Sorry to necro an old thread but can anyone cite the page number in the DMG and XGtE that this table is referencing and using to calculate an average? I don't seem to be able to find the actual original rules this table references.
In my own projects (links in signature) I have used:
- 25 gold worth of rewards + found valuables per quest per character for levels 1-4. Campaign of 10 quests has total gold amount of 250 gold per character.
- 75 gold worth of rewards + found valuables per quest per character for levels 5-8. Campaign of 10 quests has total gold amount of 750 gold per character.
So, not only are you giving your party less gold, but you also aren't allowing them opportunities to use what little you've given them to improve the party? And people wonder why their groups never make to high level play! There are entirely too many options that don't even require one to put on pants, let alone leave the house, to put up with nonsense like this. Glad I'm not in your party!
I've been running Curse of Strahd, which has basically no ability to buy anything useful (you can buy stuff up to... 25gp value. For 5-10x list cost) and the PCs don't really have trouble keeping up with the monsters.
If you struggle with magic items and gold management... look up Sane Magical Item Prices. I think it's MUUUUUUUUUUUUCH better than the crap estimation of value that they give us in DnD official... and before anyone gives me the "The reason it says 500-5000 is because it obviously varies from town to town and setting to setting!" yeah no shit... but if it said 500 I wouldn't expect every shop to sell it at 500 either, but giving me a range of x10 is RIDICOULESS.
There are many things you can do with your wealth beyond acquiring items.
You can buy a title from a cash needy noble. Make a donation to a thieves guild, asking them to look into something your party cannot track. Business opportunities unknown to the guild are best here. You could help fan the flames of discontent and fund a rebellion.
Any of these your DM should salivate over. THIS is you, the players adding to the story, grabbing the narrative wheel and being active contributors to how the story can go in directions the DM did not anticipate.
Drop money on expensive clothes. Hire Bards to sing your praises, and spread word of your legendary deeds. Get to know city rulers/councils. Gift them with found art/jewelry. Maybe someone wants to help increase their grand city's splendor and will hire you to capture exotic monsters for some Zoo. Hire a Dwarven clan to craft statues of yourselves and deliver them to the city park you are designing.
I could keep writing for hours. This isn't Diablo or some other computer game where it's accepted that your money is only a device to acquire things. Buy status with your money, or fund projects. Be a philanthropist.
A little late to the party, but I believe I came up with a decent baseline for those that want / need a place to start that is pretty close to RAW. Using the daily XP found in the DMG (pg. 84), and the PC level thresholds in the PHB (pg. 15), I determined what level a player/party would be at on a given day. For simplicity's sake, I did not account for levelling up mid-day. Using the party's average daily level, I was able to determine a relative estimate for encounter difficulties per day. The DMG states that the average day has about 6-8 (7) medium-hard encounters (pg. 84). I based my math around the fact that on average 1.5 of those encounters would yield a hoard reward. This number can be adjusted depending on whether you want to give your players more or less, for example, 2 hoards per day, or 1 hoard every other day, etc. Based on the treasure hoard tables found in the DMG (pg. 137-139) and your "hoards-per-day" multiplier, you can estimate a party's average daily earnings. Due to using the challenge ratings to scale for difficulty this is balanced for a 4 player party, but the difference for even +/-2 players would likely be negligible.
TLDR: I believe I've found a pretty good system for estimating a player's wealth at a given level for anybody who is struggling with balancing their rewards or starting equipment at higher levels. The system uses multiple rules from the DMG and PHB in conjunction with each other to determine approximate and average values.
Disclaimers: I am not an experienced player / DM and have not tested this method in a game setting.These are estimates based on math using multiple different rules.This does not account for gear or other treasures, like gems. This is not a hard fast rule, rather a starting place to come up with average values to be adjusted at your own discretion. These values are all averages and do not necessarily need to be adhered to on a case-by-case basis.
This is super helpful running my first campaign which just recently finished the characters found little use for town merchants when their pockets were lined with an immense amount of gold.
Yeah, I won't lie I tend to throw out some of these types of RAW suggestions. I do not allow magic items to be purchased beyond basic enchanted type stuff (so a brooch of protection or such).
More than that the amount of wealth a party 'should' have has to be relative to the NPCs offering them quests and the like. If the party act like selfish idiots they may not get an audience with a town or city's ruler. If they chose not to face a dragon they aren't going to get it's hoard.
