Equipment

In the marketplace of a big city, armorsmiths and weapon-smiths offer a wide variety of arms and armor for those with the gold to buy them. Here you can find practical, sturdy swords and perhaps a few elven blades of exceptional quality. Alchemists sell acid, alchemist’s fire, and smokesticks for those who want something flashier than a trusty blade. Wizards (or, more likely, their brokers) even sell magic scrolls, wands, weapons, and other items.

This chapter covers the mundane and exotic merchandise that characters may want to purchase and how to go about doing so. (Magic items are covered in the Dungeon Master’s Guide.)

Equipping a Character

A beginning character generally has enough wealth to start out with the basics: some weapons, some armor suitable to his or her class (if any), and some miscellaneous gear. As the character undertakes adventures and amasses loot, he or she can afford bigger and better gear. At first, however, the options are limited by the character’s budget.

Starting Packages

Each class has a starting package that provides default equipment (as well as default skills, a default feat, and so forth). If you equip your character with the default equipment, you can customize these packages a little by swapping in some equipment of your choice for the indicated equipment. Trades like this are fine as long as the value of the equipment you swap in isn’t higher than the value of the equipment given in the package.

Equipment a la Cart

If you don’t want to take the standard package for your character class, you can instead purchase weapons, armor, and miscellaneous equipment item by item. You begin with a random number of gold pieces that is determined by your character’s class, and you decide how to spend it (see Table 7–1: Random Starting Gold). Alternatively, your DM can assign average starting gold for each character, as indicated on Table 7–1.

Table 7–1: Random Starting Gold

Class	Amount	Average
Barbarian	4d4 x 10	100gp
Bard	4d4 x 10	100gp
Cleric	5d4 x 10	125gp
Druid	2d4 x 10	50gp
Fighter	6d4 x 10	150gp
Monk	5d4	12gp, 5sp
Paladin	6d4 x 10	150gp
Ranger	6d4 x 10	150gp
Rogue	5d4 x 10	125gp
Sorceror	3d4 x 10	75gp
Wizard	3d4 x 10	75gp

Note that buying beginning equipment this way is an abstraction. Your character doesn’t walk into a store with handfuls of gold and buy every item one by one. Rather, these items may have come the character’s way as gifts from family, equipment from patrons, gear granted during military service, swag gained through duplicity, and so on.

Assume your character owns at least one outfit of normal clothes. Pick any one of the following clothing outfits for free: artisan’s outfit, entertainer’s outfit, explorer’s outfit, monk’s outfit, peasant’s outfit, scholar’s outfit, or traveler’s outfit. (See Clothing, page 131.)

Availability

All the items described in this chapter are assumed to be available to PCs with the wherewithal to buy them. Many of these items are very expensive and rare. You won’t find them on the rack at a store in a town. But a character with the coin to buy an expensive item can usually connect with a seller and get a desired item.

If you want to buy something not described in this chapter, the general rule is that you can buy anything that costs as much as 3,000 gp. Buying a more expensive item, such as a +2 longsword, means either going to a big city where rare things are for sale, making a special deal with someone who makes or can provide the item, or paying a premium price to a merchant who makes a special effort to get you what you want.

Depending on where in the fantasy world the character is, it might be possible to buy more expensive items without a problem, or it might be more difficult to do so. In a small town, for example, it’s practically impossible to find someone who can make a suit of full plate armor. The DM determines what is and is not available depending on how he or she runs the world and where the characters are in it.

Wealth and Money

Assume a character owns at least one outfit of normal clothes. Pick any one of the following clothing outfits: artisan’s outfit, entertainer’s outfit, explorer’s outfit, monk’s outfit, peasant’s outfit, scholar’s outfit, or traveler’s outfit.

Coins

The most common coin is the gold piece (gp). A gold piece is worth 10 silver pieces. Each silver piece is worth 10 copper pieces (cp). In addition to copper, silver, and gold coins, there are also platinum pieces (pp), which are each worth 10 gp.

The standard coin weighs about a third of an ounce (fifty to the pound).

Table: Coins

CP SP GP PP Copper piece (cp) = 1 1/10 1/100 1/1,000 Silver piece (sp) = 10 1 1/10 1/100 Gold piece (gp) = 100 10 1 1/10 Platinum piece (pp) = 1,000 100 10 1