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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scurvy_Platypus" data-source="post: 4870919" data-attributes="member: 43283">One important detail that folks seem to frequently miss is the way in which XP is earned compared to back then.In the old days, the rules by default had gold giving XP. Ok, fine. An awful lot of people houseruled that out though, saying that gold was its own reward. The effect this had was that they either tossed out more critters to kill for XP (occasionally I'd see this but not too often) or you simply had slower leveling due to decreased XP being earned (much more common).3E came along and bumped up the XP being earned from killing monsters; a lot of people freaked at the time, talking about how crazy the XP awards were, but it actually was moving the rate of XP gain back to the rough _default_ assumption.In other words, since everyone ruled gold didn't give XP, the designers explicitly bumped XP awards to push the rate of leveling back towards the way the game had been intended to run, rather than the slower rate of progression that was much more commonly seen as a by-product of a common houserule.The version done by Conan I think just whacks a chunk of money out automatically, although I'm hazy on it since I don't have my book handy and haven't read it for a while. I seem to recall it also takes out a bunch/most of your equipment as well.The article that's being mentioned from Dragon Magazine Issue 10 and was called "Orgies Inc". It suggested that instead of simply gold=xp, it be shifted to gold spent=xp. They had some rules about how it could be spent by various things such as sacrifices, orgies, donations, research, etc. A shortish article but interesting. I believe it showed up in one of the Best Of Dragon compilations.There was somethings sorta floated like this in a small game called Thugs & Thieves. You can find it here: <a href="http://www.simplephrase.com/games/tat/index.html" target="_blank">Thugs & Thieves - SimplePhrase</a>  The Thugs & Thieves approach is the whole Vice and Mastery thing. Random sidenote: I say "Thugs & Thieves" and not "T&T" because "T&T" to me is Tunnels & Trolls. Groovy game, but not related to this discussion. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Some good points. There are ways around the potential issue of disparity of character levels and casters creating items, but it's something the GM is going to need to think about explicitly.The whole looting everything that isn't nailed down? Heh. It still goes on in 3.x games I've been in, but it was a lot more prevalent back in the day.Personally, I'd caution the OP about trying to use this to make a game "grim-n-gritty". Sure, you _could_ do it; it could also blow up in your face. Lots of GMs seem to be enamored with the idea of "grim-n-gritty" games, but players often aren't so keen on it. Because it generally means they're going to be making new characters frequently. I suspect GMs wouldn't be as keen on the idea if they actually had to keep making new characters. Especially given the complaints I see folks make about creating NPCs and how they have to resort to generators because of the time involved.A rule like this is much more workable to help guide a group/game into a more "devil may care" attitude towards money, somewhat like you'd see in stuff like Conan and Fafhrd & Grey Mouser.Of course as with any rule, folks are going to look to see how they can push it.The trick is that money is simply a means to an end. In D&D, it currently is a scorecard. The only "end" it really serves is to buy up more magic items. Back in the day, the game was about more than simply the endless dungeoncrawl that most folks seem to run, regardless of whether they're actually _in_ a dungeon or not. As characters gained levels, they had to worry about administering lands and crap like that. As the game has evolved, stuff like this has taken more and more of a backseat, while roaming the land forever has become more and more prominent.</blockquote>

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