Likewise, what use for coinage have a nomadic tribe of bugbears for example? Or a pack of goblins? To my mind what goblins can't hunt, make, or scavange, they'll just steal. So the premise that every creature would have gold on them is nonsense to my mind. As a result, the prices in my worlds are pegged to how many day's work it would take to make an item. A day labour gets 5sp for their work. That is just the going rate in my worlds. The higher your social strata the more you might get. So, if a fletcher can craft a hundred arrows a day, then those arrows are going to be worth cost of materials plus the cost of days work plus the profit margin. I've not yet had parties say that they are short of gold. That said, I do tend to ground my worlds in a lot more realistic analogies than other people so possibly just my style.
Sorry to necro an old thread but can anyone cite the page number in the DMG and XGtE that this table is referencing and using to calculate an average? I don't seem to be able to find the actual original rules this table references.
Thanks in advance
I had been wondering the same. After going through both books, the treasure tables in the DMG are rewards for defeating individual monsters and for treasure hordes, presented on pages 136-139. The only treasure tables in XGtE are for magic items, so I don't see how information from it could have been used.
User Martin_DM posted what look to be the same tables (excepting the rounded amounts) on Reddit a few years before the original post in this thread. That post mentions using the treasure horde tables on pp. 137-139, and the rules on p. 133. It makes no mention of Xanathar's Guide. It also goes into the details of how the numbers were calculated.
i find it odd that compared to 3.5 and PFSRD the money you get in 5e seems so little. at 5th level in 5e you get 700 starting gold which isnt even enough to buy your first ring of sustenance or even a traveler's cloak. compare that with pathfinder's 10,500 gp where you can buy the cloak, and a couple items to boost your stats. not to mention all the traveling equipment or you could spend that money to make your weapons hit harder by adding magical enhancement bonuses to them. the 700 from 5e seems very low. however i have played with people that like to min max their characters and when they dont have money they usually build characters that dont need items and break the game that way instead. as a counter to that i would say minimum at 5th level they should get 4k so that the fighter that wants a decent AC can buy plate mail and a decent magical item. however this also means that the recommended gold per level would have to be adjusted. thats just me tho, coming from a system that layed out specifically what you get in terms of gold for each level to a system that doesn't even tell you a recommended starting gold for up to 5th seems like a major oversight for players that wanna start at 5th or 8th level like a good number of DMs like to do
i find it odd that compared to 3.5 and PFSRD the money you get in 5e seems so little. at 5th level in 5e you get 700 starting gold which isnt even enough to buy your first ring of sustenance or even a traveler's cloak. compare that with pathfinder's 10,500 gp where you can buy the cloak, and a couple items to boost your stats. not to mention all the traveling equipment or you could spend that money to make your weapons hit harder by adding magical enhancement bonuses to them. the 700 from 5e seems very low. however i have played with people that like to min max their characters and when they dont have money they usually build characters that dont need items and break the game that way instead. as a counter to that i would say minimum at 5th level they should get 4k so that the fighter that wants a decent AC can buy plate mail and a decent magical item. however this also means that the recommended gold per level would have to be adjusted. thats just me tho, coming from a system that layed out specifically what you get in terms of gold for each level to a system that doesn't even tell you a recommended starting gold for up to 5th seems like a major oversight for players that wanna start at 5th or 8th level like a good number of DMs like to do
The differences between Pathfinder and 5e are clear design choices. The comparably low amount of available gold in 5e originates from three design choices made during writing of the 5th edition SRD. Back then, the rationale was that a) Magic Items should be really rare in camapigns/worlds and b) Magic Items aside from Potions should in general not be for available for sale at all and c) "Bounded Accuracy" was used for balancing everything and this concept is easly disturbed by the widespread availability of +X magic items. For this reason, Monsters in the Monster Manual also had their CR balanced to a standard 4-player party without access to magic items (with the unintended consequence that in actual games where magic items are commonly used most mid-high level partys can easily defeat foes way beyond their CR). Back then, partys and encounters were also balanced to a "standard adventure day" which typically consists of a relatively large number of low-threat encounters interspersed with multiple short rests. You will find some instances of these design guidelines especially in the early campaign books, such as Hoard of the Dragon Queen.
Now, reality has shown that neither DMs nor players are willing to play campaigns without general access to magic items (they are just fun to play with and serve as excellent quest rewards) and that storytelling works much better with less but more meaningful encounters. All of this has had profound consequences for the design of more current campaign and rule books as well as the balance of races and classes.
So, how do we deal with this? In my opinion the best solution is to adapt the availability of gold and magic items to your setting. In a high-magic setting such as Faerun or Eberron with plenty of spellcasters and crazy tech everywhere, I see absolutely no issue with 5th level player characters having access to purchaseable +1 magic items. In a postapocalyptic setting or a general low-magic setting in Lord of the Rings style this may of course be very different.
