D&D 5E What's the point of gold?

[Jester David]

D&D characters have none of these concerns.

Why not?

But we need things like food, water, and shelter,

Rations and meals are in the PHB. As are inn stays and lifestyle costs.

we have financial demands like insurance and taxes,

Why wouldn’t the local lord or king collect taxes on treasure hordes?
The first known tax’s date to the Old Kingdom of Egypt’s 1st Dynasty roughly 5000 years ago.

and we derive entertainment value from things that have no practical use.

And adventurers don’t need days off? Entertainment? Stress relief?

 

[Derren]

As it was pointed out the living costs are very low compared to the money adventurers make. There is hardly any equipment to buy especially now with magic stores having closed and even consumables are not really tracked in 5E.
Sure you can use money as bribes, but as D&D is mainly a dungeon crawler they come up only sporadically and because NPCs dont make much money they too have hardly an impact on the PCs wallet.
Sure you can spend money during downtime, but why have downtime in the first place? Healing is pretty much instant and there is no need to stop adventuring. The published modules certainly dont see a need for extended downtimes.
Also the adventuring lifestyle actively disincentives owning property as you will be on the road most of the time anyway. So even if you buy a castle the only thing that changes is that instead of a large sum of money you have castle written on your character sheet with no effect.

Compare that for example to Shadowrun. You have to buy better equipment, consumables, have to replace equipment in case it gets damaged or you had to ditch it which can get very expensive in case of drones and cars and lifestyles are not only expensive, you might even want to maintain severals as hideouts. And because of the healing rate in SR you will likely have more downtime than in D&D. And lastly there are a lot more opportunities for bribes or paying others to dig up stuff.

Shadowrun and many other RPGs have been designed around money being a ressource and used for advancement. D&D has not. Money is just a score you can look at to feel accomplished but which has no impact on the game.

 

[5ekyu]

As it was pointed out the living costs are very low compared to the money adventurers make. There is hardly any equipment to buy especially now with magic stores having closed and even consumables are not really tracked in 5E.
Sure you can use money as bribes, but as D&D is mainly a dungeon crawler they come up only sporadically and because NPCs dont make much money they too have hardly an impact on the PCs wallet.
Sure you can spend money during downtime, but why have downtime in the first place? Healing is pretty much instant and there is no need to stop adventuring. The published modules certainly dont see a need for extended downtimes.
Also the adventuring lifestyle actively disincentives owning property as you will be on the road most of the time anyway. So even if you buy a castle the only thing that changes is that instead of a large sum of money you have castle written on your character sheet with no effect.

Compare that for example to Shadowrun. You have to buy better equipment, consumables, have to replace equipment in case it gets damaged or you had to ditch it which can get very expensive in case of drones and cars and lifestyles are not only expensive, you might even want to maintain severals as hideouts. And because of the healing rate in SR you will likely have more downtime than in D&D. And lastly there are a lot more opportunities for bribes or paying others to dig up stuff.

Shadowrun and many other RPGs have been designed around money being a ressource and used for advancement. D&D has not. Money is just a score you can look at to feel accomplished but which has no impact on the game.

Once you decide the only bits of the game that matter are those that can be "weaponized" for your dungeon crawls, a whole lot of DnD 5e can be discarded.

But the conclusion that thats what D&D is runs counter to quite a bit of its design in 5e.

Yes, 5e could have been built so that every iota of it was a "weaponizable" reward, but it wasnt. It was built with some rewards that lend more towards those other bits of the potential gameplay - interaction, social etc.

 

[Derren]

Once you decide the only bits of the game that matter are those that can be "weaponized" for your dungeon crawls, a whole lot of DnD 5e can be discarded.

But the conclusion that thats what D&D is runs counter to quite a bit of its design in 5e.

Yes, 5e could have been built so that every iota of it was a "weaponizable" reward, but it wasnt. It was built with some rewards that lend more towards those other bits of the potential gameplay - interaction, social etc.

Its not that you decide that only certain parts matter, thats simply how D&D is designed. To keep up with the ever increasing level of PCs they fight against ever more powerful monsters which draws the PCs farther and farther away from society and into dungeons. And with such a bare bones skill system city adventures are not supported very well or at all when the PCs have outleveled street thugs so they do not find things to kill in a city any more.

And even if you decide to still have social adventures, the D&D rules offer 0 support for it either in rules like with contacts in Shadowrun or even advice like how the life of a commoner, guard, adventurer etc. looks like, how feudal nobility work and how magic and monsters affect all this.
Basically, as soon as you run a non combat adventure you turn D&D off and free form.
Other RPGs offer much more support for non combat gameplay and those are also the RPGs with more uses for wealth.

 

[Warmaster Horus]

I have two AL PCs who, in total, spent over 60k GP for a whole slew of potions and 1st-5th level scrolls. Gold is a superpower of its' own if you use it right.

 

[Charlaquin]

Why not?

Because the game is Dungeons and Dragons, not Bills and Bankruptcy.

Rations and meals are in the PHB. As are inn stays and lifestyle costs.

Yes, and they cost such a paltry fraction of the treasure you earn adventuring that they can safely be ignored without losing anything but monotonous bookeeping.

