How Much Gold Should A Player Have?
Header Art: Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons by Wizards of the Coast
There comes a time when your players do something impressive, like bring down a dragon or drop-kick an ambassador into a bottomless pit, and you start telling them all the treasure they are getting. The fighter, excitedly bouncing around in their seat, wondering if they'll finally have enough money to afford that sweet plate armor, while the wizard angrily yells at the rogue that they better not steal a single piece of that gold as the wizard needs to copy five more spells into their spellbook!
Well, how much gold are you supposed to be handing out to a bunch of people who keep claiming they are your friend but steal all the pizza while you are drawing the map?
I'll be using two books to discuss all this, and that way you can check my math - Player's Handbook (2014) and the Dungeon Master's Guide (2014).
The Basics
On page 133 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide, we are given a small peek behind the curtain about how often you are supposed to roll on the magic item charts. For those of you who don't have it, here it goes:
7 rolls on Challenge 0-4 table
18 rolls on Challenge 5-10 table
12 rolls on Challenge 11-16 table
8 rolls on Challenge 17+ table
Let's go look at what those rolls mean for a group. We will ignore magic items and focus solely on gold and gems/art accumulated for reasons I'll talk about later. For gems & art, I will be taking their average amount across every roll and providing an average amount of money the party would make if they sold it at full price.
TREASURE HOARD: CHALLENGE 0-4
Average roll:
2,100 copper pieces
1,050 silver pieces
70 gold pieces
365 gold pieces [Art/Gems]
—
561 gold pieces
x7 rolls on the Treasure Hoard
—
3,927 gold pieces
÷ party of 4 characters
—
981 gp per character after 7 rolls
That's a lot of gold for adventurers just starting out adventuring. You can see my work above, and so you understand how I am getting my numbers. I am going to go ahead and do the other three treasure hoards without as much detail.
TREASURE HOARD: CHALLENGE 5-10
Average Roll:
700 copper pieces
7,000 silver pieces
2,100 gold pieces
105 platinum pieces
687 gold pieces [Gems/Art]
---
18 rolls provide: 81,792 gp
20,448 gp per character
TREASURE HOARD: CHALLENGE 11-16
Average Roll:
14,000 gold pieces
1,750 platinum pieces
4,712.5 gold pieces [Gems/Art]
---
12 rolls provide: 434,550 gp
108,637 gp per character
TREASURE HOARD: CHALLENGE 17+
Average Roll:
42,000 gold pieces
28,000 platinum pieces,
14,025 gold pieces [Gems/Art]
---
8 rolls provide: 2,688,200 gp
672,050 gp per character
Adding It Up
A character retiring at level 20, having the average amount of gold and artwork rolled for them, should retire with a total of 786,086 gold pieces. To put that into perspective, if a character wanted to retire with all their ill-gotten goods and live a Comfortable lifestyle of 2 gp per day, based on the information on page 157 of the Player’s Handbook, they could live for 393,043 days or 1,076.83 years off their hoard.
A Wealthy lifestyle would be 4 gp per day, which is only 196,521.5 days or 538.41 years. Though, if you decide to live it up a bit more and go with an Aristocratic lifestyle, which is 10 gp per day (at the very least), you could only relax in style for 78,608.6 days or 215.36 years - which is hardly enough time to really relax after a stressful year of adventuring.
So what exactly can we do with this knowledge that our players are expected to get a lot of money even by level 5? Well, we can look at things that are available for buying in the Player’s Handbook and the Dungeon Master’s Guide and see how that affects our mechanics.
There are only two class features (OK, technically three) that require any type of gold value to actually function. Assassin rogues need 25 gp every time they want to use their Infiltration Expertise subclass feature where they can make an unfailing fake identity. Next are the wizards who need to spend 50 gp per spell level for a spell they wish to copy into their spellbook - and yes, the Warlock also must pay 50 gp if they take the Book of Ancient Secrets Eldritch Invocation.
So, for a rogue, they probably make a handful of identities, but probably not enough identities to go through 786K gp - or maybe they do have 31,442 identities on hand. Who can tell with such sketchy individuals. But what about wizards, how much are they spending? Well, a Wizard gets 6 spells when they begin play and then 2 spells at every level up. For the sake of brevity, I'll just assume they always grab 2 new spells of their highest level they can cast.