In one of the above posts in this thread, I have therefore laid out an extremely simple system to calculate gold availability at higher levels that can easily be adapted to any setting. For this, take the experience points required to reach the desired starting level and divide by a number of your choice. The result is the starting gold for the given level. Picking a higher divisor means less starting gold. I suggested using a number between 5 (rather high magic) and 10 (less wealth and magic), another user suggested using 8 based on calculations from hoard gold.
Sorry to necro an old thread but can anyone cite the page number in the DMG and XGtE that this table is referencing and using to calculate an average? I don't seem to be able to find the actual original rules this table references.
Thanks in advance
I had been wondering the same. After going through both books, the treasure tables in the DMG are rewards for defeating individual monsters and for treasure hordes, presented on pages 136-139. The only treasure tables in XGtE are for magic items, so I don't see how information from it could have been used.
User Martin_DM posted what look to be the same tables (excepting the rounded amounts) on Reddit a few years before the original post in this thread. That post mentions using the treasure horde tables on pp. 137-139, and the rules on p. 133. It makes no mention of Xanathar's Guide. It also goes into the details of how the numbers were calculated.
Could it be the sidebar "Behind the Design: Magic Item Distribution" in "Awarding Magic Items" in XGtE?
It has lists of how many times the treasure hoard tables should be rolled on per tier of levels.
I think a major reason for the adventurer economy becoming wonky and meaningless at mid+ levels is magic items.
They are so expensive and players get them from loot. So mundane things quickly become practically free for someone who regularly finds strong magic items.
For example After my players defeat an Adult Red Dragon I will give them each 15,000 gp which mow that I think about it that is probably not enough.
For reference, for a 'comfortable' life, a player character would only need 73,000gp in order to never have to work again.
15,000gp is enough coin to live using comfortable daily expenses for 20 years.
Your average commoner if we assume a 'modest' life would make that go 40 years.
This assumes a faerun/real world 365 day year.
this just in! a new wave of crime sweeps the sword coast as bands of previously ambivalent hobos begin targeting the houses of humble retired folk. "forget tombs! there's no banks!" one looter was quoted as shouting. "so, there's got to be twenty years of comfortable daily living expenses under every other mattress!" in response, experts are being called in to discuss a series of local community vaults to store currency. critics are quick to note that this would only simplify the hobos' main quandary of locating caches of gold. reached for comment, noble-backed wizarding experts wish to remind peasantry that a large enough single 'horde' of gold is, as we all know, where dragons have traditionally entered the picture. representatives were unwilling to comment on efforts to stem the tide of hobo violence other than to note that their right to rule was divine in origin and the rabble should continue to trust establishment institutions. thatch hut futures are down. cow-and-magic-bean markets rise steadily before the bell and continue to be considered by many as the 'doomsday' currency standard of choice.
Greetings all,
Sorry to necro an old thread but can anyone cite the page number in the DMG and XGtE that this table is referencing and using to calculate an average? I don't seem to be able to find the actual original rules this table references.
Thanks in advance
So, not only are you giving your party less gold, but you also aren't allowing them opportunities to use what little you've given them to improve the party? And people wonder why their groups never make to high level play! There are entirely too many options that don't even require one to put on pants, let alone leave the house, to put up with nonsense like this. Glad I'm not in your party!
I've been running Curse of Strahd, which has basically no ability to buy anything useful (you can buy stuff up to... 25gp value. For 5-10x list cost) and the PCs don't really have trouble keeping up with the monsters.
If you struggle with magic items and gold management... look up Sane Magical Item Prices. I think it's MUUUUUUUUUUUUCH better than the crap estimation of value that they give us in DnD official... and before anyone gives me the "The reason it says 500-5000 is because it obviously varies from town to town and setting to setting!" yeah no shit... but if it said 500 I wouldn't expect every shop to sell it at 500 either, but giving me a range of x10 is RIDICOULESS.
There are many things you can do with your wealth beyond acquiring items.
You can buy a title from a cash needy noble. Make a donation to a thieves guild, asking them to look into something your party cannot track. Business opportunities unknown to the guild are best here. You could help fan the flames of discontent and fund a rebellion.
Any of these your DM should salivate over. THIS is you, the players adding to the story, grabbing the narrative wheel and being active contributors to how the story can go in directions the DM did not anticipate.
Drop money on expensive clothes. Hire Bards to sing your praises, and spread word of your legendary deeds. Get to know city rulers/councils. Gift them with found art/jewelry. Maybe someone wants to help increase their grand city's splendor and will hire you to capture exotic monsters for some Zoo. Hire a Dwarven clan to craft statues of yourselves and deliver them to the city park you are designing.
