Wealth-by-Level as Meta-resource

[Firechanter]

(I mentioned this in another thread but thought it might use some dedicated discussion, so sorry for any déjà vus.)

When I talked to my fellow players about our next D&D game, one said he isn't comfortable with the idea of having to hoard treasure to buy gear. You see, he's the type that wants to spend his loot on carousing and wenches and custom hats and parrots and all that.

This reminded me of an idea had before, so I said fine, how about we separate ingame wealth and metagame resources. Will have to work out the details, but the cornerstones are:
1) keep using the WBL table, but define GP as "Gear Points" rather than "Gold Pieces".
2) you can't buy or upgrade magical items with gold. However, you can expend Gear Points to do so. Looted magical items count against your Gear Points, but you can trade them in.
3) Any actual gold you find is there to blow on mundane items (with which you will be saturated pretty soon), after-adventure comforts, or "ale and whores".

How those gear upgrades are actually worked into the game is a different story. For one thing you don't need Magic Mart. Of course you may find magic stuff in your loot, and in some cases, you may use friendly NPC enchanters who owe the party a favour to make or upgrade gear.
In case of "standard" enchantments, such as enhancement bonuses to armour etc., you might completely ignore it ingame, just spend the GP and your armour is a point better.

FWIW, the campaign is probably going to start at level 5 and will hopefully go all the way to highest levels.

What are your thoughts on the matter? Anything I need to keep in mind, special caveats?

[Aharon]

This is similar to the system I use. In my game, after sessions, I hand out a part of the WBL that is proportional to the XP they got (i.e. if they are 5th level and get 2500 xp, they also get half their WBL for level 5). This money, they can spend on stuff normally between sessions.
In addition to this metagame WBL, I hand out specific items I find cool/made up myself/are from Frank&Ks tomes, plus lots of gold, gameworld-rewards (like mansions, lands, titles etc.), because with only metagame rewards, the game would become boring.

In-game, they can buy stuff from their in-game gold, but it's no "I buy this and am done", but RP-encounters where the seller usually won't be content with just taking gold. This is so that they can still, i.e., get that scroll of Discern Location which they absolutely didn't foresee they would need. They could try to buy permanent items (armor, rings etc.) and fully-charged wands in-game, but unless there is a very good in-game reason why they didn't use their WBL-money for these, I wouldn't allow it.

[Firechanter]

Yeah, that's actually a pretty cool side effect. Separating "crunch money" from "fluff money" you actually get the players to spend their hard-earned cash on fluff.
Reminds me of that one game, where as major quest reward every character was warded a low-end nobility title (even below Knight) and got to choose between two further rewards: a significant pile of gold (10K at level 5), or some land. I don't even remember if the land came with taxpayers, but I think not. Needless to say, everyone who wanted to keep playing their character took the gold.

[PersonMan]

This sounds good.

I'm going to be stealing appropriating it for my own use in the future.

[Haarkla]

When I talked to my fellow players about our next D&D game, one said he isn't comfortable with the idea of having to hoard treasure to buy gear. You see, he's the type that wants to spend his loot on carousing and wenches and custom hats and parrots and all that.

This reminded me of an idea had before, so I said fine, how about we separate ingame wealth and metagame resources.
I would never play in a game that used such rules. It would totally ruin immersion. Sounds far to gamist for my liking.

Tell him to spend his starting wealth on a good magical sword, and start roleplaying. If he needs additional gear either hand it out as treasure or have the party go on a quest for it.

When I DM you cant just walk into a shop and buy powerful magical items.

[pffh]

I would never play in a game that used such rules. It would totally ruin immersion. Sounds far to gamist for my liking.

Tell him to spend his starting wealth on a good magical sword, and start roleplaying. If he needs additional gear either hand it out as treasure or have the party go on a quest for it.

When I DM you cant just walk into a shop and buy powerful magical items.

Why not? Some people (like myself) like playing in a world where magic is abundant and freely available and in such a world there would naturally be shops filled with magical items.