By level 20, the wizard will learn 44 spells which are 8 1st-level, 4 2nd-level, 4 3rd-level, 4 4th-level, 4 5th-level, 4 6th-level, 4 7th-level, 4 8th-level, and 8 9th-level.
The total available spells in the Player’s Handbook for a wizard is as follows, value in brackets is the running total, and when they get access to that spell level:
1st / 30 spells - 8 = 22 spells to copy times 50 gp = 1,100 gp [1,100 gp, 1st level]
2nd / 34 spells - 4 = 30 spells to copy times 100 gp = 3,000 gp [4,100 gp, 3rd level]
3rd / 29 spells - 4 = 25 spells to copy times 150 gp = 3,750 gp [7,850 gp, 5th level]
4th / 23 spells - 4 = 19 spells to copy times 200 gp = 3,800 gp [11,650 gp, 7th level]
5th / 23 spells - 4 = 19 spells to copy times 250 gp = 4,750 gp [16,400 gp, 9th level]
6th / 20 spells - 4 = 16 spells to copy times 300 gp = 4,800 gp [21,200 gp, 11th level]
7th / 15 spells - 4 = 11 spells to copy times 350 gp = 3,850 gp [25,050 gp, 13th level]
8th / 13 spells - 4 = 9 spells to copy times 400 gp = 3,600 gp [28,650 gp, 15th level]
9th / 12 spells - 8 = 4 spells to copy times 450 gp = 1,800 gp [30,450 gp, 17th level]
Total gold spent is 30,450 gp; meaning that they have 755,618 gp leftover from their hoard. If we go back and look at how much money a wizard will have after certain Treasure Hoards, we can easily see that by the end of 4th level, they should have 981 gp which isn't quite enough to cover the cost of transcribing every 1st-level spell. BUT, because they are expected to have 18 rolls from Levels 5 to 10, we can assume they get at least a few of those rolls at level 5, meaning they can easily copy everything else. By the time they hit level 10, they'll have enough to transcribe every spell they can cast, and by the time they hit level 16, they'll have way about four times as much money as they need to scribe all their spells.
[A major flaw in this is not talking about the price of scrolls; this is assuming you find a spellbook or scrolls for every spell.]
Spending That Money
Of course, you could look at this and just decide to give your wizard access to every spell in the game so that they can spend their gold, but that’s not really what I’m saying. They should get something to spend their money on, but it shouldn’t just be on transcribing spells into their book, just like fighters and barbarians should be given something to spend their gold on that isn’t just weapons, armor, and fur-skin loincloths.
We can safely assume that the designers of this game assumed that gold should be spent or they wouldn’t be planning for the players to have 786K+ gp by the end of the game. So, what could your players do with this gold?
Mundane Equipment
Let's talk about equipment. Players all begin play with their starting equipment and while that equipment is good and useful, players will probably upgrade their equipment once or twice in total if they only have the mundane equipment from the Player’s Handbook, and let’s face it; it’s not like there are other books out there that offer mundane equipment. If there are going to be new items in this game, it’s always going to be magic items because no one makes just mundane equipment. Dexterity-based fighters and rangers will get a rapier or longbow/heavy crossbow; fighters, paladins and clerics will get the best armor they can, and maybe a big stick to hit people with.
Based on the information provided in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, by level 5 a character should have all the equipment they need. Why do I say that? Because by the midpoint of 5th level, a character will have an average of 981 gold pieces plus the moment they get a roll on the Lv5 Treasure Hoard they'll earn another 1,136 gp. They'll have plenty to spend on the most expensive item equipment-wise, which is plate for 1,500 gp followed closely by a spyglass for 1,000 gp. If a player wanted plate armor and a spyglass, they'd have to wait until their next roll on the Lv5 Treasure Hoard, which they can pry expect to happen two times per level.
From this, it is assumed that anyone that can have plate should have plate by the time they are getting into 5th level because that is what the game is designed around as there is little to nothing else for players to spend their gold on. Once your players are getting into Tier 2, they will have their preferred equipment and gold will start to become meaningless for many of the players because it doesn't actually matter how much gold they have.
Well, that's disappointing, you might be saying, they need to know the value of a gold piece! Even if they are 20th level, they should know that that copper piece they turn their nose up to is important!
