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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6546052" data-attributes="member: 37579">A lot of classic characters tended to live hand-to-mouth. Conan, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Elric to an extent. They find a treasure and then spend said treasure. And most fantasy stories start out with tight purse strings or the protagonists struggling to make ends meet, such as the Kingkiller Chronicle, Wheel of Time, and some characters in Game of Thrones. Even the franchise fiction, such as the Drizzt books or the Dragonlance Chronicles series have heroes with limited means who aren't "making it rain". I imagine that goes hand-in-hand with the everyman farmboy protagonist. A useful trope as they learn about the world at the same time as the audience making it easier to understand the book. And a convention of being young is being poor. Fantasy books and other fiction where the protagonists don't want for money are rare. Harry Potter might be an exception, but the first book hews closer to fairy tales in structure, and finding out your unknown family was exceedingly wealthy is a trope of that genre (although Harry's money never really seems to be useful, so he might as well be poor).</blockquote>