I'm currently GMing RotRL for my group, which is the first ever non home brew campaign I've ever ran.
Up Until this point I've only been including the treasure listed in the AP, such as this room contains x gp or this npc has y on their corpse.
A few days ago one of my players noticed while reading the Bestiary that it had a treasure section for each monster and asked me if I had been including this. I said no because the AP tells you what loot is there to be found.
However after a bit of thinking I realized that the characters wealth is still quite low even for level 3. So was I wrong to not include treasure from monsters which have no indicated treasure in the AP?
Sorry if the wording is a bit off I've just come back from an exam and my brain is fried.
Any input would be greatly appreciated.
- Talos of the 8th Legion
You have been doing it right, there is generally more than enough treasure in the AP for your players to stay on target for wealth. It is not a bad idea to have them audit their sheets between books though to make sure.
I agree, but would add some rolled treasure for any random encounters. I've been doing this for my Serpents Skull game, we're up to book 4 now, and seem to be right on track for WBL. I've been checking every second level or so and adjusting if necessary.
I'm running Runelords myself right now, and my players have been pretty close to on target throughout the AP. There are definitely times where they're below the recommended WBL, but it usually balances out by the end of the adventure.
I just checked my players' sheets. They're level 7, and they each have somewhere in the realm of 20,000-ish gold in equipment, consumables, and raw cash. The caster has a bit less than the others and the primary fighter has a bit more than the others, but it's pretty close.
I asked my players to tell me how much money and what items they currently. One of the players is currently on in Bali so he's not going to respond.
It seems the wealth is around 220-300ish gold and two of the pc's have 1 magical item each. So for a few of the pc's they are on target however the rest are grossly under.
Sorry It's 22-30 gold not 220-300
Where about are you in the AP? I ask because, if I remember right, my players were generally under WBL until the ransacking of Thistletop.
Edit: O_O That changes things a bit... by level 3 they should have started raiding the Catacombs and gotten SOME cash.
They have just done the Catacombs and the next session with start with them leaving the Catacombs. My primary concern is them being undergeared for Thistletop.
A number of my players are quite bad at completing simple gm requests, so I'm guessing It's more than likely down to bad inventory management and them not posting everything they have.
It looks like I'm going to have to check how much they should have for myself
Yeah, you should. The goblin guy is wielding fairly valuable weapons, and Erylium's dagger is be worth a pretty penny in and of itself. Heck, just selling the goblin's longsword should give EVERY PC a couple hundred. That's not even including the aforementioned dagger or any other loot in there that I'm forgetting.
Somethin's up with your party's scribing of loot, methinks. :)
The party Cleric and Magus both left their character sheets at my place last time we played so I know exactly what they have. The Cleric has the +1 longsword off the goblin and the Erylium's dagger.
The only discrepancy on my end is that I don't have a cost listed in my notes for the tiny +1 returning dagger. And now that I think about it I'm unsure how to calculate the value for a tiny magical weapon.
I agree with you that they have not been keeping track of the loot properly unless the player away is keeping the vast majority of the loot (unlikely since he is the wizard and we have a 19 strength barbarian) there has been a lot lost a some point.
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I apologize if I missed this but are we calculating this on a 4 person party? If you have more they are going to be poor. If/How you rebalance that is a different discussion.
Agreed you are doing it right and if you just finished the catacombs that is not a long enough measure for you to worry about it. Also it is going to vary based on how much they sell or keep if you are doing standard devaluation.
Yes sorry I should have mentioned it was for a party of 5.
I've already figured out the problem is extremely poor party item management. I'll have to work out a fix for the long term progressed, I have already done so for xp.
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And now that I think about it I'm unsure how to calculate the value for a tiny magical weapon.
Rules-wise there is no difference in value between Tiny & Medium (ie the dagger is worth 8302 gp, 4151 sale)
However, I would expect a merchant would devalue it if they don't have a lot of tiny customers...
Thank you Scribbling Rambler, I just made another thread about this. I was thinking about if I should devalue it at the end of the last lesson. I'm not sure how much I'm going to devalue it though.
I think I'll decide how much to devalue it by after I sort out this inventory debacle.
I need to figure out if someone is having a derp moment and cant read what they have written down properly. Or if there has been cases of player confusion as who is carrying it and hence should be writing down. There should be a communal "party loot" list which the Barbarian player has, which is where I expect to find a lot of the problems.
The problem I see with it is that although it has some fairly powerful magic on it. It's size is a massively limiting factor and reduces its potential for selling on immensely .
Tomorrow I'll work out how well the value of 4151 matches up to the WBL and go from there.
Creative Director
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We generally put about 200% or more of the treasure into an adventure. If the PCs completely and efficiently scavenge everything, don't have to spend any gold on recovery stuff (like resurrection or restoration or other costly spells), and there's only four PCs in the group, they're likely to end up at twice the recommended treasure allowance for their level. This is for three reasons:
1) No group consistently finds every bit of treasure.
