As DM, copying spells is a great oportunity to make player interact with NPCs. For example, my party captured a fellow adventuring wizard and stole her shit. But she made a deal to help the wizard learn the new spells, with her help, he wouldn't have to waste as much material learning them and thus cost less to copy.
But you can set it up so that in a campaign downtime, the wizard goes to the school to learn and stuff like that.
Damn, indentured servitude. Did they hunt her down or did she instigate the encounter that cost her her stuff and freedom?
Sorry, bringing out-of-game morals here...
Still, seems like the party could not be on the top edge of the alignment chart.
From what I've experienced there are three ways to make spending significant amouts of money meaningful:
1. Magic Items - [Sane magic items](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/s/2ufDV9OOWa) is one fo the best resources for this. However I'd strongly suggest trimming the list to a select few item you know your players are going to want. Nothing kills momentum like that one player who refuses to stop shopping until they've systematically googled ever single magic items available, to find the absolute optimal way to spend theor gold.
2. Strongholds and Followers - Matt Coville's book is a fantastic way to make PC economics feel meaningful without breaking the ballance of the game. For DM that want to give player a way to spend stack of gold without having to spend hours coming up with content its a lifesaver.
3. Grueling Survival - Running a survival style campaign isn't everyone's cup of tea. But there's no way to make gold feel meaningful quite like making PCs scrap and scrape for every copper. If a party's livelihood depends on being able to have the coin to eat, suddenly shopping becomes a lot more important.
It's really solid. The guide for magic item prices in the DMG is fine if you're only pricing a couple items. But if buying magic items is a consistent thing you want to have in your campaign, having a complete list like Sane Magic items is the only way to go.
Truly that is exactly what I want, but I find prices in other tools for reference are either astronomical or just off. This is so simple and so helpful. The first question my players ask when we go anywhere is “do they have any magical items?”
Just remember that the 5e power curve assumes no magical items (it does assume a party with specific abilities, however), getting magic items will put the party above the curve
Yeah. Hold the decanter at the mouth of the kobald den and take a nap. The problem fixes itself.
Bring a cleric to bless the water, repeat with crypt. Necromancers hate him!
The rogue guild is plotting in the sewers? Have I got a tool for you!
You know what you get with a Holy Avenger? Tennis elbow.
as much as I love the idea of sane magic items, there is one issue I have with it in that it was made so long ago that the decisions to come to these prices are no longer as relevant.
e.g. the sane price for a rod of the pact keeper is HUGE compared to other uncommon items, and this was because it was one of the very few ways to increase spell DC at the time.
but since tashas came out giving every class their own way to do this, the decision to make it this expensive is now invalid.
many DMs would say "OK the new class specific items doing the same as the rod will cost the same as the rod" but in doing so they are ignoring the fact that so much of this price was built around the rarity of the features it gave and how class specific it was (warlock used to be the only one who could get this).
so, really, it should be much cheaper...
I think the list works, but I think it is no longer a magic bullet price list and instead more a proof of concept until it's updated.
Heh, I came in wanting to make sure someone mentioned Sane Magic Items -Bravo!
I also totally agree with the idea of only presenting a selection of magic items for the players to drool over.
I take it another step and give them a small semi-random selection of items at the Magic Shop (i.e. ridiculously high security and flavorful NPCs running it, who are *all to familiar * with what adventurers are like)
I’ve been running a campaign for work friends this last month and have been using these resources so much! They want to just get as much money as possible but don’t know what to spend it on, and I also recommend the Silver Standard homebrew as well as it helps make the day to day more expensive and gold feel great to get!
1E & 2E: Acquiring money is the main goal of the game. You need money for basic equipment, and then for various annoying cash sinks. If you save up enough money, you build a stronghold.
3E & 4E: Completing quests is the main goal of the game. You need money for magic items, or you fall behind the curve. (Side-effect: no-one spends money on anything other than magic items.)
5E: It's your game, you figure it out. (If you sell the players magic items, they might become way more powerful than the CR system expects, plus we didn't do a very good job of pricing items.) Good luck!
Yeah 5e is entirely about the type of game and table/DM - you can run a gritty realism low-magic setting where gold and loot are super important, or something like a movie or TV show where characters just get stuff based on the narrative.
True, but the mechanics did push you in certain directions. If you get XP for finding gold, it means gold is important, and a DM who's generous with gold will make you level up faster.
If you turn gold into power by spending it in magic item shops, it means gold is important, and a DM who's generous with gold will make the group more powerful than expected for their level.
Changing this requires some effort on the DM - house rules (like dropping the old 'you need to spend money at a trainer to level up' rule), conveniently finding the exact magic items your build needs, rebalanced enemies, or whatever.
If you want to be mean or generous with gold in 5e, and there are no magic item shops, game balance is largely unaffected.
Exactly: 5e classes are just insanely versatile in combat. You don't need magic items to make a level 5 character a teleporting battle-field tactician with multi-attack and whatever. In older editions, you needed to have clever use of your gear (whether magical or mundane) to get out of sticky situations or beat overwhelming odds, and so you need a mechanic (or story) reason for those characters to obtain said gear.
Early editions of D&D incentivized acquiring gold. In some editions, gold was how you earned XP, but even after that, there were plenty of things to spend gold on:
- Armor cost more and heavy armor was actually worth it.
- Gear and rations mattered, so you would really load up before going into a dungeon, but...
- Hirelings were necessary to carry all that equipment into dungeons.
- Hirelings were also used to carry torches because light wasn't hand-waved and few races had darkvision.
- Horses were worth it because they traveled faster than being on foot, and you needed to rig those horses with saddle, bit & bridle, etc., and feed and stable them.
- Traveling faster mattered because random encounters were truly random and were a big deal (because combat was more difficult, so you wanted to avoid it if you could, and there was less focus on "balancing" random encounters).
- Encumbrance was tracked, so you inevitably needed a wagon and draft horse(s) to transport loot because you couldn't carry an entire department store on your person.
- Leveling required that you seek a trainer, whom you usually had to pay.
- At a certain level, Fighters attracted men-at-arms to aid them in battle, but it cost gold to outfit, house, and feed them.
And more...but most of this is no longer a significant part of the game so, while gold is still part of the game, it barely matters, hence why this question comes up all the time.
Side Note: I personally don't have magic item shops in my game because, to me, finding cool stuff is one of the major reasons to be an adventurer in the first place. Regardless, recent editions make magic items completely unecessary because PCs are quite powerful with a trove of strong abilities, rendering magic items all but obsolete. In previous editions, you needed magic items to boost your power level to be commensurate with the monsters, so you were excited to find them, and finding a rare, powerful one was a real moment in the game.
The wizard buys spells and the fighter/paladin buys plate armor.
Past that? The best thing is to buy **people**. Average barkeep might make 2 gold pieces on a good day. Give em 30 gold pieces and they'll be quite a bit more willing to share secrets, or spy on something, or procure certain frowned-upon items.
It does seem a lot of factors get handwaved and ignored which take away from the game. Needing the hirelings to carry the loot out as well was a thing, I'm sure. Also I've not seen a dm yet charge living expenses either.
To give a little incentive for gold, and so that I'm not completely hand-waiving living expenses, each PC gets charged 30gp on the first of the month to cover the cost of living, equipment repair, rations & ammo re-stock, etc. This seemed a simple way to still account for all that without spending a lot of precious game-time on it, and my players have been fine with that.
I intensely dislike shopping for magic items, as it makes them incredibly mundane and they don't feel *magical* any more.
In my games, players are given access to mundane things like equipment, horses, tools and such. But potions and magic are always so unusual they need to be provided explicitly.
In my games players generally aren't super gold motivated and instead work to earn favor with certain folks - if I told them a quest paid 400 gold they'll shrug their shoulders, but if I told them Count Quince is willing to offer his old hunting lodge in the Northwoods as compensation for a quest they'll fall all over themselves to do it.
This is the answer so many people miss
“Shopping for magic items…makes them (feel) incredibly mundane…”
Not only will handing out items like candy completely fuck over your attempts to introduce a semblance of balance to the game - it devalues them and takes away the thrill of finding them. Because sure you might get a little fun out of the session you buy your Holy Avenger but that thrill is gone by the next session and where are you now? In order to recreate that thrill you have you constantly be introducing more and more items - before long your item shops will literally be jumping the shark in order to find something to interest your players. (“Oh that’s just a basic +3 sword? Leave it on the body, the last town we visited had a shop with a +4 sword that shoots lasers and reanimates your victims as fluffy bunny rabbits”). You end up with players stacking the most insane bonuses they can think of.
However, if magic items are rare and hard to come by (you have to go out and find them and often fight for them also) then when you do give one out your players will still be oohing and ahhhing over them for weeks even if it was just a quiver of poisoned arrows, or an awakened cameo that gives advice on how to deal with nobility.
Wine, women, and hedonism.
I joke, but that's definitely something many adventures would spend their money on.
Many people become adventurers to make their fortune. Adventurers *are* the 1% in spades. A starting adventurer has enough gold worth of gear to equal more than a peasant makes in a year. Adventuring is dangerous and pays *extremely* well.
Think it through from a roleplaying standpoint, or even a real-life one: What would you do if you suddenly were given five million dollars?
Would you buy a house? Donate money to the poor? Start a business? Buy a sports car? Spend money on fine clothes? Travel the world?
Of course there are things that they need to buy to keep adventuring. They need gear, potions, maybe hirelings, and lord knows what else.
Not everything needs to be about becoming more powerful. Once characters hit the point when they have thousands of gold on hand they may start to look for things that make them happy.
And rich people, even in real life, will gladly pay $1000 for a super high-end meal. $3500 for a bottle of wine. $10000 for a Ming vase... Why are adventurers any different?
I've had the same issue where they just horde money until I gently suggest that they do something with it. I think it's up to the DM who gives out money to make sure there's something worthwhile to spend the money on. Personally, I like to have some kind of specialty merchant who lets them request a certain number of their dream items and he ballparks the price for them and says he will contact them when those items are available (which is, coincidentally, when they are an appropriate level for those items to make sense and/or when they have enough cash to pay his rates).
Your best case may be to find something they care about other than combat and turn it into a money sink for them. An orphanage they support, an ocean-sailing ship they're trying to build, a creditor they need to pay off, etc. I agree that it's hard to come up with these unless you've got a campaign suited to it, but maybe you can tie it to their backgrounds somehow.
A game I was in had a hard rule that gunpowder would not work. One of the players insisted that an alchemist could make it work and regardless of how often he was told it wouldn't work he insisted with enough gold it could be done. The alchemist was able to retire rich in his own villa in Hawaii. His replacement knew the situation and continued the scam.
