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

[Paxanadu]

Having a table showing "true" accumulated wealth and give that to new PCs would create lots of problems:

#1 - Some could game the system easily (particularly if GM is not too bright): party is in big city between 2 adventures, and knows the party is going to stay in the city for a while. Player tells GM they want to play something different just for a few adventures, but don't want to fully abandon their old PC. They make a new "disposable" PC with personality Flaw "Thinks giving outrageous gifts to close associates actual buys friendship." Receive tons of cash to equip it, but keep most of it available for spending. Then of course proceeds to "penalize himself" by paying for everything the party needs and giving tons of gifts to them, maybe even earning Inspiration while he's at it. Of course, also tries to gives gift to the old PC if he is somehow still around a little bit. Then, only a couple games later, kills off the PC or tells GM: "Oh well, that was a bad idea, this new guy is dull, I preferred playing my old PC." I've seen an actual GROUP of players use such a tactic, all "in" on the "deal", except the GM, to take action against a DM that gave new characters "Better than average starting wealth" but was super-stingy with loot afterwards.

#2 - It's bad to make the *default baseline* assume that all the fun and loot and treasures and adventures were in the PC's background stories instead of (or equivalently to) actual game sessions. Starting a PC at level 15 doesn't necessarily mean that that PC lived a ton of high-danger high-pay adventures already. For example, let's imagine a short campaign going from levels 15 to 20. Forcing players to have character concepts that are all very experienced veteran adventurers can be is pretty limiting. What if a player is wanting to play a very young super-prodigy wizard, that had the benefit of the personal teachings of the god of magic himself ? That young guy is powerful, but still has zero adventuring experience, so why should he *obligatorily* has to start off as rich as a mere mortal that raised his levels to 15 the hard way? What if the DM's campaign concept is "all PCs are the sons and daughters of actual gods, they start off quite badass already." That doesn't make them experienced or rich or full of magical items already.

#3 - There is a HUGE difference in "true" value to a player between FINDING a "semi-random" magical item, put there by the DM, and starting right off the bat with a magical item that, oh so conveniently, more often than not will be exactly (or nearly exactly) what the player wants and does the perfect combo with his PC'S capabilities. PCs that have been played since level 1 are often "organically grown" and have several character sheet choices that are there more for strictly story and roleplay reasons, than "perfect combo of pure power". Fully played PCs are way less "optimized" that "start-high-level-right-from-off-the-bat" PCs.

#4 - Assuming the PCs haven't actually neither SPENT nor LOST anything during their background is also a mistake. PCs spend stuff all the time, and even lose stuff all the time. I've seen a party buy a galleon once. Made a profit on it being "mercenary merchants". Then the big boat sank, with their new wealth also in it. Not in the next couple adfventures,., mind you. Such a DM would just be acting like a jerk. The event was also story-based, independent on the PCs having a boat, not a "DM wants to get rid of annoying boat, let's add a random encounter specifically to do that". So yeah afterwards they were high level, but quite poor. Everybody still had a fun time and loved taking revenge on the big baddie that sunk their boat and "left them for dead thinking the PCs drowned". Or those low-magic campaigns where the timeline isn't all cramped "from level 1 to level 20 within one in-game season", and there is still lots of traveling around and the way to travel involves buying rations and paying for every stop at every little inn along the road (instead of, you know, just teleporting right in the big bad's bedroom during his sleep). Especially if the PCs'" standards of living" are high for whatever reasons. But even at very common fare it's about 4 gp per day for the entire party. A simple 100 miles boat trip is about 100 gold for a 5-PC party (you also have to pay to come back, right?). If every adventure is 2 months away then that adds up to thousands and thousands of gold in the long run. Tons of ways to make players actually WANT to spend cash.

#5 - It's just no good to start off a campaign with the PCs already too rich. That makes the typical and very common (and simpl)e adventuring motivation of "becoming rich" to become kind of a stupid motivation for PCs.

#6 - And probably my biggest beef with it of all, and this, by a very wide margin: giving new PCs the SAME (or almost the same) amount of treasure and magical items as every other PC that has actually been played through tons of gaming sessions, that will just greatly cheapen the rest of the PCs accomplishments. How can you be proud to have accumulated all that stuff (and power) when poof, somebody else also gets it for free merely for showing up for the first time? Kinda make you thing "what was the point", no ? If the point was merely to have fun during the gaming sessions, not to ALSO have fun amassing cash and magical items, then by that VERY same logic, new PC s*also* doesn't have to have lots of cash and items, right ? Fair's fair after all.


