Location-Based Games, Part 1: Clarifying the Purpose of Gold in Dungeons and Dragons

This is retreading old ground, but it’s ground worth retreading, for my own sake if nobody else’s. What is the purpose of gold in D&D? Or – to put it a different way – why was gold so important in early editions of the game?

In the average good Fifth Edition campaign – motivated players, talented and committed DM – my experience is that gold serves, at best, two functions (at least after the first level or two): buying magical items and plate armour, and, under the influence of Matt Colville, building strongholds. Yet in some published 5e adventures, there is almost excessive gold – for what purpose? And in others, none at all – and so what if the players do want to build a stronghold? This betrays the inconsistent design philosophy of 5e – is it a game about fantasy worlds, or fantasy storylines? (You may not know what I mean by that, but we’ll get back to it.)

I’m going to consider a few uses of gold in early editions, and then seek to draw out the deeper purpose of gold in those editions. This is going to lead to a discussion of how Located-Based Games/Campaigns work, and how I run my 5^th Edition game in a way that emphasizes gold and locations.

Various Purposes of Gold
Gold-as-XP

Perhaps most (in)famously, early editions – particularly OD&D, 1^st Edition, and the Basic versions – rewarded XP on the basis of gold retrieved from the dungeon. This is easy to decry (Gary even answers complaints in the 1^st Edition DMG!), but I’ve long thought the abstraction makes more sense than it people sometimes say: the XP reward is not for the loot per se, but the proof of puissance in excavating it. If you were able to take such treasure against such great challenges, then you must be mightier and wiser than before. Combat XP (in 1e, but especially in Basic) isn’t considerable – so loot retrieved is the measure of success. The deeper you delve and the more dangers you defeat, the mightier you become. This isn’t, however, a way of spending gold, but earning it – gold matters, but achieving this goal just leaves you with, well, gold. What is it spent upon? Well:

Hirelings and Henchmen

The henchmen who are closest to your character will want their cut, and your hirelings will need their pay (and if you’ve brought 3 henchmen and 10 hirelings to the dungeon, that’s plenty of money).

Sages, Hired Spellcasters, and Research

In 1^st Edition, at least, if you want to know something obscure or complex – an enemy’s weakness, a way of creating a new spell, and so forth – you had to spend time and money on it, either by hiring someone, or doing the work yourself. You need gold for either, to one degree or another. (You need time, too, but that’s a different resource for a different post).

Specialist Equipment and Magical Items

Though the very earliest editions think less in terms of “you can go and buy a magic item on every street corner”, such a thing may be possible, and certainly the enchantment of such items, or the creation of magical scrolls, can be paid for. Specialist equipment, too – as per the example of plate armour above, but more exotic things, too – needs gold.

Training

In 1e, as you hit higher levels, you need to spend time and money training, rather than automatically levelling up. To really hone your skills, you need the right equipment and perhaps the right trainers, or if you are Magic-User or Cleric, the right environs and magical or miraculous resources for study. All that costs gold.

Strongholds and Armies

The most obvious gold sink is the stronghold, costing 10s of thousands of gold to build, staff, and so forth. Your castellan will need soldiers, equipment, and even siege equipment to defend your holdings; your sage will need a tower library; your Pegasus will need a special aviary-stable. All these things must be paid for.

Tax

A suggestion from the 1e DMG – if you have so much money, you bet your suzerain wants some.

 

Is this economy unnecessary?

Now of course, if you don’t want strongholds, or research costs, or hirelings, or whatever, then gold has little monetary use. That's largely true in newer editions of the game. If you want players to advance via achieving official story goals, then it has little heuristic use for XP. Take it as a given that if this is your angle, then the purpose of gold in your game is fairly null.

But why do multiple editions of the game include a fairly detailed system which requires gaining gold, and then gives multiple ways in-game – many of them valuable and important, if not essential – of spending it? Is it just a weird emphasis on realism? Or perhaps a personal obsession with gold that has bled over into the game?

When you consider the original format of the Lake Geneva game run by Gary Gygax – and the dynamic of most early adventure modules, from the mid 70s to the mid 80s – the real reasons become more apparent.

The Adventurers go into the Dungeon. They are called 1^st Level Adventurers at first because they descend to the 1^st Level of the Dungeon. Why have they gone there? Because they are rapscallions and rogues, or idle dreamers seeking glory, or mages looking for resources so they can research spells, or perhaps even princely exiles seeking resources to reclaim their own. Dungeons – ruined castles, temples full of strange animal-men, crashed spaceships (well, just that one time) – are full of portable goods to make your dreams come true. The Adventurer descends so he might ascend, and become as mighty a man as the Baron, or as famous a wizard as the Archmage. Resources are needed.

