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Does the Character Wealth per Level table, as presented on page 135 of the DMG, reflect the wealth that should be owned by a single PC on each level, or by the party as a whole?
Example: there is a 9th level party.
Is it assumed that each individual player has access to 36,000 gold pieces of wealth, or should this be the total wealth of the entire party, meaning that each player of a 5-man party at level 9 would, on average, have a personal wealth of 7,200 gold pieces?
The Dungeon Master’s Guide does not generally make assumptions about things like party size. While a party size of 4 is often used in examples, there is no particular expectation that every party will consist of four members. As such, it would make the table really unwieldy if it were for the whole party, since you would have to scale it in increments of 25% for larger or smaller parties.
Table 5–1: Character Wealth by Level is based on average treasures found in average encounters compared with the experience points earned in those encounters. Using this information, you can determine how much wealth a character should have based on her level.
(Dungeon Master’s Guide pg. 135, emphasis mine)
