend to select items worn in the remaining body slots, or other items that the player finds consistently useful. Furthermore, at low levels or in low-magic settings, dividing by much more than 30 means other magic items would almost never contribute to effective character level.

To summarize this crude system:
Naked character level = 2/3*CL
Level increase due to big-3 items = item level/15
Level increase due to other items = item level/30 (best 4 items only)

Add these up, including fractions, and round at the end. If all 7 items counted above are of the character's level this method gives a naked character level plus magic item level equal to the character's level.

So, let's see here. Consider a level 10 character in a lower magic setting with the following items:
Magic weapon +2 (level 6)
Black Iron +1 armor (level 4)
Bracers of Mighty Striking (level 2)
Horned Helm (level 6)
Belt of Vigor (level 2)

The rules above would calculate its effective character level as 7.66. For those with better 4e experience than I, does that seem reasonable? Better yet, I'd be curious to see what it computes for PCs people are actually playing by the standard rules (does it work when using the usual WbL guidelines?) as well as in low-magic settings (does it give effective levels around the encounter levels that seem to be working for that campaign?)

 

[Lanefan]

Wealth by level is a tool. Like any tool, some find it useful, some don't need it, and some will misuse it.

Absolutely. It's a tool.

However, it's a tool that should be kept locked away in the DM's toolbox away from the prying eyes of players; to be used by the DM if-when desired in whatever way she sees fit.

That said, in a long campaign any individual character is going to see wealth come and go relative to the party average - sometimes one character will be stinking rich while another is dirt poor thanks to a fireball-driven meltdown. Most of the time these things tend to even out over time.

And maybe I'm in the minority, but I don't mind straight +x items as long as they're not the only things we ever see.

Lan-"just give me all the treasury and the problem's solved"-efan

 

[FireLance]

However, it's a tool that should be kept locked away in the DM's toolbox away from the prying eyes of players; to be used by the DM if-when desired in whatever way she sees fit.

It really depends on the gaming group dynamic. In our group, for example, it's kind of pointless to make any kind of distinction between DMs, who are privy to the arcane secrets of how the game works, and regular players, who aren't, simply because we encourage pretty much everyone to try his hand at DMing the game at least once.

 

[Hassassin]

(Long post ahead. The TL;DR version is that I think we should decouple character power from item power and use their total to determine "level." Doing this right would have some pretty big effects on a system, some of which I discuss below.)

Excellent post, but I wonder if we could come up with a simpler rule than in your follow up.

Ideally simply "every 3 levels of wealth difference adjusts ECL by 1". (For accurate numbers of 3 and 1 instead of my made up ones.) That way I could look at a 5th level character, see his wealth is close to that of an 8th level one in the tables and consider him a 6th level one in total.

Note, this is 3.5, since that's what I'm familiar with.

 

[Starfox]

What Wealth by Level does is turn gold into just another form of xp. You now have two gauges of character efficiency - xp and net value. A character can have a lot of xp and under-perform because of low item budget, and the reverse is also true. But the problem is not really with wealth per level - that was an attempt to save the system introduced from the very start where a character IS his magic items.

My 1E experience of fighters is that they were very much differentiated rules-wise by the magic items they had. Things like Gauntlets of Ogre Power had an extreme effect on your character, and once everyone had such things very little of the characters attributes mattered any longer. The main difference between two characters was that one wielded a Flaming Sword and the other a Nine Lives Stealer.

While magic items of this kind gives a fantastic air to the game, I think it is self-defeating in the end. The big six of 3.5 and item slots of 4E are symptoms of this - these are not cool bling that lets you shine, they are necessary gear to avoid sucking. And when magic items are used not to suck, they are no longer fun. Another bad thing about this is that PCs are no longer rich or poor - they always lock up 90% of their funds in their gear, giving them a comfortable but not extravagant lifestyle. Wealth has simply disappeared as something to differentiate characters with.

In my current games, I use a point-bye system where you are free to pick items or powers to do something - items have less prerequisites but can be lost or stolen. This has led to players keeping few items, while the few items they do have are things that let them step outside their normal role (like the cat shapeshifter with a collar that has group telepathy, quite outside her normal sneaker skill set).