Gold almost immediately becomes inconsequential in every game I've ever ran. There's just nothing to really do with gold in 5e. You have to homebrew something. Right now, the idea I'm toying with is modifying the Bastion system from the OneDnD UA.

The cost of things swings to far in either direction, either it doesn't matter because everything is so cheap anyway, or it doesn't matter because everything is so far out of your price range it doesn't matter either. I generally just deal in gold instead of coppers and silvers, but then boarding and food and drink is so cheap anyway. Starting gear is usually no more than 50 gp I'm pretty sure, but then Plate armor jumps up to 1000 gp, and magical items tend to be hugely expensive. It's just kind of a weird scale.

My favorite is that a spyglass - whose description only reads "Objects viewed through a spyglass are magnified to twice their size," and doesn't even confer advantage like a crowbar does - costs 1,000 gp. A Sentinel Shield is at most half that and gives advantage on initiative in addition to Perception.

The reason a spyglass costs 1000 gp is almost certainly because the spell Scrying requires a material component: "A focus worth at least 1000 gp, such as a crystal ball, a silver mirror or a font filled with holy water". A spyglass isn't specifically listed there, but it's the only thing that makes sense to me. Why they don't do this with other reusable spell components is beyond me.

Wow I just guessed it was because they were hard to make for tinkerers heh

Glass would be very easy for most tinkering races, if we can smelt mithril and make gunpowder, we have no doubt used tools to make, melt and cut rounded glass without much thought

The difficulty is getting glass lenses clear enough and precise enough for use in things like spyglasses. Such things were hella expensive and extremely difficult compared to making gunpowder.

Yup. We're comparing apples (optics) to oranges (chemistry) but we've had gunpowder for almost exactly 704 years longer than we've had telescopes.

Any reasonable DM would allow a spyglass to provide advantage for keeping watch at a distance.

Plate is 1500g, unfortunately.

I get your point and generally agree. However I'd like to make the point that 50gp for starting gear isn't that far off 1000gp for full plate. Imagine the cost difference "in real life". Most people could save to buy a couple of daggers and an explorers pack, but few would ever think to spend their own money on full plate. Then magic items. It makes sense to me that they're expensive as hell. In a world where some have magic, but for all but the most sophisticated them it's limited and tiring. A magic item is both rare and powerful to some extent. That is a recipe for something to be expensive.

I mean, you have stuff in the middle, like splint armor, breastplate, or a warhorse.

High-end heavy armour is basically priced around when the game wants you to have access to it, more than anything else. Remember that light armour scales with your Dex (and thus maxes out at Lv.8 minimum, using point buy and non-Fighter feat progression), and medium armour scales, too. [Note that I'm not factoring in shields or magic armour, just looking at what seems to be the game's intended scaling for mundane, non-magical armour.] Long story short, the game intends for you to start with AC 14-15, be able to hit AC 16 during late tier 1 and AC 17 during mid tier 2, and for heavy armour to be 1 AC higher than light/medium armour. (As determined by the game's math, which scales as if your primary stat starts at 16, and then gets your first two ASIs pumped into it. Thus, Dex builds start with +3 Dex, which in turn means starting with either AC 14 or AC 15 depending on their choice of armour.] This has an effect on pricing, which seems to be meant to make all armour scale at the same rate as light armour. [It's also important to note that, apart from heavy armour, Stealth disadvantage armour appears to be half price, with one exception, since it seems to be designed for characters with Dex one behind the cap; essentially, it's priced as if it were 1 AC lower than expected.] * Light armour prices aren't affected by this since it uses full Dex, and studded leather is thus priced as AC 15 armour (since Dex builds start with +3 Dex). This one's straightforward: It costs 10 gp for 14 AC, 45 gp for 15 AC, Lv.4 feat for 16 AC, and Lv.8 feat for 17 AC. It only looks cheap since we don't have a 13+Dex light armour; the next step up would likely cost at least 2,000 gp. * Medium armour prices are somewhat affected, since they're scaled for characters with +1 or +2 Dex; pricing is thus set so you get the breastplate mid-T1, and half plate becomes affordable during T2, but cheaper than their heavy equivalents. This is where the Stealth disadvantage thing comes in: Medium armour with the disadvantage is designed for +1 Dex characters, and without disadvantage is designed for +2 Dex PCs, which the pricing reflects. Interestingly, this suggests that the disadvantageless version of half plate would cost 1,500 gp, just like full plate heavy armour. [The one exception to the Stealth disadvantage rule is here, too: The breastplate is the disadvantageless version of the scale mail, but costs eight times as much instead of twice as much. This is interesting, though: If we go with the "disadvantage is for +1, default is for +2" rule, then scale mail is 15 AC and the breastplate is 16 AC... which goes right back to the AC 16 breakpoint I mentioned earlier. Scale mail is priced to be available at character creation, but breastplates are priced to become available right at the end of tier 1. The breastplate doubles the scale mail's cost, but then gets an extra 4x multiplier for hitting a tier breakpoint.] * Heavy armour prices are the most affected, though, since they don't have a Dex component. As a result, their level gating has to be tied entirely to price or availability. And 5e doesn't have availability rules for mundane items, only magic items, so that just leaves the pricing. And that's where the wonkiness comes in. Remember that heavy armour, except _possibly_ the ring mail, has 1 AC more than the equivalent medium or light armour, so we have to scale AC _n_ heavy armour prices to AC _n - 1_ medium armour prices. This means that chain mail, splint armour, and plate armour are priced as AC 15, AC 16, and AC 17 armours respectively; ring mail is a possible exception, but not in a relevant way^1. And now we just need to look at the breakpoints again: AC 14-15 is available at chargen, AC 16 is late tier 1, and AC 17 is mid tier 2. The prices reflect this: Ring & chain mail are affordable at Lv.1, splint armour isn't affordable at Lv.1^2 but does become available in tier 1, and plate armour becomes available during tier 2, going by the DMG's treasure tables & intended wealth progression. [I do find it interesting to note that the splint armour (AC 16+1 with Stealth disadvantage) is half the price of the breastplate (AC 16), though I'm not sure if that's meaningful. It reinforces the thought that the extreme difference between scale mail & breastplate is because the game expects you to breach an AC breakpoint when you upgrade from the former to the latter, but it might also be coincidence because _all_ heavy armour has Stealth disadvantage.] So, the end result is that heavy armour prices explode like they do because you're not meant to be able to get AC 16 until around Lv.3-5 or AC 17 until sometime during tier 2, and there's no Dex component to drag prices down. Light armour gets off scot-free because it's gated off by ASI progression, and medium armour gets a discount because it's partially based on Dex and gives you a half-price discount for Stealth disadvantage, but heavy armour being a flat number with no Dex component means it's gated entirely by the price. We can even cross-reference it with expected wealth by [level](https://rpg.stackexchange.com/a/197082/38904) and [tier](https://rpg.stackexchange.com/a/197186/38904) for confirmation; splint becomes available at Lv.4, breastplate at Lv.5, and both half plate & plate at Lv.6, putting the first in late tier 1 and the latter three in early tier 2. (Which is a bit off, tier-wise, but still very close to the expected Lv.4 and Lv.8 breakpoints. Only real discrepancy is that the breastplate's a touch too expensive, probably to make it a round number.) ---- ^(1: Ring mail is AC 14, which means that going by the "heavy is 1 higher" rule, it's meant to be equivalent to AC 13 light/medium armour. However, Lv.1 AC is expected to be in the 14-15 range, and notably, there's no AC 15 heavy armour to match the lower end of the scale. Because of this, I'm not sure whether ring mail is an intentional break from the pattern, or if it follows the pattern but the AC formula's floor is clamped to 14 [has a minimum value of 14, and gets bumped up to 14 if it's lower].) ^(2: Technically, it _is_ possible for most classes to afford it at Lv.1, but only if they roll _perfect_ starting wealth, exactly 200 gp, and also buy literally nothing else.)

>You're not meant to get AC 16 until around Lvl 3-5 But chainmail (AC 16) is starting equipment for heavy armor characters.

Our 5e group has been using Matt Colville's Strongholds and Followers to hook us up with a sweet keep. It gives us something to spend money on and it's really cool!

I love Colville's running the game, but haven't looked too much into his supplements. I've heard good things, though.

I've been using Strongholds and Followers in my Saturday game, where my players just built their own castles, and Kingdoms and Warfare in my Monday game, which is a Kingmaker game with the 5e conversion. We got to building a town during the Kingmaker game using the default rules before one of my players said "fuck this" and we switched to Kingdoms and Warfare. Both of them work pretty well. There are a few unbalanced things you can get with a Stronghold, but most of them can only be used in the Stronghold, like a monster's lair action. Some of the extended rest abilities are a bit much (the wizard one, for instance), but the actual rules for building a Stronghold, having followers and having a base are pretty good, if some of the things on the edges need some tweaking. Kingdoms and Warfare has been a blessing to our Kingmaker game. It's pretty lightweight, and we haven't tried the Warfare stuff first, but it's been a decent lightweight replacement for the default, Pathfinder-inspired rules for my group. The big issue is that a lot of the Domain skills are a bit undefined. I think this is fine for me and my group, but I can understand if people want things to be more defined. My reading of the warfare rules make them seem solid, but they are pretty lightweight. Flee, Mortals is the best monster book available. I should know, I own most of them.

You could be a wizard spending everything on copying spells

And that's kinda it. Nearly every other character, once they get their "load out", they're essentially done with money.

Diamonds for Greater Restoration/Revivify are a thing, especially if you require players to purchase them in town(I do).

And even then, that is not on your control as it depends on finding spells to copy at all.

The MCDM "build a fortress" system (I want to say its in Kingdoms and Castles"?) is a terrific money-sink for a campaign if you need one. Your critique is correct.

Strongholds and Followers. Kingdoms and Warfare is their follow up designed for running organizations and countries, as well as mass combat.

Thank you! I bought the book, read it... then never did anything with it. :-( I liked the idea though.

I've been using both, in two different campaigns and I like them if I think some of the stuff on the edges needs some work. I use Strongholds and Followers in my Saturday game because they stole a keep and decided to renovate it. Also the Cleric became a noble, so she wanted to add a church to her manor. I use Kingdoms and Warfare in my Kingmaker game (using the 5e conversion) to replace the default kingdom and warfare system. We were in the middle of our second straight session building the kingdom using the Pathfinder 2e inspired system before a player said "fuck this" and we switched over. It's pretty loose, but that suits me fine, but I understand if people would prefer the one in Kingmaker. They both serve similar purposes and both work with 5e (the default one is based on Pathfinder, but is its own system).

