Quote from: CRKrueger;579187The Hobbit is basically a retelling of Beowulf.  In Beowulf the dragon as a symbol of unreasoning greed is the antithesis of Norse society where generosity is a virtue and one of the main social ties.  Don't want to derail this too much with getting into the literary analysis of Beowulf or Tolkien, but if the character's are spending the money and making their realms better, it's "working as intended", they've returned a measure of balance to the

Awesome post!

Suggested mechanics: substitute 1xp/gp earned for 1xp/gp spent, e.g. paying hirelings, donating to temples, giving the thieves' guild a cut, building and mantaining a stronghold, etc.

Hell, even gold spent in adventuring gear might be worth xp. You're keeping smiths and merchants and innkeepers in business and advancing the cause of civilization in D&D's archetypically untamed, monster-haunted world.

Edit: Scooped by estar, above.

Quote from: CRKrueger;579187The Hobbit is basically a retelling of Beowulf.  In Beowulf the dragon as a symbol of unreasoning greed is the antithesis of Norse society where generosity is a virtue and one of the main social ties.  Don't want to derail this too much with getting into the literary analysis of Beowulf or Tolkien, but if the character's are spending the money and making their realms better, it's "working as intended", they've returned a measure of balance to the world.

I don't want to derail either, but even more than Beowulf I'd point to the Volsungs Saga, to an episode which is also told briefly in the Prose Edda, that of Fafhrd and the dragon hoard. It was the obvious prototype for the story of Eustace in the Dawn Treader, though this fable ultimately goes back to the dragon of Phaedrus, the joyless miser. The possession of vast wealth, in these allegories, transforms you into a dragon who loses touch with humanity and does nothing but guard treasure. So, being a dragon isn't as awesome as it sounds. The dragon that Eustace meets is miserable, and Eustace is miserable when he becomes a dragon.

So, a really literalist system for the fable would be one where, once you control beyond a certain threshold of treasure, you need to make a save to leave it, anywhere - in a basement, in a bank, in a castle, wherever. If you fail the save, you gain a dragon trait. Dragon traits are physical changes that make you more powerful, but also more you look more reptilian, perhaps give you some control issues. Maybe in extreme cases, the dragon tongue becomes your native language and you forget Common. The difficulty of the save scales against the value of gold in the hoard. If you gain a certain number of dragon traits, you risk becoming an NPC who can do nothing but guard the treasure. Every time you go back to your hoard, to deposit or withdraw, you need to make a save again on departing. The only way to rid yourself of dragon traits would be by doing something altruistic with the treasure, perhaps.

You could also probably design a campaign feature around a cursed magic item with this property.

Maybe a bit more White Wolf than TSR, here.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;579250Think Renaissance and Early Modern rather than Dark Ages.

The reward for clearing out pirates? The lieutenancy of the Five Ports, an office worth 10,000 gp if it was purchased from the king - the lieutenancy also includes control of three royal galleys. Defeat a dangeous wizard? A professor's chair at the College of Wizardry worth 50,000 gp, and the option to privately tutor students on the side. Holding the pass against the frost giants? The castle of Scarrock, worth 100,000 gp, plus a company of guards.

Of course, with all of these rewards comes responsibilities.

Excellent point.

Also, taking away more gold than you need xp for the next level is 'wasted' effort; you only get one level's worth of xp at a time.  A 200,000gp dragon hoard is fairly useless when you only need 12,500 xp for the next level.  Sure, it's still money to use in the game world, but you have 187,500 gp to haul away that isn't getting you any more levels.  If you can somehow manage a ton per trip, that is 180+ trips (one out, one back), to say nothing of where to safely store it while you are out on the next trip.  Best bet is to use some of it to make the dragon's lair your new home.  Wasn't there a statement about becoming the new dragon earlier in the thread?

Local rulers will not take kindly to a group having more money than them, either.  The 1st Edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide details a number of ways to relieve the party of their money, starting on page 90.  As mentioned earlier, getting the dragon's treasure is often worse than not getting the dragon's treasure.  Best to stuff your pockets and bags with all you can carry and hightail it out of there.  Maybe one or two more trips before everyone realizes the dragon is gone.  One other option is for the Magic User to carefully study the lair so they can teleport in anytime they want and collapse the entrances.  That would take even longer to get the treasure out, however.