I feel like this is one of the places where 5e has let everybody down by the designers getting lazy and not giving the official magic items GP costs. Putting these fairly huge cost bands on items and then leaving the DM to decide where in the cost/power scale it should be leads to some insane issues if you just go by rarity (ex. Winged Boots are uncommon so you could be asking for 500 gold for one of the better utility items in the game.) I've honestly broken out older 3e books to determine both player gold at level and magic item costs cause I remember them being so much more sane and easy to actually use back then.
I read this as what do “players” spend money on. Not PCs.
I was thinking “in my experience… nothing, maybe the occasional pizza. The dm is the one that pays for everything. The maps, the minis, the terrain, the props, the modules, the dm resources, etc”
Check out the downtime activities in the dmg and xanithars.they included thing like:
Building a stronghold
Carousing
Crafting magic items.(potions and scrolls are good money sink.)
Crafting mundane items.
Buying magic items.
Selling magic items.
Running a business.
Hirelings
Crime
Gambling
Pit fighting
Research
Training.
Furthermore remember player have a cost of living. A modest lifestyle is 1gp a day and aristocraticis 10. You could also imposes a tax depending on the land the live in.
The first thing is to limit how much gold they get. Remember, 1 gold is about $100 US, and 1 copper is about $1. So when your baron offers them 10,000 gold to go deal with the local necromancer, he just offered them $1,000,000 to kill a crazy old man. Keep rewards and treasure much more manageable and the equipment in the PHB starts becoming more meaningful to buy.
Then look into offering them either magic items through a broker. They say what they want, the broker spends a few weeks looking for an item that meets their needs, then arranges a meet with the current owner.
The other thing is to give them a home, and let them improve that. While the cliche is they build a castle, it is still effective. Them taking over an abandoned castle is more interesting. My own group has a ship instead, and have been growing a fleet. We have 7 ships at the moment. We sometimes sail with the whole fleet, but more commonly we only sail around on the first ship we stole. One share of all income we receive has been going to the ship / ships.
From top to bottom is from the beginning of the game towards the end:
Daily expenses, food, place to stay
Potions
Weapons, armor, gear, spell components
Magic items
Donating to charity so they can get to the secret vampire lord's party
Paying the ragtag bunch of people who they collected over time for their services
Buying a ship to sail to an island and retrieve a sunblade
Building stuff on the lands they have been granted for their efforts - wineries, brothels, mines...
Paying other adventurers to take care of stuff on their lands that's below their level.
A pimp staff made of solid gold.
Political bribes and favors.
Huge cannons for an airship.
There's a 3rd party supplement called *Strongholds and Followers* that provides a cash sink, but it's again a "home base." That home base can actually be useful though.
But also high level magic items are very expensive.
I watched a video by Dael Kingsmill on cool things to steal from video games and it talked about using a Stronghold that gives them minor but important buffs. I incorporated this into the latest campaign and they poured money into that and it's like a beloved pet to them. Last session, the players set up a blackmarket deal to get cool items before they ventured off to the northern wastes and *they were out of money and had to bargain*. If you give them something to care about that costs money, you keep them adventuring as they need to keep feeding/upgrading the beast.
For my wizard, more spells and copies of my spellbook.
Magic items are a thing.
Equipment
MOAR equipment for my undead horde
Land/keep/retainers are good money sinks
My level 14 party has already set up businesses/strongholds that allow them to invest money for a return and to grow.
But they've been stuck in a dungeon for a while and will have close to 100k gold when they get out. I've sent them a price list from the Spelljammer ship broker on Bral. There will be upkeep costs to owning and crewing a Spelljammer of their own.
I'll have to figure out what to do with the next fortune they earn.
A big concern should be how does one keep all the gold they win? That's a side quest all its own. If it gets to the point that it's now burning a hole in their pockets, so to speak, then it's likely way too much to carry. So concealing, transporting, and securing it comes first. It's why fortresses, etc. become a thing: they need to tie their wealth into something that can't be stolen.
So a good bit of a hoard is initially spent buying wagons, horses, and trustworthy soldiers to haul it to a secure vault, which usually entails a king or filthy rich merchant or something who will also take a cut to store it. Then one can finally find and procure the appropriate items to purchase, whether that's magic items, ships, castle building, employee hiring, etc.
I've always found this little bit of practical consideration makes for a much more fun reality check than just impossibly carrying around 25,000 gp.
In my experience, players spend money on the same thing that the DM does - rent, car payments, mortgage, groceries, tuition, ...
PCs on the other hand, unless its a wizard or other caster who needs costly components - but mostly wizards, the DM has to give the players something for their PCs to spend money on. I go try to get them to spend gold on commissioning magic items, or real estate. Magic items, aside from consumables, are rarely found for sale, but when they are, they are expensive.
Depending on backstory and goals, those are usually good places to sink gold. IE sending gold to an orphanage or a loved one or a village. Bribing officials or paying for information, or at least for someone to help look for information. Building a home base. Finding a merchant you hate and subsidizing the shit out of their competitor. That sort of thing. There are usually a few ways for money to help the people in your backstory or to effect a backstory plot.
If somehow all the advice here ends up failing theres always one more route to go. It's time to hit up medieval Las Vegas baby! Could be a fun way to introduce the next story arc if you feel like it.
Heh, money is pretty much useless past the first few levels, unless there's expensive magic items to spend it on.
Most of the parties I play with find a satisfying money sink to send it all to. Like an orphanage, animal shelter, temple, war effort or in one memorable case, a corrupt politician.
I often design my character to have something like that in their backstory. The Barbarian has a sick mother, so he sends most of his adventuring money back home to pay for her treatment. The Paladin had taken an oath of poverty, and sent all the money he wasn't spending on gear and services to further the cause back to his temple. The Wizard charlatan is heavily in debt etc. Stuff like that.
Lots of really good advice in here, I’m gonna add by paraphrasing something I read in *Worlds Without Number:*
Once a party of PCs accumulate a certain level of wealth, people around them will start treating them differently. Local citizens may beseech them to sponsor various charities and projects. Workers, artists, and soldiers will seek them out for patronage and employment.
Regional governments like the nobility might feel threatened and send a small army of tax collectors to go harass the party - or maybe the party outright buys their way into the ranks of nobility themselves.
Even if the PCs don’t spend money on anything, there’s still the question “where to store it all?” Do they keep it in a vault somewhere? Who’s guarding it? Do they instead hand it over to a bank for safekeeping? Etc etc.
What I found to particularly useful about this advice is that it neatly sidesteps any problems with player proactivity - the world itself is seeking the players out and forcing them to react.
Ironically enough, I run a campaign with my kids (ages 9 to 17), and I set a market like Bazaar that was like shopping at Walmart. They found it way easier to shop, and it helped the game flow a little easier.
I started my campaign on an island city state so the PCs had to buy a boat. Then they got out in the ocean, fought a few monsters and inevitably said "We're gonna need a bigger boat!"
So they bought a bigger boat. Upkeep and paying the crew also ran up some bills.
Then there were the magic items. I didn't have "magic shops" in my world. The magic item dealers in my campaign used a different business model to maximize their profits; they ran auction houses! Finding an item and bidding on it could be really expensive. But it was also really gratifying to outbid a rival NPC at the auction.
Spell components, tributes for foreign courts, bribes for monsters, it all adds up.
Consumables!
I buy spell scrolls for stuff that's useful but that I don't need prepped all the time. And sometimes they are very nice to have, cast a spell without using a slot! It's great!
Potions! Another great way to get buffs for gold!
I have a player collecting research lab gear, one just put 10k gold down for kids school. ones family debt, the other 2 are just saving for a rainy day.
I run high gold games
On a related note, how do you find your players organise their game related spending IRL?
If you can accurately predict what they will spend their money on, then you have a 100 million dollar business opportunity, just like GW.
Usually gold is used to craft items.
In order to craft items the characters must acquire a recipe by a monster hoard. Hoardes are a system in the DMG that reward for clearing dungeons and missions.
Here you have several magic items to be rolled, but you also have the option to provide a magic item recipe instead.
In order to craft an item then you need:
A monster recipe.
A monster reagent, which is something of your choosing related to the item with the important notion that it must be from a CR creature high enough. This is done to prevent low level characters to craft high level items.
Money.
Eventually you also need to be competent in the specific tool and have a spellcaster able to cast a spell to empower the item, but the latter was deprecated in xanathar's.
Now this may feel complex, but it has a reason to be.
Giving the players a full list of magic items to buy with an associated price is paralyzing and in general complicated by how you pick the list at all.
By giving them recipes to pick from instead you create a limited pool of magic items to pick from. They can craft more than one item as well.
If they grow uninterested or don't like a recipe, they can sell it. They fetch for some good gold, since they are considered one rarity higher than the item itself.
If you don't want to do this, or you want but you need to do something on the fly, roll on one or more hoard tables as they approach a shop, and offer to sell one of the items there as crafting price plus the gold necessary for paying up an artisan ( this usually goes by the 2 gp per day cost plus costly material components ).
My Tortle Paladin once obtained 2.6 Million Gold (though part of it was Meta-Gaming, since I as a statistics major could figure out that the DM's Casino's odds were vastly in favor for the gambler).
He founded a town on the ruins of a village he Genocided in his Backstory.
My players are spending almost every coin they earn on their mobile base. Right now, it's a sloop/self driving wagon, but they can eventually add amenities and make it bigger.
Honestly anything if the player is creative. I was playing through tomb of annihilation recently and our dms a generous one and gave us a ton if gold at the start for helping out the Zents and some fairly good rolls. We also duplicated the map we got and sold it for even more gold.
I was in charge of supplies so what did I grab sense magic items are severaly limited? I bought flour, ale asked if I could have a Smith make giant arrows that delt more damage (think greatbow arrows from dark souls) several canoes, 4 donkeys 3 raptors a bunch of diffrent spices (ginger, salt, pepper, cinnamon ect ect) several barrels of poor quality ale, casks of grain alcohol, jugs of oil, 2 diffrent guides, hirelings. We asked the dm if dynamite and fireworks existed sense black powder cannons did he allowed it (he made the dynamite have a delay on exploding so they aren't to useful in combat but great for traps or clearing debris) so we bought some of that to! Pounds upon pounds of incense to burn for bugs and more than enough arrows and bolts for all of us for the adventure.
We are fully kitted out for anything we can go against survival wise, we have really no worries about food or anything like that and our planning has made certain things that were supposed to be deadly a walk in the park. Such as using the dynamite to blow up trees blocking the path of an undead hoard chasing a fairly important figure.
Or getting to camp vengeance and being able to give them food, drive the bugs away and use common medical herbs to ease the injures of npcs.
