To Reimburse or Not to Reimburse?

[Umbran]

What do you think? Should players be punished until the campaign's end for lapses in financial judgment, or should DMs enforce the consequences of poor financial judgment?

I'm a practical kind of guy. The books (3e or 4e) give me wealth guidelines. Those are guidelines, a first approximation to help it be easier to hit the assumed target.

If I am aiming for a fundamentally different target, the guidelines go out the window. Even if I'm playing within the book's general assumptions, I watch the players - if they are having fun, and not having too much trouble with the encounters I want to throw at them, I may pitch them more loot. If things are going really easily for them, I'll withhold loot. Or maybe I'll just adjust my encounters. It's a style thing.

 

[Infiniti2000]

I'm in the "whatever's the most fun" camp. If the players' mishaps means that they're having fun, then so be it. If they make a mistake and would be seriously unhappy from then on, I help them rectify it. What the hell do I care about keeping them screwed over? Not all players want to be held accountable for tracking money. Some just want to play the game without an accountant. Some only care about the numbers. It's best to cater to all of them IMO.

 

[Hejdun]

If you look at the guidelines for new character wealth, it's pretty much assumed that in the course of adventuring, PCs will lose 25-40% of their "wealth" through using consumables or selling outdated stuff at 20%. I'd pretty much assume that it's part of the plan. You're supposed to use the stuff you find until you find something better to replace it, whereupon you sell it for "not much." This is probably why magic item costs scale up so dramatically. By the time you sell an item that's past it's prime, you've found gold and items worth many times more than what the old item was worth. Or even the 80% you get ripped off for. So who cares? What's losing 800gp from the exchange rate matter when any new items you're looking at cost 20,000gp?

 

[Destil]

This sort of thing is handled fairly well by the 'wish list' philosophy of 4E, for one thing. I don't play my game quite that way in a meta-game sense, but if a player wants a new sword or whatever and they make it clear to me in character I'm likely to add plot hooks where they could potentially get such an item

I can't say I've ever run 3E like that as far as treasure. For both editions I generally read through the level-based guideline, stat up treasure by them, then throw in some random junk which is consider to be 'optional' and reward good logic or PC actions or whatever. If they find the extra stuff great! If not they're not underpowered, but they may not have as many cool options.

 

[Dice4Hire]

It is just a shame that 'wish lists' are the way to make the economy work best.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

If you look at the guidelines for new character wealth, it's pretty much assumed that in the course of adventuring, PCs will lose 25-40% of their "wealth" through using consumables or selling outdated stuff at 20%. I'd pretty much assume that it's part of the plan.

You're right that selling old stuff for pennies is part of 4e's plan, but I don't think the starting-above-1st-level wealth guidelines are meant to be any accurate indication. If you plot out all the loot that a PC gains over the levels via default parcels, you'll see that the new character guideline is only roughly accurate from about 4th level to 7th. Heck, by 14th level or so a character who started at level 1 should have six or seven items!

It is just a shame that 'wish lists' are the way to make the economy work best.

Sometime I'm going to run a goofy Diablo style campaign, so I can say "Let's cut the crap: you know what you want, and I want to give it to you. So when a monster dies, you get to choose which item mysteriously pops out of its corpse."

 

[Infiniti2000]

It is just a shame that 'wish lists' are the way to make the economy work best.

I don't see why it's a shame. Like Tequila Sunrise points out, it cuts out the crap. PCs will always end up with their wish lists anyway. Any build you see out there is by definition a wish list. Actually using a wish lists eliminates all the excess and not-fun (IMO) rigmarole for the PCs to get what they want. I'd personally rather spend my time playing the game in terms of plot hooks and such rather than buying/selling. Any buying/selling we do will be part of the plot and interesting, not basic bookkeeping.

 

[keterys]

Heck, by 14th level or so a character who started at level 1 should have six or seven items!

I just made a 14th level character the other day, using the DMG guidelines. I have 15 magic items and 9 rituals. And I'm a dual wielder. They're more viable than you might think.

Whatever the edition, consumables should be consumed and lost items should be lost, or player decision and performance don't have meaning. The differences between a character who makes a couple mistakes and one who doesn't are actually quite minor. Especially with the 4e treasure model of x5-ing treasure values.

 

[thaco]

I always liked the "crap" like the decanter of endless water in 2e. our group had so much fun with that item and came up with inventive ways to use it to solve problems

 

[keterys]

Yep - and the lower the sell price (or if there's no point), the more likely you are to keep that 'crap'. I'm a huge fan of lots of wacky gear over carefully pruned wishlists and totaled gear limits.