In fact this sort of attitude that the only real way to roleplay is when magic is rare and everything needs a quest and otherwise it's rollplay annoys me. I just want my gear and my magic so we can get on with the bloody epic story we are telling and not need to take a break from chasing down the dragons killing the gods every time one of us wants a new sword.

[Kallisti]

I would never play in a game that used such rules. It would totally ruin immersion. Sounds far to gamist for my liking.

Tell him to spend his starting wealth on a good magical sword, and start roleplaying. If he needs additional gear either hand it out as treasure or have the party go on a quest for it.

When I DM you cant just walk into a shop and buy powerful magical items.

Why would it ruin immersion? The value of magic items is a metagame concept. I spend Gear Points to upgrade my +3 sword to +4. In-character, nothing happened. All we did was change the value I add to the die when I roll it, which has nothing to do with immersion, "gamism," or roleplaying.

It'd be harder to justify adding non-static properties, true--like if I want to add Vicious or Flaming. I'm sure you could find an acceptable handwave for something not too flashy--Vicious? It's my fighting style, devastating but leaves me exposed--and you could always just disallow buying flashy properties like Screaming or what-not with Gear Points.

Besides, you're making the assumption that "Magic Mart is bad." In your setting, perhaps, but if I run a game in Eberron and magic isn't freely available, people are going to wonder if I bothered to read the Eberron Campaign Setting. More generically, sure, buying the Infinity Plus One Sword in Podunk, Nowhere strains belief, but why shouldn't a bustling metropolis in a world where anyone with sufficient intelligence can become a mage have a wide variety of magic items to purchase?

[Curmudgeon]

When I talked to my fellow players about our next D&D game, one said he isn't comfortable with the idea of having to hoard treasure to buy gear. You see, he's the type that wants to spend his loot on carousing and wenches and custom hats and parrots and all that.
Then let him do so, and just use whatever gear he acquires in treasure instead of shopping for stuff.

It's roleplaying. If he wants to play a character who doesn't care about equipment, that's perfectly fine; he can enjoy the experience of carousing and then (almost inevitably) dying.

[Epsilon Rose]

I do sort of like the idea of separating meta wealth from fluff wealth, but I see several problems with this system.

I (and this one is a personal opinion) absolutely hate being penalized for picking up and using an enemy's weapon. I already "payed" for it by getting it from the enemy, I shouldn't have to pay for it again to use it. That's for the stuff I actually buy and don't want/can't acquire via some rp means.
How does this take crafting into account?
You said this character wants to spend his cash on carousing and the like and you want to reward that (with good reason. Fluff expenditures should be encouraged.) but shouldn't a character on the other end of the spectrum (ie. one who spends all his money on bettering himself and improving his odds) get some reward? It's sort of like how in real life you can choose to spend your money on entertainment or something that will help you at your job.

Ideally, what I'd like to see is some system that can give some alternative incentive for people who spend there money on public entertainment/public relations. Perhaps better info, moral bonuses, public support, discounts, better gear (ie the blacksmith considers him a friend so he puts more effort into making his longsword and it get's a +1 to damage). But I'm not sure how feasible the creation of such a system would be, especially if it took higher levels into account.

There are two fairly similar alternatives. The first and simplest is to say your an adventurer of X level and as an intelligent being you've been putting aside money for basic living expenses (this could also be used to explain away what they eat/sleep in/ transport) and can spend this much money freely on that sort of thing and if you want to spend more you have to start dipping into your adventuring funds. The option is to adopt a version of d20 moderns wealth system (which is basically a more robust version of what I just described). The first thing is to do a way with gb entirely (it's broken and silly so this is probably a good idea anyways) and give people a wealth level. This doesn't represent how much cash you actually have on you but how much you're comfortable spending. If you purchase things that are bellow your wealth value it not an expenditure you'd really notice, so most adventures would be able to purchase ale and whores without a second thought but if you purchase something above your wealth level (or something that's just flat out expensive) like that flaming burst bastard sword you've had your eyes on your wealth level takes a hit and your not going to be able to be quite so free with money for a while.

