Simplified Wealth- an idea to lower d&d accounting

[Sadrik]

One way to do it too would be you always round an treasure gained down to the nearest 100gp. In this way, everything is in groups of 100gp. This is sort of where I wanted to go with a wealth system, abstracting it. We could institute abstract $100 bills . A characters wealth is determined by how many 100gp bills they have. Call them Drachens or something cool. So if a character had 20 Drachens they would be worth 2,000gp.

Then, a rule that says you can afford to buy anything that is equal to the number of Drachens you have in gp as essentially a free purchase a certain # of times per adventure. So for instance, if you have 20 Drachens you can afford to buy anything of less than 20gp X times per adventure. Since all treasure gets rounded into Drachens (100gp increments) characters lose out on all the change. Essentially that change gets turned into free small purchase buys.

X would need to be less than 1 Drachens (100gp)? or maybe not? X could be half the number of Drachens you have. So, 20 Drachens would be 10 purchases. I would also institute

Major purchases would all work off Drachens and not the free buy system, of course.

For purchases greater than their token cost and smaller than a whole Drachens they can buy multiple items. For instance a player can spend 1 Drachens for 100gp and buy up to 100gp of gear. Any change left over disappears. All players start with 2 or 3 Drachens?

 

[der_kluge]

*whew*

Yea, that's a much simpler system.

 

[Ilium]

Actually I see where you're going with this. I do the same thing in my game but I don't bother tracking it at all. I know the PCs are wealthy (at least compared to normal people) so I don't bother with paying for inn rooms, boarding for the horses, replacement clothes, etc. Every once in a while I just say, "Ok, everybody mark off 100 GP for living expenses during the last month."

 

[Sadrik]

*whew*

Yea, that's a much simpler system.

It is not a simpler system than calculating and adding up the gp of a dungeon haul. But it does eliminate the time required to do that. Now, the group can just cost everything into 100's of gp. And players can always have a certain number of gp available.

D&D accounting is one of those time sinks that I am trying to reduce. Our game time is between 4-5 hours a week and I dont want to lose two out of game hours on trying to calculate precisely what and how much we have. If I can shave that down to a 30 minute transaction, I would be so pleased. I think making it more abstract is the key here. The gold and stuff just becomes x Drachens and the magic stuff gets selected. Simple.

 

[Celebrim]

If you don't like keeping track of coins, institute an abstract wealth system.

You have a wealth attribute just like strength or health. (Say a 16, for a +3 bonus).

You can buy things up to say character level x 20 gp for free. You don't even have to shop for them. Just roll a skill check versus appraisal or something, and viola you have them in your pack.

Then just have a scale of difficulty of purchases. Fail the check and lose a wealth level. Recover wealth by overcoming a challenge. Each challenge of CR equal character level or higher gives each member of a party of 4 1 wealth level. Challenges less than character level give base 0 wealth levels. Challenges of different CR's than character level (higher or lower) require an appraise check based on the difference in CR. Beating the appraise check results in one extra wealth level for the encounter (1 or 2). There, whole system except for some tables.

It shouldn't be too hard to come up with some numbers that approximate suggested wealth by character level provided that the players agree to not try to abuse the system and you as DM maintain rule 0 sensibility.