DM control over wealth by RAW

[Talakeal]

Page 167-168 of the 3.5 PHB give very clear instructions for how the PCs are to split up treasure.
Page 54 of the DMG states that it is the DM's job to ensure that treasure is distributed evenly and to step in if wealth imbalance between the players grows too extreme.

But the book never has any suggestion of HOW the DM is supposed to enforce this.

Every time I have had a problem with wealth imbalance / distribution in my games and have come to the forum for advice, I have reached almost universal consensus (which is very rare for a forum) that I need to step back and let the players handle it themselves, and that even thinking about stepping in and telling the players that their characters had to give up wealth would be the very worst form of railroading.

But, afaict by RAW, the DM absolutely can and should enforce even wealth distribution, it just doesn't give any advice as to how they should go about it or how they should justify this loss of autonomy to the players.

So has anyone actually had experience with this? If you were determined to use the treasure rules by RAW, how would you going about enforcing the printed rules?

[zlefin]

I don't have personal experience;
it seems odd that you would receive such advice from this forum (rather than the similar sounding, but distinctly different advice on the similar topic when a party has too much wealth overall, rather than what you describe here, about wealth imbalance within the party itself). it doesn't sound like what this forum usually says; at any rate:

the first question would be: why is the wealth imbalanced in the first place? different causes would have different solutions.

then the main step would be talking to the players OOC. tell them the wealth imbalance is a problem, preferably pointing to some in-game examples that demonstrate it. If you can get player agreement OOC that there's a problem, then it's easy to handwave whatever ingame excuse is used to rectify it.

[BowStreetRunner]

The only time I have ever been in a game where distribution of treasure became an issue for which the DM needed to intervene even a little was where one PC was stealing from the rest and relying on his abilities (high sleight of hand and bluff scores, etc.) to ensure they never found out. So the PC thief usually waited until he was on watch and then looted the rest of us while we slept. So the DM simply arranged for our camp to be attacked while the thief was busy looting and by the time everything was sorted out we had definitively determined that we couldn't trust this guy on watch anymore.

I would generally use a minimum amount of DM intervention, and only if some of the players were complaining. I know some players can and will take advantage of other players to the point that it will ruin everyone else's fun, and the DM needs to prevent this where possible. However, I believe it's going to be exceedingly rare for it to get to the point of DM intervention at all.

[Telonius]

Personally, I would only step in directly if something seems truly screwy. This actually happened once, when one of our (very scatterbrained) players had been forgetting not only to purchase equipment, but also to write down his loot for a couple levels. We were able to get that sorted, since I did keep close track of what loot had been distributed, and how much wealth he was supposed to have.

Usually if I notice one player is a lot less efficient in purchasing items, I'll put some goodies specifically designed for them in the loot pile. A quick infusion of wealth followed by easing up on the treasure usually fixes the issue.

If you're going total DM vs Player mode, Rust Monsters, Ethereal Filchers, Disjunction, and Sundering are all ways to decrease any excess loot concentrated on a single person. I would do that extraordinarily sparingly.

[Nifft]

There are quite a few printed rules which I don't enforce.

Multiclass penalties, for example.

If one player were such a bully that I felt an urge to start enforcing wealth-distribution, then I'd probably boot the bully instead.

What it comes down to for me:
- With mutually supportive, cooperative players, there's no need for the DM to enforce wealth-distribution.
- Without mutually supportive, cooperative players, there's no reason to play the game with those jerks in the first place.

[Reversefigure4]

Wealth imbalance between the party usually comes from one of two sources:

a) The GM gives out poorly balanced treasure. A classic Fighter/Rogue/Wizard/Cleric party gets a treasure pile of a +5 Adamantine Flaming Greatsword, a Scroll of Detect Evil, 200 gp and a Potion of Cure Light Wounds. Since the Mega-sword of Death will be going obviously to the Fighter and the other items are massively undervalued, the Fighter is over-treasured. The solution: to put in more appropriate treasure in future treasures - a Blessed Book for the Wizard, quality light armor for the Rogue, a Pylactery of Undead Turning for the cleric, etc, with little for the Fighter until all PCs are approaching equal wealth. In the case of huge imbalances like the example, it's best to solve out of character, where the GM explains he screwed up and wants to retcon it to a +1 Flaming Sword instead.

b) The players divide treasure poorly. Because Bob the Fighter's player is aggressive, he claims 'first dibs' on any magical item found, and has picked up a +2 Rapier, a Headband of Intellect, and an Amulet of Natural Armor, 2 of which he simply sells for money. The rest of the party has an uneven distribution. The solution: This one is pretty much solved out of character by the GM saying "Bob, stop being an ass or we'll kick you out of the group". If it's less malevolent than that, it could be that the players (Bob included) just haven't realised how they're unbalancing themselves with their form of wealth distribution, as which point the GM-as-rules-controller should step in and explain how they should do it.

