How much treasure per adventure? [125-pointers]

[Kromm]

I had a nice post written and my power went out. Yay? Briefly:

It's easy to soak up too much money with cost of living, healing at the temple (including resurrection), hirelings, power item recharges, repairs (to favorite weapons and armor that get corroded, splintered, etc.), special orders, training expenses (optional), and of course money in the collection plate after divine intervention. You can find all this and more in the books . . . I haven't time to go back and cite the pages a second time.

It's harder to find new players if you're stingy and they give up because the knight can't get her expensive plate armor repaired, the scout can't afford arrows, and the casters can't keep their power items charged, so they're always working below full efficiency and never getting to do classic FRPG stuff like resurrect dead friends and hire porters to carry their spare weapons.

So, be generous with money. My personal approach is to use the exchange rate for points for cash at character creation (1 point = $500) as a gauge of how much money the whole party should get on an adventure that generates on average that many points. For instance, if you go with the recommended 0-5 points per session + 0-5 points for adventure completion, a four-session adventure will earn an average of 12-13 points per hero, so the whole group should get at least $6,000-6,500 in flexible cash.

"Special" items – gear of extraordinary quality or composition, magic items, one-off artifacts, etc. – live outside this framework. I try to include one item like this per party member. I don't worry much about trade-in value, as I use Selling the Unique pricing as a cap. More important, I make the items impossible to find in town and very useful, so people are inclined to keep them.

Finally, I don't scale cash to character point total. I see no reason to do that. I'm the sort of GM who has no issues with 62-point wannabes getting more from clearing a rich merchant's basement of rats than a gang of 500-point clerics and holy warriors get from doing the gods' work against demon lords. That said, rat-clearing is likely to be a two-session thing worth ~5 points while a visit to Hell can end up being a dozen hard sessions worth ~50 points. I do scale special items, though . . . I don't look at price, but rather at how special an item has to be to matter to someone that competent. This is less special for 125-pointers than for 250-pointers, but it isn't a calculation.