Cash money

Naked Man and I often lock horns about money.  Not real world money though, just the currency that we use in our RPGs.  Recently we have been talking about how our characters interact with gold and how we would like for it to work.  NM loves the idea of gold mattering to characters.  He is a big fan of them seeking out treasure to buy the things they want, keeping track of expenses, and budgeting.  In his ideal world we would each keep track of exactly how many coins we have of each denomination and have fun collecting old and obscure currencies that we can then try to convert into more useful coinage.

I, on the other hand, built a whole roleplaying system where player wealth is described simply by Destitute - Poor - Professional - Landowner - Mayor - Royal - Monarch.  What level you are at tells you what stuff you can buy and what you can own.

I often give NM trouble because in our DnD game I do a lot of rounding of money and don't bother to keep meticulous track of it.  I also complain about pricing of things when those prices don't make sense to me.  For example, early on we ended up in a big city and I wanted to learn spells.  The prices seemed ludicrous to me, because to learn a single level 1 spell was 1000g.  1000g could buy me a decent magical item, so the idea that it cost 1000g to just look at someone else's spellbook for an hour seemed absurd to me.  Who in the world is paying those prices?  The person selling the spells doesn't even expend anything when they make a sale!  These strange prices often come up because we are combining sources from a variety of editions, some of which are decades old.  This leads to some strange situations.

For example, in our last session we suddenly got rich.  Up until this point we had accumulated roughly 30,000g between all of us.  About half had been spent on various things like spell research and magic items, and the rest we were carrying around in cash.  In this session we sold a bunch of items we had gotten in our recent adventure for a total of 70,000g.  50,000g of that was in just 2 items that we were selling because they weren't much use.  It makes sense in the lore of the world that these items would be valuable and sought after - they had a history and were completely unique.  Unfortunately that windfall makes it hard for us to take money seriously otherwise.

How do you make yourself worry about small change when you randomly stumble upon single items worth as much as all the loot you have ever seen?  I think DnD has always had this sort of problem because as you level up you find more and more expensive and powerful things, and this leads to out of control inflation from the perspective of characters.  

It is hard to worry about spending 100g on something when you will randomly open a box and find 10,000g in it!

This trouble is exascerbated by our current campaign style.  We are on the clock trying to save the world from apocalypse.  Adventurers that take long breaks and choose their missions based on monetary rewards can interact with world economics in fun ways.  Do we go fight the ogres, which is easy, or do we delve into the lich's tomb, which is dangerous, but probably much more rewarding?  That is a good question.  However, our adventures are often part of saving the world and so we don't have a lot of choice.  Chasing ogres for cash isn't happening.  I suspect that interesting monetary dilemmas are extremely hard to maintain in a race to avoid armageddon.

One thing NM has wanted is for spell components to be expensive.  He likes the idea of spells that have expensive components that we have to either find or pay for as a way to bleed off some of our money.  That works for me, but it is a tricky balance to strike.  Recently I came upon a bunch of spells, some of which had expensive components.  However, the spells were extremely weak, much worse than other ones that didn't have any extra cost.  That isn't going to make for any interesting decisions - why would I pay 1000g to cast an inferior spell?

After some back and forth NM decided to improve those spells and suddenly there were some interesting choices.  A few of the spells were decidedly more powerful than similar free ones, or at least offered a unique perk.  I like that situation, as it lets me choose between free spells or spending cash on something new and exciting.  I have to decide what to prepare each day, so I face the challenges of figuring out when I will need the big guns and getting ready to spend resources on them.

There are ways to make gold interesting in a fantasy RPG, but I don't know that they end up being worth the effort.  When I think about fantasy stories none of them ever involve the characters taking months off to go fight trivial opponents to collect cash.  That isn't a bulletproof argument though, because we aren't playing a book, we are playing a game, and these are different things.  

When I am running games I don't think I am willing to put in the effort to build a complete economic system for the players to interact with.  It is just too much, and I am not interested in something half baked.  NM, on the other hand, seems dead set on including an economics simulator in his fantasy RPG.