I think AD&D took care of 'greed' as an emergent property of other rules on the mechanical side.  Building a stronghold and maintaining it was pretty expensive, for one thing.  The DMG provided guidelines for a common sense approach to the rest of it.  Taxes, tithings, and so on, as the header for the aforementioned section details.  And as Black Vulmea states, money=power=responsibilities.  Those responsibilities can be fairly onerous and put a serious crimp on adventuring.

There's a real incentive to scrape every copper piece from every dungeon in D&D.  Buying magical gear is expensive.  

But that doesn't encourage the feel that I want.  Remember in the '3 Amigos' how the 'heroes' return the money?  When was the last time your adventuring groups did that?  

I've talked with my players, and the best thing we've found is to agree that they won't spend a lot of time stripping the bodies of the dead for loose change, and I'd ensure that they're rewarded appropriately.  

Thus, the king can give them a magical item for accomplishing the mission, but if they steal every suit of banded mail then they won't get 'real rewards'.  Since 'real rewards' are more interesting and heroic, it really works.  But the DM has to be willing to reward players for NOT chiseling the frescoes off every dungeon wall.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;579208I think the simplist way, if you want to introduce this, is have a god of charity who punishes wealthy individuals (ie PCs) who spend most of their money on themselves. This is just the first idea that popped into my head but establishing it as part of the setting does seem the best way to me.

It wouldn't even have to be a "God of Charity"; a "God of Commerce" or "God of Merchants" would likely take a dim view of hoarding wealth, rather than spending/investing it.

Greed hasn't been much of a problem in my games in many years. First, I moved to a "spend treasure for XP" system after reading "D&D Option: Orgies, Inc." in The Dragon #10. However, the main thing that keeps every character from being a greedy, hoarding miser is that the character have to live in the world and greedy, miserly adventurers aren't really all that popular in many places.

Quote from: RandallS;579273Greed hasn't been much of a problem in my games in many years. First, I moved to a "spend treasure for XP" system after reading "D&D Option: Orgies, Inc." in The Dragon #10.

I'll tell you what frustrates me sometimes:  you probably read the print version of The Dragon #10.  Sometimes being in the second generation of gamers only serves to remind me of the cool stuff I juuuuust missed.  

Stellar. Great suggestions folks. Keep it coming.

Quote from: StormBringer;579274I'll tell you what frustrates me sometimes:  you probably read the print version of The Dragon #10.  Sometimes being in the second generation of gamers only serves to remind me of the cool stuff I juuuuust missed.  

Yes, I have the print version -- I bought it the month it came out. It was the first issue I was actually able to get as it came out. Any more, however, I usually look at my PDFs from CD-ROM collection of the magazine. It's easier to get at the issue I want that to dig through a couple of hundred issues.

What edition are we using? If 2e, this is readily doable because of the various alternative methods to XP, including optional ones like general puzzle solving, quality role playing or humor, and other GM judgment calls.

Then all you need to do is add carrot & stick:

Carrots - NPC blessings, blessed treasure, avoidance of vice coercive quests, good reputation which attracts: vice negative attention (plot hooks!) and/or helpful virtuous company, etc.

Stick - NPC curses, cursed treasure, quests of virtue vying for same time, bad reputation which attracts: virtuous negative attention and/or dangerous vice company, etc.

The premise is easy to say, but perhaps hard to implement. Let's make this more practical. Give us a concrete example and we'll drop seeds to reward virtue and punish vice, and then let you decide which direction you find best.

Quote from: estar;579253Keeping with the spirit what was said earlier of the Beowulf myth, you add the following rules.


1) You gain X XP for each Y gold you spend.
2) Per Month/Year you gain X XP for every Y Gold you posses. However if you lose the gold you lose all the XP the it conferred. If you lose a lesser amount then you lose that percentage of your XP. Even if recovered you won't gain it back until time have passed.

This make the greed choice explicit in the mechanics. You either spend generously or you keep it all and hoard it.

The in-game explanation that having gold effects one's wyrd or karma on a spiritual level. Having large amount of gold equate into greater power for an individual.

