Topic: Character wealth and character level

[bocklin]

Difficult question I guess, but as a 3rd edition D&D player, I am used to the idea of having character power and character wealth be matched and intrinsically linked.

As I am slowly coming back to RM after a 15 years hiatus, I am still grappling with some aspects of the game (let's say I didn't play RPG the same way 15 years ago).

In the four books put out so far, I did not really see any "law" or rule of thumb to help the GM match character level and character wealth (i.e. "how much treasure and magic ites are appropriate for a level X character?").

My D&D years convinced me of the need to monitor closely the distribution of wealth to players as it might clearly affect what their characters can or cannot do, and if you try to use character level as a power reference (when building adventures or campaigns), it's quite important to have these somehow match.

Was/is there such a concept in RM2/RMC? How do you handle this?

Bocklin

[Arioch]

In RM wealth is not tied to the level of the character: you can be level 30 and pennyless or level 1 and very rich... Background options can give you more money and equipment to start with, if you want to play a wealthy character.
When making up higher level characters I usually give them money/possession based on the character's concept/background: a wandering knight will have only what he can carry (and probably little gold, too), while a city merchant-mentalist will have money, houses, stores, slaves, etc...

[bocklin]

But my worry is not so much at character creation, but how to handle this as the campaign goes on.

How do you work out how many items you reward them with? Or how much in gold do they get offered to take up a certain task?

I am afraid of being too generous at the beginning and they all end up with too powerful magical items for level 5 and are much too powerful for tackling level 5 encounters...

Said otherwise "When is it appropriate for them to receive a Mithril sword?"

Do the creature levels in CT assume a certain level of wealth on behalf of the heroes? Or Is it okay to send a bunch of level 15 creatures against 4 level 15 RMC characters with nearly no bonus-ed equipment?

Bocklin

[Marc R]

It's a tough question. Are you playing in a published game world, or home brew? A lot of the baselines for wealth and magic level are setting based.

[yammahoper]

It is appropriate to hand out a mithrel sword after they kill the Sword Demon that owns it.

You want to read Castle and Ruins, which offers the most comprehensive info on economy in a RM setting.

Basically, a peasent makes 8cp a day.  This is very poor resulting in a yearly income of 2gp, 5sp and 4cp, assuming a six day work week.

This amount allows a single person to live on the poorest meal and room cost for a year as listed on the tables in GM Law...barely.

lynn

[bocklin]

Dear LordMiller and yammahoper,

Thanks for the info. I somehow tend to disagree with the idea that such a system is only setting-based, it is also a question of game-balance (but I have been playing D&D 3E too long, so maybe I am too obsessed by the later) and therefore I think that guidelines about this belong in the core rules.

For example, if I want to design a balanced encounter for my Level 10 player group and I throw a bunch of medusas at them, how many shall I use? Two, three, four?

I can use the level of medusas to estimate how many of them my group of players can shoulder, but does this information (i.e. virtual level of a medusa) assumes character with no magic items at all (and therefore I can throw a couple medusas more at my players if their characters have powerful magic items available)? Or does it assume characters with a value of "Level x [number] gp" (and I should be wary about sending so many medusas if my players never got any magical items so far)?

This kind of guidelines or information is necessary to design balanced encounters and to help the GM design treasures appropriate to the level of their group... Or at least that's how I have started to think since playing D&D 3e. 

If I take a setting-only approach and compare the yearly salary of a craftsman to evaluate how much the town mayor will pay to get rid of the nearby tribe of kobolds, maybe he will offer the heroes 10 gp or 30 gp? But what they can buy from that is ludicrous... It is not even enough to procure an hemorrhage-stopping herb.

So reconciling setting economy and heroic treasures usually does not work (as the D&D rules show), but my hope had been that there were at least some RM guidelines to harmonize character levels and virtual wealth (as represented by magic items).

Sure my players will get their mithril sword after they killed the Demon that guards it. But shall that be a Type III or a Type V Demon? Shall I confront them against him at level 10 or level 20? Etc.

I guess my best bet is to use the treasure codes in the creature entry and always stick to that, hoping that, in the long term, randomization will even out aberrant results and the extra power my group gets from items will be "appropriate" to their level... I guess I just like the idea of having a convenient table that gives me indication as to what is appropriate for an average wealth at a given level.

Bocklin

[Rasyr-Mjolnir]

As stated above, money/wealth/magic items are setting dependent, not system dependent like they are in D&D.

How do you work out how many items you reward them with? Or how much in gold do they get offered to take up a certain task?

Based upon the costs of items on the equipment lists, gold should be fairly rare, and it should be based on the relative richness of the area/person involved as well.

