Money in DnD makes no damn sense. If you go by the rules as published characters have absurd amounts of gold and carry around bandoliers of healing potions, laugh at the cost of spells and ingredients, and upturn economies just by wandering into town.
Naked Man has tried to fix that in our current campaign, and I can see why. Gold scaling gets rapidly out of control, and players who are poor have more interesting decisions to make much of the time. Unfortunately there are some issues with scaling back money that are hard to deal with.
For example, in our latest adventure at level 4 we encountered hobgoblins. They have about 150g worth of stuff on them in the form of armour and weapons. One would imagine that if they could afford that much stuff that they would have lots of cash, but mostly they had in the neighborhood of a 1g. That makes little sense, but the legions of hobgoblins we have slaughtered would have left us stupidly rich if they had appropriate cash on hand considering their obvious wealth, so we take our tiny amounts of gold and just accept that all the weapons and armour are 'monster weapons and armour' which means they are nearly worthless.
Just recently we attacked a dragon and managed to drive it off, though not kill it. We got about 200g worth of cash from it. The adventure certainly had it listed as having far greater sums, probably multiple thousands of gold pieces, but Naked Man did his usual thing of chopping the cash rewards to a tiny fraction of their normal value. That makes sense - thousands of gold pieces from this hoard would warp the campaign to bits.
The problem is that in the lore of the world that dragon is supposed to have a treasure hoard. It doesn't even have enough money to buy a decent suit of armour! That 'hoard' we found isn't enough cash to buy splint armour, a shield, and a sword for a random city guard. Sorry dragon, you are pathetic.
Thousands of gold pieces would have been a problem. Hundreds of gold pieces seems absurd. How can random guards and starting adventurers have more money than a powerful dragon?
But I won't blame Naked Man for this. The game *requires* absurdity one way or another. Here is the logic:
The players must kill huge numbers of enemies to gain levels.
The players will take all the accumulated wealth from the enemies they kill.
Those enemies have enough money to buy good equipment.
Therefore, no matter how you slice it, the players should have the accumulated wealth of huge numbers of appropriately geared soldiers. They players then use this wealth and their newly found levels to fight more powerful things, which should have commensurately more cash, increasing the player's money holdings.
You have to break that chain somewhere or the players end up with absurd amounts of money from consolidating the total cash reserves of huge numbers of enemies. No way around it. You can do what I do, which is have fights be much more rare and levels be based on accomplishing goals rather than vanquishing foes. That goes against the basic plan of DnD though. You can insist that somehow when enemies die the characters don't gain much money, which is what Naked Man is doing, but of course that makes the world make no sense. You could just only pit the characters against zombies and slimes and bugbears so that they never find any money because their opponents don't have any, but that isn't how adventures are normally written. No matter which link in the chain you break, you have big problems.
I don't have a good solution. Naked Man's solution, given that we are doing DnD with normal experience rules and running through published scenarios, is pretty much his only option aside from just throwing up his hands in despair and accepting that we will be stupid rich. If you are going to slaughter tons of people who are wealthy enough to have expensive equipment and take all their stuff, something has to break sometime.
Rich is a relative term. Just give the players things to spend their money on: don't limit yourself to the equipment page in the player's handbook.
ReplyDeleteLet them buy business investments, with risks and rewards. Let them buy land, let them buy ships, hire followers, even command armies! Let them bribe their way out of trouble, and into high places. Let them use their wealth and their reputation to get access to places that common folk can't go: and give them reason to feel poor again when they finally reach an audience with a Count who owns everything around them as far as they can see; including, technically, the heros themselves!
Let them buy land. Let them invest in buildings, castles, keeps, villages. Let them use their fortunes to re-build the villages ravaged by dragon-fire, and trampled by evil warlords. Let them use their wealth to offer diplomatic gifts to the right people at court: or at least, the ones who *seem* like the right people.
Give them titles, noble rights, and favours to call in: and all the attendent responsiblities and favours owed that go along with that sort of relationship. Make them responsible for the fate of a small village; a town; a county; even a kingdom. Make other people suffer the consequences of their actions, for good or for ill. Give them a sense that what they do with their money *matters*: and then don't worry about how much they have. Instead, make the players worry about what they want to *do* with it: they'll be happier, and you will, too.
Just my $0.02,
Kevin
Sky's characters rarely want to buy anything that doesn't enhance his combat skills. I've tried to encourage him in that direction with minimal success.
ReplyDeleteThe entire basis for this rant is slightly off - in that campaign, you're getting the full amount of treasure that's listed. It's a young dragon that just arrived, and it didn't bring a hoard with it.
Hobgoblins wear chain mail, which is 75gp, re-sale is 37gp (true in all economies, real and fantastic). Plus the cost to adjust it so it fits. And it's got a taint on it having been used by foul humanoids to kill innocents - can you ever really get the hobgoblin smell out of it? So maybe you get 30gp? We don't want to forget the longsword with a straight re-sale value of 7.5gp, and 5gp of shield.
Note that your combined group isn't actually strong enough to lug 64lb of "treasure" per hobgoblin for two days to the local village, where it would quickly overwhelm the demand for such items anyway. So you need to drag it to Neverwinter. The local merchants and guilds aren't going to look to kindly on your dumping a bunch of gear on their market, so maybe you don't get the full 40-50%. Or maybe you should be playing "Merchants & Markets" instead of D&D. :-)
And of course the hobgoblins don't have any money - they had to spend it all to get the armor and weapons!
I don't think there's much reason to think hobgoblins would have money. If it's anything like any D&D world I've experienced they wouldn't shop at the same places characters would, if their society even mints coins at all. Plus, a soldier in an army might have very expensive gear to support killing other people but probably has little to no cash on hand in a combat zone. A farmer might, all told, be very "wealthy" if you simply added up the value of all of their tools, livestock, etc. That doesn't mean they aren't struggling to make ends meet.
ReplyDeleteI agree that there is an essential problem with the absurdity of how money works, especially when it exponentially inflates with character level. The way money works often feels more like a video game than a fantasy story (where money doesn't seem to come up all that often).
I recall one campaign I ran I went the opposite direction and had the players find a massive hoard of treasure, more than they could ever carry, right at the beginning. They spent the rest of the campaign being able to buy whatever they wanted, but that was all pretty secondary to the story.