MGibster
Legend
Since as far back as I can remember, acquiring massive amounts of wealth in the form of gold, gems, and magic items has been part and parcel of the D&D experience. In fact, treasure used to be tied to experience points which caused some problems as characters accumulated ridiculous amounts of the stuff. But then there were plenty of things for characters to spend their gold on including training to advance to the next level, some spell components were quite costly, and you could hire henchmen and build strongholds. Assuming you actually bothered to do any of that stuff. I don't know about you guys, but when I sit down to play D&D I want to go out and adventure not stay in my stronghold and figure out how to decorate the place.
My memories of 2nd edition are fuzzy (I'm a 7 percenter now and getting older), but at least by 3rd edition treasure had been complete divorced from experience points but we still continue to accumulate a ridiculous amount of gold in 5th edition. Once you reach the point where you character is living like a rock star and wearing clothes and bling so excessive that Liberace would decry it as "tacky" there's not much else to spend you gold on. Is there any reason we actually need all that much gold in D&D?
As a player, even when playing a Rogue, I don't really care about gold. My character might, but it doesn't make much of a difference to me. I'm not interested in building strongholds because the core game play for me is adventuring and sitting around my house is not adventuring. So it makes more sense to me to either include mechanics designed to drain PC's wealth or just stop distributing so much gold. In Conan by Modiphius games, the PCs are expected to either spend their money on partying like it's 1999, on getting information, or to thieves or other misfortunes. I don't want to eliminate all wealth from D&D, but what's the point of doing all that extra bookkeeping keeping track of treasure when it doesn't add any significant fun to the game?
My memories of 2nd edition are fuzzy (I'm a 7 percenter now and getting older), but at least by 3rd edition treasure had been complete divorced from experience points but we still continue to accumulate a ridiculous amount of gold in 5th edition. Once you reach the point where you character is living like a rock star and wearing clothes and bling so excessive that Liberace would decry it as "tacky" there's not much else to spend you gold on. Is there any reason we actually need all that much gold in D&D?
As a player, even when playing a Rogue, I don't really care about gold. My character might, but it doesn't make much of a difference to me. I'm not interested in building strongholds because the core game play for me is adventuring and sitting around my house is not adventuring. So it makes more sense to me to either include mechanics designed to drain PC's wealth or just stop distributing so much gold. In Conan by Modiphius games, the PCs are expected to either spend their money on partying like it's 1999, on getting information, or to thieves or other misfortunes. I don't want to eliminate all wealth from D&D, but what's the point of doing all that extra bookkeeping keeping track of treasure when it doesn't add any significant fun to the game?