So the key mechanic mentioned above – Gold-as-XP – is vital because it creates a virtuous feedback loop based on the game’s premise. The players explore, and are rewarded for exploring. The game is about the locations – the world, and the challenges therein. The world is explored, and the players benefit from it. The mechanic for encouraging this exploration is that as areas are explored or cleared, and treasure removed (including fiendishly hidden treasures of unimaginable worth – requiring real skill to find!), characters become more mighty.

Now the typical critical response to this, in my experience, is this: “Well, yes, and that may be very fun for those who want it; I do not. That’s a very barebones and unexciting thing, surely? Go down, solve puzzles – I can barely do the Beginner Sudoku! – and haul out treasure. Where’s the story? Where’s the wonder?”

Well, oh critic – and you are a  generous and gentle critic, because I hear some fellows call such a game “outmoded” or “primitive” on top of the rest – the answer is simple: the world should be full of wonder, and full of potential stories. This is evidenced by both the glory days of Basic, 1^st Edition, and the best 3^rd Party material from that era, and the best of the Old School Renaissance. There are dozens of modules where the basic assumption is Gold-as-XP, and the settings are funkier, stranger, more exciting, more pregnant with story and fascinating interplay, than any Wizards 5e adventure (and a couple of those are even good, to be clear!).

Is this accidental? Is this a strange mismatch – the setting is great, but the mechanics are primitive or really intended for a different sort of game? No. The key thing to realize is what Gold-as-XP (and equivalents – I’ll discuss that below) incentivises, and what Story/Combat XP incentivises.

 

Story-Based and Location-Based Games

Put it this way: if the DM exclusively awards XP (or Milestones - *shudders*) based on achieving goals in the Story, or for killing monsters, what will players do? They will seek to achieve the goals the DM sets, or kill the monsters they come into contact with. The typical “official” 5e format mixes the two, with Story XP and Monster XP, though plainly the Milestone is the preferred advancement system (this explains why sometimes Wizards adventures don’t seem to have enough XP to advance characters – they weren’t playtested like that so no-one noticed). Milestones and Story XP reward doing things the DM tells you are worth doing; monster XP, where it is the dominant type of XP, rewards you for killing things.

What won’t happen in such a game? Well, of course, a good version of such a game may be more flexible than that sounds, but essentially, such a game will often inculcate two forms of negative player behaviour: (1) passivity and a lack of initiative, and (2) an assumption that combat is really the main part of the game (even if other parts of the game exist, too). Monsters exist to be killed – usually in fair, balanced fights, because otherwise it’d be too hard to get XP. (Ironically, Story XP/Milestoning does mitigate this somewhat, by removing the reward – but equally, if players feel too passive or unable to really affect the direction of the game, Murder Hoboism becomes much more likely. Story XP is also, I think, harder to calculate, but that’s a different discussion.)

What sort of behaviour is incentivised by Gold-as-XP? Well, not killing monsters, generally – though there might be some XP there, the objective is to get the loot. So what do you with monsters? Avoid them, negotiate with them, or – if necessary – coming up with an insane plan to trap or kill the horde you definitely can’t beat in a fair fight but have to get past. The monsters are an obstacle, not the objective.

Again, “the DM’s Story” is much less important. The players go places they hear have gold; that, of course, is something the DM locates, but note the difference. The emphasis is on a location the DM creates, not a story. Locations are much, much more amenable to player agency than pre-written stories – such stories have beats, big moments, and endgames. Even a talented, flexible DM must retain some strong guiderails to ensure the players enjoy the product on offer. (Indeed, it would be a bad DM who incentivised the pursuit of a plotline and then made it half-impossible to really follow.) Locations exist to be wrecked, rebuilt, reformed – with new factions in charge, perhaps including the player characters.

This form of location-based game does not need to revolve around one dungeon (the so-called “megadungeon”). It can certainly be a city-state, or even a world – there can be many dungeons, and “dungeons” (bank vaults, Prince’s Palaces, merchant Jammers in the Phlogiston, inter-connected wilderness areas, and so forth). The breadth of the world is up to the DM – and, bluntly, it will require more work than most pre-written, story-driven adventures.

