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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 8451897" data-attributes="member: 29398">While your analysis is quite good as far as it goes, I think there's one more step to it:Yes, "the game has moved away from troupe play in a shared sandbox and towards following the exploits of a particular group of characters", but beyond that the game has moved away from looking at what those characters do in the setting as a whole in favour of focusing almost exclusively on what they do while adventuring.Adventure-path play is the worst for this; the design expects the party to jump straight from one adventure to the next along the path until the path is complete, at which point the campaign ends.Put another way, there's very little if any design-level focus on downtime; on what characters might do when not out in the field.  Contrast this with 1e where downtime between adventures was almost baked into the rules, particularly via a) the very slow natural healing and b) having to train in order to level up; and in any case it was usually somewhat expected that a party - even one with no character turnover - would take some time off between adventures.Strongholds, houses, towers, guilds, etc. - setting those things up are all downtime activities, as is spending the requisite funds.  If the game as designed doesn't put any consideration into downtime it's no wonder these things just don't come up.Lifestyle Expenses are an active disincentive for a party to take downtime.I disagree about the not-worth-it part, but hirelings generally don't cost very much and thus aren't that useful in draining money from PCs.Magic items, yes.Another thing is some sort of party-member-revival insurance fund; such that if a party member dies and the survivors have to pay for getting said person revived, the insurance fund (which everyone's already chipped in to) covers it.Whci is one way you-as-DM can cause some adventuring-related expenses to arise: put costs on various spells.  Don't go the 3e route and insist on diamond dust, that was dumb.  But have it that a certain value - be it in goods, cash, or whatever - must be sacrificed in order to pay for divine* spells, whether cast by a PC or a hired NPC.* - this works best for divine spells as the offerings can simply vanish... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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