There's no point in tracking a resource if there's no chance of the players running out. So if you're going to let your players maintain a massive fortune, you might as well skip tracking money and save on the pointless book-keeping.

It really depends on the needs of the Campaign. AD&D is designed around a detail-oriented, large-scale campaign with long and frequent sessions. In that kind of campaign, it might make sense to hand out large sums of money with concordant large expenses to spend them on. The design is essentially bolting a management sim on top of the dungeon-crawling gameplay.

Personally, I run a biweekly game in a tight 3-hour timeslot, so I tend to want to trim off anything that gets in the way of keeping the adventure moving. That means minimizing money management as much as possible and trying to let it be done between sessions. The best solution for that is games that use an abstracted money system of some kind. In D&D-likes, I can get away with modifying the XP ratios and just giving out less money. In my Dolmenwood campaign, I'm operating on 0.5x XP for Gold and 10x XP for encounters. I'm trying to keep the treasure hauls in the range where they can be spent on useful items like horses, herbs, etc. There's no magic items for sale and no domain rules, so a big pile of cash would just be a hassle for them.

Quote from: pawsplay on February 09, 2024, 05:36:28 PM
Because somewhere along the way, EGG figured out he was giving out staggering amounts of wealth every few adventures, and he tried to figure out how to get rid of it.

  I think this is dead on.  Random loot tables hit too many magic items that players immediately sold for their nutty prices rather than kept for use.  So he cooked up insane prices to level up and was concerned with "powering down" the group after making a mistake with giving too much.  Other wise if treasure is a tad more stingy the crazy costs for leveling make adventuring look a lot less like seeking a fortune and simply running on a hamster wheel to pay training taxes.

It's kind of inevitable when players start needing over a million xp to level up with the lion's share of that coming from treasure or the value of magic items they get.  You wind up with high level adventurers with enough precious metal coinage to collapse the entire economy sitting in a Scrooge McDuck money vault somewhere.  I think a more sensible solution is to drastically reduce they money they are getting and have much more of their xp come from other things.

Quote from: yosemitemike on February 11, 2024, 08:16:00 AM
It's kind of inevitable when players start needing over a million xp to level up with the lion's share of that coming from treasure or the value of magic items they get.  You wind up with high level adventurers with enough precious metal coinage to collapse the entire economy sitting in a Scrooge McDuck money vault somewhere.  I think a more sensible solution is to drastically reduce they money they are getting and have much more of their xp come from other things.

If you like XP coming from money, but don't like the runaway inflation dynamic, by far the easiest route is to read all gold as silver, silver as copper, and copper as some made up minor coin.  Change prices to match (at your discretion) but not labor rates.  Then give out XP based on silver found.  This effectively leaves the XP from treasure ratio the same, but without all that gold floating around.  Hiring services just got relatively more expensive.

In fact, that kind of thinking is the starting point of the economy in my current campaign and the system around it.  Since a system is supporting it, I've built it into all the prices lists.  Then tweaked the costs of a few things back up to reflect scarcity, but the basic idea is "read gold as silver".

Have you played 5E and noticed the players all have several ways of completely retarding any danger whatsoever and that only increases as they level up? Well, whilst that wasn't completely the case with AD&D, I've noticed that players do get a lot of money as they get up in levels. And they can absolutely use that money to buy all kinds of things they can use to cause shinanigans. And eventually they just end up getting bored of the characters because they can buy anything they could possibly want. So you need to find some way to keep them hungry for loot and gold. Otherwise they'll just stop playing.

Quote from: King Tyranno on February 12, 2024, 11:28:24 AM
Have you played 5E and noticed the players all have several ways of completely retarding any danger whatsoever and that only increases as they level up? Well, whilst that wasn't completely the case with AD&D, I've noticed that players do get a lot of money as they get up in levels. And they can absolutely use that money to buy all kinds of things they can use to cause shinanigans. And eventually they just end up getting bored of the characters because they can buy anything they could possibly want. So you need to find some way to keep them hungry for loot and gold. Otherwise they'll just stop playing.

I've run into the opposite problem as well: when the rewards for adventuring aren't extravagant enough compared to mundane earnings, the players start indulging in Merchants&Middlemen instead of Dungeons&Dragons. Even during the Gold Rush, the folks that made the biggest fortunes were the ones selling picks and shovels.

Quote from: Zalman on February 12, 2024, 11:32:54 AM

Quote from: King Tyranno on February 12, 2024, 11:28:24 AM
Have you played 5E and noticed the players all have several ways of completely retarding any danger whatsoever and that only increases as they level up? Well, whilst that wasn't completely the case with AD&D, I've noticed that players do get a lot of money as they get up in levels. And they can absolutely use that money to buy all kinds of things they can use to cause shinanigans. And eventually they just end up getting bored of the characters because they can buy anything they could possibly want. So you need to find some way to keep them hungry for loot and gold. Otherwise they'll just stop playing.