Story in Location-Based Campaigns

But, you might say: “Yes, the location may be wonderful and weird, and I get the incentive mechanism, and I can see why some of that play would be fun – I love talking to NPCs, and this stuff about building a stronghold sounds good. But what about story? I like the sense of higher stakes, of big issues players must deal with, and so forth.”

That’s quite a reasonable point – but again, a location-based game can do that. It just frames the matter differently. There are three general ways “Story” can be identified in such campaigns, on a spectrum:

A.    The Fully Emergent Story. Good examples: Castle Greyhawk itself from what we can tell, Jaquays’ JG102 The Caverns of Thracia, and Patrick Wetmore’s Anomalous Subsurface Environment. There are factions in the location; there are curios and toys and weird things; there are amazing places to explore. The story is what happens when you throw a party into this tenuous equilibrium. Now, even here there may be other moving pieces – in Anomalous Subsurface Environment, other adventuring parties and outside factions also enter the dungeon and begin to mess around, and events happen as time passes (though, interestingly, time passes tracking when characters level.) The epic story will consist of how you broached peace between two factions at war, how you defeated your rivals, and how you barely escaped the hellish mock-city of the Grubmen.

B.     The Unfolding Mystery Story. Good examples: Patrick Stuart’s Silent Titans, Chris Kutalik’s Hill Cantons (especially “Beet for the Beet God” in What Ho, Frog Demons), and arguably Gygax and Mentzer’s Temple of Elemental Evil (perhaps more so in Gygax’s original tabletop game than in the final module). It may be that the game starts with a mystery that engenders exploration – in Silent Titans, a band of mismatched strays caught from across time and space end up in a bizarre version of Chester and the Wirral, and don’t know why.  Alternately, it may be that events begin to spin out of control as the players progress on their merry explorations. That’s certainly the case in Hill Cantons, where different actions ramp up (or occasionally calm down) the Chaos Index (or Beet Infection Index, or even the Anti-Chaos Index). Weird stuff happens – sometimes very bad weird stuff – as those indices move. The strange, acid fantasy environment of the Cantons means that player actions shape reality more than they intend; a mechanic models that. Or again, it may be that the characters unearth some evil plot or strangeness whilst exploring – such is the case in Temple of Elemental Evil. The epic story emerges from the exploration of the mystery, one way or another – the mystery and strangeness that emerges in the game from the nature of the location.

C.     The Connected Location Story. Good examples: Gygax’s GDQ1-7, Carl Sargeant’s Night Below, what I can make out of Tony Huso’s World of Adummim homegame (I recommend his various published modules from that game, incidentally). The basic principle here is that “someone” other than the characters is acting to shape the world. They have a foe, whether they know it or not. Now I’m on dangerous ground here – sometimes these stories have formal “plots”, and sometimes they don’t. They can certainly be mistaken for a more typical modern game, with connected setpieces. But there is a world of difference between Gygax’s Giants and Underdark series, say, and the assumptions in Lost Mines of Phandelver or Out of the Abyss (both interesting 5e adventures from Wizards). In GDQ characters do travel between a number of Giant holdings, and thence into the Underdark through a variety of locales – they uncover an evil plot, and because the plot is happening in time, and not paused for the players, most characters will desire to investigate it. The assumption is that the plot will be opposed – but nothing in the material absolutely requires it, if the DM is willing to develop the material. But assuming the characters try to stop the plot, they still must explore a series of six (or seven, including the subpar Queen of the Spiders module) locations, which are not setpieces waiting to happen, but emergent environments, where beings live and work, with guard routines, secret ways in, potential allies within, and so forth. Because XP will still come from gold with combat on the side, and gold is still needed for all the purposes listed above (as GDQ is a 1e series), adventure play itself will still be on the Gold-as-XP model – cunning, interaction, exploration, strategy. Notably, Night Below – a 2e adventure, in an era where raw combat or story XP had become the standard – does reintroduce Gold-as-XP as an optional rule. The story, at any rate, in this subtype, comes from the interaction of the characters with some other active force – but, vitally, this force is to be dealt with in traditional locations, not cinematic encounters.

You can see that these are all campaigns with story, though of different types. Yet none of them, when you read them, seem very much like most of the dungeons or evil bases or whatever in more modern modules. (All are vastly more textured and open than even the best 4^th Edition location adventure, Madness at Gardmore Abbey.) Why is this? I’ll look at that in my next post.