Blog (A5E) Level Up: Spending Gold (At Higher Levels)

One of the challenges with designing an advanced 5th Edition (A5E) is filling in some of the areas of the original (O5E) game which have room for expansion.

We’ve looked previously at how we’re expanding the exploration pillar. This article takes a quick peak at ways to spend your gold at higher levels. Of course, at all levels characters can buy magic items and other equipment, but here we’ll explore some other options.

Spending Gold (At Higher Levels) — Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition (A5E)

One of the challenges with designing an advanced 5th Edition (A5E) is filling in some of the areas of the original (O5E) game which have room for expansion.

www.levelup5e.com

 

[CapnZapp]

This modern trend of there should be a rule for everything is simply bad for the game.

That ship has sailed many decades ago.

Anyway, whenever there is a mechanism where I as the GM don't feel confident in just winging it (without risking unintended imbalance much later), I appreciate it if I can use money to purchase well-written rules from professionals.

While I myself might not feel a need for published rules just to say "you build a wizard's tower", someone else might not feel so confident.

And it's not that I want to brag about being able to just come up with fail-proof economic transactions on the spot! I definitely feel the need for rules when it comes to magic item transactions. Given the party has looted, say, 10,000 gold pieces, what would be the appropriate price for a magic weapon? Fifth edition does not say, or rather, does not give an answer that holds up in either the short term or the long term.

If Level Up can provide a level of stringency to that aspect of the game that even approaches Paizo's very detailed and battle-tested offering with Pathfinder 2 (its Treasure table, complete with specific prices on a thousand magic items), that would be a great boon for many many 5E players!

 

[Faolyn]

I really think this is something that should be handled by the DM. This modern trend of there should be a rule for everything is simply bad for the game.

To be fair, the idea that there were rules for everything has been there from the start. It's just that the rules weren't codified so you could find ten very different rulesets for the exact same outcome, depending on who wrote the entry for what supplement when.

 

[tetrasodium]

That ship has sailed many decades ago.

Anyway, whenever there is a mechanism where I as the GM don't feel confident in just winging it (without risking unintended imbalance much later), I appreciate it if I can use money to purchase well-written rules from professionals.

While I myself might not feel a need for published rules just to say "you build a wizard's tower", someone else might not feel so confident.

And it's not that I want to brag about being able to just come up with fail-proof economic transactions on the spot! I definitely feel the need for rules when it comes to magic item transactions. Given the party has looted, say, 10,000 gold pieces, what would be the appropriate price for a magic weapon? Fifth edition does not say, or rather, does not give an answer that holds up in either the short term or the long term.

If Level Up can provide a level of stringency to that aspect of the game that even approaches Paizo's very detailed and battle-tested offering with Pathfinder 2 (its Treasure table, complete with specific prices on a thousand magic items), that would be a great boon for many many 5E players!

That goes both ways too. I as an experienced gm might be comfortable making rules for building a wizard's tower & associated benefits but getting players to show interest in or read a homebrew system no matter how cool the gm might find it can be a high bar. That bar gets even higher if this is not the first time the gm came in with a pdf/stack of homebrew rules

 

[Morrus]

This modern trend of there should be a rule for everything is simply bad for the game.

Modern?

"A rule for everything" is pretty old school. Modern stuff trends towards the rules-lite.

 

[Imaculata]

I really like the idea of renting a demi plane. One of the problems of owning any building in D&D, is that the party will spend most of their time being somewhere else. But if a player can build their own keep in some sort of pocket dimension, this opens up the possibility of having access to your private keep in between adventures.

I hope something along these lines is further explored.

Also, I love the idea that certain buildings can provide permanent benefits, such as a stat increase.

 

[Faolyn]

I really like the idea of renting a demi plane. One of the problems of owning any building in D&D, is that the party will spend most of their time being somewhere else. But if a player can build their own keep in some sort of pocket dimension, this opens up the possibility of having access to your private keep in between adventures.

I gave my players an extradimensional locker instead of a bag of holding, and they love it. They'd probably go insane with happiness if I gave them access to a demiplane.

 

[Kinematics]

The logarithmic scale feels a bit broken at level 1.

100 square feet is a 10' x 10' space, which is on the scale of the smallest bedrooms (9' x 9'), or a large tent (roughly the same size). I suppose it could qualify as a "hut", but I don't know that I could imagine a workshop for any sort of task to be usable at that size. It's certainly too small to be considered defendable in any sort of way (as one might expect from a category called "stronghold").

