D&D 5E Wealth by level

[Coroc]

[MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION] #15 and #18 with 3.5 wealth per Level had a totally different meaning than with 5e. But why did i t have that? Because you were suposed to be able to buy a +3 sword or a wand of cure light wounds with 50 charges.

If you want wealth per Level you Need to introduce some Kind of economy which goes beyond the equipment list or at least adjusts the Prices on the Equipment list. I heavily recommend (also for a greater challenge) to Hand out starting Money instead of the starting Equipment in the phb
Also i recommend to introduce a cost System for those classes who do not have to invest in the most expensive items (heavy armor) on the phb in a meaningful way. (E.g. generic spell component costs, paying for learning a spell, having to Support the church of your faith etc.) and /or do adjust by different starting Money for the classes depending on their Initial Needs like former Editions did.

Since 5E has no such rules at all, and the given things in the PHB are Close to useless (i mean they could have also left out the Prices for items, since they are unrealistic without end), you either can houserule /homebrew things or if you insist on using the RAW only then just Forget about any wealth per Level (like you suggested) because it is not worth it, it does not even give flavor to the campaign or any challenge or micromanagement skills.

 

[Charlaquin]

Seems to me like the obvious solution would be to make +X weapons and armor nonmagical. Straight numerical bonuses become a feature of the item’s quality, and magic items are reserved for more interesting effects (and would also generally be of sufficient quality as to come with a +X bonus as well.) Then you can make the higher quality mundane weapons and armor a part of the expected progression and sell them for gold, without introducing an magic item market or making magic items a requirement to keep up with the bonus treadmill.

 

[darkrose50]

They went from having too much magic item economics to too little magical item economics. This was being lazy and/or pandering (marketing, if being positive) because most people seem to not want magical treasure to interact with economics, so they did not address this idea fully in the system.

In a world where a thing exists people will trade for the thing, especially if it is magical treasure, else they are not acting like people interacting with something that is (a) magical and (b) treasure.

[1] Is treasure valuable economically?
[2] Are valuable things traded for, bought and sold in the economy?
[3] Is magic treasure something that people with and without wealth would want?
[4] Is magic treasure actually treasure?

If the above questions are answered yes, then the default rules for an economy should include magic in it.

This lazy or pandering (marketing being a positive word) idea of no economics integrating with magical items is so crazy that in my mind society must have been beaten stupid into a post-apocalyptic wasteland for the no-magic in economics thing to sit right in my mind, but that is not the default setting.

Not having baseline rules for people trading for magical treasure is crazy stupid nuts (I think lazy or pandering). Having the baseline be that people don't act like people trading magical treasure is nuts.

People say that a magical sword being worth gold ruins the story value of the magical sword . . . I say the opposite! If my hero has a magical sword and no one is offering gold, titles, marriage contracts or what not for my hero or the sword, then it removes how important the sword is in the story. No one wanting to trade for the magical treasure sword removes from the idea of magic, of treasure, and from the idea of people acting like people who want cool things.

If I found something really cool like a WWII tank in my adventures, and no one wanted to buy it, then I would be questioning my reality. People buy cool stuff. Magic is cool, and if it is not, then you are doing it wrong. D&D is definitely doing the magic items separated from the economy thing wrong (as a base rule). I would enjoy (more) fully fleshed out economics that include magic.

 

[Oofta]

They went from having too much magic item economics to too little magical item economics. This was being lazy and/or pandering (marketing, if being positive) because most people seem to not want magical treasure to interact with economics, so they did not address this idea fully in the system.

In a world where a thing exists people will trade for the thing, especially if it is magical treasure, else they are not acting like people interacting with something that is (a) magical and (b) treasure.

[1] Is treasure valuable economically?
[2] Are valuable things traded for, bought and sold in the economy?
[3] Is magic treasure something that people with and without wealth would want?
[4] Is magic treasure actually treasure?

If the above questions are answered yes, then the default rules for an economy should include magic in it.

This lazy or pandering (marketing being a positive word) idea of no economics integrating with magical items is so crazy that in my mind society must have been beaten stupid into a post-apocalyptic wasteland for the no-magic in economics thing to sit right in my mind, but that is not the default setting.

Not having baseline rules for people trading for magical treasure is crazy stupid nuts (I think lazy or pandering). Having the baseline be that people don't act like people trading magical treasure is nuts.

People say that a magical sword being worth gold ruins the story value of the magical sword . . . I say the opposite! If my hero has a magical sword and no one is offering gold, titles, marriage contracts or what not for my hero or the sword, then it removes how important the sword is in the story. No one wanting to trade for the magical treasure sword removes from the idea of magic, of treasure, and from the idea of people acting like people who want cool things.

If I found something really cool like a WWII tank in my adventures, and no one wanted to buy it, then I would be questioning my reality. People buy cool stuff. Magic is cool, and if it is not, then you are doing it wrong. D&D is definitely doing the magic items separated from the economy thing wrong (as a base rule). I would enjoy (more) fully fleshed out economics that include magic.

Then make up rules for running a magic mart. The task is only as difficult as you make it. Take 20 seconds out of your day and google "sane magic item prices".

Just because there's nothing official doesn't mean that it can't exist in your world. Being able to buy/sell magic items won't make sense in some campaigns and will in others.

