From my post in the Abstracting Wealth thread:
I want to seperate the magic item economy completely (no buying, selling, or even crafting of magic items), use the inherent bonus system to make sure everyone's numbers are covered, and then make money matter more.
As the system currently exists, copper pieces are essentially meaningless. They matter for about 5 minutes during level 1, after which you might as well skip writing them down. Silver pieces have relevance for a couple of levels longer, but soon anything but vast quantities of them are simply an inconvenience rather than treasure. Often a quest takes long enough that by the time you finish it, the originally promised reward is pocket change, and almost not worth your time going back for.
I want to have a campaign where, as in some of my favourite fantasy novels, money occasionally matters. Do you take the higher paying job, and the risk that goes along with it, or settle for the safer but less rewarding one? Do you have enough spare gold to stay at the best inn, do you settle for the dive on the waterfront, or do you sleep in a stable? Can you afford next term's tuition at the academy, or are you going to have to get a loan from a loan-shark?
Maybe, once I run it, I'll find it frustrates me, or the players, or both. Still, I want to give it a shot.
Part of any effort to make money matter is also ditching the DMG treasure guidelines. Using them would indeed be counterproductive.
The reason that the parcels scale up so much is because of the magic item economy. I'd be divorcing expected wealth from level entirely. The economy need not necessarily scale at all.
Costs of living become relevant. If your job in the city pays 1 gp a day, you're barely scraping by. That's enough for a day's stay at an inn in a typical room, one meal, and one pitcher of ale, with a silver left over. An offer of a 10 gp reward for a task is a chance to get ahead, rather than a joke. A promise of a 100 gp for a quest isn't a trivial amount used as a plot-hook, it's a serious motivator.
Pursuing a dragon's hoard becomes taking a serious gamble with your life for a shot at actually becoming fabulously wealthy, rather than something that rewards you with exactly the same amount of wealth you would have earned for taking a safer quest that earned the same XP.
I want to seperate the magic item economy completely (no buying, selling, or even crafting of magic items), use the inherent bonus system to make sure everyone's numbers are covered, and then make money matter more.
As the system currently exists, copper pieces are essentially meaningless. They matter for about 5 minutes during level 1, after which you might as well skip writing them down. Silver pieces have relevance for a couple of levels longer, but soon anything but vast quantities of them are simply an inconvenience rather than treasure. Often a quest takes long enough that by the time you finish it, the originally promised reward is pocket change, and almost not worth your time going back for.
I want to have a campaign where, as in some of my favourite fantasy novels, money occasionally matters. Do you take the higher paying job, and the risk that goes along with it, or settle for the safer but less rewarding one? Do you have enough spare gold to stay at the best inn, do you settle for the dive on the waterfront, or do you sleep in a stable? Can you afford next term's tuition at the academy, or are you going to have to get a loan from a loan-shark?
Maybe, once I run it, I'll find it frustrates me, or the players, or both. Still, I want to give it a shot.
Well honestly, aside from new dragon articles/what's possibly in MME, the only thing you can really buy with gp are magical items. So as soon as you say "You can't buy magical items", there's nothing you can really do with it.
And even if this changed so that there was lists and lists of mundane items you could spend your money on, that would mean jack once you hit a certain point because there's nothing truly expensive to use lots of treasure on. The total monetary treasure for a 15th level is 50,000gp. What can you spend that on if magic items are out?
So the system is sort of abstract in "Hey I want to buy a boat" "Uh... ok you do".
Also yes. It depends on the group. They may not know what to do with it. If your players are accountant/simulationist types (those who insist on listing every item in their pack, and get a calculator to split treasure to the copper), this will likely frustrate them.
Part of any effort to make money matter is also ditching the DMG treasure guidelines. Using them would indeed be counterproductive.
The reason that the parcels scale up so much is because of the magic item economy. I'd be divorcing expected wealth from level entirely. The economy need not necessarily scale at all.
Costs of living become relevant. If your job in the city pays 1 gp a day, you're barely scraping by. That's enough for a day's stay at an inn in a typical room, one meal, and one pitcher of ale, with a silver left over. An offer of a 10 gp reward for a task is a chance to get ahead, rather than a joke. A promise of a 100 gp for a quest isn't a trivial amount used as a plot-hook, it's a serious motivator.
Pursuing a dragon's hoard becomes taking a serious gamble with your life for a shot at actually becoming fabulously wealthy, rather than something that rewards you with exactly the same amount of wealth you would have earned for taking a safer quest that earned the same XP.