I've run into the opposite problem as well: when the rewards for adventuring aren't extravagant enough compared to mundane earnings, the players start indulging in Merchants&Middlemen instead of Dungeons&Dragons. Even during the Gold Rush, the folks that made the biggest fortunes were the ones selling picks and shovels.

I think some of that can depend on the IRL initative and buisness sense of the players but a GM should create a balance there between having too much or too little gold. A player should feel rewarded for braving danger but still feel like they need to do more braving danger to get more gold. Gold is part of the progression system in RPGs and progression exists to incentivize playing the game. It's very psychologically manipulative in that sense. And that's why Games Design is a hard job. Creating a balance of things being not too hard and not too easy is difficult. You need to understand the psychology of players and create those little breadcrumbs that lead them to satisfying things that they think are fun.

Quote from: Zalman on February 12, 2024, 11:32:54 AM

Quote from: King Tyranno on February 12, 2024, 11:28:24 AM
Have you played 5E and noticed the players all have several ways of completely retarding any danger whatsoever and that only increases as they level up? Well, whilst that wasn't completely the case with AD&D, I've noticed that players do get a lot of money as they get up in levels. And they can absolutely use that money to buy all kinds of things they can use to cause shinanigans. And eventually they just end up getting bored of the characters because they can buy anything they could possibly want. So you need to find some way to keep them hungry for loot and gold. Otherwise they'll just stop playing.

I've run into the opposite problem as well: when the rewards for adventuring aren't extravagant enough compared to mundane earnings, the players start indulging in Merchants&Middlemen instead of Dungeons&Dragons. Even during the Gold Rush, the folks that made the biggest fortunes were the ones selling picks and shovels.

I've had players talk about doing that. No one has actually tried to take the game in that direction. I wouldn't allow it anyway because honor, daring, and glory should be bigger motivators than a secure income. There's something seriously wrong with the player or the campaign if becoming the florist is seen as a better option to adventuring.

Quote from: rytrasmi on February 12, 2024, 03:27:59 PM
I've had players talk about doing that. No one has actually tried to take the game in that direction. I wouldn't allow it anyway because honor, daring, and glory should be bigger motivators than a secure income. There's something seriously wrong with the player or the campaign if becoming the florist is seen as a better option to adventuring.

Heh, I might be too much of a softy and allow it.  But then, I would have patrons show up requesting rare flowers, man-eating plants, strange dungeon fungi, and assorted plant based alchemical reagents.  Basically using the player's reputation against them.  And of course, there's now a whole town of hostages *cough* neighbors to protect.:-)

I am running a fairly long-standing (by now) AD&D 1e campaign, and the party is finally starting to get to the middle levels, and, being 1st edition, they
have found/earned/stolen VAST amounts treasure by now... but, as they say, easy come, easy go.  There's a host of ways to part players with their hard
won treasure. 

Often they party needs the aid of a higher level cleric, this will cost a good 1000 gp per spell level on average.  Seizure from local lords (if their alignment
reflects such unscrupulousness) or 10% taxes paid upon a border crossing, on occasion they party CAN find magic items for sale, but at prices as high or
higher than the DMG's listed price.  And, of course, rival parties, rival thieves guilds, and Monsters have all managed to rob the party before.  During an encounter on a fortified keep over a river not long ago saw the party's horses and pack animals stolen when an enemy fighter pulled off a bend bars/lift gates roll to open the portcullis to the lower gatehouse where the party's horses were kept, unguarded with their saddlebags.  As everyone was sniping the enemy from the top of the gatehouse.  Heh-heh.  Even though I dispensed with training costs for the most part, I've never had much difficulty parting them from their gold.

And that's WITH lowering encumbrance weight of coins considerable.  Despite that, the group has TWICE buried vast amounts of silver and electrum in
utter pirate style, with a map included.  Due to being unable to carry coins with all the other junk they port about.  They'll doubtless have SOME sort of
difficulty recovering it, if they ever do.  And if they are all killed off, maybe someday another group will find the map they made somehow. 

Got to do SOMETHING about the vast amounts of treasure the group needs to level up, luckily there are plenty of options.  Once they hit name level,
whatever base/tower/keep they found will drain finances steadily as well.  Though they're a ways off from that yet.  Magical Items are far more
important that mere treasure in any case, and I am fairly stingy about giving those out, though they do have a few nice items.
 
Made it to the next town, and a restoration spell and a new batch of horses cost them more than they'd made along the way.  But since they CHOSE to
spend it, they just shrug and move on, since I might have them get robbed or ripped off by the merchants, it's a result of their own choices, not just
arbitrarily stripping them of gold. 

The ludicrous amouts of gold in the old editions isn't such a huge problem, just need to be creative to make it work.

RPGs do not need money sinks. They simply need viable uses for in-game assets. If wealth is an in-game asset, it needs to have a use case. That use can be a money sink (training cost) or it can be a money investment (researching magic items, building a castle or army) but if no uses exist then wealth is not an in-game asset. Of course, it's entirely possible to play with wealth not being an asset; it could just be used as a metric for tracking XP, and that's that. But then it raises the question of why there are equipment prices and mercenary wages and so on.