I can think of lots of variations for the level 2 stronghold (townhouse, shop), using 500 sq ft to 1000 sq ft. As it scales down to 100 sq ft, though, it approaches the above problems.

Basically, I'd consider 400 sq ft to be a useful size for level 1, and a reasonable bottom end for level 2. 100 sq ft is too small to even be worth putting on this scale, as it's barely different than living in the streets, or sleeping under a lean-to in the woods.

As levels increase, I also am left wondering about the distinction between building size and land size. A house on a 1 acre plot of land (43,560 sq ft) is not an unusual purchase for those who want some pseudo-farming space (raising chickens or goats, or wanting a large vegetable garden, etc), though the house itself would be a typical size (1500 sq ft to 2000 sq ft). Would the stronghold category be based on the building size (level 3) or the land size (level 4)? Based on the examples, I'm assuming building size.

At the same time, I'd assume that outbuildings would be included (for example, a cathedral would not be just the cathedral building, but the associated living quarters, libraries, kitchens, etc, that are all collectively part of the cathedral complex as a whole).

That then leads to considerations of, say, a fortress. A fortress is not really defined as a single building, but rather as an enclosed, protected area. The walls define the boundary of the fortress, rather than the building. Walls a quarter mile on a side would be well into the 1,000,000+ sq ft range, but a building a quarter mile on each side is just ludicrous to consider. (For scale, a quarter mile is 1320 feet; the Empire State Building is 1250 feet tall, or 1454 feet when you include the spire.)

Notes: A mansion is generally considered to have a minimum of 5000 sq ft, often at least 8000 sq ft. Keeps generally topped out at 10,000 sq feet. A 'typical' castle might cover 3 acres (130,680 sq ft), while the largest might scale up to 140 million sq ft (though that's more in the category of 'fortress', as it includes a large amount of the surrounding land). That leaves a scale gap that's a bit fuzzy, though.

If I were to try to build a scale based on "usefulness tiers", rather than just x10 for each tier, I'd probably look at something like:

Tier	Size	Example
1	Up to 400 sq feet	Small living area (1-3 rooms), Workshop
2	Up to 1200 sq feet	Modest living area (eg: townhouse), Small Shop
3	Up to 5000 sq feet	Large living area (eg: farmhouse), Large shop (eg: tavern), Temple, Tower
4	Up to 20,000 sq feet	Mansion, Keep
5	Up to 75,000 sq feet	Mansion or Keep with bailey and walls
6	Up to 250,000 sq feet	Castle, Cathedral
7	Up to 1,000,000 sq feet	Palace, Fortress
8	1,000,000+ sq feet	Fortified Lands

Where tiers 1-7 largely just cover actual buildings, tier 8 includes any arbitrary amount of land that is also walled-in and defended. Tier 5 is a fuzzy area, where I think it would be useful to include a walled defense line with bailey and such, as an intermediate stage between an unguarded mansion and a full-on castle.

This doesn't give a simple x10 metric-like scaling on size (it's closer to x4 at each step), but instead scales on building type, which I think is easier to visualize, and provides a better granularity.

Edit: Didn't intend to post yet. Working on details.
Edit2: Updated.

 

[Faolyn]

100 square feet is a 10' x 10' space, which is on the scale of the smallest bedrooms (9' x 9'), or a large tent (roughly the same size). I suppose it could qualify as a "hut", but I don't know that I could imagine a workshop for any sort of task to be usable at that size. It's certainly too small to be considered defendable in any sort of way (as one might expect from a category called "stronghold").

I can think of lots of variations for the level 2 stronghold (townhouse, shop), using 500 sq ft to 1000 sq ft. As it scales down to 100 sq ft, though, it approaches the above problems.

Smallest modern bedroom. Things were... a bit smaller in history.

We have a nature center not too far from where I live that contains a reconstructed log cabin (built elsewhere in the 1830s, rebuilt on the center's property) where a married couple raised six kids, and later one of their kids raised fifteen kids... in 240 square feet. Over two floors. I've been in it. It made those little Ikea demo houses seem positively roomy.

The basic answer is: they did a lot of stuff, including sleeping, outside.

