D&D 5E I gave my players too much gold

[FormerlyHemlock]

So, my question is, how would you deal with early-game inflation? Would you just raise the prices on everything? Would you find some way to bleed the characters of a few thousand gp and then get things back to normal? Would you just tell the players that they wake up in the tavern and, darn, all your gold is gone!

I wouldn't do any of these things. They have a small hoard of treasure, but per the DMG tables, treasure ramps up exponentially over time anyway as you kill bigger monsters (assuming those bigger monsters with big treasure hoards actually exist in your campaign, but that's on the DM to arrange). So they may be four levels ahead of the curve, but all that means is that for the present, money won't be the bottleneck on any of their ambitions. If they want to hunt down an NPC wizard and offer him oodles of cash to copy his spellbook, lack of cash won't stop them (but lack of knowledge/access could). If they want to hire Elmo as a hireling for 100 gp, they can. If they want to buy siege engines, they can. If they want six doses of purple worm venom for emergencies, they can have it, although it will drain them dry.

D&D isn't supposed to be a treadmill. As you increase in capabilities, you can take on greater challenges. Wealth is a capability. Give them a challenge and let them use their wealth as part of their strategy for meeting it. Or not.

After all, what's the fun in being rich if you never get to throw money at a problem? Or daggers. Daggers thrown by dozens of soldiers, paid with money.

 

[TarionzCousin]

Either way, be sure they get value for their money. The goal is to turn money into story material, not to cheat the players.

Exactly.

Give them the option to buy some cool interesting things that are more plot hooks than anything else. A ship. A tower. A tamed purple worm with harness and saddles. A dirigible. A bar. A guildhall. A headquarters. All stuff that you can turn into a side adventure and which they will have fun with but ultimately it won't impact game balance.

Like Mistwell says: give them an opportunity to spend their gold on something fun. Don't steal the money from them; that won't be fun for them and they will whine and complain until you regret having done it.

 

[TarionzCousin]

Perhaps they want to spend it on a pony made of diamonds.

Yes! And if you feed it platinum bars, it pukes or poops out other magic items!

 

[Tony Vargas]

I'm totally on board with them buying magic items. I'm setting the list at the shops, but this is a high magic setting, and, as long as it doesn't break the game, I'm ok with most items outlined in the DMG showing up at some point or another.

5e's design philosophy is that magic items do make the character with them 'just better,' which, depending on how you look at it, can mean they're 'meant to break the game.'

OTOH, such items are a potential tool for the DM to set tone, open up new areas for adventuring, and/or empower lagging PCs. Whether you're placing them in a hoard, or in a high-magic-world shop, you control the kinds of items the PCs may acquire.

Letting PCs have what they want out of the book, would be passing on that opportunity, and maybe letting item-based power builds creep in, so I'm glad you've thought about it enough to have already excluded some items.

At the moment, I'm using random treasure tables to determine a few uncommon items available for purchase at each store. That is faster and easier for me, and it also means that there's a little bit of "wonder what they'll have this week?" on both my part and the part of the PCs.

Making up items, or digging up prior-ed resources for inspiration can be a good way to get a little senseofwonder going. Particularly cool for this are less conventionally adventuring items, something less combat oriented and less generic than a +X sword or Scroll of X Spells. Transportation and safe-environment items open up new locations to adventure, take a Flying Carpet to a Cloud Giant's castle, get a ship to cross the ocean, or water-breathing gear to go under it, or frost protection to explore the arctic, or fire resistance to delve into a volcanic area, wander the multiverse with a Cubic Gate, etc. You could have magic items that are symbols of status that also help players in the interaction tier, or convenience items to make adventuring life less of a chore (instant campsites, food/water producing items, feather token pavilions, etc). In a high-magic world, magic items can afford to be made for much less serious purposes than life-and-death battle.

The prices outlined in the DMG are super low, though. Uncommon items are set at 101-500 gp. The party could buy out all the shop's uncommon items and still have enough gold left over to buy a tavern. Of course, I can raise the prices (which I'm doing), but then we get into the whole problem of having to recalibrate an entire economy in my spare time, which goes a little beyond my time and interests.

Prices can swing a lot on the very high or specialty end without much impacting the broader economy (except, perhaps, for rich folks suddenly feeling more/less rich because their collection of magic swords is theoretically more valueable while successful adventurers are bidding them up, or less valuable because someone's dumping extras on the market).