Sure, you can always say "DM can always adjust". But then we don't need to pay for a book that presents weak mechanics and just just tells do do that, do we ? That is like a restaurant cook cooking his meal only halfway and then telling you "you can always cook it yourself your own way, you know!". the base rules should try to cover not only the default situation, but the commnon exceptions too, and in a way that makes the DM's job EASIER, not HARDER. So it's better for the baseline to be quite low. that sets the bar of player expectations. When a DM wants to give "only a little", he can. When he gives "a lot", he gives extra and players are happy. The opposite would be, when DM "gives a little", players complain they get nerfed, and when he gives "a lot", players consider that totally normal as they deserved it (despite having not done anything to actually "deserve" it.).

So basically it's simply way better to *greatly* err on the side of caution to have better chances to avoid these potential problems. For DMs, it's much easier to give than to take away.


Anyway, even the DMG p.136 treasure tables themselves are quite ridiculous. Expecting me to think that a CR 1/4 random Goblin will have the same pocket change as a CR 2 random Ogre and also the same as as CR 4 random Ettin, this is just plain stupid. DM fiat is badly needed in that section. But if all DMs were that good they wouldn't need to buy a book. The reason the book is there is not to tell the DM "you can do it like you want anyway", every DM already knows that rule. They are to give DMs precise and complete mechanics that make sense and that they don't need to work a lot on unless they want to.

 

[Paxanadu]

Compared to living expenses for downtime days starting adventurers are living hand-to-mouth in a bad way. They can barely afford to feed themselves and replace their starting equipment if stolen / destroyed. You've got to start pulling down level 5-10 treasure to really move out of the sell-sword gutter.

Marty Lund

Totally agree here. If anything, the loot tables for early levels are ridiculously low.

Let's put it into perspective:

Food & Board for 1 day for 5 PCs = 4 gp.

Cue in typical unoriginal low-level mission:
Rich lord/noble/city official/merchant of the week comes see PCs to hire them:
They need to go: RISK THEIR LIVES
In: filthy lair/dark forest/shadowy ruins/remote manor/other side of the street
In order to save BELOVED DAUGHTER/SON/BROTHER/WIFE/MAGGUFFIN(TM)
From: goblins/bandits/cultists/evil twin/whatever monster of the week
Before: they eat her/they rape her/they sacrifice her/he marries her/she is sent to another plane to be married raped sacrificed and eaten by a demon.

DM wants to give "per rules" rewards, so he rewards them... a "whopping" 300 gp reward !

Wow, that's, like, only 2 months of basic living expenses. Food and lodging only, only for the 5 PCs themselves, and with absolutely zero extras.

Also, while they are in town, they must live at the inn, paying their own food. He's so busy, ya know!

Being a sword for hire sucks big time heh ? That kind of adventure just makes me wants to kill off that selfish lord right there and there and loot his house instead.

Just when is the paladin expected to actually be able to finally buy his plate mail? Level 6 ?

IMHO early on the best loot is the very mundane stuff in the dungeons themselves that the enemies use. It's *often* worth a lot more than whatever the usual reward are. A small family of evil nobles playing cultists under their manor just out of town ? HUGE mistake at level 1: think about all the valuable loot in there. Even a simple chest is itself worth 5 gp ! A good DM always think about how "rich" the dungeon furniture itself, not just the typical rewards, should be, and how "easy" it would be for players to grab some wagon and then sell everything not nailed down.

Similarly, if a DM wants to make the armor and weapons that the orcs used in battle worth peanuts because they are "old decrepit and filthy and full of holes and rust and bumps and have orc butt smell and orc armpit grubs and other vermins", then he should make these orcs LOOK super poor right at the onset of battle AND give them actual combat penalties. In a though sellsword world, people don't care as much about how their equipment looks, they care about functionality. If it works without penalty, then it works and is worth almost the same value. Washing off an armor of vermin and smell isn't rocket science, and repairing holes is minor repairs that the PCs already do on their own equipment or that is relatively cheap to make in town, to get back a good chunk of value. So if the items are" super" bad then give them something bad in battle. Longswords that deal only 1d6 instead of 1d8 and break on a natural 1 OR if a PC scores a crit on the monster. Armor that might fall off, restraining the monster. Just add a couple more monsters to compensate for the power level. After all, the DM is gimping the loot. A lot.

Trying to make sense of D&D 5e's economy is like saying you love having headaches of something. I suggest just not trying and go with the flow and not try to gimp player loot.

Don't make the mistake of thinking "Total_Loot = Reward + Treasure", always assume the formula is instead: "Total_Loot = Reward + Treasure + Everything Not Nailed Down", and then design the adventure accordingly and LET players get what they want.