Separately to this is the issue that the DM has given too much or too little loot to the party as a whole, but that's different to loot distribution between players.

[Talakeal]

The GM gives out poorly balanced treasure. A classic Fighter/Rogue/Wizard/Cleric party gets a treasure pile of a +5 Adamantine Flaming Greatsword, a Scroll of Detect Evil, 200 gp and a Potion of Cure Light Wounds. Since the Mega-sword of Death will be going obviously to the Fighter and the other items are massively undervalued, the Fighter is over-treasured. The solution: to put in more appropriate treasure in future treasures - a Blessed Book for the Wizard, quality light armor for the Rogue, a Pylactery of Undead Turning for the cleric, etc, with little for the Fighter until all PCs are approaching equal wealth. In the case of huge imbalances like the example, it's best to solve out of character, where the GM explains he screwed up and wants to retcon it to a +1 Flaming Sword instead.

Its funny, AFAICT, by RAW the PCs in such a situation MUST sell the +5 adamantine flaming great sword and split the money evenly according to page 168 of the PHB.

Not that I have ever seen anyone actually play that way, but that does appear to be the rules.

[Vizzerdrix]

It depends on the nature of the imbalance. Is one player hogging the loot? Tell them to quit it. Are the other players gear stacking the meat shield? Not a problem. I think more info is needed.

[Talakeal]

It depends on the nature of the imbalance. Is one player hogging the loot? Tell them to quit it. Are the other players gear stacking the meat shield? Not a problem. I think more info is needed.

In my specific instances we had one issue where a player would refuse to chip in for party expenses, use consumables, or purchase any item that wasn't an optimal end game item and thus had far more wealth than he should for his level but required the other PCs to carry him often times, another time I had a single player convince the group to give him 100% of all loot at a single T1 caster who was significantly above WBL was more effective than a full party at WBL, and one case where the party would look dead PCs and then expect replacements to come into the group with full WBL for a new character, and of course the wanting to sit in a hole and craft for five years between adventures.

Its just a lot of little problems over the years. I just find it strange that at the time the 'net's response was for me to butt our and let the players handle it, but by RAW it absolutely is my business, but RAW provides absolutely no guidelines as to what I am actually supposed to do about it. Its mostly just academic at this point though as I am not currently running a game and don't plan on running D&D again in the foreseeable future.

[BowStreetRunner]

I would treat each of these as a distinctly different issue.

When a player refuses to chip in but still expects other party members to carry him, I would create situations where the player cannot depend on the rest of the party. I distinctly remember one adventure where the party ended up getting 'flushed' down an icy waterway when the lake we were crossing suddenly emptied through a glacial wall while we were crossing. The raft overturned and a few convenient die rolls later each of use came through and onto dry land on the other side of the glacier, but all separated by miles of unexplored terrain. If the party you described went through a similar situation those with consumables would be much better off than the guy without any.

Another idea would be a BBEG who was familiar with the party dynamic - perhaps having spent time with them as a friendly NPC before being revealed as the bad guy, or maybe just scrying on them. The BBEG would attempt to divide the party by actually pointing out how selfish the party member was being and asking the others to betray their stingy comrade. Since it is an in-game dynamic, it's fair game for a plot device. It's best to make sure the others won't actually want to betray him first, but it can expose the white elephant in the room nonetheless.

In the case of the T1 caster funded by other players, that's their call to make. It's also their risk to take. This is a perfect opportunity to hit them with a nice Arcane Ooze encounter to display just how woefully vulnerable such a party can be.

