How many people actually pay attention to whealt by level?

[King of Nowhere]

something that has been burning in the back of my brain, but exploded when seeing a thread on how many spells a wizard should have in their spellbook, and some arguments like "but if you give spells for free you put the wizard above wbl"

None of my tables has ever respected wbl, even close. with experienced groups, we've always been a lot above. in my campaigns, I play a high magic, renaissance/industrial tech world, and everyone is expected to be full of magic. in another campaign, the dm started by trying to follow wbl, then the party started to explore every plot hook the dm was dangling in front of us, which resulted in lots of sidequest, so the dm started handling out less xp to control the pace of progression, but still we got loot.
In addition to that, I just never cared to try and balance loot according to the tables, but i do balance according to what makes sense for the plot. Lardalia Ermenegigi is a 20th level rogue and head of the most powerful noble family in one of the most powerful empires on the world; she owns more land than you can see from the top of a mountain on a clear day. Obviously she's able to buy any magic item that is for sale on this world - and if the party manages to kill her, they can loot accordingly.
Conversely, with unexperienced parties, there is a scarcity of magic items simply because nobody is thinking of them. in my first party we were level 15 and we barely had any gear. I once had a railroading dm, when we quitted the campaign (at level 5) we had less gear than we started with at level 1!

So, my experience is that wbl only exhist in the dmg. nobody follows it. nobody cares.
It's not like following it actually improves the game in any way. Expected power level? what's that? my inexperienced party at level 17 could barely fight an iron golem - a cr 13 monster. My current high-op party at level 17 took down a group of 4 solars (technically a level 27 encounter) in half a round without breaking a sweat, then fought five level 30 encounters in a row and they were still in pretty good shape by the end. power level depends entirely upon optimization level and what's allowed at the table. in turn, this depends on the dm knowing their specific group - I know I can give 4 solars as an easy encounter to my high-op group, and I would never dare to do something similar to a group of rookies. So, following wbl does not make for a more predictable power level of the game.
Breaking wbl also improves balance a lot, because finally the martials are able to get all those abilities that they need - flight, see invisibility, etc. - without pestering their casters, and without mortgaging their primary weapon.
It also allows for more creativity; want that object that does something nice and situational and not particularly powerful? You can get it, without sacrificing your capacity to contribute.
conversely, with a low-op noob game, having low gear - provided you give adequate opponents - can be better because the players can barely remember what half their abilities actually do, much less how they interact with magic items.

In my experience, not only nobody follows wbl, but the game is also better for it.

So, I'm curious. Are there parties who actually track wbl and try to stick to it? dm who, if the party is above wbl, will send in a few big monsters without loot to give xp and put the party back on balance? Are there people who can say that trying to stick to wbl enhances their games?

[vasilidor]

Really it should be expected magic items by level by class. I see it as a sort of a base line, like if you are below this line you are going to have a hard time. Mind this is more true for non-caster classes than casting classes.
Fighters would not need so much magic to keep up with the casters if not for the bonkers abilities of monsters.
At low levels it is not as much of a problem, but past around level 7- it is a problem.
Take a fighter against a Nalfeshnee. Assuming the fighter is at level 14, but has no magic items, He is going to hit it no problem but do bupkis for damage. Assuming a strength of about 18 after leveling, and weapon specialization and greater weapon specialization with a long sword he will do about 0 damage after he failed his will save to be dazed. even if he does make the will save his average damage will be about 3 on a hit. and he will do so on a 6 or better as I am assuming he could get a master work weapon.
If he has power attack he can take up to a -14 to hit to gat a +14 to damage. Assuming the player knows the AC of the monster, they are going to try and take a -5 to hit to get a +5 to damage. They are hitting far less often, but are actually able to do damage on a hit. Chances are they will still die. Even if they have plate mail and a large shield with a +1 from dexterity and the dodge feat. the creature only misses the fighter on a 1 and is doing an average of 30 points of damage a round. The fighter probably has about 110 HP.
If the fighter was part of a party, none with magic items, assuming the standard cleric, mage, thief, fighter grouping that the designers seemed to have based the game on, someone is dying in this encounter most likely. The odds of one or more characters failing the will save is near 100%, especially if we assume standard point buy or standard array for characters was used in creation.

What this combat would look like: round 1 it activates its smite ability. someone, probably Rogue or fighter, very probably both, fails their will save and are stunned. It then rips into the mage in round 2. The mage probably having around 37 HP dies very fast unless they can remove the Nalfeshnee with one or two spells (or the cleric can). The Nalfeshnee most probably saves against any will save either caster can bring to bare. On round 3 it starts into the cleric, cleric dies probably around round 5, with a strong possibility that the Smite ability it used to daze the fighter and rogue wearing off around here, so it uses Smite once again on round 6. Cue the rogue being torn to shreds.

This is the most likely outcome unless the party already knew it was there and had cast spells before hand to help even out the odds. The cleric and wizard sacrificing spell slots to replace not having magic items.
If the wizard and cleric had only prepped healing and blasting magic, as I have known some players to do, they all very dead.

[zlefin]

For me, it's not something I'd pay a lot of attention too; but I would pay a little attention. Having fun is the main thing, so if everyone's having fun, it's all fine. If there's a problem, then WBL is one of many diagnostic tools to help assess.

It's generally more about the basic numbers than anything else. A party substantially below WBL can have martial types underperform. It can also be low on saves or AC compared to the baseline. If a party seems weak, low wbl can be a reason; if a party seems too strong (and they want things toned down) high wbl can be a reason.

Since most costs tend to use square function scaling, being behind/ahead doesn't have quite so dramatic an effect, unless the difference is very large.

As with many tools in the game; it's a useful starting point for the inexperienced DM or the DM who can't adapt well and discuss things with the players.

It's wrong to think that just because a certain path worked out for your group, that it'd work fine for every other group.

[vasilidor]

What I posted earlier is the dread every player has when playing 3.5 and the DM says "No magic Items" or "Low magic Campaign." If the players are close to wealth by level and are smart in what they buy they could easily turn that encounter into an easy breeze. Just getting a +3 cloak of resistance on the players can make a huge difference in the outcome of the fight. If a character is lagging in one way or another a good way to boost them up is drop a magic item meant for them. Or if you want to stick them with low to no magic and stay with low to no magic, stick with monsters whose CR is around 2/3rds of the party, and exclude some monster types altogether unless someone has class features or feats meant to directly counter them, and then generally only as a means of making that character shine.

[ericgrau]

WBL is supposed to be for new characters not to control party treasure. Party treasure is supposed to go by the treasure tables which could end up being lower or higher than WBL depending on luck and circumstances.

[RandomPeasant]

WBL is a broken system. You can't really ignore it, because going too low or too high can cause problems. At very low wealth, Fighters get kicked even harder in the teeth than normally, while Wizards don't really care (Vow of Poverty is even a semi-viable build for Druids!). At very high wealth, it becomes easy to blow through encounters simply by throwing gold at them, trivializing characters. And that means that adventures like "defeat the necromancers in the onyx mine" or "explore the monster-filled wilderness" are inherently problematic. And it makes spells like wall of salt or fabricate inherently abusable. So what you need to do is reform how magic items work as a whole. Or, like any other problem, you just mind caulk around it and the DM fuzz things so that people don't notice there's a problem.

[pabelfly]

I just do milestone-based experience and gold. Seems to work without issue for my group at the moment, and it reduces time I spend doing DM prep on unnecessary stuff, which I'm a fan of.

[Dimers]

Like the tier system, a WBL guideline does nothing active to improve the game. What it does is show you something to pay attention to consciously instead of making assumptions about how the game "should" work. How does wealth impact a game? That can vary a lot based on kind and distribution.

Kinds: If your gameworld doesn't have diamonds readily available, death isn't something you're going to bounce back from. If there are lots of magic weapons and armor, warriors will be more effective (but monks won't). If every second magic item that appears only provides a skill bonus, certain encounters will be trivialized and others will be unaffected. If PC wealth is given heavily in lands, luxuries, business opportunities, and other non-adventuring goods, players will need to optimize harder to handle supposedly level-appropriate fights and dungeoncrawls.

Distributions: Every party divvies up loot differently. Sometimes a frontliner gets the lion's share; sometimes the deciding factor is "hey, who can use this?"; some parties insist on an even split, down to the copper; sometimes there's a common fund to pay to fix problems like death or petrification no matter which member they happen to; in a few groups, a rogue can actually get away with tucking away extra wealth without other characters' knowledge. No matter what the situation, how wealth is distributed will affect which builds benefit and which builds lag. Even with theoretically equal distribution, some characters can craft themselves magic items and some can't.

One time I played in a campaign where new PCs came in a handful of levels lower than existing ones, which was problematic enough. But on top of that, the old PCs had gotten rich from adventuring, and the new ones got NPC WBL. They were basically worthless, barely able to contribute to the same challenges at all. (Three of the high-level ones were a cleric, a sorcerer and a psion ... and the DM believed that one of the newbies could build an effective martial tank for that party's fights.)

[Rleonardh]

Is it a wbl problem or more of ac and Bab of monsters just being to high in 3.5e.

Now to the question of do I as dm follow it?
I do try to be within the range of the wbl but at times I blow way past it.

[vasilidor]

I think part of the problem with wealth by level is how it was derived as necessary due to hold over design elements from 1st and 2nd edition where if you did not have a magic sword, you may as well just go home. Your character could not contribute.
In the example I gave earlier, the fighter needs about another +5 to hit and damage in order to be effective against the monster. How he gets it is up in the air. And about another +3 to 4 to his will save somehow to be able to have a meaningful chance of not being daze locked. Same goes for the rogue in the example of him being in part of a party.
Then you get into the issue of some monsters could not be engaged without some way of getting your character to them because they are flying and have a spell going that nullifies archery such as wind wall or worse.

[sleepyphoenixx]

It's a useful guideline. Not something i follow slavishly, but i keep an eye on it and adjust treasure if my players are significantly below or above (~30-40% deviation or more).

Being above WBL isn't really an issue unless players go out of their way to abuse it - as someone already mentioned they tend to spend extra on more situational items or less optimal ones so it doesn't have too much impact on balance in my experience.

Being significantly below WBL has a huge impact on anyone who isn't a full caster though so it's definitely something to avoid.
It's also why my games tend to have semi-regular shopping opportunities so the players can actually use the wealth they get.

[Mechalich]

I think part of the problem with wealth by level is how it was derived as necessary due to hold over design elements from 1st and 2nd edition where if you did not have a magic sword, you may as well just go home. Your character could not contribute.
In the example I gave earlier, the fighter needs about another +5 to hit and damage in order to be effective against the monster. How he gets it is up in the air. And about another +3 to 4 to his will save somehow to be able to have a meaningful chance of not being daze locked. Same goes for the rogue in the example of him being in part of a party.
Then you get into the issue of some monsters could not be engaged without some way of getting your character to them because they are flying and have a spell going that nullifies archery such as wind wall or worse.

It's even somewhat more fundamental than that.

D&D is a game about adventuring. Adventuring is best described as: 'Go places, kill things, haul away everything valuable that's not nailed down.' The acquisition of wealth is just assumed to be part of the base set of goals for D&D characters. After all, no character starts out with more than enough money to buy basic gear. Earlier edition DMGs had specific instructions that PCs who start wealth are not to be allowed. Greed is a fairly universal human motivation, so, so far so good. The problem is that successful adventurers tend to become astonishingly wealthy - by local economic standards - very quickly. Unfortunately, if that happens the proper in-character action is for the now financially secure PCs to retire from adventuring. This means the game ends and that's bad. Consequently, the game needed ways to divest characters of the massive monetary gains they were presumed to obtain and Gygax and co. arrived at the solution of pricing level appropriate magic items in line with level appropriate treasure totals. This created an inducement to direct all in-game wealth towards the acquisition of gear and never towards doing something else with it. And this sort of setup is actually fairly common. Basically all video game RPGs work this way. Usually it simply isn't possible to buy anything other than gear/consumables.

There are two major problems with doing this. First, it turns gear into a major component of the overall character power level evaluation, which may not be desirable or thematically appropriate (for example, Starfinder's take on this issue in a space-based setting fell flat). Second, it creates world-building distortions because of the way it converts wealth into personal power that most games don't bother to consider at all.

The D&D specific problem is, as usual, its absurd power-scaling. At level 1 it absolutely makes sense for gear to matter. The difference between a sword and a longspear or leather armor and chainmail is very significant at that scale. At 20th level it's pointless.

[Gruftzwerg]

It is situational.

For forum showcase and contest purposes you should follow em as strict as possible for given reasons.
But in actual play it is totally different from table to table or campaign to campaign.

WBL can also be used as tool for party balance. Giving the struggling players access to more specific stuff for them can often help them to not get overshadowed to hard.

It's really more about your intention. For theoretical exercises you should try to stick to it. For actual play, decide what fits the situation best.

[Maat Mons]

I've definitely had campaigns that deviated substantially from wealth-by-level.

My current DM has a tendency to go through several character levels either not giving us any significant quantity of money, or not allowing us to spend our money anywhere. But even he occasionally notices the effects of this and makes a point of dropping a bunch of treasure on us, putting us in a position where we can actually buy what we want, or both.

