Player Character Starting Money - I

Amy: It is just a rock.

Chris: No, it's not just a rock.

Amy: No?

Chris: No. It's forty-two pounds of polished granite, with a bevelled underbelly; and a handle a human being can hold. And it may have no practical purpose in and of itself, but it is a repository of human possibility and if it's handled just right, it will exact a kind of poetry.  For ten years, I've drilled for oil in 93 countries, five different continents, and not once have I done anything to equal the grace of a well thrown rock sliding down a sheet. Not once.

 — Men with Brooms

Most often, the belittlement of D&D frustrates me into a dark place.  The line in the film above to the belittlement of curling is said gently, kindly, with love; but I have been apt to write acerbically to the same argument.  D&D is not just a game.  Any practical purpose it may serve may be minimized or mocked ... but to my mind it is a repository of human possibility.  If handled just right, it is poetry.  If I feel an acute, burning fury from moment to moment when reading the phrasings other people use, it is in the clanging of their metre ... the desecration of rhythm, form and beauty.  The inapt insistence on understating, soft-pedalling, depreciating or deflating the game to a size and strain that can't impune their tragic egos.

Gygax writes on the bottom of page 25 of the DMG that it's important to give the player characters little money because we must "prevent the game from becoming too easy."  This, because he sees a scenario where the players will be able to wholly purchase all the tools they need to make the dungeon or the adventure "too easy" ... to which I say, phooey.

Don't tighten the purse.  Raise the fucking bar.

The United States has all the wealth of Mammon with which to settle matters between Isreal and Palestine, or Iran and Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan and India ... and guess what: there's not enough money in the universe.  If the problems we rely upon to make our adventures difficult can be solved with coin, then the problems aren't that difficult.  They're not that imaginative.  But they fit right inside the tiny mind of most D&D game designers.

My sympathies for those Gentle Readers feel a bit insulted by that.  I assume you're not paying me to pat you on the head; or to tell you that the same undead acculturations of 40 years of resurrecting long-dead game design content is okey-doke.

The nice comforting thing about dungeons as they usually manifest is their lovely straight-forwardness.  Oh, sure, there's a bit of mystery to break up the fights; and granted, you can always choose to go through the dungeon by the left-hand door and not the right.  But we are speaking of a linear, straight-line process whereby you meet an obstacle, surpass the obstacle, meet another obstacle, surpass that, then rinse, then repeat.  This ... isn't problem-solving.  This is puzzle-solving.  As far as D&D goes, gaming like this is as interesting as pouring out puzzle pieces and six people spending the evening putting it together.

Not a hideous evening.  Company, drinks, jokes, gossip, stories, dopamine ... not the worst evening I've had.  But jeebs ... D&D can be soooooo much more.  If it's handled just right.

Problems get interesting when there are no definite solutions; where that is the case even when a resolution has been met.  Where, when the situation arises again, there's reason to think that maybe, just maybe, though the first essay produced a resolution, it wasn't the best resolution.  The best problems are those that, whether we've committed ourselves or not, we are still taking apart the pieces and putting them back together again ... because there is no set way to put those pieces together.  Depending on how they're arranged, the pieces change shape.  And, more importantly, no matter how many ways we put them together, or how they change, we'll never be sure we did right.

I see DMs writing descriptions of how they're going to build their game worlds, and how they're going to put the pieces together, and what matters to them ... but NONE of these DMs ever write, "And once the players see this, they'll be able to do THIS ..."  For these DMs, there are no players.  The DM is building a puzzle; and crafting the pieces; and it is inherently implied that the players will have fun putting the pieces together.  So why talk about it?  Why discuss what the players will do?  Or what options they're being given?  They're being given the option to play.  That's enough for them. 

"I'm certainly not going to spend twenty blog posts writing about their experience possibilities in my new game world.  No, no, I'm going to spend the next twenty posts talking about my cleverness, and the reasons why I've decided to be clever in just this way, and why other people should understand how damned clever I am."

I love my game world and I talk about it a lot but please let's understand: the players need and want a game world that is more interesting than puzzle play.  And so we're clear, I'm counting a set-up where they enter a room and kill monsters as a PUZZLE.  I'll include that kind of play in my world — obviously I will, because my players online are participating in that now.  I won't tell them not to kill monsters, and I will put the monsters in front of them for as long as that's what they want to do.  Running an open game demands that I accede to that request.

But when the player stops one day and says aloud, "Hey, guys ... you ever think about why we even do this?" ... my answer is not going to be, "because that's how the game is played."

My answer is, "You don't actually have to."

Players can choose a different path.  First, however, they'd have to imagine a different path.

That's a problem.  And that problem has no specific solution.  It can't be solved entirely with money; it can't be solved by finding all the pieces and miraculously putting together a puzzle.  It must be solved by stepping back, looking at the whole picture and realizing that the choices we make in life are not limited by "doing the right thing" or "doing the obvious thing."

"Trying something new" comes to mind.  Or "trying something impossible."  Though while a player might conceivably attempt something on these lines, you, me and the cheese knows the DM is going to squash it because the DM needs to minimize the game to a size and strain that he or she can manage.

And judging by the field ...

That ain't fucking much.

Money

Though I'm told to think otherwise, I don't believe that D&D is just a game of going out to a dungeon or other lair, killing everything and bringing back its treasure.  Nor do I think it is only a game of goofing around in towns, making pretend conversations or telling stories.  I think it is a game of players "making things" ... although, obviously, I'm in the minority here.

