Does WBL system cheapen the acts of selflessness?

[StragaSevera]

I always felt like something isn't right with WBL as a concept, and today I had woken up with an understanding - why it feels strange to me.

I'm playing in a campaign where all player characters are Good - we have a LG paladin, a NG magus, and my character is CG inquisitor. And our interparty dynamics is very interesting - we sometimes disagree on the methods of achieving our goals, but we almost always agree on the goals themselves - which is, to help people. For example, right now we are in a small town that will be attacked by hobgoblins in a week, so we are doing what we can to bolster its defences - donating most of our loot to the guards and the militia for free, refusing to get rewards for the quests we do - "use those items to help the town instead", etc.

In this situation, these acts can be interpreted as not purely selfless - after all, our survival depends on the town safety too, it's easier to help the town survive than to deal with hobgoblins on our own. But let's strip this situation from such context, to sharpen up my example.

Imagine the same situation, but without the imminent looming threat. The party is just some wandering altruists, helping people because they can, "with great power comes great responsibility" and all of that. Of course, you can argue that even in this situation the party gets benefits - for example, building up their reputation. But still, it's hard to argue that this party members are selfless, right? If they donate their healing potion to a sick child, or if they are refusing to take a +2 sword from an old guardsman, because the town guard may need it to protect the people, this may be considered a purely selfless act.

Except... with the WBL system, it isn't.

Reality is not fair. There are reasons why Just World Fallacy is a fallacy. In reality, if you donate to charity without any strings attached (like tax cuts), you just lost your resources. Period. The world would not magically see that you are a good person, and will not give you good luck to compensate for the resources you lost. That's why, in reality, selflessness is so valuable and admirable - because these people really hurt themselves to help other people.

But in a game, if you donate a healing potion, it makes your party wealth go down a little. And if you refuse to take a +2 sword from a person that may need it, it makes your party wealth not go up a lot - like it "should" have gone. And this literally will give you good luck - for example, next time you would fight a monster, it will have more treasures to compensate for this "selfless" acts, and to push your party wealth to the WBL guideline. In a tabletop game with WBL, the Just World Hypothesis is not a fallacy - it really is how the world works.

And I really feel like it cheapens the acts of selflessness. When our party healed a wizard that had gone mad, and refused to take the magic items that she offered for helping her - "No, thanks, we are equipped pretty good, donate those magic items to the town militia instead" - for me it, for some reason, did not feel like a selfless act. At that time I thought that it didn't because we were indirectly helping ourselves by strenghtening the town defence against hobgoblins, and it was just a "resource allocation" problem, but right now I understand that even if we would leave the town and never come again here, it would not be a selfless act, because GM would need to either "reward" us by giving better loot in the future, or to break the WBL rules.

Does anybody feel that way too? Are there any ways to be selfless in a world with WBL?

[Satinavian]

I always assumed WBL was a guideline of what PCs should get minus 15% for assumed lost consumables.

What players do with that money is their decision. Giving it away instead of buying stuff is not something the GM should compensate.

[StragaSevera]

I always assumed WBL was a guideline of what PCs should get minus 15% for assumed lost consumables.

What players do with that money is their decision. Giving it away instead of buying stuff is not something the GM should compensate.

That's one interpretation, which may certainly be valid. However, is it really _wealth_, if you cannot use it in any way? Maybe the correct term would be "resources acquired per level", or something like that?

UPD: I looked at the Pathfinder rules (which is the system I play), and it says:

Table: Character Wealth by Level lists the amount of treasure each PC is expected to have at a specific level.

Note that it does not say "expected to get", but "expected to have".

[Hytheter]

Note that it only says 'expected to have' and not 'definitely does have.' If you give your stuff away, you may end up with less stuff than expected.

[icefractal]

Interesting question. Personally speaking, I don't think I've been in any campaign that continually enforced WBL like that.

I guess a similar situation I have seen is inherent bonuses. As in, instead of magic items you get certain abilities based on your level - either a fixed progression like VoP, or "virtual items" based on what your WBL would be.

Does that cheapen altruism, since the gold you're giving away may not even matter to you, depending on how the plot goes and whether the character cares about luxury? Personally, it didn't feel fake, but it didn't feel hugely impactful either. It was more like "Regdar donated 10,000 gp to help the town build a new bridge? Nice, truly a man of the people." rather than "You donated 10,000 gp?! Seriously?! Whoa ... I guess you're really devoted to your principles."

But OTOH, that's pretty much how I'd feel about a billionaire donating some amount that's objectively large but a tiny fraction of their total wealth to charity. Like, good for them, they legitimately made a positive impact, but I'm not going to sing their praises as some paragon of altruism, because for them it wasn't a big deal. And even fairly-broke high-level D&D characters are somewhat billionaire like in their capabilities, including the capability to acquire money when they need it.


On how I've seen WBL applied -
Even the more by-the-book tables treated it as an input, not an output:
* New characters start at WBL for their level (usually in the form of items more than raw gold)
* Adventures were designed such that the foes averaged out to "standard" treasure, and/or with additional rewards to counter no-loot foes.

With the result that we were pretty close to WBL. But it didn't get adjusted for what we did - if we gave stuff away or lost it, then we had less stuff. If we somehow got extra loot, then we had extra stuff. I think in a few of the games, the GM did periodically audit our total wealth, but that was like once per 1-2 levels, and was more like "guess I should adjust future loot up/down" than any kind of instant compensation/tax.

