[3.5] easiest ways to get more gold

[Somensjev]

ok, so, i'm one of those people who thinks one can never have enough gold pieces, but, i never seem to have enough in comparison to my level, since you have to buy all kinds of items

so, i was wondering, what are some of the easiest (low-level) ways to get rich quick

i'd like things that any class could do, preferably, but i'm ok with things that only certain classes can do, or things that some may do better than others

thank you in advance for any replies and hopefully this actually makes sense :smallbiggrin: :smalltongue:

[Zweisteine]

Fight monsters. That's the bet way.

I'd you want to make your DM mad, buy a candle of invocation (an evil or good one). Gate in an Efreeti or a Noble Djinni who must grant you three wishes. Wish for 25k go each time. If you want to die, make the third wish for another candle instead.

Craft, perform, and profession have uses that say "earn money." If you hire a bunch of untrained commoners, you can make a production line (they all aid you in crafting items), which is profitable, but a lot of work to figure out. Your best bet is to be an imaging race and spend a few years doing a job.

[Darrin]

5 GP short at character creation? Take the explorer's outfit for free (PHB p. 111), sell it back for half the market price (10 GP / 2 = 5 GP), buy a peasant's outfit for 1 SP.

Then there's the old 10' ladder = two 10' poles trick.

Can you be more specific about what level or resources you have? Casting water to acid is available around level 5, wall of salt around level 7. This older thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=276626) discusses several methods. Or if you have about 1000 GP, you can summon a djinn to create 20 cubic feet of black lotus extract (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showpost.php?p=10040483&postcount=5) with a market value of 86 million GP.

[sideswipe]

Do you care for your characters?

If not then make a 1st level wizard, with 12 brothers, all with collegiate wizard feat. (so they have 6 1st level spells in his book.) and all cantrips. This book is worth hundreds of gold second hand to start up wizards in cities and schools.

So put your book in storage with a note saying if you die it passes to your younger brother.

Kill yourself.

Your younger brother turns up. Gets the book and has two. Sells off his brothers and keeps the gold.

Puts his book and the gold into a vault with A note saying if he dies they pass to his brother.

Kill yourself.
Rinse and repeat.

Last brother is a lvl 1 whatever you want with around 5k gold.

Your Dm hates you forever and bans you from the game.

But hey you died rich :)

[jokeaccount]

There are no easy ways to make gold. If your DM doesn't want you to have all the items you won't and if he does he will give them to you himself. You cannot generally force fights that have good loot tables since those are "scripted" (as in, the DM decides based on his story). The classic ways to make gold is to rip people off using magic. Some examples:

Summon horses (there's an arcane spell for that) and sell them for free profit.
Use suggestion on a merchant to buy your stuff for obscene prices.

However, if the DM wants to counter this he can easily find ways to corner you and you might lose more instead of gaining anything. There was a trick with buying some ladders and then disassembling them and selling to wood individually and according to RAW you make a lot of money (ladders are cheaper to buy as a whole than their parts individually -_-). But that is pure cheese and you will probably get killed by a dragon that wants to keep the trick for himself or smth.

[Somensjev]

i dont have a character at the moment, i'm just trying to compile a list of get-rich-quick schemes

my DM's all follow the idea of "if it's in a book, and you want to do it, then go ahead" (which sometimes ends with interesting results) so, thanks to that the DM won't stop me from doing these things

i'd prefer things that didn't require multiple characters to achieve, but i dont mind reading them

also, i'd like the schemes to work before level 5 (level 10 at the very latest)

[sideswipe]

Someone might have to help me with this one....

Be a 1st level paladin.

If i am correct. there is a demon/ devil you can summon with a word and sacrifice one of your alignments for a ring of 3 wishes.

I cannot remember where i read the demon, and the fine points of it. but i remember about 3 years ago inventing it with my group.

I need help finding him again.

[JeminiZero]

Pazuzu.

Of Pun Pun fame.

[Kioras]

The key is to make as much money as possible without the DM resolving to find out that the city your cash is being made at/stashed in is actually pompei.

One of the ways I recently made some spending cash the last time i played was to sell my spell slots for 1/2 going price, with the other 1/2 going to the temple as a cleric, there are always people who can use a cure spell, of various means.

Few days work netted me a few thousand gold, which covered some travel expenses. You can go ahead and abuse it as much as possible, or atleast as much as your DM allows without suddenly dropping on the DM, 'I sell this stuff at 1/2 market price, and make 5 million gold'

[almightycoma]

i read this on a similar thread. buy gold by weight, then use craft minting to turn it into coins. craft use a 1/3 or 1/2 ratio so you get a lot more coins then the value of the gold you bought.

[Gemini476]

i read this on a similar thread. buy gold by weight, then use craft minting to turn it into coins. craft use a 1/3 or 1/2 ratio so you get a lot more coins then the value of the gold you bought.