I could keep writing for hours. This isn't Diablo or some other computer game where it's accepted that your money is only a device to acquire things. Buy status with your money, or fund projects. Be a philanthropist.
Enjoy!
A little late to the party, but I believe I came up with a decent baseline for those that want / need a place to start that is pretty close to RAW. Using the daily XP found in the DMG (pg. 84), and the PC level thresholds in the PHB (pg. 15), I determined what level a player/party would be at on a given day. For simplicity's sake, I did not account for levelling up mid-day. Using the party's average daily level, I was able to determine a relative estimate for encounter difficulties per day. The DMG states that the average day has about 6-8 (7) medium-hard encounters (pg. 84). I based my math around the fact that on average 1.5 of those encounters would yield a hoard reward. This number can be adjusted depending on whether you want to give your players more or less, for example, 2 hoards per day, or 1 hoard every other day, etc. Based on the treasure hoard tables found in the DMG (pg. 137-139) and your "hoards-per-day" multiplier, you can estimate a party's average daily earnings. Due to using the challenge ratings to scale for difficulty this is balanced for a 4 player party, but the difference for even +/-2 players would likely be negligible.
TLDR: I believe I've found a pretty good system for estimating a player's wealth at a given level for anybody who is struggling with balancing their rewards or starting equipment at higher levels. The system uses multiple rules from the DMG and PHB in conjunction with each other to determine approximate and average values.
Disclaimers: I am not an experienced player / DM and have not tested this method in a game setting.These are estimates based on math using multiple different rules.This does not account for gear or other treasures, like gems. This is not a hard fast rule, rather a starting place to come up with average values to be adjusted at your own discretion. These values are all averages and do not necessarily need to be adhered to on a case-by-case basis.
The table can be found here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JxPzgEex8kfG5zAv1DHv9GUsfvLgLGXGi-1PQhnK0E8/edit?usp=sharing.
Rows highlighted in blue show when a new level has been hit.
This is super helpful running my first campaign which just recently finished the characters found little use for town merchants when their pockets were lined with an immense amount of gold.
Yeah, I won't lie I tend to throw out some of these types of RAW suggestions. I do not allow magic items to be purchased beyond basic enchanted type stuff (so a brooch of protection or such).
More than that the amount of wealth a party 'should' have has to be relative to the NPCs offering them quests and the like. If the party act like selfish idiots they may not get an audience with a town or city's ruler. If they chose not to face a dragon they aren't going to get it's hoard.
Likewise, what use for coinage have a nomadic tribe of bugbears for example? Or a pack of goblins? To my mind what goblins can't hunt, make, or scavange, they'll just steal. So the premise that every creature would have gold on them is nonsense to my mind. As a result, the prices in my worlds are pegged to how many day's work it would take to make an item. A day labour gets 5sp for their work. That is just the going rate in my worlds. The higher your social strata the more you might get. So, if a fletcher can craft a hundred arrows a day, then those arrows are going to be worth cost of materials plus the cost of days work plus the profit margin. I've not yet had parties say that they are short of gold. That said, I do tend to ground my worlds in a lot more realistic analogies than other people so possibly just my style.
DM session planning template - My version of maps for 'Lost Mine of Phandelver' - Send your party to The Circus - Other DM Resources - Maps, Tokens, Quests
Actor, Writer, Director & Teacher by day - GM/DM in my off hours.
I had been wondering the same. After going through both books, the treasure tables in the DMG are rewards for defeating individual monsters and for treasure hordes, presented on pages 136-139. The only treasure tables in XGtE are for magic items, so I don't see how information from it could have been used.
User Martin_DM posted what look to be the same tables (excepting the rounded amounts) on Reddit a few years before the original post in this thread. That post mentions using the treasure horde tables on pp. 137-139, and the rules on p. 133. It makes no mention of Xanathar's Guide. It also goes into the details of how the numbers were calculated.