 

[ad_hoc]

In a world where a thing exists people will trade for the thing, especially if it is magical treasure, else they are not acting like people interacting with something that is (a) magical and (b) treasure.

Magic items are both very rare and essentially unique.

It's a bit like saying there should be an MSRP on the Mona Lisa.

Sure magic items will be bought, sold, traded, and offered. 5e assumes that each case is unique. Trading in magic items is fraught with danger. As well, local authorities may get involved. Maybe they want to lay claim to the items or maybe they don't want to deal with the consequences and danger that selling them can bring to their land.

 

[Nevvur]

Not having baseline rules for people trading for magical treasure is crazy stupid nuts (I think lazy or pandering). Having the baseline be that people don't act like people trading magical treasure is nuts.

There are baseline rules for trading magical items on p.130 of the DMG. They're not great rules, but they do exist.

Anyway, baseline prices emerge from what people are willing to pay for a given item (in a free market society). The prices for any particular magical item can (and in my setting, do) fluctuate based on a number of factors exclusive of their mechanical effects. Consider:

materials: a rather plain looking +1 longsword is worth less than a +1 longsword with gold filigree and gems embedded in the hilt.
history: a +1 longsword wielded by the future king of Antaros in his adventuring days is worth more than a +1 longsword newly produced at Ye Olde Arcane Forge.
vendor personality: is he willing to negotiate on the price?

Briefly, I think the price for each magic item should be unique and based on setting, not some figure invented out of concern for game balance. I don't fault anyone who wants that, but I regard the absence of a 'better' system in official sources as a conscientious decision to respect the design space in my game, not developer laziness.

 

[Syntallah]

TPK Games has a fantastic book called Fifth Edition Options (great stuff, can't recommend it enough!). It has a Wealth By Level chart on page 13. Not sure if I can copy it in its entirety here legally, but the bookends are:

2nd 200gp
20th 28,000gp

 

[delericho]

I do not buy that. If the text is explicit that wealth and magic item distribution is entirely up to the DM and that the system math does not require or expect any particular amount of gold or magic items by any particular level (which it does), then I don’t see any problem with giving an example of how a DM might choose to distribute wealth and magic items throughout the campaign.

One of the dirty secrets of 3.x is that the Wealth by Level table in the 3.0e DMG (which wasn't updated for 3.5e) was actually generated from the random treasure tables - the game assumed 13.3 'balanced' encounters per level, each 'balanced' encounter gave an average treasure value (that varied by level), so they multiplied those together, multiplied by 80% (to account for use of consumable items), and added it to the total from the previous level.

3e's Wealth by Level wasn't a guideline to the DM, "you should give out this much treasure", it was rather a reflection of how it was likely to work out - "if you use an average number of encounters and have average treasure rolls, your PCs will end up with this much treasure".

(They did screw up in at least one way: their treasure tables didn't account for selling recovered equipment, so if you used lots of humanoid villains your PCs would very quickly break the table.)

And 3e did explicitly state that all of these were guidelines. (Furthermore, if you did through the work done on "Trailblazer", you'll find that the game, or at least the core rules, are designed assuming the PCs don't have access to any particular items at any particular levels. They're assumed to have some way to bypass damage reduction, but not necessarily permanently-active magic weapons.)

(And, of course, there's the second big mistake - 3e also gave PCs the ability to easily craft items, so of course the PCs will have them!)

However, the perception very quickly became that you did have to give out those items, and that if the DM didn't give enough treasure he was short-changing the PCs. (And by later in the edition the analysis had changed, and it was assumed that PCs did get those items.)

TL;DR version: it's not enough to clearly state that all of these are guidelines, because people are much more likely to see a "Wealth by Level" table and assume it is holy writ than they are to read the accompanying guidelines.

In my campaign, I'm very roughly assuming "expected gp" to be equal to "current xp".

Yeah, it does occur to me that the designers of both 3e and 4e missed a trick when building the reward scheme for those editions. For 5e, given that there's no fixed guideline, I'm inclined to use this convention for PCs generated above 1st level.

 

[CapnZapp]

TL;DR version: it's not enough to clearly state that all of these are guidelines, because people are much more likely to see a "Wealth by Level" table and assume it is holy writ than they are to read the accompanying guidelines.

To me the obvious solution is to publish the magic item economy in a separate book from the DMG.

Then, by definition, it is not part of the core rules.

Also saves us from having to invent time travel in order to insert it in the actual DMG, since it was published four years ago.

This also means any hater can just chill the beach off - don't buy the book if you dislike magic item shoppes and converting gold into character power

 

[delericho]

To me the obvious solution is to publish the magic item economy in a separate book from the DMG.

I'd tend to agree with that. Except for two things:

1) If they're only producing one rules book a year, there are other topics I'd much rather seem them cover.

2) Ideally, I would have preferred them to have worked out all this stuff ahead of time, even if they hadn't included the WbL tables/magic item economy in the DMG. Retrofitting it to 5e now is probably going to be awkward at best. Lacking a time machine, part of me thinks we're actually better off without this stuff until 6e arrives - better to know it doesn't really hang together than to have a kludge that gives the impression of more rigour than is actually there.

But YMMV on both points, of course.