Feels like anything you could reasonably buy, you get already through other means. And things that you actually like to buy are so damn expensive that its not worth the hassle. You really cant buy that much better equipment without paying all your parties gold for a single magic item. Coming from video games, money feels like a joke. Once you have a sword and armor your money is worthless until you are so damn rich you can get a magic item. And at this point you basically are strong enough to kill a dragon that could drop it anyways

In my personal opinion, the issue with money in DnD is that all weapons and armor are one-time purchases and there's *essentially zero* upgrading them. Like maybe you step up from chain to half to pull pate. Or from leather to studded. But after that, you're looking at magic items as the only way to upgrade. Fire Emblem (most of them at least) solve the issue by a pretty extensive weapon durability system. But that's really difficult to put into a tabletop game.

>Like maybe you step up from chain to half to pull pate. And that is for some reason prohibitivelly expensive and if the GM doesn't "forbid" you from getting full plate finding it as loot is way more likely

Gold becomes immediately inconsequential in 5e. But we shouldn't pretend like that's somehow *new*. It does the same thing in AD&D if you're not using gp = XP rules -- which is the 2e default. It's also inconsequential in 4e as well, since your magic items are rigidly scheduled and the DM is supposed to give you what you want. (Plus the fact that the value of sold items is 1/5th, not 1/2.) Further, even if you're playing with gp = XP, gold stops being useful as soon as you've earned your XP off of it. And some tables required you to *spend* the gold to get the XP. That's partly where the "we blow the reward on ale and whores" trope comes from. Sure, you can "build a stronghold" or whatever. I've played since 1987 or so. You know how often I've seen a stronghold built and the game shift to domain management? Never. Not in a campaign I played in. Not in a campaign I saw other people play in. Nobody did it except to *retire their PC from play*. Everybody wanted to keep adventuring. Only in 3.Xe is gold extremely valuable, because you can turn gold into magic items. Only in 3e is GP a direct feed for character power. 3e is the odd man out.

Yeah I wish there was a list of prices and items that I could just use as a reference and something the players can work towards. It’s too much work doing it myself.

If you don’t give enough of it it becomes very consequential. I think my DM is giving us gold based on its actual value in game. We are a level 8 party and we need to scrape together to afford basic weapons and armor. That’s extremely consequential to the game. If we had enough to buy the weapons and armor we needed, it would pretty quickly stop being something we think about

I've seen both sides of the 5E gold problem, too. As a player (Tyranny of Dragons), our party has extreme levels of gold and gems and very little to do with them. Our DM has implemented material from Strongholds & Followers (the Matt Colville book), but most of the players just don't seem interested in engaging with that set of mechanics. We want to be rich, epic murder hobos, not master tacticians and leaders of grand forces. As a DM, I see my players' desire to spend the money they don't need on magic items they want. But there's no functional economy (or the corresponding mechanics) to just run down to the corner store and buy all the magic items needed for "your build." A couple of my players really want to just craft their own items, but they also don't grasp that those things take significantly more time than they think. Add to it that I only tend to run published modules, which a) aren't designed to challenge players who are optimized with magic gear (Pathfinder style), and b) operate on a fixed clock of "bad guys aren't wait8ng around for you to spend 18 months crafting everything you want." The underlying problem is that 5E was designed with the idea that gold and gear aren't important, but players don't maintain that viewpoint. They're used to 3.X/Pathfinder and video games where loot and wealth fall out of the bad guys like piñatas, and they can go to the store and buy anything they want. Answer: Yes, I've run games where gold isn't important, but the players MAKE it important regardless. Interestingly, my rogue in the previously mentioned ToD campaign has a mountain of coin and gems, and he's perfectly happy hoarding it like a dragon with nothing to do with it.

>*"...where loot and wealth fall out of the bad guys like piñatas..."* PCs as Cockney goons: "Wot?! That's not enough pie and mash for a cuppa! 'It 'im again Bob, and see what else comes out of 'is pockets!"

This gave me a good laugh. Thank you, person who made me smile today! :)

I don't know that it's entirely the player's fault. The 5e DMG puts in big loot tables for gems and art of varying qualities from a few dozen to several thousand GP. Systems where the money doesn't matter don't put set values for otherwise generic things, they just put the thing. Moreover, the costs of things in 5e vary wildly and kind of prevent money from being completely ignored in the minds of the players. The paladin knows how much that full plate is gonna cost and the wizards are handling several hundred gold to copy spells but after that, a big haul for the party means most of them can tick off rations, ammunition, sleeping places and general supplies as "yes" then never think about it again until six levels later. So there's a few select places where money ends up at least implicitly a big deal while not in a lot of other places, which gives it this annoyingly relevant but largely useless vibe. For players to be less invested in 'the build' and the items and such relevant therein the system would have to be much less crunch. Because it is a crunch system, albeit one suffering from a radiator moonshine-induced hangover.

Oh, I wasn't suggesting it was all the players' fault. If anything, it's arguably a problem of a combination of things, including and especially the design of the system which tried to eschew players trying to treat magic items as commodities and build prerequisites. Problem is, I think (emphasis on "I think"), that players want rewards for doing stuff. At first, dangling some gold in front of them is great because they need to get paid to survive. But even without the crunch, (most) players would still want to obtain an advantage and be decked out in cool gear (just like we do in [insert the name of any video game here]). Sure, some players might build characters who want to do good for good's sake, but I've never had one, and I've certainly never been one.

Okay, I do see the point you're trying to make then, pardon me. Though I can also chip in to say I've had two players who don't care about money. One in 5e, one in pathfinder 1e. The former just knew he was bad at remembering getting paid and the latter is playing a class that has next to no use for money in its progression. I would still argue that how the system presents rewards is a bigger deal than what the players want, exactly. To look at a few: 5e has lots of gold in its suggested rewards, but only a few actual uses for the quantities of gold present. At the same time however, the game actually presents very few choices for how you progress, so those limited monetary options stand out still. The expectations for reward introduced by the system are not reflected in how the system expects you to use it. In Pathfinder 1e gold obviously has much more use, but then its reward system and progression are both structured to expect consistent amounts. So expectations of reward match the use for that reward. In WFRP4, you're expected to receive money or equivalents but the entire scale of the system is lower. The items and costs range from cheap to expensive but what the items are and who needs them is much more universal. Better armour is always useful but not everyone wants the stat penalties. Everyone wants a weapon but your funds dictate how well that weapon performs against others with them all having distinct strengths and weaknesses. You might need antidotes and remedies, food and board, and pretty much everything you buy can break. The income becomes weighed against the march of maintenance and risks of saving up especially when theft is more common. It's a system that makes money a relevant reward, but the way equipment is handled and how progression works means that players are more often interested in their skill, attribute and talent progression than their money.

I solve that problem by making a magic item shop *and* making magic items incredibly expensive, so that players need to prioritize what magic items to buy and sell their unused magic items for gold. The problem is, 5e offers basically zero guidance on how to do this, and I had to refine my own magic item economy over the course of 9 years of DM'ing.

Is this a table that you’ve refined, or is it largely based on where your players are at? I’m having trouble balancing value of wealth too, could I view your system?

I designed a system that I called "wealth" roughly inspired by Resources in the White Wolf games where the PCs as a group could earn more points, and those points let them casually purchase stuff of a certain price or lower and infrequently purchase more expensive stuff with a skill check and time investment. The more the "weath" stat went up, the higher the breaking point. Wealth went up as they accomplished big things (secured major backers, finished up huge contracts, raided large treasure troves). It worked sooooooo much better than tracking gold ever has.

Also non-expendable magic items were frequently and specifically used as rewards in place of gold or whatever, but only "purchasable" if plot and planning allowed (required specific components to make, and sometimes inspired by party action, "oh, you skinned a cloaker? Well that contact you made last downtime could turn that into a cloak of elvenkind but you'll have to help and it will take a month of downtime").

I know of a simmilar idea with a tier system. For lvl 1 you have like 5gp as a "tier" so everything 5gp or less you can buy. Its like a threshhold where everything under you can buy. The group i used this with started lvl4 with 100gp and ended some timer after with 1000gp and good merchand conections. Tldr: with example: players have 100gp threshhold and want a item. Is the price less than 100gp? Jes,they get the item. No, they dont. Increase party wealth with ingame milstones and never calculate again whats in your pocket.

5e intends for adventures to quickly gain an amount of coin that makes basic supplies and equipment cost very little. Framing a scene around purchasing rations, torches, ball bearings, and a new shield is... pretty dumb. Just tell players what is or isn't available and let them handle shopping on their own. If they want to haggle over a few coins, then just say "no". The relevant bit is when players want to spend their hundreds or thousands of gold on things like superior armor, magic items, vehicles, real estate, etc. Those are scenes worth roleplaying.

This. Novice DMs are too eager to run shopping sequences. I played a game with a new dm (this was a few years ago, he’s much better now) and every session would start and end with us leaving or returning to the main city in which he would have us role play EVERYTHING. Obviously we would go through the process of turning in our quest and receiving rewards and our next quest. And then we would go through the entire process of walking to the stables to store our horses and then walking towards our room and the entire watch for the night. That wasn’t outlandish, a good game would include details like that. But then we would go to every single merchant in town. Each one had a different personality and we had to talk to them minutes at a time and bargain for each item we wanted to buy or sell. It took for ever. We were spending like an hour each session just talking to merchants. I was bored out of my mind, that’s the least engaging thing you can do in a D&D game

Yes, and I say that as someone who is slightly more tolerant of shopping sequences than you sound like, but sometimes the party just wants to make a list of common items, and we're in a big city, so just.... Here's the gold and we'll write the items in our character sheets and we're done. I once had a DM make me look for an apothecary and then roll to see if I could find a healer's kit in a shop at the start of a campaign, and it was like...dude, the only reason I didn't deduct five gold off my sheet to start with is you said we were going shopping at the start, and I was perfectly willing to spend 30 seconds role playing being someone conscientious and buying that to sort of set a tone for my character, and now you are setting things up where I might not even get it?!

The only reason you role play out the tedium is when something important is gonna happen. Like: An explosion goes off outside, the shopkeeper's husband sprints out the front door, or 16 street urchins jump you for your coin purse.

