Yaarel
🇮🇱 🇺🇦 He-Mage
Decouple wealth from leveling.
In a setting with high wealth, players can use that wealth, to build homes, shops, fortresses, empires.
In a setting with low wealth, these expenditures are not part of what characters do.
D&D 5E (2024) Gold & Other Treasure (Can we get off the treadmill?)
- Thread starter MGibster
- Start date
In a setting with high wealth, players can use that wealth, to build homes, shops, fortresses, empires.
In a setting with low wealth, these expenditures are not part of what characters do.
What do you mean "accused"? He straightforwardly was the CEO of a rightwing media company. If you like ACKS, fine, but there's nothing "alleged" about his associations
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Ok. I still like ACKS.
Some Dude
Hero
And he wrote a series of blog posts subscribing to the theory that Pence could refuse to certify the 2020 election. He's also just announced an upcoming ACKS supplement based on a book published by neo-nazi Vox Day's own Castalia House Publishing. People making excuses for him remind me of everyone who said, "It's all a big joke, you just don't get it! He was actually Trolling!" when M.A.R. Barker was outed as a Holocaust denier.
M_Natas
Hero
So, maybe let's go back at the topic at hand.
I think the lack of use for Gold and Treasure is a DM and DMG problem.
First the DMG:
When a new DM reads the DMG (I did!) he is not told, how much Gold characters are expected to find per level. There are treasure tables and stuff but what is actually missing is just one small table:
"If you follow the treasure tables of the DMG, a character will find on average 100 Gold during Level 1, will have accumulated 650 Gold at level 5, 16.500 Gold at level 10 and 800.000 Gold at Level 20."
Because if you don't know how much Gold they find, how are supposed to be able to plan in how they spend that?
For my first big campaign I run I made my own table. I just said: Okay, the characters will gain money per level as Gold reward = XP × 2. Than I set the prices for stuff accordingly.
Like, okay, I now know how much money the party will find around level 5 (accumulated 13 000 Gold). At level 5 I want them to be able to buy 1 uncommen / a +1 magic item each. So for a 4 people group party, one uncommon / +1 magic Item was set to around 1500 Gold pieces. And I did that for all the levels and in regards to magic items and consumables like healing potions and it worked totally fine.
So to come up with a system to make Gold matter is actually simple:
Step 1: Decide on what the characters should be able to spend money in that campaign and what level those things should be available: Mundane adventuring Items (all affordable at latest level 5), Magic Items (+1 at level 6, +2 at level 11, + 3 at level 17), Strongholds, Followers, Ships, Businesses ... (and Talk at session 0 with your players about what Subsystems they want to interact with. Like, Magic Items always work, but having Strongholds and followers is not anybodies cup of tea).
Step 2: Just make up any Rewards System you want. Just determine how much Gold the party or a character will get per Level (which should be increasing by level).
Step 3: Set the prices of the Objects from Step 1 according to the Gold rewards set in Step 2.
Voila.
And such a simple system with guidlines should have been presented in the DMG.
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In my current campaign I'm a player in, Money is always tight. Why?
It is a city campaign. Two factions are now starting a war about the control of the city. Our adventuring group hates both factions and now we are becoming the third faction.
Even though I'm running around with 1000 Gold in my pockets, I'm feeling broke. First of all: My character is a wizard and getting all those spell scrolls and copying them is expensive.
Second of all: Write are building up a militia. My character made friends with a Velociraptor Merchant and wants to build up her own Cavalry made up of Orphans who ride on Velociraptors. That cost a lot of money.
We are campaigning with the people, giving out money to help the poor to have them on our side.
Money is Power in such a campaign setting and our (highly irregular) troops need to be fed.
The other campaign I'm DMing is a Spelljammer Campaign. The players have an Asteroid Hopper (basically a raft) as their first ship, which they are upgrading for a lot of money.
