[maximara]

Originally Posted by malloyd

If you've given the PCs too much money for the game to still work, arbitrarily stripping it from them is a terrible solution, being an inevitable source of player anger and all too likely to fail anyway. Like so many of the things people try to solve by post-facto "in world" mechanics that are clearly targeted at the PCs, you'll get much better results if you just talk to your players out of game and negotiate some sort of across the board cut in their cash reserves, with or without an in game reason.

This i the very reason I am not thrilled with some of the advice in "History of a Game That Failed" (Dragon #99, July 1985).

For example it suggests if the party gets a wish item it becomes effectively a poor man's monkey paw with 'I wish I had X' being 'oh you now remember you once had X but lost it some time ago' on a good day and 'X is now a permanent part of your body' if the wish granter wants to hose the wisher.

At least 4e got rid of Classic's idea that wealth determined the Income from a Job (Classic Basic Set p 193)

Personally I used the idea that a huge money windfall resulted in disadvantage replacing that for having low wealth. Sort of like the anime Outlaw Star where the struggling character gets ownership of a spaceship...and a bunch of enemies and a need to find things to keep the ship maintained.