[x-posted at story-games.com]
I had a thought.
In Swords & Wizardry (the "0th edition" D&D clone), player characters get XP at the end of the adventure equal to how many GP worth of treasure they manage to haul out of the dungeon environment safely.
It occurred to me that, if we're already going with the premise that there's some link between getting the loot and growing more powerful, then maybe being parted from your loot should make you *less* powerful.
It might be cool to give p.c.'s the option of preemptively relinquishing their claim on a bit of treasure in order to avoid being XP-penalized for it - basically, if they give it away, bury it, throw it away, spend it frivolously, etc., the important thing being that they don't really benefit from it changing hands, they can never lose XP from someone making off with it.
If loot is spent on things that are useful to the player, or the p.c., even if it's something like "I tell our informant that the next round of drinks is on us. That should loosen his tongue!", then you've spent it and there's no need to worry about losing it at all. However, if it's spent on something that sticks around (possessions, property, etc.), and something should happen to those tangible investments, you lose XP equal to their value until/unless you get them back.
This could create some interesting dynamics. Certainly, there's something of a precedent for exploring in this direction: the AD&D paladin has to tithe 10% of his earnings to his church or temple, and some editions and settings suggest or demand that clerics do something similar.

This could set up a scenario in which players dutifully haul their gold back to the front door of the dungeon, and then decide how much to keep for necessities and things, and how much to fritter away. Maybe charitable acts, done outside the context of a "you scratch my back..." exchange, could also count as throwing the cash away. If there's no explicit tit-for-tat going on, such that the recipient of your charity is not literally obligated to help you in return (but maybe the GM remembers your good deed for another day), then you've gotten rid of the gold successfully.

I think this could make things interesting at higher levels, too - the ubiquitous lordly title that fighters earn at 9th level comes with a keep and followers; what if squandering these gifts made you lose XP? Or is that hitting the player twice? Since repairing the damage done bumps you back up to where you were, it shouldn't be too harsh, but it does give me pause for thought about the ramifications.

I would imagine 20000 gold pieces to be extremely heavy.

If that was the case could it count as strength training?
How would it work with an artifact?

Hi,

Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign effectively worked this way- you got xp for spending gold on hobbies or partying it up.  It also meant that gold spent on equipment, magic items, scrolls, potions, hirelings, etc. were not also worth XP.  Players had to choose between investing in xp vs. investing in tools for the next expedition.

Chris

I was going to refrence that Dave Arneson rule as well. As I took it, spending on what your character cares about makes you stronger in the long run (levels), but buying gear with gold makes you stronger in the here and now. Makes me think of narrativism with some ugly reality grit thrown in.

If only Dave had gotten control over D&D - with that and that single rule, I think the roleplaying landscape today would be a very different one.

Chris,
Thanks for the context!

Callan,
Agreed. I think I'll ponder some ways that p.c.'s could "dump" treasure, so as to seal the xp it gave them, so to speak.

Ckelm (do you have another name I could call you? Unless Ckelm IS your given name..),
Where did the number 20,000 come from? I'm intrigued!
Also - I haven't decided what to do about magical items yet - ostensibly, they are worth either 100, 1,000, or 5,000 gp, because of how the trade-out treasure system works.
And it works thusly: for every 100 gold the GM puts in a given pile o' loot, there's a 5% chance that that 100-gp increment is actually a minor magical item of some kind (yes, there are tables). For every 1,000 gp in a pile, you can trade that in for a 1-in-20 chance of a medium magical item. For every 5,000gp, a major magical item. The 19-in-20 chance implied here is that you'll get a gem or gems worth some extremely random amount of gold. It'd be interesting to take a nod from Donjon and give the players the choice of trading it in. I'll have to ponder that!
Still, there's always the argument that money in itself might not be so useful, but a magical object has inherent merit. If you're some kind of weird, advanced-rules Ranger or something, able to hunt and forage, or maybe a Druid, able to get by on the offerings of nature, money has less meaning. But that sweet longbow +1 of striking or that staff of treants could tempt even the most spartan of hermits.

Expanding on the broader idea: throwing in some very explicit metagame mechanics would do a lot to irreparably remove the ability of a GM to use Illusionism - yeah, s/he can still decide how much treasure there is overall (though it's recommended that s/he follow a certain ratio of monster xp to treasure xp), but that amount is something that can be, and might need to be, altered up and down over time, based on some consideration of how much advancement the GM wants to toss at the players.
Heck, the whole gp=xp rule sets things up for a good deal of metagame consideration at the outset - the Swords and Wizardry rules are fairly clear in taking that kind of it-doesn't-need-to-make-sense approach (in-setting, "fiction" sense, that is). And this is a good objective lesson for me in the mechanical kinship between storyful games and competition games.

From the rulebook, p. 62, in the GM section:

It may seem counter-intuitive that treasure somehow makes characters more
experienced, but that's not what awarding experience for gold pieces is all about. Gold pieces are an after-the-fact measurement of how ingenious the character (player[!!]) was in getting them. The gold pieces aren't the source of the experience, they are the measurable product of it.