Mine is a pretty odd game.
We started at lvl 4. Before lvl 5 hit they had completed the first several plot arcs and had liberated a diamond mine held by pirates where they were using the crews of conquered ships as slave labor. Sort of led a slave revolt, had a big ship-to-ship battle in the sky, and they had a mine and some fame. At this point they were crew, but the PCs were on the island when the sky battle started and the ship took a pretty heavy (plot driven) pounding and the captain died in the fighting. Leaving the first mate (a PC) in control of the ship.
When it started they all had starting Wealth for 4th level PCs, minus a few points for occasional expensive gear, but they outfitted themselves as they thought the crew of a merchant ship would. Nobody bought armor, everybody equipped themselves with clubs and daggers. One guy bought two small pistols, which sapped his Wealth a bit.
For the most part they stuck with very minimal gear, found gear, or gear they built themselves. It's a Grim Tales game, so everybody needed a Craft anyway. One guy took Craft (Tailor). Another Craft (Carpentry). The gun-guy took Craft (Gunsmithing). That first arc was mostly RP, sneaking around investigating, and any firefights they'd scavenge the shot, powder, and gun of anybody that had a firearm.
But what they have bought, they've bought big. The diamond mine they pretty much traded for their own airship as equal value. They each got a +3 bonus for that adventure to represent goods and whatnot they sold, but they also recieved some musketoons and pistols from guards. The ship came with some personal firearms as well.
In the trading, the merchant house they were pressuring to get the ship from offered up a daughter in marriage to the new captain, whose dowry and connections gave him a free Windfall feat (as well as all sorts of hooks for future adventures). So he became the most wealthy member of the party.
I use some weird item rules in the game: We use the multiple-levels and effects of mastercrafting found in the Black Company Rulebook, but I use the "+3 DC Per Mastercraft Jump" system from d20 Modern because I've never particularly liked that a Mastercraft Steel Sheild costs 165gp and a Mastercraft Leather Armor costs 170gp and a Mastercraft Spoon costs 150.03gp.
So the captain went out and had himself some very nice leather armor made. +2 equipment to defense, 3 points of Damage Conversion, 10% lighter, and +1 on Diplomacy checks when wearing it. (Decorative, Light, and a home brewed Increased Protection benefits. We use Fewer Dead Heroes which converts the defense bonus of armor in Lethal damage to Nonlethal damage. Increased Protection ups the conversion without upping the defense bonus.) The total cost was something like DC 17, which hit him for 1 point. Two other people realized they could get Increased Protection and Light on Leather Armor for DC 14 and picked up their "free" sets during down time after their Wealth Bonuses surpassed 15. That was around the end of Lvl 5 for them.
It's a magic-common setting, but for setting-specific flavor reasons metal objects can't be enchanted. No magic swords, no magic guns. So most of the "special" items the crew has are mastercrafted. The only magical items I can think of are the ship itself, its figurehead, a two minor cloaks, and a model ship that reflects the condition of the real ship and the positions of its crew for the wives at home. So nobody has gone out and blown all of their cash on a +1 Flaming Musket. They COULD go out and blow all of their cash on a Cloak of Charisma +4 or Leather +2, but it's cheaper and more effective to use Mastercraft bonuses that, while individually do less, do MORE taken all together. I like.
After the first DM-arranged plot-device wedding, the other players decided that, being respectable free traders as they were, and needing to get a leg up in local politics, they should settle down too. Around level 6 they were getting into politics. So one character (the wizard) went looking for real estate in the home city and put a down payment down on a house, then started courting local women of reasonably good family and station. All of which had its own prices and Wealth rolls and Diplomacy checks and was quite interesting and very unexpected. That depleated his Wealth. The gunslinger type spent some money on a few really nice pistols and two nice daggers, dropping his Wealth a bit (quick draw and TWF and single-shot pistols means quite a bit of cash in load-out). The captain, oddly enough, went out and blew some Wealth Bonus on really nice jewelry for the wife (expensive to begin with, then mastercrafted Ornate (+2 Diplomacy check when he gives it to her) and Decorative (+1 on HER Diplomacy checks while wearing it). Very IN character but out of character for your average game. All of this didn't drop their Wealth Bonuses below +11-12 or so, though.
The next arc involved getting some rare semi-magical wood so the wizard's NPC mentor could craft them a magical figurehead (I.E. their ship recieved its first Legendary Ship level). The wood turned out to be fey wood inhabited by dryads, but one dryad's tree had long ago drowned when a ground well shifted and the dryad trapped inside had warped into an undead Charisma-draining monster. After the battle they were given free hand to gather deadfall from the special trees, and I measured some usable deadfall in the back yard, worked up a rough sketch of the grove and calculated how much they could collect. I hadn't done this BEFORE the game, as I'd forgotten, and I underestimated how much wood a whole grove of those trees might shed on average ... so I'd over-priced the wood. The total value ended up around 2 MILLION silver (campaign baseline). Luckily they couldn't flood the market and chose to keep a reserve of it for use by the carpenter in projects. They gave all of the crew a 1%-apiece share for a bonus, reducing it again, then divided it among the PCs. So 2 million bucks carved and split and rendered only jumped them about 7 points on average (though they DID roll a little low). Everybody was happy, but deadfall a larger-than-life carving does not make ... so they had to role play and Diplomacy roll some interactions with one of the dryads to take a pretty large, though in no way fatal, cutting from her tree (the largest).
At this point, in a D&D game, they should have been outfitted with a quarter of a million in gear. They've never bothered to go buy much more than they have now.
Not to be left out, the player whose character wasn't currently trying to curry favor in town via marriages (he was being political by writing treatises to influence national opinion and using their trade routes for distribution ... genius idea of his, really) decided to learn Sylvan and try to woo the dryad they'd interacted with. Prompting some other adventures to find rare plants for gifts.
During huge swathes of campaign time, Wealth hasn't come up at all. Which I've adored. Nobody bothered "looting the bodies!" after they felt they had enough weapons that everybody who wanted a firearm could have one. I enforce encumbrance (and pretty hars encumbrance rules to boot) so nobody is a walking armory ... thus the popularity of lighter-than-normal armor as well. They're FUNCTIONALLY unbelievably rich ... owning their own flying ship, having powerful NPC connections in their major trade city, etc. They don't need huge Wealth bonuses to represent that. They're also officially, by the little chart anyway, rich.
Illustrating that, they went to my campaign's version of Monaco/Vegas/The Bahamas and I gave them the opportunity to hit the gambling establishments. But they're rich and without huge wagers and equally huge amounts of money being won or lost, they'd not see any fluctuation in Wealth. So what did I do?
They played for Experience Points. Heh heh heh. They were flabbergasted. They were also very very timid about it, but they thought that was a very fun day. We really sat around for several hours of the game day and played dice (Ship, Captain, and Crew) for XP.
--fje
