D&D 5E In fifth-edition D&D, what is gold for?

[Zilong]

I just want to say that there should be nothing wrong with wanting to spend a large amount of gold on stuff to make yourself a better adventurer. Batman does it and if Batman does it, it MUST be a good idea!

I agree! Dressing up as a flying mammal and keeping a young boy around for ambiguous reasons in a cave system beneath your isolated mansion while also beating up random strangers and encouraging your ward to do the same should be things everyone emulates!

 

[CapnZapp]

What is D&D for?

No, seriously, if you can answer that (and I assume everyone posting here can offer their own answer - it's not meant to be a deep philosophical challenge) then you can answer the gold question. If you say that D&D is for X, then for you, gold represents success at getting X. It's as simple as that.

At its simplest level, D&D is about killing monsters and taking their stuff. You get XP for succeeding at the killing bit and GP for succeeding at the taking bit. You don't have to spend the gold, any more than you have to spend the XP. At this level, gold is not for spending, it's for getting. It's for keeping score.

Beyond that, it becomes a means to an end, not an end in itself. It becomes a commodity that is interchangeable with the means to attain other personal goals for the player (or, in the fiction, the PC). All the usual ones: power, sex, security, companionship, entertainment, and so on. There's no great mystery about it.

To see how important or not gold is in your game, imagine that every new PC starts with a million GP to spend on whatever they like, and they get an automatic million extra every time they level up. Normal prices still apply. Does that (a) ruin the game because there's no incentive to go adventuring or (b) make the game more fun because it removes all those irritating mundane constraints on having a good rip-roaring adventure? Ask around the table, don't prejudge. There's no right answer.

This is both a very good answer, and a huge letdown.

On one hand you are open to lots of playstyles, on the other you don't even mention purchasing magic items for all that gold.

Why would you exclude "better gear" from your list?

 

[MichaelSomething]

I agree! Dressing up as a flying mammal and keeping a young boy around for ambiguous reasons in a cave system beneath your isolated mansion while also beating up random strangers and encouraging your ward to do the same should be things everyone emulates!

The average adventurer does half those things already so I might actually be on to something...

 

[CapnZapp]

To be fair, though, 5e doesn't support a GNS-'gamist' approach to wealth & magic items the way the other modern editions did, that just means you can more or less leave those things out of it when using that approach. It's calibrated, in that sense, for 6-8 encounters/day and no items, with wealth /nearly/ irrelevant. Not ideal, but not impossible to cope with.

But, as the blog shows, it isn't.

5th edition still supplies the hundreds of thousands of gold pieces, even though every reason for doing so is far gone.

Perhaps not in your home game, but Storm King's Thunder is an excellent showcase proving the blog right.

 

[CapnZapp]

I ran into this problem last campaign. I come from a 2E background, so gold seemed like something you kind of save for hiring people and building or investing later on. Turns out my players had no desire for that, and were disappointed to find out they couldn't simply buy magic items (most were Pathfinder vets, where this is basically the main use for gold).

My "solution" really just came down to communication. Once I knew they weren't interested in traditional "build a castle, hire an army" style of late-career investments, I just kind of told them that it means gold is probably not a very big motivator for the average adventurer. I mean, really anyone can go on an adventure, make a few thousand gold, and sort of retire for 10 or 20 years as normal people, so the player's just needed to figure out what made their characters different. Why *wouldn't* they just retire after a few levels and several thousand gold?

We are at a point where the "reward" really isn't gold or wealth anymore. It's often offered and acquired, but generally donated or set aside for adventuring expenses or compensation (sorry we lost your ship...) because they are -- by a large -- good people. This was an interesting change, because I was able to start crafting adventures and story hooks on things other than having some shady guy hire them out in a tavern for deal that's bound to go bad.

It's made sessions a bit more efficient as well. We don't track rations and stuff too much, opting instead for periodic "payment" whenever they hit a town. Some purchases are only semi-permanent, like horses, so those get repurchased once in a while. Without everyone trying to track coppers, we don't really spend a lot of time scrounging around dungeon rooms looking for hidden treasure. I have everyone's passives, and the mage casts detect magic if he really needs to, but otherwise we just assume the group can usually to a more thorough search after the place is cleared.

Sure and I'm happy it all worked out for you.

What I wonder, though, is why everyone is so accepting and forgiving of the fact that we had a perfectly good outlet for all the gold, namely magic items, and then that just dried up with no substitute.

I wonder why everyone simply accepts the huge headache you get as DM when the players realize there's nothing worthwhile to spend their gold on.

That part of the game was fun. Now it's no longer supported.

To me, that's a huge letdown.

 

[CapnZapp]

He's asking if anyone else noticed this, so he's obviously not trying to claim his experience is representative of everyone elses'. Also, your request for a list is facetious, considering you know full well if he did actually link some kind of notepad with crap like "mark is a powergamer who wants more gold" you'd probably still dismiss it.

More importantly, it would be creepy as hell.

Even more importantly, it's off topic for this thread

 

[Zilong]

I'm actually glad the wealth by level and magic mart it gone. That always felt a bit odd to me. Like anyone who killed a goblin or two could buy there way up to heroism. As for the gold problem itself, I agree with what others have said in that a DM can either ignore it, as it doesn't really seem important, or give the players a RP reason to use their wealth. In game wealth, though logical, seems to me to be more of a legacy holdover and possible interesting hook than mandatory use. Granted, it would be nice to have concrete rules for spending, but, as others have said, it is not a particularly pressing issue.

The average adventurer does half those things already so I might actually be on to something...

Next question is: which half are adventurers doing?

 

[BoldItalic]

This is both a very good answer, and a huge letdown.

On one hand you are open to lots of playstyles, on the other you don't even mention purchasing magic items for all that gold.

Why would you exclude "better gear" from your list?

Because it comes under the heading of "power", which I did list. Magic items and costly equipment make your character mechanically more powerful. That's what they do. In fact, that's all they do. If one of your motivations for playing D&D is the satisfaction of making your character more powerful (and I'm including magic, here, as a form of personal power) that's fine, I can sympathise with that. No problem.

Gold is only valuable in the sense that other people (i.e NPCs) are willing to do things for you or give your their stuff in exchange for it. If your idea of personal power is a +2 Sword of Goblin Smiting and someone has one for sale, that's okay but just trading gold for it isn't very heroic in itself; if you can employ someone to make, steal or recover one for you from the Uttermost Caves of Doom, that adds a little of flavour to the narrative although possibly only a little. Spending the gold on sages to discover where to find the Caves of Doom and potions to keep you alive while you go and get it yourself is more indirect way of achieving it and generates more story, thereby making the game more interesting, at the expense of taking longer. It depends on how much you and your DM want to spin out the story. And that comes right back to the question "what is D&D for?"

 

[Beleriphon]

Further, consider that ships are different from most goods in that there are few shops who will maintain a finished goods inventory of completed vessels or that will have the facilities to store a purchased vessel.

Crazy Thog's Used Shipyard, with prices so low you'd think Thog was Charmed!

 

[CapnZapp]

Because it comes under the heading of "power", which I did list.

Please then let me rephrase: Why didn't you mention such a prominent and elaborate part of a previous edition specifically instead of bundling it under a generic header that means everything and anything?

Besides; magic items is so much more than merely power. The real value in magic items is customization.