• The VOIDRUNNER'S CODEX is coming! Explore new worlds, fight oppressive empires, fend off fearsome aliens, and wield deadly psionics with this comprehensive boxed set expansion for 5E and A5E!

D&D 5E Tracking gold, consumables, etc as a DM

SilverBulletKY

First Post
As a DM, do you all concern yourself with this at all, or just trust your players are keeping up with it and not cheating at all? I think for the most part, my players wouldn't try to slip in few gold but was just wondering what most people do. I really don't want to mess with it.
 

log in or register to remove this ad


I'll say, "That'll be x GP. How much does that leave you?" If the numbers over time don't jibe with the number I'm thinking it should be around, I'll start to pay better attention.
 

If you're worried that your friends will cheat in a cooperative story driven game, there are more serious issues at hand.

Then again I did have someone "roll" 10 20's in a row on Roll20. Suffice it to say we never played with him again.
 

the Jester

Legend
It's not worth my time and effort to track this, but I do have a couple of rules about it.

The main one is that no money or item the party gets is allowed to be written down in two places. This means that I absolutely prohibit each pc tracking all the loot individually- either one person writes it all down, each haul is noted by a different pc or (the preferred solution) the group keeps a separate sheet for party treasure that they can pass around, but that isn't on a specific character's character sheet. When they split the loot, each pc writes down what he or she has, and it gets marked off the party list.

A corollary to this is that if it's not written down, it's gone. I've seen pcs lose major magic items this way, though not in quite a while.

The other rule is that if you are getting sloppy with tracking your stuff, it's all gone. You're not marking off the money you spend when you spend it? A gentle reminder, followed by a warning, followed by "You're broke" or "You're out of arrows". I am mean and ruthless about this. If a player wants to put the onus on me to keep track of their money and arrows, they absolutely will regret it. If a player is unwilling to track their expendable resources, then they're basically making my job as DM too much work. I don't need that at my table, and haven't had to take the firm, mean, "Nope, you're out" step in a long, long time- partially because my group believes that I'm willing to do it if I feel it's warranted.

I absolutely recognize that this makes me sound like a tyrant, and I'm fine with this. My players must find my DMing to be good enough to put up with a little tyranny, since I haven't had a player walk (with the exception of two guys who hated 4e) since the earliest release days of 3.5, and that was because he was having a lot of personality issues with everyone else in the group anyhow.
 

Crothian

First Post
The players keep track of it. It leads to statements like "I have that we found 5000gp and that seems high so let's say we just have 2000gp."
 

Remove ads

Top