Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

Hi guys,
I have a quick question about selling loot.

It seems that the rules highly suggest that the wealthiest delver sells the loot for the entire party... but are there any limitations in place? It feels to me very "cheap" to just pool character points into a single delver with wealthy and then the entire party will have a huge profit for this, especially if the wealthy PC is a team player.

And regarding another potential "limitation" on the inflaction of wealth... How much time does the selling takes? Does it depends on the loot being sold to different merchants? To the lump amount of loot to be sold in general?

So, how do you manage selling loot in your game?

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

If you take a dependency on a single wealthy character, the only limitation is that you're now dependent on a single wealthy character. If the wealthy elven bard sells $10K of loot for $10K instead of $4K and says, "okay, let's split $6K of this evenly between everyone, but I want to keep $4K to buy healing potions and spell scrolls to help the party," they're not doing anything wrong[1]. Some people enjoy the gear and equipment minigame more than others and if they choose to invest character points in getting better at it, while still helping everyone else, that's okay.

As for how long it takes, I just make it happen at the end of an adventure during downtime, as Exploits suggests. If players wanted to do it during the middle of an adventure I'd eyeball it: 1-3 days sounds reasonable in a large city for selling most items.

[1] The wizard who casts Invisibility on everyone but Flight only on himself, because he doesn't want a -10 penalty to all his spells, is likewise not doing anything wrong.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

Maybe I'm missing something about the Downtime. Shouldn't it be calculated in number of weeks? Or the assumption is to just eyeball it, and that's it?
Because sometimes the rules assess the number of downtime activities per day, and sometimes per the entire downtime.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

It's an eyeball based on the tenor of Exploits pg. 15-16, which gives the distinct impression that selling stuff happens "at the end of the adventure" as a relatively atomic event. E.g. if you go strictly by pg. 16, "For You, A Special Price", there is only one merchant involved per selling spree.

By eyeballing it as 1-3 days I'm actually probably requiring more time than the RAW call for, because I don't actually think the ideal buyer for broadswords is necessarily the ideal buyer for silk pantaloons and jars of cinnamon, etc. I'm assuming that the Wealthy PC has to shop around a bit to find the best price.

If it took weeks to finish the adventure and sell loot, I am assuming pg. 15-16 would be written differently, and would mention the weeks of effort explicitly as part of the rules for selling. E.g. instead of "no repeated attempts (p. 7) until after the party brings its next haul to town!" it would say "no repeated attempts until three weeks have passed."

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

Thank you very much for the clarifications! :)

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

I think really that if the same wealthy elven bard sells $10k of loot for $10k instead of $4k and says "okay, you five split this $8k and I'm keeping $2k for my own personal use" that's still okay: everyone's coming out ahead, the bard just comes out more ahead. "Having more money to buy better stuff" is the superpower he paid for instead of, say, Weapon Master or three more levels of Magery or whatever.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

I don't disagree that that's still okay. I was just making a separate point in response to the bolded text above, that there is a minor downside (bottlenecking) if only one player has Wealth.

Other cases when that downside manifests include (1) when the player misses one or more game sessions or adventures you'll get less money; (2) if the character dies during the adventure you'll get less money.

P.S. I guess the other point I kind of had in mind is that having $4000 to spend on the party's behalf is a really cool and fun "superpower". DFRPG has a great gear-and-equipment minigame! $160 for a universal scroll of Major Healing, $400 for a universal scroll of Bless, $300 for a charged scroll of Shield III or Haste III, $100 for an (uncharged) scroll of Great Haste... a wealthy elven bard who spends $4000 on consumables is going to have a lot of fun during the next adventure.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

Be wary, those are just like sjmd45's opinions, they're not necessarily wrong, but there are other ways to do things...


That's certainly one way to do it, but I've seen really cutthroat parties that got very irate the Wealthy guy wanted a higher share after the sale. And they basically browbeat him into splitting it equally, after the next session he suggested they split the loot equally and then everyone go sell it individually as he now refused to sell for the whole party...

Woof. That also didn't go over very well either, but it did convince the less greedy Players that he was right the first time, and the party (Players as well) basically split into two distinct groups... and the two greedy guses who refused to back down from their positions were kicked out (too many instances of being "those guys").

