All editions of D&D have given exponential monetary awards in order to lure you back down the dungeon.
Including 5th edition - at least if you use the loot tables of the DMG. A tier I hoard is worth 412 gp on average, a tier II hoard is worth 4507 gp on average and so on, roughly multiplying the loot value by ten each tier.
Right. To motivate you via gold, the game has to either deprive you of gold or offer an ever increasing amount of gold.
You can use the higher tables or continue to use the lower tier tables throughout the game. Multiple tables are provided, and you can choose what table to use and how many to award.
(My players are about to gain access to a high level hoard. Which is going to be interesting.)
In effect, 5th edition still hands out vast amounts of treasure. Only, it does not provide any good answers on what to spend it on. Hence the title of this thread: what is gold for?
What is gold for? Whatever you want.
The catch is, the game doesn't give you an assumed cash sink. Which means you can choose how to spend your money.
If you want to have a campaign where money is spent on
ridiculous things you can. If you want the players to spend their money repairing a forgotten keep on the borderlands you can. If you want the players to visit the City of Brass and buy very rare magical items then you can.
Or - much, much more importantly - if your *
players* decide *
they* want to do anything of the above, they can. And you can let them do so without having to kludge together a subsystem of "keep supplies".
Now, I agree that a lot more of these cash sinks could be detailed. In an ideal world they would have been. But ideal worlds aren't limited by page counts, and the amount of content that was cut from the DMG for space is pretty high. I wouldn't want to lose monster building or sanity or artifacts in order to accommodate more robust kingdom management or carousing.
And it would be lovely if WotC would release an adventure based around this type of activity, providing added support for rebuilding a castle. But I imagine that's difficult to fit into their nostalgia-influenced storylines.
The lack of variety in the storyline adventures so far is a shot against WotC.
Let me point to a specific example: playing Storm King's Thunder. Much like every previous official 5E campaign it takes place during a limited time. There is no notion of taking a break for months and years, to spend money on castlebuilding or other long-term downtime activities that could explain where all the gold goes. And yet, it relies on the DMG random treasure tables.
What limited time is that? SKT has no timeline I can see.
Given you spend weeks or months trekking along the North it can take place over an extended period, very likely the better part of a year.
The players might very well decide to claim a ruin and repair it as a base of operations for their giant slaying.
Or they could choose to hoard the gold away like little dragons.
Their choice.
It's clearly not meant to build castles, since there is no time for that if you play official adventures. (WotC is clearly aware most players aren't interested, and just want to keep adventuring)
Published adventures are an odd beast in that regard and not what I would use as "the baseline".
They also have a firmer story providing a motive for adventuring. There is a quest and a task, with consequences for inaction.
Really, no gold needs to provided in that kind of adventure. Any gold provided is a perk. If you're saving the world, you don't really expect to get paid and you're not doing it for treasure. In theory, you can end the adventure as broke as you started.
In the storyline APs, gold is really just handed out for tradition. Because it's expected.
Really, when you get down to it,
"treasure" is a sacred cow.
But I don't think the game system should assume every DM is running a "save the world" storyline and remove gold as a potential motivator.
In 3rd edition we had a system with a wonderful ambition: to provide the framework that let players convert all that gold into actually useful items that helped them on their next adventure.
When you get down to it, gold was unneeded in 3e & 4e. In those systems you could just award exactly the magic items the players want, and improve existing items, awarding almost zero gold.
Gold is just the middleman in that equation, and is a form of needless bookkeeping and accounting. Gold was basically a character advancement resource, like feat slots or skill points. You could replace it with "Item Points" worth 1k gp each, and allow players to just build an ideal character, dumping gold entirely.
But… sacred cow.
The giant problem with the 3e/4e system was its inflexibility. (Even excluding the funky things it did to the world economy.) It didn't let you do anything else with your gold, and you had character build options that could be taken away, lost, and traded. And it tied combat power level to something that could be gained independent of levels.It was too easy to adversly affect the balance of characters. It was a little too easy to *break* the system:
* If the party bought something other than magic gear, they were at a disadvantage
* If the party did something clever found a large amount of gold (or found a way to sell something valuable) the DM either had to cheat them out of a reward for clever thinking (aka punish them) or they experienced a spike in their power level.
* It was preferable to die than be captured, since losing all your magical gear was a permanent penalty and a literal fate worse than death
* Creatures that damaged your gear - like a rust monster - caused a permanent and irrecoverable reduction of power.
* There was limited incentive to resurrect a character, since the gp cost was a permanent reduction of the wealth of the entire party. In theory, a new PC of equal power would come along.
* But if a character died, what happened to their tens of thousands of gold pieces worth of gear? The gear might not work for the new PC, but spreading out the gear affects the party wealth.
In the few Pathfinder Adventure Paths that tried to do something else other than what the game was rigidly designed to do, they had to invent all new rules, such as build points and plunder, so the party could do things like build a castle or raid ships without affecting the character's power levels. So you have the piles of trade goods that were worth money and could be spent like money, but couldn't be used to buy anything for you character for reasons.
It was very video gamey. Quite literally, as those mechanics are identical to Garrison Resources from World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor for the same reasons: it's unfair to ask players to spend the gold they're looking to spend upgrading their gear & advance their character on the plot.
Sure it wasn't perfect, but did 5E try to improve this system? No.
Actually quite the opposite.
Because the point of the system was *not* about giving people to spend their gold on. That was just a side effect.
The system was assuming set amounts of magical items in order to balance the math. So they established wealth by level and assumed players had magic items of that value and then used that to help set the numbers.
5e did the exact same thing. Only it set the amount of assumed magic items as "0" instead of "Christmas Tree".
I can't say I'm overly pleased with any one of them, but I appreciate the frank clarity in actually adressing the problem. As well as the clear outline of why it exists, how it came about, and perhaps most fundamentally: that there is a problem.
Where you see a problem, I see an opportunity.
There is the learning curve. The players looking at the gold and expecting the game to provide an answer rather than looking inward and finding a character motivation for spending wealth.
But the game shouldn't tell you how to play. It shouldn't tell you what to spend your gold pieces on anymore than the game should tell you how to choose your feats or what spells to take.
What do players have to spend their gold on?
The exact same stuff they had to spend their gold on in the 26 years prior to 3rd Edition.
