der_kluge
Adventurer
This is a multi-faceted problem. The economics of D&D make absolutely no sense. A peasant supposedly earns just a few silver per day, yet a dragon might have 10s of thousands of gold in a hoard just a few miles away. This begs the question - where the heck did the dragon get all that from??
A solution to this problem, IME, requires several things.
The inverse also requires work...
I also don't require the PCs to deal with transactions less than 1gp. In other words, don't do the math when you buy an ale for 5cp at the local tavern. It's just not worth dealing with, unless you're playing in an extremely impoverished world, but that's not typical.
A solution to this problem, IME, requires several things.
- don't give out so much cash. In the real world, if you broke into someone's house (their lair), killed them, and then looted them, you'd be walking away with antiques, jewelry, watches, maybe a coin collection, and other assorted things. Unless the person was a drug dealer, you wouldn't be walking away with bundles of cash. But that tends to be the expectation in D&D.
- monsters (except for dragons) don't have any real use for money. A lot of monsters simply wouldn't have a treasure pile. They just wouldn't. The only way some would is if they brought back a dead adventurer to a nest and it was eaten, and whatever wasn't eaten, remained. But any sort of creature that travels over a territory would just kill and eat its victim where the battle happened. A hydra isn't dragging bodies back to its nest for fun. In my world, as well, dragons rarely attack humans, because they're not stupid. A dragon can live a long, long life so long as it leaves civilization alone. The moment a dragon attacks a merchant caravan, it invites paladins to come and kill it. As such, they don't tend to have tons of gold coins in their lairs - because they wouldn't have easy access to that stuff.
- In reality, adventurers wouldn't wander around with thousands of gold pieces in their pockets. A) it's really heavy, and B) people don't tend to walk around in the real world with thousands of dollars on them. So, even slain adventurers shouldn't have piles and piles of coins.
- treasure, more often than not, should be interesting stuff. I've started to spend more time thinking about treasure - and chatGPT is useful here, in helping me design interesting "mundane" things that the PCs can find interesting, but that don't necessarily have a huge intrinsic value. Last game, they found a key that had religious significance and lore (was completely mundane) yet I told them that it could serve as a reliquary for the purposes of the Holy Aura spell, should they ever get to that level. That's something they'll hold onto, even though it has no real monetary value, although it does to priests of that particular faith.
The inverse also requires work...
- Most city gates apply a tax, but most GMs don't really bother with this sort of thing. One could implement a "weapon tax" at a gate. So, for each longsword, dagger, etc, the party is carrying, they have to pay a fee to enter. Most D&D players are adults, and as such, we pay bills, and tend to hate that. So, I think part of the neglect here stems from the fact that paying these kinds of taxes is just gloriously unfun.
- I don't readily sell magic items in my game. If the party manages to find them, it's usually because a thieves' guild has some, and they're always interested in trades and barter, but never outright selling. BUT - most of my major cities have alchemists who sell a wide variety of potions. I've found that PCs are happy to spend a couple of hundred gold on a potion that will turn them into a duck for an hour, even if they never find a use for it.
- Poisons. Like potions, sometimes my PCs will have the opportunity to find nefarious individuals who craft and/or sell poisons. In my last campaign, they found such a dealer (a cleric of Talona) and for an additional +200gp they could bump the DC of the poison up by 1. I think they spent 3,000 gp on a couple of contact poisons that caused paralysis that had a Con DC of 19.
- I haven't spent much time thinking about it, but having a vendor who sells "common" magic items, might also be a good way to alleviate the party of cash. A lot of the common magic items are admittedly kind of dumb, so I'd want to sit down and make a list of actually interesting things that people would want to buy, and give them some prices.
I also don't require the PCs to deal with transactions less than 1gp. In other words, don't do the math when you buy an ale for 5cp at the local tavern. It's just not worth dealing with, unless you're playing in an extremely impoverished world, but that's not typical.
