When I first played D&D, using the AD&D rules in the early 1980s, every gold you earned gave you XP, and thus gain levels. You also gained XP from killing monsters, but based on what I observed from the published adventures and comments in the Basic and Companion rules, about three-quarters of your XP would come from treasure. (Some players did away with this, but there was a lot of treasure in the published AD&D and D&D adventures, as analysed in this old EN World thread).
The sums were much larger from what we expect today. A second-level fighter had probably gained about 1,500 gold pieces to reach that level; a tenth-level fighter? Likely about 200,000 gold pieces for their next level.
The question then becomes, on what do they spend their gold?
These were the activities proposed at that time:
- Employing henchmen and hirelings (and armies)
- Building strongholds
- Training for the next level
- Researching spells and crafting magic items.
- Taxes, tithes, living costs, etc.
- Replacing and upgrading equipment
- Spell component costs
- NPC Spellcasting
Variants of these costs have continued through the years since in D&D campaigns. They typically didn’t work that well, and you’d have a lot of gold left over.
So, what do you use gold for in the D&D Adventurers League?
Henchmen and strongholds don’t work within the structure of the campaign. Training costs are no longer part of D&D (for the most part), and the lifestyle costs don’t come up that much (and aren’t that significant).
That leaves research, magic item crafting, equipment, NPC spellcasting and spell component costs.
Researching brand-new spells? Not a good fit for DDAL play. The equivalent ability is wizards scribing scrolls into spellbooks, which still exists.
Crafting magic items? Not a thing in default DDAL play (or in many D&D 5E games).
Replacing and upgrading equipment? That’s something. But once you have your platemail, most of the costs are pretty trivial.
So, on what do the high-level adventurers of the D&D Adventurers League spend their money?
- Wizards scribing spells into their spellbooks
- Potions of healing
- Spell component costs
- Living costs (only when coupled with downtime activities)
- NPC Spellcasting (Raise Dead and Restoration spells, primarily)
- Special events (Fai Chen’s, Faction Rewards)
From that, you can probably see the problems with the economy: Most of the uses for gold are for spellcasters; wizards in particular. The special events don’t even occur for many players. You have characters that need a relatively small amount of gold, and some characters that need a larger amount of gold.
Meanwhile, the amount of gold being given out in D&D Adventurers League games? It was huge. Not so much at Tier 1, but in the later tiers, most PCs would accumulate far more money than they needed. The guidelines for how much gold to give out in a DDAL game weren’t as nailed down as the XP awards, and tended towards giving out a lot!
Gold is interesting when you don’t have enough to do everything you want, but can do some things. If you need to choose between casting heroes’ feast or buying two potions of supreme healing, you’ve got an interesting decision. If every time it is “I do both and still have more than 10,000 gold pieces!”, then there’s no decision to be made.
The suggested method that the D&D Adventurers League want to use next season is this: You don’t gain gold from adventures. Instead, whenever you gain a level, you gain gold according to the tier you’ve achieved. Tier 1: 75 gp. Tier 2: 150 gp. Tier 3: 550 gp. Tier 4: 5,500 gp.
When we discovered that, howls of surprise and dismay began. This change breaks immersion for me more than any other that has been proposed. I’m fine with the abstraction involved in advancement checkpoints and (magic) treasure checkpoints. This gold one feels more wrong.
Part of that is due to the way a typical DDAL adventure goes: You go on a mission, and you get rewarded for it. That’s still how it works for advancement and treasure checkpoints. However, the gold reward delayed until you level? That feels weird, and I’m far from the only person to note this.
Mike Mearls had this to say on the subject:
We’ll see how it plays out. If the amount of gold and how often you earn it is an issue, we’ll make changes. For instance, we could pretty easily tie a GP reward based on the tier you gain in addition to each treasure check earned. So, if an adventure gave 2 treasure checks, it would also give 2 * that tier’s GP reward packet.
Having gold rewards at the end of adventures (or sessions, for hardcover play)? That feels better. It still doesn’t fix the “we found a hoard of treasure in this hardcover and couldn’t take it” feeling, but at least gold rewards would be more constant.
It should be emphasised that the rules are currently still in draft form, and Wizards and the admins are still gathering feedback. While some things are unlikely to be changed, others are – and I think the gold rewards will be one of those.
The other aspect of the dismay comes from how low the rewards are. If I plug in the suggested treasure from hoards in the DMG, I get the following approximate values:
| Tier 1 | 7 hoards (Challenge 0-4) | 150 gp per level |
| Tier 2 | 18 hoards (challenge 5-10) | 3,000 gp per level |
| Tier 3 | 12 hoards (challenge 11-16) | 15,000 gp per level |
| Tier 4 | 8 hoards (challenge 17-20) | 175,000 gp per level |
That’s a bit of a gap compared to the suggested rewards in the DDAL! Now, I’m fine with them being lower due to fewer things you can spend money on compared to a home campaign. However, the difference in rewards at Tier 2 and 3 is surprisingly large.
