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Message: <blockquote data-quote="OB1" data-source="post: 7759502" data-attributes="member: 6796241">Finally caught up on this thread and figure this is as good a point as any to dip in..Maintaining a wealthy lifestyle requires around 1,500 gp a year, an Aristocratic one 3,600.  Assume you want to retire from adventuring at some point means a human would need 45,000+ gold minimum.  Want to build your own castle?  You'll need 500,000gp just to build and another 140,000 per year to maintain.  That's a CR17+ treasure hoard every year.Of course, all of those things come with their own complications, as does spending money trying to buy magic items, as doing so could draw the attention of other powerful beings.Spending money is all grounded in the particular story you are involved in.  And to the point of this thread and Mearl's statement, not being as granular about the rules allows DMs to better tell the story that their individual table is interested in.  Could this mean that there is a disagreement at the table over how much 100,000 gp should be able to purchase?  Yes, it might, but that disagreement carries a much lower consequence to it than one over whether or not the evil Orc hit you with it's sword and killed you. Combat in D&D takes up so much design space because it is both the primary player agency mechanism and has the highest stakes.  As long as the rules of life and death are seen as fair, the players can use that to impact the world with an expectation that the results will not be at DM whim. For example, if the DM decides that no amount of money can buy a castle because the King must grant the land, the players can use the rules of combat to kill the King and build the castle anyhow.  This in turn, leads back to the central conceit of the game as it was designed, for the DM and players to create an exciting story of bold adventurers who confront deadly perils.And that to me is the whole point of the 5E design philosophy.  What are the minimum amount of rules necessary to inspire and tell that exciting story?  I'd argue that the extensive combat rules both inspire the imagination in exciting action packed scenes and give players a sense of agency without perfect certainty leading to careful weighing of options on how to engage the world.  Extensive travel rules or shopping rules just don't, IMO, have the same rewards for added complexity.  There are also diminishing returns on increasing the complexity of combat to these goals as well.</blockquote>

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