Seems to me that the problem with 5e economy stuff is they tried to pull away from an accountant line item system and tried to go abstract but didn't have the gumption to go fully abstract, and ended up in this murky territory where nothing really makes sense when you look at it, but you can't look away because there isn't a way to just hand-wave it.
Imo they should just add a Wealth Level abstraction, like character levels. As you go up in wealth level you just have stuff, whatever you want to have, up to whatever your wealth level can support. You never need to track individual gold changing hands, it just gets tabulated like xp. Then some various wealth based options as your wealth levels go up, like having networks of business contacts, or a personal assistant, or a guild that works for you, etc. You could specialize in a wealth class or whatever.
Character level 3 but wealth class Noble 20 because I'm the 1st in line to the throne, need a legendary item? Yeah I can get that.
Character level 20 but wealth class hermit 3 because I'm a druid in the middle of a desert for the past 80 years, need anything besides some cactus juice or a pocketful of sand? Best keep walking friend.
They started down this road with backgrounds and quality of life guidelines and downtime activity but it needs a good one-two punch to really knock it into the full on abstraction side of things. This in between is just no good. Either my character just has what a character of their means and I don't need to micromanage anything because we're here to tell a story... or I need to track the pennies and we need to analyze local market impacts and availability within local markets and tracking supply chains and whatnot.
It'd make it super easy for DMs to manage issues by just regulating their characters wealth level to whatever is right for the story they're telling. IDK, that's my 2 cents.
Imo they should just add a Wealth Level abstraction, like character levels. As you go up in wealth level you just have stuff, whatever you want to have, up to whatever your wealth level can support. You never need to track individual gold changing hands, it just gets tabulated like xp. Then some various wealth based options as your wealth levels go up, like having networks of business contacts, or a personal assistant, or a guild that works for you, etc. You could specialize in a wealth class or whatever.
Character level 3 but wealth class Noble 20 because I'm the 1st in line to the throne, need a legendary item? Yeah I can get that.
Character level 20 but wealth class hermit 3 because I'm a druid in the middle of a desert for the past 80 years, need anything besides some cactus juice or a pocketful of sand? Best keep walking friend.
They started down this road with backgrounds and quality of life guidelines and downtime activity but it needs a good one-two punch to really knock it into the full on abstraction side of things. This in between is just no good. Either my character just has what a character of their means and I don't need to micromanage anything because we're here to tell a story... or I need to track the pennies and we need to analyze local market impacts and availability within local markets and tracking supply chains and whatnot.
It'd make it super easy for DMs to manage issues by just regulating their characters wealth level to whatever is right for the story they're telling. IDK, that's my 2 cents.