D&D (2024) Gold & Other Treasure (Can we get off the treadmill?)

[Vaalingrade]

just have magic items for sale and it's all good.

And move them to the PH where they belong.

 

[CleverNickName]

And move them to the PH where they belong.

It's easier for the DM to ignore them that way.

 

[Vaalingrade]

It's easier for the DM to ignore them that way.

Yep. While the players just buy what they want. Everyone wins.

 

[CleverNickName]

Yep. While the players just buy what they want. Everyone wins.

Yep, that's the plan. Not all that different from the way we've always done it. Instead of the DM deciding which magic items to add to the game, and how quickly, we let the players buy them from a standard list.

Of course the DM still decides how much money gets added to their coffers, and how quickly, but (waves hands around) it's all totally different.

 

[DEFCON 1]

No it's not simply a matter of interpretation or pedantry over the terms. The idea that players are authors who get to decide how their story develops is an incredibly toxic influence on new players because the way d&d is structured follows a loop of 1: GM describes the situation ->2: players react -> 3: GM describes the outcome. Anything that encourages players to feel like steps one & three are theirs to decide like "your story" or "Their story" when specifically referring to a player encourages that toxicity.

Nobody at the table is there to tell a story or even decide what the story is. Nobody has that role because no one side of the GM screen is responsible for the entire 3 step chain. The story is something that develops based on the results of dice plus both sides of the screen rather than a thing someone decides or tells. wotc needs to do a much better job of expressing that in the 2024 books.

That is absolutely ridiculous.

Why? Because you are pretending that players have no authority in their #2. In how they react.

GM describes a situation and then asks the party "What do you do?"

What you do think their DECISIONS are? Those decisions are them AUTHORING their response! DECIDING what is it they want to do. That's my entire point! THEY get to decide what they want to do. THEY get to "write" how they act and react. THEY get to decide something like "We ignore that job-post board you told us was in front of us, and instead want to leave the village and go see the local baron about acquiring our own keep." THEY get to make that choice, and THEY get to tell the DM how they wish to go about it.

And the DM either says "Yeah, okay!" if they are a good DM... or "No, you don't get to make that choice because I'M the one who writes everything that happens and you have to do and go where I say" if they are a crap one. Which DM are you? Because I am most definitely the former, and when my players tell me they want to take control of their own narrative and NOT DO whatever it was I placed in front of them because it just didn't interest them... I follow THEM. Not force them to do it the other way around.

And all of this while we still play the game.

 

[tetrasodium]

That is absolutely ridiculous.

Why? Because you are pretending that players have no authority in their #2. In how they react.

GM describes a situation and then asks the party "What do you do?"

What you do think their DECISIONS are? Those decisions are them AUTHORING their response! DECIDING what is it they want to do. That's my entire point! THEY get to decide what they want to do. THEY get to "write" how they act and react. THEY get to decide something like "We ignore that job-post board you told us was in front of us, and instead want to leave the village and go see the local baron about acquiring our own keep." THEY get to make that choice, and THEY get to tell the DM how they wish to go about it.

And the DM either says "Yeah, okay!" if they are a good DM... or "No, you don't get to make that choice because I'M the one who writes everything that happens and you have to do and go where I say" if they are a crap one. Which DM are you? Because I am most definitely the former, and when my players tell me they want to take control of their own narrative and NOT DO whatever it was I placed in front of them because it just didn't interest them... I follow THEM. Not force them to do it the other way around.

And all of this while we still play the game.

No it's not ridiculous at all. Look back at the original statement

Spoiler: Here it is

Money is a plot device. That's all. Whether or not the players have too much or too little cash depends entirely on what they wish their D&D adventures to include and where they want to go.

If players want to spend gold on something to further their story and adventure... they will. If they as a group want to buy a keep and run it? Then they will collect all the money they can, make all the connections to the nobility they can, and actually play their story to acquire / build / renovate their keep and lands. And thus all the gold you gave them as DM will see use.

But if the players don't care about that... if their reason for playing D&D is to just go out and explore the lands, find tombs, or interact with interesting people for example... then money will serve no purpose. Money doesn't give them that which they want and why they play. So there's no reason to consider that "reward" and little reason to give it to them. To them... new places to go and new locations to explore is the reward. That's why they are playing the game.

The age of nickle-and-diming your way through equipment tables is over. It's been done hundreds of times by every player for decades. So few players at your table probably care about going through that same exact "mini-game" again and again and again of "going out to acquire treasure and then coming home to spend it." That novelty is gone. So don't try and recapture that genie and stuff it back into the bottle. Instead... merely see what the players enjoy most about D&D and angle the stories of the campaign such that they get more of what they want.

The players are entirely incapable of making that decision unless they have the power to decide what monsters the GM chooses to yuse & how/if the GM chooses to modify those monsters. Thinking of it as their story rather than the group's stories or our stories encourages a belief that anything in step one or three can be subject to veto simply by deciding that it doesn't fit MY story. Even the decisions players make in step two don't actually do anything until after going through the dice & any influences of the world on it along with the rest of step 3 where the GM describes the result.

