Yes, absolutely yes!
I have even been dangling out a quest that the party could take on that could net them 1 million gold. Something called the Soul Gem in a tower that is destroyed but is rumored to appear on certain nights. The PCs aren't biting the hook though. The money isn't important enough to them.
Of course my campaign is decidedly non-standard. The PCs have a great deal of wealth tied up in things that they can't easily sell. The land holdings that one of the PCs had went away when that PC died. They have received a scholarl position at one of the universities in the major campaign city, which finally allows them access to the inner city areas. Of course, that only has value if they decide to use it. But that is where all the intersting people and political machinations of the city take place. I suppose that is also where the closest things to 'magic shops' exist as well. We will see what they end up doing with it.
I also gave the 5th level Favored Soul a +3 returning trident. I laugh because I can already hear a certain segment of the posters in this thread crying "Monty Haul". Of course, the trident was a gift from his god. So it needs to be able to last him a very long time. With luck, when the PCs are powerful enough, he will look at trying to build in some upgrades. In the interim, I happy because I wanted at least one PC that had a weapon to bypass DR x/magic.
Of course, I use the Artificer's Handbook for magic creation rules. The spell slot system is the limiting factor, not money. Money is useful in my game to by mundane things, but magic gew gaws are harder to purchase outright.
I break the wealth guidelines all over the place. But I am very cognizant of how that affects CR . Then again not all challenges the party faces are meant to be fought. The players know that. Even the ones they are supposed to fight have handed them their butts on occasion. Oddly enough, even the overpowered trident doesn't do much to overwhelm the opposition. It works pretty much as I intended it to.
I don't advocate this playstyle for everyone. Not everyone likes to tweak things the same way I do. That's just fine. But to insinuate that somebody else runs a monty haul campaign when you don't understand the context of their campaign cracks me up.
It's fine to say that such a thing won't work in the games you want to run. It's OK to point out why it might be problematic with the stock assumptions of the game. But to continuously drop thinly veiled insults is kind of lame.
