I am planning a new campaign setting to our new campaign and because most of it will take place in a Feywildesque other plane (with almost exclusively chaotic settlements) the use of money will be very rare. I was wondering how this affects game balance and if I have to take special care with certain classes or character options.
[RPG] How does the lack of money change the game balance
balancepathfinder-1e
Related Solutions
It will take some work, but it's perfectly doable.
Enemies with special defenses
The players won't have access to see invisible, flight, magic weapons, or ghost touch. Therefore, if you include enemies that can fly, or have DR/magic, or are intangible, these will be huge challenges, and may be downright impossible. The easy solution is simply to not include such enemies, but the more interesting way is to treat them as nigh-invulnerable enemies that the heroes will have to figure out how to defeat. In a normal Pathfinder game, a ghost is a normal critter with a +2 CR template pasted on top, and requires some minimal preparation to defeat. In a low-magic Pathfinder game, a ghost is a mystery: why did they become a ghost? How can you persuade them to pass on, or at least let the party pass by peacefully? Can you persuade the local priest to perform an exorcism, and will it even work? Instead of "find monster, insert fireball," these types of encounters are now role-playing challenges, because they can't be solved any other way!
Alternatively, you can simply strip out the special defenses from enemies. Pathfinder assumes you have level-appropriate counters to special abilities anyway, so by removing those special defenses, you aren't going too far from the original intent. Adjusting the CR is left as an exercise for the GM, because it's going to take a fair amount of trial-and-error to determine what the right balance is.
Fixing armor class, and other numbers issues
Pathfinder assumes that both attack bonuses and defenses will be augmented by magic items. This partially balances out if the players don't have magic items, but consider giving everyone a +1 bonus to AC and all defenses every four levels. Don't make them pay a feat for it, just give it to them.
While you're at it, give your players bonus XP for the monsters they defeat, by calculating the XP as if the monsters were a higher CR. Since they're operating without magic, every encounter is going to be harder than what the DMG "expects" when it calculates XP per CR.
What will they do with their money?
Your players won't be able to buy gear that personally enhances their ability to make things dead faster, or grant them new solutions. If you keep to the normal loot rules, then the party will have far, far more money than they know what to do with. You have two options here: give them less money, or give them something to do with that money.
Let them invest in mercenary companies or land holdings. Let them become influential in the church, or their hometown, or even their country as their economic might and donations in the right places give them power that they would never be able to take with a sword. Favors in high places give characters some very powerful options.
Recovery after combat
This will require explicit house rules; you'll need to accelerate natural healing (heal a percentage of HP per day instead of a flat amount?), allow Heal checks to do much more than they normally do, grant the local clergy some extremely localized healing powers (they can heal people brought to their church, but not outside of their place of worship), and/or make this a political game rather than a hack-and-slash game.
If everyone's having fun, then it's a good game. It doesn't matter if the characters aren't optimized: as long as they feel like they're making a difference in the world and they're enjoying the game, then you're doing it right. The characters will be balanced, more or less: they all don't have access to magic, so intra-party balance isn't as much of a problem. You'll see that the players lack all of the magic-based solutions that you'd expect in a normal Pathfinder game, and you'll select the enemies more carefully, but things will work out fine. Let your players know that things will be a bit different than normal, and your players will go along with it; they requested this kind of game, after all.
You should talk with the GM. The GM should kick the player out. The situation is clearly beyond the 'talking to people' point and several intermediate measures have been tried. The person the group unanimously doesn't want to play with is an jerk and you shouldn't play with them. Further intermediate measures will only allow him to damage the game further.
In a non-in-person RPG group like you are playing in, kicking players is hard but it still occasionally needs to be done and it is the GM's responsibility. Consider sharing the 5 Geek Social Fallacies page with your GM, as he may benefit from it. Consider having a group discussion on how bad someone needs to be for your group to kick them to give the GM some space to talk about why he or she hasn't kicked them in a non-defensive manner and you some space to explain that the group expects them to kick people like this if it comes up again in the future.
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Best Answer
In Pathfinder, wealth means magic items, and magic items are directly tied to character power and therefore to game balance. The game’s materials assume a certain amount of magical gear for characters, and characters will perform less well than expected without such gear. This makes GMing tools like CR less reliable, because they are assuming magical items that are unavailable.
Worse, these issues are not equally problematic for all characters. Some characters have plenty of their own magic, so even though they’d certainly like some magical items, if they don’t have them they can make do. Others have no magic, and absolutely need magical items because magic is necessary to survive in Pathfinder.
Worst of all, the classes that suffer the most without magical items—non-magical warrior classes—are already the classes that have the most difficulty in the game. So by taking them away, you make a bad problem worse.
For more on how lack of magical item effects can cause issues with CR, the primary GMing tool available, see this question.
But notice that all the issues stem from lack of magic items—not intrisically from lack of wealth, coinage, and so on. Characters need the items—they don’t really need the coin. In fact, coins themselves are useless; it is only once characters can trade those coins for magical items that they actually become relevant to game balance. A character with all his or her wealth in coins and gems is just as badly-off as a character with no wealth at all, as far as the game’s mechanics are concerned.
And, furthermore, it’s not really important that magical items be, well, items. They can be boons or blessings or even (with some flavorful drawbacks) curses. They can even just be an intrinsic part of being higher level: you could say that instead of everyone buying a cloak of resistance +1 at 3rd level, they just get a +1 resistance bonus on all saving throws at 3rd level (and yes, pretty much everyone should buy a cloak of resistance +1 at 3rd level; other bonuses aren’t quite so neat and tidy, but you get the idea).
So what I strongly recommend is that you maintain normal Pathfinder levels of magical item bonuses and benefits, you just change how they are distributed, exchanged, and used to match your campaign setting. This will give you the best of both worlds: the campaign you want, and the most reliable GMing tools that Pathfinder has to offer. (Though, to be honest, even at their best they are still pretty unreliable, unfortunately. It’s just a whole lot worse if you go wildly changing access to magical item effects.)