NPC Gear for Epic Level Question?

[Aluvial]

Why does the allowed gold piece value for allowed gear jump so high when characters go to epic levels?

From the DMG page 127:

17th 100,000
18th 130,000
19th 170,000
20th 220,000
page 209
21st 975,000
22nd 1,200,000
23rd 1,500,000
24th 1,800,000

I don't understand. We get this nice progression of gear, 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 and then BAM 755,000. What gives with this?

Aluvial

 

[Ditch]

I agree that it is a huge jump. I think maybe it's because of epic level magic items. Look at how much it cost to make a Belt of Giant Strength +8 and you realize that decking out a fresh new 21+ level NPC gets expensive (if you chose to buy epic items). I don't have access to my book at the moment but i think it's like this:

Normaly it is enhancement bonus squared x 1,000 gold
so that a Belt of Giant Strength +6 would cost 36,000 gold

Epic = enhancement bonus squared x 10,000 gold
so that a Belt of Giant Strength +8 would cost 640,000 gold

Again, this is from memory (which seems to be failing in my old age) so please be gentle if I got the exact numbers wrong.

 

[Aluvial]

I agree that it is a huge jump. I think maybe it's because of epic level magic items. Look at how much it cost to make a Belt of Giant Strength +8 and you realize that decking out a fresh new 21+ level NPC gets expensive (if you chose to buy epic items). I don't have access to my book at the moment but i think it's like this:

Normaly it is enhancement bonus squared x 1,000 gold
so that a Belt of Giant Strength +6 would cost 36,000 gold

Epic = enhancement bonus squared x 10,000 gold
so that a Belt of Giant Strength +8 would cost 640,000 gold

Again, this is from memory (which seems to be failing in my old age) so please be gentle if I got the exact numbers wrong.

Yeah, so what. You may be right about the costs of better items, but who said that somewhere between 20 and 21, all of a sudden, you gained over 700,000 gold! That's rediculous. Then all of a sudden you drop to 225,000 gold to go to 22nd, and then back up to 300,000 for 23rd and 24th. Ok, so maybe you do get 200,000 to 300,000 in epic, but the 700,000+ jump is just plain rediculous...

Aluvial

 

[Infiniti2000]

Why does the allowed gold piece value for allowed gear jump so high when characters go to epic levels?

Would you say it's an epic jump?

I don't understand.

What's to understand? It's epic.

 

[Ditch]

"Yea, so what."? I didn't make the rules. No need to be that way with me. Besides, I said that I agree with you. I was just shedding some light on the matter. If you come to the boards looking for help, don't be so defensive about other people's insight.

Added:
I think the real potential for abuse here is when making a new NPC that is lvl 21+. Noone said you must spend his character wealth on epic items. The extra +2 STR in my example is nothing compared to what the extra 600k would buy if you concentrated on non-epic DMG items or cusomizing everything to min-max. NOT that I would ever do this...

 

[Goolpsy]

Are you sure its the right table...? lvl 21: 975K = Normal Pc Gear..

 

[Ditch]

Actually, character wealth by level is listed in a table on p. 135 of the DMG. A level 20 character should have wealth totalling around 760k. Now when you flip over to the epic level table to compare, it's not such a stark contrast in wealth. The first table the OP was looking at was the value of NPC gear up to level 20, not for PC's.