No. Not by RAW. But by the Social Contract the group of Players have among themselves, possibly.

Personally when I've been the party bursar I've never held back a larger share for myself, but then my "super power" was in selling/buying and wasn't nearly as useful in combat or 'dungeoneering', so I considered the fact the other party members were actively keeping my paper man alive and rolling in loot was equitable.

If that's what that Player wants to play... keep in mind someone has to play the "nigh useless bungler" in the dungeon in this case...

There is no inflation of wealth in DFRPG. Town has an unlimited capacity to buy, unless you want to limit it and most GMs (from what I've seen and read) tend to. Frex in Peter Del'Orto's megadungeon, the town of Stericksburg has a random Wizard who is occasionally around to buy the weirder magic (or cursed) items the PCs find, things the regular merchants won't touch.

In one game I ran the outpost "town" had a semi-random ceiling on "purchasing power", the outpost merchants had (5d6+10)K$ total each "week" and a strict limit of "half that" for any singular sale item.

Now I was running a "lower wealth" game, for more money just up the dice or turn the "+" into a "x", and you can set limits too.

My default assumption based on the "RAW" of "once per week" adventuring would say the better part of a week selling and buying. So if someone wants to spend extra time to up their Merchant skill, it should be in weeks. Now RAW DFRPG doesn't really allow for this, but... so what. Do what you want.

If you want them to unload on a broker who fronts them cash and turns around and resells their goods, do it, make selling take as much time as for the broker to assess the value (say a day, less if they want to take a lower cut).

You can do it either way. Base DFRPG assumption is "handwave it", it doesn't matter as long as it doesn't slow the adventurers down on their way to the next dungeon "next week". But if you want to have a little more fun in town, fun it up.

Just be wary, town is handwaved for genre reasons, so if you start messing with that, you're undermining those conventions and will have spill-over effects.

If you run games like I do, you don't handwave town at all. I gave out more points to my starting characters so they could afford more Social Skills and I ran town like a living, detailed element of the world, maybe not as dangerous as the wilds, but just as treacherous in it's own right.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

I 100% endorse this statement. Agree with me only if I've convinced you.

I will again recommend Wealthy Elven Bards as fantastic all-rounders, not useless bunglers. They're pretty good at stealth, pretty good at fighting, pretty good at magic, excellent at the gear and equipment minigame.

Wealthy [20] for buying and selling
Elven [20] for Magery 0 and other goodies
Bardic Talent +1 (3) [10] to boost all your Hard spells up to 15+
Song of Humiliation [4] for an awesome, inexpensive free action
6 points left over for ER 2 or Move +1 (8) or whatever suits you

For spells, be sure to pick up Resist Sound-15 to maintain on the whole party while dungeon crawling so that you and the wizard can spam Concussion without repercussions, Mind Search-14 as a nice complement to your face skills, Concussion (requires 4 quirk points for prereqs) to pre-cast before combat to shift the odds decisively in your favor against most monsters, and maybe Charm and Loyalty for when you're not busy maintaining Resist Sound, to give you strategic and tactical options, and Hush because it's cheap and useful for recon and easy to drop if you need to speak or spellcast. Later on you can pick up stuff like Invisibility, Dark Vision, Complex Illusion, and Illusion Disguise too, although you'll want to raise IQ if you want to keep them up habitually.

"Nigh useless bungler" you will not be.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

Eh, when I did it I did 30 points into Very Wealthy and suffered a bit for it at the outset. The PC certainly grew to be "more" competent in dungeoneering later... and it was also a Thief (which I wasn't considering above) and we probably know my thoughts on how relatively unworthy that profession is when you've got a Wizard with Lockmaster and a Knight who just "tanks the traps".

Kinda... really skews the old perceptions there. I'd still rather slowly buy up Wealth on another profession than ever do Thief or Bard.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

In DFRPG you don't even have the option to buy Very Wealthy without creating a custom profession (Adventurers pg 14). The Thief template only has Comfortable and Wealthy.

