Gold or Silver for XP in 5e
From “Histoire de la Belgique…” By Théodore Juste, 1853
Note: This is a postscript to a previous article about rebuilding the treasure tables in the DMG. You can read it here.
One of the hallmarks of old-school RPGs is using gold for XP. Mostly to provide an incentive against (or, sometimes, for) killing everything you see. The more I dig into the nitty-gritty of treasure, levels, and monster power, I crave a unifying mechanic. Cash can solve a lot of problems for an adventuring party, and along with XP, can be used as a metric of power. If a level 3 fighter finds 200,000 gp, she has an advantage over her penniless 5th level counterpart. Is there a way to unify XP and gold distribution, and thus control (or plan for) a character’s power? How would that impact the game?
This is actually easy to calculate, we know how much experience is required to level up, and we can calculate the amount of cash the characters would have to accumulate. The table below compares the purchasing power of a 4-person party and shows what level they reach certain benchmarks.
It is pretty obvious that if you use gold for XP, there will be far more gold at lower levels. The party can buy plate mail for the fighter by 2nd level and pick up a rare magic item by 3rd. This is much faster than the standard treasure tables in the Dungeon Master Guide. All of this gold for the taking might add to your players’ ludonarrative dissonance. Think about it this way, a gold piece is around $100 in today’s currency, so that means each character must find $30,000 worth of gold in order to reach level 2. Assuming you want the characters to advance quickly that gold might be pretty easy to find. How does the world look if a small fortune can be made with a day or two of light adventuring? The townsfolk are left wondering why they aren’t adventuring…
Silver for XP looks more promising and lines up better with the DMG. The characters will be just a shade poorer than average until the treasure tables in the DMG take off in the second tier of play. This looks like a viable alternative to just killing monsters for the experience of it.