Looting dead PCs is one area I would absolutely and unequivocally put my foot down as DM. I've come across players with the idea of creating a bunch of disposable characters just to pump WBL before settling on the actual PCs they were going to play. There was even one group that kept asking friends to sit in a game or two with no intention of staying, just playing long enough to get killed so the party could loot them. This isn't a matter of internal imbalance as much as it is a matter of overall imbalance. Take measures to deal with this. If a party self-polices by having PC last will and testaments to determine where the wealth goes (outside the party) when they die, then let it be. If they don't, then you should feel free to let loose a little thieving, sundering, taxing, and overall treasure reducing until the party's WBL comes back in-line. In one of my previous games the party was absolutely strict about passing dead PC wealth along outside of the party. Our logic was that if we gave the dead paladin's holy sword to his church or family, then it was less likely the DM would sunder the wizard's staff leaving us with a sword we couldn't use and needing a staff we could.

[zlefin]

In my specific instances we had one issue where a player would refuse to chip in for party expenses, use consumables, or purchase any item that wasn't an optimal end game item and thus had far more wealth than he should for his level but required the other PCs to carry him often times, another time I had a single player convince the group to give him 100% of all loot at a single T1 caster who was significantly above WBL was more effective than a full party at WBL, and one case where the party would look dead PCs and then expect replacements to come into the group with full WBL for a new character, and of course the wanting to sit in a hole and craft for five years between adventures.

Its just a lot of little problems over the years. I just find it strange that at the time the 'net's response was for me to butt our and let the players handle it, but by RAW it absolutely is my business, but RAW provides absolutely no guidelines as to what I am actually supposed to do about it. Its mostly just academic at this point though as I am not currently running a game and don't plan on running D&D again in the foreseeable future.

ok, for each of those a different optimal solution would apply;
a party member should chip in for party expenses, that's how parties work. I'd ditch the player if possible. if not, I'd say they have to pay their own way, and the party won't cover their expenses if they get in trouble.
the net consumable budget isn't that huge a part of total WBL; so it really shouldn't cause their WBL to skew that far from expectations; It couldn't possibly tip it more than 2 levels higher; and I'm doubtful it would get it to reach even 1 level higher than expected. If someone wants to skip on consumables, I'd just let them.
If someone only wants optimal end-game items; just sidestep the issue by letting them upgrade their items by paying the cost different. (so +1 weapon to +2 weapon they pay 6k for the upgrade). then they can steadily upgrade their gear as needed without it being a problem. It's also not that clear to me that even if a player weren't using upgrading and did what you described that it'd push their wbl off by THAT much; due to the exponential nature of wbl.
I'd also ask if the player, who required carrying when they were lower level, was able to carry the power later with the extra power they acquired by scrimping.
mostly though the player just sounds like a jerk to not play with.


On the party giving all their gold to one guy; i'm pretty sure that one guy with over WBL wouldn't be more effective than the full party with the wealth somewhat spread out, but I'd have to see their builds to be sure. also tier 1's don't need gear that much anyways, so I don't see how it'd be any more effective. (it'd also depend if they use the extra wealth to spend very heavily on consumables, which would provide a short burst, but wouldn't work long term). maybe just have the whole party play tier 1's so it isn't a problem.


the party looting dead pcs to accumulate wealth should be prohibited, period; which prevents that from causing disparities as well.

the whole party wanting to craft shouldn't affect disparities; only overall party wbl compared to expectations.


it's possible you misremembered the net's response, or took the response for just one of those cases, and took it to apply to all of them even though they never meant that; or got an atypical and small sample.

as a default solution:
talk to the players OOC; point to the sections in PHB and DMG that say the wealth should be spread out; tell them that dm'ing is hard and you're just trying to follow the rules and ask them to go along with it. if they refuse, then they can do the work of DM'ing.

[Darth Ultron]

I have seen tons of wealth related problems in D&D. In 3X, wealth by level has always been a joke.

The game rule sure say a lot about the DM creating and controlling wealth before the player characters find it, but then just gets vague after that. The rules say that in no way should a character find more wealth then their ''level'', and that PCs and NPC's can only have set amounts of wealth. But then the rules get vague as to what to do if character x of x level has 1001 gold coins.

Of course the ''boards'', being what they are, always say stuff like ''just let the awesome players do whatever they want" and if the DM does anything it is ''badwrongfun''.

The DMG 3.5 pg.13 does say one of the main jobs of the DM is to keep game balance. The rule here, do say a DM can do anything in game to keep the game balanced. And the rules even say not to make it obvious. And Wealth-by-level in the DMG does reference the keeping the game balance rules.

