Blue
Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
I need to speak up here. In 3.x it was inherently part of the play loop, and in 4e is was explicitly part of the character advancement math. Both because of items. But it's not an inherent part of the 5e mechanics at all. You can run 20th level characters without items if you want. And the recommended number of items for the entire party (Xanathar's pg 135) makes it abundantly clear that not everyone will have "+X weapon and armor" and such as expected in earlier editions. It isn't calibrated into the monster math and isn't inherently needed in the game.When getting more money is an inherent part of the core gameplay loop...
Now, there's a lot of things to do with money outside of magic items, but that also varies on the game. For instance I'm running a game where the group are agents for the Imperium and can request any mundane needs, so there's no need to buy horses - they just borrow them from the local Post or pay for lodgings or worry abotu upgrading mundane equipment, etc. And they don't care about money at all. It's not a push for adventure or anything like that.
D&D 4e had an eye-opening way to do this, which was treasure packets. Great idea to remove one of the causes of murderhobo-ism. Basically it was like milestone XP but for treasure. Important as magic item upgrades were expected and worked into foe math and it was effectively part of character advancement so couldn't be left up to "did they avoid this combat or not".Hence my question (3 paragraphs to get to the discussion prompt, I know...): If you run a heroic game in a TTRPG system with wealth progression, how do your players get treasure (and magic items etc.)? Do you just accept that in your universe the victor gets all the possessions of the defeated? Do your questgivers handle the majority of the rewards? Did you make item progression abstract in some other way? What are some ways you deviate from the typical tomb robbing/pillaging treasure collection TTRPGs usually assume?
This doesn't mean that it is impossible to have a wealth progression system in a heroic game, of course. Lots of GMs do so succesfully. Hell, I do it in my games all the time. It's just that the overthinking part of my brain dislikes the inherent opposition in these two play styles, and I'm trying to see if alternatives exist to "These guys are selfless heroes who take on morally justified quests, but the majority of their wealth and magic items comes from robbing tombs and taking the possessions of their enemies". Not that the style I just described is inherently bad, I'm just trying to see how we could move past it.
Basically, the treasure would make it's way to you whichever way you accomplished goals. Capture bandits - get a reward. Realize the law is correupt and join the bandits - they have a few items they can't use they will sweeten the pot of you coming over, and then a share of coin when they hit the tax collector. Etc. So having bounties for doing things, rewards, and all sorts of mechanisms outside "we killed this and took it's loot" or "we found every treasure in a tomb" was pushed by the rules.