I once had a DM who would throw Mordenkainen's Disjunction at us when he felt we were getting too well-equipped.

Don't be like either of those guys. Give your players opportunities to acquire the things they need, and don't break their toys. If things have gotten so bad on the gear front that you need a big in-game event to get things back on track, you went too long without paying attention to this.

You don't have to stick to the exact numbers presented in the DMG, but too little or too much wealth can negatively effect the game.

[Fizban]

Everyone should pay attention to their party's stuff. You should know what they have, what they need, and what you're giving them. If you don't check their gear vs WBL and your game still works fine, then fine, but it is something that should be checked if there are problems, can aid in preventing problems, and it's entirely possible that even if a game is working fine without such guidelines it could work even better with some acknowledgement.

A character's gear is not recorded total lifetime treasures acquired. It is not cash or market value of current assets. The value of a character's useful gear is the value of their useful gear. The system overall expects a certain amount of flat bonuses and effects that can be tailored to a particular game outside of the leveling and character mechanics. If the party has been finding expensive trash items, they are under-geared until they can convert that into useful gear. If they have more weapons than weapon-wielders (cloaks for cloak-wearers, etc), those extra items have diminishing value until they can be converted into something useful. And if an adventure happens to be particularly weak to a certain item (Bane, it's usually Bane, or some sort of immunuity), the party can even be over-geared while under "wealth." Often complaints about WBL, as with many guidelines, come down to a failure to understand the point and context of a guideline while instead treating a tiny portion of it as a rule.



It's not like following it actually improves the game in any way. . .
In my experience, not only nobody follows [blank], but the game is also better for it.
Edited into form statement. You can replace [blank] with any sacred cow and have a true statement for any number of groups. Pick whatever metric you don't like about the game and tear it down or even turn it inside out to make your game better. If that's WBL, great. It could also be the CR system, the XP system, the skill system, the feat system, multiclassing penalties, prestige classes, the accepted body of published game elements, the idea that people can write their own game elements, entire concepts of adventure design, of party dynamics, of narrative structure or causality, of literally anything in the game. Any aspect of the game can be harmful for a given group, so for any [blank] there can be a someone that says following [blank] is bad and the game is better without it.


As for me, I have previously kept a meticulous spreadsheet of all items acquired, sold, and assigned- which did keep me fully aware of the giant pile of consumables none of them ever remembered, the unclaimed heal-bot's treasure starve, and the fact that since most of the characters entered at higher levels the party could easily "afford" to lose the giant pile of loot which was being carried by the character whose player left (since they were already a little over gear). I don't intend to do so again since it was a lot of work and it seems better to audit/adjust the treasure before it's found and then check up with the characters less often . I would rather keep a lid on WBL than end up with an over-geared party that needs overpowered foes or a sudden loss of treasure to compensate.

[King of Nowhere]

It's even somewhat more fundamental than that.

D&D is a game about adventuring. Adventuring is best described as: 'Go places, kill things, haul away everything valuable that's not nailed down.' The acquisition of wealth is just assumed to be part of the base set of goals for D&D characters. After all, no character starts out with more than enough money to buy basic gear. Earlier edition DMGs had specific instructions that PCs who start wealth are not to be allowed. Greed is a fairly universal human motivation, so, so far so good. The problem is that successful adventurers tend to become astonishingly wealthy - by local economic standards - very quickly. Unfortunately, if that happens the proper in-character action is for the now financially secure PCs to retire from adventuring. This means the game ends and that's bad.

this seems more of a failure for the player to come up with decent motivations for his character. and really, magic items don't fix that. "you can retire and live the rest of your life in luxury... or you can spend all your money on this item that will give you a % increase in accuracy."
if your character is the kind of guy who would retire to live in luxury, he would still do it.


Is it a wbl problem or more of ac and Bab of monsters just being to high in 3.5e.


I find them way too low. all the martial characters in my party are able to take down monsters from the manual depressingly easily. while the monster itself struggles to hit, and even when it hits, it does not deal any significant damage. conversely, i do find spell resistance too high. the party martials can one-shot enemies, or at most finish them in the second round, with basically no risk of failure. Conversely, the party casters fail to affect them 50% of the times. the wizard can still use a quickened true casting, but cleric and druid not so much.


I think part of the problem with wealth by level is how it was derived as necessary due to hold over design elements from 1st and 2nd edition where if you did not have a magic sword, you may as well just go home. Your character could not contribute.
In the example I gave earlier, the fighter needs about another +5 to hit and damage in order to be effective against the monster. How he gets it is up in the air. And about another +3 to 4 to his will save somehow to be able to have a meaningful chance of not being daze locked. Same goes for the rogue in the example of him being in part of a party.
Then you get into the issue of some monsters could not be engaged without some way of getting your character to them because they are flying and have a spell going that nullifies archery such as wind wall or worse.




It's generally more about the basic numbers than anything else. A party substantially below WBL can have martial types underperform. It can also be low on saves or AC compared to the baseline. If a party seems weak, low wbl can be a reason; if a party seems too strong (and they want things toned down) high wbl can be a reason.


Really it should be expected magic items by level by class. I see it as a sort of a base line, like if you are below this line you are going to have a hard time. Mind this is more true for non-caster classes than casting classes.

But that's the core point of my argument against wbl: if you use wbl solely to control the party's power, it does not work. Because the party's power depends as much on the optimization level as it depends on wealth. as a dm, you are already adjusting the power level to the optimization of the party. you do not prepare your adventures by looking at the manual and saying "my party is level 13, so I'll give them four ecl 13 encounters for the day, and that will be balanced - but only as long as they are following wbl!".
you do not do that, because it fails to account for the optimization of the party and resourcefulness of the players. an optimized party will destroy any level-appropriate encounter. smart players will find ways around obstacles. for my party, I would know level+5 is where I can start looking for monsters that aren't total pushovers. I already have to throw out all the CR and expected power system and make adjustments on the fly, based on what I know the party is capable of. And I basically use their previous encounters to figure out their power level. For a party of noobs, I'd have to underlevel encounters instead.
And since I'm already adjusting the difficulty level based solely on the party's demonstrated power, and not on any projection of what they should be able to do based on their level, then accounting for wbl is pointless. so my party is not only highly optimized, it's also overequipped; ok, instead of giving them level+5 monsters, I'll give them level+10 monsters. I will build npc opponents using their level of optimization and wealth as a baseline. I know my players have AC in the 50 range, this monster has +45 to hit, seems about right.

to control the power level of the campaign, I have a list of tricks, builds and powers - drawn while consulting with the players - that details what is the acceptable optimization level, and what is too strong. and that is the only thing I found to work.



Edited into form statement. You can replace with any sacred cow and have a true statement for any number of groups. Pick whatever metric you don't like about the game and tear it down or even turn it inside out to make your game better.

that's good wisdom.
it's also something that we all know already, but it's good to remember that every once in a while.
and it helps put the answer in context. because this is less about tearing down a sacred cow, and more about curiosity on how other gaming groups work.
So, let's start back on my basic premise on why I never bother to care for cr or wbl or any of those tables that the dmg is so fond of




Originally posted by [B]myself earlier in this post
you do not prepare your adventures by looking at the manual and saying "my party is level 13, so I'll give them four ecl 13 encounters for the day, and that will be balanced - but only as long as they are following wbl!". you do not do that, because it fails to account for the optimization of the party and resourcefulness of the players.

Is there someone instead who actually prepares adventures this way? who takes all the tables and guidelines on the dmg and crunches them and produces some actual balance? A balance that can be applied to different groups of different players playing at different levels of optimization?
if so, how do you make it work - because if I tried to apply that system, I'd produce terrible encounters.

[sleepyphoenixx]

I find them way too low. all the martial characters in my party are able to take down monsters from the manual depressingly easily. while the monster itself struggles to hit, and even when it hits, it does not deal any significant damage. conversely, i do find spell resistance too high. the party martials can one-shot enemies, or at most finish them in the second round, with basically no risk of failure. Conversely, the party casters fail to affect them 50% of the times. the wizard can still use a quickened true casting, but cleric and druid not so much.

You're comparing optimized melee (who presumably spend most of their resources on hitting better and harder) against baseline caster level. No wonder they fail to overcome SR.
There are plenty of options to get better at penetrating SR - not least of which Assay Spell Resistance, which is also a cleric spell - and spells that don't even allow it.

If your caster players pick spells with SR but don't improve their ability to make SR checks they have only themselves to blame. The options are there.

[King of Nowhere]

You're comparing optimized melee (who presumably spend most of their resources on hitting better and harder) against baseline caster level. No wonder they fail to overcome SR.
There are plenty of options to get better at penetrating SR - not least of which Assay Spell Resistance, which is also a cleric spell - and spells that don't even allow it.

If your caster players pick spells with SR but don't improve their ability to make SR checks they have only themselves to blame. The options are there.

we weren't aware that ASR is a cleric's spell too.
most other ways to overcome SR rely on heavily pumping caster level, which is severely restricted at my table.
the casters are pretty well optimized too; the druid can spam maximized firestorms and quickened maximized firestorms. the cleric is perhaps the least optimized, but a cleric does not need a lot of optimization to play support. he still can shoot implosions with DC 30+.
it's just that we were missing one single detail on a spell designed specifically for a situation.

I solved this problem at the table by giving all monsters +5 AC and -5 SR, anyway.

[sleepyphoenixx]

most other ways to overcome SR rely on heavily pumping caster level, which is severely restricted at my table.

There are plenty of other ways to boost SR penetration. Starting with feats like (Greater) Spell Penetration and the Robe of the Archmagi in core.
The MIC also has a few (Third Eye:Penetrate, Tomebound Eye of Boccob, Vest of the Archmagi or the Shattermantle weapon ability).
It's just that usually nobody uses them because pumping CL beats SR and does a ton of other good things too.

But if you restrict CL boosting those options still exist. The list is hardly exhaustive either, there's plenty of options.
And all the optimized metamagic reduction or high DCs won't help you if you didn't put anything in beating SR, as your players found out.
So if they want to use SR:yes spells they need to invest at least a little into it, much like the melee guys invest in things that increase their to-hit.

It's good if things worked out for you but there really is no need for monster SR to be nerfed.

[icefractal]

Well, I've more often than not seen it used for starting gear. Like, if the campaign is starting at 10th level, it's likely we'd start with gear equal to standard WBL for 10th level.

Beyond that ... to a certain extent, which varies by campaign. Here's the different varieties I've seen:

1) Standard Treasure
The combination of loot from foes and other rewards is standard for the CRs you're facing. So in general this follows WBL, but the control is on the input side, so if you miss loot you could be under WBL, and if you manage to get extra gold, or do cost-saving things like magic item creation, you could be over WBL.
Used to be the norm, less so now, but still used in things like published APs.

2) Virtual WBL
For when the GM doesn't feel like loot / money being a focus of the campaign. Loot given out during gameplay will be minimal, but characters have the effects of "virtual" items up to what they could afford with their WBL.

3) Not Applicable
For example, one of the games we're playing is modified E6, so having reached 6th level and then progressed considerably from there, there's no more "by level" for the wealth to correspond to.

4) Rewards Only
Not common, but there have been some campaigns where the PCs act on behalf of an organization and all their gear comes from that organization, at the organization's discretion - loot is minimal and/or discouraged. This has only happened a couple times and the campaigns didn't last long, so I don't have much data for how well it works in practice.

5) Nonstandard Treasure
Loot is just whatever gear made sense for the foes to have, rewards are based on the setting, with no particular adjustment toward WBL. When this is generous, it works fine, because having extra gear doesn't break anything until it's a lot extra, IME. Like, twice WBL is no big difference. Having too little gear can break things, but is fine as long as players know that's going to be the case and build accordingly.


That last point is important, I think -
If the players (and GM) are moderately mechanics-savvy and told about the campaign parameters in advance, almost anything can work and have reasonable intra-party balance.
No gear. 10x the normal gear. One encounter a day. Dozens of encounters a day. Atypical foe distributions like "almost entirely classed NPCs" or "mostly undead and oozes". House rules like "restricted healing" or "magic recharges quickly" or "magic has backlash" or "feats can be learned in play".
They all work fine if everyone builds accordingly, and the GM keeps the modified strength of foes in mind when creating the scenarios.

People will say those are inherently imbalanced, but what they really mean is:
"I can't just assume any standard build will be viable" - It's better to build with the campaign in mind anyway, IME.
"We'll have to have a session 0 and intentionally balance our characters" - You already do if you want a balanced party in 3.x; it doesn't happen automatically.
"The GM can't just use stock foes of CR X and trust they'll be fine" - See previous answer, that's already not something you can rely on in 3.x.

[zlefin]

If that was your core point, then you did not explain it clearly in the first place.
op said: "But that's the core point of my argument against wbl: if you use wbl solely to control the party's power, it does not work. "

It's also a rather poor response to our posts, as it simply ignores what we actually said to replace it with a strawman version of it. Please read the actual arguments that were made more carefully; the point was not to use WBL solely as hte one and only tool for balancing party power; nobody said that. The point was to use WBL as one of SEVERAL possible tools for balancing party power, and for detecting what is causing imbalances when they occur.

Please don't strawman, please read carefully the arguments actually stated.

[Thurbane]

How many people actually pay attention to whealt by level?

In my experience?

IRL at actual tables: not much.