[Bullet06320]

the party looting dead pcs to accumulate wealth should be prohibited, period; which prevents that from causing disparities as well.

in my experience, PCs loot everything else in sight, why wouldn't we loot our dead party members. the going theory is, they don't need it anymore, except in cases where resurrection is available
my group generally only uses WBL as a starting point, but we tend to run monty haul/monty python type campaigns

[Kelb_Panthera]

Two DM tools spring to mind:

Tailored treasure; instead of rolling entirely random treasure, intentionally place things suited best to the PC(s) that have fallen behind until they've caught up.

Gear removing encounters; rust monsters, ethereal filchers, old-fashioned thieves, etc to bring the PC(s) that have gotten too far ahead back down.

The first is far preferable but don't be afraid to use both as needed. If they get irate about it, tell them honestly why you're doing it.

[Telonius]

In my specific instances we had one issue where a player would refuse to chip in for party expenses, use consumables, or purchase any item that wasn't an optimal end game item and thus had far more wealth than he should for his level but required the other PCs to carry him often times, another time I had a single player convince the group to give him 100% of all loot at a single T1 caster who was significantly above WBL was more effective than a full party at WBL, and one case where the party would look dead PCs and then expect replacements to come into the group with full WBL for a new character, and of course the wanting to sit in a hole and craft for five years between adventures.

Its just a lot of little problems over the years. I just find it strange that at the time the 'net's response was for me to butt our and let the players handle it, but by RAW it absolutely is my business, but RAW provides absolutely no guidelines as to what I am actually supposed to do about it. Its mostly just academic at this point though as I am not currently running a game and don't plan on running D&D again in the foreseeable future.

Yeah, the problems you're describing seem to be mostly out-of-character in nature. One player is trying to "win" D&D, and causing a disruption by doing so. Out-of-character problems should not be solved with in-character solutions. When something like that happens, you need to talk to the players and explain that's really not how the game is supposed to work. No amount of rust monsters or custom designing of loot is going to fix that underlying problem.

[DrKerosene]

...afaict by RAW, the DM absolutely can and should enforce even wealth distribution, it just doesn't give any advice as to how they should go about it or how they should justify this loss of autonomy to the players.

So has anyone actually had experience with this? If you were determined to use the treasure rules by RAW, how would you going about enforcing the printed rules?

I would hope that an OOC discussion about how various Party Members should have more gear than they do, and that one character should see no more treasure for a while if they don't share a bit now, would be sufficient to get that changed, but I do have some ideas for in-game methods to modify party loot.

Further magic items may start having a "must X race/class/ and/or alignment to use this item at all, maybe take negative levels if you don't qualify and still try. Perhaps the Party finds a weird Martial Weapon that only the Fighter/Paladin can use. Magic Item Compendium had armor sets and such, perhaps the Party finds part of a set, but each item only works when used by the same person or when very far from all other parts of the set.

If your Party is cool with down-time and a narrative skip to the Party being higher level, then everyone except Greedy McLootcheeks can get some extra special gifts, crafting results, inheritance, etc. To bring them up to parity.

Otherwise, I love the Fiend of Possession. You could use it to make a favorite magic item act like a terrible cursed item, and maybe the magic item will get discarded.
Alternatively, you can depower the magic item and say it was the Fiend of Possession boosting the magic item until now.

If you want a core monster, then in MM1 & SRD the Nightwing (relative to Nightwalker) has an ability to add negative levels to a magic item, and it stacks too, but is reversible. So you could eventually make a +5 sword into a +1 or even regular masterwork. I think this is a bit better than completely destroying the magic item.

A Bebilith can rend armor as an extraordinary action, if you don't want to use an evil mage casting Disjunction.

I once used Dust of Choking and Sneezing as part of a high-level wizard + a dozen CR 1/2 mooks SWATting the Party. The "officially sanctioned" Wizard confiscated their items (eventually all was returned, it was just a high profile arrest scenario, not an actual WBL issue).

If your Party is members of a good church, like Heironeous, or want to get something as part of a character goal, perhaps giving up their item to be used by a greater NPC against a too-damn-big-for-the-party threat, or something as trade/cost for a very significant favor. Or maybe the magic item is a key to exit a hardcore dungeon, but it's a one-use deal that breaks the item. Or maybe just depowers it, whatever you need. Point is you can make it a "all your lives and all your gear, or just that item" scenario if you want to provide an in-game railroad for removing something other than an Ethereal Filched, or a variety of Dopplegangers stealing some things.

