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

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Yeah they probably should have put that in the MM but its a trivial issue for me.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

A DM shouldn't be throwing such low level monsters at PCs, but those 500 hobgoblins still drop almost 2.5k GP even assuming they don't have a single magic item among them.

What gives you the idea that hobgoblins disappear from the world when you turn 20th level? The whole point of inventing bounded accuracy is that monsters don't go obsolete. If you split the hobs up into groups of 100, that is five Deadly fights right there--and it's not even implausible fiction. Sauron had thousands of orcs in his army--it would be the PCs' job to find small, isolated companies of only 100 at a time and defeat them in detail.

(And yes, the PCs will steal clean their clocks if they are smart, but that happens with dragons too.)

 

[Riley37]

What gives you the idea that hobgoblins disappear from the world when you turn 20th level?

Well, in Katamari Damacy, when you reach a certain size, small objects such as screws and coins vanish; when you reach a larger size, chairs and cats vanish; presumably, there is also a size at which hobgoblins vanish.

If your D&D is based on storytelling, then you probably have an encounter rate more like the ones in, say, LotR, or the Conan stories, or Percy Jackson stories. There is a passage in "Holy Grail" (the original, not the Monty Python), in which the knights have fewer adventures per day than usual....

But if your D&D is based on games such as Katamari Damacy, and if you get into fights 6-8 times per day, then you need bounded accuracy for hobgoblins to stay visible. At high levels, AoE spells defeat them trivially.

What living human has experienced an average of 6-8 encounters per day, even on the front lines of a war?

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

At high levels, AoE spells defeat them trivially.

How many Meteor Swarms does it take to kill 100 hobgoblins before they can shoot you full of 100 arrows? How will you deal with the second hundred hobgoblins half a mile away?

(Note: I'm not advocating a day full of purely hobgoblins. For adventuring fun I'd suggest mixing things up with e.g. 200 hobgoblins behind fortifications, a mobile strike force of 50 centaurs, a squadron if 30 to 50 harpies or perytons, and some illithid commanders with intellect devourer minions, mixed in with the hobgoblins. Just because variety is good. But either way you're not going to kill whole formations with a single Fireball; you'll be lucky to kill ten with each spell. Note that it takes 30,000+ gold to equip 200 hobgoblins.)

 

[Belisarius76]

RIght, but the baseline of the game is simplistic. If you play by the base then gold is worthless because there's nothing to spend it on. When you start to add the modules of upkeep blah blah. Then the game becomes extremely bookkeepy which is fine, but to me it's counter intuitive to that simple nature. So gold use is either non existent in a simple game, or the game becomes overtly complex with book keeping which requires the gold. By default the gold has very little value, but I guess it's not a bug it's a feature, right?

This is why you give it value mate, by making is scarce, along with magic items and make PCs fight tooth and nail for everything. That's what I'm doing anyway. So players quickly realize that obtaining such items is a lot of hardwork ,and they rejoice when they actually gain some decent gold/magic item. That's how D&D Next was meant to play right from the playtest packets.

That platemail armour should be legitimately earnt. Think of it in terms of reality, who owned platemail armour in our reality? Kings and very wealthy nobles/knights, very few basically. The rest had chainmail/leather. Platemail should be earnt the hard way imao. If you, as a DM, proceed and have massive massive loot all the time, well then the game will wear off very quickly, and the PCs will easily obtain items of all types including general provisions etc, no fun in that, encounters should be challenging and the PCs should be scared about dying like real life imao.

 

[MoonSong]

This is why you give it value mate, by making is scarce, along with magic items and make PCs fight tooth and nail for everything. That's what I'm doing anyway. So players quickly realize that obtaining such items is a lot of hardwork ,and they rejoice when they actually gain some decent gold/magic item. That's how D&D Next was meant to play right from the playtest packets.

That platemail armour should be legitimately earnt. Think of it in terms of reality, who owned platemail armour in our reality? Kings and very wealthy nobles/knights, very few basically. The rest had chainmail/leather. Platemail should be earnt the hard way imao. If you, as a DM, proceed and have massive massive loot all the time, well then the game will wear off very quickly, and the PCs will easily obtain items of all types including general provisions etc, no fun in that, encounters should be challenging and the PCs should be scared about dying like real life imao.

Sorry, but I don't subscribe to the idea that rarity= value. I only consider valuable things that are desirable on their own, if it isn't desirable on its own, I won't value it no matter how hard it was to get.

 

[Shasarak]

That platemail armour should be legitimately earnt. Think of it in terms of reality, who owned platemail armour in our reality? Kings and very wealthy nobles/knights, very few basically. The rest had chainmail/leather. Platemail should be earnt the hard way imao. If you, as a DM, proceed and have massive massive loot all the time, well then the game will wear off very quickly, and the PCs will easily obtain items of all types including general provisions etc, no fun in that, encounters should be challenging and the PCs should be scared about dying like real life imao.

You should always earn your platemail the old fashioned way - find out who has platemail and then kill them for their platemail.

If the DM does not give you enough treasure then just remember that there is a reason why Gawd invented Crowbars and Lamas.

 

[Belisarius76]

Sorry, but I don't subscribe to the idea that rarity= value. I only consider valuable things that are desirable on their own, if it isn't desirable on its own, I won't value it no matter how hard it was to get.

rarity = desirable = valuable mate. Gold for example in real life or silver, or diamonds, actual tangible items that can be used to make stuff. They are desirable and relatively rare, hence they're store of value. So what you just said contradicts almost in terms of how you came across.
However I think what you are trying to say is, unless an item in game has use to your character in particular (maybe even almost from a power gaming perspective perhaps?) you're not interested in it. Which is fair enough. Really gold should be rare in the fantasy setting, as it must be mined by archaic means, generally by dwarves who covet it as well, so a double whammy for all adventurer's, you would literally have to defeat a whole nation of dwarves/gnomes to acquire the wealth à la Smaug style

 

[Belisarius76]

You should always earn your platemail the old fashioned way - find out who has platemail and then kill them for their platemail.

If the DM does not give you enough treasure then just remember that there is a reason why Gawd invented Crowbars and Lamas.

lol

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

rarity = desirable = valuable mate. Gold for example in real life or silver, or diamonds, actual tangible items that can be used to make stuff. They are desirable and relatively rare, hence they're store of value. So what you just said contradicts almost in terms of how you came across.

This is a bit of a tangent, but gold works differently in-game than in the real world. In the real world, a diamond has no intrinsic value. It's valuable only because other people want to give you money for it, and gold is the same (except w/rt semiconductor construction). In (A)D&D, gems have intrinsic worth as spell components (takes 300 gp worth of gems to Revive someone from the dead).