 

[DEFCON 1]

No it's not ridiculous at all. Look back at the original statement
The players are entirely incapable of making that decision unless they have the power to decide what monsters the GM chooses to yuse & how/if the GM chooses to modify those monsters. Thinking of it as their story rather than the group's stories or our stories encourages a belief that anything in step one or three can be subject to veto simply by deciding that it doesn't fit MY story. Even the decisions players make in step two don't actually do anything until after going through the dice & any influences of the world on it along with the rest of step 3 where the GM describes the result.

So basically you came up with some convoluted interpretation of my original statement just to be able to say "Nuh uh! Yer wrong!"

Gotcha. Well, I'm sure other folks who read it came away with slightly more reasoned interpretations of what I was saying and can decide for themselves what they think is right. Needless to say, I think you are tying yourself up into knots over all of this just to justify your own beliefs. So good for you.

 

[Bedrockgames]

It's been oft lamented that treasure becomes essentially meaningless very quickly in 5th edition D&D. At least it's oft lamented by me. I ran my first 5th edition campaign in 2014 or 2015, and just accumulating treasure off of monsters and foes, even at lower levels, kept the party hip deep in more gold than they really knew what to do with. There were no magic shops, they weren't spending gold to advance in level, they were itinerant adventurers so real estate wasn't an option, and we were really more focused on old school style adventuring. Even when I ran Acquisitions Inc., a few years later, gold was essentially meaningless as it was trivially easy to make enough of it to keep the business afloat and to make improvements.

How important is treasure in a campaign really? Don't get me wrong, I might have characters who are highly motivated by treasure, but as a player, I don't really care about treasure. It doesn't matter to me if I find five gems with 50 gp each or a statuette made out of electrum. In Honor Among Thieves, the obsession with the acquisition of wealth wasn't the motivation for our heroes (I'm not going to spoil the plot for anyone who hasn't seen it yet), and it's not necessarily the motivation of many protagonist from various fantasy movies and novels.

Is the revision of 5th edition (I threw up a little calling it a revision) going to feature less treasure or provide DMs and players with more options on how to use treasure?

Treasure can be important but I use more of modern economic prices, which allows me to know what anything in the setting would be worth (rather than just the things listed in the equipment section) and I find that means players make rapid use of their economic resources (the difference between 1 million and 100 million units of currency isn't just academic the way it might be if they were sitting on a pile of gold and just buying magic items or something: they can erect buildings, hire people to serve as servants, bodyguards, etc). I also tend to have a lot of treasure that is specific. So they aren't always gong to be finding gold. In the wuxia setting I run, salt is important and salt mines are a monopoly of the empire, so there have been a lot of salt stealing situations, illegal salt mine operations, and even taking over official salt mines. Another thing I like to add is the value of antiques. I often have a lot of non-magical but highly prized items. These could be things as simple as a chair used by a famous kind or a work of art that is the world's equivalent of the Mona Lisa. Oddly enough players sometimes take a lot more interest in something described as the "Mona Lisa of this world" that equals its value if you were to sell it.

I don't think wealth should be the only aim or the primary goal (again my campaigns the focus is often things like developing new kung fu abilities, finding lost manuals, etc). But the search for wealth can be fun when it is done with a greater aim in mind.

 

[tetrasodium]

So basically you came up with some convoluted interpretation of my original statement just to be able to say "Nuh uh! Yer wrong!"

Gotcha. Well, I'm sure other folks who read it came away with slightly more reasoned interpretations of what I was saying and can decide for themselves what they think is right. Needless to say, I think you are tying yourself up into knots over all of this just to justify your own beliefs. So good for you.

No not really. That "tell" your story" wotc folks kept saying throughout 5e & your paraphrasing of it to "want to... For their story" is still an incredibly toxic influence on the game encouraging people to feel like they have control over things they do not & personal veto over events that occur at the table.

 

[Clint_L]

There are plenty of good fantasy stories involving wealthy nobles. I'm not opposed to characters acquiring treasure, even a massive amount of treasure, but I'd like more options for what they can do with it. Or failing that, just do away with keeping track of gold and go with an abstract system. Something.

Yeah, there are a few. I guess. I'm having trouble thinking of them. More common in superhero stories, but even there you only need so many Tony Starks (and look at how many of his storylines involve him losing his fortune).

Looking to make a score is a fine motivation, especially if the party is kind of broke. Looking to earn some extra platinum to add a new wing to the manor is...not super interesting story motivation for me.

What bothers me is that mounds and mounds of treasure has always been part of D&D's DNA, probably because back in the day the game really was gearing players up towards wargaming campaigns with castles and stuff. And then treasure became tied to progression through experience points. So there's always this kind of expectation that PCs will be loaded, and that they have to earn treasure as part of every adventure.