And then for the majority of games, WBL was more like a general guideline, or it was applied to new characters but not in-play. Certainly for the "sandbox" type of campaigns, the fact that you could end up richer or poorer depending on what you did was part of the point.

[StragaSevera]

I guess a similar situation I have seen is inherent bonuses. As in, instead of magic items you get certain abilities based on your level - either a fixed progression like VoP, or "virtual items" based on what your WBL would be.

Does that cheapen altruism, since the gold you're giving away may not even matter to you, depending on how the plot goes and whether the character cares about luxury?

I'm not sure. From what I know, at least in Pathfinder, if you play with Optional Bonus Progression rules (the "virtual magic items" one), your WBL is cut in half. So you get less money, and therefore, the money is more important to you, so it balances itself out =-)

But it didn't get adjusted for what we did - if we gave stuff away or lost it, then we had less stuff. If we somehow got extra loot, then we had extra stuff. I think in a few of the games, the GM did periodically audit our total wealth, but that was like once per 1-2 levels, and was more like "guess I should adjust future loot up/down" than any kind of instant compensation/tax.

I would argue that ANY audit of your wealth devalues your altruism - that's why I said it's more like "having good luck in the future" than "direct compensation". But if you don't look at the party status at all, then sure, it works - but it at least breaks the RAI (not RAW because, as Hytheter pointed out, it is "expected").

So I'm interested if there is any way to both adhere to RAI and not to devalue the sacrifices =-)

[icefractal]

I'm not sure. From what I know, at least in Pathfinder, if you play with Optional Bonus Progression rules (the "virtual magic items" one), your WBL is cut in half. So you get less money, and therefore, the money is more important to you, so it balances itself out =-)

I was thinking more of the version where it entirely replaces magic items (use the row two levels higher, IIRC) or the Spheres (3PP) version where you replace all wealth with 15 points of Boons (a much better system than the ABP, IMO; it's a lot more flexible but still easy). So in those cases, gold has no use for buying magic items, only normal gear, fancy living, and (if the campaign goes that way) ships, castles, staff, soldiers, etc.

By "virtual magic items" I mean that if your WBL was 100k, then you could use that for:
Orange Prism Ioun Stone (30k), Headband of Int +6 (36k), Ring of Sustenance (2k), Belt of Dex/Con +2 (10k), Amulet of Magecraft (20k)

But you don't actually have those items, you have the properties of them as innate abilities. So again, gold has little connection to personal power and an ascetic character could eschew it and still fight at full strength. Which I think is the simplest answer to:

So I'm interested if there is any way to both adhere to RAI and not to devalue the sacrifices =-)

With virtual magic items, the game stays balanced* regardless of whether the PCs pursue gold or not, and whether they keep that gold or not. Which means you don't need to abide by WBL at all, things can just yield as much gold as makes sense in-setting. However, it has pros and cons:

+ Supports (balance-wise) a wider range of character concepts
+ Can use a wider variety of adventure hooks, there's doesn't have to be a payout
+ With no magic items to spend on, people might actually buy galleons and castles and such
– Loot becomes a much weaker motivator, many adventures will need adjusting
– For characters who prefer the simple lifestyle and don't want political/social power, gold doesn't matter after a certain point and isn't much of a reward.
– Acquiring and spending loot is IC advancement (somewhat rare). Virtual magic items is just OOC advancement (plentiful, and levels already provide it).

Incidentally, D&D 5E, if going by the "magic items are seldom available for sale" guidelines, has a lot of similarities with this, including the "at a certain point players get a dragon hoard and just yawn" problem.

* To the extent that WBL is balanced. Many are of the opinion that a higher WBL reduces caster/martial disparity at least somewhat. And anecdotally - when we played Kingmaker (and had extremely above-WBL gear due to embezzlement), a Monk was a powerful and effective part of the party, which included a Psion and a Druid.

[Maat Mons]

I think we should draw a distinction between the player being selfless and the character being selfless. The character doesn’t know that wealth by level exists, or even that levels exist.

And bear in mind, adherence to wealth-by-level only makes the world fair for PCs. NPCs can’t count on DM handouts. So observations of those around them won’t give the players’ characters any reason to believe the world is fair.

It may also be worth noting that wealth-by-level has sillier effects than adding karma to the game world. If you take the morally neutral action of crafting magic items, your future luck will be worse to compensate for the extra value the items have above their crafting costs. At least with charity, you have a good rationalization for why the gods would reward you. Crafting items for yourself is just benefiting from your own hard work. I’m not sure what D&D deity would punish someone for being productive.

And what’s really weird is how, whenever the characters grow stronger, they suddenly start finding themselves facing more dangerous adversaries. When you think about it, every level the PCs gain makes the world that much more dangerous. If the players really cared about the kingdom, they’d level-drain themselves until the only threats around were weak enough that the town guards could take care of them.

[Hytheter]

I don't think contriving to ensure the party meets WBL is RAI. I could be mistaken, but I believe that when they say 'this is the wealth you are expected to have at this level' what they mean is that the game's maths is calibrated with that in mind; in other words, if you have the right amount of stuff then you will find challenges in the corresponding challenge threshold to be approapriately challenging (though of course, that's a fuzzy bar to begin with). That doesn't mean the party must have that wealth, though; it just means fights will be harder if you have less stuff than expected, and easier if you have more stuff.