[Fitz10019]

For me, the "just hand it out as treasure" philosophy hurts immersion more than magic mart. In order to successfully satisfy player's equipment needs and wants, you would have to discuss it in advance, and then lo and behold that shambling mound the party just defeated just happens to have the gloves of holding someone wanted. That would happen mid-session, too, so it really kicks immersion in the shins. [And the players would have to take turns getting what they wanted. That is too much unnecessary bookkeeping (and politics) for me as DM.]

I've also had DMs who, in an effort to maintain immersion, would give loot gear that was merely similar to what you wanted.

Generic loot and between session shopping is the way to go in my book. Maybe this is because I cut my teeth on Living Greyhawk.

In the campaign I recently started, I told the players that everytime they level, they may re-outfit themselves according to the WBL table as if the character were new (but with no more than 15% spend on consumables). The campaign is still too new to declare the success or failure.

I like the OP's idea of Gear Points v. Gold Points approach, especially if it leads to acts of indulgence, charity, self-promotion, etc. The consequences of those acts can be a rich source of player-choice related plot options.

[Firechanter]

I also don't see how it would ruin immersion. On the contrary, what's far more ruinous to immersuin for me includes:
- seeing that a level 20 character in mundane full plate can't defend himself any better than a level 1 character in mundane full plate.
- looting the hoard of an adult dragon that comes down to one cubic foot of gold. Hello? Bed of coins? More like a first aid sheet!
- constantly having to swap out your gear because you find better stuff. That's nice for a computer game, but in an RPG it makes the honourable meme of "your father's sword" totally unplayable. Luckily, items can be upgraded, but the outside conditions need to support it, too.

I think plain Plusses or even non-flashy magical properties can simply be integrated by gear point choice without harming immersion at all. Flashy stuff like Flaming Burst etc. might be a different matter, that should probably have some background in the game.

BTW, I've also played on a NWN online server where, although not an official rule, gold is best thought of as metagame resource. This allows players, for instance, to play poor character indepently from their actual wealth. In RP, characters usually talk about small amounts of silver pennies and not about ten thousand gold pieces. That, in my experience, makes for much better immersion.

[Fitz10019]

I was thinking of NWN1 servers earlier, in the terms of low-magic, because on that system you could have Masterwork +1, +2, +3 -- non-magical bonuses only to the attack, to reflect higher and higher levels of non-magical craftsmanship.

In terms of "my father's sword" and Gear Points, the character's increased competence could 'unlock' previously unknown powers of an ancient sword. Unfortunately, this idea is tripped up by a pearl and a 1st level spell. I'd really like a system that limits the information provided by Identify.

[Firechanter]

I was thinking of NWN1 servers earlier, in the terms of low-magic, because on that system you could have Masterwork +1, +2, +3 -- non-magical bonuses only to the attack, to reflect higher and higher levels of non-magical craftsmanship.

Funny you should mention that, that's exactly how we handle it on said server. Maybe you have played on it? (MERP-UK / UTT2 / Wireplay).
Being a Middle Earth game, truly and officially magical weapons are very few, but you get "Improved", "Superior" and "Masterwork" weapons with +1- to +3 attack bonus, and some regional special weapons with +2 to +6 to damage and/or other properties on top. Armour goes all the way up to +5, but is also considered non-magical (for instance, +4 is "Artificer's"). Other quasi-magical items have similar adjectives. The whole system is designed to depict a low-magic word with a high-magic engine; it's not perfect but it works pretty well.

[Frozen_Feet]

I'd support this kind of system, and have been thinking of devising something similar for a game of my own. Though you could go a bit further and scrap the "gear" part entirely, and make them "generic" character improvement points.

