Spreading the Wealth

Giving Your Players more way to spend coin.

 Giving your players too much coin in the way of rewards can cause all sorts of problems, but there is one that gets missed a lot of the time: not knowing what to do with the coin. Your players might feel like heroes, but if they cannot find what to do with their steadily increasing pile of loot, the money will feel pointless. How do we fix this? By giving your players many more ways to spend their money, many of which do not have any sort of apparent mechanical benefit. By leaning into a narrative use for coin, we can create a satisfying way for players to keep their coin flowing. Your players will thank you when you make them spread the wealth.

The Golden Problem

Your party rolls into town after clearing out the nearest bandit lair. Their hoard ended up being especially wealthy due to some very wealthy (and unlucky) targets. Their packs are heavy with gold, and they want to spend some of it. Coming into town, however, they find very few places to spend it. The paladin already has solid weapons and armor. The wizard is set on paper and ink for scribing spells. With no place to spend the coin, it just sits in their packs. This can ultimately lead to a few problems.

Not having a way to spend hard earned gold will cause its value to drop from a subjective point of view. 400 gp with nothing to spend it on might as well be 200 gp if it will just sit in a players pack. This means that as your party rises in level, the increase in treasure will start to have a reduced impact on the party. What good is acquiring the Dragon’s Hoard if you cannot spend it on something. When gold accumulates, it can also cause problems down the line. If your party has nothing to spend their coin on, it will just sit and accumulate. Most of the basic equipment can be easily acquired in Tier 1. After that is grabbed, the amount of equipment to buy reduces drastically. Health potions and other consumables will provide an outlet, but it will begin to feel like an expense for adventuring. This means that down the road you might be shocked when a player has enough coin to completely buy out the traveling merchant that you thought would only part with one of their wondrous items. 

Now we can always provide more mechanically beneficial ways to spend the coin. Creating weapons that are useful in specific instances and offering more limited use items means that the party will always be spending money as they work through their resources. This can also prevent needlessly hoarding of items, which I like to refer to as [Phoenix Downing]. However, I think there is another option that can enrich the world your players are exploring.

Providing More Outlets

Looking back at our example, one of the problems that stands out to me is that we are accidentally giving our players a very spartan life. The party adventures to get coin, and then spends the coin to continue adventuring. This accidentally makes a group of workaholic players. We want to avoid this, and allow our players to adventure to live, in a sense.

Customizing Your Gear

Everyone loves a chance to express themselves, especially at the table. Players craft amazing backstories, making their characters feel unique and alive in this world. As GMs, we can use this as a way to provide our players with another option to further that customization, expending extra gold in the process.

In addition to selling plain gear, have your merchants offer customization for an additional fee. The customization can be simple, or extravagant. The paladin can have that shield, but for an extra few gold the blacksmith can easily put their coat of arms or the symbol of their god on the front. The tailor has clothing that will get the players into the king’s banquet, but if they really want to stand out, it might be a few extra silver.

In addition to providing another outlet of gold, customization can also be a great way for players to express themselves creatively. They get a chance to make that item entirely their own, without having any sort of additional mechanical benefit. This process can also be a great place for some narrative elements to play out with your group. You can do this at the table, as a collective experience, letting the players work cooperatively on their logos or style, or even just showing off to one another. If you do not want to spend the time at the table doing this (because sometimes shopping episodes can be a drain), you can make this a solo exercise. Let players do this in between sessions, presenting their results when they play again. This allows players to stay engaged in between sessions, building up that buy in.

The Finer Things

Why should the party stick with the normal when they have the coin to live a little better? Getting a bowl of the perpetual stew and a loaf of day old bread fills the stomach, but fine dining can fill the spirit. Why settle for the itchy straw beds in the tavern common sleeping quarters when the party can afford private rooms with feather beds?

When the party returns with their packs laden with riches, the world is ready for them. As they reach their normal tavern to celebrate, the barkeeper notices that they have reason to celebrate. Instead of their normal cheap ale, the bartender recommends a special brew that was imported recently from the next city over. While not something for everyday drinking, it is great for special occasions. The party can also upgrade their meal, swapping out their normal perpetual stew for some nice roasts and fresh vegetables.

These changes can be for flavor, and provide no mechanical benefit at all. Instead, we can narratively point out the improvement the extra coin provides. Lean into describing the nicer things a bit more. If the group decides to hit a local bath house, make sure to put emphasis on how relaxing it is and how the sensation of being clean is very enjoyable. The players will feel like their hard work seducing dragons and slaying princesses in towers has paid off as they get to elevate their lifestyle beyond the normal options folks have.