Not to say keeping the party on target is wrong, either. It depends on the game. Maybe the GM finds the party lacking and generously balances the scales. That's fine. Maybe they instead keep that in mind when designing future encounters and thus make those encounters a little easier. That's fine too. Maybe the GM just trucks on like normal, and the lack of wealth becomes an obstacle that makes the game harder. That's also fine. Every table has its own playstyle - that's one of the biggest selling points of the hobby. WBL is just a tool to help the GM run the kind of game they want, to adhere to or ignore at their preference.

The problem you've outlined in the OP is therefore a mismatch in expectations. If you want a game where the your monetary choices have consequences but your DM is doing everything in their power to keep you in the right ballpark, then maybe it's time to have a talk about the kind of game you all want to be playing.

[icefractal]

And what’s really weird is how, whenever the characters grow stronger, they suddenly start finding themselves facing more dangerous adversaries. When you think about it, every level the PCs gain makes the world that much more dangerous. If the players really cared about the kingdom, they’d level-drain themselves until the only threats around were weak enough that the town guards could take care of them.

A definitely benefit to playing sandbox style is avoiding that siutation.

Although TBF, most of the linear-type campaigns I've been in did have a better explanation than that - either we were going to new places that were more dangerous, or the threats we were facing had always been a problem, just not one we'd been able to confront directly before. Or the campaign was set during a "**** hits the fan" event where things suddenly did get more dangerous for the world at large, but not because of us.

[Vahnavoi]

Wealth by level is not a guaranteed value that a character has regardless of what they do, under normal play rules it's the expected value of all the treasure a character has found at that point of their career. The whole thing largely exist to eyeball material possessions for characters above 1st level who are not created through normal gameplay. Game rules are largely silent on how this wealth is acquires or spent. A game master is not obligated to up player character earnings if players are being wasteful; to the contrary, if players are wasting resources, a game master can leave it entirely up to them to realize that they are below their nominal weight class.

For these reasons, wealth per level is largely detached from considerations of the just world hypothesis or altruism. Some version of the just world hypothesis being true makes sense for a D&D-like fantasy setting, but even then it doesn't necessarily mean material acts have material rewards. You have to account for various afterlives and the long timespans and distances involved in something like the great wheel cosmology: rather than lost wealth appearing in the next monster lair, the reward can only come after a character dies and their soul leaves for the outer planes, or in their next reincarnation, or the entire point of the exercise is that it increases the fitness of a group rather than an individual, fitting Lawful alignments and normal concepts of altruism. It's also worth noting that altruistic behaviour and rationally selfish behaviour could be congruent; or, to paraphrase a certain sci-fi author, duty is to a group what selfishness is to the individual, and it only makes sense to argue an act is one and not the other when there is genuine conflict between the two cases. In D&D terms, that conflict would be that of Law versus Chaos. Since there is such a thing as Chaotic Good in D&D's vocabulary, there is room for acts that are non-altruist yet still Good; indeed, it would make sense for any Chaotic character to scoff at the concept of "selfless" acts.

[KorvinStarmast]

When you think about it, every level the PCs gain makes the world that much more dangerous. If the players really cared about the kingdom, they’d level-drain themselves until the only threats around were weak enough that the town guards could take care of them.

The party looks up and the Paladin says "Wait. Do you mean to tell me that we are a part of the problem, not a part of the solution?

[stoutstien]

Most integrated Wealth and/or item upgrade systems are just false complexity for the sake of it. They are half legacy from when wealth was exp and half from the progress treadmill of more modern system's number chasing.

I wouldn't read into them as something to use to make in game coherent connections.

[Kish]

My answer would be: sure but you're not thinking extensively enough. In editions with WBL, "wealth hoarding" isn't something any sane person with PC class levels would ever do. Would a wizard rather have the market value of a ring of wizardry in gold, or have a ring of wizardry? Obviously the latter, with actual money being limited to "what we expect to need for expenses." If someone has a massive pile of money they're just hanging on to, that person is something like a dungeon boss and literally exists to be killed and looted. Quest-givers have enough money to give quest rewards, but if, beyond that, they have enough for ostentatious displays of wealth, they're likely to wind up getting killed and looted at some point, either by NPC villains or by PCs, depending on their and the PCs' ethics and general behavior. This changes the entire economic system--in ways I can't begin to go into with the no-politics rule here, I'm afraid.

I will say that ignoring WBL leads to horror stories like "and then they got TPK'd by a single vampire; who knew the challenge rating had no flexibility for them having no magical weapons at all?"

[False God]

I don't think so, and I don't think WBL implies what you suggest it does.

IMO, WBL is just "This is how much money you should have earned, if you had started at level 1 and made it to level X." It's a way to keep the system balanced because enemies begin to outstrip the players in ways that the game uses magic items to compensate. It is IMO, absolutely terrible design on those grounds alone. I ignore WBL entirely because I think it's terrible, but that's me.

Selflessness is cheapened when it's not selfless. Giving a person 100gp to help their sick child isn't selfless if you know they are likely to swear a life debt to you and serve as your personal butler for the rest of their days. Giving, but not "giving till it hurts" is still selfless; if the act was done freely and is comparable to the need. Giving a 1gp to a person who needs 100gp isn't selfless when you have a million gp. It's like when rich people ask for donations for their personal hairdresser's cancer treatment.

I don't think WBL has any real impact on this whatsoever, other than to generally raise the bar on what constitutes selflessness. The party needs less and therefore can give more. A billionaire walking through town giving everyone $20 isn't being selfless, they're just being weird, at the end of the day after he gives out 2000 20's for a total of 40k, that sum of money could have been better applied where need was greater and the giver in question has the ability to do so much more.