On optimization forums: A LOT!

[Endarire]

WBL has mattered as a starting point. For example, if you start as an ECL 11 character in 3.5, expect to start with 66,000G worth of stuff. Beyond that it's rarely mattered.

[Faily]

WBL are guidelines. They approximately cover at what point PCs go up against enemies with certain resistances, defenses, or special abilities, and what sort of gear they should have access to in order to handle such threats. Whether that be magic weapons, diamond dust for restoration, or cloaks of resistance.

I don't think any table I play with really follow it strictly. Even when we play the offical APs, I don't think even those stay within WBL, but I admit I haven't done the math to check.

[Rleonardh]

I will at least tell you the ways I use it.

Creation of level 6+ character
In one shots or short campaign settings or adventure books.

In long term campaigns I completely ignore it, love when players decide to build fleets or forts, help a town or other "money sinks" as it allows them to really get into the world around them than simple you gotta stop the world from ending.

Best one I was actually a player in, was a setting where ancient vampire lords awoke to once again take domain over the material world. Each one had a special power, every time they killed one of them the other vampires gained that power, there where 5 of them. If all vampires were truly killed it would open a portal that not even the gods could close to the abyss, so we had to kill 4 and figure out how to entomb the last one where it could never arise again. Never got to the end of that one as the dm passed away and we drifted away.

[Akal Saris]

I've seen WBL used often for new characters in existing campaigns, as the guidelines that organized play used to use, and presumably as guidelines for treasure in published modules (I am dubious about the last point!).

Other than those cases, no, but I'm not sure that it's better for the game. After all, I've been in a game where my level 11 ranger had a masterwork bow as his most valuable item, trying to stay relevant in a party with a druid, a wizard, and a cleric. As a DM, I rarely care at all about WBL.

[Fizban]

Also, the intent of the game is that you shouldn't need to strictly enforce a WBL cap -because WBL is just an average of their treasure results. If you're using level appropriate monsters with standard treasure, then you should on average end up close enough to the expected treasure, because you're already following expectations. The game said roll X (the average is [something]), and you're rolling X.

A potential problem is when people use tons of classed NPCs, who have triple or more the expected amount of treasure, or lots of other increased treasure monsters, without enough no-treasure monsters (or money sinks) to compensate. And wouldn't you know it, the higher a power level you want, the more people lean on only the most powerful (and highest treasure) monsters and their own char-op NPCs, while ignoring the "boring" and "easy" mindless and brute monsters that have low or no treasure.

If you're running a module, it should already have appropriate treasure. If you assign treasure based on number of encounters rather than monster treasure entries, that should also end up appropriate over time. And now I could swear I've had this conversation before.

I would be interested to see the math on whether treasure is also "self-correcting" like XP- presumably not, since that comes from a formula that includes your level, while treasure is just treasure and as noted can be completely divorced from the CR of a monster even in its own entry.

[Troacctid]

As someone who has spent an unreasonable amount of time researching and cataloguing the best and most efficient ways to spend gold, I would feel remiss if I didn't follow through and hew closely to WBL in my games.

Here is my strategy. Look at the XP gained as a fraction of the amount needed to gain a level. Then take that same fraction of the expected WBL increase for that level, and give them that much gold per person. For example, from 8th to 9th level, a PC needs 8,000 XP and is expected to earn 9,000 gp. So if the level 8 party gets 4,000 XP in one session, they also get 4,500 gp each. Easy.

[sleepyphoenixx]

Here is my strategy. Look at the XP gained as a fraction of the amount needed to gain a level. Then take that same fraction of the expected WBL increase for that level, and give them that much gold per person. For example, from 8th to 9th level, a PC needs 8,000 XP and is expected to earn 9,000 gp. So if the level 8 party gets 4,000 XP in one session, they also get 4,500 gp each. Easy.

A character going from 8th level to 9th is expected to earn 11,331 gp, not 9,000 (as per the "wealth comparisons" table on DMG p. 54).
The excess ~25% you earn over the expected 9k WBL gain is the assumed costs for consumables and other one-time expenses.

[Crake]

Personally, I use pathfinder's automatic bonus progression starting from level 1, and my players assume no magic items at all will come their way. I'm quite happy to hand out all sorts of exotic, but otherwise mundane items, in fact I have a whole spreadsheet/loot table that includes all the various exotic materials and armor/weapon types for various cultural settings, and I also include a variety of firearm levels as well.

But this way, magic items actually become exciting and valuable, or even the source of a quest to forge or find, and it also allows me to throw as much, or as little gold at my players depending on the type of campaign I'm running, without fear of it ruining things, while still letting them spend it on all sorts of non-mechanical goodies, like buying land, or a ship, building a dojo and so on. Sure, it doesn't let every character shore up all their weaknesses, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, it's a team game after all, the players are supposed to cover each other, not cover themselves with magic items.

[pabelfly]

As someone who has spent an unreasonable amount of time researching and cataloguing the best and most efficient ways to spend gold, I would feel remiss if I didn't follow through and hew closely to WBL in my games.

Here is my strategy. Look at the XP gained as a fraction of the amount needed to gain a level. Then take that same fraction of the expected WBL increase for that level, and give them that much gold per person. For example, from 8th to 9th level, a PC needs 8,000 XP and is expected to earn 9,000 gp. So if the level 8 party gets 4,000 XP in one session, they also get 4,500 gp each. Easy.

I used to do exactly this in each session. Now I've simplified it even further and do milestone levelling once every few sessions, along with the equivalent milestone of gold as reward for completing some sort of quest.

[Seerow]

I think there is a line somewhere between "paying attention to it" and "following it slavishly".

Basically every table should be aware WBL exists and that there is a baseline expectation in the game for some degree of wealth. Variation from that is fine. Usually I try to keep within a 50-200% range, figuring as long as it's within that range, within the next level or so it should even out without direct intervention.

If it drops below 50%, I've clearly done something wrong (possibly too many Treasure: No encounters over the last few levels), and might arrange for the next big fight to have a larger treasure horde or some specifically targeted magic items for the party to counter-balance that.

Similarly if it gets above 200%, it may be time to pull back for a bit and give the party some breathing room, or an external gold sink besides gear to make up the difference. My regular group loves customizable vehicles, castles, etc. So if they're too wealthy, well somewhere in the next adventure they might get to hijack an airship and now there's all these great options they can spend gold on to make their airship cooler. It's still wealth, but it's wealth separate from player power and that's fine.


Though I admit, WBL and gold for magic in general can be annoying. I have run campaigns trying a bunch of things to divorce the two. I've tried the automatic bonus progression from PF. I've also just straight up given the entire party the benefits of Oath of Poverty from Spheres. I've done homebrew where the party uses milestone leveling, but still earns experience that they are able to spend on magic item effects inherent to them. I also once tinkered around with an incarnum style system where everyone got a certain amount of essence points they could use to activate magic items, then cut the price of magic items to like 5-10% of normal and super common and easy to find.

Basically, I keep an eye on party wealth and use it as a guideline. I also occasionally experiment with ways to completely break away from wealth. But one way or another making sure the party has access to the benefits of the wealth they're expected to have is important, and that is what WBL does for the game.

[Rleonardh]

What I wonder more than wbl is this.

Do you guys give more gold than art gems and items?

As gold is only thing that's not reduced by 50% when you sell?
I usually offer the players a straight -50 on selling straight or can trade for 75% so they only lose 25% of value.

Like at a potion dealer you can trade art or gems for 75% while regular armor can be traded for general items at general store, magical items can be traded for other magical items.

[Crake]

What I wonder more than wbl is this.

Do you guys give more gold than art gems and items?

As gold is only thing that's not reduced by 50% when you sell?
I usually offer the players a straight -50 on selling straight or can trade for 75% so they only lose 25% of value.

Like at a potion dealer you can trade art or gems for 75% while regular armor can be traded for general items at general store, magical items can be traded for other magical items.

This is actually incorrect. Page 112 of the phb, trade goods. Trade goods can be generally sold or exchanged for goods at their market value. Trade goods include, but are not limited to: gems, jewelry, art objects, and valuable metals. So if you've been making your players sell those things at half price, then you've been stinging them out.

[King of Nowhere]

If that was your core point, then you did not explain it clearly in the first place.
op said: "But that's the core point of my argument against wbl: if you use wbl solely to control the party's power, it does not work. "

It's also a rather poor response to our posts, as it simply ignores what we actually said to replace it with a strawman version of it. Please read the actual arguments that were made more carefully; the point was not to use WBL solely as hte one and only tool for balancing party power; nobody said that. The point was to use WBL as one of SEVERAL possible tools for balancing party power, and for detecting what is causing imbalances when they occur.

Please don't strawman, please read carefully the arguments actually stated.

fair point.
I'm frankly not even sure what my point is, or if I want to make one in the first place.
What I know is that in my gaming experience I've never seen wbl respected even closely, I don't find it useful for a plethora of reasons - mostly boiling down to "what's sensible in the setting takes precedence" and "you gotta balance power level to the table anyway" - and I wanted to hear some other experiences.

So, a question for you: because you have some control over wealth and optimization, do you send level-appropriate monsters at the party? Or do you still have to adjust to the power level, for example by sending level+3 CR encounters with reduced wealth to make the treasure appropriate for the party level?


Also, the intent of the game is that you shouldn't need to strictly enforce a WBL cap -because WBL is just an average of their treasure results. If you're using level appropriate monsters with standard treasure, then you should on average end up close enough to the expected treasure, because you're already following expectations. The game said roll X (the average is [something]), and you're rolling X.

A potential problem is when people use tons of classed NPCs, who have triple or more the expected amount of treasure, or lots of other increased treasure monsters, without enough no-treasure monsters (or money sinks) to compensate. And wouldn't you know it, the higher a power level you want, the more people lean on only the most powerful (and highest treasure) monsters and their own char-op NPCs, while ignoring the "boring" and "easy" mindless and brute monsters that have low or no treasure.
the problem is that when your party starts to optimize even a little bit, then throwing CR-appropriate monsters at them is not challenging. So you gotta use stronger monsters, and this equates to more loot. sure, you can reduce loot then, but you have to manually adjust difficulties and loots regardless.
the intent of the game - where you'd throw level-appropriate monsters with level-appropriate treasure at the party - only works at extremely low optimization. I mean, one of the core characters (that were used to playtest the difficulty, I think) is a rogue/wizard multiclass, that's the expected optimization level! Even though I want to limit the power level of my characters, I couldn't build something so cringeworthy if I tried.


What I wonder more than wbl is this.

Do you guys give more gold than art gems and items?

As gold is only thing that's not reduced by 50% when you sell?
I usually offer the players a straight -50 on selling straight or can trade for 75% so they only lose 25% of value.

Like at a potion dealer you can trade art or gems for 75% while regular armor can be traded for general items at general store, magical items can be traded for other magical items.
I don't even keep track of that stuff. If I have to give generic loot, I say "you get x thousand gp in assorted loot countervalue". the only times I do have an exact loot is when the party is facing npcs, because I know exactly what their gear is.

[Crake]

the problem is that when your party starts to optimize even a little bit, then throwing CR-appropriate monsters at them is not challenging. So you gotta use stronger monsters, and this equates to more loot. sure, you can reduce loot then, but you have to manually adjust difficulties and loots regardless.

I mean, do you need to use stronger monsters? Instead of throwing one no-loot brute at your party, just throw two. They still get no loot from the encounter, but now they're facing twice the challenge. Alternatively, just let them have their win. Or find other ways to make things challenging. Make them spend spellslots countering environmental challenges, like casting daylight to be able to see in the dark, and overcome their enemy's darkness SLA that just dispels their cantrip light spells.

Theres plenty of solutions beyond "just throw bigger, tougher monsters at them". All too often, I feel like people just baseline assume that their players will always have the perfect spells prepared, and that they will always be at full fighting capacity. That's only true if you let players full rest after every encounter, in which case, the issue lies with the pacing of your game.

[Troacctid]

A character going from 8th level to 9th is expected to earn 11,331 gp, not 9,000 (as per the "wealth comparisons" table on DMG p. 54).
The excess ~25% you earn over the expected 9k WBL gain is the assumed costs for consumables and other one-time expenses.
If I were randomly generating the treasure, I would indeed give slightly more to account for vendor trash, but I'm not, so I don't.

[Alcore]

I keep track of “useable” wealth by level. A crate of alchemist fire? Counted. The wagon they carry it? Not counted unless used as a weapon at least once. A pile of coins they hoard like a dragon? Shouldn’t be counted until they start dipping into it.


Are they grossly above level? Lets try a beefed up encounter or I could let them be awesome for an encounter or two… far below? Can they beat the encounter? Should I throw in a research arc finding the special kryptonite? Maybe turn it into a narrative where they don’t have to win the old fashioned way?


WBL is part mechanic and guideline of where the party’s equipment and magic items should be at. It’s part of the difficulty curve. The wargame difficulty curve, that is. Once you start delving into lore and narratives more options start showing up that don’t rely on wealth at all.

[False God]

I've never played at one, anecdotally speaking.

I've played in 3 different(I played in two of them with several groups and in several parties) long-term large-scale 3.X campaigns; one of them rained magic weapons on us like they were going out of style. One of them gave us all the wealth in the world but made it fairly difficult to get magic items (usually gated belong long quests, but you got some good stuff if you did them) and the last was an ultra low-magic ultra-gritty game.