Strangely, though the amount of money available to characters has sharply diminished, the number of things they can spend money on has increased! The new rules make spell scrolls and a small selection of potions available for purchase, and the list of spells you can get NPCs to cast for you has also increased.
I like that spellcasters can get scrolls. I like that all characters can get potions. I just wish they’d have enough money to do this!
Copying spells into a spellbook is also an issue: at present, it costs 50 gp per spell level to do so. That would take most of the money for a level-gain for one spell of the appropriate level for the first two tiers.
Although I like having less money in the game, a few things about this proposed method strike me as rather odd!
EDIT: For some reason, lifestyle costs remain (and must be spent when you spend downtime). Odd. I’m not sure how much that adds to the game.
Here’s hoping they listen before Season 8 begins. This is a serious problem for any new spellcaster and definitely encourages a “haves vs have nots” mentality: existing characters will be rich compared to new characters, and that gap will never close. In MMORPGs, you deal with this by implementing gold sinks that encourage rich characters to spend their money; something like that could be very helpful here.
I believe the gold sink to get rid of the existing characters’ gold is the ability to purchase scrolls? At least that is what my character’s hoard will be used for. Check page 3 of the Adventurers League Player’s Guide v8.0.
Sorry that was supposed to say “Page 3” instead of “version 3.”
It’s part of the gold sink, yes. Gold in the DDAL looks to be mainly spent on spell components, spell casting and (now) potions & scrolls.
I think if they did change it so that it gave the recommended tier amount *per treasure point awarded* and gave it out at the end of each adventure, that might work. I looked at the amounts of gold awarded in the Season 5 and Season 7 DDAL modules and their average amounts per treasure point would come out to (roughly): Tier 1 = 100 gp/TP, Tier 2: 400 gp/TP, Tier 3: 450 gp/TP, Tier 4: 5300 gp/TP. If they doubled the Tier 2 amount and then gave it per treasure point instead of per level acquired, then it would be in line with prior DDAL modules on average.
Including modules in Seasons 1-3, the average gp/TP values become: Tier 1 = 85 gp/TP, Tier 2 = 325 gp/TP, Tier 3 = 440 gp/TP, Tier 4 = 5300 gp/TP. So definitely, AL should double the Tier 2 base amount and award it per treasure point received at the end of each adventure rather than the proposed per level award. This way, the average gold piece award is the same as it has always been on average.
But they want to reduce gold, so it should be “amount per treasure point”, not doubled, and then the admins are happy that they cut gold in half and we’re happy cause we’re not as broke.
You mentioned copying spells into a spellbook being an issue. A 4 hour session at level 1 earns 2 TP which can be spent on Half Plate and then sold for 375 GP, plus you get 75 GP for leveling up. That totals to 450 GP for the session. That’s enough to buy 2x 1st-level spell scrolls (150 gp) + 2x inks (100 gp) and material components for Identify (100 gp) and still have 100 GP left over to buy 2x Healing Potions.
The biggest thing I’m concerned with, apart from the issue with spellcasters, is in picking pockets. If gold isn’t just lying around to take any longer, then picking pockets becomes a non-issue. It also creates at least 1 story award that is now completely invalid and useless. From the epic DDEP07-01, Peril at the Port, we have the following story award:
“Uku The Spider Boy
A naughty flying monkey called “Uku the Spider Boy” has latched onto you. Uku (“OO‐koo”) wears a crimson waistcoat adorned with tiny mirrors and sports a silk skullcap. He has a naturally mischievous nature.
Uku can smell gold from 30 feet away, even if it’s kept inside a purse or container. As an action, you can command Uku to steal or retrieve up to 100gp using his Sleight of Hand skill bonus of +4. Uku keeps 10% of the takings, which he spends on boiled sweets next time you’re in town.”
With the new mechanic, I’m really curious to see how picking pockets is going to be done. What happens to the above story award? Does it still work, much like one of the wealth story awards that has been teased for Season 8? Will we have to trade this story award in for something else? Is it now completely useless apart from having a non-familiar monkey?
Uku aside, picking pockets has always been effectively meaningless in AL anyway. The DM can’t give out more treasure than the Rewards section of an adventure dictates. If you pick someone’s pocket for 2 gp, that’s 2 fewer gp you’re going to find somewhere else.
Lots of good points have already been made, but the verisimilitude or picking up gold as you go seems more fun than a direct deposit at the end of an adventure.
Arbitrary gold just feels… wrong! Playing D&D should be about getting immersed in the adventure, the world, and this rule just took the role-playing down a notch.