I don't think WBL says anything about the Just World fallacy. Sure, a character could get to the level in question and have not earned that much money, but WBL is just telling you if you're playing the game by the book, that shouldn't happen. It doesn't say anything more or anything less. Applying it to the entire world is the fallacy here. It applies to just the PCs as a meta-game construct to ensure that characters are appropriately equipped to fight the threats the book says they should.

[King of Nowhere]

I don't think contriving to ensure the party meets WBL is RAI. I could be mistaken, but I believe that when they say 'this is the wealth you are expected to have at this level' what they mean is that the game's maths is calibrated with that in mind; in other words, if you have the right amount of stuff then you will find challenges in the corresponding challenge threshold to be approapriately challenging (though of course, that's a fuzzy bar to begin with).

It applies to just the PCs as a meta-game construct to ensure that characters are appropriately equipped to fight the threats the book says they should.

Indeed. the OP is giving too much importance to wbl.

in addition to that, I will add that the wbl is calculated in a way that characters of a certain level with their wbl in gear will be "balanced" against level-appropriate monster. but the problem is, the characters used for playtesting those concepts include a rogue/wizard (without any of the prestige classes that could make the option worthwile) and a monk. It is also assumed that everyone has 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8 as stats array. and with those premises you can be sure a lot of that wbl is spent on crap. when experienced players with optimized characters go against "level-appropriate" threats, they mop the floor with the monsters so hard, it's not even funny.

the whole math on which the wbl hinges is founded on the whole table being noobs. which is right, because a table made of noobs will look at the tables and use them and get passable results. then they will start strategizing more, and balance will need to be reestablished in some other way. that's where various forms of balance to the table come in.

Imagine the same situation, but without the imminent looming threat. The party is just some wandering altruists, helping people because they can, "with great power comes great responsibility" and all of that. Of course, you can argue that even in this situation the party gets benefits - for example, building up their reputation. But still, it's hard to argue that this party members are selfless, right? If they donate their healing potion to a sick child, or if they are refusing to take a +2 sword from an old guardsman, because the town guard may need it to protect the people, this may be considered a purely selfless act.

this is a different issue entirely - and it's less about altruism, and more about efficiency.
I mean, is it better to use your resources to equip a large army? or is it better to have the large army less equiped, but have a group of really powerful adventurers? there's no easy answer here. It's akin to a real world army having to divide its money between light infantry and last generation planes. if a plane pilot sells his plane to buy better body armor for a thousand soldiers - or if the ministry of war reroutes funding from one more plane to better body armor - is that going to make the army as a whole more or less effective? there's not a univocal answer.
so, regardless of altruism (and I think it is an altruistic gesture in any case), it may well be that giving a random guard a sword that will increase his hit chance by 10% will make for a less effective army, when it would have been better to concentrate all the better resources and give them to some highly skilled individuals to make the best use of (like buying planes for the pilots in the real life example).

On the other hand, you can't take this too far to justify greed. you can donate a healing potion to someone in need, and possibly save their life. but doing so will reduce your chances to defeat the demon lord, so you may be actually endangering the whole world to save one person... no, this does not work. if you are facing a demon lord, one single healing potion means nothing to you; it won't actually affect your chances.
And while story-wise we know the players will defeat the final boss, the world at large does not. what if the party still dies? we will send in the second best group of champions we have and hope they get more lucky. in this case, giving all your best gear to the party means putting all your eggs in one basket.
It may very well be that if redgar donates 10000 gp to rebuild the bridge, this will increase trade and create more wealth, resulting in more magic items being produced, which means when the demon lord appears a few years later the world will be actually more prepared than if redgar had used those money to upgrade his ring of protection from +3 to +4.

tldr, asking "but if the players donate money to charity they make themselves weaker and endanger the world" is an avenue better left unexplored

[Just to Browse]

Wealth by level is not a guaranteed value that a character has regardless of what they do, under normal play rules it's the expected value of all the treasure a character has found at that point of their career. The whole thing largely exist to eyeball material possessions for characters above 1st level who are not created through normal gameplay. Game rules are largely silent on how this wealth is acquires or spent. A game master is not obligated to up player character earnings if players are being wasteful; to the contrary, if players are wasting resources, a game master can leave it entirely up to them to realize that they are below their nominal weight class.

I think this comment is a distilled version of my own thoughts on the topic, especially the stuff I bolded.

Also, I'd like to cite the 3.5 DMG here with some more bolding for emphasis:

One of the ways in which you can maintain measurable control on PC power is by strictly monitoring their wealth, including their magic items. Table 5–1: Character Wealth by Level is based on average treasures found in average encounters compared with the experience points earned in those encounters. Using that information, you can determine how much wealth a character should have based on her level.

The baseline campaign for the D&D game uses this “wealth by level” guideline as a basis for balance in adventures. No adventure meant for 7th-level characters, for example, will require or assume that the party possesses a magic item that costs 20,000 gp.

WBL is a dissociated mechanic used by DMs for balancing stuff, derived from the meta expectation of wealth per encounter. If the dragons in this session are dropping more swords in this session because you made a donation last session, you and your DM should talk about expectations.

[KorvinStarmast]

Most integrated Wealth and/or item upgrade systems are just false complexity for the sake of it. They are half legacy from when wealth was exp and half from the progress treadmill of more modern system's number chasing.