None of them cared about WBL. Heck, none of them cared about balance.

Now, I have played in a number of smaller-scale games but they seem to have their own special sense of balance based on the much more contained adventure they were presenting.

I personally run low-magic, low-wealth, survival & intrigue games. And I sure as heck don't care about WBL, in fact I can't even run my preferred style of game if I did.

[KoDT69]

I was rummaging through my old binder of characters I played once upon a time when I could be a player. I have a 4th level character that has a single silvered dagger, 5 regular daggers, no armor, under 5gp in coin, and a handful of salvaged crap like ropes, pots and pans, bottles, etc. It was from an extreme low magic extreme low wealth campaign it ran for 5 months or so. XP was nearly non-existent and what's hilarious is that we enjoyed it immensely. On the flip side I have a 15th level Wizard with like a +1 Robe of Armor, a bag of holding, and like 4 super low end magic items, but his spell book was only 575% full if we were even close to the rules, but that dude got 2.3 million gold... Like loaded beyond rational limits here, and apparently I never thought to buy stuff! I remembered him being an old favorite but holy crap I didn't remember him not having things. Apparently I was having enough fun in that game that it never crossed my mind!

So the point is that any WBL in my actual experience has been nearly irrelevant. I'm sure many of you would have raided a magic shop or 10 with that 2.3 million gold ;)

[vasilidor]

I was rummaging through my old binder of characters I played once upon a time when I could be a player. I have a 4th level character that has a single silvered dagger, 5 regular daggers, no armor, under 5gp in coin, and a handful of salvaged crap like ropes, pots and pans, bottles, etc. It was from an extreme low magic extreme low wealth campaign it ran for 5 months or so. XP was nearly non-existent and what's hilarious is that we enjoyed it immensely. On the flip side I have a 15th level Wizard with like a +1 Robe of Armor, a bag of holding, and like 4 super low end magic items, but his spell book was only 575% full if we were even close to the rules, but that dude got 2.3 million gold... Like loaded beyond rational limits here, and apparently I never thought to buy stuff! I remembered him being an old favorite but holy crap I didn't remember him not having things. Apparently I was having enough fun in that game that it never crossed my mind!

So the point is that any WBL in my actual experience has been nearly irrelevant. I'm sure many of you would have raided a magic shop or 10 with that 2.3 million gold ;)

Your DM probably had a good idea as to what you could and could not take on with magic items. It also hurts less both at lower levels and if everyone is a spell caster.

[gadren]

I use WBL for starting wealth (for new characters above L1) and after that I use WBL for determining how much xp I give to characters, just like old-school D&D.

[King of Nowhere]

I mean, do you need to use stronger monsters? Instead of throwing one no-loot brute at your party, just throw two. They still get no loot from the encounter, but now they're facing twice the challenge. Alternatively, just let them have their win. Or find other ways to make things challenging. Make them spend spellslots countering environmental challenges, like casting daylight to be able to see in the dark, and overcome their enemy's darkness SLA that just dispels their cantrip light spells.

Theres plenty of solutions beyond "just throw bigger, tougher monsters at them". All too often, I feel like people just baseline assume that their players will always have the perfect spells prepared, and that they will always be at full fighting capacity. That's only true if you let players full rest after every encounter, in which case, the issue lies with the pacing of your game.

there's plenty of solutions, but in the end of the day, if the monster can't hit and the party fighter will instakill it, then it's not a real challenge.

Most important, if you are using environmental effects to try and waste spell slots or make the monsters more effective, then indeed you are adjusting the difficulty. You may as well use a bigger monster at this point.
All this is a tangent, though.
It's also a very abstract discussion that does not take into account the actual campaign. I do occasionally play with environmental effects, but really, the main factor is whether the adventure justifies such effects in the first place. Any dm worth their salt will pick monsters and enemies that are appropriate to the campaign, not something chosen solely for CR.
My campaign, the way the worldbuilding is set, most high level foes are npcs. with class levels and full gear. So if you play encounters like that, you're going to get lots of loot. I just embraced the outcome instead of trying to "fix" it.

[Max Caysey]

something that has been burning in the back of my brain, but exploded when seeing a thread on how many spells a wizard should have in their spellbook, and some arguments like "but if you give spells for free you put the wizard above wbl"

None of my tables has ever respected wbl, even close. with experienced groups, we've always been a lot above. in my campaigns, I play a high magic, renaissance/industrial tech world, and everyone is expected to be full of magic. in another campaign, the dm started by trying to follow wbl, then the party started to explore every plot hook the dm was dangling in front of us, which resulted in lots of sidequest, so the dm started handling out less xp to control the pace of progression, but still we got loot.
In addition to that, I just never cared to try and balance loot according to the tables, but i do balance according to what makes sense for the plot. Lardalia Ermenegigi is a 20th level rogue and head of the most powerful noble family in one of the most powerful empires on the world; she owns more land than you can see from the top of a mountain on a clear day. Obviously she's able to buy any magic item that is for sale on this world - and if the party manages to kill her, they can loot accordingly.
Conversely, with unexperienced parties, there is a scarcity of magic items simply because nobody is thinking of them. in my first party we were level 15 and we barely had any gear. I once had a railroading dm, when we quitted the campaign (at level 5) we had less gear than we started with at level 1!

So, my experience is that wbl only exhist in the dmg. nobody follows it. nobody cares.
It's not like following it actually improves the game in any way. Expected power level? what's that? my inexperienced party at level 17 could barely fight an iron golem - a cr 13 monster. My current high-op party at level 17 took down a group of 4 solars (technically a level 27 encounter) in half a round without breaking a sweat, then fought five level 30 encounters in a row and they were still in pretty good shape by the end. power level depends entirely upon optimization level and what's allowed at the table. in turn, this depends on the dm knowing their specific group - I know I can give 4 solars as an easy encounter to my high-op group, and I would never dare to do something similar to a group of rookies. So, following wbl does not make for a more predictable power level of the game.
Breaking wbl also improves balance a lot, because finally the martials are able to get all those abilities that they need - flight, see invisibility, etc. - without pestering their casters, and without mortgaging their primary weapon.
It also allows for more creativity; want that object that does something nice and situational and not particularly powerful? You can get it, without sacrificing your capacity to contribute.
conversely, with a low-op noob game, having low gear - provided you give adequate opponents - can be better because the players can barely remember what half their abilities actually do, much less how they interact with magic items.

In my experience, not only nobody follows wbl, but the game is also better for it.

So, I'm curious. Are there parties who actually track wbl and try to stick to it? dm who, if the party is above wbl, will send in a few big monsters without loot to give xp and put the party back on balance? Are there people who can say that trying to stick to wbl enhances their games?

I ude WBL when creating/ building new characters above level 1. Or when calculating wealth of followers… I never use it for anything else !

[D+1]

Like community demographics, difficulty level, and challenge rating, WBL is not inflexible RULES never to be broken. It is intended to be guidelines/tools and I treat it as such.

[Crake]

there's plenty of solutions, but in the end of the day, if the monster can't hit and the party fighter will instakill it, then it's not a real challenge.

Most important, if you are using environmental effects to try and waste spell slots or make the monsters more effective, then indeed you are adjusting the difficulty. You may as well use a bigger monster at this point.
All this is a tangent, though.
It's also a very abstract discussion that does not take into account the actual campaign. I do occasionally play with environmental effects, but really, the main factor is whether the adventure justifies such effects in the first place. Any dm worth their salt will pick monsters and enemies that are appropriate to the campaign, not something chosen solely for CR.
My campaign, the way the worldbuilding is set, most high level foes are npcs. with class levels and full gear. So if you play encounters like that, you're going to get lots of loot. I just embraced the outcome instead of trying to "fix" it.

My point wasn't that you don't need to throw stronger monsters, my point was that tougher encounters don't need to equate more loot. Adding environmental challenges, or upping the ante doesn't have to spiral the loot issue out of control, just find ways to make the encounter tougher without throwing gear or high loot mobs at your players.

[Telonius]

I know I'm probably a big outlier here, but the groups I'm with usually game for a whole level 1 - level 20 adventure path. Half the time I'm using published modules, and half the time I'm making my own. When I'm making my own, I try to keep pretty close to WBL. Not down to the copper; I don't like spreadsheets enough to do that. But given how much extra power you can squeeze out of magic items, I want to have a general idea of how strong to plan the encounters. (Some of my players belong to the "Take everything that's not nailed down, and have a crowbar for the stuff that is," school).

[sleepyphoenixx]

My point wasn't that you don't need to throw stronger monsters, my point was that tougher encounters don't need to equate more loot. Adding environmental challenges, or upping the ante doesn't have to spiral the loot issue out of control, just find ways to make the encounter tougher without throwing gear or high loot mobs at your players.

Don't forget the power of oneshot items. If you're using a lot of NPCs it's a simple way to keep loot reasonable without making combat too easy.
And important NPCs tend to live a lot longer with a Doomwarding weapon or a Ring of Nine Lives.

As a DM you can give your NPCs partially charged items, overpriced potions and all those other things players tend to shy away from in favor of permanent magic gear.
You don't need it to last for more than one encounter after all.

[Rleonardh]

I usually give NPCs those type of items also, most players will love the free one use potions or wands they don't have to buy if the wands are actually of use.

[Mordante]

In my experience?

IRL at actual tables: not much.

On optimization forums: A LOT!

QFT,

This forum is mostly for and by people who play D&D as an Excel sheet optimization.

[RandomPeasant]

My point wasn't that you don't need to throw stronger monsters, my point was that tougher encounters don't need to equate more loot. Adding environmental challenges, or upping the ante doesn't have to spiral the loot issue out of control, just find ways to make the encounter tougher without throwing gear or high loot mobs at your players.

Don't forget the power of oneshot items. If you're using a lot of NPCs it's a simple way to keep loot reasonable without making combat too easy.
And important NPCs tend to live a lot longer with a Doomwarding weapon or a Ring of Nine Lives.

As a DM you can give your NPCs partially charged items, overpriced potions and all those other things players tend to shy away from in favor of permanent magic gear.
You don't need it to last for more than one encounter after all.

If you feel the need to do this sort of thing on account of WBL, that seems like evidence that WBL is a problem, not a "way to make it work". You shouldn't need to do something special to keep the campaign sane when the PCs fight the Legion of Doom, but WBL inherently means that you do. Carefully designing each NPC warrior-type so that he has an oil of greater magic weapon and greater magic vestment instead of actual gear is just annoying for the PCs.

[sleepyphoenixx]

If you feel the need to do this sort of thing on account of WBL, that seems like evidence that WBL is a problem, not a "way to make it work". You shouldn't need to do something special to keep the campaign sane when the PCs fight the Legion of Doom, but WBL inherently means that you do. Carefully designing each NPC warrior-type so that he has an oil of greater magic weapon and greater magic vestment instead of actual gear is just annoying for the PCs.

If you're throwing tons of gear on NPCs you shouldn't be surprised if WBL breaks. The expected treasure averages explicitly assume that some enemies don't give loot.
You're probably also going way over NPC WBL to keep them relevant because doing that with permanent magic items isn't cheap.
You can't really complain about WBL not working when you're ignoring the expectations it's based on.

Using oneshot items is how you keep gear-using NPCs relevant within NPC WBL, which doesn't go very far without them. The WBL balancing is an (admittedly nice) side effect.
Charged and oneshot items are simply a lot cheaper for most effects and i see no reason to equip my NPCs with stuff my players would want - there's magic shops for that and item creation.

You don't have to go all-in and use only one-shot items, but every permanent magic item you replace with a charged or oneshot one gets you more power for your NPCs out of their wealth and helps keep PC WBL in check.

[RandomPeasant]

You can't really complain about WBL not working when you're ignoring the expectations it's based on.

I can when that expectation is "the PCs, characters with class levels and gear, will not frequently fight and be appropriately challenged by other characters with class levels and gear". I agree that there exists a set of campaigns for which WBL "works". But that set of campaigns is very constrained. It constrains out fighting large numbers of geared enemies. It constrains out the PCs having a business that makes money independent of their adventuring. It constrains out fighting long sequences of encounters that don't give treasure. It constrains out adventures set in environments made of exotic and expensive materials. It constrains out letting people use spells like wall of salt or fabricate creatively. Certainly, you can live within those constraints. But it might perhaps be better to consider an alternate approach that required less constraints.

[sleepyphoenixx]

I can when that expectation is "the PCs, characters with class levels and gear, will not frequently fight and be appropriately challenged by other characters with class levels and gear". I agree that there exists a set of campaigns for which WBL "works". But that set of campaigns is very constrained. It constrains out fighting large numbers of geared enemies. It constrains out the PCs having a business that makes money independent of their adventuring. It constrains out fighting long sequences of encounters that don't give treasure. It constrains out adventures set in environments made of exotic and expensive materials. It constrains out letting people use spells like wall of salt or fabricate creatively. Certainly, you can live within those constraints. But it might perhaps be better to consider an alternate approach that required less constraints.

It will always be an issue as long as wealth = power. Which is one of the basic assumptions of 3.5.
As long as players can spend extra gold on more magic items you'll always have problems if you throw too much loot at them.
I rather doubt you want to remove items from the game, so i'm not sure what your proposed alternate approach is supposed to be.