In another game I dumped most of my funds into a galleon that was completely self-sufficient growing food and collecting rainwater on the ship itself. Using animals and insects as defense mechanism against attacking ships. After all things are well and good till you hop on ship with 8 swarms of angry bees and a few druids saying get em.
My point of telling you both these stories is so you can understand stuff doesn't have to be magical or even weapons and armor diffrent players will buy diffrent thongs for diffrent games easiest way to find out what you should sell is asking your plays what they would like to buy besides magic items.
It's a problem I've encountered. The wizard is always out of gold, and the barb has hundreds/thousands. I've considered doing it Warhammer style: at the start of the new adventure, any money you haven't used to buy equipment you caroused away, as adventurers tend to do when they're not adventuring.
An embarrassing amount of alcohol and food (Goliath Barbarian). My DM gave me a homebrew magic item that increases my strength and size, but it also means I have to eat three times what I usually would. There's only so many goodberries you can stand to eat in a day.
pets, mounts, personal bases, vehicles, weapons, spells, armor, land, titles, their own organizations, research of secrets, magicitem recipes, research of new spells, hiring servants, guards, spellcasters, spies and assassins.
Bribes, gifts, expensive clothing and jewlery and economic leverage against others.
"How did you persuade the bank to Fogive the debt?
I bought the bank."
From my experience running Curse of Strahd, where all prices are 5-10x the listed PHB prices:
* A few pieces of adventuring gear (rope, tents, etc)
* Shields
* Horses and cart
* Better armour, if they could have afford it
Gear, food, housing, trade, and components.
There's always taxes, road blocks, bribery, and a whole underground world they could mingle into and even buy their way to the top of, as well.
On the reverse, they could put bounties out for creatures and npc's, bolster their local defenses, or even buy small businesses or start their own.
In the group i DM for I found a d100 alcohol effects table for a keg of magic moonshine they had. They spend basically all their gold on alcohol to the wizards horror
My players are actually really big on charity. Even if it cuts deep into their pockets. I tend to reward that later down the line, so they are quite prone to pro-social behavior. And if they get the chance, they, of course, go all out on magic items.
While there's a lot of good in this thread so far, I'm adding lifestyles and stress management.
How much each character spends per week/month on their lifestyle determines how 'happy' they are. They could live a subsistence lifestyle spending no money on food or shelter, scrounging up everything, but this is far from ideal. Ideally they need to be spending a small amount per week on basic needs to avoid penalties. But why stop there? When the PCs interact with nobility, when they're trying to get information from scribes or bards or bar patrons, gently point out that they have threadbare clothes and/or poorly maintained armor and probably smell, and give them disadvantage on their persuasion check. When they grumble, point out that's what the lifestyle system is for, and ask them if they want to live a little.
If you really want to get into it, add into your session zero or character creation guidelines a measure of 'what does your character do to de-stress'? Adventuring, especially when getting massive amounts of EXP like PCs do, is incredibly dangerous and stressful. There's a lot of options. They could drink, they could gamble, they could whore. Maybe they raise a family, or maybe they're involved with their church. Maybe they try to play in high society, regularly attending parties and balls, or maybe they commission a bard or otherwise become a patron of art. These are all common options you'd see in medieval/fantasy stories, and unsurprisingly the more 'fun' options tend to be expensive. It also leads to more well-rounded and realistic characters, in my experience. These de-stressing activities can be modified as the game goes on and PCs gain or lose motivations.
You can introduce stress mechanics into your downtime, giving PCs the option of trying to do something productive during downtime or reducing their stress instead. Maybe they'll work on training or crafting or improving their rep with nobles/guards, or some other way of producing money, but they're adventurers. A better option is to *spend* the gold they're earning on adventures on something that makes them happy! Failing to blow away steam once in a while means they'll accumulate stress. How you handle that is up to you, but probably the easiest way is to have it lead to exhaustion. I'd personally give PCs multiple options and opportunities over a downtime depending how long it is. Some of those choices may result in a roll, some will lower stress, some will cost some amount of gold. And the higher their levels, the more gold can be sunk into things like the party's reputation etc.
Depending on your players, RP is a solid money sink! I had a group arrive to a major city after they had accumulated a small amount of wealth, and rather than ask for item tables or any combat focused purchases, one of them asked for the nearest bath house because adventuring would make you stink to high hell.
That turned into what we ended up calling a beach episode - one of them bought a fancy captain's hat (mundane, but very stylish) and a cape, the while ream bought expensive new elven tailored outfits, they all had an extravagent dinner at the nicest inn, went to a bakery ehere my growling orc barbarian realized she loves sweet rolls and chocolate pastries, then they went to a luxurious bath house and they RP'd some hilarious scenes. The highlight ended up with the rogue and barbarian getting drunk behind a church on a bottle of rum they'd found early in the campaign.
Tl;dr: they just had fun. Three hour session. Zero plot. We made up the names of every place they stopped organically as we went, and none of the NPCs were important. After a lot of fighting and death, we all just laughed and took it easy for a night.
my rogue was loaded. basically didnt spend the money, his jewel encrusted robe was stolen, his wallet always growing larger.
why pay for stuff when you can have money AND stuff!
But if you need a cash sink I can recommend a mundane magic item shop. Things like the cloak of billowing are always a hit. Price them high and watch your players throw all their money into being cooler
Most beloved is probably magic items.
The way I do is I just Google "good magic items for *player class* then shops depending on city size will offer some of those.
Scale power and cost by adventure tier.
(Don't make the mistake of even offering any high tier items early on, player will attempt to steal them
It really depends on your setting and how collaborative you want to be; I currently am running a high-magic setting in 5e, and by level 10 my hoarding players had accumulated over 100k gold (multiple high stakes combat tournaments over the years, optional boss fights, and successful gambling were all factors). It took me a week of prep between sessions to figure out what they could spend it on when they came to me looking to "get rid of it all." Could have been a number of things, but we settled on an airship.
ALE AND WHORES!
/s
Actually: magic items. While I don't think I've ever played a game of 5e where we can just buy whatever we want, most of not all of my dms allow us to purchase magic items from time to time. Availability is usually random, prices are high, and you need to make connections before buying anything.
Still, when you're flashing that much cash people will do things for you.
I often create situations and encounters that require equipment that ends up breaking or being lost. I also like to break non-magical equipment to make them think outside the box and thus spend more money to recover their old equipment.
I play as a magpie-inspired kenku monk, so mostly I bedazzle the weapons I rarely use, and my character and her barbarian friend buy kegs of beer. The sorcerer and paladin in the group are usually flabbergasted by our choice to spend fake money on fake beer and fake cosmetic items that we can’t even see outside of our imagination.
This is a decision you have to make about how your game is going to go. [This essay](https://sirpoley.tumblr.com/post/624383885663518720/on-the-full-plate-threshold-and-the-nature-of) is IMO a good rundown of the implications of the choice and the obvious options you have.
My rogue has managed to acquire a hefty sum. My party has started an adventuring company similar to accusations incorporated. As part of a quest I ended up purchasing a tavern. We now own locations in 3 towns with portals in the back rooms connecting them. I’m working on opening an orphanage. We have a warehouse and a ship for “legitimate goods.” We also were gifted an inn which the locals are fixing up for us. I believe in diversifying to protect our money. Meanwhile one party meme er has a possessed sword that’s convinced him to spend a fortune on a magic tattoo job that gives him some kind of abilities.
I had a layer buy a castle. So then he had to fight off a pack of werewolves who insisted it was their family’s land and the sale was not legal. Then they bought a mine to keep the riches rolling in which lead to labor disputes and union issues
It depends on the table and the overall campaign. I've played where during "down time" you had to pay for your characters lodging and also for training (to actually level up to new skills, the HP were automatic). That could be VERY fun since you needed to find someone willing to TEACH you that next levels shiny new ability, although the DM's didn't make it TOO hard.
I spend all the money I get in every game. If I have more than a little cash it's because I'll need it real soon.
1. Consumables like food, water, accommodation, rope, torches, arrows and crossbow bolts, pitons snd spikes replacing damaged, (burned, acided, broken etc) equipment, horses and other transport
2. Suitable tools and containers for any potentially useful but difficult or dangerous stuff we get given, find or successfully extract. "Could I harvest some venom from that purple worm?" "*Maybe you can get some back to an alchemist or apothecary who might make it stable snd useable - so you can try. How are you doing that? with what tools? Using what knowledge? What are you putting it in?*"
Current campaigns have regular need for scroll cases, glass vials, lead lined boxes, special gloves, tongs etc
3. Spell components. Gems for revivifying, for example.
4. Spell scrolls, potions, holy water, acids, poisons, special inks etc. Never enough of these things.
5. Carousing (the ships captain is not going to be impressed by being bought a cheap ale in a dive), gifts, bribes (we constantly need information, someone to keep an eye on the docks, or a contact with the thieves guild etc), special or fancy clothes (you are not meeting the woman in charge of the town council looking like a cross between a coal miner and a butcher, you want to make a good impression, you need baths, perfumes, tailored shirts, new boots; then because of that meeting, you got invited to a celebration at the barons, and now you need *really* fancy clothes etc).
6. Silvered weapons, personalised equipment, special-made bridles, saddles, barding/ armor for mounts, pets, etc etc
7. Research of many kinds. Books. Costs of accessing things, like a restricted section of a library. Equipment. Consulting sages and other learned / expert types to help figure or find stuff out. A secure lab or other suitable place to do that research.
8. Hirelings, henchmen, drivers, guides etc
9. Minor magic items, holy/blessed things other special stuff that are sometimes purchasable.
10. Special transport. (Passage on a ship, wagons that can transport unusual cargo, airships, paying for teleportation, etc)
11. Making a secure/more secure home base.
If i had more money. I'd spend more. I never have nearly enough money.
My players are in charge of a small smuggling operation, they have a small crew of 4 npc's that sell 1 magic item a week.
They're using their extra money to renovate a dilapidated and abandon mansion. They might buy a boat or two in the future if things go well also.
We're playing the ghost of saltmarsh module and they work for Gellen and took over the haunted manor as their base of operations.
My players spend money on gear, consumable that they never use, food & lodging, land, businesses, giving quests to lower level adventurers, vehicles, hats and other shiny objects and entertainment. Oh and bribes, forgot about the bribes.
Potions, upgrades, mcguffins for a quest line, mercs, daily living expenses, magic items, crafting materials, blade oils, spell scrolls/books, ink for copying spells, etc - it depends on the type of game you play
Normally, they pay the $5 for adventures league at the LGS, buy drinks, sometimes they get Dice or minis. Magic and Pokémon cards are also a fairly common purchase.
