There’s an interesting statement in the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide. “The Game is Not An Economy”.
It goes on: “The rules of the game aren’t intended to model a realistic economy, and players who look for loopholes that let them generate infinite wealth using combinations of spells are exploiting the rules.”
As I was considering this statement, and the fact that D&D 5E has been painfully short of ways that characters can spend wealth, I realised there was such a thing as what I’m calling a Reward Economy. This isn’t a simulation of how the fantasy world economy works. 99.99% of players don’t want that.
Rather, it’s how you get rewards during the game, and both (a) how those rewards get better the longer you play/level up, and (b) can exchange those rewards for other rewards.
In the initial release of D&D 5E, I noticed how players would get gold for their accomplishments, and fighters wanted to get 1500 gp so they could afford full plate – but there wasn’t that much past that worth spending money on. Wizards, at least, had to spend money on special spell components and scribing spells.
Giving out 100,000 gold pieces to a party sounds like there’s a great treasure involved, but what is there to spend it on?
Let’s consider some ways that previous editions have come up with to spend gold:
- Purchasing magic items and mundane equipment
- Crafting magic items and other gear
- Hiring people (henchmen and hirelings) – including alchemists, sages, spies, armies
- Building and maintaining strongholds
- Ruling a realm
- Upgrading magic items
- Researching new spells
- Researching history and lore
Am I forgetting things? Quite likely – and there will be things from other games entirely I haven’t included. The thing is, games need to think about the rewards they give to players, and for long-running games, this can be incredibly difficult. You can see it in computer games as well, and perhaps even better, because you’re more likely to spend a concentrated time with the game and seeing its rewards. Rather than 4 hours with a game a week, it’s 20+ hours in a weekend!
(Well, for mostly people without children, families, or lives. Even so…)
But it’s really interesting how many of the rewards feel useless. I’ve played over 100 hours of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla last year, and the weapon I use is the same weapon I picked up in the first 5 hours of the game. Same with the armour. Every other weapon? Not interesting to me.
But, on the other hand, some of the rewards I was getting were upgrading my weapon and armour. So, it’s not like there weren’t rewards! It’s worth taking this lesson: It’s okay for some of your rewards to not always be interesting. And it’s also okay for them to have specific audiences. While I wasn’t interested in the new weapons, I’m not a good player in that respect – other players would grab them and go “this is much better for this sort of foe!” and have fun that way.
Can you imagine a game where a player gained a vorpal sword at level 4? What weapons would he be interested in past that? Very few! (I actually did this in a game once. And let me tell you, it was an AD&D game where that sword was a lot more effective than its current incarnation). That’s another aspect of the reward economy: holding back the better rewards until later in the game.
5E – both 2014 and 2024 – both do this. Items are divided into categories of Common, Uncommon, Rare, Very Rare, and Legendary, and those correspond to bands where they appear. The intention is the better the item, the later it appears. While I think this mostly works, there are some very odd exceptions. (Primary amongst these is how it deals with consumables. A potion of flying is “very rare”? Huh?)
Much less successful is how this then integrates with magic item crafting. 5E uses a very broad scheme, and it falls apart completely when it comes to consumables. (Craft a potion of flying for 10,000 gp! Or a Broom of Flying for 200 gp!)
This was something I hoped would be addressed in 2024’s version. Nope. The 2024 magic item crafting rules are the rules from Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, slightly adjusted (not necessarily for the better).
Crafting rules are odd in D&D just because they rely on a style of play that is not universal. Do you have time between adventures? For many players, the answer is “No! We’re saving the world!” So, the core reward system is purely (worthless) gold and (useful) magic items.
Bastions and Crafting? Non-core. The challenge becomes to have a core system that works while also having additional elements that manage to integrate and also work. It isn’t easy. I don’t think 2024 gets close.
What gets close? In D&D editions, 3E had a much more robust crafting system. Still flawed – we learnt a lot from it – but at least it matched cost to power better. The Companion rules (BECMI) took a much better look at strongholds and followers.
Computer games tend to do it better, because it’s part of their core loop. (Why do you hunt monsters in Monster Hunter? To get parts to upgrade your weapons that can hunt better monsters!) They also have a much better time of tracking things. In D&D, our fungible rewards (those that can be traded) are gold pieces. (Everything converts to GP). It’s only one currency. But in most computer games, they have multiple currencies or upgrade components.
It partly derives from AD&D and it’s ideas of magic item creation – eye of cockatrice, spleen of newt – but tracking all those currencies doesn’t work as well on the tabletop. And the gathering of those currencies works better for computer games. (Spend 25 metal shards and 2 boar hides to upgrade your resource pouch! Spend 100 metal shards, 2 carp skin, and 1 bighorn sheep bone to upgrade your potion pouch!)
But even if D&D’s system shouldn’t be so complicated, it still requires thought to make gold and the other game rewards useful, while balancing the benefits they can bring. This is something that can be improved.