WBL itself might have been a reaction to, or a correction to, some of the AD&D oddities, like the old "monster can only be hit with a +2 weapon or greater" stuff that was a sloppy way of dealing with power creep. (I never liked that feature of the game from either side of the screen).

[Aeson]

But in a game, if you donate a healing potion, it makes your party wealth go down a little. And if you refuse to take a +2 sword from a person that may need it, it makes your party wealth not go up a lot - like it "should" have gone. And this literally will give you good luck - for example, next time you would fight a monster, it will have more treasures to compensate for this "selfless" acts, and to push your party wealth to the WBL guideline. In a tabletop game with WBL, the Just World Hypothesis is not a fallacy - it really is how the world works.

Says who? Where in the rulebook does it say something along the lines of "make an additional roll on Random Loot Table 173 for every thousand GP-equivalent that the party is short of WBL," whether for altruistic reasons or otherwise?

WBL is a guideline to help (inexperienced) DMs know how much loot to give out over the course of an adventure or how much of a 'starting budget' to give the players for equipment, consumables, and anything else they might buy or hire when they're building level N characters rather than level 1 characters for the start of the game; it's not a rule that says the PCs should trip over Gram in the dragon's lair just because they handed some poor kid a pile of gold instead of buying Excalibur.

For that matter, if you do take WBL as a rule that says you have to compensate the players for being short of where WBL says that they "should" be, where does it say that they'd only be compensated for being short of WBL for altruistic reasons? Say the party spends 50,000 GP worth of consumables getting through the last encounter; should they not be rewarded with an extra 50,000 GP worth of stuff beyond whatever they were "supposed" to get to compensate them for the wealth that they just burned getting through the fight? I don't see any reason to think that spending a scroll of Fireball is in any way, shape, or form more altruistic than spending a prepared Fireball, yet a scroll of Fireball notionally represents wealth equivalent to at least a few hundred GP which is destroyed upon use whereas a prepared Fireball spell is basically free insofar as monetary or "wealth" costs to spending it are concerned. Moreover, unless you're just having the players trip over random loot in compensation for their expenditure of wealth, a scroll of fireball that you spend during an encounter helps you get through it whereas a healing potion that you gave to some sick kid back in town does not, so even if post-encounter loot is being adjusted to compensate you for the 'missing' wealth either way I'd say that one of these two actions is clearly more altruistic than the other.

Altruism isn't binary, and in fact you could very well argue that a lot of real-world charity isn't really much better or more altruistic than giving a healing potion to a sick kid in-game when you know the DM's going to compensate you for it after the next encounter. You might not be compensated for it in the real world, but if you have a disposable income of $50,000 or $100,000 a year then giving $15 or $20 - or even $200 or $300 - a month to charity isn't going to have a significant impact on your wealth.

[Slipjig]

There have been a bunch of great points raised so far, but I would also like to add that giving up your magic items to random guards is almost certainly NOT actually a smart way to do good. Unless your PC already has a better sword, that +2 sword will almost certainly do more good in the hands of a PC than it will in the hands of Timmy the Town Guard: unless he also has magic armor, Timmy will probably go down after only 1-2 rounds of combat, at which point the sword becomes irrelevant (or, worse, is now in the hands of the enemy).

[Ionathus]

The only effective way I've found to do this is to introduce items that are scarce, even if wealth becomes a meaningless concept.

Diamonds are my most natural first pick. They are used for resurrection and are therefore, logically, worth almost as much as life itself. Finding a diamond big enough to cast even Revivify is a big deal to my players as a result, and they hoard them jealously. The paladin has had some delightful scenes where he resurrects a commoner that died because the party wasn't fast enough to save them and the rest of the party goes "dude, what the heck, we need those for us."

Having to sacrifice a magic item falls in the same boat (but only if it makes sense, like "break the magic item to deactivate the Puppy Kicker 3000"), as does having to sacrifice your time to do a good deed and therefore miss out on a short window for advancement.

[Willie the Duck]

I will as well throw my lot in with WBL being descriptive, not proscriptive. 3 lines of reasoning:

1) In particular because there is no mechanism detailed by which this happens when other similar mechanisms exist. Let's think about other types of altruism. Let's say that, instead of giving all their gold to a poor, beleaguered community, the PCs instead offer to help the adventurers of that community to get better at fighting off those things that challenge it. Perhaps the PC party of 4 high-level adventurers could pair up with a party of 4 low-level NPC adventurers and split into two half-and-half groups, each going out and taking on moderate challenges. When that happens, there are direct mechanism (CR vs. party ECL xp-granted formula) that will help the low-level-NPCs level up at a rapid pace. No similar mechanism exists for WBL.

2) If we conjecture that the books leave the actual mechanism to DM, but still assume the process (since "expected to have" rather than "expected to get"), applying that logic uniformly creates some rather unbelievable situations. Cities and towns of various sizes are also supposed to have a certain number of NPCs of a given level*, based on their population. Should we also assume that if those numbers are not met that new NPCs will pop into existence**? Perhaps it just means that one will likely show up, given that there is a power/niche vacuum to be filled. However, that (incentivization structure explanation) is more analogous to the notion that a PC with lower-than-expected WBL will likely go out and acquire more treasure, rather than some magical/karmic force will come into play to keep adventurers of a certain level. I, for one, have no problem with the notion that a PC might give up their treasure since being treasure-poor will incentivize them to go back out and look for more. That sounds like excellent RP.
*and magic items available, and some other qualities
**actually, since this site used to host Erfworld, that's not a completely impossible notion, just very very specific campaigns

3) Third. If we do suppose that mechanisms (unelaborated upon in the DMG) exist to keep PCs of a certain level matching a certain wealth threshold, why would we assume that it is the wealth that will be boosted to match the level? In a game with multiple, varied, and ubiquitous avenues for PCs to lower in level or xp total, it's equally possible that a PC who loses their wealth will find themselves inexorably drawn into situations where they will lose levels to match.

