Location-Based Games, Part 3: But What About Gold? WHAT ABOUT GOLD?

Okay, okay, let’s talk about the gold itself. Here’s the basic headline: gold gives players agency. I’ve already hinted at this at various points in the preceding, but it’s worth considering further.
 
Gold in D&D should basically function like money in our own lives: it gives a wider capacity to act and decide than when we lack it. I get that we go to fantasy to escape reality, but however you run your table, you’ll be giving players agency or taking it away, one way or the other. A good table provides real choices and real agency, and real choices are best made in a “predictable” or regular universe. I, of course, don’t mean predictable in the sense of dull or rote – I mean predictable in the sense that there are known rules.
 
Basically, a general principle in good RPG play, especially in D&D, is that there are rules, however few. Players make decisions in the context of those rules. Good DMs do not throw wrenches into that (and nor do they protect players from those rules – the rules create incentives AND consequences).
 
Gold is a form of predictability. You go to dungeons or wherever to get gold; that gold, being fungible, gets turned into other stuff...other decisions. Want new armour? Spend gold! Want a castle? Spend gold! Want to hire specialist henchmen? Spend gold!
 
Now – of course – there are other ways of characters getting these things. They could chance upon such things. They could declare that they will research something or use their streetwise skills to identify a source. Sometimes this will be a good way for a decision to be made by a PC. But a risk is run by relying upon DM-designed occurrence, particularly – it reduces player agency and increases DM fiat, and whilst that has its place, a location-based game (ironically?) is much more about character choice than the average “character driven” plot-fest. Plot-driven games often emphasize character background, big motifs, and so forth – but are much less character-centred, in reality, than a game which gives characters resources and lets them do what they want.
 
So the purpose of gold in location-based games, after giving characters one location-based means of Level advancement (particularly if the best treasure is well hidden and requires careful searching), is to give players agency in how they affect the world. Setting aside various Gold=XP equivalences, let me just list a few ways gold can be used to offer player agency:
 
Shopping: A catch-all for all “I go to a vendor and get something I need”. This does not include specialist, commissioned items – see below. But whether the vendor is a human in Waterdeep or a slug-man in the habitable gullet of a star-leviathan, cash lets players choose the things they want. D&D by default has a certain wargame-like accounts nerd emphasis, and inventory is part of that. It doesn’t have to be – but it’s in the genetics. It need not be the case that this stuff hobbles the exploratory game – in fact, inventory-keeping emphasize the difficulty and the achievement of exploration. At any rate, there is agency to be had in what equipment is bought and so on. Furthermore, when characters need expensive and complex things, yes, fetch quests can come in – but so, frankly, can going to the right merchant in some crazy place and paying cold hard cash. The cash is not an unromantic removal of magic from the story – it’s the result of real achievement, and the payoff for player risk.
 
Strongholds: The most obvious traditional cash-sink, especially in the training-less Basic rules. The assumption about high-level play in Basic and 1e is that the point of characters is to run domains. This drifts out in 2e, except in Birthright, and this is, honestly, a shame. Tastes vary, sure, but a truly world-shaping character will soon enough assert dominance, whether intentionally or accidentally. Stronghold rules give shape to that. They also represent an objective for which characters can fundraise – money is needed so adventures are had. Strongholds are expensive (EXAMPLES). Strongholds, incidentally, are really only fully functional in a game where the map matters – in a plot-driven game one supposes the DM may deign to have them attacked, but there is no organic reality to the Stronghold. It is attacked because the DM wants it so; it is not attacked because it is relevant or natural within the world.
 
