Hereâs a little trick Iâve used in D&D games where the premise of your campaign calls for the party to have access to lots of Stuff, but you donât want to do a whole bunch of bookkeeping: the Wagon.
In a nutshell, the party has a horse-drawn wagon that they use to get around between â and often during â adventures. This doesnât come out of any individual player characterâs starting budget; itâs just provided as part of the campaign premise.
Before setting out from a town or other place of rest, the party has to decide how many gold pieces they want to spend on supplies. These funds arenât spent on anything in particular, and form a running total that represents how much Stuff is in the wagon.
Any time a player character needs something in the way of supplies during a journey or adventure, one of two things can happen:
1. If itâs something that any fool would have packed for the trip and itâs something that could reasonably have been obtained at one of the partyâs recent stopovers (e.g., rations, spare clothing, fifty feet of rope, etc.), then the wagon contains as much of it as they reasonably need. Just deduct the Playerâs Handbook list price for the item(s) in question from the wagonâs total.
2. If itâs something where having packed it would take some explaining, or if itâs something thatâs unlikely to have been available for purchase at any of the partyâs recent stopovers (e.g., a telescope, a barrel of fine wine, a book of dwarven erotic poetry, etc.), the player in need makes a retroactive Intelligence or Wisdom check, versus a DC set by the GM, to see if they somehow anticipated the need for the item(s) in question. Proficiency may apply to this check, depending on whatâs needed. The results are read as follows:
Success: You find what youâre looking for, more or less. If the group is amenable, you can narrate a brief flashback explaining the circumstances of its acquisition. Deduct its list price (or a price set by the GM, if itâs not on the list) from the wagonâs total.
Failure by 5 points or less: You find something sort of close to what youâre looking for. The GM decides exactly what; it wonât ever be useless for the purpose at hand, but depending on her current level of whimsy, it may simply be a lesser version of what you were looking for, or it may be something creatively off the mark. Deduct and optionally flash back as above.
Failure by more than 5 points: You come up empty-handed, and canât try again for that item or anything closely resembling it until after your next stopover.
As an incidental benefit, all the junk the wagon is carrying acts as a sort of ablative armour. If the wagon or its horses would ever take damage, instead subtract a number of gold pieces from its total equal to the number of hit points of damage it would have suffered. The GM is encouraged to describe whatâs been destroyed in lurid detail.