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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eamon" data-source="post: 5003758" data-attributes="member: 51942">Thanks, I'll think one up in the next few days.  I blame laziness for avoiding an example in the first version <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" />.I intentionally had some "heavily" theoretical stuff because it's important to me to have a reasonably firm assurance that the new system is indeed equivalent to the old system.  You can skip it; it should be fairly clear that if items tend to be no more than 60% of their full worth that raising treasure by one level (i.e. 38% value) is pretty safe.  But if you want to take even later reselling into account and put all the bits together, it's there.If you sell old stuff, the buy/sell ratio is not that important due to the exponential price rise over levels.  After all, even at 100% stuff that's five levels behind is just 20% of a new item.However, with random loot, people will need to sell new stuff regularly - stuff that just dropped.  Here, the buy/sell ratio matters a lot.Well, that's dependent on specific items.  I can well imagine low level items remaining useful, but generally just as an extra option, not as an overall power increase.  In any case, that's not too relevant to the wealth system; after all the plain DMG system makes it easy for PCs to acquire low level items too by including a very heft gold amount each level.  In any case, this is outside of the scope of this wealth system, for sure ;-).  The exponential price hike is good because it makes it very very hard to sneak past fundamental assumptions by saving smartly or by a party pooling their money.  It's a very solid fundamental building block that gives solidity: by having the price rise by a factor 5 every five levels, even a factor 2 or 3 imbalance in wealth just means a few levels advantage in wealth - not even a single +1 on a weapon.  That's robust; I don't want to get rid of the exponential scaling for that reason.My reasoning behind this choice is in the post titled "Why the 20% sale price needs to go".  In short; you can simply grant 5 times the items instead.  But that's more complicated in practice because, well, it involves altering the # of parcels, just adding one level is really easy by comparison - you can run premade adventures with almost no change, just raise each item by one level.  Secondly, you'll have more variance if you simply grant 5x the items.  If the sale price is half and you just raise an item by one level, then a lucky PC just "gained" 1 level on one item.  If you grant 5x the items, it's not unlikely to have a PC that got lucky and gets several appropriate items; after all you're distributing 20-25 items each level.  That might disrupt intra-party balance somewhat.  No, this probably won't affect balance in the long run, but balance in the short run is important too.Handing out that many items is also just more work for the DM; more items to choose, more items to make fit the flavor, etc.  Also, I like sometimes handing out an appropriate item - and if the number of items isn't radically different, that's OK; if the number rises dramatically, you need to be careful to not imbalance the game (not to mention the fact that magic items become a lot less dramatic when you find half a dozen each session).Finally, as a detail I don't like the (small) incentive the current system has whereby PC's try to pick items that remain useful indefinitely.  If the sale price is a little higher, it's a little less important to pick out items that will be useful forever; switching is cheaper.  This is a small step towards balancing hard-core gamers versus the more relaxed sort that didn't preplan every character choice X levels in advance.To cut a long excuse short: you're right, you can definitely just increase the number of items by a factor of (slightly less than) 5 and make no further changes without dramatically altering balance.  On the other hand, that solution does have a number of small issues which is why I prefer the raise-by-one-level and sell-for-half approach.  It's not like that's much more complicated - it's actually simpler in play, even, I hope.</blockquote>

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