2) Sometimes money goes to "upkeep" like casting expensive spells, spellbooks, donations/tithes, or other in-campaign money draining elements.
3) In my opinion, the wealth by level charts are kind of on the low side anyway.
Every GM should develop a comfort zone for how much magic the PCs have. If your players are super experienced and have been gaming together for decades, they'll be better at the game and you might want to lower the treasure given out. If the players are new and relatively inexperienced, you can increase the treasure given out both because the players will miss more treasure, and they'll need the power boost of that extra treasure to shore up their inexperience with the game. If you have fewer than 4 PCs, you might want to lower the treasure, and if you have more than 4, you should definitely raise the treasure.
In the end, you did exactly the right thing—periodically audit the PCs' wealth levels to make sure they're where you want to be. If some are short, that's probably because other players are hoarding the items, or because that player's character is a build that simply isn't supported well by the in-adventure treasure, or so on. In these cases, you should adjust the adventure's treasures so that the characters who are low on treasure have something to gain.
I generally tend to have LOW WBL. We don't have tailored magic items, we like the "look what I founds" more than the "I made this"
With that being said, I'd like it If future APS had treasure listed in BOLD like in old 1e modules, so you could scan ahead real easy and then decide if you needed to add or take anything out.
be nice if this could be done.
future APs could use a bit more armor and/or shield peices too.
That is the crux of your problem then. The Adventure Paths are stated out for a 4 person party so if you are going strictly by the book for xp/loot then are going to end up 25 percent short with 5 players. Short term it is bearable but, since all APs are long term that will cause problems.
That is actually wrong, as James already pointed out. Although my totals I saw when looking through Kingmaker and Carrion Crown generally came out looked a little less than 200%, rather at 125% WBL for a 4 player character party. Although James probably calculates the magic item at 100% market price, while I automatically reduce them to 50% market price ( I automatically assume that my player will sell most items to craft their own stuff ).
To the OP: You should also keep in mind that treasure will be concentrated at the module bosses. So if your party seems a bit low on magic items ( outside of their poor inventory management ), look to the end of the module and see if the treasure there makes up for the difference.
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Creative Director
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I generally tend to have LOW WBL. We don't have tailored magic items, we like the "look what I founds" more than the "I made this"
With that being said, I'd like it If future APS had treasure listed in BOLD like in old 1e modules, so you could scan ahead real easy and then decide if you needed to add or take anything out.
be nice if this could be done.
future APs could use a bit more armor and/or shield peices too.
Changing magic items to be listed in bold isn't going to happen in this edition of Pathfinder. Because doing so would mean we'd need to revisit and likely change how we use bold already for stat blocks and as smaller headers in running text. And being able to use bold to make stat blocks easier to navigate is FAR too important, in my opinion, to abandon in favor of listing magic items in bold. Listing them in italics is far better for a lot of reasons as a result, especially since if you're getting into an adventure to such detail that you're adjusting treasure and the like, you're already going to have to be reading the adventure in detail anyway...
With regards to Burnt Offering (chapter 1 of RotRL), I definitely found the treasure to be a bit clumped together at the end of the module. YMMV.
Changing magic items to be listed in bold isn't going to happen in this edition of Pathfinder. Because doing so would mean we'd need to revisit and likely change how we use bold already for stat blocks and as smaller headers in running text. And being able to use bold to make stat blocks easier to navigate is FAR too important, in my opinion, to abandon in favor of listing magic items in bold. Listing them in italics is far better for a lot of reasons as a result, especially since if you're getting into an adventure to such detail that you're adjusting treasure and the like, you're already going to have to be reading the adventure in detail anyway...I generally tend to have LOW WBL. We don't have tailored magic items, we like the "look what I founds" more than the "I made this"
With that being said, I'd like it If future APS had treasure listed in BOLD like in old 1e modules, so you could scan ahead real easy and then decide if you needed to add or take anything out.
be nice if this could be done.
future APs could use a bit more armor and/or shield peices too.
Well, it's a pain when you have four people using longswords, in a group for example, and you just find daggers, maces and scimitars. It's kinda hard to say "oh yea, he was trying to bash your head in with a mace, but that's all of a sudden a longsword."
But if there is, say a longsword, in the near future, no need to change it up, because a glance over really quick will tell you it's coming up. The Italics doesn't stand out very well.
In my experience you have to sell most of what you find because it is the wrong stuff. This combined with not finding everything leads to a group that feel lucky to have only a little less than WBL. Unless someone dies, which bringt the party to way under WBL.
For example we had one pc death in Kingmaker during the fight with the stag lord.
Bringing back the dead pc destroyed all the wealth the battle would have given us and put us to about or below half WBL.
Our party never recovered from this blow to their economics. For me the consequence was to wipe away the tear, mourn about the loss and start a new pc instead of ruining the party once more by having them raise my pc.
Don't forget cold iron bumps up the price of that dagger...
wow! thread necro much.
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IT LIVES! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!