Good things I see in separating "fluff" and "crunch money":

- It allows for separation of high-level magic items from normal economy. Especially in D&D, a problem is that magic and non-magical items operate on different levels of wealth entirely, leading to awkward question of why doesn't transition of magical items upheave the local economy each time like it should. With the separation, you don't have to worry nearly as much about where all that gold is coming from, where it will end up.

The GM can actually throw around setting-appropriate amounts of coinage without having to worry about it breaking the game when someone injects it all in magical industry. When magic items don't have defined IC prices, it raises way fewer eyebrows for the GM to say that magic items are not available, or that you can't just buy them with money.

- It remedies "magical hobo syndrome". When magic items are bought with actual in-character wealth, it leads to the hugely amusing phenomenom where a character has magic sword and armor worth a kingdom, but can't afford a house for himself. This becomes way more plausible when you can't objectively state that magic items are worth a kingdom.

[Firechanter]

Oh, there was a question about item creation. Well, aside the fact that this is intended as houserule for my group, and I'm pretty sure that none of us are going to make an item creator:
Let's say that would work in exactly the same pattern. You pay the "gold" cost out of your WBL GP, and the XP cost as usual. If you sell the item on the market, however, you get ingame cash, which you can't use to create more items.
If a player uses this method to create gear for himself and the party, the effect is the same as per standard rules: invest feats, lose some XP, gain double effective WBL. That's how it works.

As a side effect, players can no longer break the game with Infinite Money tricks, such as Profession:Trader. Such a skill can still earn you a lot of cash, but it's going to be ingame cash that does not affect WBL. Their characters will be rich and can buy houses, castles, caravans, but not run around with level 20 gear at level 5.

[gbprime]

Look at it this way... if you hand the character 1000 gp and he spends 500 of it on ale and whores, then you really only handed the character 500gp. Expenditures on pure roleplay aren't really WBL, since WBL measures equipment and ability to handle expected CR encounters.

Let him keep doing this as much as he wants, then drop a magic item he needs in his lap every so often.

[Fitz10019]

... drop a magic item he needs in his lap every so often.
Is that better immersion than between-level shopping, in your opinion? I'm not trying to bait you, I just honestly don't understand.

[Frozen_Feet]

Is that better immersion than between-level shopping, in your opinion? I'm not trying to bait you, I just honestly don't understand.

For a band of adventurers who go adventuring in far-off locations where great beasts dwell and ancient magic reigns, finding magic items on their way is vastly more plausible than buying from the nearest backwater town mainly consisting of peasants and non-magical craftsmen.

It depends on the quality of the setting. I'll take, for example, Praedor and its world of Jaconia. Within Jaconia, magic is strictly regulated. Wizards live in their own isolated city. Buying poweful magic items is not something you do casually in your free time, it's a quest all to its own!

However, Jaconia is surrounded by Borvaria, magical ruins of ancient wizard civilization. It is the main motivation for the namesakes of the system, Praedors, to trek there and loot everything that doesn't kill them in a horrible way. Searching the ruins for riches and magical artefacts is what their life revolves around. If one happens to find a nifty magical sword, hey, more the glory for him!

[gbprime]

Is that better immersion than between-level shopping, in your opinion? I'm not trying to bait you, I just honestly don't understand.

Yeah, that's totally a setting-driven decision.

My setting uses the "magic shops are just sales contacts" idea. Each shop sells components, scroll making supplies, potions, and trinkets. You want something good, the guy can arrange to have it delivered from the dude he knows who is selling it. Takes a while, depending on the shop.

But in that case, if the PC is being a true wastrel with his money, he may have SPENT part of the payment for the item by the time the item is delivered. Do that once and it's an adventure. Do that more often, and it's easier on everyone to just have him FIND an item he needs (or perform a great service for a chick who can MAKE one for him). And if he has too much money after that... rob him. WBL solved. :smallamused:

[Firechanter]

Look at it this way... if you hand the character 1000 gp and he spends 500 of it on ale and whores, then you really only handed the character 500gp. Expenditures on pure roleplay aren't really WBL, since WBL measures equipment and ability to handle expected CR encounters.