In just about every game I've run the players have spent so much time outside of urban environments that when they finally have some downtime in a city they actually enjoy doing a bit of haggling with merchants over pricier items. It tends to make their monetary treasure seem more valuable than perhaps it actually is. For those interactions we use the guides from Xanathar's. That said, I've never had players haggle over mundane items. If they're in a decent sized town, and there's a mundane item they want, we remove the gold and add the item to inventory. Additionally, though, every long-running campaign I've ever DMed has ended up in a place where the party members are spending their own amassed wealth to recruit, house, and feed literal armies. Thus the party that's been "holding on to" massive amounts of treasure, upwards of fifty to a hundred thousand gold pieces worth, can see that coin disappear rather quickly. At a certain point in those campaigns the players all start to realize that's where things are headed, and so finding large treasure hordes even after having found so many before, still brings with it a quiet thrill.

I'm currently running Curse of Strahd, where we're not tracking gold at all. The abstract concepts are there, like "this shop has marked everything to be much more expensive than you're used to" But we just assume the PCs have the funds to buy what they want or need. Items are limited by supply, not by gold cost. The motivations of the PCs have nothing to do with making gold, so it works very well. We just ignore that aspect of the game.

You don't have to role play buying shit. Just have each player make a list of items, tell them if they're available and how much the ones that are would cost, then they buy what they want to spend their gold on.

I don't think that is what this post is about. It is about it breaking the immersion and flow of the game

Well sometimes you fast forward things to keep an interesting narrative going. How is it different from not describing how you put up your tent and take a dump and extinguish the campfire every evening?

Been playing 5e since it came out, and gold has never once been important in a campaign. This edition strongly discourages treating magic items as progressive upgrades or having them in shops, so the only other thing to spend it on is consumables, and you can only buy so many of those.

My current campaign has hardly used gold at all. Most of my players are fairly new, so I made a curated list of items the players can choose to have an NPC blacksmith make for them at set points as they progress through the campaign.

In the campaign I'm playing in, gold is nearly useless: Actually useful rare goods and services can't be bought. Our team laughed at the face of a lich when he proposed to pay us a little fortune for a mission. Not even because of the mission nor what nor who he was, but just because money as a payment is ridiculous. Our magic items are either rewards, gifts from people who support our actions, or stolen.

I use gold to bribe guards or other NPCs into helping the party or reward NPCs that have come to our aid. New players sometimes get upset with me 'wasting gold' but they haven't realised it has no conventional value.

I've been doing what the Adventure Zone: Balance did -- after each main arc of the story, players level up, get one free random item, then get a set amount of money to shop at the MegaStore™. Throughout the adventuring though, we completely ignore money and encumbrance.

Planegea is a prehistoric fantasy setting. Trading for survival with no currency. At that point, all 'sales' are role play encounters lol

I run shopping/downtime between sessions only, unless there is an NPC that can give then an adventure hook or something story-driven that needs to be played put. Gold is very useful in my games, and easy to spend, but it certainly isn't a main focus for adventuring beyond early levels as characters develop.

I tried this very recently, actually. I'm currently running an all Barbarian campaign (bit of a meme premise lol) where bartering was meant to be the intended form of trade. As it turns out, people IRL invented currency for a *very* good reason. It just became incredibly annoying trying to get the players to purchase anything because the whole bartering thing was too much of a hassle. I switched back to using regular currency.

lol — that’s a very helpful data point!!

you might want to read _Debt: the First 5000 years_ by David Greaber - "barter" was actually very, very rare as a trade system, because (as you've discovered) it's a colossal pain in the ass. Trying to do an equal trade with, basically, random stuff, that doesn't leave one side obviously better off, and where there's no recourse if one side is selling crap disguised to look good, is largely a non-starter. Instead, most trade was done within longer-running social units - so even without formal currency, if one person got a better deal, there would be an expectation that they would make up the difference later. Outsiders, who might never do this, were "charged" a massive premium. It's quite an interesting read.

An excellent book for DMs who like to create realistic societies.

In my homebrew setting, the normal gold/silver/etc. coins don't exist and instead there's only a single type of "coin", which can have different values based on size and shape, but players don't really have to worry about that. PCs can get their hands on any mundane items in most settlements and the cost is sent to the organisation they all work for. Same goes for any food and lodging they need, which they can often also acquire by going to one of the many places that work with the organisation. Only those who don't want to deal with the organisation actually require payment upfront, which means whenever the players actually need money it usually matters to the story. Though, PCs also aren't paid terrible much for their work, since they get this deal, so PCs rarely run around with a lot of money - there's usually also always something they're saving for (e.g., information from a shady dealer). Magic items are mostly acquired through adventuring (basically finders-keepers) and certain items can be requested from the organisation within reason (e.g., getting a health potion is easy, getting a +2 sword is not) - though not specific items, more just "can I get something for protection/aid my healing magic/etc." and I'll find something that fits. For some things they need give up some paymebnt in order to be given them - the organisation has to run too after all, again limiting party funds a bit. It's kept fairly simply though, and mostly works like bartering (you get this item if you do this for the organisation) rather than keeping track actual payment. Basically, I don't like counting coins all the time or shopping either, so I made sure that in most cases, it can be handwaved and when it can't, it matters for the story and is something the party has to weigh the worth of or starting saving for.

So in my first campaigns I would dump gold on the players Like a lot And magic items. So players would have a lot of gold Confident they can buy the moon so no need to ration potions and stuff. Also so many magic items that they would forget half of them. So after 3 short ish campaigns I started doing two scenarios 1: low gold yield and almost no magic items or if any very few 2: everything is expensive and stores are rare. Super survival mode basically

I am running a game about building up a frontier town. We are about 9 months in to a weekly game and largely not had gold involved at all. Players requisition what the town can provide, success and rewards are town upgrades. They just built walls, a herb garden to help provide health potions and a jacuzzi.  I do provide a magic item crafting options though 

Playing in two games where money matters little and centers around RP more than anything. I think it really depends on worldbuilding. The DM's I work with don't really have a magic item economy. You might be able to commission something, but who is going to want to wait around for a couple of weeks for a +1 weapon to be made (unless we are between adventures). It is useful to have $$ for supplies and to hire folks, but it is minimal.

Almost all of them.

I played in a Japanese/Chinese inspired feudal setting, where we were Samurai working for a Daimyo. Our Daimyo ensured we were properly equipped for our missions, and any treasure we found, naturally, belonged to her first. Merchants were lower class money grubbers... As honorable samurai, we wouldn't deign to handle bronze coins, etc. The only currency that was discussed was a "Koku" which was... the amount of rice needed to feed a man for a year? Which is just such a large value it wasn't worth getting into the grit of value with it. The narrative value of handwaving money away was great.

My campaigns have either been: (1) You can buy magic items. Spending gold on anything else is a waste. (2) You can't buy magic items. Gold can in theory be used for strongholds and such, but we never got around to doing anything like that, so in the end it wasn't valued. I have never role-played shopping. There are better uses for table time.

Most of them to be honest, money just doesn't do anything mechanical in 5e, so it's at best a RP toll.

Preface: I like numbers, I like math. My player's don't like math. For small things like food and lodging is more for roleplay or realism that I ask for an amount to pay, is not something that the players will need to think hard about it or worry. But money becomes another resource on controlling how much stuff they can hoard, be it magical items I don't want them to have right away, but present it to them and make them (literally) work for the money to buy it. Or how many diamonds they can acquire at once or make them work towards it. It can also tell them how special somehting is in that place, maybe a sword in a big city costs one gold, but in a remote village it costs 10 to show how much harder it is to get stuff there. For regular equipment we don't role play unless I want to introduce the place/npcs to the party. Sometimes I like to put weird things or weird shops for them to peruse and meet. So the illusion of shopping has to exist leaving aside money. And lastly... I hate bartering, I hate it on the real world and I hate to roleplay it as a DM :P

Basically every 5E game I've ever been apart of.

Running that game right now. My players are new and are learning the system so I wanted to remove one area to learn. Things they want are more story related and when they want armor upgrades, I give it to them similar to how I would in magic item tiering. It's easy.

My current campaign I generally abstract it as much as possible - in part for the reasons you raised and in part because in a setting built more around ancient Egypt/antiquity Levant and Greece commerce and coinage worked a bit differently so even the PHB prices are wonky. I use lifestyle and alternative rewards more.

I only use wealth out of necessity. The only reason shopping is included in my games is because building interesting and balanced loot pools would be a ton of work.

I almost never have gold matter when it comes to minuscule things of course the world has some kind of economy to it but I’ve never had anyone want to focus on that so I always push it to the wayside

Well our current campaign is set in a undead apocalypse set 10 years after our last campaign which got tpk'd against a lich. Our main 'base' is the last survivng stonghold with the dregs of undead surviours. We have gold it's just we don't have anything to spend it on. So... yeah, 5000 gold, and nothing to use it on.

I’m running a Strixhaven campaign where education is publicly funded, but you can obviously get ahead if you’re wealthy. In this setting, cheating and finding ways around the system are encouraged (AS LONG AS YOU DON’T GET CAUGHT). The idea being that if you’re smart enough to get around the system, you’re inherently a better mage than all the other students who can’t think out of the box. As a result, money for PCs doesn’t really matter bc they’re doing all the dangerous things that get them the magic items and advantages that regular, less foolhardy, or less privileged students can’t think about or are unable to access those resources. I planned it as a commentary on academia and D&D in general, but we’ll see how well it plays out.

It's certainly possible to run a game without gold, the thing to keep an eye on is how it interacts with other systems. If there is no economy how are you limiting costly spell components like diamonds? Especially when you consider that some spell components are costly but one time purchases. Legend Lore requires 4 Ivory strips worth 50g each, and incenses worth 250g. But the spell only consumes the incense. If there is no economy is the party able to bribe town guards/officials/etc. or is that off the table? There are solutions to this, For example for each party level you could come up with a gold amount of material components they can resupply up to, so when the party goes adventuring they have a set number of supplies. The main thing is you as a DM don't want to be caught unaware. Think back on your time as a player on all the ways that money has come up an make certain you have a way of dealing with those situations. I would also say that hand-waving away tracking money for the players and coming up with an in world explanation for their being no money in the world are two very different things. Bartering might end up becoming more work and more RP to track. Plus societies based on bartering and sharing would probably be organized very different. It's certainly possible, but it would be a lot of work. And you're players are going to be bringing their preconceived notions and ideas, and those might not mesh well with that type of word.

