It comes down to motivations. By default, PC's are motivated to become wealthy/influential/powerful. They have decided that the best way to attain fortune and glory is to risk their lives doing dangerous things, as opposed to say, becoming merchants or simply taking the Noble background and managing their lands.
You can replace wealth with some other motivation, but greed is a rather universal one, so it's easier to use as a means to get a group of random weirdos to be on the same team.
AD&D turned this into a feedback loop where money, by it's nature, led to more success. This has proven to be successful as it never leaves players wondering, now that they've acquired mountains of cash, why they are still adventuring and not retiring as fat cats. Most DM's find themselves inevitably placing more and more importance on the adventures themselves to keep the campaign going.
5e has simply repeated the mistake of 2e; by removing wealth from any direct expansion of player power (beyond, say, building a keep and attracting a tiny force of goons to guard it as an excuse to give yourself a couple of extra characters to bring with you on adventures), it becomes a bad motivation.
If the players are motivated by a problem that can be solved with money, they'll be able to solve it before they reach the double digit in levels. Magic users have ways to effectively generate money at a certain point, making it even more meaningless.
Even if you add big ticket items to the game like majestic castles, actual armies, or flying ships, eventually the players will have all of those things as well. It's like billionaires who, rather than use their wealth to help others, go and buy yachts so large they block waterways or pay to put themselves in space because, why not?
As the game stands, money is primarily a metric for "when can I have Full Plate" and "how many spells can I put in my spellbook", and possibly "can I actually use this spell that has a price tag ever or can I live without it". This is a fairly low-Tier problem. The game could function perfectly fine without money at all.
In fact, all the things 5e gives us to do with money come down to "make healing potions/scrolls to make resource attrition meaningless", or just "let the players make/buy magic items" (at which point we've come full circle).
You can replace wealth with some other motivation, but greed is a rather universal one, so it's easier to use as a means to get a group of random weirdos to be on the same team.
AD&D turned this into a feedback loop where money, by it's nature, led to more success. This has proven to be successful as it never leaves players wondering, now that they've acquired mountains of cash, why they are still adventuring and not retiring as fat cats. Most DM's find themselves inevitably placing more and more importance on the adventures themselves to keep the campaign going.
5e has simply repeated the mistake of 2e; by removing wealth from any direct expansion of player power (beyond, say, building a keep and attracting a tiny force of goons to guard it as an excuse to give yourself a couple of extra characters to bring with you on adventures), it becomes a bad motivation.
If the players are motivated by a problem that can be solved with money, they'll be able to solve it before they reach the double digit in levels. Magic users have ways to effectively generate money at a certain point, making it even more meaningless.
Even if you add big ticket items to the game like majestic castles, actual armies, or flying ships, eventually the players will have all of those things as well. It's like billionaires who, rather than use their wealth to help others, go and buy yachts so large they block waterways or pay to put themselves in space because, why not?
As the game stands, money is primarily a metric for "when can I have Full Plate" and "how many spells can I put in my spellbook", and possibly "can I actually use this spell that has a price tag ever or can I live without it". This is a fairly low-Tier problem. The game could function perfectly fine without money at all.
In fact, all the things 5e gives us to do with money come down to "make healing potions/scrolls to make resource attrition meaningless", or just "let the players make/buy magic items" (at which point we've come full circle).