I would prefer to use these latter kinds of things for narrative twists and turns, and not to correct Party imbalance, but that's all I could think up.

[Elkad]

I let my players divide loot however they want.

Occasionally - every 3 levels or so - I'll add up everyone's WBL and give the full group the results. If someone is out of whack, the party fixes it.

I'll adjust treasure to bring the total back in line (generally about 20% over actually), but I don't really fiddle with the group dynamics.

My current group (of 5), the Crusader is about 30% over, Warblade (new to the table - old returning player) and Bard are about 10% over, the Wizard is maybe 30% under, and the Druid is lagging far behind (her Tiger has more gear).
The Tier1s are donating money to the other 3 for gear purchases.

I'm not counting cash, and they just made a haul, just have to get it back to town.

[zlefin]

in my experience, PCs loot everything else in sight, why wouldn't we loot our dead party members. the going theory is, they don't need it anymore, except in cases where resurrection is available
my group generally only uses WBL as a starting point, but we tend to run monty haul/monty python type campaigns

it's not a strict rule (or it needn't be), but generally speaking it's best avoided. in particular, as others mentioned, if players just repeatedly make throwaway characters they intend to allow to die just so the party can accumulate several pc's worth of gear that's very much an exploit.
if you're going to ignore the wbl guidelines and go far above them, then it matters a lot less of course.

[BowStreetRunner]

it's not a strict rule (or it needn't be), but generally speaking it's best avoided. in particular, as others mentioned, if players just repeatedly make throwaway characters they intend to allow to die just so the party can accumulate several pc's worth of gear that's very much an exploit.
if you're going to ignore the wbl guidelines and go far above them, then it matters a lot less of course.
Additionally, if the party keeps looting dead PCs the DM can always drop new PCs in game without any items of their own.

[Calthropstu]

I ran into this problem a little while ago in my campaign.

It was entirely accidental, but I had my players calculate their wealth. The wizard and oracle came up severely short while the magus was way over and the barbarian was just fine.
So I distributed some items specifically for them.

The problem was caused by high character death and the wizard and oracle paying the costs of ressurections.

[Yogibear41]

Depends on the kind of game you play in I suppose. I have had characters that are high level that were essentially broke and I've had 1st level characters that had close to 10k gold before, all in the same campaign world. Our DM doesn't care about WBL at all, he cares about if your character actually goes out and does something to get loot. He not going to just have that +1 sword fall out of thin air because your character is of X level, you have to go out and actually do something to get it. He is also not a big fan of the "magic mart" but will still let you buy a pretty much what you want as long as you go to the right place as long as it isn't insanely rare or expensive(might have to roll %dice to see if they have it in stock, or wait a couple weeks/months in game time for it to come in)

I remember once I was playing a CE Cleric and the rogue in our party found a magic ring, I happened to have the magic domain so I could identify for free without paying the GP cost so I did the Identifying. Said player was also swapping out the rogue in order to play a wizard and we also found a +6 headband of intellect in the same dungeon so he was super happy to get that on his more or less brand new character. (we were around level 7 I believe) Anyway I told the player that it was just a ring of jumping or something boring and gave the rogue an adamantine dagger I had and he was happy to trade the ring for it, not to mention he wasn't even going to play the character anymore, so the rogue went his merry way with his new adamantine dagger, and what did my Cleric get out of the deal? Oh just a shiny brand new Ring of Three Wishes. Other player never even knew. It was great.

[lylsyly]

Captured by Slavers(or the BBG), they do escape ... with the rags on their backs.

Now everyone is equal again.

[Bullet06320]

in particular, as others mentioned, if players just repeatedly make throwaway characters they intend to allow to die just so the party can accumulate several pc's worth of gear that's very much an exploit.

kinda like the players that have characters die, then the new character is the old ones brother or nephew or sum such and says the gear is their inheritance?
my brother used to do that, but then again the only reason we let him play with us was the fact he bought the pizza every time, lol

[Calthropstu]

I actually had a thought to prevent thievery. Have a custom spell distributed amongst reputable buyers and sellers that tells the buyers how the loot was recieved by the seller.
If it was stolen, looted, purchased, earned, found etc. Stolen loot results in a runner going to fetch the city guard.
There will be disreputable buyers, but they pay much less than reputable ones and their purchase limit is much smaller.