You can also use craft(minting) to turn one pound of gold coins into three pounds of gold coins. No need for gold bars.

Also, Wall of Salt. Salt is a trade good, and in 3.5 inflation is not really a thing, and it can be traded as if it were gold. (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/equipment/wealthAndMoney.htm)
Using Google:
(1 inch) * (5 (square feet)) * (2.17 (g / (cm^3))) =
25.6031488 kilograms
Or 56.445 pounds/CL.

At a price of 5gp/lb., that gives you 282.225gp/CL.

[Somensjev]

You can also use craft(minting) to turn one pound of gold coins into three pounds of gold coins. No need for gold bars.


wait, what? :smallconfused:
i'm so tempted to abuse that... :smalltongue:

[Osiris]

Speaking of all the salt tricks, here's one I invented.
1 Buy a Decanter of Endless Water
2 Realize that it can make salt water
3 Buy the world's best strainer
4 Strain the salt (duh)
5 ?
6 PROFIT! You have just invented the infinite salt-making machine:smallbiggrin:

[Curmudgeon]

3 Buy the world's best strainer
4 Strain the salt (duh)

The world's best strainer, in a pre-chemistry civilization (using alchemy instead), is incapable of separating a solution at the molecular level.

Why not bypass this level of indirection and simply buy the world's best gold-making machine?

[Krobar]

The world's best strainer, in a pre-chemistry civilization (using alchemy instead), is incapable of separating a solution at the molecular level.

Why not bypass this level of indirection and simply buy the world's best gold-making machine?

Why not just use the decanter to fill a boiler powered by a permanent wall of fire, and evaporate the water off, leaving the salt?

[Somensjev]

Why not just use the decanter to fill a boiler powered by a permanent wall of fire, and evaporate the water off, leaving the salt?

i'm now going to design a city (in character), and it's entire purpose will be this on a massive scale

i'll start it as a town, getting the needed money from ladders, then i'll buy a decanter and some wall of fire/iron and chamber to do this, then sell the salt, and use to gold to make more chambers like that one, then i'd hire creatures of some sort with fire immunity (or maybe pay a caster to make me some golems) to collect and sell the salt for me (they'd be paid a portion of the gold they get)
i think i could manage that while i adventure

[Eaglejarl]

A few more:

Quarterstaves are free. Firewood is 1cp

It doesn't say how MUCH firewood you get for 1cp. So, assuming you want to have a small fire for not very long, grind your quarterstaff up into splinters and sell each one for 1cp

A 10' ladder costs 5 copper. It is made up of some rungs (firewood), and two 10' poles (2sp each). Buy ladders, sell poles, repeat.

A gallon of ale costs 2sp. 8 mugs costs 16cp. A mug of ale, going by weight, is 1 pint and costs 4cp. There are 8 pints in a gallon so the gallon of beer costs you 2sp to buy but, as soon as you pour it into the mugs you can sell it for 3.2sp. The first gallon pays for the ale and the mugs, every gallon after that nets you 1.2sp

Musical instruments are 5gp. A woodblock is a musical instrument and quarterstaves are still free.

A blank spellbook costs 15gp. It has 100 parchment pages. Tear the pages out and they are suddenly worth 20gp for the parchment.

50' of silk rope costs 10gp. Monster Summoning III gets you 1d4+1 Small Fiendish Spiders, each of which is capable of spinning a web "5 to 60 feet square depending on size". Assuming that Small spiders spin a 5'x5' web, that's 3600 square inches. 50' of silk rope is about 25 square inches (50' long, 1/2" wide; I'm ignoring thickess for simplicity). That means one spider web is 72 ropes, or 720 gp for the investment of 1 third level spell. (Monster Summoning I and II will get you one spider or 1d3 spiders respectively, so if you fill all your spell slots for the day with MS, then at 5th level you can cast it 6 times for a total of 1d4+2d3+4 spiders, each of which makes you at leas 720gp. Oh -- the webs are ordinarily sticky, so you've got two choices: convince your DM that you can have the spider spin only the non-sticky strands that it uses to move in the web (which is real (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_silk#Types_of_silk), and could easily be done), or you can roll the silk in dirt to cover up the sticky, or wash it in acetone / a dilute acid to remove the sticky.

If you have, or can hire, the appropriate skills you can also weave the silk into more expensive things -- noble / royal clothes, silk armor, etc.


Oh, you can also milk the spiders for their poison and sell that. I don't remember the price for poison, though.

In short, if you're a wizard, money ain't no thing.

