Blog Friday: Money Sinks in Tabletop Roleplaying Games

What exactly is the point of money in dragon games? In each edition of Dungeons and Dragons, there are rules for money and they are always a little weird: carrying money, spending money, the different denominations of money. Money is always good no matter what, and you don't need to worry about the king suddenly devaluing the Gold Piece or whatever. Early adventures, such as The Village of Hommlet, even featured the location of every NPC's spare change in case the thief decided to go pick-pocketing.

Now the obvious answer is that it's a game, don't worry about it. But here at Magnolia Keep we do nothing but worry, so we're gonna do that anyway. What I came up with is that money in games like DnD is a means of exchange not for goods and services, but for power (only the best analysis here), and that a lot of the way that normally works doesn't really do it for me.

via the National Gallery, The Battle of the Moneybags and the Strongboxes

When I, a young man of fourteen, first heard of the idea of treasure for XP, I thought it was ludicrous. Why on earth would you reward that over fighting monsters, which was (to me, who primarily played Pathfinder) clearly what the game was actually about. Learning more about the early history of DnD, such as Matt Colville’s What are Dungeons for?, it began to make sense: it’s a scoring mechanic, a concrete way to see how well you did. That is the point of money in those games, and your reward for building up that hoard was building a stronghold of some kind, a tradition that’s been kept alive by games like Basic Fantasy. The end reward of a DnD campaign well-played is that you get to play Chainmail or some other wargame instead.

3.X and 4.0 Dungeons and Dragons (and their derivatives) kept “money=power” through the magic item economy, where all that gold can be funneled into scrolls and amulets and magic armor for those with the patience to read through the sourcebooks (there was also . Fifth Edition suffered from the problem that, sans the magic item economy, there was nothing to spend money on, really. Another dozen healing potions? A pet? And so the game wrapped back around to building bases, from third party supplements like Stronghold and Followers to Bastions now being a thing in the new Dungeon Master’s Guide. 

What I find interesting about all these rulesets (except for the new DMG, haven’t read that) is they all exclusively touch on the fortress as, essentially, a money sink. Sure it also provides quest hooks and taxes and followers (and in the case of Strongholds and Followers, new powers. More on that in a second), but beyond that it’s not an especially involved process. The most mechanically complex I can think of is the Kingdom Rules from Pathfinder 2nd Edition, but as someone who ran that it was (at least for my table) too involved. So what is a GM to do? I ended up stumbling on two possible solutions, both (partially) stolen from other games.

Solution 1: Spending treasure for XP (aka keep players poor)

Lots of role playing games try to simulate the rapid gain and loss of wealth. Off the top of my head, Worlds Without Number even brings up PCs gaining Renown if they spend at least 25% of their moneys after a dungeon delve. After all, the classic image of Conan the Barbarian is of him having blown all his money from the last job, and needing to find a new one, and this kinda makes a degree of sense for your average murder-tourist out on their wanderjahre. Historically, dealing with coins kinda sucked, so why not spend it all now? Do you really want to carry all that copper from Newman’s Point to Last Carcosa? Of course not! Laser Ritter helped me solidify the idea in terms of “Spend your brownie point and then get XP,” but the rule is simple.

Instead of one XP for every gold taken out of the dungeon, you get one for every gold spent on training or frittered away. 

Frittering away could be anything (dice, cards, paintings of monkeys), but the important thing is that it is gone and you cannot get it back. Dododecahedron describes a version of this in Old School Rebellion, where you gain clout with the rebels for money you steal from the empire and redistribute back to the people. My take is a bit less noble, focused more on a game about wandering Ubermenschen capable of immense amounts of violence. 

Solution 2: Make Upgrades More Meaningful and Less Finicky

When Gary Gygax built the Obsidian Citadel, it was mostly a practical concern. His characters were too powerful for normal adventures, and they had more money than they could spend, and so chose a spot where they could get “plenty of action.” That proximity to danger was, in essence, a perk. And that’s what I think a lot of base building rules miss: the Perks they give should be much more direct in what they do and less requiring the GM to make stuff up.

Strongholds and Followers sings here, introducing powerful new abilities players can only use after a month working in their strongholds (the wizard teaching students, etc.), but only really has the individual power for each PC, with group investment not really featuring; not “We have a castle” but “I have a castle and also the wizard has a tower.”

Oh God is Liz gonna talk about Blades in the Dark again

Blades in the Dark excels at this with its crew sheets. Aside from the “Levelling up" of the Crew itself, each one has both generic and unique upgrades you can spend Coin to unlock, turning the crew (or fortress or whatever) into something that grows with the players, rather than being grown by the players. Between that and Coin functioning as a way to boost your Downtime, my Scoundrels (and the ones whose groups I was in) often having approximately No Money. 

All this brings me to my game Sunk Cost, where I tried to apply all of this at once. Aside from having a gold-for-XP downtime activity, every time the PCs enter Downtime, they need to select a Lifestyle to determine how well they’re living. 

Then there is the communal upgrade sink, the submarine, where players can spend money to repair it, gain a base somewhere (which is hideously expensive), and so on, granting them more survivability, room for extra retainers, and so on. All of this together provides the PCs with a constant pressure to not get rich, but keep looting simply to keep their heads above water (no pun intended).

Ultimately, while accumulating money is fun, I think it's at its best when it's serving a purpose in the immediate future, with immediate results and consequences, rather than being simply a rote impulse or part of your adventurer’s long-term retirement plan. Whether that's me reinventing the wheel or simply being extremely inpatient is left as an exercise for the reader.