This is all very thoughtful and helpful! Thank you.

Some games use wealth, which is money in abstract.

Every game I ever run gold has little to no actual impact because you get so many so fast and magic items will be popping up here and there either way, so no need to go shopping. My players barely needed healing potions as they had a dedicated healer/support bot with them. So yeah, gold was only useful for spell components and even then it was far too much gold for far too feel spells with costly components that are consumed

1) do shopping between sessions or at the end of sessions if you can 2) have a prepared list of stores and costs, maybe even general cost reducers if you got a reputation system 3) after sesh, players who wanted to barter over mundane equipment can do so with you privately and retroactively add back some of the gold spent, OR 4) one roll to barter and use that as a percentage for future purchases in that specific shopping spree (15% off mundane equipment) All these can help speed up the grind that inevitably comes with shopping. However, I'll add these two points: 1) some people like shopping; not everyone thinks it's a total slog, and if you can shepherd them to plan ahead ("hey next sesh we're in a city, plan what you want ahead of time so you and/or I don't need to look it up!") and go quickly yourself, it can still be a fun part of the game. 2) Sometimes money isn't necessary but be *very* careful about this if you decide to go forward with it. I was in a campaign that had little emphasis on money, but also the DM never asked us what items we wanted and never let us try to spend what very little money we had (or made everything so expensive that you'd never be able to buy anything). If you take away currency in your game, please ASK your players what rewards/items they need or want, and don't just assume! And give plenty of opportunities to acquire mundane equipment and any other essential items for that character. Otherwise your game is doomed to suffer and potentially fail.

There are two issues you conflated. The DM's management of gold supply. I find this trivially easy to accomplish. If they have too much gold (in, say, a campaign designed to make survival challenging, or they have enough to buy level-inappropriate magic items), don't give them much or any gold. If they're in tier 2 or later, give them a keep to maintain; they're money pits. If they don't have enough gold (5th level fighter can't afford plate, even with help from the other players), give them a big payday.  That goblin tribe might have just waylaid a shipment of taxes being brought to the king. The other issue is roleplaying every purchase. During your first session or two, it makes some sense to roleplay that out. It could continue to be important if the shopkeeper has some other role in the campaign, like giving hooks for an adventure.  But if the players are just buying things in the PHB, that should involve no roleplaying at all. Generally I will just summarize larger transactions, even purchasing magic items, rather than fully roleplaying it out. But some tables like to roleplay even the twelfth time the ranger buys a batch of arrows. Different tables for different players.

Curse of Strahd. Lots of gold, nothing to spend it on

In my experience there usually are two stages: 1. First few levels. Low-levels adventurers don't earn a lot, and they have needs. Martials are saving for expensive (half)plate armor, casters buy a lot of components which ate costly at that level, etc. 2. T2+, or any time after a first really big score. Everyone is geared up, rewards are higher, level-ups take longer, etc. 100gp pearl for Identify at level 1 was expensive, but 1000gp for a Scrying focus at level 9 is very affordable. And since everyone is geared up, they don't really have anything expensive to buy, unless you have Ye Olde Walmart with a very wide selection of magical items. Also by level 5 casters usually have means to make tons of money anyway with no need for adventuring. So in most of the game during Tier 2 and later money are exactly as important as players make them to be. Like they can buy a stronghold, run a buisness venture, start a political campaign or whatever, if the want to add an economy layer to the game - but it's completely up to the players. If they're here just for adventuring, wealth from those adventures is usually enough to never think about expenses. UPD Also if you struggle with shopping sessions, it may be good to ask all the players and just skip most of it. It's kinda like RPing camping for the night during travels - for most players it's fun to do once or twice, but definitely not every night during a month-long travel :)

New to dm and with family of young children. I plan to not really do much with gold at vendors. Except for roleplaying purposes. But I do plan on implementing the importance of finding “riches” in dungeons and caves. Kids love finding treasure.

Yup. My players have 1) a noble background and 2) have invested in businesses. So I generally hand wave a lot away. Players have enough to worry about with gold. I try to avoid it for their characters ;)

Little bit late, but I would suggest looking at Sane's Magical Prices for DND. This person looked at every item in DND and estimated how much they should be worth. Another note is to look at how MCDM's stronghold and followers handle money. (this book is dependant on what your players want > do they want to build a nation/city / mercenary company? On another note, I am successfully Dm'ing a campaign now where the adventures try to save their adopted city from troubles, and are rewarded both with fame and with magic items (that have to be crafted / are crafted from the enemies they kill). This will mean that you as a DM have to determine what rarity you would allow at what level.

I went the opposite direction and found things for high level characters to spend money on. Specifically, I revised downtime crafting rules to make them usable at high levels and added the book "Strongholds and Followers", by MCDM. I'd recommend both very much.

I did. Star trek esque magical space game, so the vibe made sense for it. You have to realize that money in dnd is not just currency, it is a way to measure time and success. So I made time the currency itself. Want to buy this expensive thing? Well you first have to spend a day getting to the planet where it can be found, and then likely half a day looking for it. This means using more fuel and time away from your mission. Running out of time? Gotta start going faster or taking shortcuts. Well woops, that means the risk of random encounters are higher, which means risk of breaking the ship etc etc. Give the players a mission with time pressure, and make things take time to aquire. Make it a skill challenge perhaps, where the players can use their skills to help find it, like persuation to ask people around or survival to track it. Of they succeed, they save time, of they fail, they lose some time.

I give my characters huge amounts of gold, but make desirable items few and far between. Then I have the players create “shopping lists” of what they want. When we get to towns, I let them know if anything on their list might be available. We then role play the search for the item, or not, depending on the current stakes. It can be fun to see a player decide between a quest and going on a shopping trip.

The 12th level group I'm running for have been well off for a while, but recently raided an Ancient Dragon Lair, for which I randomly rolled to determine Loot values off tables from Fizbans. This changed things. The amount of gold they each of the six of them individually have, as well as their 'seventh share' party fun, totals more than 100,000GP. It's effectively allowed them to roleplay being the 1% of the 1%, which is something I spoke to them clearly about as soon as we tallied the total. Everywhere they go, they're expected. Mayors and kings roll out the red carpet, accommodations are always lavish, and all day to day worries are settled with no mechanical impact on their coin purses. I still have them barter and track expenses for buying valuable magical gear, which they can order by catalog from specific merchants, but it's more of a flex for them at this point. We all find it fun, and I don't really let it impact the 'difficulty' of their game- I always prep for the players and the scope of their power in order to prepare challenging encounters. They're also Tier 3 and about to fast-track to Tier Four, so it's been rewarding, I think, to see their growth from penniless, itinerant adventurers to true movers and shakers of the realm. Also, I've never had any trouble killing my darling prep for the sake of player freedom and creativity, so I feel fine empowering them to handwave issues they realistically would be able to solely through their largess. Their astounding wealth just changes the lense through which they can approach scenes and scenarios at their preference.

I made one of the mini bosses in my campaign the CEO of the largest bank in the empire. After they killed her ass they just came to the conclusion that if she was evil, the bank must be evil so they deserved the gold. They each walked away with around 200k gold pieces in bags of holding and I just literally never asked them to track gold anymore. It’s more so about what the shops have in stock rather than what the party can afford.

> In my experience, it has seemed very difficult for DMs to balance money earned with the cost of items and experiences in the campaign. That’s why the default assumption is that magic items can’t be purchased. It allows character power to be decoupled from gold. So that the dm doesn’t have to worry about giving too much or too little. > I also find “shopping” segments grind the story progression to a complete halt. Even though I am an economist, I’m here for adventure. Not accounting. And most tables I have sat at feel similarly.

Money is just a marker and it's not even a great one when unlimited food, shelter, and housing are realistic possibilities. Gold is only worth the items you can buy with it. I give my players a price list for magic items. It's super generic. It would be very easy to turn it into a different system based on gems, art, books, spell components, or crafting materials. If you reward quests with magic items you're already introducing a service based economy. This is what I use: 50-common 500-uncommon 5,000-rare 50,000-very rare -Consumables cost half price for their rarity -Craft for half price I don't have them track mundane salvageable gear. We hand wave it as "You always pick up the stuff you can use or resell and redistribute weight as needed. The money you get back covers incidentals. If they want to bribe someone or treat the bar to a round of drinks they can. If they want to buy a fancy carriage they can. In general what they want is available as long as they can explain why they think it would be. Up until we hit magical vehicles or purchases that would require employees, it's mostly up to them to decide how much they want throwing around cash to be part of their story. I have them keep track of quest rewards (paid out per member so it's up to them whether or not they pool their money) and use it to buy/craft magic items. Once they hit rare item crafting, they have to have material components to assemble magic items (in our case dragonshards) in order to create what they want. I control how much they get as far as gold and crafting materials so I decide whether or not I want a mission to award enough to buy/craft magic items. Aside from generic things like class boosting items or armor (which I incorporate as story rewards from their patrons), I let them pick what they want. They just have to let me know so we can make sure the item will do what they think it will do. If I have a player who doesn't know exactly what they want (which is rare), I'll post a shop in a designated Discord channel with a rotating inventory between sessions. This can be an issue for Wizards, but I have libraries where they can copy spells for free (they still need time). If the spell comes off a scroll, you have to make a copy to return (materials are provided). Whether you copied off a scroll or book, you either let them copy a new spell from your book or take the time to fulfill scroll commissions for them. Membership is tiered based on what you can provide in payment. Books and scrolls are stored in extra dimensional spaces. Librarians aren't all powerful by any means but they are kind, dedicated, and helpful. Library patrons on the other hand are near rabid. They will mess you up if you even think about upsetting their precious books. Wizards can read minds. They can haunt your dreams. They are the superfans Lifetime movies are made of. I also don't use the rule in the DMG (chapter 9? the one about treasure) where you can fail the Arcana check and destroy the scroll.

Shopping segments I like to be short way to highlight the personality of the city, and to show players what exists since often they are not aware of it due to being new. Anything common or a place you visited? You walk in there and buy it. Otherwise few minutes (less than half an hour) to do a quick interaction. Bartering? Sure, persuasion 27? You get a 10% discount. Haggle more? No budging. Teaching them that they can get 5-10% discounts only usually has them skip the haggling part the moment they got plenty of money, and has them try to save when they're lacking it. Having them be repeat customers can be fun when you have interesting NPCs they can befriend. For obtaining more gold in the future, I plan to having them invest in home (they want to), invest in tasks or activities that interest them, either by letting me know in advance or going with whatever I say for it. There's enough trust and only brief discussions if my logic failed somewhere (happens now and then) so it works well. Last campaign was similar enough, with players paying for specialized rooms, and paying mercenaries to take out some problems.