That's all nice, but we are not playing a solo campaign. There will be a party, and loot will be split evenly. Now if each player blows a differing portion of their loot on High Living, WBL goes down the gutter faster than you can sneeze. The more I'd try to balance one char's WBL, the more broken the other ones would become.

[gbprime]

That's all nice, but we are not playing a solo campaign. There will be a party, and loot will be split evenly. Now if each player blows a differing portion of their loot on High Living, WBL goes down the gutter faster than you can sneeze. The more I'd try to balance one char's WBL, the more broken the other ones would become.

Hence the reason of handing a PC an item specifically. If you just hand them gold, then everyone has to get some. But if you hand out a +2 Keen Rapier and only one PC uses a Rapier, you can be assured that he'll receive it. He then receives less gold that adventure since he got a cool item, but that's fine because he was blowing it anyway.

You can't just say "well he spent it on lifestyle" and throw it out the window like that, you have to balance it after the fact. Example...

A rogue, a cleric, and a ranger adventure together. The rogue blows half of everything he earns on wild living. The cleric gives half of everything to his church. The ranger gives nothing away and spends it all on equipment upgrades. Ten levels later, the ranger is armed to the teeth while the cleric and the rogue are underequippped.

Your job as a DM is to prevent this. The rogue and the cleric must therefore get more stuff. If you feel this is unfair to the ranger player, then hand out extra helpings of greif and plot complications to the rogue and the cleric. In the meantime, the Ranger has the cool gear NOW, while the other two have to spend a while just WANTING it.

[Curmudgeon]

A rogue, a cleric, and a ranger adventure together. The rogue blows half of everything he earns on wild living. The cleric gives half of everything to his church. The ranger gives nothing away and spends it all on equipment upgrades. Ten levels later, the ranger is armed to the teeth while the cleric and the rogue are underequippped.

Your job as a DM is to prevent this.
No, no, no, a thousand times no. That approach is totally backward.

Your job as a DM is simply to provide an adequate source of wealth through the game, and then step back and let the players run their characters. Intervening in a heavy-handed fashion either penalizes players for running their characters smartly, or rewards players for running their characters stupidly. That's going to make the good players hate you, and for cause.

[Firechanter]

On the other hand you could say that players should not be penalized for roleplaying the fluff part of their character. If one wants to play a carousing dwarf and the other an ascetic monk, one gets punished for remaining in-character and the other does not. Also, I don't like the idea of (indirectly) forcing everyone to play ascetic characters if they don't want to suffer mechanical disadvantages in the game.

But curmudgeon has a point nonetheless: I don't want to baby-sit some players and micro-manage everybody's gear. Had to do the latter last time I DMed, after I took over a mid-level group from another DM who didn't give a tinker's cuss about WBL, and the ca. 11th-level characters' net worths were wildly disparate (anywhere from <10.000 to >100.000GP, and I am not making this up!). I spend the next few sessions seeding the loot drops with customized gear to get the poorer characters halfway up to par.

Hence, the plan to use the Gear Point approach. There I don't have to micromanage anything, and I don't put anyone at a disadvantage for playing the character they want to play. They still have to give thought to what upgrades they purchase with their WBL, so the powergamers can be expected to get more out of it than the casual ones.

So far I haven't discovered a real flaw in this method. Looks like everybody wins.

[mint]

I ran a campaign where proliferation of magic items would have been awkward. I let the players use their WBL to learn "techniques" instead.
The game drew pretty heavily on east asian fairy tales etc.
So if anything, having a lot of the tinsel items be native to the character made them feel more like they belonged in a world that was kind of fantastic to begin with.
It turned out really well but a lot of that was the setting.

In general, if they wanted tinsel for their character, they could learn by spending WBL. I gave them full WBL but it was not accessible at any time. Before every other session we sat down and talked over their investments.
I thought about making them jump through hoops if one of them wanted a new sword or something particularly exotic. But there was so much else going on it felt like that would just amount to quest clutter.

