... is what my son asked me when I told him that they won't be able to buy magic items in
our new 5e campaign.
I told him to start a business, donate, buy or build a house, tower, castle, ... - not interested!
He's definitely spoiled by our previous campaign (my fault!). 
So any other good ideas?
(Except for my counter-question: "What, you expect treasure?")
Buy a boat, pay your crew, hire people to do things for you, dress well, eat and live well, take vacations, purchases/build a home base to keep all your cool stuff in and employ the people that keep it safe and in good order.
...and if none of that interests you, consider not bothering with taking more money than you need for food and lodging.
FighterFan wrote:
Thanks for the ideas so far!
Kayal wrote:
FighterFan wrote:
FighterFan wrote:
Kayal wrote:
Use it for politics. Money is like the Gate spells--it opens doors to realms you could never have reached before.
Batgirl_III wrote:
Dagnabbit, knew I should have used my Expertise bonus on something other than Knowledge (Comic Books).
HermanTheWize wrote:
The paladin in our game buys presents for NPCs.
QwertyAzerty wrote:
oh n another thought is that if you make only items you attune to permanent since you can only have a limited number of items attuned
Suggest slaves. Walk them in front of the party to set off traps and ambushes. Much easier than using livestock and (depending on the culture) sometimes cheaper too.
If he balks at doing that because it's wrong, life lesson taught.
If he doesn't, buy him a power tie and enroll him in business school.
DemoMonkey wrote:
Honestly, this is one of the questions that I've had about the system for a very long time. Particularly if they're the kind of purchases that you don't need an intimate knowledge of the world to plan for (i.e. in other editions, you could tell your players they have X amount of gold to spend, and they could spend that amount on allowed sources and you'd know what to expect when they came to the table; in 5e, since the only big-ticket purchases are things like castles or businesses, every single player will have to pester you for what they'd be spending their starting wealth on!).
The only thing I've found that's assumed to be available that's worth spending significant funds on would be expensive spell components or plate armor, which aren't useful to all characters. There's no way, realistically, that I can believe that a every higher-level character would pass off twenty thousand gold pieces worth of treasure on bribes (or the aforementioned "most common reward"), for instance, instead of on capital investments (which, for adventurers, are things that make them better at adventuring). I might be able to actually assemble a small army for that kind of budget - which is appropriate for some sort of games, I might add, but again, requires heavy work with the DM instead of something the players can do themselves. Meaning, of course, more work for you.
Do note that there is a way to make this more believable if you're not starting at higher level - make sure you hand out a realistic number of downtime days, and actually track lifestyle expenses over them. It's not like adventurers will spend every single day of their lives in a dungeon, and those expenses add up (particularly if you're going for an aristocratic lifestyle in order to get contacts with the king's spies, for instance). This also forces younger players to think of their characters as people - what do they do when they're not swinging swords or chanting spells?