Well, fear not. There are ways to use your player's money beyond relying on the system to give a reason for gold. I'll go over a few ways to help you get an idea about money.
Magic Items
If you are in a world where you want to sell magic items, this provides a pretty good way of deciding how much to charge by simply looking at the average amount of gold a character will have and then determining a price for it. Let's take a +1 weapon for example. If you want to price out a sword of magicalness, you need a benchmark first. At 6th level, a monk gets magical fists which means that by 6th level, characters should have a way of overcoming magical resistances. So we can look at the total amount of money a 6th level character would have and just ball park it based on that. They should have about 4,389 gp plus or minus a few copper that they left behind because… well, they are copper pieces.
If you take out 1,500 for plate and another 500 in miscellany for taverns, inns, that one time they threw a gold coin on to the street and made the urchins fight over it, and everything else that I can't think of, let’s say 100 gp per level, then they would have about 2,389 gp leftover to be spent on a magical weapon. You could then price a piece of magic for them that would take a lot of that gold, maybe 2,500 or so. This way it takes a ton of saving on their part, but is still doable at a decent time in the campaign. Though, you can increase or decrease that depending on how much magic you want available. If you want more magic, you could decrease that to 1,000 or 500 - or if you only want them to have a +1 weapon and no more, you could easily squeeze that up to 4,000 or 6,000 so that it is harder to track down.
Xanathar’s Magical Pricing
If we check out Xanathar’s Guide to Everything (2017), we can see that they do offer some suggestions for magic items, which we can then compare to how much gold our players get. A common magic item averages out to only 40 gp, uncommon ~300 gp, rare ~11,000 gp, very rare ~30,000 gp, and legendary is ~175,000 gp. So right off the bat, we can see that if a player scrimps and saves every single copper they could expect to get in a level 1 to level 20 campaign, they still won't be able to afford the legendary item until they get one or two rolls for the Lv17+ Treasure Hoard.
Meanwhile, a level 4 character is supposed to be able to afford pretty much as many common items as they want or a few uncommon items. Once they reach level 10, they should be able to afford pretty much as many uncommon items as they want or need, as well as a few rare items. By level 16 they should be able to buy a few very rare items, and by the time they hit level 20, they can afford pretty much as many very rare items as they need. Of course, this isn’t considering selling back any items they might have bought or the fact that if they are buying a consumable item, you can double how many items they can buy. Plus, what about all the magic items they do find on their journey based on the tables in the Dungeon Master’s Guide?
Homeowners
Or maybe, you have no interest in magic items being for sale. Instead, you could point the characters over to a nice castle or ship and trick them into buying it. Now, those things take a long time to be built, so maybe they should get one that has a few miles on it. Nothing too decrepit, just something that needs a bit of love and work. The most expensive thing I could find in the Player’s Handbook is on page 157 and is a Galley for 30,000 gp, which the party could buy, if they all go in on it, by about level 8. Though, an individual could buy a galley if they saved all their money by the time they are getting into level 13.
But let's think larger; the most expensive thing I could find in the Dungeon Master’s Guide is on page 128 and is a palace or large castle for 500,000 gp. An individual could not afford such a massive prize until they are safely in Lv18 or Lv19, but if the whole party gets in on it, they could afford it by level 17 if that was their focus. They'd then have some leftover gold from the purchase to buy the most expensive furniture possible. All other buildings cap at about 50,000 gp, meaning a character could easily afford 10 of those buildings while still having plenty of leftover gold to retire on, and then sitting on their property like its a game of Monopoly and they are trying to get their friends and family to hate them.
In Play
What does this all mean for your table? How are you supposed to take the provided information and use it to improve or change up your games? Well, I think the first thing we can take away from this is to feel free to give a few scrolls to your wizard to transcribe and don't freak out if your fighter wants to get plate armor at level 5. The system is designed for that to happen.
After that, encourage your players to dream big. They don't need to buy a palace but give them something they can start throwing their money at. A bar, a tavern, a ship, or maybe a few magic items. If players are getting this much gold, per the rules and suggestions provided to DMs, then they need to spend it on something or else it just feels pretty pointless to have 786,000 pieces of gold and not have anything to do with it.
An earlier version of this post originally appeared on our Patreon. I thought that discussing gold fits in quite well with my recent magic item pricing article and decided to adapt it for this website.
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