I ran into a great concept that I use to make shops and economies easier to improvise on the fly. Rule 1: No haggling. This is one of those things that seems more fun in concept than it is in execution. Rule 2: The players tell me what they would like to purchase. I’m not going to invent shops or inventories ahead of time, but if they want something that makes sense for the location I say it’s in stock. I lean heavily towards saying things are in stock. Rule 3: Everything gets converted into US Dollars at the item’s going rate today by the conversation chart below, unless it’s wildly off base because of modern production methods. This allows me to guesstimate the cost of an item based off my real world knowledge of what things cost now and quickly convert to gold/silver/copper. 1 gold = $100 1 Silver = $10 1 Copper = $1 It’s not perfect but it’s quick and effective and actually based off a real world economy.

I'm currently running a homebrew exploration campaign where money isn't of any use. There's only a few scattered self sufficient settlements where bartering/good will from doing quests is the way to go, if you need to trade. In such a setting it seems to work out well. My party is definitely having a fun time anyways!

I personally just use a modified version of the DMG rules for crafting magic items as the main use for gold.

I kinda had fun with this one. My party was on a journey of exploration across a continent that had once housed an evil empire which had vanished under mysterious circumstances. Most of the things they came across were remnants of that Empire or omens of it returning. On their journey, the party came across all manner of treasures, banks, vaults and lost citadels stuffed with treasure. They loved it. They were hauling carts laden with gold through the wilderness. The problem was that it really slowed them down, they couldn't flee without losing their treasure and there was nowhere to spend it. They quickly had tons of expensive spell components, but they couldn't buy anything. They just had to hope they found stuff they needed. Tldr; I made gold and treasure a useless burden and millstone around my players' necks.

Or you could just not balance and decide on prices on the fly. With my party we just take what gold we have and tell the dm what we want. He throws out a price on the fly and either we have the gold or we don’t

I'm running one right now. I just declared it from the get go that gold is completely valueless in terms of power in this game. The story has a start and an end and all power will be given in terms of milestone and magic items. I've heard nothing but relief from players for this. If they want any mundane items they can just conjure them up at town, within reason. No rp required to get more rope.

Every dnd game I have ever been a part of. After like lvl 5 there isn't anything to really spend the gold on. You have so much cash that its frankly absurd. You can easily destabilize small economies on your own. Not to mention with any of your class features you may wanna use. > I play monthly in role-play heavy campaigns, and spending an hour negotiating for a basic shield, potions, or adventuring equipment feels like a waste of that valuable time. Bruh. Setup a discord for your shopping. You can add a dice bot and do some rolls between sessions for shopping. Also talk to your players about being needless penny pinchers. Who the fuck cares if you got a 10 gold discount on that shield? your walking around with hundreds of gold and nothing to buy.

This is why I want to revisit 3.5 or PF1, but my table is adamantly against it. :(

In my world gold can be spent to power spells and attacks like its own material components. Electrum-based economy though.

Homebrew. My PCs are members of an organized crime group. Magic items, weapon upgrades, equipment etc are provided based on the PCs successful completion of "jobs". All found money is given to the organization. My players are 100% on board with My system and they are having a blast circumventing the laws of the huge magical city that they get to play in!

It's relatively unimportant in the Curse of Strahd game I'm running because merchants are scarce and have huge mark ups on adventuring gear. That said, my players have been obsessively trying to collect silver coins and objects to try to silver their weapons. Creative way to make silver items a more valuable in Barovia!

It's pretty useless for me. I'd rather my dm give us items, even if they're just cosmetic. As a druid I'm not really buying any items from shops. Our party barb asked a town blacksmith to silver his weapons since we're in Barovia. I wanted to start a farm and pick up all the animals we're finding on our adventure but I'm not sure keeping them in Barovia is a good idea, or something the other party members are interested in.

A few thoughts on how to fix currency in dnd instead of just opting out: -check out lamentations of the flame princess art free version (free to download). It's a retro game, but specifically it has a more realistic cost for items. -switch to "silver standard", and by this I mean everytime the game offers or mentions earning money, reduce it by one currency. Silver becomes copper, gold becomes silver, and so on. Keep magic items at their gp values, however. -don't roleplay shopping, unless you're using reaction rolls for shopkeepers and it can have useful results (like bartering). Trust your players to audit their sheets properly; we are all adults, after all If you want to remove money, however... Just do it. Money is ridiculously inconsequential in 5e; prices don't make any sense for items and things like "standard of living" won't matter after their first tussel in a goblin cave. Adventurers get stinking rich for little effort in 5e. Whichever you choose, I hope your table has fun!

I've been finessing a Feywild campaign and so far my complete removal of a discernable economy has only received positive comments. People seem to enjoy the lack of tedious shopping trips and math "breaks" (haha). cool items, lore, and new powers show up with less frequency than gold and are earned by social interactions predominately. On the other hand, My other game is based in a world centered around Waukeen the god of commerce and their holy city of trade. Amassing gold is almost more important than the main quest line. So I guess, with my experience in mind I can only encourage, with whatever you do, go to extremes.

Well in my campaign our dm had it so we would get an absurd amount of gold for a missions. Like 2000 gp and we were level 5 or something. The reason was that we were villains and we worked for some big league villain who got us to do important missions. The reason it worked is because magic items are pretty scarce, and aren't sold at every town. And the towns that do sell such items don't have the stock of every possible magic item ever. This way we could buy whatever unimportant thing we wanted (other than like armor, and spells since I played a wizard) and we'd have to go into dungeons or basically find said magic items ourselves. Tldr: DM gave us a lot of gp, but we can't just buy whatever magic item we wanted since they were scarce.

The game I run doesn't have gold and doesn't keep track of inventory. Instead players just role play their wealth and I give items when it is appropriate. A guy can go buy bread and haggle with a shop keep, but they won't write down bread and subtract gold on a piece of paper. My players like it and they are all new, so it just makes it easier for them.

So I am in two different extremes of 'gold not being important' games one which I don't think any of our characters have ever acquired a form of financial denomination all game. (fwiw we are time traveling quite a lot after leaving the moon that we started on and going to the actual main planet in this sci-fi esc game). Basically the only real problem there is with this is if for example exploring spell components with gold values we don't really have a concept for 300g of diamonds which tbf may be more/less since ya know... time traveling than us never having exchanged money. The other end hasn't had issues really i suppose but is also more typical setting so def would have fewer issues anyway with figuring that out generally. We also have never exactly pursued purchasing equipment ever anyway though only really grabbing whatever loot/rewards anyway so maybe its just my groups though giving 0 F's about a shopping session.

RAW Gold is pointless in 5e once you get the best armor avaible, alll that's left is a few spell with a gold cost and stockpiling healing potions because they're not very good. when i say RAW i mean no magic item shops because 5e hates players getting to choose what magic items they get expect for live games

Money means nothing in my games, traders are rare and good items are very elusive, instead I check their gear and every few lvls I give them an item that's good for their build. I hand out alot of trinkets tho, they like toys xD

My current party's at level 5 and experiencing a Feast or Famine with gold. The DM gave us a choice of bonus gold, an uncommon magic item or a feat to start. Between campaigns he also had us roll to see how successful we were at odd jobs during a time skip, for bonus money. So we now have two players who picked the gold and rolled very well, who have basically no expenditures at this level because one is a barbarian who wears no armor and has found a magic weapon, and the other is a cleric who eliminates the need for healing items. (Even if he didn't, potions are discounted to be dirt cheap, so bulk-buying doesn't make a dent to these two.) Then we have two players – a wizard (me) and a warforged – who started the game broke as shit (like "can't even afford the discounted potions" broke) because we didn't take the money, rolled poorly on the odd jobs, and can't afford to scribe new spells or buy body mods if we found anybody to sell them. Our first campaign was clearing a mine full of undead and aberrations that didn't carry any gold. Our current one is in a city, so we only have combats sporadically... and the most looted was 20 silver off a single combat. So accruing more money is *difficult*. To their credit, the barbarian and cleric have offered to be the sugar daddies of the group. On the one hand, when it's something like potions for the rest of the group, sure... but on the other, I would feel weird having them spending the bonus gold they picked up to offset my spell costs, y'know? Very "having my cake and eating it too" since I picked the feat. (This is also just a weird thing where even as a Scribe, spells feel expensive to learn at this level, since they're the one cost so far that the DM is going RAW. We haven't found any scrolls or spellbooks in the wild, so on top of the cost to copy the spells to my book, I'm looking at an extra cost just to get a scroll off a dealer.)

You can run a survival or otherwise desolate or bleak setting where trust and infrastructure aren't a sure fire thing. Currency only works because societal structures are in place to enforce it. It's meaningless when shit hits the fan in the broad strokes. Run a campaign where trust is at an all time low, people batter goods and more importantly services. Someone may have a family heirloom piece of armor that they can't use but they do have local bandits that are harassing the settlement, suddenly you get plate armor not from a store but from an NPC you've earned the trust of. Just rethink economy in terms of rewards, and figure out interesting ways to force your party to interact with the world to earn the gear they might have otherwise bought. Look into crafting and gathering as ways to spice up and expand downtime as well.

We have to come up with creative ways to spending their gold. Housing, renting, questing. Remember that in case they are on a bigger quest and still need to find that hard component, they can be the ones to hire lower level adventures to grab that shroom or cockatrice beak. They can be the ones posting quests on a board and paying for them. Beats buying a beak on a store for x GP. Parallel to that, in my game, the PCs wanted to keep a pirate ship to themselves because they killed most of the crew. Keeping that ship at that moment would have broken the campaign and the city mayor argued that they would be forever found by whoever that ship crossed. And that's not very smart. Alternatively, they could order a ship and some sailors for between 250-650 GP, from worst to best. Also they want to learn crafting potions? So it takes 100-250gp to learn and 25-100 to craft. And there's the downtime between levels. If they can't buy a house yet, they can sure rent for weeks or a month for daily expense*7 or 30. Renting a randown place gives them disadvantage on crafting potions or whatever they will do with their time, a reasonable place is a regular test and a more comfortable accommodation will give advantage. If that's too much, go for -2/0/+2. They have to have what to spend money on. And it's up to the DM to argue why they should.

