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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spatula" data-source="post: 4130312" data-attributes="member: 2198">Well, he said the playtester NDA was being lifted, which was either a mistake or all the other playtesters were struck dumb that same weekend.  There's no way to say how accurate the 4e claims are since other playtesters aren't allowed to talk and WOTC has been so tight-lipped.  There is an awful lot of... hyperbole there, though.That does not follow at all.  From what we know, the encounter balance expects PCs to have a +x weapon, +y armor, etc. at level N.  That could just as easily be expressed as: PCs of level N need (the sum of the costs of those items) gold, which is to say, the wealth-by-level guidelines are still there.  They are, however, much more specific and thus more useful. (3e threw all items into the same pot, regardless of their combat usefulness, or regardless of whether it was spent on a few big item or many little ones, which results large variances that the encounter balance cannot account for)  It is a major balance mechanic - it's a big part of why the encounter "math" should actually work.  The other big part would be the monster design, but the monsters only work as opposition to the PCs, so it's important to know what kind of numbers the PCs have in relation to the monsters, which comes back to... expected treasure by level.Anyway, I've only run or been in one 3e campaign that tried to stick to the wealth guidelines.  One of the party members had the Vow of Poverty, which supposedly is balanced vs those wealth levels, so I felt I should try to maintain it.  And I failed - by 19th level, the PCs were about 100,000gp behind, I think, maybe more.  The thing is, it didn't really make the party noticeably weak or anything, so obviously there's a LOT of wiggle room in the 3e wealth guidelines - a fine example of the large variances mentioned above, and why the 4e guidelines are an improvement.</blockquote>

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