Whatever the DM deems gold can be useful for. I allow the purchase of magic items. I use the guidelines for costs in the DMG and use loose negotiation. I enjoy this type of negotiation better than hard prices for magic item creation or purchase. It's fun to negotiate. I get to take time to think about what the person might need to make a magic item of a certain type. I can make up why it costs the price it does such as paying for a group of mercenaries to track down a particular component or paying a merchant to acquire the item from a far away place. If I make the price high enough, it motivates the player to pursue gold. At first my players had the same reaction about gold, but I've worked in a way to keep the gold useful. I even charge maintenance for fortresses if they want to keep their items. You can make gold as useful as you and your players find entertaining.
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D&D 5E In fifth-edition D&D, what is gold for?
- Thread starter CapnZapp
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What is D&D for?
No, seriously, if you can answer that (and I assume everyone posting here can offer their own answer - it's not meant to be a deep philosophical challenge) then you can answer the gold question. If you say that D&D is for X, then for you, gold represents success at getting X. It's as simple as that.
At its simplest level, D&D is about killing monsters and taking their stuff. You get XP for succeeding at the killing bit and GP for succeeding at the taking bit. You don't have to spend the gold, any more than you have to spend the XP. At this level, gold is not for spending, it's for getting. It's for keeping score.
Beyond that, it becomes a means to an end, not an end in itself. It becomes a commodity that is interchangeable with the means to attain other personal goals for the player (or, in the fiction, the PC). All the usual ones: power, sex, security, companionship, entertainment, and so on. There's no great mystery about it.
To see how important or not gold is in your game, imagine that every new PC starts with a million GP to spend on whatever they like, and they get an automatic million extra every time they level up. Normal prices still apply. Does that (a) ruin the game because there's no incentive to go adventuring or (b) make the game more fun because it removes all those irritating mundane constraints on having a good rip-roaring adventure? Ask around the table, don't prejudge. There's no right answer.
No, seriously, if you can answer that (and I assume everyone posting here can offer their own answer - it's not meant to be a deep philosophical challenge) then you can answer the gold question. If you say that D&D is for X, then for you, gold represents success at getting X. It's as simple as that.
At its simplest level, D&D is about killing monsters and taking their stuff. You get XP for succeeding at the killing bit and GP for succeeding at the taking bit. You don't have to spend the gold, any more than you have to spend the XP. At this level, gold is not for spending, it's for getting. It's for keeping score.
Beyond that, it becomes a means to an end, not an end in itself. It becomes a commodity that is interchangeable with the means to attain other personal goals for the player (or, in the fiction, the PC). All the usual ones: power, sex, security, companionship, entertainment, and so on. There's no great mystery about it.
To see how important or not gold is in your game, imagine that every new PC starts with a million GP to spend on whatever they like, and they get an automatic million extra every time they level up. Normal prices still apply. Does that (a) ruin the game because there's no incentive to go adventuring or (b) make the game more fun because it removes all those irritating mundane constraints on having a good rip-roaring adventure? Ask around the table, don't prejudge. There's no right answer.
Much like War, absolutely nothing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01-2pNCZiNk
Tony Vargas
Legend
Meh, 'RPG' brings the 'G.' And the idea that it's somehow wrong to approach a game as a game is absurd on the face of it.
GNS is cute if you like putting people in familiar boxes, but D&D is under no obligation to exclude two out of those three boxes. If anything, 5e, in trying to bring together fans of all past eds, is bucking to put all three boxes on it's shelf. Not that it's a great way of expressing it: GNS is an innately divisive and exclusionary paradigm that denigrates even attempting to support a second of it's rigid stereotypes in the same game as 'incoherent.'
To be fair, though, 5e doesn't support a GNS-'gamist' approach to wealth & magic items the way the other modern editions did, that just means you can more or less leave those things out of it when using that approach. It's calibrated, in that sense, for 6-8 encounters/day and no items, with wealth /nearly/ irrelevant. Not ideal, but not impossible to cope with.
Capn Charlie
Explorer
When I was doing my 5e sci-fi conversion, I wanted to give the players some idea what amount of money is"enough". There are copious ways to spend in my game, you can dump it on new ships, manpower, downtime activities, and all the other story investment opportunities of an rpg, and I even added a weapon and armor upgrade system (there aren't really magic items, so these are usually what fills that niche, but there is an optional "magic mart" system where you just buy them).
But even with all of that I wanted players to be able to look at their money number, and have some sense of real accomplishment, so I added a retirement table so that you can know how much "enough" is for a character to be able to just cash out and walk away from a life of adventure. Not that it happens a lot, but more so that you have an idea of what a lot of money can buy, and can value your accumulated hoard.
But even with all of that I wanted players to be able to look at their money number, and have some sense of real accomplishment, so I added a retirement table so that you can know how much "enough" is for a character to be able to just cash out and walk away from a life of adventure. Not that it happens a lot, but more so that you have an idea of what a lot of money can buy, and can value your accumulated hoard.
You keeping some kind of list? I'm not seeing the same people. So let's have some proof to back up your claim?
I ran into this problem last campaign. I come from a 2E background, so gold seemed like something you kind of save for hiring people and building or investing later on. Turns out my players had no desire for that, and were disappointed to find out they couldn't simply buy magic items (most were Pathfinder vets, where this is basically the main use for gold).
My "solution" really just came down to communication. Once I knew they weren't interested in traditional "build a castle, hire an army" style of late-career investments, I just kind of told them that it means gold is probably not a very big motivator for the average adventurer. I mean, really anyone can go on an adventure, make a few thousand gold, and sort of retire for 10 or 20 years as normal people, so the player's just needed to figure out what made their characters different. Why *wouldn't* they just retire after a few levels and several thousand gold?
We are at a point where the "reward" really isn't gold or wealth anymore. It's often offered and acquired, but generally donated or set aside for adventuring expenses or compensation (sorry we lost your ship...) because they are -- by a large -- good people. This was an interesting change, because I was able to start crafting adventures and story hooks on things other than having some shady guy hire them out in a tavern for deal that's bound to go bad.
It's made sessions a bit more efficient as well. We don't track rations and stuff too much, opting instead for periodic "payment" whenever they hit a town. Some purchases are only semi-permanent, like horses, so those get repurchased once in a while. Without everyone trying to track coppers, we don't really spend a lot of time scrounging around dungeon rooms looking for hidden treasure. I have everyone's passives, and the mage casts detect magic if he really needs to, but otherwise we just assume the group can usually to a more thorough search after the place is cleared.
He's asking if anyone else noticed this, so he's obviously not trying to claim his experience is representative of everyone elses'. Also, your request for a list is facetious, considering you know full well if he did actually link some kind of notepad with crap like "mark is a powergamer who wants more gold" you'd probably still dismiss it.
More importantly, it would be creepy as hell.
MichaelSomething
Legend
I just want to say that there should be nothing wrong with wanting to spend a large amount of gold on stuff to make yourself a better adventurer. Batman does it and if Batman does it, it MUST be a good idea!
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