“You’re in a long-forgotten temple, and have braved the traps and perils. In a hidden side room, you see several green gems in a bowl on a pedestal. Is it a reward for finding this secret chamber, or is it yet another trap?”
Players would be weighing risks and rewards. But in the new system, why take the chance of grabbing the gems when you’ve got a set amount of gold you’ll be getting?
The same goes for pickpocketing (as Popestar mentioned above), haggling, finding ingenious ways to log a 400-pound statue along for its value to a collector,…
Another use of gold that everyone seems to ignore (or maybe it is rarely used?) is to make life easier/bypass obstacles…
In Storm King’s Thunder alone, my character bribed no fewer than a dozen guards for various reasons, slipped cash to various people to grease them for information, hired minstrels and caterers to throw a party as a diversion for a breakin, rented noble level outfits and courtesans to infiltrate a gathering, rented various boats and carriages and horses, etc etc.
Those sorts of ongoing expenses are FUN. Hiring and developing the loyalty of the street urchins of Waterdeep and using them as a paid information service was a blast. It was also EXPENSIVE.
NONE of my approach to much of SKT in AL will work in season 8, because I won’t have grease for the wheel, so to speak, and this is LITERALLY a story about a heist. I can’t BEGIN to imagine that my gold+social approach from SKT wouldn’t apply pretty well to parts of the upcoming Dragon Heist storyline.
That’s awesome! FWIW, the gold rewards in Tier 1 aren’t too far off standard (certainly once living costs are removed) so Dragon Heist should play fine(ish). It’s Tier 2 that concerns me more.
I’d like to see this resolved by slapping down the moist egregious offenders by emending the Hardcovers through the ALCC. (Content Catalog). Libraries in CoS, SKT, HotDQ/RoT, and the gems in ToH. are all high GP targets for gold farming. Overall the gold values might be high but there are more things to buy with gold that will bleed some of that off.
For grandfathered gold, offer some high priced prestige items with little combat value. When it was introduced, I figured the treasure/gold rules would supplement some of the very low-gold adventures like ToA and not replace it all.
The changes that Adventurers Leagues has planned for Season 8 all seem pretty reasonable. The checkpoint system for XP and magic is a pretty straight forward conversion. The magic item treasure points will bring parity between players who just play DDAL (who can’t choose their magic items) and DMs of AL (who can choose their magic items).
The changes AL is proposing for awarding gold is BROKEN.
Why bother opening trapped chests? Can’t take the stuff in there anyway? Why go adventuring? Do what an NPC wants? Why take on danger and and still not improve your lot in life? You’d make more gold pieces in Waterdeep doing a craft than adventuring. 4 months of basket weaving in a safe metropolis for 75 gp or go adventuring and gain a level to get 75 gp…
Just what would happen if your AL wizard had their spell book lost, destroyed, or taken away for a plot device? There is no way a Tier 1 or even Tier 2 wizard could ever afford to replace it with the gold system proposed for Season 8.
Clerics will also be hung up to dry in season 8. The 3rd level divine spell Revivify, which a cleric gets at 5th level would hardly ever be cast. If this cleric saved every gp and bought nothing, they would have 375gp at 5th level. Casting Revivify cost 300gp to cast.
(* Edited down a little – MB).
Most people seem to think Lifestyle expenses are going away with these changes, as mentioned above. They are in fact not, I don’t know why this is the new lifestyle changes are on the same table as level up gold. For most players, the lifestyle costs are going to increase under this system. Few people payed above modest before, in my experience, but the new fixes the minimum expenses at modest for tier 1, comfortable for tier 2, Wealthy at tier 3 and Aristocratic at tier 4. This makes spell scribing costs more expensive and makes trading even more limited than the downtime cuts suggest. Relevent Text from Player guide below.Gold.
If your character gains a level (or for 20th-level characters, for each 8 advancement checkpoints you earn), add the gp reward they earn as determined by the table below. This gold can be spent or saved—recording expenditures normally. If your character used downtime, deduct the lifestyle costs associated with your character’s lifestyle (also determined by the table below) from your gp total. You must pay your lifestyle cost for each day of downtime you spent.
Individual Treasure
Level Gained GP Reward Associated Lifestyle
1-4 75 gp Modest (1 gp)
5-10 150 gp Comfortable (2 gp)
11-16 550 gp Wealthy (4 gp)
17-20 5,500 gp Aristocratic (10 gp)
You’re quite right. I’ve edited the post a little to reflect that; and I’m not sure why I thought lifestyle costs were going…
(ducking as I post this)
Living Forgotten Realms gave y amount of gold per adventure depending on your tier and the level and length of the adventure. and it worked well.
The each treasure point = x amount of gold gives us the immersion because we can get it several ways with in the bonds of each adventure.
If they want to control the economy the better way yo do it is to control what we can spend it on…. witch they already do with brutal efficiency,