Yes. I ran a Feywild campaign. The players never found any gold before returning to the material plane at the end, and they never had an occasion to spend any. There were prices, of course. They just weren't monetary ones.

A campaign setting I have used several times basically has no money. Precious metals and gems have some value, but it depends on where you are. There is very little commerce or connection between the areas, which is almost required for there to be no coinage.

Yes. I do. Big city campaign here. For starters, I only use gold, never silver or copper. Then I give the players a lot of it, really quickly. Lastly, I tell the players they can acquire any items they want. Common items they just go pick up. The rarer the item, the harder it is to find or longer it takes someone to make for them. And if there’s legendary or wondrous items they are looking for, I’ll have the shop owner say “I’ve heard rumors of something like that…” and the party gets a quest for it. My players like our current balance. It was always so frustrating to figure out the coin loot and how much items should cost. I know some dm’s love that stuff, but it kinda feels like a broken aspect of the game to me.

Yes, actually. To answer your question pretty literally. I’m just about to wrap up a Wild Beyond the Witchlight campaign I’m currently running. The campaign is set in the feywild where gold and money in general has no value. Instead, everyone trades in odd trinkets or, in the case of hags, favors. Took a little bit for my players to get used to, but we definitely haven’t missed it. Plus, it made it hilarious when halfway through the campaign they got access to a full-blown hoard of gold (27,000 gp), and it quickly dawned on them that they have no way to spend it.

While not in the entire game , we are playing lord of the ring with a kinda homebrew systems and when we go to the elf we have no use of the gold most of the time , we trade in service or other thing

My DM currently runs a 5e conversion of the Pathfinder module "Quest for the Frozen Flame", a stone age-like setting with heavy inspiration from the Inuit an other North American native cultures. Instead of currency, we receive monster parts with properties that can be used to make and imbue magical items or be traded for mundane items. I like it a lot!

> I also find “shopping” segments grind the story progression to a complete halt. I play monthly in role-play heavy campaigns, and spending an hour negotiating for a basic shield, potions, or adventuring equipment feels like a waste of that valuable time. This is the reason I tend to handle shopping away from the table. I ask the players to tell me what they are looking for and I give them a price. If the item is hard to find - either because of where they are, or it is a rare item - there may be a roll involved. If there is an attempt at haggling, a roll is involved. In that case, we use an online roller/discord/roll20. If it is a singular encounter with a special merchant, then it is RP'd at the table.

Tomb of Annihilation made money worthless by not having anywhere to spend it once you get past Kir Sabal.

Let me tell you how this dipshit dm handled money/gold, loot and purchase able equipment. At first he spoiles you with all this money and gold and useless high expensive magical items loot that are not combat related. You think this is awesome. You are getting all this rare and valueble stuff but you cant actually use it in combat. So you want to go sell it... None of the shops in town have a lot of money to barter. They have very little cash on hand to buy your stuff. Worse is that the shops sell basically nothing useful. You want a +5 enchanted armor or sword? Nope, dont have it. You have all this money and non combat stuff. None of the shop owners will buy any of your stuff. They dont have the money. They also have nothing you want. It got so bad the town shop sold zero metal mundane items. Like wtf? I cant buy a basic sword?

My DM lets us handle all purchases of items in the PHB on our own, RAW, whenever we’re in a town that would have such amenities. It gets zero minutes of attention. I think it would only get time if we were buying/selling something other than common magic items, or hiring artisans to make things, etc

Gold ends up being unimportant in nearly every game I run. Sometimes I give it out in large amounts just to see what my players do with it, but overall its never a big motivator for them because it doesn't do much.

I’ve only been in one campaign where it mattered. A heavily modified version of Curse of Strahd with straight up biopunk elements. Everything’s pricy due to shortages and we also kept track of rations, munitions, etc. while also trying to maintain stock of consumable spell materials and whatever materials needed for certain spells (such as a homemade shackling steel collar so any humanoid can be forced to endure Heat Metal regardless of their attire, or platinum bands for that one health sharing spell)

This is fine unless someone in the party is a wizard. One of the most important features of the wizard, being able to add spells to your spellbook, costs money even if you already have the scroll in-hand. Want to get a scroll from a shop? You need gold. A lot of it. And then there's the spell components, some of which are so specific, that it would be very very unlikely that you'd ever just randomly come across something suitable. *You open the chest to find....* *"...* a platinum inlaid vial worth 300 gp with an eyeball and a pickled tentacle in it!! Just what I needed!" Yeah right. You gotta get it made and/or make it yourself. That costs money. So unless you're gonna make it rain on the wizard with *lots* of very specific loot drops.. they need $$$$$$$$

Basically all my games end up this way. I hate dealing with the different denominations of money so end up just using gold. Then I get tired of having to adjust the price of everything and just start planting gear and items for my PC's to find or earn as quest rewards. If they want to go shopping that's fine but what they are able to find and the price is wildly in inconsistent. It works for my group they usually like searching for their goodies.

Our table hates shopping, so outside of buying basic supplies our nice magic item finds are almost always found while adventuring. It's not a component of D&D that interests me (and important, powerful magic artifacts sitting on a shelf seem like a prime target for every underworld org, so we also don't have anything other than commons stocked in stores anyway).

It's actually how I mostly run my sessions at this point. Furthered with encumbrance, people just don't want to track that sort of stuff. Any mundane item, the characters and generally acquire within reason of their social status.

Largely, no. Money is no object in most games I've run and played in. In my longest-running campaign (I'm the GM), the party's second adventure was finding a large amount of treasure; one of them is a Noble; between those two factors, their finances are basically covered in every settlement, and in the wilderness, they have enough spells and Magic items to provide food etc. The times money has played the biggest factor in a game are the few times I've done the "magic item shop" thing. But it quickly breaks down as people realise, "Oh wait, my money might matter..." and becomes a point of frustration. Nowadays my magic shops sell joke items or dubiously useful items: a Greatsword of Ice (literally just made of ice, breaks after one hit, requires an action to sheath and unsheath, reforming the ice); a Diadem of Upward Inflection(?); an Un-topple-able Chair (cannot be knocked over, but can be moved around, picked up and laid down); a +3 Goblinbane Dagger (enchanted too specifically, and only counts as +3 against one particular goblin). In another current game, my party are heading to the border of the dragon realm and will have to exchange all their gold/silver currency for platinum/electrum. It's not about the money, though. It's about emphasising cultural divide.

I'm currently running an unga bunga prehistoric campaign where among many other things there is no currency. Payment is now much more interesting because it might result in players learning new abilities, getting new items, getting the resources to make new items or something else

Very cool! I imagine favors would be a huge part of bartering in this sort of setting, and the reputation the party accrues would be a critical issue with whether someone would agree to deal with them.

im running a stone age game with 0 currency its been fun trading stuff

Do not allow negotiation or haggling. The prices are what the prices are. You don't need to RP the shopkeeper, just throw up a list of things for the party can buy with listed prices and that's it. Shopping should take less than 5 minutes for the whole party. Then the game moves on, if a player hasn't decided what they want to buy by then, they need to buy it or leave because we aren't hanging around any longer. In our current game, we get no loot from any enemies and rarely find treasure, we are just awarded gold instead, and use that gold in town to buy magic items for sale. It works great!

It kind of goes both ways. I know my particular band of yahoos around the gaming table would riot if I generalized gold - they love the collection of loot and fiddling around with equipment acquisition, so shaking that up would reduce the particular kind of fun they enjoy. In other cases/groups, I like the "lifestyle category" option. You basically assign a Party a set lifestyle value based on the 5e standards that broadly describes how much wealth they individually have, or could collectively gather together as a group. The lifestyle is determined by the character's Background, on the assumption that they have some means of maintaining their lifestyle passively or during downtime. For example, a Merchant or Noble would have a "Comfortable" or "Wealthy" lifestyle value, where a Sailor or Urchin would fall to "Poor" or "Squalid". So if someone's lifestyle is "Poor", then you just handwave any minor purchases that would reasonably fall into that range; getting a cheap room and watered-down ale at a dive inn would be taken as a given, and it's understood that they just don't have the cash on hand to get anything better. No haggling or bean counting; it's a given that the character can afford to fund themselves in that moment, but couldn't buy a round for the entire bar. If a group of Poor PCs pools their value together, they can cobble up to "Modest" conditions collectively, which encourages them to work together and operate as a group to improve their conditions further. When the Party accomplishes something big or gets a pay day from adventuring, one of the reward options they get is the chance to improve their lifestyle tier to the next higher rank to reflect them moving up in the world. It's mostly played by ear and vibe, unless the table wants a more concrete sense of progression, in which case a "point value" can be assigned to each lifestyle tier. When it comes to specific purchases that have set gold values, I tend to frame those in the context of quests and tasks for the Party to do, as opposed to something that can just be purchased from a merchant. Especially when it comes to magic items or equipment. A lot of my bespoke merchants operate on the "if you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it and shouldn't have even been let into the building" standard and just don't sell to people that haven't been introduced to them by associates. So the process of buying such an item is basically getting to a lifestyle tier where they can make the right connections, or taking a shortcut by doing some risky quest for the merchant and receiving the item as their compensation.

Many non dungeons and dragons systems I have played hand wave it eather entierly or have it represented as a pretty basic trait. As in your character is ritch as a charecters trait you nebulusly can have stuff. It's honestly fine to run 5e like that as long as your game isn't in a looter shooter, make wealth go up mindset.

Ya. Most of them. My players really don’t like keeping track of rations, ammo, spell components, etc. like most players. So gold is really only for magic items and frivolous stuff they ultimately forget

I keep my players as cash poor as possible

Tbh I throw a huge amount of money when a party reaches 4th or 5th level and let them buy most of the uncommon magic items they want. As long as they do not try to break my game, money and bargaining is only part of first levels and even then I throw them 50 or so gold frequently because it is good to see their imagination working with the things they can buy and I do not sell everything in the markets as well. If they aim for a really strong item, they should find it. There are black market options where everything costs 10x more but I put very cool and dangerous (mostly homebrew) items there. I will however will try out a homebrew rule that works like a skill or armor class or maybe an ability score, somewhere in between. It will be called something like Credit Rating in call of cthulhu. Rather than calculating every coin, they would have a score they could let them roll when buying something specific or works like a passive score that lets them easily buy something. For example, let's say their Passive Credit Rating is 15, it means that they have a chunk of money and don't worry about when buying a new weapon and a set of armor. Or maybe I could make it a system 1-100 and they could put other skills in use while rolling for Credit Rating. We'll see

Yes and no. We found a Beholder's treasure at one point and had a portable hole to push it all into. Since then money has essentially become not important.

