Do Sundering and MDJ really matter?

[Calimehter]

A recent post about the value of Improved Sundering for a melee build got me thinking:

If your DM is following the written DMG rules about wealth by level . . . does it really matter if you are sundering gear or not? The DMG just says that the DM should make sure that the players stay at or near their WBL, and that he should adjust 'treasure' (which is not purely limited to that wielded by opponents in their hands/tentacles/etc.) accordingly. If PCs are sundering lots of magical gear for tactical advantage and thus find themselves below WBL at some point - isn't it by RAW the DM's responsibility to 'plant' extra treasure to compensate?

Much of what can be said about sundering can be applied to Disjunction. I seem to remember Emperor Tippy saying something similar to the point above about why he allowed Disjunction a lot in his campaigns. Their campaigns treated WBL as RAW, so if the PCs got lots of their gear destroyed, they would get it back very quickly so as to stay at WBL.

Thoughts?

[Erik Vale]

If, If WBL is followed strictly.

And still, Disjunction can outright end encounters when applied first. It's ability ranges from:
You can't fight back. At all. What so ever. So you die.
You die due to environment. [Fall into a pit of lava sucka!]
You disappear due to adventuring through magical means.

It's kinda worth trying to find useless artifacts to stick on your body just to make other wizards avoid disjoining you, so as to avoid becoming high level commoners[Right down to the HD and skill points, just a different skill list and a tiny bit of class features on them... And now a bunch of your feats are useless], and bad enough that if you don't have that you want to have anti-disjucntion contingency wars.

[Urpriest]

WBL is a consequence of proper treasure pacing. Adjusting to excessive player losses isn't really a requirement of the system.

You can build it in, sure, like Tippy does, but that's an extra condition. Especially if you're using modules, the assumption is that the system provides the proper amount of treasure, but if the players waste it then they waste it.

[Mnemnosyne]

I find this weird focus on the wealth by level guidelines kind of odd when it comes to a lot of these discussions, especially when someone suggests or says they 'enforce' it, neither allowing the players to get too far ahead or behind the curve.

That seems to run completely counter to letting the players make meaningful decisions. If the players choose to squander their wealth (or have it destroyed because they didn't take proper precautions) then suddenly providing their characters with replacement wealth without requiring they go through effort proportionate to the wealth they're obtaining is little different than fudging the dice in their favor, preventing them from ever dying, or other forms of DM babysitting that are generally frowned upon. By the same token, a player that chooses to do things that provide their characters with unusually high wealth, and then the DM contrives to have that wealth removed is little different than a DM that ignores the stats and decrees his monsters to win because he says so, and otherwise alters reality around the players in order to prevent them from accomplishing whatever they want to accomplish.

So I suppose sundering and disjunction are theoretically less problematic if the character(s) will inexplicably find a new pile of treasure right around the corner to ensure that they always have exactly the right amount of wealth, or have plot fairies steal it away if they have too much, but personally I see some serious problems with a game that removes player agency like that and doesn't allow them to make either good or foolish choices with their wealth, so they can neither lose nor gain more.