I’ve been looking to change treasure troves up a bit. The experience I’m working to build isn’t well-served by players having to count every copper. XP doesn’t rely on gp extraction from dungeons. Cashing out treasure isn’t straightforward as if walking into a modern pawn shop and selling a pile of old stuff for cash.
I already have PCs dealing with agents who have contacts elsewhere who take treasure goods and sell them to those contacts and then return with suitable coinage or gemstones or the like (and get a commission for doing so). PCs live on advances against the sales for regular expenses prior to having accumulated a nest egg. The accounting for treasure is thus already moved away from to-the-copper bookkeeping.
I’ve encountered systems that use wealth ratings instead of coin counting and, while I’ve never been convinced to carry any specific such subsystem over to another system I used, I’ve always suspected that such a system could be designed to work really well. I now think such an approach would work well for me, provided I can nail the flavor and maintain the focus on what I find important.
What’s your experience with wealth rating systems? Which of them have worked well for you? More importantly, what did they do that seemed to cause them to work well?
I can say that many of them simply didn’t have enough levels of wealth rating for me. Breaking the scale from scraping by to extremely wealthy in five steps, for example, just doesn’t provide the granularity I’m looking for. Nine steps, eleven steps…those might provide the grain I’m looking for.
And how did the rules work for or against your expectations with regard to extracted treasure affecting the overall wealth rating? Or how purchasing worked in conjunction with wealth ratings and causing those to fluctuate?