 

[Zaran]

The prices outlined in the DMG are super low, though. Uncommon items are set at 101-500 gp. The party could buy out all the shop's uncommon items and still have enough gold left over to buy a tavern. Of course, I can raise the prices (which I'm doing), but then we get into the whole problem of having to recalibrate an entire economy in my spare time, which goes a little beyond my time and interests. Wherever possible, I'd rather be able to use prices more less as presented in the PHB and DMG, maybe with slight fluctuations for flavor reasons alone. (There's only one inn in this town and it's run by a greedy bastard, so prices are all double.)

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Ok I will give you that the magic items are pretty cheap in the DMG . But it's ok to overcharge for them. Also, there are some more rare items that while aren't ultra powerful in combat could be really cool to have. Like figurines of power or Bags of Holding. I definitely wouldn't just sell them a +1 longsword for 500 gold. Give every weapon something extra and call it a Rare. Maybe that +1 longsword does extra damage to dragons but every dragon within 3 miles can hear it's song. Maybe the seller doesn't even know what extra magic the sword can do but needs 5000 gold to purchase a potion of fertility. Then the PC buyer can have fun trying to figure out why the sword likes to fly off on it's own to fight evil.

 

[redrick]

Cool, thanks for all the ideas, all.

I'll probably come up with a simple pricing differential between consumable and unconsumable items. Dust of Sneezing should nowhere near as expensive as Gauntlets of Ogre Power. I wish it were something where a bit more guidance had been given in the DMG. I appreciate that there is a concern about players taking the DMG as RAW and insisting that magic items be available at the prices listed, but ballpark prices for the campaigns where DM's do want to sell magic items to their players to players would have been nice.

And I'll try to come up with some cool adventure hooks with price tags that can be pitched to players, as well as some adventures where I've envisioned a possible financial solution. The acquisition of wealth is such a big part of so many adventures, but not all players are interested in the more flavorful ways to spend wealth. When we stop tracking wealth and stop trying to find ways to get that huge chest of silver back to the town, we're losing out on an aspect of the game.

We'll see how it works out — this week will be the first opportunity this party has to spend cold hard cash since last year. My concerns might be overblown and they might walk into town and start commissioning diamond ponies with interesting digestive mechanisms. That would be ... great.

 

[jgsugden]

The DMG has suggested treasure distribution that includes found magic items. For a party of 5 PCs, that ends up being about 6 'permanent' items per PC (not counting potions, scrolls, etc..) over 20 level, or 1 item per PC per every 3 or 4 levels. Not much.

They're supposed to be rare and special, unlike in 4E. Buying them is intentionally hard and is left up to the DM as doing so has big implications. My suggestion: The first time throw a 1-20 level progression, stick to the guidelines. See if it works as built. There is a temptation to flood PCs with items and gold which can be turned into items to make them happy, but that is not the primary design of this edition. They allow for it - but it is not the recommended version.

 

[redrick]

The DMG has suggested treasure distribution that includes found magic items. For a party of 5 PCs, that ends up being about 6 'permanent' items per PC (not counting potions, scrolls, etc..) over 20 level, or 1 item per PC per every 3 or 4 levels. Not much.

They're supposed to be rare and special, unlike in 4E. Buying them is intentionally hard and is left up to the DM as doing so has big implications. My suggestion: The first time throw a 1-20 level progression, stick to the guidelines. See if it works as built. There is a temptation to flood PCs with items and gold which can be turned into items to make them happy, but that is not the primary design of this edition. They allow for it - but it is not the recommended version.

All well and good, but in August 2014, there were no guidelines. The DMG also suggests that magic items are for sale in large communities in a world where magic is ready and available. While it is a system where magic items are not a necessary part of character advancement, it also gives a lot of latitude as to just how available magic items should be in any given game world. The treasure horde tables are also littered with permanent magic items. Just one roll on that table (for levels 5-10) spat back 4 permanent items for me last night. (A +1 weapon, gauntlets of ogre power, winged boots (fly for up to 4 hours a day without spending a spell slot?), and a sentinel shield. So saying "stick to the guidelines" doesn't really mean much, because, well, the guidelines give a lot of options. A store that has a few magic items for sale in a back room is nothing like the magic item levels in your standard 4e campaign.

 

[Sunseeker]

I usually give my players the ability to buy something really cool that has no real mechanical value, such as a fort, some kind of neat wagon contraption, something the players have a reason to need and use, but won't bog down the game with meaningless +1s

 

[Sadras]

1. Give them a list of magic items they can buy or commission. This doesn't have to be a "direct sale" from Ye Olde Magick Shoppe. For example, the acolyte cleric can give up a donation to the church and be entrusted with a holy relic of some kind.

I realise this was only an example, but just FYI, clerics (in the classic D&D sense) be dead-dead if caught in Glantri...the Light of Rad is the only one true way, legally speaking.