Then, in addition to WBL I threw them the occasional weird junk and consumables. Like a illusion dispelling short sword (because the MIC tables looked like a lot of fun).

[Epsilon Rose]

On the other hand you could say that players should not be penalized for roleplaying the fluff part of their character. If one wants to play a carousing dwarf and the other an ascetic monk, one gets punished for remaining in-character and the other does not. Also, I don't like the idea of (indirectly) forcing everyone to play ascetic characters if they don't want to suffer mechanical disadvantages in the game.


I don't think that's really fair to the person who actually wants to play the ascetic. It seems that by only letting gold be used for fluff purposes you heavily favor those who want to go carousing as the ascetic/focused (they don't actually need to be an ascetic to not want to go whoring) character can't really do anything directly related to their goal with all the loot they're plundering while the wastrels can.
Rather than simply trying to keep every one on an equal level with the same set of resources it would probably make more sense to have some other set of rewards for the characters who spend their money on more social endeavors.

[Pigkappa]

When I talked to my fellow players about our next D&D game, one said he isn't comfortable with the idea of having to hoard treasure to buy gear. You see, he's the type that wants to spend his loot on carousing and wenches and custom hats and parrots and all that.


What levels are your characters? Unless they are extremely low level (1 to 3 I would say), he can only spend just very little of his gold this way. That is, unless he starts having 300 dedicated prostitutes, a contract with every tavern of the world to drink free everywhere, and pays several stylists to make new custom hats.

[Firechanter]

Well sure, that's a different perspective. Actually we're prolly going to skip the lowest levels and start on lv 5. Iirc WBL is somewhere around 10K at that level.

Come to think of it, that player may be once bitten, twice shy -- his only previous D&D experience was with a different group where by level 5 he had maybe 500GP to his name. His colleagues had a bit more, but iirc also way below WBL. So maybe it would already be enough to just show him the WBL table and tell him it's going to be applied.
But that would then take us back to the problem of "dragon hoard size: tiny", which could elegantly be avoided by the meta-points approach.

[Pigkappa]

But that would then take us back to the problem of "dragon hoard size: tiny", which could elegantly be avoided by the meta-points approach.

Or you can make the dragon hoard be partially made of copper and silver coins and be as big as you want...

I think this is better than drasticly changing the rules to include gear points.

[Endarire]

What about letting the fluff expenses be just fluff? I played a game where we accumulated a bar tab, but never paid for it.

[Firechanter]

Or you can make the dragon hoard be partially made of copper and silver coins and be as big as you want...

Silver wouldn't be large enough volume either. Okay, if it was _all_ copper - and that's not very cool - the hoard is going to be 200 times as big as if it was gold (because copper is just about half as dense as gold). So instead of 1 cu.ft it would be 200 cu.ft. That's 5.4 cubic metres.

An adult red dragon is Huge, i.e. takes 15*15ft, or 225 square feet. Which means his bed of... copper is less than a foot thick. Okay, I guess it would be enough for a (very compact) bed, but still: copper is just not cool, also not very durable, it will grow green with time, and be even less appealing to a dragon.

Nah, before I do that, I'd rather revert to the idea someone posted on a different forum once: it's all gold pieces but the dragon absorbs all the precious "essence" and leaves just a bittle pile of worthless crumbs. Sifting through the pile you find an amount of remaining gold coins to the amount specified by his treasure size.

[gbprime]

Nah, before I do that, I'd rather revert to the idea someone posted on a different forum once: it's all gold pieces but the dragon absorbs all the precious "essence" and leaves just a bittle pile of worthless crumbs. Sifting through the pile you find an amount of remaining gold coins to the amount specified by his treasure size.

Well that would explain how you enchant a magic item then... pour gold onto it until all the gold is absorbed and transformed into a sufficiently strong foo field effect.