As far as inflation from adventuring, its effects are way over-exaggerated because people aren't able to fathom the size of actual ancient economies. The mines at New Carthage alone produced 9,125,000 sp per year.  The Roman economy as a whole mined 50,000,000sp a year.  You have to be at the scale of Alexander's capture of the Persian treasury, or Caesar's capture of millions of Gaulish slaves, to make a difference.

Quote from: amacris on February 14, 2024, 03:53:14 PM
RPGs do not need money sinks. They simply need viable uses for in-game assets. If wealth is an in-game asset, it needs to have a use case. That use can be a money sink (training cost) or it can be a money investment (researching magic items, building a castle or army) but if no uses exist then wealth is not an in-game asset. Of course, it's entirely possible to play with wealth not being an asset; it could just be used as a metric for tracking XP, and that's that. But then it raises the question of why there are equipment prices and mercenary wages and so on.

As far as inflation from adventuring, its effects are way over-exaggerated because people aren't able to fathom the size of actual ancient economies. The mines at New Carthage alone produced 9,125,000 sp per year.  The Roman economy as a whole mined 50,000,000sp a year.  You have to be at the scale of Alexander's capture of the Persian treasury, or Caesar's capture of millions of Gaulish slaves, to make a difference.

That's the scale of countries. We're talking about a party of 6 adventureres dropping thousands, tens of thousands and at the top end, hundreds of thousands of gold worth of coin, gems and misc into a single town, keep or city at once.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on February 14, 2024, 04:30:56 PM

Quote from: amacris on February 14, 2024, 03:53:14 PM
RPGs do not need money sinks. They simply need viable uses for in-game assets. If wealth is an in-game asset, it needs to have a use case. That use can be a money sink (training cost) or it can be a money investment (researching magic items, building a castle or army) but if no uses exist then wealth is not an in-game asset. Of course, it's entirely possible to play with wealth not being an asset; it could just be used as a metric for tracking XP, and that's that. But then it raises the question of why there are equipment prices and mercenary wages and so on.

As far as inflation from adventuring, its effects are way over-exaggerated because people aren't able to fathom the size of actual ancient economies. The mines at New Carthage alone produced 9,125,000 sp per year.  The Roman economy as a whole mined 50,000,000sp a year.  You have to be at the scale of Alexander's capture of the Persian treasury, or Caesar's capture of millions of Gaulish slaves, to make a difference.

That's the scale of countries. We're talking about a party of 6 adventureres dropping thousands, tens of thousands and at the top end, hundreds of thousands of gold worth of coin, gems and misc into a single town, keep or city at once.

Indeed. Even on the country scale even a single hoard is a lot.

50 million sp (Rome as a whole) is 5 million gp.

A single type G hoard might have up to 120,000 gp; a dozen gems, up to half a dozen art objects and any 5 magic items... conservatively it's 2% of the entire Roman Empire's economy from a single haul.

For comparison, that's about like dumping half a TRILLION dollars into the US economy from ONE roll on the treasure table and we've all seen what the Fed pumping that sort of money into the economy has done.

It's not like that's going to be the PC's only haul in their career either. That's just one of the single biggest ones (barring critters you roll multiple times for).

This also needs to be considered in relation to the setting as well. Default AD&D isn't set in the Roman Empire at its height; it's set in a post-Roman collapse medieval world with much smaller and more isolated economies.

That one hoard is more than an entire large town's annual GDP being dumped on it overnight.

Now imagine PCs doing that monthly or even weekly.

At best the result should be hyperinflation. At worst you collapse the economy as people need wheelbarrows full of coins just to buy the essentials and the king can't afford to pay his peacekeepers enough to feed their own families.

The flip side to that is how did that money end up there?  And, the economic loss that hoard represented to the prior kingdom that had failed.  Yes, logic has its limitations, but it is a fun bit of world building to consider.  :-)

Quote from: zircher on February 14, 2024, 11:47:34 PM
The flip side to that is how did that money end up there?  And, the economic loss that hoard represented to the prior kingdom that had failed.  Yes, logic has its limitations, but it is a fun bit of world building to consider.  :-)

That would depend on if it was attrition over time or "city sacked" overnight sort of depletion.

Regardless; it's more the shock to the system from the rapid availability (or lack) of currency that would be terribly disruptive.

In real terms, the relative non-fiat values of things don't change much. It has often been cited that if you convert an ounce of gold into US dollars at various points in our history, what it can buy is about the same... what's changed is the value of the fiat currency and the value of the labor that currency is used to provide compensation for.

D&D currency is essentially a fiat currency in the sense that, no matter how much silver you dump on the market, a unit of gold will always be worth ten units of silver. No matter how scarce gold becomes, ten units of silver will always be worth one unit of gold.

Similarly, the coinage of D&D is never debased or the edges shaved; causing general inflation.

Fundamentally, the problem with dropping 2% of a continental empire's GDP onto a single town in the form of mountains of precious metals is that the system isn't actually dynamic enough to handle it with any realism.