I have been running a campaign for about a year now, and the big thing I've noticed is that gold isn't that great as a reward. My players are sitting on gold with nothign to really spend it on. Sure they buy drinks and food, and rooms at the local pubs, and taverns they come across. They buy the provisions they need, rope, lanterns and the like, but all of that doesn't add up to much. For a while it was good cause they would buy better mundane armor with it but that's become a non issue now. In older editions players would save money for that magic item they want or need, but no prices are given for magic items now, and it pretty well says in the PHB or DMG (i don't recall which) that unless your DM allows it, players can't buy these things usually. So what do they do with this gold, it's not enticing for them any more. I'd like to let them buy magic items, but I have no idea how much a +1 long sword would\should cost. What's a DM (a noobish one at that) to do?
I make my parties spend gold on big social gatherings. The best way to attract high-class clients who need problems solved is to throw expensive parties. I usually ask my players how much gold they plan on spending on a celebratory bash after they get back from a dungeon and the more money they throw around, the cooler people they meet who need things done, or maybe they get more information about their next quest because their party attracts more people who just know things. My players sometimes have dumped thousands of gold into "multi-day" bashes in order to get an edge on an adventure.
EDIT: Other than that, other social things like donations to local temples, maybe a druid or ranger conservation effort outside of town, paying off the local mob/thieves guild, etc. are good ways for players to build up connections in the community and spending their gold so it doesn't pile up so high. There are also base-building mini games that exist, so that the party can buy of a crappy old manor or keep and fix it up, hire some underlings to take care of it, and have a nice place to come home to and display all their cool trophies after each adventure.
EDIT EDIT: You can even que up a fun bit of adventure where the party spends a lot of time and effort building up their home over the course of several adventures and then is sent off on a long quest. When they get home, they find that one of their minions sort of assumed control of the place while they were gone and has fortified the area and bought up some monster mercenaries and such, maybe they are even terrorizing the surrounding lands using the player's keep as a base of operations. It's very Robin Hood, minus Mr. Hood. Then the party has to bust into their own home and fight to take it back.
Those are good ideas but not terribly applicable to the campaign i'm Running. I'll keep that in mind though. They players can't even get their current gear enchanted in this edition which feels like an odd omission as it's been part of the game for quite some time.
I'm currently running the Rage of Demons adventure. Money was good for them at the get go since they didn't have much for weapons and armor or basic provisions, but now that they are geared up it's not been much use to them. A lot of this is just a different way of thinking. I'm used to players being able to buy the enchantments and items they want, so money was always and incentive. Now I've had to come up with other things, which is fine, but when they get to a large city like Graklehstugh, or Baulder's Gate or something, I would think they would be able to buy magic items more easily. Currently they have either been coerced by the city guard (do this in exchange for your freedom. The rogue has sticky fingers), or "volentold" by a powerful npc to get things done, but a reward of a large sum of gold isn't really cutting the mustard with them or me.
In the newest story-line, Tomb of Annihilation, the NPC that hires the party offers to give them each a rare magical item if they complete her quest before she dies. You may want to consider something like that in place of gold if your players are becoming less swayed by money. Maybe give them payment in scrolls or other consumable magical items as well. Those sorts of things tend to have gold values attached to them that you can do a treasure conversion for. And spell scrolls are equally nice gold-sinks because if the party wizard wants to make those spells more permanent by transcribing them over to their spellbook, that costs gold and has a failure chance.
This edition sheds the mindset where gold is necessary for character development - unless your character is after full plate, chances are they'll run out of shopping to do by about level 3. This is unless you bring in the optional magic item crafting, purchase, and selling values listed in the DMG, but given how the game is balanced, I wouldn't recommend it. Buying magic items is not an "omission", it is a conscious design decision to make magic items feel special rather than mechanical (and to reduce the amount of insipid busywork of item creation and accounting).