[Nifft]

kinda like the players that have characters die, then the new character is the old ones brother or nephew or sum such and says the gear is their inheritance?
my brother used to do that, but then again the only reason we let him play with us was the fact he bought the pizza every time, lol Use real money to buy pretend money... hum.

It almost sounds like he's playing a table-top version of those pay-to-win Freemium games.

In any case, it's good to enjoy pizza.

[BloodSnake'sCha]

Wealth imbalance between the party usually comes from one of two sources:

a) The GM gives out poorly balanced treasure. A classic Fighter/Rogue/Wizard/Cleric party gets a treasure pile of a +5 Adamantine Flaming Greatsword, a Scroll of Detect Evil, 200 gp and a Potion of Cure Light Wounds. Since the Mega-sword of Death will be going obviously to the Fighter and the other items are massively undervalued, the Fighter is over-treasured. The solution: to put in more appropriate treasure in future treasures - a Blessed Book for the Wizard, quality light armor for the Rogue, a Pylactery of Undead Turning for the cleric, etc, with little for the Fighter until all PCs are approaching equal wealth. In the case of huge imbalances like the example, it's best to solve out of character, where the GM explains he screwed up and wants to retcon it to a +1 Flaming Sword instead.

b) The players divide treasure poorly. Because Bob the Fighter's player is aggressive, he claims 'first dibs' on any magical item found, and has picked up a +2 Rapier, a Headband of Intellect, and an Amulet of Natural Armor, 2 of which he simply sells for money. The rest of the party has an uneven distribution. The solution: This one is pretty much solved out of character by the GM saying "Bob, stop being an ass or we'll kick you out of the group". If it's less malevolent than that, it could be that the players (Bob included) just haven't realised how they're unbalancing themselves with their form of wealth distribution, as which point the GM-as-rules-controller should step in and explain how they should do it.

Separately to this is the issue that the DM has given too much or too little loot to the party as a whole, but that's different to loot distribution between players.

In my group the Fighter will have to pay the group the same amount of gold as the group need to get from selling the sword(it is the same for every item, we go be sell value and everyone get different amount of gold because everyone take different item with different cost).

this also solve b).

[Thurbane]

Unless you're DMing for a group that's never played RPGs before, and/or contains borderline sociopaths, it's ludicrous for the books to expect distribution of treasure among the players to be the DMs job.

Just my 2 coppers, anyway.

[Andry]

In our Pathfinder group we do need before greed. Any thing noone can really use we put into party treasure. We then sell that loot with each member getting an equal share with another share going for party expenses (healing wands, potions etc. It works really well for us.

[One Step Two]

Story time! I was in my early 20's when I first started playing D&D, after having spent some of my life doing work with managing a small business with my brother. This meant that when I first joined a gaming group, my first inclination was to play a support role while I learned the game. So I started this by noting down details I thought were important, NPC names, place names, money, and loot found for easier bookkeeping. Cause that was a skill set I could use to help, and that's a good thing right?

At the end of the first session when we had cleared out the crypt we were sent into, I announced to the party we had accumulated a X amount in coins, and that everyone got a share worth Y. And we had found several items, and I made my best suggestions at who should carry them.
(Give all the healing items to the cleric, they're responsible for that right? No reason that a rogue would want some healing items for scouting right? :smallredface:)
There was a brief look of skepticism from the party, and with the DM confirmed that all my numbers were correct, and after some shared glances and nods, they rolled with it, and made a few item suggestions, and we continued from there.

Skip a few months later when the group is relaxed and chatting. They asked me why I took notes on loot, and I explained that it seemed like a simple task, and I asked them why had they not in the past. It turns out I was in an mostly evil/chaotic party, and loot was guarded jealousy against one-another because of acts of theft in the past.
The moment I started keeping tabs on all the numbers announced by the GM, and distributed it evenly, it broke a sort of back-stabbing and theft cold-war among the party because instead of needing to jealously hoard their wealth from every other member, this fresh faced Bard was keeping track of it for them. I also learned what meta-gaming was, because the rogue character did tell me quite obliquely that loot he found wasn't necessarily what he told the party he found, but he was okay with the end result, since it meant he wasn't being focus fired any time there was a minor dispute over missing treasure.

