Making money matter (forked from Abstracting Wealth)

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.

Rechan said:

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.

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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 already went there in the original topic. If you want to do this, but still have important magic items and the like, then you have to set it up with a big gulf so that the two economies rarely cross lines productively. That is, you can sell a magic item for a fraction of its true worth, but will rarely find it a good idea.

This actually gets easier to do if you make magic items more valuable, instead of less. Food costs coppers, but magic costs in thousands of platinum and gems. There just isn't anything in the middle to let people accumulate. Then you end up with a middling kingdom that could be traded for a Holy Avenger, but why would the king want to?

In order for money to matter, it has to be a tightly limited resource, so that the PCs can't just buy whatever they want. (The same applies to ammunition, rations, encumbrance...) The game handles this automatically by allowing them to buy magic items, but if you're wanting to break that cycle then you'll need to do something else.

Basically, you'll need to be much more frugal in giving out treasures. Instead of getting a treasure of 100gp, they'll need to get 100cp. And so on. As soon as the PCs amass any significant funds, money will cease to be of interest.

At the same time, you'll probably want to add some means of money drain. Either declare some equipment items to be 'perishable', and in need of replacement every adventure (likely possibilities are rations, water and wine, rope, potions, acid, oil...), or charge them a maintenence/training charge after each adventure (say 1% of their XP total in gold), or deduct a percentage of their ready gold between adventures (costs of the rock-and-roll adventurer's lifestyle, loss to pickpockets, bad gambles, or money that is just lost).

One other alternative you might consider is dusting off the old notions of domain management - encourage PCs to set up their own stronghold, with all the costs inherent in building, maintaining and staffing such an undertaking. Those costs will also very rapidly add up.

Works fine - eliminate the magic item economy, decide how much 1 gp is worth, and stick with it. Enforce upkeep costs, and tie them to social status.

BTW 1 gp/day, 30gp/month, is pretty much a middle class lifestyle. Sure if for some reason you live permanently in your own room at an Inn, it's expensive - but you earn a lot more than most people!

I just wanted to mention (since I didn't see anyone bringing it up) that rituals are affected as well.

Neubert said:

I just wanted to mention (since I didn't see anyone bringing it up) that rituals are affected as well.

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I'd argue that they're affected in a positive way. Now the players have some extra money to spend on rituals (rather than magic items). In the same vein, rituals can now be used as plot hooks (need to find that ritual, gotta go adventure for it).

As I pointed out in the "3.5 Cost Conversion" thread, the truth is that you can give out pretty much any amount of money you feel like right now using RAW and it just doesn't matter.

PCs can only make at-level common magic items. Big deal. That means basically healing potions, and vanilla +N items. It is no worse than using inherent bonuses. The DM controls all of what can be purchased, and practically all of what can be enchanted.

Obviously you don't generally want to give away limitless gold, but you CAN ignore parcels for gold, and frankly it isn't even THAT big a deal to be really flexible about them for items. Rare items are especially good there, because they don't hold big excessive pluses but they ARE better enough than a lot of the uncommon stuff to be worth taking a bit of an extra risk for. Besides, most players don't really sit there considering risk/reward ratios that closely.

The other benefit is all of a sudden rituals start to be a lot less of a penalty to use. Sure, they may even be expensive, but you can always go out and do something overly hazardous and make back the cash, and if you chuck around a few good rituals creatively, well that extra hazard may be cut down to size anyway.

So, I say don't house rule anything. Just go for it. Give away treasure in a completely organic way and have fun. Unless you go berserk the game just isn't going to break.

@Crazy Jerome - The approach I was planning to take in the campaign is that magic items are quite rare. As you say, you could sell them, but good luck finding someone who is able and willing to pay what they're worth.

@delericho - Yes, my plan is to more frugal with treasure rewards. Or at the very least make it so that while it's possible to get massive rewards, one can only do it at massive risk. Sure, a dragon's hoard has enough treasure that the whole party could live in luxury off of it, but you have to get past the dragon to get it. If the only dragons around (or the only ones with hoards worth taking) are say, 8 levels higher than you, a wise adventurer is going to save that for later. Either that, or try and come up with the best plan ever...

Consumable and perishable items are pretty much guaranteed. Encumbrance will definitely be enforced (which is another obstacle to taking that dragon hoard). Domain management is a possibility as well, though like taking a dragon's treasure, carving out a kingdom is a long term goal, not the starting place.

@S'mon - Yeah, 30 gp/month isn't bad for middle class, if you have a home you've already paid for, and aren't buying all your meals at the inn. However, to a foreign adventurer just arrived in town, it's barely covering expenses. 3 gp disposable income at the end of the month, assuming you can get by on only one meal a day (which of course, by the rules, you can). Of course, a party of five is likely going to pool some of their resources, doubling up in rooms, splitting that pitcher of ale, etc. However, that sort of thing is exactly what I'm hoping to achieve: players changing their actions based on considerations of cost.