[Siosilvar]

Nah, before I do that, I'd rather revert to the idea someone posted on a different forum once: it's all gold pieces but the dragon absorbs all the precious "essence" and leaves just a bittle pile of worthless crumbs. Sifting through the pile you find an amount of remaining gold coins to the amount specified by his treasure size.

I like that idea, but how about this one:

That's how much gold I'll let you carry out. There's more, but you're going to need a wagon train to get it. EDIT: [Which is another adventure in and of itself! Fight off other scavengers to earn coincidentally the listed treasure for their ELs! Bonus if you get there faster!]

And if you don't like "pouring gold onto things" to enchant them (also an interesting idea), that's the price to hire someone to get the phoenix feather, green-gold mushroom caps, and troll ichor the wizard needs to make Bracers of Armor AC6 +4.

...yes, I do borrow heavily from AD&D. Why do you ask? :smallwink:

[tyckspoon]

I like that idea, but how about this one:

That's how much gold I'll let you carry out. There's more, but you're going to need a wagon train to get it. EDIT: [Which is another adventure in and of itself! Fight off other scavengers to earn coincidentally the listed treasure for their ELs! Bonus if you get there faster!]


I'll assume somewhere in there you first ruled out or destroyed the various magics with the explicit purpose of making this a complete non-issue, because there's at least 3 in core material with another 2 or 3 that make large hauls easier to deal with even if you don't just shove them in an extra-dimensional hole.

[Ormur]

By mid-levels I find that spending money like hyperactive shopaholics that just won the national lottery doesn't dent your WBL that much. The DM might also help such roleplaying by making sure to adjust loot to the higher proportion of consumables the WBL is spent on.

In one campaign we had spent a few weeks staying in the most expensive hotel of the kingdom's capital and found ourselves comparatively short on cash after splurging on some expensive magic items. We dreaded loosing even more money paying for the hotel bill but it just amounted to something like 200 gp, maybe a tenth of what we considered low cash reserves at that level.

In my own campaign at a lower level the players figured buying up every vacant hotel room in a city of 80.000 people would be a good way of hiding where they slept that night to avoid an assassination. I did the math and again it cost something like 200 gp.

Even adventurers would find them selves strapped for cash doing just that every day but the money tends to come in so fast when you're looting level appropriate challenges every other day that they shouldn't notice it.

[Firechanter]

As for "hauling away the huge hoard", I've already done the maths on this some time earlier... it really isn't a problem. There are bags of holding, shrink object, teleport... a dozen ways to skin the cat.

As for "high living" still costing only a fraction of your wealth -- those are all fair points. I will give them due consideration, and also talk it over with my group. I guess I could also just sprinkle out some extra cash and mundane rewards (like some land, a residence...) that I don't count against WBL.

[LansXero]

I don't count against WBL.

Thats the solution, basically. Only count against WBL that which will be used for mechanical upgrades and give them a bit more free cash for random RPyness. As for dropping specific loot runing inmersion, you can always try to keep it consistent with the source of said loot. They wont get a custom tailored wish-list, but they shouldt at least not see only bows when no one is an archer. . .

[Pigkappa]

Silver wouldn't be large enough volume either. Okay, if it was _all_ copper - and that's not very cool - the hoard is going to be 200 times as big as if it was gold (because copper is just about half as dense as gold). So instead of 1 cu.ft it would be 200 cu.ft. That's 5.4 cubic metres.

An adult red dragon is Huge, i.e. takes 15*15ft, or 225 square feet. Which means his bed of... copper is less than a foot thick. Okay, I guess it would be enough for a (very compact) bed, but still: copper is just not cool, also not very durable, it will grow green with time, and be even less appealing to a dragon.

Nah, before I do that, I'd rather revert to the idea someone posted on a different forum once: it's all gold pieces but the dragon absorbs all the precious "essence" and leaves just a bittle pile of worthless crumbs. Sifting through the pile you find an amount of remaining gold coins to the amount specified by his treasure size.

