Kraydak said:
To which I reply that if you drop your return on investment much from 3ed (removing the purchasing of magic items, mainly), then gold completely devalues. Because DnD power is personal rather than societal (high level people don't need armies, they are armies), people don't actually have anything to spend money on and so don't value it. Instead, high level people work with a currency based on the +1 longsword rather than the gold piece, the magic item market reforms etc...
If you remove useful magic items altogether, you lose one of the basic (and succesful) design principles of DnD.
The question of what is gold useful for is a good one, but given DnD's power structure, the answer becomes "buying power" or "nothing" very fast. Which is cool in its own right. A "colonialism on crack" DnD world with high level characters playing the part of westerners wandering around a world filled with local (but to the HLCs irrelevant) potentates. Without access to real power (levels) or wealth to which to bribe people with real power (magic items or gold to turn into items), the locals would be background while the HLCs duke it out over "natural resources" (adventuring sites). Watching players try to come up with some amusing use (there is no practical one) for a few 100k gp might be fun.
Maybe the disconnects in this discussion are over terms.
The problem here is that we are using "gold" in the 3.5 sense to mean "wealth"--from buying that first basic longsword to the millions of gold pieces necessary to buy that 3.5 complete set of +5 everything, plus widgets.
But if we let wealth scale in that fashion, then we ignore the stages of wealth. And 3.5 pretty much does ignore the stages. At first level, by the RAW, you can be hurting a little for money, but the characters are hardly poor (usually). By 2nd level, by the guidelines, the characters are already outfitted well. By 4th, they have access to ever piece of mundane equipment they could possibly want, except for their own galley or such.
In D&D, there are potentially three useful layers of wealth. I'll label them in D&D terms, but don't get too caught up in the labels. I think the issue we are seeing is the way characters can accumulate a lot one layer which translates directly into something in a higher layer:
1. Copper/Silver Wealth - Where a character fits on the basic subsistence scale. A guy without two coppers to rub together has to find a job with room and board just to stay afloat. A guy rolling in silver has no mundane needs that aren't being met, but there are definite limits on what he can buy. (He can hire a few guards long term, or a small army short term, but not more, for example.)
2. Gold/Platinum/Gem Wealth - Where a character fits in the "mover and shaker" scale. Here, you can hire armies, build keeps, do extensive bribes, throw lavish parties, have your own information network, etc. You can also buy any kind of minor magic that qualifies as a commodity. This only translates into personal power indirectly, based on the character's skill (and luck) at using the wealth.
3. Major Item/Unique Treaure Wealth - Things that may not be exactly priceless, but nevertheless command a price way out of scale with what you would expect at first glance. These are not commodities in any shape, form, or fashion. Characters with this kind of wealth can translate it directly into personal power, when it isn't already. That diamond as big as your fist isn't measured in "gold pieces". It's measured in how good a magic sword you can trade for with it.
Here I'm using "minor" magic item to mean anything that you can buy as a commodity, and "major" magic item to mean anything you can't. Necessarily, each group would draw the line in different places. The only way you could spend "gold" to get a "major" item is for special story reason combined with a lot of it. For example, you have 100,000 gold, and the wizard that has no liquid cash is willing to sell you that major sword for it, even though it's practically a steal.
D&D 3.5, especially the Magic Item Compendium with its reduced prices, works hard to collapse the distinction between the layers. Even the near artifacts have prices. But it doesn't have to be this way. It's perfectly reasonable, for example, to have a campaign world where "+2 swords are a necessary part of every talented warriors equipment, but +3 swords and better are one-of-a-kind heirlooms, attainable only by force or by trading something equivalent." In order for each DM to set that point where they want, you need a way to divorce "gold" from "major magic item acquisition".
