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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 9765411" data-attributes="member: 6779196">This makes sense on paper, and yet, in my actual experience, players never seem to mind the fact that gold is useless. The “broken play loop” is mostly a theoretical problem that GMs get in our heads about, while players usually aren’t even looking at treasure that way. They’re busy using it as a high score system.Nobody complains that points in arcade games aren’t “useful” in the games. Because our primate brains treat them as intrinsically valuable. We make number go up, and that makes us feel accomplished, so we try to make number go up more. Gold and other monetary treasure in D&D works mostly the same way. That’s why even long after players have accumulated enough money as for it to be no object, they still insist on haggling over every transaction, because transaction makes number go down, and number going up is how they know they’re winning.Any resemblance to the behaviors of people who have more money than they could ever spend in real life is purely coincidental, I’m sure.</blockquote>