DSMatticus wrote:
The disease is that letting gold = power means people will go to great lengths to get gold out of everything. And that has serious ramifications, because you are encouraging players to live like misers and loot everything not bolted down, then everything bolted down, and then probably the bolts, too. People want to be as super-badass as they can be, and magic items do that. This means that every copper spent on anything but magic items is making you less super-badass than you could be. This means everything you see but don't sell is making you less super-badass than you could be. As a mechanic, gold = power incentivizes players to loot the shit out of everything you put in their way. And this is supposed to be a fictional world that makes some vague amount of sense, so when a player comes up with a clever idea or makes a clever observation, you can't just say, "no, because I said so." Well, you can, but that's a failure of the system.
Because you can still buy/create components to make magic items with wealth, you can still damn well make whatever you want. The only one getting hosed in this whole deal is the fighter, because he can no longer buy anything. The wish economy makes magic item creation feats crazy powerful (because gold is no longer a limit) and screws anyone that can't make their own.
And of course then the solution becomes to create super currency, but at that point, why bother? Why not just set it up so the regular economy works?
As far as players trying to loot things they find, that's the point of the game. Making it so you can hand players massive treasure hoards of valueless crap is not the answer. As with any adventure design, you wouldn't hand out a 10,000 gp gem to first level adventurers. So why not just be careful what you put in your quests.
As far as setting scenery stuff, like chairs and crap, There's nothing really saying that tables, chairs and statues have to be all that expensive. As with most goods of artistic value, they tend to vary based on the economy. In times of peace, people tend to value art highly. In times of war, they'd rather have weapons. Given in D&D a monster could eat your face at any time, you could simply say that artistic stuff just isn't all that valuable.
It would be more similar to the economy in The Witcher, where armor and weapons are very expensive, but finding a diamond or an emerald only nets you a small profit.
About the only thing that you'd really run into is things that are actually made of gold, like a solid gold throne, but really, by the time you get to bad guys who can afford that stuff, that shouldn't be all that much money. If you're rich enough to make a chair composed of $100 bills, then you should have the defenses to match. By that time, the items you want should be costing you tens or hundreds of millions anyway, to the point that 50k throne doesn't really even show up as a huge profit (and really as a DM when you throw in a solid gold throne, you should expect your PCs to want to sell that).
So long as you maintain some verisimilitude in your world, you shouldn't run into the trouble of PCs grossly breaking the wealth system. I have to really wonder what kind of adventures you're running where the stuff you get off the walls is worth more than the actual treasure in the villain's lair. It's just not realistic that this guy is going to be spending all his money on really expensive furniture...
You can get people to buy luxuries by making them cheap enough. If you have 1 million gold, throwing down 5000 of it for a castle doesn't seem all that big of a deal and people will do that. The current problems with castles is that right now they're just too expensive.