The purpose of gold in 5e is instead whatever each character wants gold for. It is not the DM's responsibility to determine why characters want to be adventurers, although you should be instilling in your players the mindset that they need to figure this out. Most adventurers are (at least partially) in it for the money - to be able to afford to buy a homestead or temple, to purchase land and a noble title, to start their own business, or simply to raise enough to retire comfortably. It helps if there are subgoals along the way - raising money to pay off one's gambling debts, indulging in expensive downtime activities, or a family member's farm loans. D&D is not a video game - PCs have motivations outside of simply spending money on rote loot to get through the next adventure.
This isn't first edition, where players earned XP based squarely on the gold they made - party members have to determine why they're doing what they're doing, and whether their goals require currency. If you have the rare adventuring party whose motivations are entirely non-monetary, then you can tell them at some point to stop doing gold bookkeeping and focus on playing. Like any economy, gold in D&D only has value based on the value ascribed to it by the actors in that economy.
If you are willing to use some house rules the following could be interesting:
In my campaign players can occasionally find a merchant who sells a magic item and they find some formulas for crafting magic items where they also have to spend their money to advance in the crafting process. Moreover i am planning to use the Stronghold Rules, another option to spend the hard earned money. There are also some cool Gem socketing rules, where players can enhance their gear with gems. Crafting the sockets into gear will consume different amounts of money. This could also be a possibility to use the gold and give the players an option to enhance their gear. Keep in mind that these mechanics allow players to get stronger and therefore the basic balance of the game won't be suitable in all situations. But as a DM you can modify encounters by instinct and throw some more monsters or monsters of higher levels at them to keep the balance.
Where are players keeping their huge amounts of gold? I wouldn't allow characters to carry thousands of coins around with them - that could equal hundreds of pounds. They should have to pay a sizable percentage in order to keep their money secure, since it will become the target of thieves and other greedy monsters. In fact, a good way to deal with the whole issue is to have their money stolen. One way to secure a large amount of money is to build an entire stronghold around it with people/monsters/magic to guard it, and that's gonna cost some.
the first thing most players get is a Bag of Holding and just shove everything it there.
It also depends on how much realism you want in your fantasy game and if you use encumbrance or not, most games I've played in and all the ones I ran don't use it
Of course, the Bag of Holding. Well, it may be not a rare magic item, but it certainly shouldn't be considered standard equipment. I wouldn't have it in every campaign, especially if it was contributing to players being blase about their gold.
I don't use detailed encumbrance but I do draw the line at some point, otherwise characters will have everything but the kitchen sink along.
Where are players keeping their huge amounts of gold? I wouldn't allow characters to carry thousands of coins around with them - that could equal hundreds of pounds. They should have to pay a sizable percentage in order to keep their money secure, since it will become the target of thieves and other greedy monsters. In fact, a good way to deal with the whole issue is to have their money stolen. One way to secure a large amount of money is to build an entire stronghold around it with people/monsters/magic to guard it, and that's gonna cost some.
Gold is usually only presented as the value of the party treasure, abstracted from the various gems, art pieces, etc. they have found. Since gold can be traded at face value for carryable platinum or gems, requiring the party to keep track of how they’re carrying their gold is needless busywork, especially if it gets stolen all the time. If players are already blasé about gold, making a bunch of rules for accounting and then stealing their hoard is not going to help.
I was only suggesting a way around the problem of characters having too much gold. I'm not advocating introducing a bunch of rules, only drawing reasonable common sense lines about what players can carry and, if they can't carry it, what they do with it. Turning gold into an "abstraction" strains my credulity, since it assumes there are money changers or banks everywhere where characters can just cash their gold, copper and silver in for gems and platinum. Why not just give them cred cards? Treasure is a physical thing and should be treated as such. It should also be important for most characters - wealth is a pretty common motivator in this life. So unless they are ascetics or otherwise adverse to acquiring wealth, characters should care about their gold, and if they don't, then I think there's something off with your storytelling. It's your game, and y'all play it how you want, but I think details are important; they enhance immersion and the roleplaying experience. Yeah, it's a fantasy game, but for me, the fantastic loses its appeal unless reality gets at least a bit of lip service. Again, I'm not advocating for nitpicky rules and busywork to slow the game down, but only for a general sense of consequences. Players at my table are not going to be filthy rich without having to consider some of the consequences.