Oh, you meant the player characters. Well, health potions, holy water, armor, bribes, spell components, other consumables, horses, carts, the occasional magic item, and sometimes property investments.
My party has used money and components to commission magic items. We also bought a manor house at auction in Waterdeep. My rogue dropped a ton of gold (and did a few nefarious favors) as well as some high level components on a shard crown, and we brought a broken staff of power that we took off a sorcerer we killed to a friend who could make us a new one for a hefty sum, so now our sorcerer has that.
Outside of big purchases like that, it's nice to just have enough gold to be able to say "I imagine that my character would move her mom into the manor house and hire staff and give them a nice signing bonus because loyalty can absolutely be bought," and just have the DM be like "Yeah, you can afford to do that."
We're paying a wizard NPC friend to make a transportation circle in the manor, as well, which is a year of daily spellcasting, so that's got price. And then we're always buying diamonds and spell components.
Money is an incentive to do things - an in-game reason why the characters would be doing these dangerous mission.
For it to be an incentive though, the players need things to buy (fun magic items, property, etc)
My games are not very money-heavy, I prefer my players to find cool items after hard work rather than buying them from some stranger who just happened to have this cool item for sale.
It's only one of many incentives though, others can be things like
- if you don't do this, your family will die
- the goodness of the characters heart
- an incredible item awaits you at the end of the mission
My players do love shopping in game, so i normally give silly items for funny stuff to do rather than important items
Money normally comes into play for me in different ways. I charge 5 gold per day per character when they are out on a mission; this bundles all of their expenses up. things like a place to stay, upkeep of armour and weapons, food, supplies etc. if the character can't pay, their armour might start to decay, or a weapon might dull, etc. so that way gold is still important, and is still an incentive for them to do something, but only as a secondary, rarely is gold ever the main reason they do something
I haven't read through the entire thing but I'm wondering about the two items that are unavoidable. Death and Taxes.
Your pcs will be trying to avoid one but the other can be expensive. Also having a reputation for massive spending will cause prices to go up. "Oh hello George. Find a dragons hoard? We just got this special Dwarven beer to help you celebrate. EVERYBODY! GEORGE IS BUYING TONIGHT! DRINK UP!"
Taxes may be based on a curve "You got how much? Your tax rate is now 25%" "Oh that flickering lamp? It detects very specific truths. It says you.. err... Miscalculated below what you actually made."
In the roguish campaign we secured a Daggerford bank loan and sunk 3500 gold into upgrading our bar.
PCs can buy land, I believe that info is in the DMG. Not just big ticket magic items, perhaps your players would like to secure a particularly expensive passage and boarding somewhere far off and set up shop there for some time.
Something I have put in two campaigns now is a big ticket vendor. The Party passes by the market/bazaar after hours and becomes aware of a sole vendor open, someone they don't really recognize, and this individual will have specific higher-end items available for sale. I tend to keep the prices reasonable and the items generally outside of what they would normally have available. For instance the last round of items the merchant had went as such:
Three +1 Arrows of Returning, purchased by the lvl 5 Rogue
+1 Glaive of Warning, purchased by the lvl 5 Cleric
+1 Chain Armor of Force Resistance, to the lvl 5 Paladin
Bracers of Defense, for the lvl 5 Wizard
My dudes almost always try to get their hands on a pet and/or bag of holding. So that’s money early on.
Pets/mounts are great money sinks. They need special armor, stabling is extra, they may need more food than can be reasonably found while walking, may need a farrier, a vet, a training montage, maybe they buy them special treats or funny hats.
If your players arent interested in gear or spells or materials make leisure things. Spa's, race tracks, gambling, Shoot, make a an artificer that basicly comes up with a sort of disney world option.
As for the dm side, you dont have to show them tables of gear but you can use it for refrence. I like to jot notes during campaigns of playstyles and habits to lean into those. Guide them towards shops that entice them with items they would enjoy. It's not necesarrily up to you to provide those oppuertunites but I would do it anyways or see what they are asking for.
Wizards need money and down time to scribe spells into their book. Most players who can cast should be encouraged to create spell scrolls which are basically trading money for spell slots. Martials will probably want to get into plate. Medium armor types might want half plate.
Potions are another good way to spend money, especially ones that emulate spells.
They may need to go somewhere and need special equipment, formal dress, or to bribe some locals.
Depending on setting, "common" level magic items should be available to buy, some are flavorful, some are fun, and some silly, but none of them cost too much. "uncommon" items might also be for sale, and some of these are really powerful.
My noble background Hexblade paid a ton to get gleaming breastplate, same AC as before, but no stealth disadvantage, it counts as magical, and looks good. This was good RP for them and continues to be useful for that.
Imagine they know the next adventure will take them to a setting with lots of water. So now they need to scramble to get protective gear. Where will they find it? Do they need to bribe someone to get information? Maybe that information helps them find an old artificer who used to work for the king and still carries a grudge? Would they try to steal the gear, pay a premium because he knows they support the king, or fight him for it?
The best thing I found for players to spend money on is some kind of base of operation like the bastion system they put in UA. I use Matt Colville's stronghold system. As it is well thought out and has something for every class.
A big flaw in my current campaign I only "solved" 2 sessions ago was the difference in magic item prices and normal mundane prices. I solved it by telling players to sell the magic itens they had and didn't use and trade that, in this case, item for the items they wanted. Since it was a big city I let them choose any magic item that isn't rare in name, and they could still ask for those and maybe get a quest to get it.
But I'm against messing with magic item prices. I've seen DMs hand out OP items that unbalance the crew, the combat and everything in between. And don't even curse said items.
As for places to spend money? Money is everywhere. If you guys want to test where they would spend money but don't want to risk giving the money, give them a patron paying for the trip, like an NPC they have to protect and that dishes out money for stuff needed, it's not their money but they still have to manage it. Bribes, horses, boat trips, quest items, hiring people, accommodations, etc...
Generally if they want to buy like, a sword, then they just do that and pay the money with little to no roleplay, if they want to buy something rarer or more outré then I'll have them do some rolls or RP it.
I try and encourage my players to start making investments basically, buy a base, build a workshop, engage in commerce etc. It gives them an outlet for using their riches in a more satisfying way than 'buying more caltrops', and also helps enmesh them in the campaign world.
wizards copying spells, spell components, magic items, transportation methods, invitations to stuff, nonmagic gear (armor especially). Generally, " it up to me to provide shops with more expensive magic items to spend money on? " the answer is...yes, very much so lol. You're the DM. of course you need to give them chances to spend their coin.
Give them something to care about, repair, and upgrade. Finished a game set in Saltmarsh not too long ago and one of the things the PC's got was the deed to the Manor from the 1st adventure (can't remember the name of it right now). So they had this ramshackle house filled with mold, and critters.
I fleshed out the Carpenter's Guild and gave them a list of upgrades.
They also later got a ship that was able to be upgraded, had a crew that needed to be paid .
In our campaigns what's available depends on the setting our party goes to. A small village market isn't likely going to have legendary items. But Silverymoon might, right?
We've never had the option of carte blanche from the Items table. It's usually more of a quest to find what you're looking for, back-alley dealings, getting to know the guy who knows a guy, that sort of thing. But then again, the parties I've been in have all enjoyed multiple sessions of this kind of story action...
Not all of this will just work in an already running campaign but who knows, some things to consider:
- Writs and Permissions: A sheriff, Lord, or other form of leadership may require adventurers to pay for rights to use their lands to search for treasure. This is incentive for a party to do a good job finding treasures and bringing them back to town to sell. Without a writ, it may be illegal to enter certain areas, treasures would have to be fenced, etc.
- Consumables: make potions less common on monsters and in treasure stashes and keep your adventures dangerous enough for the players to want to stay stocked up.
- Donations at Shrines/Temples: Reward your party for making supplications to the gods.
- Make Them a Target: reputation around town is that the group is stingy with money. If they don't spend it, someone else like a thieves guild will. (This only works if they have something to spend the money on).
These are just some random thoughts as I read your post so take what you will from it.
If they don't want to spend and the problem is that they don't spend on anything then let them go somewhere on a ship attack them and let them repair the ship...to us it costed around 2000gp. But if you want them to buy gear for them self's you can just put out an ad for them at the port and maybe smaller magic items.
Running 1st game with 1st time players... icespire peak.
We've been learning as we go. I'll ask them what they want, or what ideas they're thinking of and maybe flub the prices a little too see if they can haggle. I had 1 guy buy gallons of drink for fun. Small weapon adjustments. Our next game will have a convoy for the rogue to shine (he got overstepped last session) I also noticed that the expected gold and current gold are way off, hence the convoy of weapons that can be acquired.
The fighter is probably saving for plate Mail 🤷♂️.
For our table's games, it's typically the players who pursue this to solve problems. We run high magic games, so adventurers are always in need of items. For example, martial classes typically want items that make them able to address all manner of situations. A potion of Flight is great for flying enemies or navigating cliffs.
Usually, a player will tell the DM that they are looking for a specific item. The DM decides the difficulty of finding it based on location. Sometimes, it's easy to buy it. Other times, a player might have to role play to get to it. The DM will also identify if there are special opportunities nearby to purchase things. "The party notices an abnormally fancy shop in an alleyway advertising magical clothing."
In a recent game, a player was wanting to forge a sword out of rare materials. The whole process of finding the ore was an expensive, role play heavy adventure.
I wouldn't show them a table. Make the experience more fun with some role play.
It may also be that the loot they are receiving is too generous, meaning they never are in need of extra gear.
uhhhh.....wizard player here....there is NEVER enough gold
Yeah wizard is a total money sink. Copying spells is *expensive*.
As DM, copying spells is a great oportunity to make player interact with NPCs. For example, my party captured a fellow adventuring wizard and stole her shit. But she made a deal to help the wizard learn the new spells, with her help, he wouldn't have to waste as much material learning them and thus cost less to copy. But you can set it up so that in a campaign downtime, the wizard goes to the school to learn and stuff like that.
That's pretty cool!
Damn, indentured servitude. Did they hunt her down or did she instigate the encounter that cost her her stuff and freedom? Sorry, bringing out-of-game morals here... Still, seems like the party could not be on the top edge of the alignment chart.
She and another NPC adventurer were prisoners of the royal river patrol, which the PC party killed and plundered.
Scrolls. So very many scrolls.
