Physics Guy wrote: ↑Sun Mar 24, 2024 5:20 pm
The old rules were even worse about down time: they stipulated "monthly expenses". Player characters had to drop 1000 gold pieces per level per month, supposedly in maintaining a lifestyle commensurate with their experience level.
The idea was to keep the players hungry for loot even as the profits from their adventures rose well above anything they might actually need. It was one thing to tell the players that they couldn't just gain class levels by studying for a month, they had to go and fight monsters. It was another thing to tell them that they couldn't even just save their money for a month. They
had to squander it away.
I think I accepted a bankruptcy plea, and didn't make anything especially bad happen if they didn't have enough money to pay the full amount. And at least for the clerics and paladins I argued that they were supporting worthy causes. I tried to tell the wizards that they were spending their money on buying rare tomes and exotic ingredients, but then it was hard to explain why all that expense wasn't bringing them any tangible benefit. With ordinary fighters and thieves I was pretty much reduced to insisting that they were alcoholics or gambling addicts, or something, who could defeat literal demons but were helpless against their own bad habits. I didn't actually say that but it was hard to avoid that interpretation of the monthly expenses rule.
I tried to remember what we did regarding this and honestly don't remember. I don't remember if we ignored it, if we just rolled with it, no idea. We had a period where the group was running a barony with the fighter as the baron and the magic user living their Merlin fantasy as advisor to the baron, but I don't recall if it was for mechanical reasons. I'm getting old I guess.
5e still has lifestyle costs but they are only meaningful at low levels. They have some benefits if used logically in the game but the amount of gold involved is insignificant compared to what mid-level parties find in most games. Funny they haven't figured out how to balance that yet. I understand the 2024 update to the game will include rules for keeps so we'll see. I gave the Coville system a read through and didn't use it because I couldn't see the group I was DMing for at the time finding it interesting.
Anyway, good points and I wish I could remember what we did when it came to upkeep costs...and the fact I can't probably says something about it.
Just letting player wealth follow the campaign plot, instead of trying to control it by rules, did lead to a few exceptional cases. One thief made a huge individual haul from an episode that had him literally digging through giant gems in a dragon's hoard, under the sleeping eye of the dragon, to extract the world-changing artefact that was the goal of a long quest. The extraction was a long, tense series of Pick Pockets attempts to dig down one more layer without alerting the dragon, but the thief was using a magical thief's glove that had a kind of built-in bag of holding—and he kept all the gems he removed. He then somehow made a quick trip to the capital city of a sorcerous empire—it was a high-level group by then and they teleported around a fair bit—where it was already established (alas) that powerful magical items could be bought and sold routinely. He cashed in his gems for some carefully chosen good items; I forget exactly what, but I think one was an artefact sword and another might have been how he got his Belt of Giant Strength, turning him into one seriously badass halfling thief.
Hmm. I guess we always played as a group where shared XP was a necessity. My friend group at the time was too competitive so we had to agree that as long as someone was at the session they got their share of the XP split evenly. That was to discourage the dude who would skip and the whine that he had to miss so he shouldn't have to miss out on XP. I don't know of a comparable situation I experienced to the Bilbo reenactment. Certainly the dwarves wanted their share of the treasure like in the book right?
I couldn't have let that all happen if I'd been following the original rules—it would have been wildly unfair to the other players, letting him get like ten times as much experience as they did just because he got so much loot that they never knew about. It was a little out of control, even as it was, but that halfling thief was living the dream, and if the possibility of doing that wasn't there, why were we doing this fantasy game?
The bigger point is certainly fair. The fantasy of doing cool things, taking big risks, and winning big rewards is really what I think my current players want out of it and justly so. In my return to 5e we briefly tried XP based leveling and before the first session ended it was clear it was going to be an issued when the rogue went, well, rogue and ran off into the market on his own getting into trouble without the rest of the party. And I found the only real solution to these kinds of problems was talking to the players. No in game solution worked no matter what I tried, but finally just telling him and the other dude who was prone to trying to play solo that it was hurting the game so they needed to rethink their motives for doing so did work. Meta-DM is the truly true BBEG I guess.