I was thinking about that today, I might just take a trip down to Party city and A costume shop to get a bunch of fake coins, gems ,scrolls and stuff like that. They could just " find" a ship and use it to hold all their treasure.
One of my favorite ways of handling a rich group is to incite them into creating an adventure company, depending on their funds this could include things such as purchase of land or property from where they can run their company out of, as well as a ship for travel that is docked and taken care of for a fee of course. Nearly anything could be added that makes sense and you could easily make the cost of a property, ship, employees, renovations, care and maintenance high enough to burn through all that gold.
This also creates a great and easy way in for any adventure you might want to throw at them, people have heard of your company and sent a letter to your office requesting help. Have a funny secretary like character back at the office letting them know about new letters of send help received while the party is away. Something along those lines anyways.
One of my favorite ways of handling a rich group is to incite them into creating an adventure company, depending on their funds this could include things such as purchase of land or property from where they can run their company out of, as well as a ship for travel that is docked and taken care of for a fee of course. Nearly anything could be added that makes sense and you could easily make the cost of a property, ship, employees, renovations, care and maintenance high enough to burn through all that gold.
This also creates a great and easy way in for any adventure you might want to throw at them, people have heard of your company and sent a letter to your office requesting help. Have a funny secretary like character back at the office letting them know about new letters of send help received while the party is away. Something along those lines anyways.
Love this idea as it feels like promoting player agency. It’s also the plot of every ghostbusters movie, which can be used for further inspiration. Maybe there’s a local magistrate who is out to get the adventurers through death by red tape, so they can’t just murderhobo him and have to get creative. Maybe the adventurers lose the goodwill of the town and have to earn it back. Maybe the secretary is Thor in disguise. Go for it!
I think a decent idea might be to have traveling merchants show up once in a while carrying a bit of common magic items, not unlike the ones listed in XGTE. Have a few fun, quirky items (like the Wand of Scowls -- range your items from cheaper less desirable to super expensive, but for some reason extremely desirable (like maybe a sentient mechanical pet or something).
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
How do you get a one-armed goblin out of a tree?
Wave!
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
I have been running a campaign for about a year now, and the big thing I've noticed is that gold isn't that great as a reward. My players are sitting on gold with nothign to really spend it on. Sure they buy drinks and food, and rooms at the local pubs, and taverns they come across. They buy the provisions they need, rope, lanterns and the like, but all of that doesn't add up to much. For a while it was good cause they would buy better mundane armor with it but that's become a non issue now. In older editions players would save money for that magic item they want or need, but no prices are given for magic items now, and it pretty well says in the PHB or DMG (i don't recall which) that unless your DM allows it, players can't buy these things usually. So what do they do with this gold, it's not enticing for them any more. I'd like to let them buy magic items, but I have no idea how much a +1 long sword would\should cost. What's a DM (a noobish one at that) to do?
I make my parties spend gold on big social gatherings. The best way to attract high-class clients who need problems solved is to throw expensive parties. I usually ask my players how much gold they plan on spending on a celebratory bash after they get back from a dungeon and the more money they throw around, the cooler people they meet who need things done, or maybe they get more information about their next quest because their party attracts more people who just know things. My players sometimes have dumped thousands of gold into "multi-day" bashes in order to get an edge on an adventure.
EDIT: Other than that, other social things like donations to local temples, maybe a druid or ranger conservation effort outside of town, paying off the local mob/thieves guild, etc. are good ways for players to build up connections in the community and spending their gold so it doesn't pile up so high. There are also base-building mini games that exist, so that the party can buy of a crappy old manor or keep and fix it up, hire some underlings to take care of it, and have a nice place to come home to and display all their cool trophies after each adventure.