Alternatively you can tie in some mechanics to the improvements, and provide minor benefits for the party. In the now legacy 5E book Xanathar’s Guide to Everything , there are downtime rules for “Relaxation”. These rules state as follows.

Characters who maintain at least a modest lifestyle while relaxing gain several benefits. While relaxing, a character gains advantage on saving throws to recover from long-acting diseases and poisons. In addition, at the end of the week, a character can end one effect that keeps the character from regaining hit points, or can restore one ability score that has been reduced to less than its normal value.

If your players are bruised, battered, and scarred from their last encounter this can be a great place for them to describe how they relax for a week, and what pleasures they indulge themselves in so that they may recover from the consequences of adventuring. Offering these finer, more expensive options is a great way to feel like a character is in fact able to breathe and regain their health, and spend some extra coin in the process.

Investment Opportunities

When players earn money through their actions, it can represent their progress in the world. Going from barely being able to scrape together the funds for a night at the inn to being able to treat the whole inn to ale can feel great. Leaning into that, you can provide ways for your players to take the coin and turn it into tangible objects in the game, that provide some sort of minor benefit but mostly make them feel that progress they are making.

A lot of player backgrounds can revolve around a specific trade or skill they had prior to being an adventurer. Perhaps the barbarian was a skilled chef, or the wizard was a renown blacksmith. While you do not want them to give up adventuring entirely, maybe they want to get a chance to tap into that background a bit through owning a business. Chapter 6 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide has some simple mechanics for running a business, outlining rolls for how to determine how much profit it makes (or how much gold it loses). 

In addition to these mechanics, a business can provide complications for a party to end up getting involved (or paying to mitigate them). The party might come back from adventuring to find out that their local blacksmith shop has offended the nearby smithing guild. The party now has to either make amends to get on good terms or potentially end up blacklisted from other smithies that work with the guild. This can end up using more gold or requiring service, further building into their own stories.

Players will also benefit from owning some sort of home base instead of always relying on inns and taverns. Whether it’s a gifted castle or the top half of a bar, the party can spend time and resources to make their space truly their own. Making a space livable can take a lot of effort, and making it unique to your own tastes even more. Players might be able to put the time into that, but the life of an adventurer is busy. Having an NPC or hireling who can do the work in their absence (or direct it) can provide them with a chance to both continue on with their lives as dungeon delvers while getting exactly what they want. Speaking of hirelings, any large home base will require staff to keep it running in their absence. Unskilled workers, per the official rules, cost 2 silver per day while skilled cost 2 gold. While not excessive, this adds up and can provide a steady way to relieve the pressure all that gold has on the party’s collective coinpurses. 

If neither of these interests the players, or your campaign does not really allow the down time needed for these kinds of investments to pay off, an alternative option is allowing the players to invest in a favored NPC. Any of the above options can pertain to someone the party likes. Maybe the toymaker wants to expand his shop, but does not have the funds to do so. Maybe the bartender wants to own her own bar. Maybe the orphans saved from the cultist’s ritual just want a farmhouse to live at. The party can step in and offer aid in the form of a loan or a gift, and let the NPC work out what they want in the background. This can allow these kind of downtime activities to play out in the background, showing results when the party next travel through that town. Sometimes nothing is more satisfying than seeing a favorite NPC get ahead in life due ot the kindness of some crazy adventurers.

Final Thoughts

I tried to stick to ways that would have either no or minimal impact on the player’s respective power in the game. You could argue that owning a business or stronghold provides a party with a clear advantage in the long run. I counter that in order to make anything particular out of such a purchase, the party would need to use more time and resources to do so. In that case, it will either work out even, or become a side quest in its own right. 

There are other ways that give mechanical advantages as well, but I will not be touching on them in this at all.

Conclusion

Now concluding our discussion you can see how offering places for the party to expand the story with some of their hard earned coin can avoid hoarding, keep loot from devaluing, and enrich the flavor of the world. Instead of generic and bland armor, players can pay a premium to get it customized so that they stand out, and make it feel entirely their own. The party can also improve their meals and sleeping accommodations, putting out more money for nicer things. Finally, the party might be able to take their gold and invest it in businesses, buildings, or their buddies to grow out a bit of the world and tap into their background. All of these methods will make the world feel much more alive, and allow the players to feel like they have engaged with it more, while doing very little to unbalance their power in the campaign.

How do you handle the wealth the game throws at your players? Do you provide ways for them to spend it that I did not cover? I would love to hear about it below.

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