In any case, trying to follow the actual DMG treasure tables too closely just suck egg big time lol. I consider that section rushed/unfinished.

Also, for DMs that worry a lot about PCs having too much cash on their hand, VERY good rewards are getting Extended Hospitality aka that famous "room and food" thing, which early on, can represent a huge expense for the PCs. Having a friendly lord hosting them for free and with a real smile for months on end, offering them the full services of his domain from repairing their armors at the smithy, consulting an old sage for free, giving them their choice of jobs for extra offtime gold such as say a ranger having free access to a lord's hunting grounds, etc., then giving them free rations and fresh mounts right before they leave, is a priceless way to "reward" PCs and make them become attached to the game world. It's way better to have the lord give a mere 100 gp reward but then flood them with mundane services freebies and treated like royalty, than giving them a whopping 1000 gp filled chest then throw them out like filthy mercenaries and the DM then expect them to pay for EVERYTHING, every little stupid detail. It's also much less micromanaging and less game session time wasted on mundane stuff. A lord giving the PCs a mule "packed with supplies" then, when the adventure calls for it, a monster pops out and grabs the mule, even then, the players can be happy that it's the mule that went down the ravine with the monster, instead of one of them. "Easy come, easy go", is a much better attitude, it encourages PCs to not care too much about gold and quickly spend whatever they have on frivolities, for pure fun, than a "we must keep a super tight grip on every little tiny bit of riches we make and strongly deal for everything as if the entire world is always against us", which merely fosters a DM-is-against-players attitude. Give them smaller gold rewards but shower them with services and friendly NPCs. ESPECIALLY when they are in trouble. When one of those NPCs later come see them for actual monetary help, they'll be much more willing to part with their cash.

Try to make it like this instead:
By level 3 or 4, every PC chooses his "class path" and should be be considered equipped with all of the mundane stuff they need.
ALL of it. for example, the fighter should have his plate mail. Party should have EVERY possible mundane thing they could need.
Several one-shot items such as Potions, couple scrolls. These items should be WAY more commonly found than permanent ones.
And still enough cash to left over to pay for a couple raise dead.

 

[CapnZapp]

Totally agree here. If anything, the loot tables for early levels are ridiculously low.

Let's put it into perspective:

<snip>

DM wants to give "per rules" rewards, so he rewards them... a "whopping" 300 gp reward !

Wow, that's, like, only 2 months of basic living expenses. Food and lodging only, only for the 5 PCs themselves, and with absolutely zero extras.

Yeah, let's put this into perspective.

There are millions of people here on earth that would do ANYTHING for 2 months of luxurious stay at a tavern: safety, food, sleep and more.

And that's before we take the levelling fact into account - that if you survive at little as two or three harrowing dungeons, you will somehow evolve into a superman that can resist bullets and throw balls of fire. Most poor desperate people would STILL sign up, even if that never happened.

Frankly, your (and mine) circumstances are more comparable to what a nobleman would experience in the fantasy world. And those people rightly conclude adventure is not for them.

 

[CydKnight]

Nope, this does not include magic items. So your characters could have more money by selling their items -- if you allow them to do so.

The characters in my current campaign have a wagon pulled by a mule and take anything that may be of even token value to attempt to sell or trade them. Depending on your the campaign and how your character's play it out, I could see the values in the OPs table doubling at least at some levels.

Thanks, for this table by the way.

 

[CapnZapp]

Page 133 of the *DMG* tells us how many treasure hoards a party is expected to find over the course of a typical campaign. If we make a few assumptions, we can use this information to estimate how much wealth a character has accumulated at each level of his career.

My assumptions going into producing this table are:
* Treasure is split evenly among four members of the party.
* The hoards are evenly distributed throughout their appropriate level ranges.
* The players use individual monster treasure as “petty cash,” spending it on lifestyle expenses, carousing, replenishing supplies, bribing officials, hiring retainers, etc.
* The party always finds the average total value of all coins, gems, and art objects in each hoard.

Given these assumptions, a character who has just hit level 5 should have recovered about 560 gp from the Challenge 0-4 hoards. By level eleven, he will have recovered an additional 23,500 gp from the Challenge 5-10 hoards. He will have found an additional 110,000 gp by level 17. And he will have secured another 684,000 gp by retirement, presumably at level 20. Quite the nest egg!

We can break this down into each level as follows:

Level| Typical hoard treasure acquired (gp)
1|0
2|140
3|280
4|420
5|560
6|4500
7|8400
8|12,300
9|16,200
10|20,100
11|24,100
12|42,400
13|60,700
14|79,000
15|97,300
16|116,000
17|134,000
18|362,000
19|590,000
20|818,000

Eyeballing it it looks like you got the same results as Blog of Holding did:
http://blogofholding.com/?p=6760

There the intention was to compare to XP awards.