EDIT EDIT: You can even que up a fun bit of adventure where the party spends a lot of time and effort building up their home over the course of several adventures and then is sent off on a long quest. When they get home, they find that one of their minions sort of assumed control of the place while they were gone and has fortified the area and bought up some monster mercenaries and such, maybe they are even terrorizing the surrounding lands using the player's keep as a base of operations. It's very Robin Hood, minus Mr. Hood. Then the party has to bust into their own home and fight to take it back.
Those are good ideas but not terribly applicable to the campaign i'm Running. I'll keep that in mind though. They players can't even get their current gear enchanted in this edition which feels like an odd omission as it's been part of the game for quite some time.
So, what kind of game are you running? If I had a better idea, I may have some other suggestions.
I'm currently running the Rage of Demons adventure. Money was good for them at the get go since they didn't have much for weapons and armor or basic provisions, but now that they are geared up it's not been much use to them. A lot of this is just a different way of thinking. I'm used to players being able to buy the enchantments and items they want, so money was always and incentive. Now I've had to come up with other things, which is fine, but when they get to a large city like Graklehstugh, or Baulder's Gate or something, I would think they would be able to buy magic items more easily. Currently they have either been coerced by the city guard (do this in exchange for your freedom. The rogue has sticky fingers), or "volentold" by a powerful npc to get things done, but a reward of a large sum of gold isn't really cutting the mustard with them or me.
In the newest story-line, Tomb of Annihilation, the NPC that hires the party offers to give them each a rare magical item if they complete her quest before she dies. You may want to consider something like that in place of gold if your players are becoming less swayed by money. Maybe give them payment in scrolls or other consumable magical items as well. Those sorts of things tend to have gold values attached to them that you can do a treasure conversion for. And spell scrolls are equally nice gold-sinks because if the party wizard wants to make those spells more permanent by transcribing them over to their spellbook, that costs gold and has a failure chance.
This edition sheds the mindset where gold is necessary for character development - unless your character is after full plate, chances are they'll run out of shopping to do by about level 3. This is unless you bring in the optional magic item crafting, purchase, and selling values listed in the DMG, but given how the game is balanced, I wouldn't recommend it. Buying magic items is not an "omission", it is a conscious design decision to make magic items feel special rather than mechanical (and to reduce the amount of insipid busywork of item creation and accounting).
The purpose of gold in 5e is instead whatever each character wants gold for. It is not the DM's responsibility to determine why characters want to be adventurers, although you should be instilling in your players the mindset that they need to figure this out. Most adventurers are (at least partially) in it for the money - to be able to afford to buy a homestead or temple, to purchase land and a noble title, to start their own business, or simply to raise enough to retire comfortably. It helps if there are subgoals along the way - raising money to pay off one's gambling debts, indulging in expensive downtime activities, or a family member's farm loans. D&D is not a video game - PCs have motivations outside of simply spending money on rote loot to get through the next adventure.
This isn't first edition, where players earned XP based squarely on the gold they made - party members have to determine why they're doing what they're doing, and whether their goals require currency. If you have the rare adventuring party whose motivations are entirely non-monetary, then you can tell them at some point to stop doing gold bookkeeping and focus on playing. Like any economy, gold in D&D only has value based on the value ascribed to it by the actors in that economy.
Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in awhile.
I totally agree with this problem.
If you are willing to use some house rules the following could be interesting:
In my campaign players can occasionally find a merchant who sells a magic item and they find some formulas for crafting magic items where they also have to spend their money to advance in the crafting process. Moreover i am planning to use the Stronghold Rules, another option to spend the hard earned money. There are also some cool Gem socketing rules, where players can enhance their gear with gems. Crafting the sockets into gear will consume different amounts of money. This could also be a possibility to use the gold and give the players an option to enhance their gear. Keep in mind that these mechanics allow players to get stronger and therefore the basic balance of the game won't be suitable in all situations. But as a DM you can modify encounters by instinct and throw some more monsters or monsters of higher levels at them to keep the balance.