Instead of rebuilding the entire system into something it's not designed for you could simply work with the options it gives you.
And you can easily work with those as soon as you stop trying to gear your NPCs like they're player characters. They're not.

[RandomPeasant]

It will always be an issue as long as wealth = power. Which is one of the basic assumptions of 3.5.

Not really. The basic assumption is that items provide power. The issue is the assumption that if you have a large enough pile of turnips, you can cash them in for a +10 sword. If you just made it impossible for people to do that, it would be entirely possible to allow both very large piles of turnips and +10 swords to exist in the game without causing any problems.


As long as players can spend extra gold on more magic items you'll always have problems if you throw too much loot at them.

Notionally, magic item slots should be expected to limit that. Practically, I agree they do a pretty crappy job, but I would hardly say it's a "basic assumption of 3.5" that your magic item slots would be finely-labeled in ways you can get around by spending enough gold or dumpster diving enough. The game would work just as well if you simply had four or six or eight magic item slots and could not use any extra ones, regardless of whether they were "rings" or "swords" or "ioun stones" or "weapon crystals".


I rather doubt you want to remove items from the game, so i'm not sure what your proposed alternate approach is supposed to be.

My proposed approach would be something like this one (https://dnd-wiki.org/wiki/Tome_Magic_Items_(3.5e_Variant_Rule)). You make three basic charges:

1. No one can use more than eight magic items at a time.
2. The numeric bonuses of magic items scale with character level.
3. Cheap magic items, or non-magical treasure, cannot be exchanged for expensive magic items.

And that solves the problems with WBL, without needing to fundamentally re-write everything. The players can fight all the classed NPCs you want, because once you have a Vorpal Sword, a Flaming Sword isn't an upgrade for you, and no number of Flaming Swords gets you any closer to your next upgrade. But the Flaming Sword still gives NPC Goon #619 a level-appropriate to-hit bonus without having to do obnoxious stuff like give people magic oils instead of real gear. If the players happen to get rich by whatever mechanism, they can simply be rich and they will not become massively more powerful in an escalating spiral that eventually gets out of control.

[icefractal]

And you can easily work with those as soon as you stop trying to gear your NPCs like they're player characters. They're not.Eh, for me, taking that approach is detrimental to the "objective world" feel that 3.x provides (to an extent). Consumables, sure, they make sense. Using only consumables doesn't make internal sense unless this is an NPC who very rarely gets into combat. At the point when you're gearing NPCs on the basis that their stats only matter in this particular combat, why not save effort and disconnect NPC rules from PC rules entirely, as 4E and 5E do?

But on the other hand, I haven't found the moderate amount of over-WBL caused by geared foes to be a problem. Prices are quadratic, so having twice as much as you're "supposed" to only puts you a couple levels ahead in gear. Not generally a big deal, IME. In terms of "now the published adventures are too easy", it's a drop in the bucket compared to the huge effect of optimization.

[sleepyphoenixx]

My proposed approach would be something like this one (https://dnd-wiki.org/wiki/Tome_Magic_Items_(3.5e_Variant_Rule)). You make three basic charges:

1. No one can use more than eight magic items at a time.
2. The numeric bonuses of magic items scale with character level.
3. Cheap magic items, or non-magical treasure, cannot be exchanged for expensive magic items.

And that solves the problems with WBL, without needing to fundamentally re-write everything. The players can fight all the classed NPCs you want, because once you have a Vorpal Sword, a Flaming Sword isn't an upgrade for you, and no number of Flaming Swords gets you any closer to your next upgrade. But the Flaming Sword still gives NPC Goon #619 a level-appropriate to-hit bonus without having to do obnoxious stuff like give people magic oils instead of real gear. If the players happen to get rich by whatever mechanism, they can simply be rich and they will not become massively more powerful in an escalating spiral that eventually gets out of control.
So your solution to fixing WBL is to remove it. Because without anything meaningful to spend their gold on it may as well not exist.
Not to mention that the complete lack of magic item trade seems a little silly when they're apparently abundant enough that every mook runs around with a full set.


Eh, for me, taking that approach is detrimental to the "objective world" feel that 3.x provides (to an extent). Consumables, sure, they make sense. Using only consumables doesn't make internal sense unless this is an NPC who very rarely gets into combat. At the point when you're gearing NPCs on the basis that their stats only matter in this particular combat, why not save effort and disconnect NPC rules from PC rules entirely, as 4E and 5E do?
Why bother coming up with a new system when the one i have works?
And NPC's having limited money and watching their spending makes far more sense than every two-bit thug being kitted out in magical gear worth more than most castles.

And as i said you don't have to go only consumables. If it makes sense for an enemy to have permanent gear by all means, give him permanent gear. Just not all of them.
It doesn't make sense for most minion types, they just need the numbers to be an appropriate challenge to a semi-optimized party and DM's tend to default to "if it was a PC i'd buy X".


But on the other hand, I haven't found the moderate amount of over-WBL caused by geared foes to be a problem. Prices are quadratic, so having twice as much as you're "supposed" to only puts you a couple levels ahead in gear. Not generally a big deal, IME. In terms of "now the published adventures are too easy", it's a drop in the bucket compared to the huge effect of optimization.
It isn't a problem unless it gets excessive, and then only if the players actually spend it in a way that causes problems.
If you have the fighter carting around six +10-equivalent weapons (but only using one at a time to fight) he's probably massively over WBL but the impact on balance will be relatively small (unless he's much too low level for a +10 weapon at least).
But if the wizard decides to invest his extra wealth in high-level staff charges or Pearls of Power or boosting his CL the impact on balance is much larger.
If a caster decides to craft constructs having more WBL is the difference between a meatshield or two and a small army.

[Gnaeus]

So your solution to fixing WBL is to remove it. Because without anything meaningful to spend their gold on it may as well not exist.
Not to mention that the complete lack of magic item trade seems a little silly when they're apparently abundant enough that every mook runs around with a full set..

Honestly it reminds me more than a bit of Starfinder. Where your spaceship is ENTIRELY disassociated from your wealth (to prevent parties from spending more on a ship by skimping on gear, or on gear by skimping on ship). And your DPR is based on buying a new gun every few levels, but you can't use guns above your level, and the mass of under-leveled guns are sold at 10%, because being an arms dealer in the future is AWESOME. We found it to be gamist in a manner that broke any illusion of realism very quickly and in stupid ways. (Why would I guard my spaceship? It's worth 0 credits. And any spaceship I steal becomes the spaceship of an APL X party, so why care? Millennium Falcon 2, exactly the same as Millennium Falcon 1).



If a caster decides to craft constructs having more WBL is the difference between a meatshield or two and a small army.

Or mercenaries. You would probably have to forbid hirelings.

[RandomPeasant]

Eh, for me, taking that approach is detrimental to the "objective world" feel that 3.x provides (to an extent).

That's the other thing. Unless the enemy knows the PCs are coming, or is coming for the PCs themselves, having enemies rely on consumables to any significant degree (especially when the explicit reason for it is "so you don't get as much treasure") starts feeling insulting pretty quick. How exactly did these guards know to apply their oils today? Why is it that we never seem to catch them with their pants down and get the full load of consumables?

It's far, far easier and far less insulting to your players to simply adopt a paradigm where getting gear as treasure does not cause balance problems. As noted, it really isn't hard, and it has benefits far beyond just treasure from NPC wealth.


So your solution to fixing WBL is to remove it. Because without anything meaningful to spend their gold on it may as well not exist.

WBL cannot be "fixed" if there are ways to gain wealth without gaining levels. And since it is presumably the case that people in D&Dland still have jobs, it is demonstrably true that you can accumulate wealth without also accumulating levels. So you can either remove increasingly large quantities of things from the game in an effort to make WBL work, or you can remove WBL (or you can take the always-available and very common option of "mind caulk"). I prefer a solution that allows the PCs to fight a cult of necromancers who wield real magic items and live in a black onyx mine. I really don't see what benefit your solution offers that makes it better, and it seems like it leaves a lot of problems unaddressed.


Not to mention that the complete lack of magic item trade seems a little silly when they're apparently abundant enough that every mook runs around with a full set.

There's plenty of magic item trade. I don't care if you cash in the flaming sword you found for a frost longspear because you have built a longspear specialist. The issue is allowing people to cash in a dozen level-appropriate flaming swords for a level-inappropriate flaming sword. And there is, in fact, no reason to let people do that.


And NPC's having limited money and watching their spending makes far more sense than every two-bit thug being kitted out in magical gear worth more than most castles.

You don't think the issue there is maybe that a fairly good magic sword is worth more than a house and requires more gold than the average person can physically carry to buy? Like, yes, it is dumb that kitting out a mid-level PC costs about as much as a castle. But a large part of the reason that is dumb is that it encourages players not to have castles when they could instead have slightly better gear. If every GP the players get is a GP that can be turned into a slightly larger bonus on a sword, what reason is there to spend any of those GPs on meaningful things like castles or titles of nobility or expensive lodgings?


Honestly it reminds me more than a bit of Starfinder.

What you are describing of Starfinder sounds a good deal more similar to WBL-based gameplay than the lack thereof. The idea that the ship has to come out of a different pool than gear is pretty much exactly attributable to WBL meaning that the "wealth" pile has to go to gear or you don't get what you need to for your level. Vendors screwing you is exactly because the game needs to keep you to WBL. Scaling bonus is a bit like not getting to use higher level gear, but if the bonus scales it completely avoids the need to cash out old weapons, and the need for scaling bonuses at all is just a function of existing math in 3.5 assuming them -- if I was designing a new system there'd just be a flat bonus for "being magic".

[icefractal]

And NPC's having limited money and watching their spending makes far more sense than every two-bit thug being kitted out in magical gear worth more than most castles.I feel like maybe we're talking about different situations? If an NPC is really a "two bit thug", then they shouldn't have much in the way or permanent items or consumables.

Which means that yes, they won't be much of a match for mid+ level PCs. Which is, IMO, as it should be. If a 10th level party ends up in opposition to a normal gang, the gang isn't going to be able to have any chance in a direct fight. Depending on the situation, they could still be tricky to deal with, but Oblivion-style "these highway bandits are 10th level Warblades using Daedric armor" scaling is not going to happen in any game I run, and I'd find it highly unwelcome as a player too.

TBF, there are some situations where being consumable-based makes sense. For example, an organization with significant resources but without many elite combatants among its agents. If they know they're going up against foes who overwhelm them in individual power (the PCs), and can arrange enough control of the situation that their agents have time to prepare (drink potions and such), then a consumable strategy fits. But it should be because that's what makes sense in-setting rather than just what makes for a balanced combat.

[rel]

As ever, it depends on the game.
If I'm running a campaign focused on the tactical miniatures combat minigame, then WBL or some modification based on it will probably be baked into the rules.
If the game has a different focus, then WBL is unlikely to come up.

And on the other side of the table, the expected amount of loot, and the choice I get in its nature, is one of the factors that determine whether or not I join a campaign.

[King of Nowhere]

Charged and oneshot items are simply a lot cheaper for most effects and i see no reason to equip my NPCs with stuff my players would want - there's magic shops for that and item creation.

You don't have to go all-in and use only one-shot items, but every permanent magic item you replace with a charged or oneshot one gets you more power for your NPCs out of their wealth and helps keep PC WBL in check.

How do you justify your npcs actually getting the time to actually use all that single-use items?
Because applying oil of greater magic weapon/armor, drinking potions and such, all that requires a lot of time. and the effects only last a few minutes, and those consumables are expensive, so you must be very certain that you'll have a fight soon.
Do your careful balancing act also requires that the npcs are always aware of the pcs coming in advance? or does it entail most of the npcs being fought while unable to actually use their consumables, and thus being basically naked?

By the way, I do see an extremely good reason to equip my npcs with stuff my players would want: it's stuff the npcs would want too.
Conversely, I see no reason to give my npcs useless junk that the players would never want. why would those npcs actually buy that stuff? Why would anyone actually make it in the first place?

All that stuff is very immersion-breaking for me, because it goes against what would make sense in-world, and it's made solely to enforce an arbitrary "balance". I'd much rather have a dm throw disjunction at me, at least that would have good in-world reasons.


I feel like maybe we're talking about different situations? If an NPC is really a "two bit thug", then they shouldn't have much in the way or permanent items or consumables.

Which means that yes, they won't be much of a match for mid+ level PCs. Which is, IMO, as it should be. If a 10th level party ends up in opposition to a normal gang, the gang isn't going to be able to have any chance in a direct fight. Depending on the situation, they could still be tricky to deal with, but Oblivion-style "these highway bandits are 10th level Warblades using Daedric armor" scaling is not going to happen in any game I run, and I'd find it highly unwelcome as a player too.

who says anything about a gang of street thugs? obviously they won't have much gear and they are not a challenge for a high level party.
The noblewoman who owns more land that you can see from the top of a mountain on a clear day? the one who's the appointed champion of the empire? She's got the very best that can be bough. She's probably got several sets of the very best that can be bought, just for backup.

again, the important thing is what kind of stuff it would make sense for the npc to have.
If my arguments didn't make it clear enough, I am one of those who care deeply about having a self-consistent world that follows internal logic. The world comes first. I try to avoid applying gamist logic to it. Sometimes I can bake the rules of magic specifically to justify some balance, but when there is conflict, the world and its consistency comes first.



