Wealth by Level

[Shar Tahl]

How does everyone treat this table in their games? I know I have gone both ways, treating it as total value of their equipment and as a lump sum of gold to spend during character creation. Blowing feats to have a little more equipment is a pretty high cost, especially for classes without bonus feats, so I mostly allow that. I know I definitely don't let them craft for other characters using their lump o cash during character creation.

The two ways seem the same, but if say, a fighter, took master craftsman and crafted magic wondrous items, arms and armor using the starting money, his total equipment market value would be much higher than his level's wealth listed.

[qlawdat]

IMO it is rarely an issue. I make sure my players always ask me though. I also have the rule that you cant buy anything for more the cost of half of your starting wealth, and if you were to make an item its base cost cannot be more than half starting wealth. So if you start with 33,000 at 8th level you couldn't make an item that has a base cost of more than 16,500 gold.

That said I Don't think the players can ever be too powerful. As a GM you can always find good ways of making the baddies more powerful.

Another thing I do if we are starting at high level, I give the players half of their starting gold to spend them selves. I then see what they want for their character and what they are spending gold on, and I spend the other half for them (fairly). I often find that after character creation you never get quite exactly the gear you want. So if the group played from level 1 to 8 and one played makes a new character why should he get exactly the gear he wants? I don't screw them with bad gear, just I don't give them that perfect gear. But this is really only something I find helpful for high levels.

[KaeYoss]

I've done away with treasure management completely and hard-wired the monetary gain to the XP gain. So if you get XP for CR 13, you get money for CR 13, too. If the enemy had something interesting, you can "buy" it from him (i.e. you take the item and decrease your "credit level" accordingly") but other than that, it's not really important what the treasure would have been.

It works quite well for us, I'd say. Players don't have to keep track of party loot, there are no big selling sessions after a longer dungeon crawl or anything.

The party ends up with wealth that sums up to about what the wealth table says, so it all works out.

I might do things differently for our next campaign, which is Kingmaker, since they'll have plenty of use for even mundane items (a growing realm needs lots of things) and more than enough spare time to really make item creation feats count.

[Brian Bachman]

Shar Tahl wrote:

How does everyone treat this table in their games? I know I have gone both ways, treating it as total value of their equipment and as a lump sum of gold to spend during character creation. Blowing feats to have a little more equipment is a pretty high cost, especially for classes without bonus feats, so I mostly allow that. I know I definitely don't let them craft for other characters using their lump o cash during character creation.

The two ways seem the same, but if say, a fighter, took master craftsman and crafted magic wondrous items, arms and armor using the starting money, his total equipment market value would be much higher than his level's wealth listed.

I don't use it at all except as a very general guideline when creating characters at other than first level.

Seriously, this chart is misused and misapplied so much that I would argue for it to be either removed in future editions or accompanied by much stronger caveats about its intended use and placed in a book intended only for GMs.

Your interpretation of the crafting rules has been fiercely debated before on these boards, and count me as one of those who says you can't use crafting to double your effective WBL if you are creating a character of more than 1st level. Others differ in their opinions.