The party looks up and the Paladin says "Wait. Do you mean to tell me that we are a part of the problem, not a part of the solution?

If they keep level-draining themselves to help out, they will quickly become part of the precipitate.

[Vahnavoi]

The party looks up and the Paladin says "Wait. Do you mean to tell me that we are a part of the problem, not a part of the solution?

There is an actual valid reading of the great wheel cosmology as detailed by 1st edition AD&D that works like this, but it requires accepting Druids are right, and everyone else is wrong.

To wit: True or absolute neutral believes that good and evil and law and chaos have a natural balance point, namely the natural world of the Prime Material, and this status quo cannot be significantly improved upon in any permanent way. All non-neutral alignments are unwanted calls to extremism and any of them getting what they want just means the pendulum will eventually and inevitably swing back the other way. For every Paladin, there will be a Demon for them to fight, for every tyrant, a band of rebels to oppose them, and vice versa.

Druids want none of that. They don't want a world that oscillates wildly between states. They want a world where the sun sets and rises, where plants grow and wither, where animals breed and die, day after day like they have done since the dawn of time. In this paradigm, great heroes are as much a problem as great villains, if they don't lay down their arms or vanish from the face of Earth once balance has been restored.

[Pauly]

WBL is similar to abstract wealth. It is designed to a be a tool of administrative convenience. It is not a tool designed to increase immersion.

Accept the tool as being fit for it’s intended purpose and move on.

If the tool is not fit for purpose for your table then abandon it and use a different tool.

WBL is designed to ensure that characters have “level appropriate gear” to deal with “level appropriate challenges”. Not every campaign needs to be based around the idea that the world will be designed so that characters at [X] level should have [X x N] GP worth of gear. Not every campaign needs to be based around every character having an roughly equal value of equipment.
I’ve played low resource campaigns where the party’s resources were about 1/10th of what WBL would suggest and had a blast.
I’ve played in campaigns with abstract wealth where social class was tied to wealth. Characters were limited to acquiring equipment appropriate to their social class, which prevented the wealthiest character simply buying top class gear for everyone in the party.

[MoiMagnus]

Others have talked about the fact that you can do WBL in a way were altruism is still a significant cost.

However, some tables do have a more extreme versions of WBL, and yes it cheapen acts of selflessness, but that's kind of the point: the goal of such gaming philosophy is to remove wealth (and every deep consequences linked to it) as a parameter so that it does not bother the player anymore, and on the least distributive ways.

(You could also "remove wealth" by making everything free, but that would screw up character powerlevel)

And obviously, it assumes that peoples would be bothered by the consequences of having a more realistic wealth system, so it's clearly not for every one.

With "extreme WBL", yes, giving material resources to NPCs is kind of cheap. What matters is whether or not you took the time to do it, that's where the selflessness is still present: because both characters and players have limited time and might have better things to do than caring about random NPCs.

[gbaji]

With the result that we were pretty close to WBL. But it didn't get adjusted for what we did - if we gave stuff away or lost it, then we had less stuff. If we somehow got extra loot, then we had extra stuff. I think in a few of the games, the GM did periodically audit our total wealth, but that was like once per 1-2 levels, and was more like "guess I should adjust future loot up/down" than any kind of instant compensation/tax.

Right. But that's what the OP is addressing. If your characters are below the WBL (because they donated a bunch of stuff along the way), the GM may make note of this, and adjust future treasure to account for it and bring them back up. Which, over time, means that donating money or magic items doesn't actually cost the characters anything.

If I donate a +3 sword at level 10, by the time I'm level 15 I will have the exact same (ok, approximate same) amount of total wealth (magic items, coins, possessions, etc) that I would have had if I hadn't donated that +3 sword, but instead traded it in for a ring of protection or something I want/need at the local magic mart. So the donation didn't actually cost me anything.

The OP is taking that one step further and asking "so does this cheapen the altruism of such donations"?

Says who? Where in the rulebook does it say something along the lines of "make an additional roll on Random Loot Table 173 for every thousand GP-equivalent that the party is short of WBL," whether for altruistic reasons or otherwise?

Says a number of rules quotes in this thread. All of which state that this is the amount of wealth a character "should possess/have" at a given level. It's not just how much they are handed at a level, but how much total they should "have" at any given level.

The whole point of WBL is to help balance out characters who are level X via normal advancement over time, and characters created at that level from rollup. If we are running a party of 12th level characters, and a new player joins the group, WBL allows the GM and new player to slot in that new character and have them be at the correct power level both in terms of actual character level *and* gear. But that process only actually works if the other characters have the same amount of monetary value of "gear" on their character sheets. And that only works if the GM perioidically audits the total value of gear characters have, and adjusts the loot handed out to keep it within the guidelines.


