Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="MGibster" data-source="post: 9553111" data-attributes="member: 4534">Bingo.  This is why gold is so popular as players tend to view giving them gems and objects of art as unnecessary extra steps they take to convert it into fungible gold.  I think any rewards given to the PCs should definitely work as a reward to the PCs without being a burden.  And quite frankly, like you said, we're not playing Accounts & Ledgers we're playing D&D.  Though some players really do like playing A&L in addition to D&D. So what are some advantages objects of art or jewelry might have over gold?  A pound of gold is worth 50 gold pieces.  In real life, a London Good Delivery Bar, a bar of gold notable for its large size and purity, is on average a little over 27 pounds, so in D&D terms it's worth 1,200 gold pieces.  That kind of weight really starts to add up when you're expected to transport it.  i.e.  Haul it from a dungeon to back to your base of operations.  And it's not really a practical amount to carry around as spending money.  A moonstone jewel is worth 50 gold, and while the DMG doesn't say how much it weight, I'm going to assume it's about the size of a gemstone.  i.e.  It's weight is negligible.  For day-to-day interactions you probably need gold, but maybe you can use gems for larger purchases?  Instead of carrying 30 pounds of gold maybe a few ounces of gems will do the trick?  I pretty much agree with [USER=61736]@Oryzarius[/USER]' list of reasons why rewards are given in games.  It's probably not an exhaustive list, but it's a great start.  Ultimately, I think the key here is that you want to make sure the rewards are meaningful to the players.  My beef with 5th edition is that after a certain point gold became meaningless, but it takes a bit more effort to make other rewards have a tangible meaning in the game.  One of my players wants a pet dinosaur.  I mean his character does.  Maybe the player does too, but I can't do anything about that.  I'm actually in a good position to have a pet dinosaur be part of the treasure during the next session.  They're finding a group of gourmands and I had planned on them finding a storage area with a bunch of exotic animals in captivity.  Adding a young dinosaur is trivially easy and I can focus part of the campaign on the PC training the darn thing.</blockquote>

Verification