For example, if we look at the Money, Gems, and Jewelry table in C&T, and at the composition section of that table. It has 19 rows. So if we take the middle row (61-65) for each of those columns, we get the following:

• Very Poor - 70 bp == 7 sp
• Poor - 250 bp == 25 sp == 2 gp 5 sp
• Normal - 40 sp == 4 gp
• Rich - 90 sp == 9 gp
• Very Rich - 80 gp

So, I would go with Normal as your starting point.  Treasure found in hoards is likely to differ from this norm in some respects.

As for purchasing magic items.... that should never really be easy (herbs should be the easiest to find and purchase.

I am afraid of being too generous at the beginning and they all end up with too powerful magical items for level 5 and are much too powerful for tackling level 5 encounters...

Said otherwise "When is it appropriate for them to receive a Mithril sword?"

Rolemaster Companion III has a table, a Treasure Generation Chart, that could be used for determining such as well.

Do the creature levels in CT assume a certain level of wealth on behalf of the heroes? Or Is it okay to send a bunch of level 15 creatures against 4 level 15 RMC characters with nearly no bonus-ed equipment?

C&T does not assume any special or magical equipment being used to defeat a given foe. However, there are some foes who can only be defeated by such items (they can be temporarily slowed or driven away with normal items though).

So, the more items that they have, the better their chances overall of surviving (anything more than 1-on-1 of equal level is likely to be deadly for the characters in RM, regardless, unless they are extremely lucky in their dice rolls....).

[Rasyr-Mjolnir]

This kind of guidelines or information is necessary to design balanced encounters and to help the GM design treasures appropriate to the level of their group... Or at least that's how I have started to think since playing D&D 3e.  Smiley

If I take a setting-only approach and compare the yearly salary of a craftsman to evaluate how much the town mayor will pay to get rid of the nearby tribe of kobolds, maybe he will offer the heroes 10 gp or 30 gp? But what they can buy from that is ludicrous... It is not even enough to procure an hemorrhage-stopping herb.

balanced? hehe..... Sorry, but I had to chuckle.

Money and magic are very much setting based, not rules based. One of the largest problems with D&D is the constant power creep that is in everything, and making money and magic levels be rules-based only increases the power creep, and destroys any sort of true balance to the game.

D&D is VERY HIGH MAGIC when compared to RM. There is no doubt of that.

Magic items make things easier, but you should never have a huge supply of them (who is sitting around just churning them out?? and where is all of the money coming from to pay for these items??).

Magic items should be rare, or else they are nearly worthless, and thus should not cost as much as they do...

Perhaps I should create something like what you are asking for and put it in the next issue of Express Additions. That table from RoCoIII could serve as a good inspiration for such a table.

[bocklin]

Hi Rasyr,

Thanks a lot for the detailed reply. I guess I have to turn my head around the RM logic.

It's very good to know that the creature level in C&T assume no specific access to items on the behalf of characters. It really helps me in the design of encounters.

The annoying thing about D&D after five to ten years of playing it is the "christmas tree" effect: your character is so dependent on what it possess that I welcome RMC even more if characters are heroic in their own right and not because of how much they owe.

balanced? hehe..... Sorry, but I had to chuckle.

Money and magic are very much setting based, not rules based.

Well, D&D tries to go at great length to explain why it should be rule-based and links directly number of XPs with numbers of GPs, but it really breaks down after you reach Level 6 and the price of your weapon could buy you four houses and as many wives... 

So in a game where monsters and adventures are designed in a way so that they assume a certain wealth and access to certain items on the behalf of the characters, thinking "treasure is linked to level" is needed for the GM to design survivable encounters. I guess I have been conditioned to think like this, but I am more than happy to move away from that. I will have to experiment a lot and see how it goes.

Bocklin

[Marc R]

I find money is very setting related.

Case and point from the last game I ran:

In a cash poor area of the western border empire, where coin was tight, prices for goods in coin were 20% cheaper than list.

In the silver mining boom towns of the southeastern border empire, silver was pouring up out of the mines, so coin prices for goods were 2-5x list.

That's inside one game world.

Also, the translation of money into power is limited in some games, and dramatic in others. . .if ye olde magic shop is handily available to convert coin into magic, then I'd likely be REALLY careful about letting the PCs get their hands on coin. . . .if there's no magic to buy and the political system is closed, then I worry less about the PCs having loads of cash, since in the end they can only carry so much, and if they cannot leverage it into power, it's less of a balance issue.

OTOH the issue of power vs level is also game dependant. . .I've seen a party of five 10th level average PCs who would be able to casually slap around a major demon. . . and I've seen a party of five 10th level average PCs who would run screaming from the same major demon, look for a church to hide in, swear holy orders and not come out for 5 years. . . .

Rolemaster, expecially RM2/C is so customizable that it's hard to judge such questions without context.