I rather doubt you want to remove items from the game, so i'm not sure what your proposed alternate approach is supposed to be.


Very simple, give loot as appropriate for the circumstances, without worrying about the party's power level. Have the world be built accordingly and react appropriately. So the pcs are super rich and have the very best loot and this make them powerful? that's ok, because their opponents also have the same kind of resources. if their opponents are large, powerful evil empires or ancient conspiracies who prepared things for centuries, or evil churches with hundreds of mid-level clerics who make a huge profit selling spells - they are basically pharmaceutical corporations, except they don't even have to spend money to produce their drugs - then it is appropriate for those enemies to have access to those resources.

[gadren]

I feel like my previous comment got buried in the argument between other poster, so I will expand upon by previous post.

I take inspiration from old school D&D in how WBL and XP are connected.

In "old school" D&D, MOST of your XP came from treasure. Enemies gave relatively small amounts of XP, but you got 1 XP per GP of treasure you took from the dungeon. Also, if you were a magic-user capable of item crafting and succeeding at creating a magic item, you gained XP according to the cost of materials that went into the magic item you created. Makes it a lot harder for a level 5 character to wind up with a wealth more appropriate to a level 20 character.

In 3.5 I keep a tally of the total value of the party's money and "adjusted" gear. (Adjusted gear value is the total value of items I consider usually useful + 1/5 the value of items that are only situationally useful (like a sustaining spoon) and expendable items.)

If the average adjusted gear value is above the party's level, I will add the necessary xp to the next session's XP reward to level the party up accordingly.

If the average adjusted gear value is below the party's level, then I make sure to drop more loot as appropriate to "balance the books", so to speak.

EDIT: Oh, also I see people talking about using magic gear just to make NPCs stronger to challenge the PCs? Why? Just make the NPCs stronger. Don't give the NPC a +1 sword, increase its strength by +2. Are you afraid that it's cheating or something? You're the DM, it's not cheating.
If I give enemy's a magic item, it's usually with the expectation that the PCs will claim it as their own, with the occasional exception (like giving the leader a magic item or two just to indicate that he was the leader and had access to the best stuff, even if it's stuff I know the PCs won't be interested in.)

[vasilidor]

As some have mentioned, too much gold in the game can remove the challenge from the game. The pendulum swings so far in the other direction and the game goes from too hard and the party being unable to handle things that an average adventure says, or thinks, they can handle to being able to challenge the party without total overkill.

[Crake]

If you feel the need to do this sort of thing on account of WBL, that seems like evidence that WBL is a problem, not a "way to make it work". You shouldn't need to do something special to keep the campaign sane when the PCs fight the Legion of Doom, but WBL inherently means that you do. Carefully designing each NPC warrior-type so that he has an oil of greater magic weapon and greater magic vestment instead of actual gear is just annoying for the PCs.

Not sure what your point is. I'm not advocating for strict adherance to WBL, I'm advocating for making encounters challenging without blowing up the player's wealth and entering exponential wealth growth as a result. The initial problem stemmed from someone saying that his players were too strong for equal level encounters, and thus they got more gear from the higher level encounters, which thus made them even stronger, thus giving them more gear etc. Even if you throw WBL guidelines out the window, you can see how that would be a problem.


By the way, I do see an extremely good reason to equip my npcs with stuff my players would want: it's stuff the npcs would want too.
Conversely, I see no reason to give my npcs useless junk that the players would never want. why would those npcs actually buy that stuff? Why would anyone actually make it in the first place?

Whether this is true or not depends on the availability of magic items in your world. An item that an adventurer found may have more value to them than they would get selling it for half price, while still not necessarily being worth them paying full value for. They didn't buy it themselves, they found it, but it's worth more than what they would get fleecing it off. That's not difficult logic to follow.

Conversely, unless you have a magic item mart super high fantasy setting, not all adventurers are gonna be able to kit themselves out exactly how they want, and will sometimes have to make do with what they can get their hands on.

[Mordante]

what reason is there to spend any of those GPs on meaningful things like castles or titles of nobility or expensive lodgings?


It really depends on the party. I don't find owning castles or titles meaningful.

[sleepyphoenixx]

It really depends on the party. I don't find owning castles or titles meaningful.

They can be fun, but that's usually when they're the focus of the campaign.
Where instead of going on quests the players deal with taking over a castle and handling the problems that arise.

As an extra when you're busy saving the world or whatever they just feel like a distraction.

[Gnaeus]

What you are describing of Starfinder sounds a good deal more similar to WBL-based gameplay than the lack thereof. The idea that the ship has to come out of a different pool than gear is pretty much exactly attributable to WBL meaning that the "wealth" pile has to go to gear or you don't get what you need to for your level. Vendors screwing you is exactly because the game needs to keep you to WBL. Scaling bonus is a bit like not getting to use higher level gear, but if the bonus scales it completely avoids the need to cash out old weapons, and the need for scaling bonuses at all is just a function of existing math in 3.5 assuming them -- if I was designing a new system there'd just be a flat bonus for "being magic".

Yeah, but like, if you fight a dozen mooks, they can all be geared to the teeth, because their guns are 5th level guns, and their grenades are 5th level grenades, and you are 7th level, because last years guns are trash and at 10% sale price it feels like you are looting the enemy castle for the spoons and plates for all its worth. Whether your item scales automatically or your WBL is "FIXED" by ensuring that you have exactly this gear at level x, no more no less, is equally a pile of hot garbage. My group found it to be as awful as your system sounds. Or in other words, sufficient reason not to use that system anymore. I homebrewed a better ship system based on PF downtime rules but we ultimately just moved back to 3.PF.

[RandomPeasant]

Even if you throw WBL guidelines out the window, you can see how that would be a problem.

Well, yes, which is the problem with WBL. WBL is the proposition that you can get really impressive amounts of power for sufficient amounts of gold. Except that, notionally, you only get enough gold to turn into a level-appropriate amount of power. I don't propose that you throw out the guidelines, I propose that you use a system where you can't break the game simply by showing up at a magic shop with a big enough pile of treasure. Then we can entirely dispense with the idea of needing special encounter designs to avoid exponential wealth growth.


because last years guns are trash and at 10% sale price it feels like you are looting the enemy castle for the spoons and plates for all its worth.

Do you not see how that is the literal exact behavior WBL demands of you? If every GP you get is another GP towards your big upgrade, you damn well better pinch every copper and greyhawk everything that's not nailed down. Your options are "the thing you're complaining about" or "disconnect GP from character power", which you are also complaining about. Your preferences do not appear to be coherent.

[icefractal]

It really depends on the party. I don't find owning castles or titles meaningful.This can be an issue, yeah.

On the one hand, I've had a lot of fun in campaigns like Kingmaker, where that stuff is a focus. On the other hand, if the campaign is about other stuff and/or the character is not someone who'd desire those things, it can end up feeling pointless.

And that's leaving aside the case where the GM won't let those titles be used for anything important - "Ok, yes, you are the ruler of this province, but you can't just get access to the crypts, you have to go through the secret tunnel and fight the skeletons like how I planned it, because ... reasons" or actively makes them a liability "Your castle is under siege, again!" Which makes them a lot less appealing.



As an extra when you're busy saving the world or whatever they just feel like a distraction."Save the world" plots create a lot of weirdness with WBL and with expected party strength in general.

Like, it sort of works when the PCs are the only ones who know the stakes are that high, and have no way to prove it. But otherwise? Why the hell are more people not getting involved? Even if for some reason the PCs are the only ones who can Do The Thing™, they should be flat-out handed / loaned all the gear they could possibly need.

"Yes, I realize the fate of the world is at stake, and if it's destroyed then my kingdom and its treasury will be gone too, but I simply can't give them this sword for less than 100k!" - something that a character who's incredibly, self-destructively greedy might say, but not really believable as a widespread opinion.

[King of Nowhere]

Whether this is true or not depends on the availability of magic items in your world.

unless you have a magic item mart super high fantasy setting, not all adventurers are gonna be able to kit themselves out exactly how they want

how many campaigns are there where adventurers cannot trade effectively? I've never been in one.

Technically, I've only been in one, with a toxic railroading dm who never gave any loot and took away our starting wealth by getting us imprisoned. Three sessions later, the fighter was still figthing with the bone of a prisoner as an improvised club, and I still hadn't had a chance to recover my spellbook and prepare new spells. But I don't count that as a serious campaign

I've been in a campaign where the DM tried to not have a magic mart.
the result? we'd look around town, travel to the bigger city, expand our network of contacts, and we managed to still get our loot bought and sold. It just took half a session. It became easier when the wizard got teleportation.
Gradually we got tired of it, and we handwaved it. "you spend a few days of downtime to sell the loot and find that latest upgrade you were looking for".

I don't know other people's experience, but it seems to me that the normal assumption would be that buying and selling is freely available, with "freely" defined as "invest some downtime into it". I suppose there are campaigns where the players are not given downtime... well, my only such experience was the railroad I mentioned above.

P.S. My setting is a high magic world with magic mart, so in my setting it makes



EDIT: Oh, also I see people talking about using magic gear just to make NPCs stronger to challenge the PCs? Why? Just make the NPCs stronger. Don't give the NPC a +1 sword, increase its strength by +2. Are you afraid that it's cheating or something? You're the DM, it's not cheating.

Sure, I could make a dude with 30 str and no gear. Nah.
I pride myself in having a consistent world with a believable setup. This includes having the npcs using the same rules as the pcs. This includes those npcs having good overall stats like the pcs, and having wealth appropriate to who they are. this includes giving a crapton of loot to the party if they do something, in-world, that would warrant getting a crapton of loot. and then addressing them to higher challenges.


As some have mentioned, too much gold in the game can remove the challenge from the game.

that depends entirely on the challenge. I found that too much gold never removed challenges from my games.
Becoming demigods with plenty of perks, being worshipped as messiah by a whole race, having every major power in the world seeing you as a savior and owing you favors; that's what removed challenge from my game.
And when I reached that point, I called the campaign over. It was a good and appropriate ending.


Except that, notionally, you only get enough gold to turn into a level-appropriate amount of power.
What is level-appropriate? There is no such thing as level-appropriate. A 10th level fighter wields sword and shield, hits at +15 for 1d8+6 damage, and struggles to face a troll. Another 10th level fighter ubercharges for 200 damage, and one-shots most monsters in the manual. Most of us play at somewhere between those two extremes, but it's different for everyone.

The dmg makes all kinds of assumptions on power level, stating that if you face level-appropriate encounters according to table A you gain level-appropriate xp according to table B and level-appropriate loot according to table C, and all this will put you within the wbl boundaries of table D, which will give you enough power to keep facing level appropriate encounters.All very neat, but in practice it falls apart as soon as the players start to be a bit creative. I'm not even talking about optimization, I'm talking even just of fighting smart, scouting, preparing.
And as soon as I realized that - many, many years ago - I threw out of the window all the tables about challenge rating, xp per encounter, loot, and just started to eyeball it. which is a lot more accurate than trying to follow those tables anyway. wbl is just one aspect of it, but really, it's the whole concept of level-appropriate power that wbl and the cr system and xp tables are supposed to uphold.

[Crake]

how many campaigns are there where adventurers cannot trade effectively? I've never been in one.

Technically, I've only been in one, with a toxic railroading dm who never gave any loot and took away our starting wealth by getting us imprisoned. Three sessions later, the fighter was still figthing with the bone of a prisoner as an improvised club, and I still hadn't had a chance to recover my spellbook and prepare new spells. But I don't count that as a serious campaign

I've been in a campaign where the DM tried to not have a magic mart.
the result? we'd look around town, travel to the bigger city, expand our network of contacts, and we managed to still get our loot bought and sold. It just took half a session. It became easier when the wizard got teleportation.
Gradually we got tired of it, and we handwaved it. "you spend a few days of downtime to sell the loot and find that latest upgrade you were looking for".

I don't know other people's experience, but it seems to me that the normal assumption would be that buying and selling is freely available, with "freely" defined as "invest some downtime into it". I suppose there are campaigns where the players are not given downtime... well, my only such experience was the railroad I mentioned above.

I personally only run magic marts in certain eras of my campaign setting, and those eras I've only run a handful of times at most. My most commonly played games are in lower magic times, with then again another handful in "magic is prohibited and will get you burned at the stake" dark ages. Players definitely get magic items, and they can readily SELL magic items, but generally, if they want to cherry pick their gear, they'll need to craft it, as they most certainly don't have access to freely trade gear, unless they're like, SUPER high level and get access to some of the high magic planar metropolises. Until that point, they generally make do with what they have, and trade what they can for upgrades when it's worth the trade.


P.S. My setting is a high magic world with magic mart, so in my setting it makes

Right, but as I said, it depends on the campaign. Not every campaign setting is a high magic world with a magic mart. I understand SOME are, but in my experience, that's not at all the norm. Players and DMs alike that I've played with have found high magic worlds largely unentertaining for long form campaigns. They enjoy them in the short term, seeing all the novelty, but then quickly get bored, and find it hard to reconcile low level problems with "why can't someone just wave their hand and solve this with magic".