Now, in Medieval times, a peasant's house might indeed be about 630-1,500 ft.^2, but half of that is for the animals. In the more sanitation-aware D&D-land, where animals live in the barn, you could probably halve the size of your actual peasant house.

Now, of course, in a fantasy world, building things might be cheaper or easier: because of magic, ingenious gnomish joining methods that allow for larger rooms without pillars or flying buttresses, stuff like that.

I also took a look here, which lists some castles for sale (it's old, though, and some of the links don't work, but that's why we have the Wayback Machine, right?). One castle is 37,000 ft.^2; another was 40,902 ft.^2.

So possibly your sizes are too big, if you're going for realistic. If you're going for "it's D&D; you need the extra room to swing a sword around," then it's fine.

 

[Tonguez]

Smallest modern bedroom. Things were... a bit smaller in history.

We have a nature center not too far from where I live that contains a reconstructed log cabin (built elsewhere in the 1830s, rebuilt on the center's property) where a married couple raised six kids, and later one of their kids raised fifteen kids... in 240 square feet. Over two floors. I've been in it. It made those little Ikea demo houses seem positively roomy.

The basic answer is: they did a lot of stuff, including sleeping, outside..

yeah there are still some old houses built in my grandfathers generation around the district where my father grew up and it still amazes me that in the eras before electricity and running water families of 10 or more were able to fit in to them. People in the past spent a lot more time outside and really did havwe tiny workshops

 

[Kinematics]

Smallest modern bedroom. Things were... a bit smaller in history.

I can certainly agree there, but this isn't just a "how big is your bedroom?" list, it's a stronghold list. How much space you need to swing your sword around is certainly part of it. Space for the mechanics necessary to secure the premises. Space for whatever followers come attached to it to do their thing. Etc.

The basic answer is: they did a lot of stuff, including sleeping, outside.

This gets into the issue I wrote about, regarding whether the area provided was only the building itself, or included the surrounding areas. If people are sleeping outside, that sort of implicitly increases the effective area that the 'stronghold' encompasses (though it also brings into question whether it qualifies as a 'stronghold' in the first place).

I also took a look here, which lists some castles for sale (it's old, though, and some of the links don't work, but that's why we have the Wayback Machine, right?). One castle is 37,000 ft.^2; another was 40,902 ft.^2.

This gets a bit into semantics, and separating a "castle" from a "keep", and such. For example, a keep with a single walled bailey vs no walls vs a double bailey, all of which could theoretically be called castles (ie: a defensible building made of stone), but could also be viewed as different types of constructions.

It's like anything from a hut to a mansion could be called a "house", but we use different words to describe different categories of houses to more easily communicate specific concepts.

So a 'castle' in the 40k sq foot range could be a very small castle, or could be a walled keep, whereas something twice that size would start to be seen as a proper castle, and three times that size being a 'standard' sized castle, more easily containing all the features you might expect to find in a castle (eg: stables, forge, multiple defensive layers, courtyards, ballrooms, etc).

So possibly your sizes are too big, if you're going for realistic.

I tried to be a bit generous, but most of the sizes are actually a fair bit smaller than the original document, while still aligning with typical expectations of various terms. The problem was that the scaling rate made the smallest tier too small, which is what got me thinking about the entire scale in the first place.

Honestly, there's not too much wrong with the original scale. Mansions starting at 10,000 sq ft is not that bad, though going up to 100,000 sq ft is a bit questionable. Castles starting at 100,000 sq ft seems entirely reasonable.

And of course there's the issue of the range of sizes. Going "up to" a given size doesn't mean they all have to be that size. Also remember that 25 sq ft is a single 5' x 5' "square" on a battlemap. 100 sq ft is 4 of those squares. Now imagine having a space smaller than that for your workshop. Even your example log cabin was over twice that size.

What can you put in a workshop of that size? Perhaps some woodworking stuff (I have a friend who has a shed out back that's probably on the 10'x10' scale that has some tools for handicraft stuff). Certainly not anything relating to a forge. Jewelrycrafting, perhaps. A small herbalist's or alchemist's hut. I don't think I'd trust that amount of space for brewing. Pottery, cobbling, etc. I could see 100 sq ft as the bare minimum to be functional. At the same time, working on something of that scale, without encroaching on "shop" territory, should allow for more space for something you're buying a feat for.

People can certainly make do with ridiculously little space, but is that a useful consideration with respect to finding ways to spend money in game, on a feature called "stronghold"?