Selling loot (wealth advantage and time spent)

[beaushinkle]

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).

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

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.

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.