This is okay because between "For You, A Special Price" (+1 to effective Wealth ~50% of the time, per Exploits pg 16) and "Haggling" (also +1 to effective Wealth and 50% of the time, also on Exploits pg 16), Very Wealthy is redundant 75% of the time anyway--you can't sell for more than 100%. If you count black markets, it's redundant 90%+ of the time.

I agree that Thieves are pretty terrible, but Wealthy Elven Bards are awesome.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

The short answer is "there are no (rules-based) limitations; go at it however you like." That doesn't mean there are no consequences to choices, though.

You'll find a big discussion of the topic (with input from Kromm) here, and a summary by me here.

Social dynamics can get interesting when a party has delvers of very mixed wealth levels...

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

Note: to me the confusing part is where Kromm says

"somebody playing the cleric who shells out for Power Investiture 5 and lots of Energy Reserve to Bless people all the time and walk around at -1 to spells"

because if you're Blessing "people" that's more than one Bless so you'll be at -2 or greater to all spells.

I'm 90%+ sure that Kromm is not suggesting that spells "on" are counted per-skill and not per-instance, and even if he were suggesting that I would veto it for my own games anyway as overpowered. I think he probably meant "-1 to spells per Bless" and just didn't write that.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

Well, I would assume that means performing Bless on numerous people, but just one at a time.

If the cleric did place Bless on n people simultaneously, then yes, that should mean -n on further spells, for as long as those Blesses remain in effect.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

Isn't that backwards? If you somehow Bless N people simultaneously with one spell you're only at -1 going forward (but that's not actually possible). If you cast Bless N times you're at -N going forward.

It's -1 per Bless, not -1 total, isn't it?

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

Yes, that. If one PC is doing all the selling, they are holding all the money. What they do with it after that is their business. If they want to negotiate a deal with the rest of the party where they sell the stuff at a higher price and keep a fraction of the difference, that's how brokerage works in reality, and should probably be encouraged.

In fact passing a note telling them how much the loot sold for, rather than revealing it to the party as a whole, is a perfectly reasonable way to handle this as the GM. If they then want to lie, you should let them.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

Maybe poor wording here. By "simultaneously" I mean multiple subjects "wearing" Bless at the same time. The actual castings would indeed be successive, taking many minutes per person, one at a time.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

The idea of the wealthy character keeping more of the coin has always confused me.

Here's the situation:

• The wealthy character can sell loot for 1.5x what it would have sold for
• The wealthy character is less powerful; thus less effective at acquiring loot
• The non-wealthy characters are more powerful; thus more effective at acquiring loot
• There are more non-wealthy characters than wealthy characters

Here's roughly how I think this plays out: 4 non-wealthy characters and a wealthy character go into a dungeon. They all risk their lives and pull out a 100g worth of treasure. The wealthy character can get the best price for it (60g instead of 40g).

The wealthy character might say "If I didn't have wealth, we would receive 40g, and you all would receive 8g. Instead, I have wealth and we receive 60g. I propose you each get 9g and I get the remaining 24g."

The archer could pipe up "I could have taken wealth as well but didn't, and as a result we earned more treasure for you to sell. Had I also been a Bard, we might have died or been unable to find some of the treasure we did".

The cleric could pipe up "I could have taken wealth as well but didn't..."

----

The more mercenary conversation looks like:

"If you don't give us our equal share, the four of us will forcibly take it from you."

Additionally, the wealth itself tends to be best spent on the non-wealthy; they probably spent the points on dungeon-useful areas rather than selling-things-for-more, and giving them better armor or a more powerful weapon or whatever is a force-multiplier.

The dynamic this creates is that money optimizers feel optimization pressure to delegate one of their members to be wealthy and that player is forever ~4 weapon skill behind all of the other ones (which is a massive difference).

If your table experiences this tension and players don't want to be mr moneybags but feel like someone has to because it's ridiculously effective, I advocate for removing the option and splitting the difference: stuff just sells for 50% instead of 40% or 60%. Has the advantage of easier mental math too.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

That's quite a leap.

(1) It's not like wealthy elven bards don't pull their own weight, especially if they use some of their wealth for things like universal Bless scrolls to help the party, or paut, or better weapons and armor; or put Resist Sound up on everybody and then chuck Concussions.

