Wealth level sharing and other things my party have done

I have had a problem with players wanting to pool there money and players with the wealthy feat just buying everything for the party what should I do?

This is by no means expert GM advice, but you may consider encouraging the player with the wealthy feat to have his character frequently exact favors from his fellow party-members; after all, he/she paid for their gear! If you’re lucky and this works, it may make your players less likely to rely on this tactic in the future.

This is exactly the reason my game still uses gold. The wealth system would remove this roleplay aspect of my games.

There are a few discussions of how to deal with pooling of wealth level in another thread, but the basic observation is that WL is exponential, so pooling it for anything bar the largest party just results in a WL that is comparable to the highest wealth level in the party. A party with wealth levels of 5,6,7 and 3 has a wealth level of 7 if they pool resources unless you want to house rule it. This is because a party member with WL 5 isn’t +1 more wealthy than one with WL 4, they are 10x as wealthy.

Ultimately if you have a wealthy party member then purchasing decisions are going to go mostly through them, that is what things like the Wealthy trait do. They buy that player the ability to bypass some WL gated choices. For RP purposes you should let them do this for the same reason the paladin kicks the crap out of the skeletons. The party gets to a local shop and one party member buys all the others the fanciest gear available, great have them take the party on a shopping spree. Of course such displays of wealth might not go unnoticed, so maybe the local thieves guild decide the party needs relieving of their cash. The resulting mini-quest shouldn’t permanently take away the characters wealth (unless they really screw it up) since if you do that you are punishing them for choices at character creation, but all choices come with costs and benefits, and a bit of temporary pain can certainly logically result from flashing the cash.

Another option is to use the situation to create some drama. Maybe the local store has a couple of exotic weapons. Your richest party member cant afford both so does the ranger get that fancy bow, or does the knight get their sword? Sure they can use their WL powers to get some really nice gear, but not all the nice gear. Make it so that the next couple of encounters are such that both would be useful. Bonus points if the attentive player could work out that one of the two options is more useful from story context. Of course you have to be careful with this as with anything else that might create division within the party, but if the party is mature this can be a great source of RP drama.

If the WL powers become too strong move the party to a location where WL has less of an impact. As the manual says, you cant buy a cup of water in the desert however rich you are. Balance challenges gated by WL against those gated by other factors. Let the wealthy character use their wealth, but not as a universal ‘solve all problems’ button. He might be able to bribe the guards to look the other way on an occasion, but you cant pay off the wife of the lich they slew who is out for blood vengeance.

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What I started doing is having the players choose to donate a maxim of one wl level to buy something if they do they lose that wealth level.

as far as the Wealthy feat is concerned, you might look at this modification to it:

and with WL, even if the person with a higher WL buys for others, they are limited in what they can buy, especially if it is at their WL, they can only make a purchase like that 1x every 2 weeks default.

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shameless self advertising right here, but I made a homebrew rule of turning Wealth Level into Wealth Points that should settle disputes, though be careful because I think my prices aren’t the most well balanced thing out there.

The new Wealth system is Chapter 3, you’re welcome.

or be reasonable and don’t change an entire system just to fix one problem, I really liked
@nanoduckling approach to the game’s WL system.

A simple approach to the WL system that I’ve done in a number of games is use decimal points.

It keeps the abstraction to help keep things simple, but it helps to create a little more that can be done with buying, including bartering, and allows you to more easily show a small difference in value of items that are within the same WL.

So, for example, you’d have:

Wealth Levels of:
2.0
2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4
2.5
2.6
2.7
2.8
2.9

And any item could have a value within that, though usually I keep most of them at 2.1 to 2.5

I remove the “2 weeks wait” to purchase something at your WL, as well as disallow you to purchase above your WL.

When you buy AT your WL, then you decrease your WL by the decimal amount.

Sam the Man has a WL of 2.7
Sam sees a wicked looking blade that he really wants. The shopkeeper, Trinity, says they’ll sell it for WL 2.3
Sam proceeds to negotiate and use they charming personality to bring the price down.
The GM allows them to use Presence, but raises the CR compared to if they had used Persuasion.
Sam rolls an 18 on their Presence roll, and gets Trinity to lower the price down to 2.2

Sam the man makes the purchase for WL 2.2, and now has a WL of 2.5 (2.7 minus the .2 cost)


With this, it is NOT assumed you maintain your WL, and it will decrease if you keep spending.

The GM lets you know if things you gathered, or sold, could increase your WL and such, but it is a more gradual increase that you can see easier as you get closer to the next WL jump.

You can still afford any reasonable amount of lower WL items. By lower I mean a full number lower. So at WL 2.X, you can buy any number of WL 1.X items. If the GM feels like the amount you are buying is significant, they might lower your WL by a decimal (so if you buy 7 WL 1.4 items, the GM lowers your WL of 2.4 down to 2.3).

It still makes it easier and abstracts the money so you can add plenty of flavor and don’t have to track as much, but adds a little bit of versatility to things. You can now negotiate/barter to get items cheaper or to try and sell things at a more expensive level.

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I’ve contemplated a similar wealth system, but encountered the folowing “problems”, how have you handled these:(?)

Can the players increase their wealth level if they just save up enough decimal points?

And what happens to the decimal points once the players increase a wealth level?

Could a player at WL 2.0 buy a lot of 1.9 level stuff whitout it decreasing wealth level?

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They took the wealthy feat for a reason, I would encourage them to roll play why thier character is giving out money to the party as other people have stated.

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Already addressed most of those in my post, but I guess a few weren’t obvious:

The GM tells you when it increases. Remember it is still an abstraction and not exact equation to an amount of gold or credits. But the whole idea is for a player to save up to jump to the next level.

And yes, 1.9 is far closer to a 2.X WL, so it would be more taxing. It’s mainly up to the GM and what makes sense for the setting as far as how much it takes away or doesn’t, but then again, I mentioned most items are going to be between 2.1 and 2.5, very few would ever be above the Y.5 decimal. If getting multiple items then maybe yes.

I’ve had a few people bargain the price down so it doesn’t bump them down a WL score in a few games too. As well as a few persuade and baragain things they were selling.

For the most part, within a WL, the decimal points add and subtract as normal. Below it, just a judgement call for the most part. In theory if they were at 3.5 WL, and they bought 3 items at 2.2, 2.5, and 2.3, that would be enough to drop them down to 3.4 WL. Likewise, if they bought 10 2.2 WL items, it could drop them down by 2 decimal points.