How do I give the right amount of treasure without going overboard, like my last DM did?

Question

I am trying to find a good model for how much treasure and money to give my players in order not to make items too difficult to buy, or too cheap to buy.

In my last game, which ran for 6 months, our DM ended up so freely giving us gold that everything was trivial for us. Our characters at level 6 were so rich, we could afford any comfort and travel as kings. This was not because we found a treasure hoard, but because our DM had accidentally been giving us too much treasure for our encounters.

For example, every time we would fight something, they would reward us with 1-2 Platinum, sometimes more. They also used in-game currency for out of game creativity. If you made them laugh, you got another Platinum or like 100 Gold.

Nearing the end of the campaign, everything was so cheap that it wasn't fun anymore to even buy anything or save up for fancy lodgings. We could afford hundreds of potions, countless trips to the local temple, resurrections...etc. There was no threat of dying, no challenge in earning, and the game lost steam fast.

I am not good with math. I am nowhere near an economist, but when I run my campaign I don't want to end up with the same problem.

Are there any charts or rules of thumb for making a balanced, long-term economy in D&D 5th?

How do I assign treasure in a way that doesn't inflate to worthlessness down the line?

I am looking for charts, guides or tables ideally. I would really appreciate the help.

Answer 1

Decide what you want your PCs to save for.

First, you have to decide what your PCs are going to use money for. Do they have to worry about everyday living costs, or are they going to save up to buy expensive magic items?

If you really want it, DMG 136-139 contains detailed tables for treasure at various levels. While sometimes useful, they don't really help you decide how the economy of your game will work.

For example, PHB 157 has a table detailing how much certain lifestyles cost, with a squalid lifestyle costing 1sp per day and an aristocratic lifestyle costing at least 10gp per day. Thus, if you want your PCs to track living expenses and aspire to aristocracy, you'd want to restrict their budgets to probably less than 10gp per day.

On the other hand, DMG 135 lists values for magic items ranging from 50gp to 50,000gp. If you want magic items to be the objects of your game economy, you'll be looking at much different numbers.

Decide how much you want your players to have, and calculate a budget

Once you've decided what your economy is going to be about, you should decide where you want your players to live within that economy. It looks like you don't want to be super rich, so you should set a budget for the treasure that you dole out.

For example, in the game that I DM, I decided to give my players easy access to magic items, priced by their rarity. Consumable magic items cost 20-50gp, but permanent magic items range from about 1k to 10k gp. Each session, I give the players a few hundred gp. I feel that this strikes a rough compromise between saving up for the big magic items and having a steady supply of consumables. As my players level up, I plan to increase both the prices and the rewards accordingly.

Restrict desirable things by other means

Honestly, D&D is an epic fantasy kind of game, and I've felt like efforts to significantly restrict gold income kind of fall flat. After all, when was the last time you saw Aragorn hard up for cash? Unless you're particularly stingy with treasure, the PCs are going to be fabulously wealthy by the PHB's standards for commoners pretty quickly.

Instead, you can create scarcity by other means. Sure, the players might have all the gold in the world, but if the temple's best cleric is only level 3, they're still going to have trouble resurrecting their friend. Likewise, the local alchemist might only have enough ingredients for a handful of potions, regardless of how much the PCs overpay him. By restricting the absolute availability of desirable goods and services, you can preserve the value of money without letting wealth be the answer to everything.

Answer 2

Take a look at the Dungeon Master's Guide.

While the treasure balance in the random tables provided in the 5e DMG is far from perfect, it will be an excellent starting point if you're worried about giving out too much treasure in your campaign. 5e is generally balanced so that if you use the standard XP and treasure rules, then players will have roughly the "right" amount of wealth for their level, and you won't see too much of players being able to buy anything they want.

There is guidance all over the DMG about how to pace your campaign, but the treasure table section starts on page 133.

Answer 3

One way that one of my DMs uses that works well is to give little to no gold as treasure. They generally ignore cost for 'normal' things like staying in a tavern, food and drink, basic supplies (within reason) and for treasure, they give us a level-appropriate magic item or two (if they'e not sure what to give us, they ask us to get ideas) or occasionally a charm (DMG page 228) or one of the weaker epic boons (DMG page 231). As we've started reaching higher levels, they've started rolling random treasure based on the DMG treasure tables. This meant that we weren't wasting game time figuring out what to spend money on and we didn't get super rich until it made sense for our level

Answer 4

The best guide I know of is to use the treasure tables in the DMG (5e, chapter 7, pages 136-139).

However, its helpful to know how many times you should be rolling on the tables.

For Treasure Hoards, I try to keep pretty close to this: "You can give out as much or as little treasure as you want. Over the course of a typical campaign, a party finds treasure hoards amounting to seven rolls on the Challenge 0-4 table, eighteen rolls on the Challenge 5-10 table, twelve rolls on the Challenge 11-16 table, and eight rolls on the Challenge 17+ table." - DMG (5e, chapter 7, Using the Treasure Hoard Table, pages 133)

But, for individual table there is a lot more range to how much gold the party can get depending on how many monster they fight. I recommend using the individual table not per literally each individual monster, but instead as a sum of the monsters CR ratings per encounter. - This is based solely based off of personal experience and a desire for more consistency (It doesn't make sense to me to give the players so much more gold for defeating 7 monsters with a CR of 1/2 compared to 1 monster with a CR of 3, even though both encounters give the same xp.)

The "challenge" number in these tables more or less corresponds with the average party level assuming there are 4 PC in the party. Meaning parties where the character level is 0-4 should be facing challenges that are also 0-4.

However, there is no simple rules for balancing treasure, so don't lock yourself into this strategy or any other. The best thing you can do to makes things balanced is be flexible. If your party has too much or to little, start doing something different - and talk with them about what they like best.

I had a similar but opposite experience where a first time DM didn't give us any treasure and gold levels 1-4. It was a really story driven game where each of us had personal reasons to be there, and it didn't really make sense in story for the "dungeon" to have gold or treasure. The DM had a place to buy things, but we couldn't afford any of it. We got caught stealing a health potion from a vendor, and then the town hated us for a while. Later, we literally scavenged our base of operations for things we could pawn. It made for some unnecessary irl drama and overall the experience made us feel underpowered and useless. But, at least it was an easy fix, because we found a big hoard that got us back on track.

Answer 5

The Adventurer's League has guidelines on magic items that are a good foundation. It may seem restrictive but you can freely give out common magic items an consumable items generally aren't disruptive.

Items that have charges like Gem of Brightness may be dropped as treasure with less than the maximum 50 charges but only 1-3 charges remaining. Your heroes may find Necklace of Fireballs with only a single bead remaining. If you give these at a steady drip feed they

You can also use the variant rule "Wands That Don't Recharge" (DMG, Pg 141) to prevent a weapon having a persistently unbalancing effect.

As a general rule don't grant players anything that increases their AC or Bonuses to hit as the game's "bounded accuracy" design principle means even a +1 sword can have a significant effect on the outcome of the game. If you really think players should have some way to bypass "Resistant to non-magical weapons" then the Moon Touched Sword (XGE, Pg 138) is a better option.

Finally, think very carefully about any item that increases mobility like Slippers of Slider Climbing, Winged Boots or Broom of Flying. Mobility is an important limitation in games and can make so many challenges from combat with monsters to avoiding traps trivially easy.

Some mobility granted such as by Ring of Water Walking can be balanced as walking on top of water doesn't necessarily make combat with swimming creatures trivial as they can usually attack anyone on the surface.