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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 9332930" data-attributes="member: 6777737">I think training costs and upkeep costs were a common house rule in part to suck away some measure of wealth and to encourage the PCs to keep gold on hand, but also just for verisimilitude. I'm pretty sure we settled on 100 gp / level, which I think is what the 2e optional rule is.I call them a house rule because (a) most editions do not have them as standard rules, and, (b) I do not think the 1e DMG's formula for training costs is functional. It's either an absurd if not outright impossible amount of treasure for the modules we ran, many of which were written for Basic, 2e, or out of late 80s and early 90s Dragon. So, no, I don't buy anyone using that very long. I know nobody that used that rule as written.In other words, I think people used the idea of them, but I think -- and my experience says -- people house-ruled them into something less stupid. Which is basically how all of 1e worked.All this gold you'd be adding in isn't actually gold. It had to be added to the module specifically to cover training, and that money is already spent. It's just fodder that's earmarked for training. It's not there to give you a gold reward that the player can decide how to spend. It's there because it has to be there because if it's not, then advancement halts and XP progression halts. You had to add in gold so that the game functions with your training costs. But all the gold does is support the training cost system. Meanwhile, the rest of the game doesn't really function because of the way XP and gp interact.There's not more stuff to buy in the game this way. There's not a new table of cool gear to pine for. It's like a loan from the DM. "Here, track and carry this gold for me until you get back to town, where you will immediately mark it off so you can gain a level and continue to earn XP." That's not treasure. That's an illusion. It's a false mechanic. It's putting boulders into the PC's backpacks so they feel like they accomplished something, while reminding them that encumbrance is an opportunity cost.And even if the amount of gp required is so high "because the 'XP for gp' rule warps things," that still doesn't work because the amount of XP you need at high level is multiple orders of magnitude more than the amount of gp that training costs. The training costs are prohibitively expensive at low level, and totally irrelevant at higher levels because XP costs so out-scale them.It was Against the Cult of the Reptile God, Village of Hommlet, or something out of Dungeon that we were running when someone found the 1e training rule. The DM looked through the module and said that unless the PCs loot literally everything including all the friendly NPCs, then there wasn't enough gold to reach level 2 or 3 even though there's more than enough XP.I do remember modules doing that thing where they tell you stuff like statues and doors are worth thousands of gp to the right buyer, but either it weighs several tons or you have to break it (and ruin it) to move it. Or they do obnoxious stuff like give you 50,000 cp (only 5,000 lbs!). Is that what you're counting? Because that's not actually treasure. Those are jokes and scenery. It would take months to extract it if at all. So... no. The modules we ran did not have anywhere near enough wealth.You could certainly just run them as they are and whatever is there is there, and when you get done you just run whatever is appropriate. It "works" in that the game is playable if you ignore the stupidity, but it means you should just reliably stop earning XP fairly often at low-level.</blockquote>

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