A session hands the party three kinds of reward, and only one of them is a number. Levels change what characters can do, treasure changes what they can afford, and a magic item changes both at once. Handle them differently, because they cost you differently.
Two systems, and every table runs one of them. Under Experience Points, you award a value per monster and per encounter, and the party levels the moment the running total crosses a threshold. Under milestone advancement, you decide they level when the story reaches a point worth marking.
Most tables land on milestone, and the reason is simple: it removes the bookkeeping and lets a level land where it is dramatically satisfying rather than wherever the arithmetic happens to tip over, which is just as often mid-corridor as not. But it has an honest cost. XP ties a level to something the players did — this many monsters beaten, this much overcome — and milestone hands it over because the story called for it. Some tables want that sense of having earned it, and for them the bookkeeping is worth carrying.
Whichever you run, tell the party which one it is. It changes what they think they are being rewarded for. For what a level actually brings once it lands, see Beyond Level 1.
Gold is inert until there is something to spend it on. A pile of it dropped on a party with no shop, no stronghold and no reason to want more is just a number on a sheet — it does not change a single decision they make. So decide what treasure buys in your campaign before you decide how much of it there is; the amount only matters once the sink does.
This page does not carry hoard tables — they are long, and they belong to the book. What is worth saying here is smaller: treasure is a pacing tool. Drop it when the party needs a reason to return to town, needs a decision about what to do with it, or needs a sign that the last fight was worth something. Drop it on that schedule and the number matters far less than the timing.
A magic item is any piece of equipment that does something ordinary gear cannot — a sword that is always a little sharper than it should be, a cloak that makes its wearer hard to spot, a ring that does something stranger still. The game sorts them into five rarities plus Artifact above them, and the rarity is a rough guide to how early — and how richly — one is meant to show up.
| Rarity | Value | Typically found from |
|---|---|---|
| Common | 100 GP | Level 1 |
| Uncommon | 400 GP | Level 1 |
| Rare | 4,000 GP | Level 5 |
| Very rare | 40,000 GP | Level 11 |
| Legendary | 200,000 GP | Level 17 |
| Artifact | Priceless | — |
Read those levels as a floor, not a ceiling. They are where each rarity typically starts showing up in a campaign, not a rule that bars you from handing out a Rare item to a first-level party if the story wants one there. The value column is the same kind of floor for the five rarities, useful for judging what a find is worth relative to the others rather than as a price tag. Artifact gets neither: no level, because it doesn't turn up in a hoard on a schedule, and "Priceless" instead of a value, because it was never for sale.
The rarity is not the real budget on how many items a character can use at once, either — Attunement is. Some items demand it, and a character can hold attunement to only three items at a time, which caps how many of your best rewards any one character can have switched on regardless of how many you have handed out. Artifacts sit apart from the other five even though the table lists one alongside them: they are not really rewards at all — treat one as a one-per-campaign object the story revolves around, not something a character finds in a hoard.
Gold gets spent and forgotten. A magic item does not — it is a permanent change to what a character can do, which is exactly why it is a better reward than a pile of coins and a much harder one to take back. Assume that anything you hand over is theirs for good, because taking it away later reads as a punishment no matter how you justify it in the fiction. Be sure you want a character to have it before you let them keep it.
That includes cursed items. They are a real tool, but use them carefully and telegraph what you are doing — a curse the player had no way to see coming does not read as a twist, it reads as a punishment for accepting the reward you gave them.