(2) Even if it happens to be an adventure where archery is better than whatever the bard does, it's not like more treasure magically appears just because the delvers are deadlier.

In some cases, the archer's remarks could be fair and true after a given adventure (e.g. archer's arrows brought down a flying gryphon and the lich-king on it, who had powerful and valuable items on his person), but it's a niche scenario. And it's mostly a moot point because a Scout can't take Wealth anyway. Positive Wealth is only on the bard and thief templates.

Do I need to point out that robbing your own allies is a really stupid way to live? Suppose this Chaotic Evil conversation does happen. What's the Chaotic Evil victim going to do in response? Well, how about smile and agree until several adventures have gone by and lots of loot has accumulated, and then backstab the robbers at the tail end of a crucial battle which they're winning, then take all of their accumulated loot and retire?

Stupid betrayal leads to stupid betrayal.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

The core problem with being the guy who sells things is that it's really not a job that needs an adventurer.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

Having better weapons and equipment, on the other hand, is something an adventurer very much wants. Even if you just take that initial $5000 from Wealthy and buy four scrolls of Universal Bless ($1600) and a dwarven whetstone ($500) and hire a $400-a-week 125-point henchman, you're bringing a lot to the table. The fact that you also sell high just means that this advantage in gear and equipment isn't a one-time thing, it's an ongoing advantage.

There's an antisynergy in that multiple Wealthy characters in the same party have diminishing returns, but then that's true for multiple healers too.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

Oh, sure, it's useful to the party. It's just useful to the party in a way that's not at all fun for the player. Honestly, being the healer has similar problems, though at least the healer has a logical reason to leave town.

There's two methods of handling wealth that are both simple and fair:

1. Don't use it at all. You have what you have, and the wealth advantage doesn't exist.
2. Wealth doesn't just give you stuff -- it's also a limit on how much stuff you can have.

There's games where either option is appropriate -- DF type adventuring usually falls in the first category -- but the hybrid GURPS tries to use doesn't really work for anything.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

3. Split loot equally BEFORE evaluating or selling it takes place.

4. Let players worry about how they want to deal with it. How and when they choose to divvy up loot is none of the GM's business.

The DFRPG method of handling Wealth works absolutely fine. I don't know what you mean by "the hybrid GURPS tries to use".

P.S. I cannot enough emphasize how much fun Wealthy characters are. DFRPG has an excellent gear and equipment minigame. A healer "has" to go into the dungeon to keep people healthy, but a Wealthy elven bard who has to go into the dungeon because he's a bard gets to burn scrolls and potions like water while doing so because he's Wealthy.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

Back in my first on-line DF game, it was 6 people and roughly $18,000 in treasure. If Lenia hadn't taken Wealthy, each PC would have gotten a $3,000 share which sold for $1,200. Lenia generally took a 10% fee off the top for her services as a sales-elf, so everyone except Lenia got $1,500 and she got $3,000. Or it might have been 5%, so everyone got $1,650 and she got $2,400. Whichever, everyone felt pretty good about it.

I am doubtful that another 20 CP in anything would have generated enough raw treasure to make a difference, since the PCs mostly cleared the dungeons and the stuff they missed were player decisions (like not searching the crushroom guts for metallic treasures or failing to inspect a false wall and missing a treasure room).

And the CP for Wealth always comes out of the Advantages section of the template, not the Skills section, so it's the bard not having Terror or Telesend; or the wizard having Magery 4 instead of Magery 6. Having -2 on all spells compared to a differently optimized character is a little painful, but it's not the stark contrast of having Melee Weapon-18 while the guy next to you has Melee Weapon-23.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

Although you could hire a factor in town to sell stuff for you, instead. Not sure how cost effective this is.

Edit: You probably want a 125 point guy for this job just to afford wealth, so that's $400. So assuming the factor gets +60% returns on loot for you, you need a $667 haul to break even.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

Yup, that's how I allow my group to handle it, though in DF they're called Agents (DF 15 Henchmen).

Depending on how good (or lucky) the agent/factor is they can get them anywhere from 20-80% return on their goods, with an average of right around 60% (I give regular in town Hireling Agents Comfortable Wealth and Merchant skill 14 and have 'critical' failures to drop price by -40%, it's the risk of hiring someone to make you more money).

