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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 7717794" data-attributes="member: 22779">Yuppers.  You used an optional rule that wasn't assumed as part of the core game.  No worries.  It's not like you were playing wrong.  Where you go wrong is the idea that everyone played the way you did and trying to extrapolate your personal experience into some sort of universal.  I have no idea how common it was to play with XP for gold in 2e.  To me, one of the major changes from 1e to 2e was the rejection of xp for gold, which massively slowed down advancement in 2e. To me, the change of the importance of gold really highlights how each edition is a different game.  For example:1e - Gold is the primary source of XP in the system.  Looking at the modules, you generally got FAR more xp for gold than you could for killing everything.  To the point where probably about 75% (give or take) of the xp of a character was gold.  Then, that gold was taken away, largely, by the training rules.  The point of play was to amass cash - killing stuff was largely incidental.  Plus there was the presumption of things like hirelings and henchmen which was a major source of the power of a party, all of which cost gold.2e - Gold is largely useless.  You aren't supposed to buy magic items in the game and, beyond buying your Full Plate armor, there really wasn't much you could do with gold.  It just kind of sat there.  To the point where, in the games I ran or played in at the time, gold wasn't particularly even awarded as treasure.  Beyond a certain point, gold just wasn't all that needed.3e - Gold again is a HUGE deal.  So much so that we get the wealth by level charts which are meant as a balancing tool in the game.  You can buy or make magic items which has an enormous impact on how the game is played and run.  Things like healing wands and the Magic Christmas Tree are all outgrowths of tying character power to the wealth of the character.  Amassing gold is a very large motivator for PC's in 3e.4e - Gold is scaled back.  It's assumed that you will have certain goodies by certain levels, so, the "reward" isn't really much of a reward at all.  You're level X, so, you have equipment Y.  So much so that you can completely remove plussed items and gold and go with Inherent Bonuses and the game works perfectly fine.  It really doesn't matter how much gold you accrue.  5e - Gold, like in 2e, has pretty much no purpose.  You're not supposed to buy magic items - at least the system doesn't assume that you can, and, outside of down time activities, gold doesn't really do anything.  For example, we played through most of Curse of Strahd recently, and by 8th level, the group total cash might be a couple of thousand gold.  It simply doesn't matter.You can run this same sort of charted examples for just about anything between editions and it's not too hard to see that each edition has some pretty deep changes.  Fighters go from 1 attack per round with minimal bonuses, to 3/2 (+1 to hit/+2 to damage) in 2e, to BAB and iterative attacks, back to 1 attack per round but now with additional riders, then to 1 attack per round increasing at certain levels.  Just something as basic as how does a basic plain jane fighter swing his sword has changed between editions.</blockquote>

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