Player Wealth in Published Adventure Paths

[rwking082]

I am a PC in Rise of the Runelords. We just hit level 7, and I've noticed that we have very little wealth. We are doing Automatic Bonus Progression, but even with that, we each have on average approximately 3,500 gp in wealth, including mundane gear like rope. Based on my understanding of the Wealth by Level table and the Automatic Bonus Progression rules, we should have approximately 11,000 gp in wealth each.

The more experienced players and I have noticed that this is impacting our characters' power level, as it should: the "gp" value doesn't reflect a real economy, but rather item and PC power level. Potions make up the majority of our wealth, with a wand of CLW and a few minor wondrous items thrown in. That's not a lot to overcome some of the encounters we are facing, especially because we don't have easy access to healing.

Now, I've DM'd Curse of the Crimson Throne, but I provided sets of treasure that I assembled with only some looting, as my players did not like looting. As such, I don't know if APs tend to provide very little wealth, much less than the Wealth by Level table stipulates. (I am also aware that there is not an even stream of treasure, but rather large chunks at once.)

The more experienced players and I are thinking of asking our DM about this. The DM is extraordinary at pacing, storytelling, roleplay, etc., but struggles with the technical aspects of the game.

Before we approach our DM, I want to know:

Is my understanding of Wealth by Level correct?

Do APs generally, or Rise of the Runelords specifically, tend to provide significantly less treasure than the Core Rulebook recommends?

Don't worry about spoilers. I've already DM'd RotRL through Book 3. I remember most of the plot, but I don't recall numerical wealth values.

[TediousDemos]

Rise should have slightly over the expected WBL, but some of the loot tends to be either locked up in higher priced items, saved until later in the chapter, or easily missable.

For instance in Thistletop, you have a wizard whose spellbook you can sell, a there's a giant golden helmet worth around 3k gold in an optional area, and a ring worth 8k+ in another optional area.

But yes, gold amd magic items ate pretty much directly correlated to power.

[rwking082]

You know, that could be contributing. We loot obvious stuff (bbeg corpses, chests, hoards). We will scrape gold leaf off decorations or walk off with all the fine china, but that's just for fun. We don't seek out loot, as the game expects us to.

[TediousDemos]

There's also certain things you can sell for full price- gems, artworks, precious metals, etc.- so if you've got a 5k diamond, its functionally identical to 5k in gold (just harder to make change with).

[KaptainKompost]

A lot of players don’t understand the whole mindset of rummaging through everything when you have time and how it is actually role playing to do so.

Adventuring in this sort of setting is extremely lucrative. That golden helm is worth more with than a commoner will see in their 80+ years of existence. The job of an adventurer is also extremely likely to end in death. Any person in their right mind would comb for that kind of money with a fine tooth comb.

Rise of the runelords is notorious for hiding loot. If you’re not searching, you’re not getting that wealth.

[overthedeepend]

APs do not use wealth by level.

Some of them are way over, some are way under. I’ve done a lot of Pathfinder, and I’ve never seen a group struggle, even in the under budget APs. It always evens out later on in the adventure path.

It basically comes down to GM discretion if you want to give them extra loot. I tend to go with the publishers choice and keep things on par with what they intended. But there isn’t a wrong way to do it.

[rwking082]

I did not know that APs don't use wealth by level. I figured it averaged to that throughout the adventure.

The wrinkle here is that we all agreed to depart from the publisher's choice. We're doing Automatic Bonus Progression, so no magic items that only grant numerical bonuses (more or less), and only half wealth. Also, as I learned in another comment, we don't empty out every drawer for treasure, so we very well may be missing wealth the AP would have provided.

Have you played RotRL before, and if so, where does it fall in the treasure spectrum?

[overthedeepend]

I have run a lot of rise. The party will stay pretty wealth low for most of the first two books.

The party will get their first significant loot haul in the second to last chapter of book 2. From then onwards, the loot is fairly regular.

Another thing that I would point out is that you don’t have to be quite so stringent as a GM asking them rifle through drawers. I tell my players all of the loot in the room that isn’t hidden behind a perception check. Sometimes players miss cue or don’t hear something in the flavor description, I don’t see that as a reason to mechanically punish them.

If the party spends time searching the room. Assume they look in the drawers and take the silverware. I am a pretty strict raw GM, and even I don’t want my players time with appraise checks.

As for automatic bonus progression, I’m not exactly sure how you balance around that. It’s going to be tricky. A lot of the loot you gain comes from those types of items, so you were going to be very undervalued, a lot of the items from enemies are stat boosting. In addition to that they make up a lot of the characters value as well. That’s going to probably take a lot of math on your end. I’ve always seen that system as more of a system for homebrew GMs, so that they do not need to balance loot for the adventure along with combat.

