FrankTrollman wrote:
The assumptions in 3.5 is that you get money and magic items from encounters, and that is all fungible towards higher level gear. But, you spend about 10% of your incoming wealth on expendables - healing potions, stays at inns, whatever. And the wealth by level guidelines explicitly tell the DM to throw in extra treasure to compensate players if they end up spending more than that (Roy still lives in denial about this, but that is what the rules say). Now Pathfinder says that players should pick up the same amount of treasure, but that they should be flipping 100% of it into permanent wealth. So apparently, you're supposed to reimburse all of the potions that players quaff in the form of additional treasure. But as near as I can tell, it doesn't explicitly tell you to do that. That's just the only possible meaning of the claim that characters should have found 7,500 gp over 6th level, bringing their permanent wealth from 16,000 to 23,500.
Hmm. They do have this bit in the rules:
Table: Character Wealth by Level can also be used to budget gear for characters starting above 1st level, such as a new character created to replace a dead one. Characters should spend no more than half their total wealth on any single item. For a balanced approach, PCs that are built after 1st level should spend no more than 25% of their wealth on weapons, 25% on armor and protective devices, 25% on other magic items, 15% on disposable items like potions, scrolls, and wands, and 10% on ordinary gear and coins. Different character types might spend their wealth differently than these percentages suggest; for example, arcane casters might spend very little on weapons but a great deal more on other magic items and disposable items.
I extrapolated from this that you're supposed to spend 15% of your wealth on expendables, but yeah, it's not explicitly dealt with anywhere that I've seen.
FrankTrollman wrote:
. I mean seriously, you divide the expected treasure per encounter into the expected number of encounters that you get from dividing the XP awards into the XP required to level... and you just don't get the numbers the PCs are supposed to have at any particular level. I think the DM is supposed to follow the guidelines for a while and then shell game everything repeatedly to balance the wealth. Or something, because following the guidelines each encounter doesn't get you anywhere especially close to the guidelines for what people should have over all. I don't really understand the thinking there, except for maybe that "Math is Hard!"
...
-Username17
Well that makes me feel better, I thought I was being dumb with math when I couldn't get the treasure per encounter to match up to the Wealth by level guidelines.
Yes, I have used the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook. It encourages you to make live-in shops and libraries, which is actually kind of cool.
Now if I can only get some players who would actually be interested in using it
The book is like the whole reason I'm trying to get away from the WBL system, castles are what money should be for, and I'm hoping my players would start to look for stuff to use the money on once they realize they're not getting any magic items out of their horde of gold coins.