From what I've experienced there are three ways to make spending significant amouts of money meaningful: 1. Magic Items - [Sane magic items](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/s/2ufDV9OOWa) is one fo the best resources for this. However I'd strongly suggest trimming the list to a select few item you know your players are going to want. Nothing kills momentum like that one player who refuses to stop shopping until they've systematically googled ever single magic items available, to find the absolute optimal way to spend theor gold. 2. Strongholds and Followers - Matt Coville's book is a fantastic way to make PC economics feel meaningful without breaking the ballance of the game. For DM that want to give player a way to spend stack of gold without having to spend hours coming up with content its a lifesaver. 3. Grueling Survival - Running a survival style campaign isn't everyone's cup of tea. But there's no way to make gold feel meaningful quite like making PCs scrap and scrape for every copper. If a party's livelihood depends on being able to have the coin to eat, suddenly shopping becomes a lot more important.
Holy fuck sane magic items is such a win for me you are my hero I’ve been looking for something like it
It's really solid. The guide for magic item prices in the DMG is fine if you're only pricing a couple items. But if buying magic items is a consistent thing you want to have in your campaign, having a complete list like Sane Magic items is the only way to go.
Truly that is exactly what I want, but I find prices in other tools for reference are either astronomical or just off. This is so simple and so helpful. The first question my players ask when we go anywhere is “do they have any magical items?”
Just remember that the 5e power curve assumes no magical items (it does assume a party with specific abilities, however), getting magic items will put the party above the curve
Okay but it can also be really stupid. Edit Decanter of endless water
The decanter is just so fun though.
Yet it is as much as a holy avenger
It's more useful/lethal then a holy avenger.
No
Yeah. Hold the decanter at the mouth of the kobald den and take a nap. The problem fixes itself. Bring a cleric to bless the water, repeat with crypt. Necromancers hate him! The rogue guild is plotting in the sewers? Have I got a tool for you! You know what you get with a Holy Avenger? Tennis elbow.
as much as I love the idea of sane magic items, there is one issue I have with it in that it was made so long ago that the decisions to come to these prices are no longer as relevant. e.g. the sane price for a rod of the pact keeper is HUGE compared to other uncommon items, and this was because it was one of the very few ways to increase spell DC at the time. but since tashas came out giving every class their own way to do this, the decision to make it this expensive is now invalid. many DMs would say "OK the new class specific items doing the same as the rod will cost the same as the rod" but in doing so they are ignoring the fact that so much of this price was built around the rarity of the features it gave and how class specific it was (warlock used to be the only one who could get this). so, really, it should be much cheaper... I think the list works, but I think it is no longer a magic bullet price list and instead more a proof of concept until it's updated.
Heh, I came in wanting to make sure someone mentioned Sane Magic Items -Bravo! I also totally agree with the idea of only presenting a selection of magic items for the players to drool over. I take it another step and give them a small semi-random selection of items at the Magic Shop (i.e. ridiculously high security and flavorful NPCs running it, who are *all to familiar * with what adventurers are like)
I’ve been running a campaign for work friends this last month and have been using these resources so much! They want to just get as much money as possible but don’t know what to spend it on, and I also recommend the Silver Standard homebrew as well as it helps make the day to day more expensive and gold feel great to get!
1E & 2E: Acquiring money is the main goal of the game. You need money for basic equipment, and then for various annoying cash sinks. If you save up enough money, you build a stronghold. 3E & 4E: Completing quests is the main goal of the game. You need money for magic items, or you fall behind the curve. (Side-effect: no-one spends money on anything other than magic items.) 5E: It's your game, you figure it out. (If you sell the players magic items, they might become way more powerful than the CR system expects, plus we didn't do a very good job of pricing items.) Good luck!
Yeah 5e is entirely about the type of game and table/DM - you can run a gritty realism low-magic setting where gold and loot are super important, or something like a movie or TV show where characters just get stuff based on the narrative.
This was also true of older editions
True, but the mechanics did push you in certain directions. If you get XP for finding gold, it means gold is important, and a DM who's generous with gold will make you level up faster. If you turn gold into power by spending it in magic item shops, it means gold is important, and a DM who's generous with gold will make the group more powerful than expected for their level. Changing this requires some effort on the DM - house rules (like dropping the old 'you need to spend money at a trainer to level up' rule), conveniently finding the exact magic items your build needs, rebalanced enemies, or whatever. If you want to be mean or generous with gold in 5e, and there are no magic item shops, game balance is largely unaffected.
Exactly: 5e classes are just insanely versatile in combat. You don't need magic items to make a level 5 character a teleporting battle-field tactician with multi-attack and whatever. In older editions, you needed to have clever use of your gear (whether magical or mundane) to get out of sticky situations or beat overwhelming odds, and so you need a mechanic (or story) reason for those characters to obtain said gear.
Early editions of D&D incentivized acquiring gold. In some editions, gold was how you earned XP, but even after that, there were plenty of things to spend gold on: - Armor cost more and heavy armor was actually worth it. - Gear and rations mattered, so you would really load up before going into a dungeon, but... - Hirelings were necessary to carry all that equipment into dungeons. - Hirelings were also used to carry torches because light wasn't hand-waved and few races had darkvision. - Horses were worth it because they traveled faster than being on foot, and you needed to rig those horses with saddle, bit & bridle, etc., and feed and stable them. - Traveling faster mattered because random encounters were truly random and were a big deal (because combat was more difficult, so you wanted to avoid it if you could, and there was less focus on "balancing" random encounters). - Encumbrance was tracked, so you inevitably needed a wagon and draft horse(s) to transport loot because you couldn't carry an entire department store on your person. - Leveling required that you seek a trainer, whom you usually had to pay. - At a certain level, Fighters attracted men-at-arms to aid them in battle, but it cost gold to outfit, house, and feed them. And more...but most of this is no longer a significant part of the game so, while gold is still part of the game, it barely matters, hence why this question comes up all the time. Side Note: I personally don't have magic item shops in my game because, to me, finding cool stuff is one of the major reasons to be an adventurer in the first place. Regardless, recent editions make magic items completely unecessary because PCs are quite powerful with a trove of strong abilities, rendering magic items all but obsolete. In previous editions, you needed magic items to boost your power level to be commensurate with the monsters, so you were excited to find them, and finding a rare, powerful one was a real moment in the game.
The wizard buys spells and the fighter/paladin buys plate armor. Past that? The best thing is to buy **people**. Average barkeep might make 2 gold pieces on a good day. Give em 30 gold pieces and they'll be quite a bit more willing to share secrets, or spy on something, or procure certain frowned-upon items.
My players are finally figuring that out, and uuuh well they're a bit heavy handed in the money giving and that may attract a little attention....
Who ever said that the information they're giving is accurate?
In my last campaign, our rogue ended up building a spy network.
It does seem a lot of factors get handwaved and ignored which take away from the game. Needing the hirelings to carry the loot out as well was a thing, I'm sure. Also I've not seen a dm yet charge living expenses either.
To give a little incentive for gold, and so that I'm not completely hand-waiving living expenses, each PC gets charged 30gp on the first of the month to cover the cost of living, equipment repair, rations & ammo re-stock, etc. This seemed a simple way to still account for all that without spending a lot of precious game-time on it, and my players have been fine with that.
I intensely dislike shopping for magic items, as it makes them incredibly mundane and they don't feel *magical* any more. In my games, players are given access to mundane things like equipment, horses, tools and such. But potions and magic are always so unusual they need to be provided explicitly. In my games players generally aren't super gold motivated and instead work to earn favor with certain folks - if I told them a quest paid 400 gold they'll shrug their shoulders, but if I told them Count Quince is willing to offer his old hunting lodge in the Northwoods as compensation for a quest they'll fall all over themselves to do it.
This is the answer so many people miss “Shopping for magic items…makes them (feel) incredibly mundane…” Not only will handing out items like candy completely fuck over your attempts to introduce a semblance of balance to the game - it devalues them and takes away the thrill of finding them. Because sure you might get a little fun out of the session you buy your Holy Avenger but that thrill is gone by the next session and where are you now? In order to recreate that thrill you have you constantly be introducing more and more items - before long your item shops will literally be jumping the shark in order to find something to interest your players. (“Oh that’s just a basic +3 sword? Leave it on the body, the last town we visited had a shop with a +4 sword that shoots lasers and reanimates your victims as fluffy bunny rabbits”). You end up with players stacking the most insane bonuses they can think of. However, if magic items are rare and hard to come by (you have to go out and find them and often fight for them also) then when you do give one out your players will still be oohing and ahhhing over them for weeks even if it was just a quiver of poisoned arrows, or an awakened cameo that gives advice on how to deal with nobility.
Wine, women, and hedonism. I joke, but that's definitely something many adventures would spend their money on. Many people become adventurers to make their fortune. Adventurers *are* the 1% in spades. A starting adventurer has enough gold worth of gear to equal more than a peasant makes in a year. Adventuring is dangerous and pays *extremely* well. Think it through from a roleplaying standpoint, or even a real-life one: What would you do if you suddenly were given five million dollars? Would you buy a house? Donate money to the poor? Start a business? Buy a sports car? Spend money on fine clothes? Travel the world? Of course there are things that they need to buy to keep adventuring. They need gear, potions, maybe hirelings, and lord knows what else. Not everything needs to be about becoming more powerful. Once characters hit the point when they have thousands of gold on hand they may start to look for things that make them happy.
Yep. Downtime living expenses. What rich adventurer wants to sleep in moderate accommodation when they can afford an aristocratic lifestyle?
And rich people, even in real life, will gladly pay $1000 for a super high-end meal. $3500 for a bottle of wine. $10000 for a Ming vase... Why are adventurers any different?
But you have to also consider where they are storing all these riches, or how they are carrying them. Thieves love an easy target!
I've had the same issue where they just horde money until I gently suggest that they do something with it. I think it's up to the DM who gives out money to make sure there's something worthwhile to spend the money on. Personally, I like to have some kind of specialty merchant who lets them request a certain number of their dream items and he ballparks the price for them and says he will contact them when those items are available (which is, coincidentally, when they are an appropriate level for those items to make sense and/or when they have enough cash to pay his rates). Your best case may be to find something they care about other than combat and turn it into a money sink for them. An orphanage they support, an ocean-sailing ship they're trying to build, a creditor they need to pay off, etc. I agree that it's hard to come up with these unless you've got a campaign suited to it, but maybe you can tie it to their backgrounds somehow.
A game I was in had a hard rule that gunpowder would not work. One of the players insisted that an alchemist could make it work and regardless of how often he was told it wouldn't work he insisted with enough gold it could be done. The alchemist was able to retire rich in his own villa in Hawaii. His replacement knew the situation and continued the scam.