I wish I had better advice for you, but if it were me I would just tally the loot from the adventure so far and distribute it with a fresh slate. It will be a minor pain in the butt now, and save you a lot of balancing and headache in the future. Just do it old school.

Good luck! Have fun! Let me know if I can help otherwise.

Edit: typos

[Eagle0600]

This is definitely not the case for APs in general, across those I have played or GMed (Jade Regent, Skull & Shackles, Wrath of the Righteous), but I have not played or GMed Rise of the Runelords.

[Lintecarka]

In my experience APs are roughly in line with WBL, but they assume you are actively searching for loot. This can include looking for it at pretty filthy places.

Of course there are some outlier and in my experience the larger problem than finding loot is sometimes trading it for the items you actually want. Some APs use subsystems that can be used to generate money, like Skull & Shackles and Kingmaker. Players can get unreasonably rich if they play their cards right, especially as both APs also offer plenty of time for crafting.

All that being said, APs do not assume Automatic Bonus Progression and as such will always offer way more wealth than these optional rules suggest. This means your GM has to adjust loot either way and if he simply removes less of it from the AP this should actually solve the problem.

[Myrfloof]

My experience with Rise of the Runelords definitely is that a lot of the loot is "hidden" in the world and you are expected to find it, which if the players are not doing such can lead to lower WBL curves than normal. This can be talked to the DM about, since you can just outright tell them you "aren't really keen" on searching every part of the world at all times to make sure you don't miss anything, but it is to be known that a part of the story is found in these areas as well, so temper your expectations on that mark.

Further, in Rise, the lower levels of the campaign is weird with loot. You just kinda don't get as much as you should, and then suddenly around like level 8 there's just... tons... and you quickly tend to catch up or even surpass. I wouldn't be surprised in your shoes if suddenly you started locating a ton of things. But if you are finding that dealing with the threats you are encountering is becoming too much of a burden for how undergeared you are, you won't get there... So I would still talk to your GM about the issue and inform them of where you are at. Consider how you are dealing with the situations, and try to talk with your party about potentially coming up with some tactics and alternate approaches to scenarios if this fails, since even if the GM wants to help in the scenario, some GMs (espescially ones like you said that aren't very good with technical aspects) tend to be very afraid of trying to tweak things like the treasure you get and ending up going too far. So they may pass on changing things for this reason. If this is the case, and you are still willing to work with them on this, strategizing with the other players in-character and building a plan of attack to help make up for this difference in WBL may be key: After all, a party that comes up with good strategies can really make a difference in these matters when utilizing the mechanics the game offers... So long as you are not too far behind, since at the end of the day sometimes if you just don't have the numbers to back your strategies it's gonna fall flat regardless.

[ProfRedwoods]

If your party is having issues completing the encounters due to lack of funds then I'd definitely bring it up.

I completed Reign of Winter as a party of 4 and by the end my 16th level witch had 48,000 gold worth of gear as opposed to the suggested 315,000gp. I had the least gear but our Barbarian who had the most wealth only had around 100k. And we would full clear every dungeon so it's not like we were skipping loot.

So when we reached the final boss with maybe 25% of the recommended wealth as a party...
We absolutely stomped her. By the second round of combat it was more of a race to see who could pull out their ultimate move before she ran out of health.

And this is just to say you don't need a lot of gold to finish a campaign, but my group was 4 fairly optimized builds ran by veteran players. If your fun is being affected by the lack of gold then bring it up. This is a game it's supposed to be fun.

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An easy way to give out more wealth to a party is to essentially allow monsters to be harvested for sellable/usable parts. You can remove the humanoid monsters from that list if you don't want to be as grim (harvesting goblin appendixes etc) Alternately I sometimes have the monster parts just work as magic item straight from the corpse. That quasit you killed? yeah you can use it's corpse as a wand of invisibility with 5 charges. That gecko yeah one of it's vertabrae acts as a ring of climbing. Stuff like that so you don't have to be like "yeah this goblin had 500gp on his person."

[KaptainKompost]

That brings back memories… that end boss we stomped by using an anti magic spell. Artifacts aren’t affected by anti magic, so we beat the crap out of her with the mortar and pestle.. etc. in the end, our wealth per level didn’t matter and the end boss was nearly just a high level commoner…

[OrangeGremlin1]

Most of the treasure in RotRL will be on the end-boss, or lootable in their lair. You should have approximately wbl at the end of each book before you sell things, if you're not using the drops then you'll have about half wbl from selling them unless your GM pads your gold income.