i find it odd that compared to 3.5 and PFSRD the money you get in 5e seems so little. at 5th level in 5e you get 700 starting gold which isnt even enough to buy your first ring of sustenance or even a traveler's cloak. compare that with pathfinder's 10,500 gp where you can buy the cloak, and a couple items to boost your stats. not to mention all the traveling equipment or you could spend that money to make your weapons hit harder by adding magical enhancement bonuses to them. the 700 from 5e seems very low. however i have played with people that like to min max their characters and when they dont have money they usually build characters that dont need items and break the game that way instead. as a counter to that i would say minimum at 5th level they should get 4k so that the fighter that wants a decent AC can buy plate mail and a decent magical item. however this also means that the recommended gold per level would have to be adjusted. thats just me tho, coming from a system that layed out specifically what you get in terms of gold for each level to a system that doesn't even tell you a recommended starting gold for up to 5th seems like a major oversight for players that wanna start at 5th or 8th level like a good number of DMs like to do
The differences between Pathfinder and 5e are clear design choices. The comparably low amount of available gold in 5e originates from three design choices made during writing of the 5th edition SRD. Back then, the rationale was that a) Magic Items should be really rare in camapigns/worlds and b) Magic Items aside from Potions should in general not be for available for sale at all and c) "Bounded Accuracy" was used for balancing everything and this concept is easly disturbed by the widespread availability of +X magic items. For this reason, Monsters in the Monster Manual also had their CR balanced to a standard 4-player party without access to magic items (with the unintended consequence that in actual games where magic items are commonly used most mid-high level partys can easily defeat foes way beyond their CR). Back then, partys and encounters were also balanced to a "standard adventure day" which typically consists of a relatively large number of low-threat encounters interspersed with multiple short rests. You will find some instances of these design guidelines especially in the early campaign books, such as Hoard of the Dragon Queen.
Now, reality has shown that neither DMs nor players are willing to play campaigns without general access to magic items (they are just fun to play with and serve as excellent quest rewards) and that storytelling works much better with less but more meaningful encounters. All of this has had profound consequences for the design of more current campaign and rule books as well as the balance of races and classes.
So, how do we deal with this? In my opinion the best solution is to adapt the availability of gold and magic items to your setting. In a high-magic setting such as Faerun or Eberron with plenty of spellcasters and crazy tech everywhere, I see absolutely no issue with 5th level player characters having access to purchaseable +1 magic items. In a postapocalyptic setting or a general low-magic setting in Lord of the Rings style this may of course be very different.
In one of the above posts in this thread, I have therefore laid out an extremely simple system to calculate gold availability at higher levels that can easily be adapted to any setting. For this, take the experience points required to reach the desired starting level and divide by a number of your choice. The result is the starting gold for the given level. Picking a higher divisor means less starting gold. I suggested using a number between 5 (rather high magic) and 10 (less wealth and magic), another user suggested using 8 based on calculations from hoard gold.
Starting gp = Exp. for the given level / 8
I hope this helps :)
Could it be the sidebar "Behind the Design: Magic Item Distribution" in "Awarding Magic Items" in XGtE?
It has lists of how many times the treasure hoard tables should be rolled on per tier of levels.
I think a major reason for the adventurer economy becoming wonky and meaningless at mid+ levels is magic items.
They are so expensive and players get them from loot. So mundane things quickly become practically free for someone who regularly finds strong magic items.
Finland GMT/UTC +2
Weapons start out at +1 for 2000 gp not 1000gp
I feel as if I often under loot my players.
For example After my players defeat an Adult Red Dragon I will give them each 15,000 gp which mow that I think about it that is probably not enough.
For reference, for a 'comfortable' life, a player character would only need 73,000gp in order to never have to work again.
15,000gp is enough coin to live using comfortable daily expenses for 20 years.
Your average commoner if we assume a 'modest' life would make that go 40 years.
This assumes a faerun/real world 365 day year.
DM session planning template - My version of maps for 'Lost Mine of Phandelver' - Send your party to The Circus - Other DM Resources - Maps, Tokens, Quests
Actor, Writer, Director & Teacher by day - GM/DM in my off hours.
this just in! a new wave of crime sweeps the sword coast as bands of previously ambivalent hobos begin targeting the houses of humble retired folk. "forget tombs! there's no banks!" one looter was quoted as shouting. "so, there's got to be twenty years of comfortable daily living expenses under every other mattress!" in response, experts are being called in to discuss a series of local community vaults to store currency. critics are quick to note that this would only simplify the hobos' main quandary of locating caches of gold. reached for comment, noble-backed wizarding experts wish to remind peasantry that a large enough single 'horde' of gold is, as we all know, where dragons have traditionally entered the picture. representatives were unwilling to comment on efforts to stem the tide of hobo violence other than to note that their right to rule was divine in origin and the rabble should continue to trust establishment institutions. thatch hut futures are down. cow-and-magic-bean markets rise steadily before the bell and continue to be considered by many as the 'doomsday' currency standard of choice.
and now we turn to weather...
unhappy at the way in which we lost individual purchases for one-off subclasses, magic items, and monsters?
tell them you don't like features disappeared quietly in the night: provide feedback!