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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 3831957" data-attributes="member: 54877">I don't see the point in tying magic items to the 3E/3.5 suggest wealth guidelines, except as a small nod towards a simulated economy.  It would be better, from a balance and clarity POV, to cut out the middle man.  Instead of, "PC Level N should have about X gold, which means he can buy these particular magic items," it should be, "PC Level N should be able to have X major items appropriate to his level, and a lot of minor items."  Since they are giving magic items "levels", it appears they are doing the hard work to make this possible.  Not only does this cut gold out of the equation, it makes it easier to balance.  (A 10th level D&D character with a +3 sword and 3 minor potions isn't noticeably more effective than the same guy with the sword and 20 minor potions.  Let the guy convert 17 potions into gold, and then into something nice, and you'll see a difference.)Then if the group wants a greater or lesser amount of equipment, simply change the number of major items allowed, and tell the DM to be generous or stingy on the minor ones.  This is orthogonal to wealth accumulation, as it should be.To simulate the economy, return to some first principles that makes sense in a game world's model economy.  Wealth is for buying expertise that you don't have.  Wealth is for buying time.  That's pretty much it.  Without the personal power to take over a small duchy, a mercenary army brings handy expertise.  Without the ability to make a sword, a swordsmith brings the necessary expertise.  Contrawise, maybe the character does have the ability to take over a small country or make a sword, but has better things to do with his time.Wealth is also useful for getting even more wealth, but if you never do anything else with it, that's rather pointless.To this end, I'd like to see a lot of suggestions for using money to buy time. Maybe there is never a +3 sword for sale.  You can go take one of the known ones, and make some enemies, which you would rather not.  Or you can spend months digging up tedius information about where one might have disappeared into a dungeon.  Or you can spend a lot of gold to have some researchers do the tedius investigation, perhaps leaving one or two exciting bits for the party.  That doesn't turn gold into a sword.  But it does tell the party a better place to adventure to get one.If a character spends all his money on ale and whores, it's because he doesn't value the expertise or the time savings (much less straight wealth accumulation).  And if you think about such a character's personality, he'd probably be perfectly willing to go get the first +3 sword that came to his attention, enemies or not.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> Either way, all types of characters can thus play in the same campaign, without power imbalance.  The wealthy ones simply have some different options to pursue on the kind of adventures they would like to do.</blockquote>

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