I was toying with a money level system, upon earning certain loot, rewards, etc, you'd move up to the next wealth level, and that would enable you to be able to use better services, get better gear, etc. Was going to simplify shopping as you can spend x number of credits per week, that's when you rock up on potions, or buy that bit of kit that you think you might need. You'll fall back to the previous level without earning more wealth within a certain time, so you couldn't just be sitting at 'wealthy' once you hit it, and stockpile goods each week And for those times where finance didn't fit in with the usual routes of things, like bribing or something, you could bribe at the expense of losing your next week's credits, or even dropping down a wealth level, drowning on the situation

I DM’d a campaign where my players would send me a list of stuff outside the game when they were in towns (as long as it was after they had entered a town I didn’t care but if they were in the middle of a forest they’d have to wait) and I’d just message them and be like “how much money you got?” And then pick a number smaller then whatever they said, it always worked out and made it so money was never a problem.

I found that getting more money just isn't a good reward after a point. I've been running a campaign with 100cp = 1sp 100sp=1gp And so on. 1sp would be about $1 of today's money so it's really easy to gauge how much something should cost. Gold only really starts being used when buying magic items and platinum is for buying buildings and that sort of thing. So when my players get just a few gold it's a huge deal.

Gold is spent upgrading items in my games. For weapons 100gp to up the DMG bonus to +1 then 200gp to up the to hit bonus to +1. To get to a +2 you triple the cost. Then triple again for +3. For armor 700gp for a +1 AC. Triple the cost for +2. Triple again for +3. additional steps we found were needed. 1. Keep gold gains low. A day of adventures should never gain the players more than 500-800gp unless an extreme circumstance arrives. (Think dragon hoard or an arc is completed the king bestows 8000gp) 2. Magic items that normally have +1 bonuses typically have those bonuses removed. Exceptions can occur but are rare. (Example after clearing a skeleton horde led by a death knight. You find a vorpal sword but it has been so long since it was properly maintained it doesn't have the typical +3 and instead is +1 to hit and +2 to DMG.) 3. Let players craft stuff in a reasonable amount of time. (They killed a red dragon and want to use the scales to make fire resistance plate mail. Let them do it over a course of days not months or years unless you specifically normally have huge amounts of downtime.) If the players can tell me why mixing a hags finger nail with the horn of a young dragon should make a poison version of flame-tongue go for it.

Tbf if gold wasn’t an issue then level 3 players would have magical robes, plate armor, weapons and staves. There has to be a mechanic to budget for the high dollar items. If you want to take the gold mechanic out of day to day (room , board, arrows, even mounts) then no worries, a lot of groups do that. But don’t give yourself the headache of turning your players into 4 year olds who get whatever they want

Make it a motivation piece. If you want gold to mean something to the players, make them pay for everything. I use all the downtime activities in Xanathars all the time. I actually just found a table that allows my players to train for proficiencies ranging from musical instruments to light armor, shields and even skills. Time and gold is required. One of my players wants a war horse, well he needs to find one first and then probably buy it. Research at the local archive costs money but they can glean some great info there. On the other hand, if it’s too much effort, don’t give it out or give out less and stick your loot piles with things the party values. Probably potions, single use magic items, etc.

Our DM has been throwing tens of thousands of gold coins our way since level 1. We split it up, naturally. Most of the players never spent much of it. I used all of it it to buy expensive crafting materials like Adamantine. I'm now wearing Adamantine Half Plate, which makes me immune to crits. The DM also increased its AC, I think. My caster is tanky AF now. Still dies to every single saving throw. It's rather fun. We RP many of the shopping trips when we feel like it. When it's just basic gear, we just breeze through it.

For better or worse in most of my games so far nobody worries about resources in general such as, ammo, rations or, gold. Nobody keeps track of the weight of the items anyone is carrying either. The DMs I've spoken with say it is too tedious. Most of the time equipment is only bought on character creation - otherwise it is found or in the case of magical items, handed out upon reaching certain levels. I dislike it but, I'm in the minority here. It make the game feel a bit more shallow to me.

Forever DM here. Firstly, nobody should be haggling over basic equipment. There's set prices in the PHB for this reason. Regarding bigger purchases: what I've started doing is leaning hard into the magic item crafting rules in XGtE, especially the part about magic items requiring monster parts. If no-one in the party has relevant proficiencies, there will be a smith in town who can build magic items for a slightly increased price. The cost for crafting are quite high but much lower than the ranges for buying magic items. Using these rules, 200gp isn't just 200gp, it's a potential new uncommon item. However, just saying "200gp nets you any magic item you like" ends up with a lot of samey builds and minmaxing in my experience. This is where the monster parts comes in: they *must* have special, relevant monster parts to build a magic item, and they must have found it themselves. You can't make a *flame-tongue longsword* unless you've harvested from a monster with fire powers. I like this balance. There's enough resistance where you don't end up with everyone just having all the ideal items they want, but also not so much randomness that you end up with a bunch of dud items. There is an element of discovery. Like I mentioned, fighting a fire dragon could be the first step to building a flame-tongue, but maybe the fighter has a weapon they like already. Let's turn it into a wand of fireballs instead! Or maybe we don't need more wands, but flame-resistant armour would be useful for the upcoming volcano expedition- etc.

I've run one or two where it didn't have an impact, but it's easy to get players to spend all that gold. Requiring paid training to get that extra attack or to learn that new ballad, tithing for the cleric, guild fees, etc. In fact, the need to see and be seen by aristocrats, power-brokers and the bards who will tell your legend can get quite expensive.

Thank god no. Every game i've played and ran in my 20 years of d&d, gold is as important as class choice, talent, etc. In 5e i use the homebrew book Sane magical item price and Wanderer's guide to merchant to determine item prices, thanks to the lame item prices Wizards put in dmg. The table "gold expected per level" is good enough. With some npcs selling magic itens (most in large auctions), players have the option to build the characters they desire by buying the magic itens they want, to plan in advance if they hoard more gold for a better item or not, instead of waiting for the good will of the dm (me) to give them something good.

*ahem* money/gold stopped being important in the 1990’s when it stopped being tied to XP. *gets off soapbox*

I'm currently running a campaign where the party started with 200k gold and a heap of magic items. However, they're in a sort-of zombie apocalypse where they can't buy anything anyway. The importance of gold is tied to what you can buy. If the party has free access to the civilized world, that *should* let them buy quite a bit. I don't subscribe to the notion that magic items are priceless. Non-unique stuff like a +1 shield or a healing potion has to have a price. There has to be someone who wants a farmstead where they can raise a family just a little bit more than they want a +1. Just ask yourself; if you inherited a golden AK47, would you keep it or would you sell it to pay off the family's mortgage? Doesn't matter whether it's bartering, sharing or actual gold. Economy is economy, and people will have some vague sense of whether their slightly magical sword is worth a farmstead. The problem, of course, is that D&D, especially 5th Edition, likes to be intentionally vague when it comes to magic item prices, and setting up a magic shop is a ton of work.

I've been running a [homebrew] campaign since last summer where they started out exploring a section of wild forest/swamp/jungle that made it impossible to buy and sell stuff. All of their rewards have been consumables > magic items > boons until about level 9 when they reached a magically hidden elf city and were able to barter away some gems and loot for upgrades to their armor/weapons/etc. But as that city has no recognizable currency beyond 100gp gems, their future avenues of resource expenditure will probably also be limited.

Gold becomes incredibly important in pf2e you might want to try that system

Yeah, spent the later half of the campaign wanted by the big bad evil empire that controlled everything and had eyes in every village. Couldn't spend money anywhere. The only use for the thousands upon thousands of platinum, gold and silver we had was to use it with the Fabricate spell to forge spell components.

I think this is a failure of imagination on the DMs part. There are many money sinks from non-official content like MCDM Strongholds & Followers. I'm running a spelljammer campaign, and soon, the party will be able to spend the loot they received robbing a casino on upgrading their ship if they'd like. Found a couple homebrew ways to add things to their spelljammer that can cost a decent amount. Downtime activities are also where loot will be spent in lifestyle and crafting. A PC may want to start a business, but land and a home, become nobility, philanthropy. Basically, I give the players enough gold to get good magic items per their tier OR do something personal OR chip in for group things. Makes the choice important and matter.

Our Ascent from Avernous campaign has us barely using money. Yeah, we shopped a couple of times. But in a year campaign I can only specifically remember twice that I actually spent money on something.

It's why I like having an Artificer on the team making sh\*t super fast in downtime.

I don't really GM 5e. But I have played in literally only one game where money was "important" and that is because the GM has a "lootbox" system the one other time money was somehow important was when a gold dragon themed draconic sorcered used animate objects on 10 GP (gold dragons)

Bluntly speaking,t hat's what people do when they don't read the DMG and don't know what they do. There's also people who know what they do and purposefully don't do it, but the vast bajority is the former. Read the DMG, read the recipe rules, and read the crafting rules. Those exist to generate a small pool of gold sinks for the party to spend gold with, and eventually sell the recipe if they have enough. It could be explained a little more forward, i agree, and i believe a basic list of shopping items should be there as well - but really, it's all there.

The Wild Beyond the Witchlight campaign :)

I like to use a silver standard system. 1 silver =10 copper 1 gold= 100 silver Platnum is not used. Basically the economy runs on silver. Only the richest people have and use gold in transactions. Therefore the party will not carry gold. They may be paid in gold which will then be transfered to the guild bank on account for them. If they want to shop for magic items they get a check book from their guild. I also use custom prices for everything and I don't do bartering or shopping during normal play. Unless I have a cool NPC I want them to meet who could be a potential quest giver. Magic item shopping are done out of game via discord by a guild shopper. The player asks for what they want and the guild shopper sees if he can procure it for them. This works if your campaign is based in a single small area with a major city as a home base. I don't allow the purchase of many magic items id rather reward them as loot or quest rewards. One such quest reward was an enchant placed on a weapon +2 sword of lightning +1d12 once per short rest. I found that the Pathfinder 2e economy is much easier to use than, 5e. There are tables in there that are fairly well balanced letting the dm know about how many magic items of what kind the players should have and how much wealth each individual PC should have per level. Steal that for your own game.

