I like trade goods, gems, and art objects as convenient delivery systems for large quantities of GP that take up less space and carry weight than an equivalent number of coins would. Not giant gold statues, but like… elaborate jewlery and such.
Shouldn't getting the goods out of the dungeon/vault/throneroom also be part of the adventure?
Yeah. It was funny seeing the players try to sort that one, but they were not amused. I did try an intermediary stage where it was gold and gems. It didn’t take long before the gems fell by the way side. I want the verisimilitude of the stuff, but it quickly becomes paperwork and an extra step between the PCs and the thing they care about, the gold.
Depends on the adventure and campaign. Sometimes, the party are relic hunters and tomb robbers, delving the abandoned ruins of the past. They're not just stripping the place of everything that isn't nailed down, they're bringing crowbars so they can up the nails and sell them too. Other times the party are Big Dang Heroes, going around saving the innocent and defending the downtrodden. It'd be incredibly rude to liberate someone from the dark shadow terrorizing the town and then make off with their good silverware.
If they are heroes, they probably don't care about gold. If they care about gold, making it central to the challenges of play makes sense.
This is why we have different playstyles, and ideally different games to support them.
It certainly can be! But in my experience it’s rarely a very interesting challenge.
I my experience, if you make the game about the business of extracting treasure, the optimal way to play is to remove the "adventure" aspect and reduce everything to a math problem.
In my view, it being extra steps is a big part of the point. Finding a valuable item, rolling to assess its value, bringing it back to town, looking for a potential buyer, haggling over the price... These things all increase the anticipation, which is a big part of what makes treasure feel worthwhile, instead of just a meaningless number on the sheet. Gold is mostly not very useful to adventurers in D&D, and the more you reduce the process of obtaining it to simple bookkeeping, the more transparent that becomes. It’s a bit counter-intuitive, but making gold more of a process in-character to acquire helps make it feel intrinsically valuable.
Like most things in D&D, the more effort you put into it the more you get out of it. If non-cash loot is just noted on a loot list and automatically liquidated once you're back in town, it's just making everyone put in more effort for the same result. If it takes a bit more effort and you put some spotlight time on it, and the party builds up relationships with specific NPCs and learns what sort of art and curios they'll pay the most for, maybe even takes on special requests as a plot hook to retrieve specific lost heirlooms? Then it's a major contribution to the fun and flavor of the campaign.
