darjr
I crit!
Yea. What the? I mean want what you want. That’s cool. Go make it if nobody else seems to want it…. Or if your right you’ll have fans! Win win!
D&D 5E Do We Really Need a Lot of Gold? (D&D 5th Edition)
The Green Hermit
Hero
To be fair, many people aren't asking that this is included in the DMG, just that there is an official supplement or two that covers it.
Exactly. Make it yourself or find a good third party product on it. There are several. Can’t make everything for everyone. I would say there are very few people that want this. And it’s cool. I love these things. I don’t think they will sell well enough. And their are very creative people doing this on their own and willing to publish it themselves for people that want it. I really think it’s snobbery for some that they won’t touch it if wotc doesn’t provide it.
The assumption is that WotC stuff would be well researched and playtested. That's obviously not true. cough**gloomstalkerranger**cough
There should be 0 pages for any of this stuff in the dmg. Because:
Acquiring massive amounts of wealth and spending that wealth in domains of various sorts does not correspond to how and why most people play the game. If you are playing an adventure path that has you traveling all over a world map for a campaign that lasts 2 months of in-game time and takes you to level 10, you're never going to interact with downtime let alone domains. If they were going to include anything about gold in the dmg, they could include some advice on how to use gold to support that latter playstyle instead of perfunctory chart about how long it takes to build a castle. That being said magic item prices would probably be very popular among certain players.
Somewhat unrelated, but the 5e dmg is my least favorite thing about this edition. It's a dumpster fire of a book.
Uta-napishti
Adventurer
You don't need needy NPCs all the time, many magical PCs burn money. If one of your players is a wizard who likes to have access to a wide variety of magic, they can suck everyone in the party's gold dry all by themselves just copying spells. The Cleric on the other hand gets access to every cleric spell fo' free, but their curse is having to carry around hundreds/thousands of gold in diamonds to fuel revivify / raise dead magic. Both of these can put pressure on the party's gold supply.
jmartkdr2
Hero
Reflecting on the original question: I think 5e games are pretty likely to not have any real use for gold, for a few reasons:
You might be able buy magic items, but you might not, and both of those ways of playing make a bunch of sense to me. 5e goes out of it's way to make magic items (or at least a specific type or amount of them) optional, and removing the ability to buy them is an added benefit for a lot of people. However, once you do this, the only game-influencing expenses are mundane gear like torches, and the amount of gold in an average loot pile (if you follow published guidelines) makes those trivial pretty fast. So if you're not running magic shops or OSR-style detailed encumbrance, gold isn't directly affecting the game mechanics. And those types of play aren't always present.
And the non-mechanical uses for gold (downtime, shopping for the roleplay value) require a type of game that also isn't always present. Some adventures don't allow for downtime, either by the nature of the threat or location, and some do. Some players are interested in investing their gold, and some just aren't.
But the DMG guidance is to give out quite a bit of gold - more than you need for mundane gear, especially if you're not using a lot of it. Between these, it's pretty common to end up in a game where after a few level you literally have more gold than you can ever spend.
I'm not sure this quite rises to the level of a problem - but it's not an ideal way to write the books.
You might be able buy magic items, but you might not, and both of those ways of playing make a bunch of sense to me. 5e goes out of it's way to make magic items (or at least a specific type or amount of them) optional, and removing the ability to buy them is an added benefit for a lot of people. However, once you do this, the only game-influencing expenses are mundane gear like torches, and the amount of gold in an average loot pile (if you follow published guidelines) makes those trivial pretty fast. So if you're not running magic shops or OSR-style detailed encumbrance, gold isn't directly affecting the game mechanics. And those types of play aren't always present.
And the non-mechanical uses for gold (downtime, shopping for the roleplay value) require a type of game that also isn't always present. Some adventures don't allow for downtime, either by the nature of the threat or location, and some do. Some players are interested in investing their gold, and some just aren't.
But the DMG guidance is to give out quite a bit of gold - more than you need for mundane gear, especially if you're not using a lot of it. Between these, it's pretty common to end up in a game where after a few level you literally have more gold than you can ever spend.
I'm not sure this quite rises to the level of a problem - but it's not an ideal way to write the books.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
This.
In fact, it's clear to me that they dont want to do that. It's not like they haven't had ample opportunity. They have determined/decided what the core experience of 5e is, and are catering unceasingly to it. The fragments that seem to point in a different direction are artifacts of an earlier era, meant to invoke "D&D-ness", without having much to with how the game is meant to be played. If you want more rigorous material along the lines discussed in this thread, you will have to go outside WotC. They made their choice a while back.
This represents a disconnect between the game as presented in the rule books versus presented in campaign length adventures. Nothing in the rule books point toward zero downtime, rocketing toward mid levels and then just up and quitting at the beginning of the really interesting part of the game. Yet here we are.
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