Of course, we could also just slash the earnings. 1 gp/day might be enough to get by on, but what happens when you're only getting 5 sp?

@Neubert - Yes, though I should mention that the campaign I'm planning isn't likely to make rituals widely available. It's a fairly low-magic setting I'm planning on. If there's any rituals I decide the players should have frequent access to, I'll probably have to adjust the costs on them.

@AbdulAlhazred - There are actually two feats from the Eberron Player's Guide, and one feat from Dragon 385 that allow you to enchant items higher than your level. Any players in a campaign that can access one of those AND have signficantly higher wealth than the game assumes are going to be able to get ahead of the curve pretty easily.

Also note that the restriction to creating Common items isn't actually a rule, or at least not one that I can find. Enchant Magic Item has received one update since item rarity was introduced, and it wasn't to restrict players to enchanting common items. It merely added the ability to upgrade magic items to the version of them that is 5 levels higher. It's the only line that mentions item rarity at all, and it says it can be performed on common, uncommon, and rare items.

As this is going to be a campaign where magic items aren't regularly bought and sold, and the players won't have access to the Enchant Magic Item ritual, it's not a direct concern for me, though other DMs planning on altering their economies should be aware.

And giving out more money would be directly counter-productive to what I'm trying to accomplish. I want money to be a motivator, something that you take risks to gain and worry about running out of.

Will it be possible for the players to become wealthy enough that, once again, coppers and silvers become irrelevant? Certainly. But with the scaling treasure economy gone, it's not an inevitability, but rather the result of in game decisions.

Grydan said:

Encumbrance will definitely be enforced (which is another obstacle to taking that dragon hoard).

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If you're going to enforce some form of encumbrance, I strongly recommend not using the RAW on this one!

It's too fiddly - counting encumbrance down to a tenth of a pound, and being expected to recalculate every time you fire an arrow/pick up a gold piece... At the same time, it's also way too generous - a single strong character (and most groups will have one) can just be loaded down with absurd amounts of loot, like some comedy carthorse.

The simplest way to do it is probably just to let characters carry a number of items equal to their Strength. This has the odd effect of making a dagger as 'heavy' as a suit of full plate armour, but in real use it almost certainly all averages out.

(Of course, you'll need to introduce some 'treasure items', such as "a bundle of poor loot", so that the characters are able to haul a reasonable amount of treasure out of the dungeon - it doesn't work if 1gp counts as 1 item, nor does it work if "all my money" counts as 1 item!)

Grydan said:

@[
@S'mon - Yeah, 30 gp/month isn't bad for middle class, if you have a home you've already paid for, and aren't buying all your meals at the inn. However, to a foreign adventurer just arrived in town, it's barely covering expenses. 3 gp disposable income at the end of the month, assuming you can get by on only one meal a day (which of course, by the rules, you can). Of course, a party of five is likely going to pool some of their resources, doubling up in rooms, splitting that pitcher of ale, etc. However, that sort of thing is exactly what I'm hoping to achieve: players changing their actions based on considerations of cost.

Of course, we could also just slash the earnings. 1 gp/day might be enough to get by on, but what happens when you're only getting 5 sp?

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I use info from pre-4e D&D, especially 3e, which seems to fit ok with 4e norms. So basic peasant subsistence is 1 sp/day; that's what you pay an unskilled labourer if there is plenty of surplus labour, it's enough to keep an active human male from starvation, it's also the cost of a maidservant in your castle - you're not really paying her, maybe an occasional sp at holiday time, but feeding her & keeping her supplied with clean linens etc adds up. A mercenary infantryman in barracks costs 2 sp/day, 6gp/month; that covers his equipment, good eating (equivalent to that Inn meal every day), booze money etc.

At the "we're successful!" level; a middle-class lifestyle (eg mercenary junior officer) is 10gp/week, 40-45gp/month. A wealthy, luxurious lifestyle (eg successful mercenary Captain) is 50gp/week, 200-250gp/month. That kind of cash establishes you as having higher social status than the 6gp/month riff-raff, lets you develop useful contacts, and other in-game benefit.

Edit: For the unsuccessful or novice adventurer, they sleep 5 to a room (1 sp) and eat 1 meal/day (2sp), the 3sp/day is 2gp/week or 8gp/month for long-term stay. Call it 10gp/month including equipment, clothes, booze & sundries. A little less than what a mercenary sergeant or elite soldier makes IMCs.

If they can't afford that, then the life of the 1sp/day, 3gp/month peasant labourer awaits - sleep in a ragged blanket on a dry(ish) stone/reed floor with 30 other men for 1cp/day, get your food from the market with plenty of hot broth and porridge and you can eat for ca 5 cp/day, if there's regular work you still have 4 cp/day for patching your rags and drinking plenty of weak beer at ca 2 cp/gallon... Not such a bad life by historical standards. But if there's no regular work, you better hope you saved some cps, or it's a choice (at best) between starvation and beggary.

Edit: Started a new thread for this - http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=311614