Quote:
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.
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You can also give them some benefit in exchange for their lost loot. They might gain a new ally of some flavor from them donating a sizable chunk of their earnings - or meet one while in pursuit of the thief who stole it from them (and it turns out has already spent it, so it's gone). In a campaign where shop inventories (particularly magic items) are randomly generated, perhaps introduce a traveling merchant who just so happens to have exactly the kind of gear the characters are looking for, but who charges above market rate. This would basically allow the players to buy exactly the gear they want (within their means) rather than having to settle for whatever is available. As for the mark-up, maybe these items are already spoken for, so the characters have to pay extra to get the merchant to abandon his commission (the extra both pays any penalties for failing to deliver and means the merchant still turns a profit after refunding the initial purchase price). Or maybe this is a rather peculiar merchant who
always happens to have whatever his clients are looking for when they encounter him, and charges a premium for such convenience. But in any case, yeah, it's important to talk to your players as adults and let them know you made a potentially-game-breaking error in letting their characters acquire so much wealth. They may well have excellent ideas of their own on how they can lose/spend all their extra cash.