This seems to me the least complicated and most D&Dish way of emulating the choice of gold in the Beowulf myth.

Damn, was thinking the same thing but you beat me to it!

One thing that was really different about my all-time favorite D&D campaign was that the DM upped the moral ante on the players. We soon found ourselves responsible for a small duchy and its people, much sooner than we expected. Then a kingdom... then an empire. And there were Dark Forces in the world which threatened to destroy all of it. We spent several dragon hordes worth of treasure protecting our people, and our allies; shoring up our border defenses, raising local militias, espionage (magical and conventional), diplomacy... and of course, we fought wars. Those things are expensive! We had more important things to spend money on than ourselves.

I'm not saying we never spent any of the "national treasury" on our own magic items. Once we reached a certain level, our characters became the kingdom's best defense, so equipping them properly was a priority... just not the only priority.

Of course this approach only works if you have characters, and players(!) who give a damn about the game-world. In my experience, some players will welcome this type of gaming, while others will fight it tooth and nail.

Quote from: RandallS;579276Yes, I have the print version -- I bought it the month it came out. It was the first issue I was actually able to get as it came out. Any more, however, I usually look at my PDFs from CD-ROM collection of the magazine. It's easier to get at the issue I want that to dig through a couple of hundred issues.

That's how I have them all.  Sometimes I thought they should have done an expansion to cover later issues, but looking back, issue #250 is probably a good place to end it.  For my purposes, it only had to go to issue 152, that is about the end of my self-defined 'Vintage Games' period.

There's one thing in many original D&D dungeons that handled this pretty well: the trick, with treasure as bait. You have a bunch of easily-transportable treasure, and one treasure that looks extremely valuable. Taking the bulk of the treasure has no special risk and may be quite a haul. Going for the tempting treasure triggers something bad. The quintessential example is "The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God"; stealing the eye of the idol triggers a punishment. More fantastic versions have the eye carry an actual curse, or (in  the old Plop! comic,) the eye of the idol physically supports the temple.

I've always assumed that the idol on the 1e PHB is one of *those* idols. There's a whole team ransacking that temple, but they just have to have those huge gems, don't they?

Speaking of which, one of the basic assumptions of the game is that you have hirelings. The more treasure you get, the more people you can hire. If you secure your own ship, you need sailors. If you maintain a household for your home base, you need servants to keep the place up. Build a keep, you need even more servants. Keeping a hand in court or city politics requires a good reputation, which can depend on hiring even more and fancier servants. A simple ratio of wealth spent on hirelings to wealth on hand could be used to predict the chance of reputation rising and falling, or in extreme cases triggering some kind of magical retribution. (Hmm, I may have to develop some mechanics for this in a blog post...)

I think there's also something worth saying about what kinds of treasure sources are assumed in the rules. You have unguarded, hidden/trapped treasures, which no one currently claims; you have treasure hoarded by mindless beasts or undead; and you have treasure stolen by bandits, brigands, pirates, rampaging humanoids. It's when the players deviate from those treasure sources, to rob the Keep on the Borderlands instead of the Caves of Chaos, for example, that you have a greed problem...

Quote from: Benoist;579201Yes. *nod* I'm following you on that. So you could have some kinds of tests of virtue throughout the campaign, as well as natural consequences of the use of wealth after it's acquired, whether you are a good lord of men and give back to the land, or become the dragon yourself, in fact.

Yes, indeed. Ive been exploring allegory and duality in my campaign, which takes place in an alternate medieval Europe. The characters travel back in time to Arthurian Wales, where the highest nobles (highest leveled) lands are plagued by various monsters. In fact, those monsters are the evil expressions of those nobles. The players slay those monsters, in turn freeing the nobles from their basest desires, allowing them to grow as rulers and in turn assist the players on their greater quest.

The players understood the allegorical nature of the realm, and faced the first of the tests of the deadly sins - but they blew it with "wrath", in which they met the proverbial knight at the bridge.

Now one of the player's characters is haunted by the appearance of the helmet of the knight he fought unjustly and in anger, which appears each morning, closer and closer to him.

What the players may later discover is that by freeing so many lands of their nemesis beasts, the result is that the "tales" they altered became stitched into the fabric of their own world.