And later they will be able to buy more expensive ships and upgrade them, too. Ship campaigns like Spelljammer or Ghost of Saltmarsh have built in money sinks.
Like, I literally never had the problem of player's having to much money in any campaign I run or played.
The big problem is: The DMG, except for very wide price ranges for Magic Items, doesn't give you any guidlines on how to do any of the things I just mentioned.
Xanathar tried, but has anybody ever really used any of the Downtime Rules of Xanathar?
No? Me neither because in modern game play, Downtime of weeks or month barley exist.
Of course you could live for several month or a year as an Aristocrat, having 3000 Gold living expenses. But who really does that?
I really tried at one point and it failed miserably for a couple reasons. One: 5e is designed so that the PCs don't actually need any of the stuff they can get through downtime. Two: because the players don't feel like their PCs need any of it I couldn't get them to bother with recording their downtime accumulation or they couldn't be bothered with absorbing and interacting with said rules if a player did track one of the many things the character sheet us incapable of supporting. At the end of the experience I wound up needing to track it and reinterpret the terrible rules to fit whatever the player wanted to do because now they had a mechanic to demand the gm support their shopping snail excursion to some degree and simply giving them the thing was often the only way to accomplish the goal of not having it hijack yet another session.
It's the reason I'm super disappointed that the downtime /between shopping by bastion NPC is "now I get x item" rather than " they took your goals in mind and spent x of your gold on y item because y is what was available"
payn
Glory to Marik
Wealth by level was a bane on 3E, but a necessary one. I am very glad the days of WBL are gone. Players feel entitled to certain amounts of gold and thus certain items because the books says so. What is worse is the game math works assuming it. 5E has killed that dead, and its a feature. Players dont need gold so the GM is free to make it a thing if they want to, or ignore it as the boring bookkeeping task that many folks see it as. Options are open.
This is exactly what I mean about the above. You felt it was needed and you figured it out. I dont want anything like this in the rules for my game.
This would be perfect for a modular supplement, however, that idea died on the vine when 5E became so popular without it.
It should be. Life as a wizard is already too easy.
There is a lot of weird stuff here. Its cool, but its unusual, and I dont know that any DMG guideline could be specific enough to cover velociraptors ridden by children.
If the DMG needs to prepare GMs for anything, its how to make up curveball stuff like this on their own. Personally, I dont put prices on stuff like this, I make adventures out of it. Help A stop B, go to location X and find Y, etc..Again, this is a bit of a gaming philosophy thing. All of this would be adventure as needed and not adventure for money to buy what you want for me. Though, if spelljammer has ships as money sinks specifically, it should be in the campaign setting material and not the generic DMG, IMO.
Without monster math assuming a certain level of PC power drawn from magic items the GM is no more free to "make it a thing" than the Weimar Republic was to just make a thing. Worse is that now the gm must track any power they grant the PCs from magic items and boost the monsters in order to counter balance the excess by rebuilding the broken game engine.Wealth by level was a bane on 3E, but a necessary one. I am very glad the days of WBL are gone. Players feel entitled to certain amounts of gold and thus certain items because the books says so. What is worse is the game math works assuming it. 5E has killed that dead, and its a feature. Players dont need gold so the GM is free to make it a thing if they want to, or ignore it as the boring bookkeeping task that many folks see it as. Options are open.
This is exactly what I mean about the above. You felt it was needed and you figured it out. I dont want anything like this in the rules for my game.
This would be perfect for a modular supplement, however, that idea died on the vine when 5E became so popular without it.
It should be. Life as a wizard is already too easy.
There is a lot of weird stuff here. Its cool, but its unusual, and I dont know that any DMG guideline could be specific enough to cover velociraptors ridden by children.
Again, this is a bit of a gaming philosophy thing. All of this would be adventure as needed and not adventure for money to buy what you want for me. Though, if spelljammer has ships as money sinks specifically, it should be in the campaign setting material and not the generic DMG, IMO.
