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So I am running an adventure path(Council of Thieves) for the first time and I am a bit concerned about the wealth of the characters. I have checked the Pathfinder book and character wealth at 5th level should be 10,500gp in items. The tank in the party has just over 20,000gp in items and that does not include consumables like wands or potions. OH I am running the game with a group of 4 players. So have I done something wrong with the way these modules work or are they normally running this heavy on cash? Thanks for the clarification guys.
Pelham
So I am running an adventure path(Council of Thieves) for the first time and I am a bit concerned about the wealth of the characters. I have checked the Pathfinder book and character wealth at 5th level should be 10,500gp in items. The tank in the party has just over 20,000gp in items and that does not include consumables like wands or potions. OH I am running the game with a group of 4 players. So have I done something wrong with the way these modules work or are they normally running this heavy on cash? Thanks for the clarification guys.
Pelham
Is he getting an equal share of the treasure, or does the party just hand stuff to him they dont want. I would evaluate everyone's treasure to see where the problem may lie. What are his items by the way?
Did the tank create his character along with everyone else or import him premade into the game?
Did the tank player cheat? if so you can make his background that he stole the items and is now being hunted.
Perhaps the other players figure the wealth is safer with someone who can take a beating and not get captured?
Wealth is often hard to hide. Make them the target of thieves and bandits attacks. Even just a greedy cult or wizard.
Also you can use creatures like gelatenous cube and rust monster to scale down the parties equipment list, very quickly.
A nicer angle is the tank has a sponsor, someone or some group of wealth who require larger and more dangerous favours (adventures) as time goes on.
I've always found that wealth isn't always as written for average character wealth if played from 1st level.
If he created this character at 5th level, and his items seem to come to a higher total that that written into the book, then, I think he is doing something wrong.
If he has played this character from 1st level (which is what it sounds like in this case), then his Average Character Wealth may be higher or lower, depending on the actions he took during the campaign.
A good example of how character wealth can differ from campaign to campaign, is my CotCT campaign, which my party is currently in. The majority of the whole campaign, the party has had little or no money, other than the Wizard who was burning his feats to make magic items.
We have almost finished, and I would have to say that their character wealth is about 20,000gp each, and they are about 9th level.
There were a lot of things the party did that changed the way the party interacted with the way the AP was written, and they also didn't do alot of what was in the AP, choosing to forge their own path.
My advice to you is to sit down with the player in question and ask him, politely, to just do a quick calculation on his total equipment's worth, and then to explain that, if it is, his total is higher than it should be.
Other than that, my party, and myself, have taken to writing down the date and the amount of xp and gp recieved, that way nobody can make mistakes, pourposely or otherwise.
A few questions:
Has anyone been making items for the character?
What is the average per character (not just this one char)?
Has the majority of the magical loot fallen to this character?
Where did the magical loot come from?
you have two options.
1 do a party audit of everything from stats to wealth.
2 go through the adventure before hand and say ok thi is too much gold so it becomes silver, etc. I have had to do this to preserve game balance since the magic item compendium came out. Limited little 1-3 use items are great but when a single charecter has 4 of them then it becomes a problem. I am going to start incorperating magic item addiction (focus) rules from shadowrun because the tank doesn't need 6 belts of healing, drain one switch out rinse and repeat. The only way to deal with this is to reduce the overall wealth.
the tank doesn't need 6 belts of healing, drain one switch out rinse and repeat. The only way to deal with this is to reduce the overall wealth.
That's certainly not the ONLY way.
For example, just ruling that charges used from an item apply to both the character and the item then make it so he has already used all his healing belt charges for the day and no more are available when he slaps the next one on. This also nicely takes care of issues like Night Sticks stacking.
Sean Mahoney
Or you could just talk to your player.
That doesn't work, my players and myself when I am a player are all rules lawyers. If it's in print and it's a rule we want it, that way we can twist it to suit our needs. We are not a role playing group we are all munchkins in the extreme.
As an example if a player isnt having fun because X class isnt as cool or as powerful as he thought it would be and basically ends up sucking on the power curve then the player will suicide the charecter to bring in a better one.Talking to my players isn't an option I have to outsmart them or bring in some off the wall type stuff to really mess with them, I cant blame them for having memorized most of the common monsters in the Monster manuals because I have too.
Did this wealth come from the modules only? Should be pretty easy to align his stuff to the stuff in the first two chapters. I can guarantee you there isn't 4 x 20k worth of treasure between the two chapters. Don't forget that for non-trade goods (armor, weapons, magic items), they should sell for roughly half the listed price.
I agree that I'd want to look over the group's character sheets and I'd ask where everything came from if they have stuff that wasn't in the books.
If he's a munchin and came in at 5th level, maybe he claimed he took his 10,500 and had a friend wizard craft everything for him at cost pre-game. That would boost the wealth to 21k. If he insists this is part of the rules, and you permit it, I'd say go for it, but the crafting happens in-game, not pre-game. Thus, he has to spend the first 21 days of the module naked fighting with a club he found. Good luck with that.
If they've had a series of characters come in and die repeatedly, is the group keeping their gear, and recreating characters with appropriate wealth? That's going to skew it a ton too over time if you aren't removing treasure as they go.
Another option for dealing with it outside of GM fiat is to simply have future encounters not produce significant treasure until they are at the right wealth level, or produce things that this character can't use, but others can. Eventually you should be able to normalize the wealth organically, if you have the time and patience.
You may have to boost the encounters to compensate a bit for their excessive power until then.
I have a fun (yet frustrating) solution: RUST MONSTER!!!!!
I have a fun (yet frustrating) solution: RUST MONSTER!!!!!Don't forget
Gold Bug
Disenchanter
Touche'
As posted above, perhaps the party simply handed him a bigger cut of the treasure.
I know that in our current campaign my 'street level' Rogue handed a lot of wealth over so the Fighter (his muscle) could be outfitted as best as we could afford.
So it does happen, perhaps it's what happened here.
Is it a problem?
For me, I don't care what stats / wealth / whatever guidelines say, as they are just that... guidelines.
Is it a problem? Does the player with more wealth / items outshine the others or make encounters too easy. Then it is a problem and there is tons of creative ways to 'right the wrong'
If not, don't worry about it, because it means nothing really. So the party or player is over the wealth guideline but if that distinction doesn't translate in any meaningful way, it is nothing to get worked up about.
Creative Director
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We assume 4 players in a group, and we generally build the adventures with a fair amount of treasure because we can't assume that every group will hit every encounter.
I've seen complaints that our adventure paths are too treasure light and complaints that they're too treasure heavy. Which tells me that we're more or less doing it right.
If you as the GM think that your PCs are getting too much or too little treasure for your tastes, by all means make changes. Note that the values listed in the Core RPG for expected PC wealth are also baselines. You can vary those as much as you want for your favored style of play as well.
In the end, if your players are still having fun, and if the encounters are still challenging (not too easy and not too hard)... don't worry if their wealth is above or below what the Pathfinder Core RPG guesses it should be. You're playing the game right if everyone's having fun! :)