Is this really a problem to be considered? They aren't gonna kill many dragons, and I don't think they are going to ask you about the mass density of the dragon's treasure.

[Frozen_Feet]

I've seen the idea in this thread that the meta-point system would be "unfair" to ascetic/focused characters, and I find that silly. It isn't a factor of the game that extremely introverted approach makes a character lose out some, it's the logical conclusion of choosing that lifestyle. Making all roleplaying choices equal is not the GM's task, quite the contrary.

I don't think "high living only takes tiny fraction of wealth" is a very good counter-argument, because the meta-point system would remove quite a lot of silliness related to exactly that. I refer to the "magical hobo" syndrome I talked about earlier.

[Cieyrin]

My thought on it is to borrow from 4E (one of the few things they did that I actually appreciate) and bring in the concept of Residuum, a.k.a. portable magical essence. It's use is in the casting of spells and making of magic items, which typically makes it not very useful to the common folk, since the barkeep and their neighbors can't do anything with it and don't want to trade magic dust for food and ale.

Basically, create two systems of trade that typically have very little interaction with each other. The coin is thus never vastly undervalued by the entrance of magic loot into the system, since no one trading them is trading coin for 'em. This also gives you a reason for hunting magical critters, since you can make the corpse worth an amount of residuum when converted, so no having to wonder why that owlbear had a chest of loot in its lair or having to have random corpses in the otyugh's cesspit to explain where that level's chunk of WBL is coming from.

[Zombimode]

And if you don't like "pouring gold onto things" to enchant them (also an interesting idea), that's the price to hire someone to get the phoenix feather, green-gold mushroom caps, and troll ichor the wizard needs to make Bracers of Armor AC6 +4.

...yes, I do borrow heavily from AD&D. Why do you ask? :smallwink:

Nah, you are borrowing from the "magic item creation for *******" section of AD&D. If you would borrow from the "magic item creation for real men" section your wizard would need gather the Head Of The Troll That Never Existed, the Feeling Of An Mushrooms Heart Attack and a Fenix Down :smalltongue:

[LansXero]

Making all roleplaying choices equal is not the GM's task, quite the contrary.

Therefore, "high living" characters get to suck it up and deal with the consequences of their choices, as in, reduced wealth to spend mechanically. Right?

[Firechanter]

Frankly I'm really torn what to do / propose to my group now. One thing is that normal WBL assumes about 10% of treasure spent as consumables (give or take); meta-gearpoints would kinda shoot this balance point to smithereens. For instance, think of all the spells requiring materials worth a few hundred GP - normally you restrict yourself to casting just a few of them, but if you're rich and don't need the money for gear, you can go Stoneskin all day.

On the other hand, meta-WBL allows playing campaigns where cashflow/loot is extremely low for some reason or other. In the most basic sense, stuff like "defending destitute villagers against nekkid monsters that carry no trezer".

[Frozen_Feet]

Therefore, "high living" characters get to suck it up and deal with the consequences of their choices, as in, reduced wealth to spend mechanically. Right?

That'd be a good solution, were it not for the fact that peculiarities of D&D throw it all out of whack - namely, if a character even close to mid-levels manages to do this, they're throwing around enough gold to turn a small village to a metropolis or something.

"High living" can still be self-penalizing within the game where WBL is turned into character creation points - in fact, it can be more so, since the character's power is not as easily turned into in-character money. The character can end up being actually poor, instead of just faking it.

[Epsilon Rose]

I still think a wealth system would be the best bet but I have yet to see one for dnd.

[Cieyrin]

I still think a wealth system would be the best bet but I have yet to see one for dnd.

There was an attempt in Iron Heroes in the Wealth feat system, since money is pretty meaningless in that low magic system. There was also an alternative system to gain mechanical benefits for carousing in the form of having gp spent convert to XP, which served as alternative to the norm of kill, loot, repeat. Both of those are in Mastering Iron Heroes, should anyone be interested in looking.