Starting a party at level 4, gear distribution and quests

[Zweisteine]

Long story short, I'm going to be running an online campaign for 6 or so players, though I have heard little from one of them, and one won't always be available. I'm fairly exhausted from helping two of them make characters, so my post here won't be so long.

The characters include a paladin and a ranger.

I'm starting them at level 4, and will probably end up sending them through the final dungeon in the Lost Mine of Phandelver.


Gear

What kind of stuff should I give them? 100 gp each seems reasonable, or a bit little, but magic items are my real concern. With no guidelines, I have no idea what to give them. All I know is that I'll be giving them items as a party, and having them distribute the items among themselves.

I haven't run all of Lost Mine, so I don't know what to expect them to have, though I know the adventure gives a +1 sword fairly early on.

What do I give them?


Quests

Besides that dungeon, I don't know if any of the other quests in Lost Mine are appropriate for a level 4 party. Actually, I'm a bit worried that that dungeon might be too tough. Has anyone played through the adventure and gained a general idea of the difficulty of the quests in it?

[Lonely Tylenol]

Going by the average rolls and the frequency distribution of the Individual Treasure table: Challenge 0-4 on page 136 of the Dungeon Master's Guide, each individual monster (of CR 0-4) carries an average of 9.942 gold in currency (CP, SP, EP, GP, and PP), or equivalent values of gems and art objects. For simplicity's sake, we'll assume that, between animals with no items of value and multiple encounters, this number averages out to one per actual encounter (it will probably be higher). Assuming adventurers who start at level 4 faced "Medium" encounters on average (with equal parts "Easy" to "Hard" encounters, and twice as many "Easy" as "Deadly" encounters), it will take them six encounters' worth of experience to reach 2nd level, six encounters to reach 3rd level (from 2nd), and twelve encounters' worth of experience to reach 4th level (from 3rd). If we assume that these adventurers acquired four treasure hordes' worth of large treasures (the equivalent of one adventure per level for the first two levels, and two for level three, with a single hoard as a capstone for each adventure), then the adventurers would have an average of about 1,022 gold as a group, or 255.5 gold individually, plus four d100 rolls from the Treasure Hoard: Challenge 0-4 table on page 137 of the Dungeon Master's Guide.

That is where randomness essentially kicks in, if you want to be fair to the party, but to give you a representative example, I rolled out those four d100s, and ended up with 44, 73, 64, 83. This would entitle the party to 1d6 items on Magic Item Table A, 2d4 items on Magic Item Table B, and 1d4 items on Magic Item Table C. In my case, this ended up meaning 4 rolls from Table A, 7 rolls from Table B, and 2 rolls from Table C. This is not really representative of an average (these are all better-than-average rolls, by and large), but it should give you an example of what you would be expected to give: this sample party would have roughly three magic items (from random loot alone), and these items are likely scrolls, potions, and other consumables, with some minor magic items sprinkled in here and there.

Not all of this math is strictly necessary, mind you, but since I just got my DMG, I was intrigued by the "wealth by level" thought experiment. :smallsmile:

TL;DR: While wealth by level isn't necessarily a thing, an adventuring party which adventures from levels 1 through 4 could reasonably expect about 1,000gp worth of gold, gems and art objects (before expenses), and slightly under a dozen magic items of largely single-use nature, split between them. This is in addition to starting adventurer's gear.