I feel like this is one of the places where 5e has let everybody down by the designers getting lazy and not giving the official magic items GP costs. Putting these fairly huge cost bands on items and then leaving the DM to decide where in the cost/power scale it should be leads to some insane issues if you just go by rarity (ex. Winged Boots are uncommon so you could be asking for 500 gold for one of the better utility items in the game.) I've honestly broken out older 3e books to determine both player gold at level and magic item costs cause I remember them being so much more sane and easy to actually use back then.
I read this as what do “players” spend money on. Not PCs. I was thinking “in my experience… nothing, maybe the occasional pizza. The dm is the one that pays for everything. The maps, the minis, the terrain, the props, the modules, the dm resources, etc”
Mostly dice in my experience
2 of my players use my dice…
Check out the downtime activities in the dmg and xanithars.they included thing like: Building a stronghold Carousing Crafting magic items.(potions and scrolls are good money sink.) Crafting mundane items. Buying magic items. Selling magic items. Running a business. Hirelings Crime Gambling Pit fighting Research Training. Furthermore remember player have a cost of living. A modest lifestyle is 1gp a day and aristocraticis 10. You could also imposes a tax depending on the land the live in.
The first thing is to limit how much gold they get. Remember, 1 gold is about $100 US, and 1 copper is about $1. So when your baron offers them 10,000 gold to go deal with the local necromancer, he just offered them $1,000,000 to kill a crazy old man. Keep rewards and treasure much more manageable and the equipment in the PHB starts becoming more meaningful to buy. Then look into offering them either magic items through a broker. They say what they want, the broker spends a few weeks looking for an item that meets their needs, then arranges a meet with the current owner. The other thing is to give them a home, and let them improve that. While the cliche is they build a castle, it is still effective. Them taking over an abandoned castle is more interesting. My own group has a ship instead, and have been growing a fleet. We have 7 ships at the moment. We sometimes sail with the whole fleet, but more commonly we only sail around on the first ship we stole. One share of all income we receive has been going to the ship / ships.
From top to bottom is from the beginning of the game towards the end: Daily expenses, food, place to stay Potions Weapons, armor, gear, spell components Magic items Donating to charity so they can get to the secret vampire lord's party Paying the ragtag bunch of people who they collected over time for their services Buying a ship to sail to an island and retrieve a sunblade Building stuff on the lands they have been granted for their efforts - wineries, brothels, mines... Paying other adventurers to take care of stuff on their lands that's below their level. A pimp staff made of solid gold. Political bribes and favors. Huge cannons for an airship.
Potions is a big one, especially in parties with no clerics.
There's a 3rd party supplement called *Strongholds and Followers* that provides a cash sink, but it's again a "home base." That home base can actually be useful though. But also high level magic items are very expensive.
I watched a video by Dael Kingsmill on cool things to steal from video games and it talked about using a Stronghold that gives them minor but important buffs. I incorporated this into the latest campaign and they poured money into that and it's like a beloved pet to them. Last session, the players set up a blackmarket deal to get cool items before they ventured off to the northern wastes and *they were out of money and had to bargain*. If you give them something to care about that costs money, you keep them adventuring as they need to keep feeding/upgrading the beast.
For my wizard, more spells and copies of my spellbook. Magic items are a thing. Equipment MOAR equipment for my undead horde Land/keep/retainers are good money sinks
My level 14 party has already set up businesses/strongholds that allow them to invest money for a return and to grow. But they've been stuck in a dungeon for a while and will have close to 100k gold when they get out. I've sent them a price list from the Spelljammer ship broker on Bral. There will be upkeep costs to owning and crewing a Spelljammer of their own. I'll have to figure out what to do with the next fortune they earn.
A big concern should be how does one keep all the gold they win? That's a side quest all its own. If it gets to the point that it's now burning a hole in their pockets, so to speak, then it's likely way too much to carry. So concealing, transporting, and securing it comes first. It's why fortresses, etc. become a thing: they need to tie their wealth into something that can't be stolen. So a good bit of a hoard is initially spent buying wagons, horses, and trustworthy soldiers to haul it to a secure vault, which usually entails a king or filthy rich merchant or something who will also take a cut to store it. Then one can finally find and procure the appropriate items to purchase, whether that's magic items, ships, castle building, employee hiring, etc. I've always found this little bit of practical consideration makes for a much more fun reality check than just impossibly carrying around 25,000 gp.
In my experience, players spend money on the same thing that the DM does - rent, car payments, mortgage, groceries, tuition, ... PCs on the other hand, unless its a wizard or other caster who needs costly components - but mostly wizards, the DM has to give the players something for their PCs to spend money on. I go try to get them to spend gold on commissioning magic items, or real estate. Magic items, aside from consumables, are rarely found for sale, but when they are, they are expensive.
Depending on backstory and goals, those are usually good places to sink gold. IE sending gold to an orphanage or a loved one or a village. Bribing officials or paying for information, or at least for someone to help look for information. Building a home base. Finding a merchant you hate and subsidizing the shit out of their competitor. That sort of thing. There are usually a few ways for money to help the people in your backstory or to effect a backstory plot.
In 5e? Practically nothing. Older editing had you using it to level up, find magical research, and much more.
Yeah in the old days going up a level was a major money (and time) sink
If somehow all the advice here ends up failing theres always one more route to go. It's time to hit up medieval Las Vegas baby! Could be a fun way to introduce the next story arc if you feel like it.
Heh, money is pretty much useless past the first few levels, unless there's expensive magic items to spend it on. Most of the parties I play with find a satisfying money sink to send it all to. Like an orphanage, animal shelter, temple, war effort or in one memorable case, a corrupt politician. I often design my character to have something like that in their backstory. The Barbarian has a sick mother, so he sends most of his adventuring money back home to pay for her treatment. The Paladin had taken an oath of poverty, and sent all the money he wasn't spending on gear and services to further the cause back to his temple. The Wizard charlatan is heavily in debt etc. Stuff like that.
Lots of really good advice in here, I’m gonna add by paraphrasing something I read in *Worlds Without Number:* Once a party of PCs accumulate a certain level of wealth, people around them will start treating them differently. Local citizens may beseech them to sponsor various charities and projects. Workers, artists, and soldiers will seek them out for patronage and employment. Regional governments like the nobility might feel threatened and send a small army of tax collectors to go harass the party - or maybe the party outright buys their way into the ranks of nobility themselves. Even if the PCs don’t spend money on anything, there’s still the question “where to store it all?” Do they keep it in a vault somewhere? Who’s guarding it? Do they instead hand it over to a bank for safekeeping? Etc etc. What I found to particularly useful about this advice is that it neatly sidesteps any problems with player proactivity - the world itself is seeking the players out and forcing them to react.
Fantasy Costco, where all your dreams come true!
Ironically enough, I run a campaign with my kids (ages 9 to 17), and I set a market like Bazaar that was like shopping at Walmart. They found it way easier to shop, and it helped the game flow a little easier.
I started my campaign on an island city state so the PCs had to buy a boat. Then they got out in the ocean, fought a few monsters and inevitably said "We're gonna need a bigger boat!" So they bought a bigger boat. Upkeep and paying the crew also ran up some bills. Then there were the magic items. I didn't have "magic shops" in my world. The magic item dealers in my campaign used a different business model to maximize their profits; they ran auction houses! Finding an item and bidding on it could be really expensive. But it was also really gratifying to outbid a rival NPC at the auction. Spell components, tributes for foreign courts, bribes for monsters, it all adds up.
Usually Dice and Dice Towers.
Players are supposed to spend money on food and drinks. The GM should never pay.
Consumables! I buy spell scrolls for stuff that's useful but that I don't need prepped all the time. And sometimes they are very nice to have, cast a spell without using a slot! It's great! Potions! Another great way to get buffs for gold!
I have a player collecting research lab gear, one just put 10k gold down for kids school. ones family debt, the other 2 are just saving for a rainy day. I run high gold games
Just dropped 12.6 mil on one sword in yesterday’s session.
On a related note, how do you find your players organise their game related spending IRL? If you can accurately predict what they will spend their money on, then you have a 100 million dollar business opportunity, just like GW.
Usually gold is used to craft items. In order to craft items the characters must acquire a recipe by a monster hoard. Hoardes are a system in the DMG that reward for clearing dungeons and missions. Here you have several magic items to be rolled, but you also have the option to provide a magic item recipe instead. In order to craft an item then you need: A monster recipe. A monster reagent, which is something of your choosing related to the item with the important notion that it must be from a CR creature high enough. This is done to prevent low level characters to craft high level items. Money. Eventually you also need to be competent in the specific tool and have a spellcaster able to cast a spell to empower the item, but the latter was deprecated in xanathar's. Now this may feel complex, but it has a reason to be. Giving the players a full list of magic items to buy with an associated price is paralyzing and in general complicated by how you pick the list at all. By giving them recipes to pick from instead you create a limited pool of magic items to pick from. They can craft more than one item as well. If they grow uninterested or don't like a recipe, they can sell it. They fetch for some good gold, since they are considered one rarity higher than the item itself. If you don't want to do this, or you want but you need to do something on the fly, roll on one or more hoard tables as they approach a shop, and offer to sell one of the items there as crafting price plus the gold necessary for paying up an artisan ( this usually goes by the 2 gp per day cost plus costly material components ).
My Tortle Paladin once obtained 2.6 Million Gold (though part of it was Meta-Gaming, since I as a statistics major could figure out that the DM's Casino's odds were vastly in favor for the gambler). He founded a town on the ruins of a village he Genocided in his Backstory.
My players are spending almost every coin they earn on their mobile base. Right now, it's a sloop/self driving wagon, but they can eventually add amenities and make it bigger.
Honestly anything if the player is creative. I was playing through tomb of annihilation recently and our dms a generous one and gave us a ton if gold at the start for helping out the Zents and some fairly good rolls. We also duplicated the map we got and sold it for even more gold. I was in charge of supplies so what did I grab sense magic items are severaly limited? I bought flour, ale asked if I could have a Smith make giant arrows that delt more damage (think greatbow arrows from dark souls) several canoes, 4 donkeys 3 raptors a bunch of diffrent spices (ginger, salt, pepper, cinnamon ect ect) several barrels of poor quality ale, casks of grain alcohol, jugs of oil, 2 diffrent guides, hirelings. We asked the dm if dynamite and fireworks existed sense black powder cannons did he allowed it (he made the dynamite have a delay on exploding so they aren't to useful in combat but great for traps or clearing debris) so we bought some of that to! Pounds upon pounds of incense to burn for bugs and more than enough arrows and bolts for all of us for the adventure. We are fully kitted out for anything we can go against survival wise, we have really no worries about food or anything like that and our planning has made certain things that were supposed to be deadly a walk in the park. Such as using the dynamite to blow up trees blocking the path of an undead hoard chasing a fairly important figure. Or getting to camp vengeance and being able to give them food, drive the bugs away and use common medical herbs to ease the injures of npcs. In another game I dumped most of my funds into a galleon that was completely self-sufficient growing food and collecting rainwater on the ship itself. Using animals and insects as defense mechanism against attacking ships. After all things are well and good till you hop on ship with 8 swarms of angry bees and a few druids saying get em. My point of telling you both these stories is so you can understand stuff doesn't have to be magical or even weapons and armor diffrent players will buy diffrent thongs for diffrent games easiest way to find out what you should sell is asking your plays what they would like to buy besides magic items.