Why wouldn’t the local lord or king collect taxes on treasure hordes?
The first known tax’s date to the Old Kingdom of Egypt’s 1st Dynasty roughly 5000 years ago.

He might, if that’s what you want to focus your game on. Again, gold matters if the DM makes it matter.

And adventurers don’t need days off? Entertainment? Stress relief?

Sure they do, but the game doesn’t focus on that because it would be boring.

 

[Maxperson]

As it was pointed out the living costs are very low compared to the money adventurers make. There is hardly any equipment to buy especially now with magic stores having closed and even consumables are not really tracked in 5E.
Sure you can use money as bribes, but as D&D is mainly a dungeon crawler they come up only sporadically and because NPCs dont make much money they too have hardly an impact on the PCs wallet.
Sure you can spend money during downtime, but why have downtime in the first place? Healing is pretty much instant and there is no need to stop adventuring. The published modules certainly dont see a need for extended downtimes.

D&D hasn't be primarily dungeon crawls since Basic. 1e had a strong dungeon focus, but it also spent a lot of time on outdoor adventures and being in cities, building castles, etc. The game has lost even more dungeon focus since then. If you've created your game to focus primarily on dungeons, then yes, you've caused a lot of the things you would spend money on to go away. Since dungeon crawling focuses on gaining treasure, though, you might want to allow magic items to be bought and sold in your 5e game.

 

[Warmaster Horus]

...There is hardly any equipment to buy especially now with magic stores having closed and even consumables are not really tracked in 5E...

When were magic stores closed? If you want magic stores put them into your game.

 

[Jester David]

Because the game is Dungeons and Dragons, not Bills and Bankruptcy.

Yes, and they cost such a paltry fraction of the treasure you earn adventuring that they can safely be ignored without losing anything but monotonous bookeeping.

He might, if that’s what you want to focus your game on. Again, gold matters if the DM makes it matter.

Sure they do, but the game doesn’t focus on that because it would be boring.

Literally ALL tracking of gold is "monotonous bookeeping".
You don't get to dismiss food and taxes and upkeep as being "Bills and Bankruptcy" and then whine that gold means nothing. It's nothing because you just made it nothing.

It's all numbers that are measured in the thousands making it ten or even a hundred times more nitpicking than encumbrance.
5e drops it as optionally relevant meaning you don't need to track exactly how much gold your character has for them to be effective, not any more than you track arrows in your quiver or pounds of your gear or rations in your backpack. You don't need to don't have to worry about accounting for every gp spent, like you did in 3e and Pathinder. (Character audits are literally a thing in Pathfinder Society.)


If you don't like that then that's cool. Just don't bother tracking gold at all. Give each player a "Wealth" ability score that goes up and have them make "wealth ability checks" to buy something, and increase their score when they find hoards.

 

[Charlaquin]

Literally ALL tracking of gold is "monotonous bookeeping".

Not so. If the things you’re spending gold on have an actual impact on the game, and they cost a significant enough amount of the gold you make that you have to think critically about what to spend it on, then it’s not monotonous bookkeeping, it’s meaningful resource management. If you made significantly less gold, if lifestyles cost significantly more to maintain, if the lifestyle you maintained made any difference on gameplay, and if there was something other than lifestyles that also cost a not-insignificant amount of the gold you made, it would make wealth a meaningful part of the game. As it stands now though, the DM has to do that work to make wealth meaningful.

You don't get to dismiss food and taxes and upkeep as being "Bills and Bankruptcy" and then whine that gold means nothing. It's nothing because you just made it nothing.

It’s nothing whether you keep track of it or not, that’s the problem. If I make thousands of gold each adventure and I have the option to spend maybe 200 of it for the privilege of being able to say my character maintains an artistocratic lifestyle between adventures or spend none of it and have to say my character has a wretched lifestyle between adventures... so what? It literally does not make any difference because neither expense puts a dent in my character’s wealth, neither option has any benefits or drawbacks of any kind, and there’s nothing else to spend the money on anyway. You might as well just take the gold tracking part out of the equation and just give me a line to write in my lifestyle right next to hair color, eye color, and alignment.

It's all numbers that are measured in the thousands making it ten or even a hundred times more nitpicking than encumbrance.
5e drops it as optionally relevant meaning you don't need to track exactly how much gold your character has for them to be effective, not any more than you track arrows in your quiver or pounds of your gear or rations in your backpack. You don't need to don't have to worry about accounting for every gp spent, like you did in 3e and Pathinder. (Character audits are literally a thing in Pathfinder Society.)

Which is fine, but then don’t act like it’s a baseless assertion to say that gold doesn’t matter. You just explained why it doesn’t.

If you don't like that then that's cool. Just don't bother tracking gold at all. Give each player a "Wealth" ability score that goes up and have them make "wealth ability checks" to buy something, and increase their score when they find hoards.

That would be a significantly better way to handle wealth in 5e. Or they could actually include meaningful things to spend meaningful amounts of gold on in the game. Both are perfectly valid options, but this awkward half-measurewhere the game tells you to track individual gold pieces and then gives you nothing to spend them on is stupid.