Mo' Money, Mo' Problems

Dealing with large amounts of gold in RPGs

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: “My players have so much money now that nothing is a challenge anymore.” Dealing with the abundance of cash that comes from a career adventuring is something that troubles the modern gamer. It’s so common that the OSR has spent a great deal of time extolling the virtues of keeping players poor. Even ShadowDark infers that during downtime you will spend all of your treasure on wine, women and bawdy songs. At a certain point though, this becomes an absurd proposition. Sure, you might be able to burn through all of your assets after your first handful of adventures, but once you start slaying dragons, unearthing riches of lost kingdoms, etc losing everything would require a bender of epic proportions. On top of that, it’s just frustrating. “Sorry, you can’t be frugal and stash money away for the future because I have to create artificial reasons for you to keep playing this game.”

That’s complete nonsense and your players know it. You asked for player autonomy, so you’re going to get it. Part of player autonomy is deciding what to do with gigantic sums of cash earned on your adventures. The answer to this quandary is, of course, domain play. How does domain play cure this ill though? Well, the answer should be obvious, but I’ll spell it out and explain it to make this as clear as possible. When you engage in domain play, you are putting your money into assets that will make you more money. At scale, these assets will include services and businesses that other people rely on. You will also have the power of cash and resources to trade for favors, loyalty and fealty. Having a Scrooge McDuck vault full of gold coins is no way to hold onto your wealth or grow it. You have to invest it and in investing it, you unlock the next level of gameplay.

Let’s talk about what you’re dealing with when it comes to treasure from adventures. Using the rules as laid out in Adventurer Conquer King System (ACKS), an Adult Dragon’s horde averages around 22,000 GP. ACKS measures that 1000 coins equals roughly 10 lbs so a Dragon’s horde weighs 220 lbs spread out across 22,000 pieces. Dragon’s keep their coins in giant piles that they sleep on, but you might not have that as an option. Even if you do, continuously adventuring will mean bringing back more and more treasure. There will come a point rather quickly where you will have more treasure than you can spend or store. Gary Gygax knew this which is why the Fighting Man eventually becomes a Lord. A Lord’s Keep can store treasure, but it also costs money to build, staff and protect. You should be doing this too, but you can do it early and build up your influence in the process. Instead of waiting to be made a Lord, begin to sow the seeds of your own aristocracy. Don’t put your money in a bank, become the bank. Spread your money around in loans and collect the interest on them. Buy a bank specifically to house your money and turn it into an opportunity to curry favor. You’ll basically be establishing a mob bank like in the beginning of The Dark Knight. Bankers control money and therefore exert a great deal of influence. If you control the bank, you control that influence.

Do you, like Dutch Van Der Linde, prefer robbing banks to usury? No problem. You don’t have to collect soft power in the form of financial dominance. You can collect hard power by investing your treasure into building a strong army. You can build The Band of the Hawk and start becoming an in-demand mercenary force to the point of turning yourself into a self-styled Lord. This approach will also give you access to additional resources. Don’t spend money on new armor or weapons. Buy armorers and blacksmiths to work for you full-time. Do you need to worry about the precise number of gold coins you possess if you’re able to feed and equip an entire army? They are your net worth and their services are valuable. In either case, whether a banker or a commander of a large army, you have become a power broker and people will be willing to give you more resources in exchange for your services. You will also now become a large target which is the entry point to the next phase of gaming.

As Richard Boone said in the beginning of Big Jake, “You know what the problem with money is? Somebody’s always tryin’ to take it from you.” As soon as you gather momentum to really be a power player, you will have a target on your back because power cannot be gained unless it is at someone else’s expense. Resources are finite, so if you control a certain number of them, those are resources that have become unavailable to someone else. When you suddenly surge to power, those who already have established power will view you as a threat. Now you aren’t just adventuring to adventure and acquire wealth. You are actively dealing with threats from rival factions. You will have to balance offensive and defensive actions to keep what you have and expand your influence. This will likely be a learning experience that you will fail at a few times. Either you’ll figure it out or you’ll fall into obscurity.

To tie everything together, GMs should not feel the need to handwave away their players’ treasure. Instead, have a shady NPC approach them with an opportunity they can’t refuse. Have someone try to steal their claim from them. Have a local noble get jealous and try to eliminate them. Give them some reason to get involved in bigger ways. It doesn’t have to be negative either. Have someone come to them for a loan. Have a local noble hire them or ask them to invest in a particular venture that they could make money from. Gently prod them into using their money on bigger things that will push them into the next level of play. Their massive amount of money will be funneled into different places, they will start to get the attention of power players in the region, and they will naturally move into a different style of play.