The reason I say you seem to be in the same ballpark is because Blog tells us to skip 4th tier treasures entirely in favor of double-strength tier III hoards, roughly halving the total at level 20.

And your 818,000 gp is roughly the same as the PHB's 355,000 XP, once halved.

 

[CapnZapp]

Page 133 of the *DMG* tells us how many treasure hoards a party is expected to find over the course of a typical campaign. If we make a few assumptions, we can use this information to estimate how much wealth a character has accumulated at each level of his career.

My assumptions going into producing this table are:
* Treasure is split evenly among four members of the party.
* The hoards are evenly distributed throughout their appropriate level ranges.
* The players use individual monster treasure as “petty cash,” spending it on lifestyle expenses, carousing, replenishing supplies, bribing officials, hiring retainers, etc.
* The party always finds the average total value of all coins, gems, and art objects in each hoard.

Given these assumptions, a character who has just hit level 5 should have recovered about 560 gp from the Challenge 0-4 hoards. By level eleven, he will have recovered an additional 23,500 gp from the Challenge 5-10 hoards. He will have found an additional 110,000 gp by level 17. And he will have secured another 684,000 gp by retirement, presumably at level 20. Quite the nest egg!

We can break this down into each level as follows:

Level| Typical hoard treasure acquired (gp)
1|0
2|140
3|280
4|420
5|560
6|4500
7|8400
8|12,300
9|16,200
10|20,100
11|24,100
12|42,400
13|60,700
14|79,000
15|97,300
16|116,000
17|134,000
18|362,000
19|590,000
20|818,000

Returning to this rather influential post a few years later to make one observation and one error notification.

My observation is that it is easy to miss that treasure hoards are per party, not per adventurer. As the post says, it assumes a four-way split. If your party consists of five people, if the DM does not compensate, the figures will be higher than what you will see at your table.

My error notification is triggered by the large jump at each tier. This tells me [MENTION=35915]tankschmidt[/MENTION] has used the average level of the party to calculate which tier of hoards to use, not the challenge rating of the monster said party just defeated. This is incorrect.

Since a level 4 party can and will loot the hoards of CR 5 creatures, they will gain tier II hoards already while still in tier I themselves. This makes the jump between tiers MUCH less abrupt, even if I suspect it won't actually change the end numbers much. By this I suspect a more accurate graph would feature higher data points at levels 4 and 5 and maybe 6 (and most significantly would not have a huge jump between levels 5 and 6) but by the time the party reach the end of each tier this effect would have been reduced to background noise.

If that - the DMG does specify how many hoards of each tier is to be expected, and if that is taken into account, the level 20 sum should not change at all. The reason this matters is because I can't graph the table since each tier jump is not representative of what the designers intended.

 

[CapnZapp]

Just gonna put this here

What we see here is that, for each tier, average hoard value is multiplied by 10. At first glance, this seems like a problem. This is not granular at all, and treasure values don’t change for 6 levels at a time?? A closer look reveals that it might work quite well. The treasure quantity is tied to the monster’s level, not the PC’s level. If PCs take on monsters of varying but surmountable difficulties, they will naturally fight steadily increasing numbers of higher-tier monsters as they level up. For instance, if you imagine a group who fights monsters of their level +1d6-2, these big steps turn naturally into a nice curve. Not only it is a smooth average, it’s one with extremely varied rewards. That means that there’s lots of the “wow! I’m rich!” moments that make slot machines so popular.

http://blogofholding.com/?p=6760

 

[Kinematics]

Just gonna put this here


http://blogofholding.com/?p=6760

Is that your blog? A couple minor errors.

Challenge 5-10: "24% of ~5 50 gp gem" should be "24% of ~10.5 50 gp gem". Total should be 4563, not 4497.

Challenge 11-16: Percentage distribution shown in the blog is 26%/26%/22%/23%, but it should be 26%/25%/23%/23%. The third category is easy to miscount because of a misprint in the book, which assigned rolls 11-12 to it, when it should have been 10-12. Total should be 36385, not 36370.

 

[CapnZapp]

No, but I'm sure Mr Blog will appreciate it.

I trust you see that in order to plot a "typical" wealth per level, you need to decide how many hoards above your tier you haul in.

Of course "zero" is not strictly wrong, if atypical (probably).

More urgently, it makes for an ugly graph with jumps in the curve and who wants that ☺

 

[Kinematics]

This actually gets a bit more complicated.