[King of Nowhere]

Right, but as I said, it depends on the campaign. Not every campaign setting is a high magic world with a magic mart. I understand SOME are, but in my experience, that's not at all the norm. Players and DMs alike that I've played with have found high magic worlds largely unentertaining for long form campaigns. They enjoy them in the short term, seeing all the novelty, but then quickly get bored, and find it hard to reconcile low level problems with "why can't someone just wave their hand and solve this with magic".

[going OT, but by now the main discussion is mostly over] Yes, that's a major difficulty in finding plots in such worlds. However, magic cannot do anything or be anywhere. I had my party spend most of the low levels as pest exterminators or detectives for hire. I've made a key point of worldbuilding to establish stuff that magic can't do, or that would be too expensive and not cost-effective.

Conversely, I found that the problem with low magic worlds are that they break to easily. as soon as they get some power, the party become basically demigods, because nobody has the magic to counter what they do. Why bother with money when you can passwall into a bank vault? in a high magic world, a bank would be protected against such forms of intrusion.
Indeed, the whole magic mart in my world started as the most important merchants (who were still limited to relatively basic stuff at the time) piled together their money to build a super safe extradimensional storehouse so they could keep high level items without being robbed. they got monopoly on such trade, which also explains why you always get fixed, non-negotiable prices.

[Crake]

Conversely, I found that the problem with low magic worlds are that they break to easily. as soon as they get some power, the party become basically demigods, because nobody has the magic to counter what they do. Why bother with money when you can passwall into a bank vault? in a high magic world, a bank would be protected against such forms of intrusion.

See, the thing is though, I've found that by the time players reach those levels, they do basically become demigods, but as a parallel, they also transcend those mortal petty needs. If there's no magic mart to spend that gold on, then whats the point of stealing all that gold from the vault anyway? If they have sufficient magic, they can conjure anything mundane they want with little effort, and if they want something magical, then the people they would be trying to steal from would be on par with their abilities anyway, so it would still pose a challenge, y'know?

Basically, anything that is trivial for the players to beat, also provides trivial benefits to them, so it becomes a pointless endeavor, unless their goal is just to break things, in which case they become the villains, and other heros will rise up to defeat them.

[KoDT69]

I have to agree with Crake pretty much on everything. Sure, high magic is fun for a minute but it comes with a lot of issues.

Let's face it. You got a small town or city under siege. If they got a magic mart, then they got a caster that clearly outclasses the party making them unnecessary. Infrastructure is handled by magic, food, material gathering and moving, communication, all kinds of quest elements already moot before you roll for ability scores. This world needs your character much less than you think.

I have to wonder where this whole "game isn't fun unless I can get my ideal set of gear tailored to me on demand at a magic mart" mentality comes from. Being old school, loot was random. You randomly got good stuff or dumb stuff, but it was what it was. It was like a side quest to trade magic items and get upgraded, but it was more like I'm looking for a specific but standard item or just something better than we got. It made the new gear more appreciated IMO.

Let's also consider that the game world and core rules are assuming you want to play Conan and Merlin, not "Superpower Anime Ninja Wizardlord Protagonist with a ridiculously oversized +12 Vorpal Deathblade of Ultimate Doom". I don't see an issue with a group of 2nd level characters having to use their heads to defeat a horde of trolls. Or is it that people think that "well the party is 5th level now we should be no effort slaughtering Pit Fiends and looking for a nice Godly Realm location for my Divine Ascension next level"?

I love that the Theoretical Optimization is technically there and can be enjoyed for the though exercise, but I hate that so many seem to expect that as a standard expectation in real games.

[King of Nowhere]

I have to agree with Crake pretty much on everything. Sure, high magic is fun for a minute but it comes with a lot of issues.

Let's face it. You got a small town or city under siege. If they got a magic mart, then they got a caster that clearly outclasses the party making them unnecessary. Infrastructure is handled by magic, food, material gathering and moving, communication, all kinds of quest elements already moot before you roll for ability scores. This world needs your character much less than you think.

The problem is not in high magic. the problem is in playing high magic and trying to have the same plots you would have in low magic. Of course those plots wouldn't work. Just the same as a story set in the middle age and one set in the modern age would have different plots. You may as well try to tell the story of a knight charging on horseback at the enemy in the modern age, and complain that the modern age doesn't work for a story.

In high magic, you don't have a small town under siege by something that a 5th level party can defeat on their own. frankly, considering that a small town is still likely to have some 5th level characters, the whole idea of the siege falls apart. and any city is going to have some high level people in it, so "there are npcs outclassing the party" is true in low magic as well as in high magic. This has to do with level distribution, not with magic level, and not even with expected gear.
And still, there is this little besieged town, there will be a capital with some high level people in it, or an army. there will be some high level people around. if there are no high level people around, then it's now low magic, it's low power, which is an entirely different concept. Then you are probably playing E6. Unless you are playing with the party being the only high level people around, but in that case why bother with a campaign world that cannot meaningfully interact with them?

Also, a magic mart does not mean that your small town will have a guild of 20th level casters making high level items. doesn't have to work that way.
in my world, the magic mart means that there is a merchant union with a big extradimensional storehouse. that storehouse can be accessed by a dozen portals in the world's most important cities. A smaller town may have an office, without any magic except some form of communication, and a mundane employee. you make an order to the employee, the communication gets passed, your item will be delivered, your sold loot will be taken to the warehouse.
There are a handful of high level casters making high level items. It's just that those requests are handled in an organized fashion.
I mean, it's not different from the airplane industry. We have airplanes for sale. If you have the money, you can go to a specialized shop and buy an airplane, or have one commissioned. Doesn't mean there is a "planemart" with a major plane factory in every small town.

Further, high level caster does not mean battle-ready. I assume that in a high magic world there are lots of casters around, most of them crafting items or selling spells, but very few of those would be battle-ready. Reasons for it include
- casters are nerds. they tend to be in poor physical shape, i.e. low constitution, which coupled with low hit die, means they will die to a sneeze
- casters are nerds. most of them do not want to fight in a battle. they want to study and discover stuff. they may not even have bothered to learn combat spells in the first place.
- casters are scientists, engineers, high-end professionals. some of them are soldiers, but most are not. they are not trained to be soldiers.
So, the average caster, in an actual fight, would panick and be confused and don't know what to do. he'd probably cast a fireball at a random enemy. or he'd get killed before he get to act. or he'd run away as soon as charged. even casters specifically trained for combat may often lack actual combat experience; and it's a lot harder to train a caster for combat. a martial can get a practice sword and spar in what's an accurate simulation of actual combat; a wizard can't really practice casting banshee's wail at people.
there are fighting mages, of course, the pcs among them. but they are a minority.



Let's also consider that the game world and core rules are assuming you want to play Conan and Merlin, not "Superpower Anime Ninja Wizardlord Protagonist with a ridiculously oversized +12 Vorpal Deathblade of Ultimate Doom".

The rules assume a lot of stuff. If the d&d community only played along what the game designers supposed you would do, this game would have been dead a decade ago.

[KoDT69]

@King of Nowhere
Ok so my example wasn't exactly right, but I agree with the point that a low level plot falls apart in a high magic setting.
My actual point is that the PC's are supposed to be special, even if slightly. If they go to a small village, sure there might be an NPC or 3 that is higher level, but if 40% of Tiny Farm Town's population are higher level casters than the party, it just eliminated the need for adventurers to be there. Sure casters are nerds and don't wanna fight. Some maybe, but not all. That wouldn't make sense either. You'd think that some of those nerds would be smart enough to cast flight and rain fire on the unsuspecting Orc tribe, or summon stuff to handle it, or even craft constructs as town guards. They never have to be in harm's way. I'm just saying that for some things to make sense, there's a limit.

[Crake]

The problem is not in high magic. the problem is in playing high magic and trying to have the same plots you would have in low magic. Of course those plots wouldn't work. Just the same as a story set in the middle age and one set in the modern age would have different plots. You may as well try to tell the story of a knight charging on horseback at the enemy in the modern age, and complain that the modern age doesn't work for a story.

I'd disagree. Modern doesn't particularly correlate well with high magic. High magic would probably be more analogous to sci-fi. And sure, you could probably find SOME way to make level 1 adventurers fit into a setting like that, but it would likely end up vastly different than what the majority of dnd players come to a fantasy table looking to experience. It would end up closer to a sci-fi game, but just with the science replaced by magic.


In high magic, you don't have a small town under siege by something that a 5th level party can defeat on their own. frankly, considering that a small town is still likely to have some 5th level characters, the whole idea of the siege falls apart. and any city is going to have some high level people in it, so "there are npcs outclassing the party" is true in low magic as well as in high magic. This has to do with level distribution, not with magic level, and not even with expected gear.

A hamlet has a -2, and a thorp has a -3 modifier to it's local's level rolls. Good chance there's nobody in the hamlet above level 2 or 3 in either of those, and even if there are, they are described in the DMG as typically being the ones in positions of power, so like, the highest level fighter would be captain of the guard, with the highest level warrior as his lieutenant. Not exactly free to go exploring or adventuring to stop some extant threat, when they need to act as local law enforcement. Or, yknow, if the players start off in the village, THEY may very well be the characters of that community that are the highest level, or perhaps apprentice to those highest level characters.

Main thing you gotta keep in mind though is the part about the NPCs having duties that stop them from being adventurers. Just because a 5th level character is there in the city, doesn't mean that they have the freedom to go about adventuring.


And still, there is this little besieged town, there will be a capital with some high level people in it, or an army. there will be some high level people around. if there are no high level people around, then it's now low magic, it's low power, which is an entirely different concept. Then you are probably playing E6. Unless you are playing with the party being the only high level people around, but in that case why bother with a campaign world that cannot meaningfully interact with them?

And herin lies the problem. Twofold to begin with. Firstly is the discussion of high/low magic. I like to break it down into three categories. Ceiling, presence, and availability. Ceiling is the highest level of magic that exists in the setting. For pretty much every setting, this will be epic+ simply with the inclusion of gods, angels, demons, and planar affairs, but not necessarily true across the board. Presence is how present magic is in the setting at a fundamental level. Are magical materials naturally commonly occuring, are magical monsters found practically everywhere and anywhere, etc. Finally availability. How easy is magic to access for the common person. Are there magical academies where anyone can learn to cast spells, are the streets lined with magical lanterns, are the toilets enchanted with prestidigitation to self-clean, so on.

Most people, when discussing high or low magic, are almost exclusively referring to the availability of magic in the setting. Just because high level caster NPCs can and do exist, they still consider the setting low magic if the availability of magic to the populus is low.

Now, this brings me to the second problem. High magic availability would indeed render the above scenario moot, because the town could call in reinforcements with ease, a simple sending spell would have you covered, and sending stones are cheap as chips, you could easily set up an emergency network of sending stones. On the other hand, if magical availabiltiy is LOW, even if there's a 12th level wizard that advises the king, he isn't made aware of the issue, because if the town is "under seige" (i have to assume you're using this in a loose sense, not an actual army-based siege), then they can't get a message out at all. Or maybe they do manage to get a message out, but the players are the ones who are sent to investigate, because the 12th level wizard and his two 6th level apprentices are busy with more important matters than a small village experiencing some issues that are, in their minds, probably just being blown out of proportion.

See how this all still works even with the presence of high level magic, but with the magic not being widely available and kept in reserve for say, when the rival nation's mage decides to try and pull a saruman on the nation's king. If magic was highly available everywhere, then communication isn't an issue, travel isn't an issue, and information isn't an issue.


Further, high level caster does not mean battle-ready. I assume that in a high magic world there are lots of casters around, most of them crafting items or selling spells, but very few of those would be battle-ready. Reasons for it include
- casters are nerds. they tend to be in poor physical shape, i.e. low constitution, which coupled with low hit die, means they will die to a sneeze
- casters are nerds. most of them do not want to fight in a battle. they want to study and discover stuff. they may not even have bothered to learn combat spells in the first place.
- casters are scientists, engineers, high-end professionals. some of them are soldiers, but most are not. they are not trained to be soldiers.
So, the average caster, in an actual fight, would panick and be confused and don't know what to do. he'd probably cast a fireball at a random enemy. or he'd get killed before he get to act. or he'd run away as soon as charged. even casters specifically trained for combat may often lack actual combat experience; and it's a lot harder to train a caster for combat. a martial can get a practice sword and spar in what's an accurate simulation of actual combat; a wizard can't really practice casting banshee's wail at people.
there are fighting mages, of course, the pcs among them. but they are a minority.

Right, but the thing is, a) casters can prepare different spells on a daily basis, and in a highly available magic world, there's no reason local casters wouldn't share their spellbooks via some sort of internet-like system the same way engineers and scientists share their papers freely with one another online, and b) you don't need to enter into a fight to trivialise it.

You don't need to get into a fight to be able to cast divination spells for local law enforcement, or hell, even cast divination spells for REMOTE law enfocement, and communicate vial scrying and message or some other system. You don't need to fight to construct golems for local defense, you don't need to fight to be able to cast create food and water (or even just goodberry) to completely negate the need for farming, and push the world into a post-scarcity society. Again, you end up with a society more akin to startrek than anything else. Like, sure, you can have good stories in such a setting, but it's a massive tonal shift that most people don't come to dungeons and dragons to experience.


