Uses for gold:
- Fabricating claims on choice counties or duchies
- Hiring Mercenaries
- "Gifting" to approve vassal or liege opinions
- Creating or usurping Duchy and Kingdom titles
- Buying a Papal Indulgence
- Building additional holdings in your demesne
I mean, you're looking at like 600 or 700 gold and 2 years just to
start to most bare-bones castl -
Oh, wait. Totally wrong game. My bad.
Seriously, though, if your D&D world buys into the whole faux feudalism motif then significant sums of gold become something relevant to the land-holders of the realm. We're talking about sums that can be exchanged for land and infrastructure. The "money is for peasants" matra of the landed nobility drops really quickly when you start talking about the kind of money that can rent an army of veteran mercenaries, siege a castle, and take the former occupant's head. Enough money makes land change hands one way or the other. Possession of land translates into control of the common law in a region - control over people.
While your PC probably isn't hording gold sufficient to usurp a county or kingdom it's pretty much a given that somebody out there (a legitimate claimant or otherwise) is trying to reach that point and other folks want to stop them. So really large sums of GPs represent potential energy in terms of political power. Sufficient quantities can, at least theoretically, be traded for anything else in a civilized society if your transaction eventually goes through a ruler. The defining characteristic of the ruler is holding a monopoly on violence / use of force in his or her realm, after all.
Sometimes its amusing to count your gold into stacks that approximate how much it would cost to buy the right to punch an obnoxious lordling in the nose without any legal woes. Personally, I prefer to keep it in small chests representing how much it would take to enable Count Alfonso to sack Count Bertold's keep and make sure his nephew Sir Cedric meets an unfortunate "accident" during the siege, but I'm strange and vindictive that way.
Marty Lund