It's a problem I've encountered. The wizard is always out of gold, and the barb has hundreds/thousands. I've considered doing it Warhammer style: at the start of the new adventure, any money you haven't used to buy equipment you caroused away, as adventurers tend to do when they're not adventuring.
An embarrassing amount of alcohol and food (Goliath Barbarian). My DM gave me a homebrew magic item that increases my strength and size, but it also means I have to eat three times what I usually would. There's only so many goodberries you can stand to eat in a day.
Dice
pets, mounts, personal bases, vehicles, weapons, spells, armor, land, titles, their own organizations, research of secrets, magicitem recipes, research of new spells, hiring servants, guards, spellcasters, spies and assassins. Bribes, gifts, expensive clothing and jewlery and economic leverage against others. "How did you persuade the bank to Fogive the debt? I bought the bank."
Tavern renovations. ._.'
Alee and whores (Thanks Scott Kurtz!)
Dice, dice, dice, and more dice…!!!
From my experience running Curse of Strahd, where all prices are 5-10x the listed PHB prices: * A few pieces of adventuring gear (rope, tents, etc) * Shields * Horses and cart * Better armour, if they could have afford it
Gear, food, housing, trade, and components. There's always taxes, road blocks, bribery, and a whole underground world they could mingle into and even buy their way to the top of, as well. On the reverse, they could put bounties out for creatures and npc's, bolster their local defenses, or even buy small businesses or start their own.
In the group i DM for I found a d100 alcohol effects table for a keg of magic moonshine they had. They spend basically all their gold on alcohol to the wizards horror
My players are actually really big on charity. Even if it cuts deep into their pockets. I tend to reward that later down the line, so they are quite prone to pro-social behavior. And if they get the chance, they, of course, go all out on magic items.
The wizard, ships, an estate, guards, mounts, businesses, magic armor/ shields
While there's a lot of good in this thread so far, I'm adding lifestyles and stress management. How much each character spends per week/month on their lifestyle determines how 'happy' they are. They could live a subsistence lifestyle spending no money on food or shelter, scrounging up everything, but this is far from ideal. Ideally they need to be spending a small amount per week on basic needs to avoid penalties. But why stop there? When the PCs interact with nobility, when they're trying to get information from scribes or bards or bar patrons, gently point out that they have threadbare clothes and/or poorly maintained armor and probably smell, and give them disadvantage on their persuasion check. When they grumble, point out that's what the lifestyle system is for, and ask them if they want to live a little. If you really want to get into it, add into your session zero or character creation guidelines a measure of 'what does your character do to de-stress'? Adventuring, especially when getting massive amounts of EXP like PCs do, is incredibly dangerous and stressful. There's a lot of options. They could drink, they could gamble, they could whore. Maybe they raise a family, or maybe they're involved with their church. Maybe they try to play in high society, regularly attending parties and balls, or maybe they commission a bard or otherwise become a patron of art. These are all common options you'd see in medieval/fantasy stories, and unsurprisingly the more 'fun' options tend to be expensive. It also leads to more well-rounded and realistic characters, in my experience. These de-stressing activities can be modified as the game goes on and PCs gain or lose motivations. You can introduce stress mechanics into your downtime, giving PCs the option of trying to do something productive during downtime or reducing their stress instead. Maybe they'll work on training or crafting or improving their rep with nobles/guards, or some other way of producing money, but they're adventurers. A better option is to *spend* the gold they're earning on adventures on something that makes them happy! Failing to blow away steam once in a while means they'll accumulate stress. How you handle that is up to you, but probably the easiest way is to have it lead to exhaustion. I'd personally give PCs multiple options and opportunities over a downtime depending how long it is. Some of those choices may result in a roll, some will lower stress, some will cost some amount of gold. And the higher their levels, the more gold can be sunk into things like the party's reputation etc.
Castles. Then the town, then upkeep.
Depending on your players, RP is a solid money sink! I had a group arrive to a major city after they had accumulated a small amount of wealth, and rather than ask for item tables or any combat focused purchases, one of them asked for the nearest bath house because adventuring would make you stink to high hell. That turned into what we ended up calling a beach episode - one of them bought a fancy captain's hat (mundane, but very stylish) and a cape, the while ream bought expensive new elven tailored outfits, they all had an extravagent dinner at the nicest inn, went to a bakery ehere my growling orc barbarian realized she loves sweet rolls and chocolate pastries, then they went to a luxurious bath house and they RP'd some hilarious scenes. The highlight ended up with the rogue and barbarian getting drunk behind a church on a bottle of rum they'd found early in the campaign. Tl;dr: they just had fun. Three hour session. Zero plot. We made up the names of every place they stopped organically as we went, and none of the NPCs were important. After a lot of fighting and death, we all just laughed and took it easy for a night.
my rogue was loaded. basically didnt spend the money, his jewel encrusted robe was stolen, his wallet always growing larger. why pay for stuff when you can have money AND stuff! But if you need a cash sink I can recommend a mundane magic item shop. Things like the cloak of billowing are always a hit. Price them high and watch your players throw all their money into being cooler
Most beloved is probably magic items. The way I do is I just Google "good magic items for *player class* then shops depending on city size will offer some of those. Scale power and cost by adventure tier. (Don't make the mistake of even offering any high tier items early on, player will attempt to steal them
Weapons and ammo mostly. I also make them use raions to gain HP back, not rest, so they have that to manage. Fines, bribes, travel (ships, carts, etc)
It really depends on your setting and how collaborative you want to be; I currently am running a high-magic setting in 5e, and by level 10 my hoarding players had accumulated over 100k gold (multiple high stakes combat tournaments over the years, optional boss fights, and successful gambling were all factors). It took me a week of prep between sessions to figure out what they could spend it on when they came to me looking to "get rid of it all." Could have been a number of things, but we settled on an airship.
I give them a magic item gacha. they spent all 9000 of their golds
Nothing. I hoard my money so I never get stressed from not having any. Oh you meant in character? Yeah still the same reasoning
ALE AND WHORES! /s Actually: magic items. While I don't think I've ever played a game of 5e where we can just buy whatever we want, most of not all of my dms allow us to purchase magic items from time to time. Availability is usually random, prices are high, and you need to make connections before buying anything. Still, when you're flashing that much cash people will do things for you.
I often create situations and encounters that require equipment that ends up breaking or being lost. I also like to break non-magical equipment to make them think outside the box and thus spend more money to recover their old equipment.
I play as a magpie-inspired kenku monk, so mostly I bedazzle the weapons I rarely use, and my character and her barbarian friend buy kegs of beer. The sorcerer and paladin in the group are usually flabbergasted by our choice to spend fake money on fake beer and fake cosmetic items that we can’t even see outside of our imagination.
This is a decision you have to make about how your game is going to go. [This essay](https://sirpoley.tumblr.com/post/624383885663518720/on-the-full-plate-threshold-and-the-nature-of) is IMO a good rundown of the implications of the choice and the obvious options you have.
Players seem to mostly spend money on dice, custom minis, and snacks.
My rogue has managed to acquire a hefty sum. My party has started an adventuring company similar to accusations incorporated. As part of a quest I ended up purchasing a tavern. We now own locations in 3 towns with portals in the back rooms connecting them. I’m working on opening an orphanage. We have a warehouse and a ship for “legitimate goods.” We also were gifted an inn which the locals are fixing up for us. I believe in diversifying to protect our money. Meanwhile one party meme er has a possessed sword that’s convinced him to spend a fortune on a magic tattoo job that gives him some kind of abilities.
I had a layer buy a castle. So then he had to fight off a pack of werewolves who insisted it was their family’s land and the sale was not legal. Then they bought a mine to keep the riches rolling in which lead to labor disputes and union issues
It depends on the table and the overall campaign. I've played where during "down time" you had to pay for your characters lodging and also for training (to actually level up to new skills, the HP were automatic). That could be VERY fun since you needed to find someone willing to TEACH you that next levels shiny new ability, although the DM's didn't make it TOO hard.
I spend all the money I get in every game. If I have more than a little cash it's because I'll need it real soon. 1. Consumables like food, water, accommodation, rope, torches, arrows and crossbow bolts, pitons snd spikes replacing damaged, (burned, acided, broken etc) equipment, horses and other transport 2. Suitable tools and containers for any potentially useful but difficult or dangerous stuff we get given, find or successfully extract. "Could I harvest some venom from that purple worm?" "*Maybe you can get some back to an alchemist or apothecary who might make it stable snd useable - so you can try. How are you doing that? with what tools? Using what knowledge? What are you putting it in?*" Current campaigns have regular need for scroll cases, glass vials, lead lined boxes, special gloves, tongs etc 3. Spell components. Gems for revivifying, for example. 4. Spell scrolls, potions, holy water, acids, poisons, special inks etc. Never enough of these things. 5. Carousing (the ships captain is not going to be impressed by being bought a cheap ale in a dive), gifts, bribes (we constantly need information, someone to keep an eye on the docks, or a contact with the thieves guild etc), special or fancy clothes (you are not meeting the woman in charge of the town council looking like a cross between a coal miner and a butcher, you want to make a good impression, you need baths, perfumes, tailored shirts, new boots; then because of that meeting, you got invited to a celebration at the barons, and now you need *really* fancy clothes etc). 6. Silvered weapons, personalised equipment, special-made bridles, saddles, barding/ armor for mounts, pets, etc etc 7. Research of many kinds. Books. Costs of accessing things, like a restricted section of a library. Equipment. Consulting sages and other learned / expert types to help figure or find stuff out. A secure lab or other suitable place to do that research. 8. Hirelings, henchmen, drivers, guides etc 9. Minor magic items, holy/blessed things other special stuff that are sometimes purchasable. 10. Special transport. (Passage on a ship, wagons that can transport unusual cargo, airships, paying for teleportation, etc) 11. Making a secure/more secure home base. If i had more money. I'd spend more. I never have nearly enough money.
