How is starting wealth for 2+ lvl characters handled in your campaign.

[just__al]

Assuming, of course, that having characters start higher than first level is allowed...

I have always gone with the average character wealth table in the DMG and allowed them to spend up to 40% of the total on one item and no more that 20% on any other items.

I've been trying to figure out if I should allow wizards to have extra spells in their spell books and how to handle it.

I'm starting a 3rd level campaign and allowed the wizard to have 6 spell levels (no higher than 2nd level spells) in the spell book at the cost of putting those spells in there. After that, they'd have to pay for the scrolls and the cost of scribing them in the book...

 

[Crothian]

I give them what I feel they should have. I don't let them "buy" items, I work with the player to see what items the character would perfer and then find something that works but is interesting.

 

[Tilla the Hun (work)]

heh - my approach is overly simplistic, but it usually works.


I look up their level in then DMG's table regarding starting characters total wealth. I give the player that total in gold, hand 'em all my books and tell 'em to go on a shopping spree. After the first try with this, I implemented the followup rule: You can't spend more 1/3 of your total on a single item.

That rule, combined with the heavy need of gold in my games, balances things out nicely. I've long thought that GOLD was the best leveling device, far away and beyond XP. In fact, I've been debating another house rule - no XP costs, just translate the XP cost into gold by XP*10 formula.

Then again, I also tend to ignore the treasure tables and award 'reasonable' gold to the party when appropriate. (Why would bandit goblins living off the land be carrying 50gp again? Track 'em down to their camp and find it. Mercs wear their wages, so you'll find jewels, gold bracelets, etc., but not a whole lot of coinage - just as examples)

My campaigns often devolve into minor subplots of players trying to find enough gold to get the material to make the item they need to sell for enough gold to get the material to make the BIG item they need to accomplish their goal - once, this took about 12 gaming sessions before they could create a 'sword of truth'... I had one stuck in the loot in a nearby kobold camp, but they wanted nothing to do with kobolds At least they had fun with fencing stolen goods, diverting the paladins attentions, and conning most of the thieves in town

 

[haiiro]

If it's at the start of the campaign, I usually let them buy whatever they like, and I don't mind the power boost this gives them -- it's the last time they can count on getting exactly the magic items that they want.

If someone joins the game later, I work with them to figure out how much of their wealth they can spend and on what, but for the most part I let them buy what they please.

If the starting level is high enough, I set a limit on how much any item they buy can cost -- to prevent someone from having, say, one +4 sword and a loincloth (and nothing else).

 

[JoeBlank]

Here is an odd variation that some might actually like. I play and co-DM in a game that has been running since 3.0 came out, and my co-DMs are very old school. We rotate DM duties, so we have to agree on this sort of thing. No one was in favor of the "shopping spree" method so we have used two methods:

1. Players roll for random magic items. When you get an item you can "sell" it back for half list price and put the money back in your starting total. Keep rolling until you run out of money, or stop when you want to save some money for buying mundane items. Some of the players liked this idea because it duplicates the randomness of finding magic items during actual play, and keeping some of them but selling the others. Hoewever, the consensus was that any starting magic was just unfair, so now we have resorted to . . .

2. Average starting gold for a 1st level character multiplied by actual starting level, and you can only purchase items from the PHB. This is the most strict method I have heard of being used, but it actually works for us. Of course, the new player with a 5th level Paladin is not thrilled that he has about 750 gp to spend, but he will catch up quickly.

This works for us because the campaign is fairly low magic, or rather rare magic.

 

[just__al]

just looking for things that go BUMP in the night

 

[Will]

I handle wealth very differently in my campaign. People have the wealth appropriate to their level, period. The rest is hand-waved offscreen.

So new people simply get the suggested wealth for their level.

 

[Will]

dupe

 

[S'mon]

I give them NPC-wealth-by-level (after the first few levels where NPC is higher than PC!) and a free hand buying what they want.

 

[Felix]

Heh, if Cyro is reading this my character is going to get whalloped next session...

Chargen. Here's what happens. DM says he wants to have a side campaign for those times when not every player can show up for the main campaign. So we start rolling stats. And he says "ok, you guys are going to have more stuff than you're going to know what to do with, let me see..."

At this point, I'm happy because in the main campaign we only recently came into a windfall of coinage (and that was due to a slight bit of Evil on my part) and I am not really interested in playing another campaign where we start in the poorhouse again.

"Ok, you get a +2 armor, a +2 weapon, 8k of gold to spend on magic, or to augment the weapon or armor, and 1k to spend on mundane items."

That works out to around 21k. And we're 9th level. Average wealth set at 36k or so. And apparently we have more wealth than we know what to do with. This, or something very near to it, happens every time we roll characters with this DM.