The point I took so long to getting to is: RAW says the party should split loot for the sake of the game, but greed can be a problem. The solution isn't as straight forwards as my story, and you need to engage with the players about the wealth is distributed. It can be as simple as letting one player be you "Number checker" in that they aren't holding the purse strings, but keeping tabs on items and loot so nothing goes stray.

While the party should be responsible for making sure the treasure is spread, the DM is responsible for making sure the party has the right level of wealth, imbalances like finding a +5 Flaming Adamantine sword, 3 potions, and a jade figure worth 25gp is a problem only the GM can solve.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Wealth imbalance between the party usually comes from one of two sources:

a) The GM gives out poorly balanced treasure. A classic Fighter/Rogue/Wizard/Cleric party gets a treasure pile of a +5 Adamantine Flaming Greatsword, a Scroll of Detect Evil, 200 gp and a Potion of Cure Light Wounds. Since the Mega-sword of Death will be going obviously to the Fighter and the other items are massively undervalued, the Fighter is over-treasured. The solution: to put in more appropriate treasure in future treasures - a Blessed Book for the Wizard, quality light armor for the Rogue, a Pylactery of Undead Turning for the cleric, etc, with little for the Fighter until all PCs are approaching equal wealth. In the case of huge imbalances like the example, it's best to solve out of character, where the GM explains he screwed up and wants to retcon it to a +1 Flaming Sword instead.

That particular example isn't possible with any of the published treasure tables, so far as I can tell. The principle is accurate enough but such extremes simply aren't without custom treasure tables.

The solution here is also a good one since it is plainly a DMing error that created the problem in the first place.


b) The players divide treasure poorly. Because Bob the Fighter's player is aggressive, he claims 'first dibs' on any magical item found, and has picked up a +2 Rapier, a Headband of Intellect, and an Amulet of Natural Armor, 2 of which he simply sells for money. The rest of the party has an uneven distribution. The solution: This one is pretty much solved out of character by the GM saying "Bob, stop being an ass or we'll kick you out of the group". If it's less malevolent than that, it could be that the players (Bob included) just haven't realised how they're unbalancing themselves with their form of wealth distribution, as which point the GM-as-rules-controller should step in and explain how they should do it.

This can be partially mitigated by dividing the total treasure from a given haul as equitably as possible. If a PC takes a piece of loot to keep, rather than declaring it junk loot, you take the full value, as opposed to the sale value, of it out of his share. Junk loot gets sold ASAP and the coin from the sale gets distributed evenly. If the greedy player sells his "keeper" loot, he can keep the coin from that but doing it habitually will put him behind rather than ahead.

Mind, this only works if magical gear flows freely in the market per the DMG guidelines.

If there's still a problem in spite of a good distribution setup amongst the PCs, the player is being a jerk and needs a sit-down rather than any in-game solution.


Separately to this is the issue that the DM has given too much or too little loot to the party as a whole, but that's different to loot distribution between players.

This is addressed pretty trivially by either giving out more or less loot over the next several encounters, as appropriate to the error being corrected.

[Reversefigure4]

This can be partially mitigated by dividing the total treasure from a given haul as equitably as possible. If a PC takes a piece of loot to keep, rather than declaring it junk loot, you take the full value, as opposed to the sale value, of it out of his share. Junk loot gets sold ASAP and the coin from the sale gets distributed evenly. If the greedy player sells his "keeper" loot, he can keep the coin from that but doing it habitually will put him behind rather than ahead.

Mind, this only works if magical gear flows freely in the market per the DMG guidelines.

While this solves the problem, it does make treasure inherently a bit less exciting (from the PC's point of view, there's very little difference between picking up a +1 Flaming Longsword from a treasure pile vs selling that one and buying another one in their custom colours from the marketplace). It means PCs get exactly the gear they want, but you'll rarely see people using a +1 Frost Longsword when they'd been leaning towards Fire simply because the opportunity came up to take one from the Ice King. Treasure will go less used, whereas I find the 50% 'finder's discount' means people are more inclined to buy esoteric items they might not pick up at full price, which makes players more interested in the contents of the treasure horde.

Personally, our group divvies the treasure into the sell value shares (+1 extra share for the collective party pool), and allows characters to 'go into debt to the party' to buy particularly expensive items they want. If you have -1500 gold because you bought an expensive thing out of the pool, next time you get 1500 gold less than everyone else.