Let me walk down a garden path here.  Getting money, having money and spending money are things that virtually all of the readers here do according to a set of principles that we may freely call virtuous.  Let's face it; I think that few hardened criminals, thieves and thugs alike, are reading a D&D blog that uses this many words.  In getting money, few of us here would consider mugging someone or breaking into an apartment for it.  I can't say "none" because, well, who can know for sure.  But the odds are against it.  Following this, most of us keep the money we have in legitimate forms of investment; when we spend it, we do so for ourselves and for others, keeping them fed, maintaining their shelter, helping them obtain their needs.  And when we think about having more money, we don't think about acquiring it in a bad way, or spending that surfeit selfishly on ourselves.  We think about how to provide and expand the opportunities for ourselves and ours.

Bear with me.  Obeying the law with regards to money means we put up with a great deal of unpleasantness: bosses, price gouging, bureaucracy, budgeting and conversations where we have to disappoint the ones we love by saying that no, we can't buy that or have that this month, or perhaps this year.  Virtue is a choice, where we reconcile playing by the rules against the probable result of our playing against the rules going very badly.  This doesn't mean we don't think about breaking the rules.  Or even that we don't break some rules by and by.  It means, however, that daily existence is a nagging headache of having to push ourselves to act responsibly while wishing most of the time that we didn't have to ... and breaking the rules when we can, only to find ourselves feeling guilty afterwards.

As years add up and families grow, this push-pull has us in its grip.  We can easily lose sight of everything except our responsibilities and our vices that relieve those responsibilities.  Week by week, we convince ourselves that if we will give this night or that to something we love, we can put up with the rest of the shit ... but year after year, that deal feels a little more sour, as age and doubt eats up even those simple pleasures of heading out to a bar, catching a concert or sitting with our friends to play a game.  Despite what we might have felt at 20, at 30 and 40, D&D just isn't the cure-all that it was ... because the stresses its trying to cure aren't those we had when we worried about getting a B and not an A in university.

One way or another, we're caught in the grind between doing what we must and doing what we want.  What makes it worse is that both options are transient.  Rush from the job to the family to the driving range to the grocery to the D&D game, and a few weeks from now that effort has already faded.  Do that for ten years and you will look back on the ten years with a sense of loss ... the sense that you've squandered something, though you lived every minute of it as hard as you could.  Perhaps you can look at your house and count ten years of payments; no question you'll look at your children and count ten years of raising them — if you're not nostalgic for those days when they gripped your hand so tightly, or finding yourself fighting with them from breakfast to dinner time.  Some of my readers have gotten a very clear idea of how it feels to be on the other side of ten, twenty or thirty years ... and how appalling empty that can be.

There is a way out of this trap.  I stumbled across it in my childhood without realizing what it was.  Between the balance of virtue and vice, there's a habit we pursue that gives scope to life.  This is creativity.  Not what we pay for, with the money we earn, but what we make with the time we buy.  This might be anything, so long as we can touch it with our hand and share it.  Because until we can hold it, and give it away, it isn't real.  It's as fleeting as the time we spend mowing the lawn every weekend, or driving back and forth from work.  A created thing is something that we can marvel at.  I made this.  I changed this small part of the world.  I contributed something that never existed before.

When I look back on the years I've spent playing, I don't think of the fun or the laughter.  I don't think of the stories.  I think of the pride I have that the memories of other people are permanently affected by the time they spent in my game world; what they saw and what they made in that game world.  The towers they built, the schematics they designed, the characters they brought from weakness to strength.  I made the world and they wrought themselves in that world ... not in a set of forgettable, repeatable adventures, where the players have trouble remembering how many times they've run through the same module.  But as unique, once-in-a-lifetime games, built by their own choices and personal design ... that will never be repeated, anywhere.  Not even in my game world.

All right.  Coming back to the clubhouse.  What does any of this have to do with money?

Money is the fabric of the game world.  Where the players are encouraged to participate in a series of adventures, a la video game quests, then money is used as a score card to decide how successful we were and as a measure of how much preparation we can buy for the next adventure.  Everything we buy, from tools to equipment to potions, only has meaning with regards to how ready we are for whatever the next adventure threatens.

But when the setting is measured by what the party wants to DO ... then money becomes the thing its made to be: a tool that enables a party to build something permanent of their own design.  In that realm, fantasy ceases to be a series of scheduled bouts and becomes a means to make our own game.  To decide what historical or fantastical challenge we want to set for ourselves, limited only by what we've accumulated.

Because D&D isn't bound by the virtues of the real world, how we get the money and how much we have, and how selfishly we spend it, isn't a matter for our concern.  The only thing that matters is how much can we get our hands on, to do the things we want to do.

Naturally, this assumes that if I were to put millions of dollars into the reader's hands, the reader could think of a purpose to put that money towards.  Sadly, that is so rarely the case.  Sadder still, most of the people who have the capacity to use money to make things are ALSO the sort of people obsessed with making money unvirtuously in the real world.  Ordinary people, with ordinary lives, who've never had money and have never imagined they might get it, can only think of spending it in ways where someone else has designed the method.  Come see this villa on this island, where you can do these pre-planned things on the scheduled tours we will organize for you.  Give your money to these charities for these purposes we've established, structured in such a way that all you need do is sign the cheque.  Buy these material items, that everyone with money and no imagination buys.  Visit.  Attend.  Retire.  And stare at the nice walls you've bought.

When I say, you can buy anything in my game world, it is hard for most players to imagine something that wouldn't be used to effect better survival in an adventure.  It is hard to think outside the straight path.  It is nearly impossible to invent your own game ... and so I know.  I'm selling goggles that when put on, make people blind.

Money in a player's hand will buy anything.  It will buy a lot more than can be found on an equipment list.  Occasionally I'm blessed by characters who really understand this.  And it's beautiful.