Starting Gold

[DraPrime]

I just need someone to answer this question because I don't have my books on me. How much gold should a level 6 character officially start with?

[Ashes]

Can't tell you. It's product identity. Plus, I can't be bothered to find my DMG, but I'm sure some kind soul will PM it to you.

[Saph]

Google search for "Wealth By Level".

- Saph

[Annarrkkii]

You could do that. But bear in mind that whoever you get it from is breaking the law, as well.

[Lolzords]

He doesn't say he doesn't OWN the books, only that he doesn't have them with him. A level six character should start with 13,000gp if you use the Wealth-By-Level guidelines, though it's your DM who decides if you use WBL or if he assigns you starting gold.

[Dhavaer]

You could do that. But bear in mind that whoever you get it from is breaking the law, as well.

Wizards doesn't care. It's been posted on their own boards, and the mods totally ignored it.

[The Vorpal Tribble]

Wizards doesn't care. It's been posted on their own boards, and the mods totally ignored it.

Not to mention the thousands of times its mentioned in the play-by-posts so the players know what money to start out with for their level.

[Annarrkkii]

True, but it is, still, TECHNICALLY illegal.

So is J-walking, but no one gets busted for that, either. That and the fact that I seriously doubt Hasbro has the online secret police to track down anyone googling their top-secret WBL charts...

[The Vorpal Tribble]

True, but it is, still, TECHNICALLY illegal.

So is J-walking, but no one gets busted for that, either. That and the fact that I seriously doubt Hasbro has the online secret police to track down anyone googling their top-secret WBL charts...

I don't even think it is actually illegal. To play a game you have to use the rules. If your players don't know the rules they can't play. Surely Wizards would not make that the case.

[Emperor Tippy]

Fine, don't say the actual number.

To the OP: I woudl advise a number between 12,999 GP and 13,001 GP as the optimum starting amount for level 6 character if you want to stay true to WBL.

[Annarrkkii]

12,999.7

@Tribble. Fine. Be that way. However, by my book non-OGL equals non-distrubtable, and WBL is non-OGL. :p

[BardicDuelist]

That is about as lawful of you as an inevitable.

[kamikasei]

I would have thought that non-OGL material in the books would just fall under normal copyright, and thus be quotable under fair use? Now, maybe there's some special, stronger-than-copyright term applied to specific things like WBL, or maybe fair use doesn't apply here for whatever reason, but I'm pretty sure I can answer someone asking "what's the first sentence on page 43 of The Children of Hurin" without breaking any laws, and that I can do the same for a WOTC book.

As I understand it the issue is that an OGL-licensed document can't include such information, and perhaps that these boards or this site specifically can't.

edit:
Ah yes, here we go.

Posting any copyrighted material without permission is against the rules. Posts containing such content will be edited to remove that content. In particular, posts containing copyrighted material from game books that are not designated Open Gaming Content (OGC) will be edited to remove the copyrighted portions.

So my understanding is that it's not illegal for someone else, somewhere else to have a WBL table on the web, we just can't post it here. And it's probably not against board regulations to say "the WBL for level 6 is n", just to reproduce the table in full. (I wonder about providing a mathematical formula?)

[Dhavaer]

(I wonder about providing a mathematical formula?)

I seem to remember that someone spent a while crunching numbers and couldn't find a formula behind WBL.

[Tor the Fallen]

Would discussing rules, then, be illegal?

[Justin_Bacon]

True, but it is, still, TECHNICALLY illegal.

Not really. You would never be able to enforce a copyright on a table full of numbers.

And even if that weren't the case, it's important to remember that you can't copyright a rule -- you can only copyright the specific expression of that rule. So even if you couldn't duplicate the table for some reason, you would still be able to say: "A 6th level character starts with 13,000 gp." Because that's not what WotC wrote in the DMG.

IIRC, the WBL guidelines aren't even on the prohibited list for use of the D20 Trademark License. So you could even use them in a product using the D20 System trademark.

Justin Alexander
http://www.thealexandrian.net

(IANAL)