[luthais]

50' of silk rope costs 10gp. Monster Summoning III gets you 1d4+1 Small Fiendish Spiders, each of which is capable of spinning a web "5 to 60 feet square depending on size". Assuming that Small spiders spin a 5'x5' web, that's 3600 square inches. 50' of silk rope is about 25 square inches (50' long, 1/2" wide; I'm ignoring thickess for simplicity). That means one spider web is 72 ropes, or 720 gp for the investment of 1 third level spell. (Monster Summoning I and II will get you one spider or 1d3 spiders respectively, so if you fill all your spell slots for the day with MS, then at 5th level you can cast it 6 times for a total of 1d4+2d3+4 spiders, each of which makes you at leas 720gp. Oh -- the webs are ordinarily sticky, so you've got two choices: convince your DM that you can have the spider spin only the non-sticky strands that it uses to move in the web (which is real (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_silk#Types_of_silk), and could easily be done), or you can roll the silk in dirt to cover up the sticky, or wash it in acetone / a dilute acid to remove the sticky.

If you have, or can hire, the appropriate skills you can also weave the silk into more expensive things -- noble / royal clothes, silk armor, etc.


Oh, you can also milk the spiders for their poison and sell that. I don't remember the price for poison, though.

In short, if you're a wizard, money ain't no thing.

...I have no words, just a feeling of awe and a dumbfounded expression... Why didn't I think of this?!?!

[Mithril Leaf]

Do you care for your characters?

If not then make a 1st level wizard, with 12 brothers, all with collegiate wizard feat. (so they have 6 1st level spells in his book.) and all cantrips. This book is worth hundreds of gold second hand to start up wizards in cities and schools.

So put your book in storage with a note saying if you die it passes to your younger brother.

Kill yourself.

Your younger brother turns up. Gets the book and has two. Sells off his brothers and keeps the gold.

Puts his book and the gold into a vault with A note saying if he dies they pass to his brother.

Kill yourself.
Rinse and repeat.

Last brother is a lvl 1 whatever you want with around 5k gold.

Your Dm hates you forever and bans you from the game.

But hey you died rich :)

I've done the math, assuming that all 2nd party books are on the table you get somewhere in the neighborhood of 2600 GP per spellbook. Fun facts.

[Lightlawbliss]

have you thought of seeing how the local magic mart secures the wares? If the shopkeep isn't very secure you could fill his bags of holding with his stuff (and skipping town after might be a good idea).

[Re'ozul]

While absolutely not optimized or notable at all, I like to sell shining pebbles.

Summon Monster IV for a Lantern Archon. (as often as you can if on downtaime)
Have each Archon use continual Flame as often as possible on something small and inherently pleasing (glass marble). Sell at whatever price people are willing to pay (as it costs you nothing) as everyone likes to have free light when its dark.

[ahenobarbi]

I don't think the ladder trick works because 10ft pole != 10ft pole with holes.

Be from Faerun and choose a region, it gets you 100gp or some stuff worth up to 350 gp (mastework breastplate, though I'd prefer arcane scrolls worth 300gp).

[ahenobarbi]

While absolutely not optimized or notable at all, I like to sell shining pebbles.

Summon Monster IV for a Lantern Archon. (as often as you can if on downtaime)
Have each Archon use continual Flame as often as possible on something small and inherently pleasing (glass marble). Sell at whatever price people are willing to pay (as it costs you nothing) as everyone likes to have free light when its dark.

Sadly this one doesn't work. Spells cast by summoned creatures end when the summoning ends. And Spell-like-abilities work as spells (except some stuff, the exception list doesn't contain anything that would make this work).

Similarly I don't think you can sell silk or poison from summoned creatures - they are part of the creature at the time of summoning and would go back with it (I think. I don't think this is settled in RAW).

[sideswipe]

A few more:

Quarterstaves are free. Firewood is 1cp

It doesn't say how MUCH firewood you get for 1cp. So, assuming you want to have a small fire for not very long, grind your quarterstaff up into splinters and sell each one for 1cp

A 10' ladder costs 5 copper. It is made up of some rungs (firewood), and two 10' poles (2sp each). Buy ladders, sell poles, repeat.

A gallon of ale costs 2sp. 8 mugs costs 16cp. A mug of ale, going by weight, is 1 pint and costs 4cp. There are 8 pints in a gallon so the gallon of beer costs you 2sp to buy but, as soon as you pour it into the mugs you can sell it for 3.2sp. The first gallon pays for the ale and the mugs, every gallon after that nets you 1.2sp

Musical instruments are 5gp. A woodblock is a musical instrument and quarterstaves are still free.

A blank spellbook costs 15gp. It has 100 parchment pages. Tear the pages out and they are suddenly worth 20gp for the parchment.

