"GM, I don't know what to spend money on"

"GM, I don't know what to spend money on"

“I don’t know what to spend money on.” How many times have you heard this complaint from players? How many times have you seen GMs asking for advice on how to deprive the player characters from money? How many times have you seen the game devolve into the characters scrounging for copper coins just because otherwise they would have no motivation to adventure, because once they get rich and have nothing to spend money on, there is no reason for them to go out into the wilds? I’ve seen plenty of that and, to be honest, I’m guilty of some of that too.

If you’re playing a low-tech GURPS game, even a very fine weapon usually isn’t that expensive, unless it’s a sword. A suit of fine armor costs a lot, but usually becomes affordable after a few adventures. Then, you either just sit on a pile of coins and go out to adventure just because the GM expects you to do that, or go the D&D 3.5 way and buy extremely expensive magic items that for some reason are widely available for sale. Unless you have such disadvantages as Duty or Obsession, there’s rarely a reason not to settle down and retire. However, it seems that this problem is mostly the fault of the GM ignoring rules that nowadays are thought to be dumb and unfun by most players.

Many know about the Cost of Living table in GURPS Basic Set, but it seems that it is mostly used as a reference to find out what sort of property a character of a certain Status level should have. Have you ever paid the Cost of Living? Now, let me guess, your game lasts much less than a month of in-game time (and possible real world time too), so it never comes up, right? I have played in games that enforced Cost of Living payment and lasted a long time, and this alone already makes you spend quite a lot of money to stay afloat and serves as an incentive to earn more money via adventuring.

Here’s another thought that would sound like heresy to modern “players” – what if character advancement wasn’t free? How does character advancement usually work in GURPS games? The GM gives you points, and you buy whatever you want. How did it work in D&D 3.5? You level up and take a level of whatever class you want, whatever feats you want, whatever spells you want, etc. How did the character learn these new traits? Usually, this question is avoided. AD&D 1e had training rules that forced the characters to spend money and time.

I have a video game example for this. One of my most cherished franchises (that, of course, inevitably got ruined) is Might & Magic. In those games, when you earn enough experience to level up, you do not level up automatically, but have to go to a trainer in a town, pay, and spend a week of in-game time for each level-up. Then you get a number of skill points that you can assign however you want, provided you paid to learn the skill. However, if you want to become an expert, master, or grandmaster of a specific skill, you have to reach an appropriately high skill rank, find an appropriate teacher and pay him. This limits your advancement in a believable way, makes you learn about the world, and presents an incentive to travel to find teachers. Imagine a video game having more verisimilitude than most modern tabletop RPGs.

Another concept that really should come back is hiring henchmen and hirelings. GURPS does have extensive rules for those, but D&D 3.5 did so much damage to this concept that most players and GMs ignore these rules. Remember the Leadership feat being considered one of the most overpowered things ever and hence banned in almost every game? Before the third edition, hirelings and henchmen were considered a norm, not an exception, but harm was done, and now players throw a fit because there are too few of them to handle a large group of enemies or that a “role” or “niche” in the party was not taken, when all this can be solved by hiring an NPC. And since you have to pay them wages, buy them gear and supplies, it serves as another money sink. But again, your game must last a reasonably long time for this to matter.

Even then, you may accumulate enough wealth that even expenditures on Cost of Living and henchmen are not a big deal to you. AD&D expected you to become a ruler of a domain with a stronghold and a bunch of followers, but the later editions gradually phased this out, even though D&D 3.0 still had some vestiges of that. Building up a stronghold and possibly an army, and maintaining everything is a huge money sink. However, it requires the players to actually care about the game and be proactive instead of waiting for the GM to lead them by the hand to the next plot point. It also requires your game to last a long time.

Now, doesn’t all the aforementioned concepts have something in common? That’s right – time. Your campaign should last a long time both in-game to allow for all this to matter and in real life, but the statistics say that a vast majority of campaigns fall apart by the sixth session. Another aspect is incentive – how do you make players want to go out and earn money? The answer is simple and something that has been figured out long before I was born – Gold-for-XP. Tying character progression to earned gold always seemed like the dumbest thing ever to me, but once I was introduced to the BrOSR, it suddenly made sense to me. It creates a loop that pushes your players to adventure, get rich, spend money, and again and again.

Does GURPS have rules for all of the above? Sort of.

-          Cost of Living rules are in GURPS Basic Set.

-          Training expenditure rules can be found in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 3: The Next Level and GURPS Social Engineering: Back to School. Both of those are quite barebones and do not account for certain aspects, so they should be expanded in the future.

-          Henchman and hireling rules are in GURPS Basic Set, GURPS Social Engineering, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 15: Henchmen, and GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 23: Twists.

-          Domain management rules are… well, you probably know that GURPS Realm Management is a disaster. There are certain Pyramid articles that aren’t very scalable, and GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 23: Twists that are very barebones. Borrowing rules from ACKS II is the best option, in my opinion.

-          Gold-for-XP rules actually exist too. They are in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 21: Megadungeons, but the ratios may require some adjustments for different point values and different assumptions, because Dungeon Fantasy assumes that you will remain a dungeon delver forever. I have to emphasize that Gold-for-XP is not the only way to gain character points – these points are earned in addition to those you earn for exploration and defeating enemies. The book also suggests awarding points for playing your role well and subtracting points if you don’t, which is very reminiscent of player grading from AD&D 1e – something that apparently is very controversial.

If you implement Gold-for-XP, you will see that many subsystems that may have seemed useless, irrelevant, unnecessary, or stupid, now totally make sense. They were created for a reason, and only later phased out due to players either aggressively misunderstanding the rules or ignoring them. It seems that 1:1 time/Jeffrogaxian Timekeeping is another component that synergizes with Gold-for-XP (well, and with literally everything else). Anyway, the TL;DR is that Gold-for-XP makes sense, is great, but may need some adjustment in GURPS games. All the common problems have been solved years ago, but later forgotten.