Lord Sessadore
Explorer
Yes, time gold isn't meant to repair inequalities in character wealth. Rather, it's intended to ensure that characters get a guaranteed amount of treasure for roughly 50% of the XP they receive.
I'm not sure we can come up with a system to iron out differences in character wealth that still has the simplicity of time gold. The best thing I can think of is to strongly encourage DMs to look at their players' sheets and see who is behind and who is not, and then bias rewards towards those who are behind until they have caught up. For such purposes, I don't think DMs need to follow the parcel system to the letter either - IMHO they're awarding parcels from previous levels, so it doesn't 'count' for the parcels in their adventure.
For example, if you find you have a PC in your party who is level 2 and over halfway to level 3 who doesn't have a single magic item and hardly any gold (and there are a couple characters like that in L4W, unfortunately), I'd encourage the DM to hand out an extra item to that character over and above whatever other treasure they had planned. Make a note of it to the judge (something like, "this isn't technically part of the adventure loot, this is just to get character X more in line with where they should be"), and carry on as if that item was given in a past adventure.
I'm not sure we can come up with a system to iron out differences in character wealth that still has the simplicity of time gold. The best thing I can think of is to strongly encourage DMs to look at their players' sheets and see who is behind and who is not, and then bias rewards towards those who are behind until they have caught up. For such purposes, I don't think DMs need to follow the parcel system to the letter either - IMHO they're awarding parcels from previous levels, so it doesn't 'count' for the parcels in their adventure.
For example, if you find you have a PC in your party who is level 2 and over halfway to level 3 who doesn't have a single magic item and hardly any gold (and there are a couple characters like that in L4W, unfortunately), I'd encourage the DM to hand out an extra item to that character over and above whatever other treasure they had planned. Make a note of it to the judge (something like, "this isn't technically part of the adventure loot, this is just to get character X more in line with where they should be"), and carry on as if that item was given in a past adventure.