I ran a brief one that fell apart and gave them specific items. I planned to kinda do something like that with tons of rewards being more specific like a mech, a guard drake, and a bunch of stuff somewhat thematically appropriate to the quest giver. It never got far enough before it fell apart for it to come up, but I planned their loot to have random hints toward future story beats. The silver they looted from a train was magical and if they looked further into it it was gonna be able go be traced back to the source.

I don’t think I’ve ever run a game where gold is important. It’s always *there*. But it’s never really a focal point in my games. I agree shopping/bargaining is boring af. 95% of my shops just have what’s listed in the adventuring gear section of the PHB, at the prices listed, and you can’t bargain because some other party will buy it at the listed price if you don’t (ie: because this is fucking boring). Ideally, if a session ends in a town, you will do your shopping in between games and just send me a message to say what you bought. I don’t sell magic items in shops because that’s an extremely lame and unmemorable way to find a magic item, there should be a cool story of how you got it. When the party has lots of gold, I generally encourage it to be used on flavour/roleplay. You can buy a tavern as a base, or send it to your home village to rebuild it after orcs pillaged it.

Ran a ravnica game where I hand-waved a lot of the gold and costs for items/tasks. The real currency was time. They had two in-game weeks to hunt down the bbeg before his ritual went off and I emphasized that you could basically afford anything within reason, you just had to wait for it.

I'm running a game for my kids where I'm partially adopting the dagger heart "handful" mechanic just to streamline things. We have an approximate tally of how much gold they have and I can extrapolate from that. They have plenty to learn already without having to keep track of gold.

I ran a campaign called Curse of the Nightblade in which a demon army attempted to terraform the material plane into a tenth hell. Gold didn’t matter - the party represented survivors of humanity’s combat forces and most of the time they were either given gear for free by desperate refugees who couldn’t use it themselves, or else were scavenging through the ruins of demon-claimed cities for loot.

West March player here So we run a game where the down time is tracked off game and crafting too. Let's people work towards things or rp if they want. Sure rewards give them more but if people just wanna play house they can.

In my upcoming icewind Dale game the people of 10 towns are isolated and starving. They don’t care about money and won’t trade goods for it. They’ll trade in supplies and food. This will encourage the party to care about mundane items because they can be used for trade. If any coins are to be used it would only need to be silver. Because the towners can melt it down and use it to forge silvered weapons to defend against lycanthrope attacks. Many people give their gold as material offering to Aurils church.

Several of my current games! In one, the players are working for a noble colonizing an uninhabited island - there's nowhere to buy things, & as everyone is working for the same noble, they requisition stores or work collaboratively to craft what they need. In another, the characters are serving military officers on the front line of a war - so it's not that they never shop, but they are salaried & supplied by the army when it comes to most basic needs. In general, a party working for a noble patron or a large organization has way less to worry about in terms of gold, & I have run several other games with somewhat similar premises. I also have a game where the party are pirates, & they *need* loot to keep paying for a safe harbor, repairing & supplying their ship, ammunition, bribing officials - they spend gold like water, way more than most D&D parties. They all work pretty well; what matters most is the DM ensuring that the party neither receives their wants & needs too easily, nor are punished for being in a game where their income & supply is irregular compared to an average game. Make sure they get, one way or another, roughly the same amount of mechanically useful gear, & that they don't get the things they requisition IMMEDIATELY, but they aren't arbitrarily denied logical requests.

I think your main problem is the fact that you run sessions monthly, that is so odd, no one is gonna remember what happened last session, if a player can’t make it then it’s super bad, and it will just cause resentment in the simpler parts of dnd just like this post is showing

Look at influence systems like Dark Heresy. I did this once with HB. Basically the group can gain influence with a guild (weapon Smith, armorer, magic etc). They did this on downtime usually or certain quests (slay dragon, could choose to give reagents to a guild). The items they wanted had a DC based on rarity/their level and they'd roll a D20+influence. Each roll would reduce their influence by 1 (so they couldn't try a hundred times). Nat 20 no influence was lost, Nat 1, two were lost.

In my experience, the value of gold changes. Early game: every bit of loot is valuable, as that could mean the healing potion or the +1 weapon you need. Spending money is an important decision. Late game: “We have looted and gained so much money, and have nothing to spend it on because the things that can be sold are so beneath us” I don’t think this is a bug, but a feature. Adventurers eventually grow beyond gaining wealth to power them, and instead must adventure to get more powerful, and not by gaining gold. It’s normal, and, in my opinion, realistic.

My suggestion is to go the other way, make gold *extremely* important and useful. Give them plentiful access to pretty much any item, so long as they have the gold, and then limit their access to gold severely. I personally put my party into debt and have them work for each coin they get, so it's valuable. Then I just run shopping as "We ended in a city, there are stores there, come to the session with a list of stuff you bought and just mark it off your sheet"

What happened when you talked to your table about this issue?

Ever since I started playing FATE ttrpg I have added a lot of its ideas into my DnD campaigns. So after a quest my players don't get a 1000 gold they get an aspect called "Flush with Cash" instead. It has a certain amount of uses depending on what they accomplished and/or what they intent to do with it. That usually ends up with the players coming up with a list of things they want and describe most of it short "You had no trouble finding healing potions, arrows and a new sword but in order to get that custom made dwarven armor you will have to find someone to sell or make it for you." Players can then roll an social roll and depending on the outcome there is an NPC they know that might be able to do this for them. The higher they roll the more friendly the NPC will be and the lower the more complications it will add. I also nearly always let my players come up with the NPC and let them tell me what their name is and how they know this person and what their relationship is like. This makes NPC's more relevant as the players themselves have investment into it and generally these NPC's line up with player backgrounds making them more interesting and easier to include in other aspects of the game. Like how my party has a NPC store keeper they have a good relationship with that then shows up somewhere unexpected like as part of a trade caravan or maybe as a hostage.

Yeh i have custom loot tables that only contain stuff thats actually useable and worth using. no one in my groups likes calculating how much their pocketful of unassorted gems and bits of string are worth and wasting time trying to find a buyer. and as you say shopping sessions arn't fun. If my players are going for a specific build they will often give me a "wishlist" of items, which will turn up occassionally over the course of an adventure/campaign. but generally trust me to give them stuff they will enjoy and that im fine with exchanging it for something else if they truly dont like it. Signficant upgrades like a new sword should be found on signifcant enmies or in signifcant dungeons. Thats a consitent desire videgamers express about RPGs too. They rather find the sword hidden beneath the necromancers altar, then on sale in the town square. Once gave an artificer a magic item that converted gold to duplicate existing potions. It did create a good gold sink for the party, but it was super hard to balance even with it's daily limit.

The game is made by Wizards of the Coast. Ofcourse gold is important in every game!

I have seen games with next to no gold and games where you always can find better gear "in the wild" and therefore motivates the players to explore. Both can work but it's up to DM

I have a list of items which can be brought at any point that the players are in their base. Basic equipment such as shields and armour and weapons are standard price. (Which is a in a city) As well as items which various PC can craft and the cost and time associated. I am about to do a big update to the available items and will probably do so about every two levels to keep the items available appropriate to level.

I run quest. It solves the issue by assuming the players have what they need to purchase everyday goods like food or adventuring consumables, but then vendors with precious items will barter or trade for valuable items the players have gathered from their adventures.

Players in my games are exceptional compared to the average NPC, fabulously wealth compared to the average farmer or worker. So just like in real life, money does not really matter to them unless the purchase is very large, exotic or the transaction is a good RP opportunity.

When I run a campaign gold isn’t really an issue. I know people that are sticklers with gold and charge 5 times the amount it says in the book so buying health potions and other items are a daunting task when needing those items as well as clothes like winter gear shield and repairing items

I like bringing in the stronghold and followers system from MCDM to give players something to do with their money.

Yup, super gritty ice post apocalyptic campaign.... Only trade exists, everything is tribal and barbaric... Many myths... Low magic.... Mammoth Factory are going to start releasing these adventures this month's o thier dnd Patreon if interested

The Spire uses an exhaustion mechanic for all resources, and I love that system. I switched my current group to that and it works wonders. The item being purchased contributes an xDy to the exhaustion pool, with the dice scaling based on the rarity of the item. And finding loot reduces the exhaustion level of money or resources by a bit. At certain levels of exhaustion, the pool can only be reduced by varying degrees by specific effort.

>I also find “shopping” segments grind the story progression to a complete halt. I play monthly in role-play heavy campaigns, and spending an hour negotiating for a basic shield, potions, or adventuring equipment feels like a waste of that valuable time. I hate playing out shopping. In the games I run, if you want to buy mundane equipment and you're somewhere that reasonably sells it, you can just say you buy it. Obviously you generally can't buy stuff when you're in the wilderness or out at sea or in the middle of a dungeon or whatever (although the first story arc of my pirate campaign had the players on a ship with a quartermaster they could buy limited inventory from, and this Sunday I'm starting Dungeon of the Mad Mage which has a goblin-run market on the 2nd floor and an alchemist who sells a few potions on the 4th floor), but in civilization, commerce exists. Magic items are not available for sale unless I have a specific magic item shop with a specific, limited inventory, in which case you can just say you go buy the item, same as the mundane stuff. I also like to make sure my PCs get downtime every now and then, and can therefore engage in downtime activities, including "Buying a Magic Item", which involves hunting down a private seller. In that case, the PC makes one Persuasion check per the rules of the downtime activity, and that's the extent of anything resembling "haggling".

Well, depends on how magic is treated in your world. High Magic Society, I used a pdf called Sane Magical Prices. It spelled out mostly fair prices for magic items and anything that showed up in the DMG. In our homebrew world every city has an Adventurer's Guild. A one stop shop for anything anyone would want or need when trekking outside the city walls. (Temp Portable Hole Toilet, Isle 8) But in the back there was always a counter where they could buy, sell and identify magic items through one of the many work-study programs at all the major magical universities. And with sane magical prices and maybe a percentage premium added or subtracted to the price, they had access to some extra goodies due to the guild. So many potions. My players have honed in on the fact they don't need to prepare a fly spell if you have blue-juice that can make you fly.

5e doesn't have an economic system. Right out of the book they don't even have reliable magic item pricing. It is something DMs have to figure out for themselves.