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

The having a character with wealth means that the team has more money and makes more money, and money is power. Spending 15 character points on wealth means that character has less intrinsic power (otherwise they could have had 3 higher weapon skill or a level of magery and 5 spells or something).

What I was getting at is that the line of "If I hadn't have made X character choice, we would have earned Y loot, so I deserve Z share" is a path to madness. We don't want to be in the business of measuring a class's DFRPG equivalent of NFL's Wins Above Replacement.

To use your (extremely condescending) phrase: Do I need to point out that deadlier delvers are able to delve deeper for better risk-reward/have a higher success rate of winning encounters that block treasure/suffer less ailments that require going back to town or healing services/need to use less consumables in order to succeed?

There's the (optional) extraordinary training rule that allows classes to spend money to acquire advantages that aren't class limited (wealth is available but a rogue's backstabber isn't iirc). It seems very odd to me that a wizard (or any class really) isn't able to become Wealthy, given how many instances of heinously rich and savvy wizards you see in the genre fiction. Iucounu in The Eyes of the Overworld, for example.

Taking money from allies sounds really evil! How about the wealthy bard doesn't steal the other 4 party member's equal shares? If the bard is giving all of us 9g when equal would be 12g, that sounds like a betrayal and maybe he gets backstabbed at the tail end of a crucial battle.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

I tend to agree that wealth is the best 15 points that can be spent on generating money, especially long term!

Yeah, it comes out of the advantages section at character creation, but after that folks are free to buy advantages and skills using earned points. Here's how this came up in my game: the party comes back from a delve relatively flush. They have enough points to buy wealth and no one has it. I play with the optional training rule where you can buy off-template generic advantages for money and some downtime.

The players immediately start discussing who "has" to take wealth; which person the 15 point tax should be placed on. No concept that the loot distribution would be anything but equitable ever came up. If it had, it would have been dunked on immediately (if you take wealthy and want more treasure, i'll take wealthy too. we'll all take wealthy. antipattern).

Wealthy is too good for someone to not have it which is a problem imo.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

There's a reason most people don't play Dead Broke delvers: having good equipment is an advantage. This is as true for Wealthy as Dead Broke. Instead of $1000 in starting equipment, you get $5000 in starting equipment (for 20 points BTW, not 15).

Surely you're not arguing that someone who spends 20 points to get a 125-point crossbowman hireling ($400), five universal scrolls of Bless (5 x $400) so that everybody can be Blessed without penalizing the cleric's spellcasting, a dwarven whetstone ($500) to sharpen all the crossbow bolts and everyone else's weapons too, a weapon and light armor for himself ($900 or so), and an extra $1100 to up-armor the party frontliners or buy paut for the wizard or healing potions in case the cleric gets injured... surely you're not going to argue that those 20 points made him and the party weaker!

Your whole argument appears to rest on the assumption that Wealth makes you a burden on the rest of the party, but that's just not the case. For example:

What you need to do is prove that losing the dwarven whetstone, the crossbowman, and the extra armor for the knight, and accepting an extra -4 to -5 penalty on the cleric's spells from casting 5 Blesses "natively", and spending those 20 points elsewhere, always increases the party's ability to delve deep. Good luck with that proof.

That's just a normal collective action dilemma: the traditional way of solving such problems is by bidding, e.g. a Vickrey auction to see who's willing to spend 20 points on Wealthy (not 15) in exchange for the lowest premium. If I'm willing to do it for 10% off the top, and you're willing to do it for 1%, and Bob is willing to do it for 0%, then Bob takes Wealthy and gets 1% off the top as his reward. Nobody can complain because Bob is never charging more than they think those 20 points are worth/would have charged themselves.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

We found it simplest for the wizard to take a point or two of Merchant and haggle on the stuff that looks most worth it. But our party is small, and doesn't compete internally very much; we're more about the story than the loot.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

If there's an Adventurer's Guild, then having a 'loot selling' function makes a lot of sense. The Guild would take a cut, of course, and they might not sell illegal or clearly evil items (they may get into trouble if someone summoned a demon using an item they had sold, for instance), but it's a definite possibility.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

Maybe that's how you get the basic 40% selling price, for example: the Adventure's Guild sells it and takes its cut.