Also, a magic mart does not mean that your small town will have a guild of 20th level casters making high level items. doesn't have to work that way.
in my world, the magic mart means that there is a merchant union with a big extradimensional storehouse. that storehouse can be accessed by a dozen portals in the world's most important cities. A smaller town may have an office, without any magic except some form of communication, and a mundane employee. you make an order to the employee, the communication gets passed, your item will be delivered, your sold loot will be taken to the warehouse.
There are a handful of high level casters making high level items. It's just that those requests are handled in an organized fashion.
I mean, it's not different from the airplane industry. We have airplanes for sale. If you have the money, you can go to a specialized shop and buy an airplane, or have one commissioned. Doesn't mean there is a "planemart" with a major plane factory in every small town.

Not sure what this point is meant to prove. If practically anyone anywhere can get their hands on any sort of gear, provided they can pay for it, then the end result is the same. Also worth noting that in such a society, gold would naturally cease to be a currency, because magic makes it so trivial to procure. You would need something far less readily generated as a currency. In my high-magic eras, it's experience. People trade their experiences for things they want, and it ends up with consumers perpetually at level 1, where they can generate the freshest experiences, while artisans end up at high levels crafting items for consumers, and using the profit experience to build what they want. Basically cities become giant XP farms for the handful of powerful spellcasters that run them, but the mass populus gets to live largely carefree, utopian lives.

The only way I could really make an adventure work in that era was to have the players stumble across an ancient secret that made them want to tear the whole system down, and they had to be very careful about taking steps without arousing suspicion until they were powerful enough to protect themselves.

In the end though, I'm not at all saying any one playstyle is wrong or bad, play how you want, but just don't conflate your experiences of having the ability to cherry pick your equipment with the norm. For the most part, nobody knows what the norm is, and we all have different anecdotal experiences, but considering the default assumption of 5e as being "no magical items are buyable or tradable at all", I think it's safe to say that the majority lean toward lower magical availability, even if the world does have a high magical ceiling and presence in the form of monsters and magical locations.

[sleepyphoenixx]

In the end though, I'm not at all saying any one playstyle is wrong or bad, play how you want, but just don't conflate your experiences of having the ability to cherry pick your equipment with the norm. For the most part, nobody knows what the norm is, and we all have different anecdotal experiences, but considering the default assumption of 5e as being "no magical items are buyable or tradable at all", I think it's safe to say that the majority lean toward lower magical availability, even if the world does have a high magical ceiling and presence in the form of monsters and magical locations.

I don't know about 5e but being able to cherry pick your equipment is explicitly the assumed norm in 3.5:

That’s not to say that you can’t apply occasional constraints
to how and when magic items can be purchased, only that the
constraints should be reasonable and shouldn’t prevent players
from equipping their characters fairly. For instance, a character
seeking a magic item should be in a community whose gold piece
limit is equal to or greater than the cost of the desired item (see
Table 6–10: Community GP Limits). You might also choose to
limit particular items for campaign story reasons—maybe the
knowledge of how to create certain items is a closely guarded
secret of a particular group, or even forgotten to all.
In general, though, you should allow characters with suffi cient
funds to equip themselves as they desire.

The DMG has a similar passage iirc.

[Tiktakkat]

I have paid attention to WBL, examined it from several angles, and tracked it more or less obsessively through multiple campaigns. My general observations are:

1. WBL is less important that Max Item Value Per Level
This is highlighted by the table in the Magic Item Compendium which effectively reduces the "cap" from half your WBL on a single item to half the wealth gained at a level on a single item. While this does not seem all that significant it has a major effect on the availability of certain items. The most notable example would be that a +1 weapon is a 6th level item and would not be expected to show up as treasure for any party until they are 5th level.

2. Not all magics are of equal relevance
This is highlighted by the Vow of Poverty feat and the automatic bonuses it gives for not owning any magic items. This effectively means that there is a theoretical design concept that magic items that do anything other than provide those particular bonuses are irrelevant to the point of being replaceable by some bonus feats. That leaves those items effectively overpriced compared to items that provide the primary bonuses.

3. Players, especially optimizers, hate consumables
Meanwhile, RAW expects them to be used and replaced constantly. This has a distorting effect on the system when players avoid spending anything on consumables, stockpiling any they find, and pouring everything into the permanent items that provide primary bonuses.

4. Wizard spellbooks are WBL
They really are. Especially with certain wizard optimization schemes. Wizard power is defined by having a spell for "everything" and the way they get that is by knowing lots of spells. Of course, no player would want to give up on a +6 headband of intellect in order to have another 30-40 spells in his spellbook, and would vehemently object if told he had to choose between the two. As a result, few players or DMs even consider trying to count a spellbook as WBL.

5. The designers know this but cannot help themselves
Look at published adventures. The treasure makes a joke of the original WBL guideline never mind the MIC IL revision. They cannot help themselves. Part of this is with good reason - it is what players expect. (This has been true since AD&D days. There was a section on it the DMG which was pretty much ignored in all the modules.) Ultimately, they had to rewrite the entire system to "fix" it. Pathfinder ultimately went the same route as well.

My conclusions from this are:
Generally, the more PC wealth is limited to the revised item level system in the MIC, the longer the game remains stable. Really obsessive attention can keep it reasonably stable up to 15th level, at which point the raw power level starts collapsing it. (Restricting optimization has a similar effect but is much less welcome and so less controllable.)
However, this is primarily limited to the "core" bonuses - attack, damage, saves, armor bonuses (including deflection and natural armor), energy resistance, and stat boosters, with skill boosters added depending on campaign. Most other magical abilities can be tossed about with more or less impunity. I have not heavily tested it, but I expect most item costs could be halved across the board with the cost for non-combat effects quartered, up to about double the WBL though still staying within the MIC IL guideline.
Without any such limit, players will generally focus on the "core" bonuses, and the power level is pretty much guaranteed to destabilize by 5th level.

Should you be this obsessive?
That is up to individual DMs and their players.
Some will appreciate the extended stability while others will frenzy not getting their magic weapon by the 3rd encounter and buying a stat boost item at 2nd level. And it has a heavy time and bookkeeping cost for the DM.
I have been obsessively obsessive and casually casual. (And watched the chaos of organized play.) My preference is a slight lean to the obsessive side but not going overboard. However, I have players who are not high-end optimizers, and so it does not matter as much. That suggests to me that the more the players optimize, the stricter you should be about IL limits if you want extended stability.
Of course, if you want over the top, optimized madness then do not merely ignore it, but use this as a guide to deliberately breaking it.

[Crake]

I don't know about 5e but being able to cherry pick your equipment is explicitly the assumed norm in 3.5:


The DMG has a similar passage iirc.

Oh, I'm quite aware of that, but I'm talking about in practise, not what the game wants to assume.

[King of Nowhere]

I'd disagree. Modern doesn't particularly correlate well with high magic. High magic would probably be more analogous to sci-fi. And sure, you could probably find SOME way to make level 1 adventurers fit into a setting like that, but it would likely end up vastly different than what the majority of dnd players come to a fantasy table looking to experience. It would end up closer to a sci-fi game, but just with the science replaced by magic.


wasn't talking about d&d setting, but about the general claim that magic makes plots moot. The example I had in mind would be to claim that the current age makes cime mysteries moot, because dna tests and fingerprinting trivialize the mystery. But it's not true. You can easily devise stories where there are no dna samples, and anyone out to commit a crime will know about those things and take precautions anyway. You have to adapt your plot to what can and cannot be done in the world.
And this is also how you tackle high magic.



On the other hand, if magical availabiltiy is LOW, even if there's a 12th level wizard that advises the king, he isn't made aware of the issue, because if the town is "under seige" (i have to assume you're using this in a loose sense, not an actual army-based siege), then they can't get a message out at all. Or maybe they do manage to get a message out, but the players are the ones who are sent to investigate, because the 12th level wizard and his two 6th level apprentices are busy with more important matters than a small village experiencing some issues that are, in their minds, probably just being blown out of proportion.

See how this all still works even with the presence of high level magic, but with the magic not being widely available and kept in reserve for say, when the rival nation's mage decides to try and pull a saruman on the nation's king. If magic was highly available everywhere, then communication isn't an issue, travel isn't an issue, and information isn't an issue.


This also works in high magic well enough. You still want to keep your strongest people in reserve. And you still want to send somebody on the ground to perform and investigation and give a report first, and this someone may very well be the party.



Right, but the thing is, a) casters can prepare different spells on a daily basis, and in a highly available magic world, there's no reason local casters wouldn't share their spellbooks via some sort of internet-like system the same way engineers and scientists share their papers freely with one another online, and b) you don't need to enter into a fight to trivialise it.

You don't need to get into a fight to be able to cast divination spells for local law enforcement, or hell, even cast divination spells for REMOTE law enfocement, and communicate vial scrying and message or some other system. You don't need to fight to construct golems for local defense,

yes, and that's accounted for in the worldbuilding. It does not trivialize fights or adventures, if you plan for them accordingly.
Ok, you can cast divination spells, but in my experience those are nowhere near as effective as people claim. So the assassin was hired by someone with a mask and a hood. How do you find out the identity of this guy with divination? There are those spells that let you contact the gods, but the gods don't have to know everything. In fact, with a whole world to cover, they are probably ignorant on most events. Also, a god can block other gods from seeing the stuff that he really wants secreted.

I generally start an adventure - at least starting from the mid levels - by telling the party what the diviners have already ascertained. which is a bunch of information. It doesn't have to trivialize the adventure, in fact it can be a convenient way to drop plot points or clues.

as for golem armies, those are a thing in my campaign world. however, golems have terrible perception and are not suited to, for example, differentiate a civilian from a hostile. They are great in battle, especially when you strap a cannon on their back, but they are not suited to policing the roads or go parlay with that hostile goblin tribe.

All that stuff is just part of the way the world works. Look, in our own world we have technology to trivialize a bunch of problems, but we've still got problems that people must solve.




you don't need to fight to be able to cast create food and water (or even just goodberry) to completely negate the need for farming, and push the world into a post-scarcity society.Also worth noting that in such a society, gold would naturally cease to be a currency, because magic makes it so trivial to procure.


ah, those are not exactly high-magic assumptions, those are RAW assumptions. Sure, if magic works just like RAW says, you get a tippyverse.
Most settings follow different premises. Myself, I found a simple principle suffices: "magic cannot create something permanently without paying some sort of price". It's an energy conservation principle, or perhaps equivalent exchange. In any case, it fixes all the magical economy. No more infinite loops of anything. No more free resources with wall of iron or wall of salt; if you want those resources to be actually permanent, you've got to pay with xp, or with some other component. Sure, you can create magic food, but that food is going to evaporate, molecule after molecule, in a few weeks to a few months; it will sustain you in a pinch, but you still need to take real meals regularly.
Other dm may use different limitations - dms that are bad at worldbuilding just ignore those issues, but you get similar issues in low magic too.

My point is that just because you have a high magic world, it does not mean that world can actually do X and Y just because there is a printed spell for it.



Not sure what this point is meant to prove. If practically anyone anywhere can get their hands on any sort of gear, provided they can pay for it, then the end result is the same.

My point is that the general concept pulled by those against the "magicmart" - the idea that "oh, but magic is rare, so you don't find it in shops" - is not accurate. It doesn't matter how rare magic is, with connections you can buy it. Just like planes are rare, and you don't find them in shops, but you still can buy a plane if you have money and connection and know where to look. "but in this setting magic is illegal", so are drugs, and yet you can buy them if you know where to look.
Adventurers are, by definition, powerful, rich and well connected. They should be able to spend some downtime to find intermediaries and interested people and buy/sell magic items. Perhaps with restrictions, but they should still be able to buy/sell most stuff. Just like someone with money and connection would be able to buy and sell most planes - perhaps you won't find a concorde because it's out of production and only 20 were made, well, probably if you offer enough cash you can still get your hands on one.
So it's not a matter of low magic or high magic. If magic exhists, and there are more than a dozen people in the whole world dabbling in it, then there will be someone buying and selling, and there will be some kind of market.

do notice that even in a high magic campaign, I still denied some of the higher level stuff by claiming "sorry, the merchant union is out of stock on this". When the players got wealthy enough to buy wishes, I rolled a couple of dice to determine how many would be for sale in the whole world.



Again, you end up with a society more akin to startrek than anything else. Like, sure, you can have good stories in such a setting, but it's a massive tonal shift that most people don't come to dungeons and dragons to experience.

Yes, you get different adventures from the standard fantasy, and yes, it may put off a few players. Others may appreciate them for their originality, for not being "the same old thing".

I am not arguing that high magic is better or anything. I started from the premise that high magic breaks the game, and I am refuting that claim by saying it's just a different kind of game, and it works perfectly well if one only takes some premises and follows them consistently.

[KoDT69]

@King of Nowhere you said the following:
'My point is that just because you have a high magic world, it does not mean that world can actually do X and Y just because there is a printed spell for it."

This is patently false in the context you're putting it in. The actual assumption with extra-planar magic mart is that you'll be able to get anything. How you are doing it in your games is cool and all, but you ARE putting in limits to deal with power scale. You can't really say the concept is fine then include a list of changes that nobody else is going to use as justification. If there is a spell X, it specifically DOES do Y by default.