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

[Caliburn101]

Wealth in Campaigns

I will be blunt.

If you don't know what good gold is for in a game, you are either running a dungeon delving fun game, or you lack depth in your ongoing campaign.

Characters take massive risks, and are rewarded disproportionately to the vast majority of others. So gold accrues unless you are shopping for yet more grapefruit sized diamonds because your Fighter can't work out when to stop running into the gaping jaws of death...

Here's a quick way to figure out what campaigns should be doing with wealth... review Game of Thrones, watch a good adaptation of The Count of Monte Christo and read about rennaisance Venice. Then how complex, dangerous and exciting money can make a campaign should be pretty obvious.

It just takes a shift in emphasis...

 

[iserith]

In my current campaign, Downtime Activities and Lifestyle Expenses did for a lot of the gold in the apprentice tier. Now that they are leaving apprentice tier, they've gotten some decent cash. Two of the PCs have full plate armor which was costly and they do buy an awful lot of healing potions.

Recently, the PCs bought a guildhall and are currently adding a tavern, chapel, and/or library to it (they haven't decided which two of the three) which is costing them thousands of gold. In exchange, they get certain benefits from these buildings, such as a free chance at Research downtime activity for the library, free divine rituals, or a big bonus to the Carousing roll. All of these are useful benefits in this campaign. (Here "free" means "doesn't cost them anything else, including time, going forward after the initial expenditure.")

If I run a similar style campaign in the future, I may expand upon these rules before play. Right now, it's sort of ad hoc.

 

[Jester David]

The entire town can, by expending ALL its liquid cash, afford to buy that many. Does the entire town want to blow its whole wad on 750 ships? Even the farmers, the tailors, and barkeeps? Does every farmer in the settlement have a 1/20,000th share of ownership in a ship?

Unless the people doing the buying have access to the entire town's liquid wealth, you're not going to be able to unload 750 ships on that town. And, being able to unload any ships on the town is predicated on there being a willing buyer. There is no rule a willing buyer must exist, or that a willing buyer must have the resources to buy what they want to buy. If you want to let your players sell ships, even 750 of them, and even to a town that is entirely landlocked, feel free to do so. Just be aware that if the PCs are throwing around too much money for your taste it is because you allowed them to do so.

Right. But the point is if the town can theoretically pool their money to afford 750 ships, the player characters should easily be able to unload a measly 3 our 4 sailing ships.

Which is the ridiculous part. Because the economy has to support adventurers buying and selling items worth thousands of gold pieces and treasure that amounts to the same, then the amount of capital in settlements is ludicrously high. So you end up with a situation where the players expect to be able to just sell off a couple sailing ships in a town of just 5,000 people.
And even if you reduce the amount of gold to a tenth, that's still 75 sailing ships.

If you shrink things down to 1% of their former value, that's still 7 1/2 sailing ships. At that point you can do the funky DM tricks. Such as justify selling ships as being such an investment that it takes time, and takes such a high percentage of the towns' money that they might just buy one.

 

[jasper]

And how many adventurers does our world have?

SUDDENLY ALL OF THOSE WITH INTERNET ACCESS SCREAMED OUT. AS IF THEY SUDDENLY REALISED, THEY WERE JUST NPCS!

 

[Sithikurro]

I had the same problems with my players when we switched to DnD 5ed. In 3.5 (and 3.0) buying (or making) magic items was an important part of levelling up. The 5th edition resotred the unusualness of magic items and suddenly a typical adventuring party had lots of gold but no ready means of investing it. So I designed simple but fun rules for a player-owned manor, with purchasable upgrades, game-mechanic bonuses and of course endless troubles that owning lands entails.
My players loved their new house, also because it gave them purpose and a place to care about PM me if you're interested in the rules, they're available on DMGuild.

 

[pdzoch]

My problem with gold in D&D 5e is more about coinage treasure in the first place. Upon finding the coin treasure deep in the dungeon, my players look at the 1000 plus coins and just ignore it, especially copper. It was like finding a million pennies: Sure, it equates to $10000, but it is still a million pennies and 20k lbs! If it ain't gold, it ain't treasure has become the treasure filter. And they hate spending gold on mundane items because they hate carrying around the change!

 

[pdzoch]

But gold enables the purchase of big ticket items like a manor or castle and to establish a lifestyle as a patron in the campaign world, funding future adventurers. That's the goal anyway -- like others in the post, we seldom can make it that far in the campaign before the group changes drastically or the rules change (or the data crash looses all characters and campaign notes).

 

[Sithikurro]

Or you can reverse the order of events: give them a manor/castle/base in the beginning of their adventure (they can find the deed/will etc in a treasure hoard), it can be in bad repair etc. All the further adventures serve the purpose of restoring the lands and manor to their proper glory. It really changes the traditional perspective.

 

[iserith]

My problem with gold in D&D 5e is more about coinage treasure in the first place. Upon finding the coin treasure deep in the dungeon, my players look at the 1000 plus coins and just ignore it, especially copper. It was like finding a million pennies: Sure, it equates to $10000, but it is still a million pennies and 20k lbs! If it ain't gold, it ain't treasure has become the treasure filter. And they hate spending gold on mundane items because they hate carrying around the change!

In my current campaign, I had a Silver Rush happen for a few weeks of game time - some mysterious figure in town (later revealed to be a yuan-ti cult battling wererats in the dungeon) was buying up all the silver at gold prices. So the players were loving it when they found silver and were offloading it for gold. This later led to some tough decisions when they discovered the wererats and yuan-ti: Silvered weapons were now really expensive, so that made dealing with the threat of the wererats harder. And killing the yuan-ti would basically end the Silver Rush from which they were greatly profiting. Hmm, what's an adventurer to do?

Well, they ended up holding back some silver and having their fighter (a blacksmith) craft some silvered arrows while stealing the silvered scimitars of the yuan-ti. They slaughtered the yuan-ti and wererats, then pulled off a major scam to keep the Silver Rush going for one more week while they offloaded the cache of silver they found in the Yuan-ti Nightmare Speaker's lair. This burst the bubble in the market and led to economic decline in town... which later led to the PCs buying property cheaper than they normally could (see my post on the guildhall upthread). So it worked out for them on all fronts because they were clever, if a bit unscrupulous.

 

[Sithikurro]

Iserith, as if I was reading a Black Company's adventure