Personally, I think it's a terrible idea and don't use it at all for any game system. But, technically, if you do follow the rules as written, the GM should be ensuring that every X level character has exactly Y value of "stuff" on their sheets.
And honestly, I think part of the reason I don't use it (and suspect many don't) is because it fails to actually result in the same reward/cost assessment for decisions the players make with their characters over time. Sometimes, characters get lucky or take extra risk, and get higher rewards. Sometimes they play it safe and don't.

It's also somewhat an artifact of D&D where magic items are somewhat part of character progression and power, so they get tied into level advancement. I'm not a huge fan of that. It leads folks to do things like assume "at this level, I should have this range of X, and Y, and Z, some percent comes from my own skills/feats/whatever, and the rest from items". Ah... No. As the GM, I'll certainly take into account PC magic items and capabilities when I'm crafting/balancing some encounter for them, but I don't really do it in a level basis (except in very broad terms). I think that a lot of this comes back to the lowball expecations of the designers that DMs are going to be skilless hacks who will just blindly plug in values from tables they are provided and drop them in front of the PCs or something (along with dutifully plugging in CR values for encounters by level, per day, etc stuff).

I like to think that even semi-skilled GMs can noodle out how to balance things without needing this. And once you chuck those things out the window, a lot of the "strange things" that can result go away. And yeah, that means that if you give away some valuable thing, there's no guarntee you're going to get it back. And I'm not going to balance future encounters as though it was assumed you kept it, nor will I adjust future loot to account for the fact that you didn't. At least, I'd hope that most GMs will move away from the tables and charts and calculations at some point. But yeah, technically, if we were to follow the rules as designed and written, then this quandary does actually exist.

[King of Nowhere]

I like to think that even semi-skilled GMs can noodle out how to balance things without needing this. And once you chuck those things out the window, a lot of the "strange things" that can result go away. And yeah, that means that if you give away some valuable thing, there's no guarntee you're going to get it back. And I'm not going to balance future encounters as though it was assumed you kept it, nor will I adjust future loot to account for the fact that you didn't. At least, I'd hope that most GMs will move away from the tables and charts and calculations at some point. But yeah, technically, if we were to follow the rules as designed and written, then this quandary does actually exist.

Indeed, I've never understood this fascinaton with charts and encounter tables. they never work anyway.
the strategy I found to actually work to balance encounters is more like this

1) eyeball an encounter

2) throw the encounter at the party

was it too easy/hard? ---> YES ---> use a stronger/weaker monster the next time. Go back to 1

NO

fantastic. let's keep going

None of this requires any knowledge of wealth by level, optimization level, encounter tables, or anything else.

[AvatarVecna]

And I really feel like it cheapens the acts of selflessness. When our party healed a wizard that had gone mad, and refused to take the magic items that she offered for helping her - "No, thanks, we are equipped pretty good, donate those magic items to the town militia instead" - for me it, for some reason, did not feel like a selfless act. At that time I thought that it didn't because we were indirectly helping ourselves by strenghtening the town defence against hobgoblins, and it was just a "resource allocation" problem, but right now I understand that even if we would leave the town and never come again here, it would not be a selfless act, because GM would need to either "reward" us by giving better loot in the future, or to break the WBL rules.

Does anybody feel that way too? Are there any ways to be selfless in a world with WBL?

This is one view of WBL that doesn't really mesh with basically any table I've ever played at. If you decide to waste your money on something that's not giving you bonuses, like charity or a house for your baby-mama or higher education for goblins, that's not the DM's problem. You may as well argue that a DM is obligated to have a new wand appear out of thin air every time the old one is consumed. WBL guidelines aren't a "if players dont have this much you've made a mistake", it's more to give guidance to DMs on what to expect from the encounter, same as CR. If you have a lvl 9 party with lvl 9 gear fight a lvl 14 monsters, they're probably gonna have a bad time, and you should be ready for that. If you have a lvl 9 party with lvl 4 gear fight a lvl 9 monster, they're probably gonna have a bad time, and you should be ready for that. But "having lvl 4 gear" is their choice on how to spend their resources, same as if they decided to make a poor feat choice for flavor, or a weird garbage PrC, or spend 100k on a really nice house instead of something practical, like a sword.

Wealth is a mechanical resource, same as levels and hit points and spell slots. It can be spent in order to gain advantage on all kinds of things. Sometimes what you're buying is a cool sword. Sometimes what you're buying is goodwill of the people you were charitable to. Generally the problem I have with WBL as for how it interacts with charity, is that it's more accidentally charitable? Like your example of being donated a +2 sword...but if the people in the party who want a magic sword already have +3 swords (or better), a +2 sword is worse than useless because now they've gotta lug it around. Charity, IMO, comes down to making difficult decisions. Deliberately giving up resources you want or need in order to make someone else happy instead of yourself. Giving up what's offered because "the next dungeon will have even more loot" is still charity, but giving up what's offered because "it's worse than useless" is not charity, and is honestly kinda rude.

My bigger issue is actually charity in worlds that don't have WBL, because you're not giving up anything. In 5e, a character who accumulates 100000 gp has nothing to spend it on. Did you buy full plate? Did you fill up your spellbook? Oh, you don't wear heavy armor and you aren't a wizard, well then this pile of gold is basically worthless. Like yeah, you could buy a 100k mansion back in town. You're still spending 99% of your sleeping time in a rucksack on the side of the road, and the very little time you spend in town will pay nothing but lip service to the fact you own your own residence. Who cares? It's not magic items, it's not spells, it's not heavy armor, it's not power. It's a little sticker on your character sheet labeled "the american dream" that affects such a small percentage of your actual gameplay that it barely deserves to be called a rounding error. So if it barely matters, if giving it up is giving up nothing...why not donate the mansion to the orphanage. You've got a ring of sustenance and a working blanket, that's all your earthly needs taken care of!