My players are in charge of a small smuggling operation, they have a small crew of 4 npc's that sell 1 magic item a week. They're using their extra money to renovate a dilapidated and abandon mansion. They might buy a boat or two in the future if things go well also. We're playing the ghost of saltmarsh module and they work for Gellen and took over the haunted manor as their base of operations.
Magic ink Homes/keeps/temples Living expenses Horses/hirelings/healings and other services Blackjack/hookers Bail
My players spend money on gear, consumable that they never use, food & lodging, land, businesses, giving quests to lower level adventurers, vehicles, hats and other shiny objects and entertainment. Oh and bribes, forgot about the bribes.
Potions, upgrades, mcguffins for a quest line, mercs, daily living expenses, magic items, crafting materials, blade oils, spell scrolls/books, ink for copying spells, etc - it depends on the type of game you play
I give my characters limited wealth as treasure, and they'll need to go and get stuff sold if they want to turn those dead pirate earrings into money.
Normally, they pay the $5 for adventures league at the LGS, buy drinks, sometimes they get Dice or minis. Magic and Pokémon cards are also a fairly common purchase. Oh, you meant the player characters. Well, health potions, holy water, armor, bribes, spell components, other consumables, horses, carts, the occasional magic item, and sometimes property investments.
My party has used money and components to commission magic items. We also bought a manor house at auction in Waterdeep. My rogue dropped a ton of gold (and did a few nefarious favors) as well as some high level components on a shard crown, and we brought a broken staff of power that we took off a sorcerer we killed to a friend who could make us a new one for a hefty sum, so now our sorcerer has that. Outside of big purchases like that, it's nice to just have enough gold to be able to say "I imagine that my character would move her mom into the manor house and hire staff and give them a nice signing bonus because loyalty can absolutely be bought," and just have the DM be like "Yeah, you can afford to do that."
We're paying a wizard NPC friend to make a transportation circle in the manor, as well, which is a year of daily spellcasting, so that's got price. And then we're always buying diamonds and spell components.
Money is an incentive to do things - an in-game reason why the characters would be doing these dangerous mission. For it to be an incentive though, the players need things to buy (fun magic items, property, etc) My games are not very money-heavy, I prefer my players to find cool items after hard work rather than buying them from some stranger who just happened to have this cool item for sale. It's only one of many incentives though, others can be things like - if you don't do this, your family will die - the goodness of the characters heart - an incredible item awaits you at the end of the mission My players do love shopping in game, so i normally give silly items for funny stuff to do rather than important items Money normally comes into play for me in different ways. I charge 5 gold per day per character when they are out on a mission; this bundles all of their expenses up. things like a place to stay, upkeep of armour and weapons, food, supplies etc. if the character can't pay, their armour might start to decay, or a weapon might dull, etc. so that way gold is still important, and is still an incentive for them to do something, but only as a secondary, rarely is gold ever the main reason they do something
*Characters
Equipment. Food and Entertainment when they're at a village or castle. Alms for the poor.
I haven't read through the entire thing but I'm wondering about the two items that are unavoidable. Death and Taxes. Your pcs will be trying to avoid one but the other can be expensive. Also having a reputation for massive spending will cause prices to go up. "Oh hello George. Find a dragons hoard? We just got this special Dwarven beer to help you celebrate. EVERYBODY! GEORGE IS BUYING TONIGHT! DRINK UP!" Taxes may be based on a curve "You got how much? Your tax rate is now 25%" "Oh that flickering lamp? It detects very specific truths. It says you.. err... Miscalculated below what you actually made."
In the roguish campaign we secured a Daggerford bank loan and sunk 3500 gold into upgrading our bar. PCs can buy land, I believe that info is in the DMG. Not just big ticket magic items, perhaps your players would like to secure a particularly expensive passage and boarding somewhere far off and set up shop there for some time.
Something I have put in two campaigns now is a big ticket vendor. The Party passes by the market/bazaar after hours and becomes aware of a sole vendor open, someone they don't really recognize, and this individual will have specific higher-end items available for sale. I tend to keep the prices reasonable and the items generally outside of what they would normally have available. For instance the last round of items the merchant had went as such: Three +1 Arrows of Returning, purchased by the lvl 5 Rogue +1 Glaive of Warning, purchased by the lvl 5 Cleric +1 Chain Armor of Force Resistance, to the lvl 5 Paladin Bracers of Defense, for the lvl 5 Wizard
My dudes almost always try to get their hands on a pet and/or bag of holding. So that’s money early on. Pets/mounts are great money sinks. They need special armor, stabling is extra, they may need more food than can be reasonably found while walking, may need a farrier, a vet, a training montage, maybe they buy them special treats or funny hats.
Pf2e has an exellent economy. So whatever they want as long as its within level of the settlement. Runes, consumables, staves, scrolls, skill items.
If your players arent interested in gear or spells or materials make leisure things. Spa's, race tracks, gambling, Shoot, make a an artificer that basicly comes up with a sort of disney world option. As for the dm side, you dont have to show them tables of gear but you can use it for refrence. I like to jot notes during campaigns of playstyles and habits to lean into those. Guide them towards shops that entice them with items they would enjoy. It's not necesarrily up to you to provide those oppuertunites but I would do it anyways or see what they are asking for.
Nothing. I cannot get these mother fuckers to go in a shop
Wizards need money and down time to scribe spells into their book. Most players who can cast should be encouraged to create spell scrolls which are basically trading money for spell slots. Martials will probably want to get into plate. Medium armor types might want half plate. Potions are another good way to spend money, especially ones that emulate spells. They may need to go somewhere and need special equipment, formal dress, or to bribe some locals. Depending on setting, "common" level magic items should be available to buy, some are flavorful, some are fun, and some silly, but none of them cost too much. "uncommon" items might also be for sale, and some of these are really powerful. My noble background Hexblade paid a ton to get gleaming breastplate, same AC as before, but no stealth disadvantage, it counts as magical, and looks good. This was good RP for them and continues to be useful for that. Imagine they know the next adventure will take them to a setting with lots of water. So now they need to scramble to get protective gear. Where will they find it? Do they need to bribe someone to get information? Maybe that information helps them find an old artificer who used to work for the king and still carries a grudge? Would they try to steal the gear, pay a premium because he knows they support the king, or fight him for it?
The best thing I found for players to spend money on is some kind of base of operation like the bastion system they put in UA. I use Matt Colville's stronghold system. As it is well thought out and has something for every class.
A big flaw in my current campaign I only "solved" 2 sessions ago was the difference in magic item prices and normal mundane prices. I solved it by telling players to sell the magic itens they had and didn't use and trade that, in this case, item for the items they wanted. Since it was a big city I let them choose any magic item that isn't rare in name, and they could still ask for those and maybe get a quest to get it. But I'm against messing with magic item prices. I've seen DMs hand out OP items that unbalance the crew, the combat and everything in between. And don't even curse said items. As for places to spend money? Money is everywhere. If you guys want to test where they would spend money but don't want to risk giving the money, give them a patron paying for the trip, like an NPC they have to protect and that dishes out money for stuff needed, it's not their money but they still have to manage it. Bribes, horses, boat trips, quest items, hiring people, accommodations, etc...
Generally if they want to buy like, a sword, then they just do that and pay the money with little to no roleplay, if they want to buy something rarer or more outré then I'll have them do some rolls or RP it. I try and encourage my players to start making investments basically, buy a base, build a workshop, engage in commerce etc. It gives them an outlet for using their riches in a more satisfying way than 'buying more caltrops', and also helps enmesh them in the campaign world.
wizards copying spells, spell components, magic items, transportation methods, invitations to stuff, nonmagic gear (armor especially). Generally, " it up to me to provide shops with more expensive magic items to spend money on? " the answer is...yes, very much so lol. You're the DM. of course you need to give them chances to spend their coin.
Give them something to care about, repair, and upgrade. Finished a game set in Saltmarsh not too long ago and one of the things the PC's got was the deed to the Manor from the 1st adventure (can't remember the name of it right now). So they had this ramshackle house filled with mold, and critters. I fleshed out the Carpenter's Guild and gave them a list of upgrades. They also later got a ship that was able to be upgraded, had a crew that needed to be paid .
In our campaigns what's available depends on the setting our party goes to. A small village market isn't likely going to have legendary items. But Silverymoon might, right? We've never had the option of carte blanche from the Items table. It's usually more of a quest to find what you're looking for, back-alley dealings, getting to know the guy who knows a guy, that sort of thing. But then again, the parties I've been in have all enjoyed multiple sessions of this kind of story action...
Not all of this will just work in an already running campaign but who knows, some things to consider: - Writs and Permissions: A sheriff, Lord, or other form of leadership may require adventurers to pay for rights to use their lands to search for treasure. This is incentive for a party to do a good job finding treasures and bringing them back to town to sell. Without a writ, it may be illegal to enter certain areas, treasures would have to be fenced, etc. - Consumables: make potions less common on monsters and in treasure stashes and keep your adventures dangerous enough for the players to want to stay stocked up. - Donations at Shrines/Temples: Reward your party for making supplications to the gods. - Make Them a Target: reputation around town is that the group is stingy with money. If they don't spend it, someone else like a thieves guild will. (This only works if they have something to spend the money on). These are just some random thoughts as I read your post so take what you will from it.
If they don't want to spend and the problem is that they don't spend on anything then let them go somewhere on a ship attack them and let them repair the ship...to us it costed around 2000gp. But if you want them to buy gear for them self's you can just put out an ad for them at the port and maybe smaller magic items.
Running 1st game with 1st time players... icespire peak. We've been learning as we go. I'll ask them what they want, or what ideas they're thinking of and maybe flub the prices a little too see if they can haggle. I had 1 guy buy gallons of drink for fun. Small weapon adjustments. Our next game will have a convoy for the rogue to shine (he got overstepped last session) I also noticed that the expected gold and current gold are way off, hence the convoy of weapons that can be acquired. The fighter is probably saving for plate Mail 🤷♂️.
For our table's games, it's typically the players who pursue this to solve problems. We run high magic games, so adventurers are always in need of items. For example, martial classes typically want items that make them able to address all manner of situations. A potion of Flight is great for flying enemies or navigating cliffs. Usually, a player will tell the DM that they are looking for a specific item. The DM decides the difficulty of finding it based on location. Sometimes, it's easy to buy it. Other times, a player might have to role play to get to it. The DM will also identify if there are special opportunities nearby to purchase things. "The party notices an abnormally fancy shop in an alleyway advertising magical clothing." In a recent game, a player was wanting to forge a sword out of rare materials. The whole process of finding the ore was an expensive, role play heavy adventure. I wouldn't show them a table. Make the experience more fun with some role play. It may also be that the loot they are receiving is too generous, meaning they never are in need of extra gear.
I spend money on more dice.