Otherwise Dead Broke becomes too easy to bypass.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

Dead Broke is already too easy to bypass.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

Yup, which is why I keep considering removing Wealth entirely from my games.

But then I also have rarely seen a PC take Dead Broke, most want far more starting equipment than Dead Broke allows.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

True, usually you want Poor [-15] and then use 5 points on $2500 in extra cash.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

Those 5 quirk points are your only completely free picks, and are far too valuable IMHO to waste on cash. If you want off-template skills like Traps for a wizard or bard or Crossbow for a wizard, or off-template advantages like Night Vision, Magic Resistance, or Fit, quirks are your only time to get them without jumping through GM-specific hoops much later on.

Cash however is easy to get in any adventure I've ever read or run.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

Ehhh. That's game dependent. In the games I run going out of Template is relatively easy depending on what the PC is going out of template for, mundane skills? Easy. Advantages? Harder. Supernatural stuff, like powered Advantages and Skills? Quest worthy.

Inversely, some games are cash strapped and the PCs are far more worried about starting gear when they'll be cut off later during a hex crawl or "marches" campaign.


So while I keep giving Poor and Dead Broke the ole stink eye and thinking "these two might be problems", it's very rare my Players ever take them. And personally despite having made a few characters that would have worked just fine as Poor or Dead Broke*, I've also never taken those disads just in case the PC needs to sell something without the party to do it for them (and there were just better more flavor worthy disads to take).


* They didn't rely on gear or armor much at all, and weren't DFRPG characters either (Ogre Barbarian/Wrestler, Spear wielding Swashbuckler/Martial Artist).

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

I'm frankly surprised everybody is sticking to the the rules as written in this case. They do make Wealth differences a really weird beast in DFRPG (and GURPS DF). Social play is not a big thing in DFRPG and Wealth is a trait that goes against the grain of the typical dungeon-delving tropes. You don't go delving with a rich character, because they can sell the loot better in town. That's what quest-givers and professional support networks are for. Also I really don't enjoy intra-party conflicts based on wealth. We have enough of that in the real world.

The easiest fix for munchkinism is keeping everybody at average Wealth, the second easiest is to forbid below-average Wealth. Yes, exploitability depends on which profession you pick, but a dead-broke martial artist is not as huge a problem as the point value you get and other combos are similar.

The slightly more involved option is to make everybody take Wealth depending on the gear they carry around after a while. It's probably not good to go with starting wealth, but 3-5 x starting wealth gear should be fine. So the martial artist can stay poor if they only spend money on perishables and everybody else can have a little gear and still be at below-average Wealth levels. This does not necessarily mean everybody will end up at above-average Wealth eventually, but staying at average or lower is now an active choice with costs and benefits. This way the equipment mini-game is tied back to points just like it is at character creation. It also helps with playing tropes. You can opt to play a scout who doesn't want to let go of their old bow and keeps using only a few select magic arrows in exchange for being more personally powerful.

What I do myself, though, is that I just let everybody get paid according to their own Wealth level. So if the very wealthy thief and the struggling scout get a $1,000 share each, the effective payout will be $1,000 and $200 respectively. That might sound counter-intuitive, but keep in mind that a realistic merchant will never pay 100% of an item's worth. So the payout must represent something else. I visualise it as investments and networks a rich character has that a poor doesn't. The poor character might also have debts to serve, relatives to help out etc.

It's an abstraction and far from perfect, but it helps to keep Wealth a personal trait, not a hit you take for the party. I also usually have the selling of the loot take a week or so (more if it's a big haul or includes very weird items).

You mileage may vary, of course, and I completely understand when people like to do things by the book. I'd love to hear other methods of cutting down on the less enjoyable effects of Wealth.

Re: Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)
 

You do both: delving AND loot selling, because staying in town all the time buying low and selling high is boring. The wealthy individual sick of luxury and looking for meaning in life is a classic archetype that's very easy to roleplay, and the fact that a Wealthy elven bard (e.g. a rug merchant who aspires to be essentially an embedded war correspondent and has prepared himself for combat accordingly) is very effective in combat makes it easy to believe overall.