Like, I've known game worlds where a +15 Sword was the best magic item in play for 10th level characters. . . .and I've known a gameworld where the local armory was churning out high steel weapons of superior quality with +15 bonuses, so essentially all the city troops and guards had +15 weapons, along with a majority of the population at large.

In the first world, the PCs would fight over a +10 dagger, in the latter, they might discard it as worthless.

[bocklin]

I find money is very setting related.

Well, now that I know that creature level in C&T do not assume any specific wealth on the behalf of the characters, I am ready to accept that as a working basis.

I found the "converting gp between D&D and RMC" thread in the conversion forums and will use this as a general reference to make sure I do not overload players with gold/silver.

But am more than willing to try out a setting low in magic items and it seems that RMC is the right system to do that. I'd be happy more than happy about PCs who are powerful and heroic because of what they have learned and can do, rather than because of what they owe.

Bocklin

[Marc R]

I find RM, done low magic, is really good for a conanesque feel.

What is the riddle of steel?

Flesh, flesh is power, for it is the arm that weilds the sword that makes it powerful.

[Arioch]

But my worry is not so much at character creation, but how to handle this as the campaign goes on.

Sorry, I didn't realized that 

As Rasyr said above, RM doesn't assume that you drop X magical items per level on your characters. In addition, very few monsters in C&M are immune to non-magical weapons (and none requires a minimum bonus, so if you have a +5 magic dagger you can hit every monster), so if you want to have your characters rely only on their strenght you can make magic items very rare in your campaign.

If I take a setting-only approach and compare the yearly salary of a craftsman to evaluate how much the town mayor will pay to get rid of the nearby tribe of kobolds, maybe he will offer the heroes 10 gp or 30 gp? But what they can buy from that is ludicrous... It is not even enough to procure an hemorrhage-stopping herb.

Herbs cost are IMHO the only thing that doesn't work in the economic system presented in the books. If you adjust that, then you'll have a very coherent economy and you'll be able to guess the right reward/treasure/price for something without even using any tresaure table.

[Skaran]

As for the cost of your hemorrhage-stopping herb in our games we tended to drop the cost of herbs by a coin level. Expensive herbs still remained expensive but you did not have to swap your village for a dose of something that costs 1000 GP.

[vroomfogle]

I've also found herb prices to be priced way too high.   I like to keep my PC's relatively poor (at least poor enough so that buying things is actually a decision making process rather then a shopping spree), but once you introduce herbs at the suggested prices they are no longer poor.    Mix that with an Animist with the Herb Mastery list and you have a quick way to make lots of cash.    Skaran's suggestion of dropping a coin level (i.e. for costs listed in gold make them silver instead) is a good one.

[Marc R]

they kind of fill a slot akin to potions in other systems though, so I usually limit them not by cost, but by availability. . . like you might be able to get said 1000gp herb for 1000gp on the black market, but if you're working for the church that controls the production of that herb, you may just get some for free as part of your payment. . .

Economic motivations are all good, but herbs make really good non-cash perks. . .sort of like medical benefits.

I could take the $50k job, or the $30k job with open access to herbs. . . .hmm decisions, decisions. "How many personal days?"

[bocklin]

As Rasyr said above, RM doesn't assume that you drop X magical items per level on your characters. In addition, very few monsters in C&M are immune to non-magical weapons (and none requires a minimum bonus, so if you have a +5 magic dagger you can hit every monster), so if you want to have your characters rely only on their strenght you can make magic items very rare in your campaign.

Yep, I am slowly realising that - and find it very liberating, somehow. 

Thanks all for the tips.

Bocklin

[yammahoper]

I also reduce herb cost to silver.  But I hand out a lot less gold than some games.

I also use the base item cost in Treasure Companion and do not multiply them by the class of the alchemist (by the rules, high level alchemist charge more to make everything).

In GM Law are some very handy buying and selling tables.  I use them alot.

For me, I have always been amused by systems that base cost of living on level, as in 50gp/month per level, or some simular equation.  I mean, even today I will only buy one of those tasty $9 six packs of beer on special occassions (and sometimes just to spoil myself ), so I have a hard time imagining my living expense would increase that dramatically because I know more.

lynn

[mocking bird]

There are other things to take into account when using the TC for costs.
So you have 1lb of laen worth thousands of gold pieces.  However now all you have to do is find someone with thousands of gold pieces (or hopefully something much more portable) who also has a use for it.  Otherwise you have a very expensive paperweight.  Similarly you have an eog two handed sword of dragon slaying.  Who exactly are you going to sell that to?  Or wouldn't some dragons be ineterested on tracking down such a weapon? 

We have found that eventually money and items can become cumbersome.  Essentially every 'trip to town' becomes a shopping trip with characters and can get pretty dull.  However with the above examples, treasure gotten can itself become a plot hook.

[thrud]

You become very famous very fast when you walk into town and buy all the jewels from the local jeweler... (and complain that it's still not enough)