Followers: My 5^th Edition parties pick up followers just like my other tables. In fact, in practical terms, they tend to have more – partly as a result of greater advancement, but also the needs and style of the players. In some cases followers (of the henchman or retainer variety) might join characters out of real story reasons – the slaves my party rescued from the Shrine of the Kuo-Toa largely joined them and now work as retainers. However, even here money will be needed to feed and clothe them, and for other followers up-front fees will be necessary too. (Porters do not go into the jungle without you paying a fairly hefty premium in case of their death, for instance.) As characters advance in ability and responsibilities, they will often want assistants, and money is necessary for that. Not only that, but gold, being fungible, allows for a wide range of choices in this area. Plot-granted NPC allies are gifts of the DM, even if they are organic; gold-granted allies are a result of pure player agency.
 
Research: This covers both PC research and the use of Sages. Sages are an important and expensive class of NPCs in the default 1e world – want to know something? Pay for it! Those sages can be independent or retainers, but the extra costs associated are independent of that. They will need books, assistants, and perhaps even special tools and materials. A PC Wizard researching and transcribing their own spells requires special inks and vellum, and perhaps even special candles to read arcane texts by. (Wizards in my 5e games spend less on training for XP and more on transcription from spellbooks they discover, so this is dual purpose.)
 
Ploys: Your players may want to run a big con or infiltrate an enemy base or charter a Spelljammer or something else entirely in the course of their adventures. They will identify a problem; they will decide they want to solve it; and players with gold will use that gold to expand their range of options. This could scare the cautious or straitened DM, but this is in fact a good thing. Players tend to respect the game world more the more they can influence it and interact with it. They tend to be more destructive and less engaged the less they can do so. Giving your players multiple options when solving a problem is good; putting the agency for creating those options in their hands is often even better. Gold facilitates this via its fungibility.
 
Items: Finally, special items are costly, even in a (coherent) Haughty Fantasy world. You’re an 11^th-level Paladin and want the sacred smiths of your Order to forge a blessed hammer from some starmetal you found? Great! But that will cost money, either to you or someone else. You’ve got the starmetal – but the magical materials needed to make an intense enough flame to melt it cost money, and the specialist inscribed tools require money, and the smiths require sustenance, and the Order may itself expect a big donation unless there is some pressing strategic need. You are sworn to poverty, after all! But of course gold allows the Paladin to choose a different path – say, to research fallen monasteries of the Order, and outfit a company to go salvage magic items from one, thereby providing blessed weapons by a different route. Gold is agency. The player decides this – the DM does not.
 
Conclusion
The general point is probably clear. In the first of these posts, gold-as-XP gave PCs a reason to engage with the world as a location, rather than wait passively for a story to be given to them.  But gold plays a bigger role in the campaign than providing incentives to engage with the world: it offers specific agency to the players, by letting them choose how they play the game without relying upon DM intervention. Gold being a significant factor in the game provides a certain degree of predictability to the procurement of a lot of things – perhaps not the finest or most impressive or strange items, certainly not the most loyal and heroic retainers, but most other things can be bought and sold, for the right price.
 
It also creates – if the economy in the game is functional – opportunity cost that is, in many ways, more interesting than the classic “pick between going to A or B in this timed situation”. Does a player want a stronghold or to research a new complex spell? What sort of expensive ploy is going to be undertaken to deal with the Cultists of Elemental Fire and their planar base? Sages are expensive and no use in combat – but is it worth attaching one to the party long-term? You get the idea.
 
I have already answered the old canard that Gold-as-XP pushes players into greedy, sociopathic games – in fact, I think players are more likely to be destructive when the world is not open and where advancement comes via ticking off story or combat goals. Similarly, an emphasis on a Gold economy does not tend, in my experience, to make players less focussed on the game, but more so, because they have more ways in which to influence the world. The existence of a gold economy makes the world more open, because gold can be turned into basically anything else.
 
The virtuous cycle, then, is: Gold-as-XP (and similar) incentivises players to engage actively with the world; the players also end up with Gold; Gold gives players agency, encouraging them to engage creatively with the world and open it further up; spending Gold means the players need more Gold, so they go to locations to get it...
 
Or, to put it a different way: Make your games about geography and economics, and you will get great stories.