When money can't buy power, donating money isn't giving up anything valuable. It's charity in nothing but name. The way 3.5 works, where being under-equipped is a serious threat to your life past about lvl 5? It means something to give up the money. Even small amounts like a mere 10k sword you can't use could've been traded away for another wand of Cure Light Wounds.

Charity is only valuable because the game runs on WBL.

[gbaji]

My bigger issue is actually charity in worlds that don't have WBL, because you're not giving up anything. In 5e, a character who accumulates 100000 gp has nothing to spend it on. Did you buy full plate? Did you fill up your spellbook? Oh, you don't wear heavy armor and you aren't a wizard, well then this pile of gold is basically worthless. Like yeah, you could buy a 100k mansion back in town. You're still spending 99% of your sleeping time in a rucksack on the side of the road, and the very little time you spend in town will pay nothing but lip service to the fact you own your own residence. Who cares? It's not magic items, it's not spells, it's not heavy armor, it's not power. It's a little sticker on your character sheet labeled "the american dream" that affects such a small percentage of your actual gameplay that it barely deserves to be called a rounding error. So if it barely matters, if giving it up is giving up nothing...why not donate the mansion to the orphanage. You've got a ring of sustenance and a working blanket, that's all your earthly needs taken care of!

When money can't buy power, donating money isn't giving up anything valuable. It's charity in nothing but name. The way 3.5 works, where being under-equipped is a serious threat to your life past about lvl 5? It means something to give up the money. Even small amounts like a mere 10k sword you can't use could've been traded away for another wand of Cure Light Wounds.

Except that's exactly the assumption of WBL. That there is a direct translation between "total wealth" and "items you posess". There are literally charts of gp value of every single magic item in the game. The expectation is that the total magic items on the sheet plus actual coins should fall in a given range for any given level. That is precisely the point of the system.

It's not just about coins. It's about the gp equivalent value of all items the character posseses. And yes, in many games, there is an expectation that PCs can buy/trade items for other magic items of equal worth. So that +2 sword you don't need because everyone already has a +3 weapon gets sold in town for gp, which then gets spent (along with additional coin gained along the way, or from selling other loot) to buy items/scrolls/potions/whatever that the character actually needs/wants.

Charity is only valuable because the game runs on WBL.

Every game I've run into that has WBL (or something similar) also has exhaustive lists equating cash to items, specifically to allow for a standardized conversion of the lists of items on existing character sheets into a single cash value amount, or to use to "spend" the WBL cash value on a list of items to put on a character sheet when generating a new character at a given level. So yes. In any system where WBL is actually being used in this way, it's correct to argue that charity doesn't actually cost you anything, specifically because the GM is expected to increase your loot over time so that when you hit the next level, you will be back at "where you should be".

Do DMs actually do this? Maybe? Not sure. But if they are following the rules as written? yes. If they don't, then new characters joining the group at a given level will not be "balanced" to the rest of the group. Also (as a couple posters have pointed out), this is tied right into the CR/encounters calculations as well. The game system assumes a specific amount of value of magic items are on each character at any given level, and dials in the expected difficulty of any given encounter based on that assumption.

So, yes, a level 12 group with level 4 gear will have a very hard time with a given encounter, but the same encounter will be "just right" if they each have the WBL gear for a level 12 character. That's literally why the system exists.

The OP is just extrapolating this effect on charity. Um... We can also extrapolate this in terms of consumable items as well. Someone mentioned the concept that a new wand appears once the old one is used up. Um... Yeah. That's actually exactly what is expected. Same deal with potions and scrolls. It's expected that at a given level you will "have" (present tense) a specific cash equivalent of items on your sheet. That includes consumables. So yeah, one can also argue that there's no real "cost" to using those potions and scrolls and wand charges up pretty much as fast as you can (only making sure to get through the current adventure). Because, over time, consumables used up will be replaced. At level X, you'll be assumed to have a specific amount of "stuff" no matter if you hoarded it over time, or spent it willy nilly.

We could go further into silliness and declare that there's no value to haggling prices down from vendors, or sleeping outdoors instead of an expensive Inn to "save money". Yes. This is absurd. But that's the point. The WBL rules, as written, are absurd. But it's the method that D&D designers choose to use to allow for "balancing" of characters.

[AvatarVecna]

Do DMs actually do this? Maybe? Not sure.

Your reading of the RAW (which I generally disagree with anyway) is irrelevant because, again, I've literally never see a DM run it that way. No DM is looking at your sheet at any point except chargen with a calculator going "you're 0.3 gp under budget, I need to add an extra backscratcher to the next hoard of items". And even during chargen, that's a big if. This isn't a thing that happens. And the concern the OP is anguishing over is only a problem in a world where that actually happens - a world that doesn't exist.

Every game I've ever played, if you buy a house, that's cool, but you're not gonna get compensated for it by the universe. If you decide to donate that house to orphans, cool, still not getting compensated. Making poor decisions with your money makes it gone. You can argue with your party members that you should get a bigger share of the next treasure hoard to compensate, but if you turned to the DM and insisted the next hoard is required to have an extra hundred grand in it because it's literally illegal for him to let you go under WBL, at best he's just gonna laugh in your face.