50' of silk rope costs 10gp. Monster Summoning III gets you 1d4+1 Small Fiendish Spiders, each of which is capable of spinning a web "5 to 60 feet square depending on size". Assuming that Small spiders spin a 5'x5' web, that's 3600 square inches. 50' of silk rope is about 25 square inches (50' long, 1/2" wide; I'm ignoring thickess for simplicity). That means one spider web is 72 ropes, or 720 gp for the investment of 1 third level spell. (Monster Summoning I and II will get you one spider or 1d3 spiders respectively, so if you fill all your spell slots for the day with MS, then at 5th level you can cast it 6 times for a total of 1d4+2d3+4 spiders, each of which makes you at leas 720gp. Oh -- the webs are ordinarily sticky, so you've got two choices: convince your DM that you can have the spider spin only the non-sticky strands that it uses to move in the web (which is real (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_silk#Types_of_silk), and could easily be done), or you can roll the silk in dirt to cover up the sticky, or wash it in acetone / a dilute acid to remove the sticky.

If you have, or can hire, the appropriate skills you can also weave the silk into more expensive things -- noble / royal clothes, silk armor, etc.


Oh, you can also milk the spiders for their poison and sell that. I don't remember the price for poison, though.

In short, if you're a wizard, money ain't no thing.

some potential problems.

one. your using maths in D&D and horribly incorrectly. if you work out the volume of the rope its 0.5^3 approx. if V= pi*r^2*length.
5'=2.4m - so - 2.4m*2.4m is 5.76m^2 this is if you have a complete sheet of silk web, no holes at all.

a 5'cube makes just under 14m^3. making 28 ropes.

say each silk strand is 0.5 cm thick scaling from a tiny spider in real life.

a 5' cube is 2.4m thick so 240cm so 480 spiders are needed. to make 480 5' by 5' sheets of silk.

if you max spiders for each spell (5 at a time) you would need to cast it 96 times to get the cube.

to make 1 rope getting max spiders you need to cast 96/28. approx 3.5 times.

and then you need to make the raw silk into rope.

meaning your rope will have cost you hundreds of gold in spell slots

[Re'ozul]

Of course if you have time on your hands, get a rod of wonder.
If you have a familiar that can use it great, otherwise hire someone to use it continuously (unless you don't care what color you are).

3% chance to get 25gp in gems (average).

8 hours of activating results in 3600gp in gems. Very slow, but funny.

[Mithril Leaf]

While absolutely not optimized or notable at all, I like to sell shining pebbles.

Summon Monster IV for a Lantern Archon. (as often as you can if on downtaime)
Have each Archon use continual Flame as often as possible on something small and inherently pleasing (glass marble). Sell at whatever price people are willing to pay (as it costs you nothing) as everyone likes to have free light when its dark.

If you have an easy way of removing ability drain (IE Binding Naberous) you can use the Create Lantern Archon spell to successfully do this it should be noted. 600 everburning torches for 1d2 constitution drain could be a very sweet deal at level 5.

[Marnath]

Sadly this one doesn't work. Spells cast by summoned creatures end when the summoning ends. And Spell-like-abilities work as spells (except some stuff, the exception list doesn't contain anything that would make this work).

You can get a lantern archon familiar though, which would work.

[Mithril Leaf]

You can get a lantern archon familiar though, which would work.

But if you're in the getting familiars for cheesing gold stage of things, why not just get a mirror mephit and have a million copies of yourself that all work in your item sale business from DMGII?

[Jormengand]

Creatures can make skill checks. You earn 1 silver piece per day if you make an untrained profession check. Find the cheapest creature you can get your hands on and get as many as you can buy. Get them all to make untrained profession checks for 1 SP/day. PROFIT!!!

[Krobar]

i'm now going to design a city (in character), and it's entire purpose will be this on a massive scale

i'll start it as a town, getting the needed money from ladders, then i'll buy a decanter and some wall of fire/iron and chamber to do this, then sell the salt, and use to gold to make more chambers like that one, then i'd hire creatures of some sort with fire immunity (or maybe pay a caster to make me some golems) to collect and sell the salt for me (they'd be paid a portion of the gold they get)
i think i could manage that while i adventure

Assuming the water is about the same concentration as our own seawater you should probably get about 4 1/2 ounces of salt per gallon of water.

[Adverb]

i read this on a similar thread. buy gold by weight, then use craft minting to turn it into coins. craft use a 1/3 or 1/2 ratio so you get a lot more coins then the value of the gold you bought.

I would totally let a player do this, and then I would have them get busted for minting their own currency.

Seriously now, seignorage like that is how nobles keep paying adventuring parties for going out and doing things. You're threatening their power base!

[Endarire]

Tickle your GM.

[Dalebert]

I knew there was something whacky about a flask of oil versus and empty flask, but I checked and it's not about the cost. An empty flask weight 1.5 lbs. A flask of oil weighs 1 lb.

[Somensjev]

anyone willing to try and workout how much gold something like that could get me per day?

also, for what i'm thinking of it as a big room-ish thing, with a decanter in it, a wall of fire underneath it to evaporate the water, and a golem inside to collect the salt, is that what everyone else thinks of?