You can find the Stronghold Rules here: http://www.dmsguild.com/product/207377/WH-Fortresses-Temples--Strongholds-rules-for-building-and-customizing-playerowned-structures
What I do is I come up with insane prices for items and because they are rare items the party will buy them.( Want a Magic carpet? 25,000 gold. )
Have their gear or weapons break and need to be fixed
Give them the option to by a keep or ruined castle on the out skirts of town that they have to pay to fix up.
Let them buy a Spelljammer ship to cross the Ocean and hire a crew to sail it.
There are ways to do it
Where are players keeping their huge amounts of gold? I wouldn't allow characters to carry thousands of coins around with them - that could equal hundreds of pounds. They should have to pay a sizable percentage in order to keep their money secure, since it will become the target of thieves and other greedy monsters. In fact, a good way to deal with the whole issue is to have their money stolen. One way to secure a large amount of money is to build an entire stronghold around it with people/monsters/magic to guard it, and that's gonna cost some.
the first thing most players get is a Bag of Holding and just shove everything it there.
It also depends on how much realism you want in your fantasy game and if you use encumbrance or not, most games I've played in and all the ones I ran don't use it
Of course, the Bag of Holding. Well, it may be not a rare magic item, but it certainly shouldn't be considered standard equipment. I wouldn't have it in every campaign, especially if it was contributing to players being blase about their gold.
I don't use detailed encumbrance but I do draw the line at some point, otherwise characters will have everything but the kitchen sink along.
Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in awhile.
I was only suggesting a way around the problem of characters having too much gold. I'm not advocating introducing a bunch of rules, only drawing reasonable common sense lines about what players can carry and, if they can't carry it, what they do with it. Turning gold into an "abstraction" strains my credulity, since it assumes there are money changers or banks everywhere where characters can just cash their gold, copper and silver in for gems and platinum. Why not just give them cred cards? Treasure is a physical thing and should be treated as such. It should also be important for most characters - wealth is a pretty common motivator in this life. So unless they are ascetics or otherwise adverse to acquiring wealth, characters should care about their gold, and if they don't, then I think there's something off with your storytelling. It's your game, and y'all play it how you want, but I think details are important; they enhance immersion and the roleplaying experience. Yeah, it's a fantasy game, but for me, the fantastic loses its appeal unless reality gets at least a bit of lip service. Again, I'm not advocating for nitpicky rules and busywork to slow the game down, but only for a general sense of consequences. Players at my table are not going to be filthy rich without having to consider some of the consequences.
I was thinking about that today, I might just take a trip down to Party city and A costume shop to get a bunch of fake coins, gems ,scrolls and stuff like that. They could just " find" a ship and use it to hold all their treasure.
One of my favorite ways of handling a rich group is to incite them into creating an adventure company, depending on their funds this could include things such as purchase of land or property from where they can run their company out of, as well as a ship for travel that is docked and taken care of for a fee of course. Nearly anything could be added that makes sense and you could easily make the cost of a property, ship, employees, renovations, care and maintenance high enough to burn through all that gold.
This also creates a great and easy way in for any adventure you might want to throw at them, people have heard of your company and sent a letter to your office requesting help. Have a funny secretary like character back at the office letting them know about new letters of send help received while the party is away. Something along those lines anyways.
Try creating an opportunity that allows them to risk some of their gold for something big.
I think a decent idea might be to have traveling merchants show up once in a while carrying a bit of common magic items, not unlike the ones listed in XGTE. Have a few fun, quirky items (like the Wand of Scowls -- range your items from cheaper less desirable to super expensive, but for some reason extremely desirable (like maybe a sentient mechanical pet or something).
How do you get a one-armed goblin out of a tree?
Wave!