OK, looking at only at the early levels to start with. The DMG suggests 7 hoards in tier 1, and 18 hoards in tier 2.

If hoard distribution is flat, that means for tier 1, you get 1 hoard at level 1, and 2 hoards at each of levels 2-4. If hoard gathering rates increase, it would mean 1, 1, 2, 3 hoards for levels 1-4.

You then need to look at what that means in terms of encounters. Assuming a large number of easy and medium encounters, with rare hard or deadly encounters, it's clear that the hoards come from the hard to deadly encounters based on how much XP is received compared to the total amount of XP needed to progress to the next level.

Aside: You need to use the difference between levels, not the XP needed to reach a given level; an easy mistake to make when trying to judge these progressions. There's also a spike in XP needed for 10 to 11, compared to the next few levels until you pass level 14.


So, looking at just the number of hard or deadly encounters to advance a level or tier:

Levels 1 and 2 require 4 hard encounters, or 3 deadly encounters, to gain a level.

Levels 3 through 10 require 10 hard encounters, or 7 deadly encounters, to gain a level.

Levels 11 through 19 require 7 hard encounters, or 4 deadly encounters, to gain a level.

Tier 1 requires 25 hard encounters, or 18 deadly encounters, to gain a tier.

Tier 2 requires 60 hard encounters, or 42 deadly encounters, to gain a tier.

Tier 3 requires 33 hard encounters, or 25 deadly encounters, to gain a tier.

Tier 4 requires 28 hard encounters, or 16 deadly encounters, to gain a tier.


Given 'expected' hoard rates of 7 in tier 1, 18 in tier 2, 12 in tier 3, and 8 in tier 4, and assuming only hard or deadly encounters provide hoards, the percentage of hard/deadly experience per tier would be: 30%-40% for tier 1; 30%-40% for tier 2; 35%-45% for tier 3; and 30%-50% for tier 4.

So 30% to 40% of all experience coming from hard to deadly encounters seems to be a reliable measure for hoard treasure.

Now look at finding a reasonable encounter distribution that allows that percentage of experience to come from the harder end of the spectrum.

Level 1: 5 easy, 2 medium, 1 hard
Level 2: 5 easy, 2 medium, 1 hard
Level 3: (5 easy, 2 medium, 1 hard) x2 = 10 easy, 4 medium, 2 hard
Level 4: (5 easy, 2 medium, 1 hard) x2.5 = 12 easy, 5 medium, 3 hard, or = 10 easy, 5 medium, 2 hard, 1 deadly

And we have the 1, 1, 2, 3 scaling that gives us 7 hoards of loot in tier 1.

Does it hold for tier 2? All of levels 5-10 can use 3 hard encounters per level to hit 30%, and the total number of hoards is supposed to be 18 — 3 hard per level * 6 levels. So yes, that works out fine, too. (Bumping up to an occasional deadly encounter just reduces the number of easy/medium encounters for that level slightly.)

Level 5-10: (3 easy, 2 medium, 1 hard/deadly) x3

For tier 3, it's closer to 2 encounters to hit 30%, which again matches the expected 12 hoards over 6 levels.

I won't bother with the rest of the ratios.


Next, how many of these will be fights which result in rolling a higher-tier loot table?

For tier 1: CR5 mobs are 1800 XP. That means they pull 450 XP for each of 4 players. 450 XP is higher than deadly for a level 3 character, but is in the hard to deadly range for a level 4 character. Thus it's not unreasonable to expect that one encounter out of the seven that provide hoard loot to come from the tier 2 table.

For tier 2: CR11 is 7200 XP, which is 1800 XP per player. That's potentially possible in a deadly encounter from level 8, or a hard encounter at level 10. I would probably expect 1 tier 3 hoard at level 8, 2 at level 9, and 3 at level 10.

For tier 3: CR17 is 18,000 XP, which is 4500 XP per player. That's deadly encounters from level 12 up, or hard encounters from level 16. I would probably expect 1 at 14, 1 at 15, and 2 at 16.


So now we have a means of assigning expectations of hoard values per level.

Here's the overall graph:

Note: if you could get half of a +1 encounter at level 13, it would smooth out the graph to make it a nice rounded curve. Since you can't have half an encounter, 13 ends up being a little janky. But everything else looks fine.

And here's the graph for just levels 1-10:

This drastically alters the wealth expectations.

You'd come into level 5 at 1700 gp, and finish with about 5000 gp. 12000 gp by the end of level 7, and 70000 by the end of level 10.


Edit: Here's the actual numbers that I used to get the above graphs: