Super glad I found this channel.

They all have anger issues so I do it specifically to make them mad, my entire purpose is purely to spite them, like I'll find a way to have a goblin do it just to make them more angry. 😂

Wow. I really never thought about TPK that way, but the way you used it is genius! That's extremly cool. Thank you so much, as always, for the advice because it helps a ton.

Well your first mistake was being in college.

A fair DM. A DM with a very light complexion.

As an experienced GM: Don't ever teach players a lesson inside the game. It just doesn't work. If you don't have fun with your bard trying to usurp the kingdom, tell the player. In-game consequences are not a teaching tool, they are a challenge. And they will be taken as such.

No dnd is better then bad DND. It's only a good session if everyone is having fun. THAT INCLUDES THE DM!!! They may run the game, but their enjoyment of the process is still THE paramount goal. I run for a few groups, and I consider myself a very story driven, rule of cool, DM, but! I will say no about things, and make rulings that what they ask for won't work. But, I will try to help them get close, or tell them the risks of a plan, and they can try anyway.

I like building a world and letting the players find their place in it, giving them options to help them find stuff to do if they hit dead ends.

I'm a very new DM and this advice was extremly important. I haven't DM'd with other people that aren't very close friends, but I am planning on becoming a DM for random people online. So every bit of knowledge I can gain about being a good DM is great, and this video helped quite a bit! If you could do that communication video I would watch it for sure :D

Aaaaaahhhh reminds me of when our party barged in the townhall guns blazing, burned the townhall to the ground, killed almost half of the city guard and attempted to capture the mayor. He was a corrupt mofo who sent goons to kills us and then labeled us as murderers and ordered our arrest but our reaction wasn't optimal to say the least. Our DM didn't let it slide though 😅

YOU ARE TOTALLY RIGHT

Read BECMI. rules are there

While there certainly are some economic issues in D&D as it's written, honestly this particular problem is kinda user error. The D&D economy was never intended for respawning dungeons. I don't think any edition has ever been written for video game style respawning dungeons. You certainly can do that sort of thing, but as you found out you really need to think through all the ramifications for your setting. I don't honestly think very many people playing D&D actually run dungeons like this. But if you are going to have respawning dungeons like this, definitely take it into account and build it into the setting. Just thinking about how such a thing would affect a real place and what it would do to the economy in your world will go a long way towards heading off what you're players are gonna do. Because, after all, surely they wouldn't be the first party of adventurers to try to take advantage of a font of free stuff. So, naturally anything you can get cheap and easy from the dungeon ad infinitum is gonna depreciate to basically no value. You can also build in countermeasures. For example maybe most of the stuff in the dungeon doesn't respawn, but actually returns to the dungeon, because it's cursed. Perhaps the nearby towns have gotten wise to this and know how to detect the cursed items so they don't get duped into buying them only to have them vanish. There's plenty of things you can do to make most of the stuff in the dungeon either worthless or impossible to take out of the dungeon. Honestly, though... It's probably better to just lean into what the game does well and not make everything respawn. Nobody actually wants to clear the same level of a dungeon over and over, your players were just doing it because it was optimal, but that doesn't make it fun. Just leave the cleared part cleared unless it gets naturally repopulated over time. Force the party to explore other places. Heck, you can find plenty of adventure without even setting foot in a dungeon. There's soooo much more that can be done in D&D.

Shopkeep: Sorry, friends, but I'm only selling right now because I've got all this surplus. Bam. Fixed.

Have the shopkeep pull Rick Harrison on the players. "It's gonna be in the shop for a long time", "I have to make a profit man", "I'm taking all the risk here" "5 gold for that plate armor is the best i can do".

Discovers D&D. Patches out D&D. :p

Beyond the supply-demand, if they want to carry everything, maybe they should also be realistically burdened by it? Need more food or pack animals with it all taking a looot of time (endangering their future quests), find things be looted already by locals that see the dungeons cleared out, having valuable stuff degraded over time (rust etc.) Also.. gold is heavy. Can they carry that? Do they have pack animals that won't get stolen when they're in the next dungeon? Are there reliable bankers that could save their stuff. How valuable is gold really going to be if you just need a good sword, food, and a clever way to beat the boss?

1. Stop respawning dungeons. 2. Merchants don't want to buy nails and doorhandles from a dungeon. 3. Merchants don't want to buy hastily and poorly amateurish homemade armor. There, problem solved in 3 easy steps. Respawning dungeons? Unless the players are gone for months each time, having new monsters move in and set up new traps and treasure in short time sounds ultra immersion breaking, contrived and unlikey. Just stop the respawning dungeon bs and you'll be fine.

It's simple, just take a look in the handbook to see the hilariously low cost of hirelings. That is how much your average fantasy peasant rakes in doing menial labour. Look at how much general store style items cost. Unless the town has a magic shop, it just doesn't have all that much gold. The loot respawning is insane. Don't do that. By level 5 or 6 it is entirely normal to have a crapload of gold, and not that much to spend it on. All your "starter" gear and common consumables is hilariously cheap. All your medium to high end stuff costs a few thousand to a few tens of thousand. Tempt them into purchasing property, hiring people, making bribes, improving their perceived appearance, upping their lifestyle, and other stuff that doesn't have numbers attached to it if you don't want to have a vendor slinging minor enchants at inflated prices. Is it really a complete campaign if the party doesn't own a bar they forgot about, and a castle they slept in once?

Gold is very rare it is hard to find and once found it is hard to get it out of the ground and then very hard to refine it into pure gold. Silver and other noble metals exist that are much more common. In the ages before us gold was only found in the hands of kings common people priced everything in silver,bronze,copper.... metals have specific uses but for money it must have certain characteristics it must be easily divided into smaller parts and have the ability to survive long periods of time without corroding stuff like that. the problem is most of us do not understand anything about money or economy or much about supply and demand. one would have to think about their world. what is the population. how many kingdoms and is there an empire. what is the geology how much gold and silver is in the ground and how much has been discovered and how much is being mined and who is mining it. Is there a hidden hand in the game (spiritual force that has unlimited control over the worlds resources) controlling the world who serves it and do they have long term plans for the world meh its complicated. it you are dealing with college students its best to just dumb everything down i guess they will have fun and not notice anything wrong with it. you could even make up fake things to be the currency.

I just make the 1st 10-25 floors ahave trashy to mid loot barely any copper. Also gold is 10 more worth and most things are paid in silver. Magic Items are incredible Expensive on the other side so actually getting enough gold to buy one either takes enough skill to clear deeper floors or is gonna take outright weeks

5E sucks at teaching players to create things like this.

Makes an infinite gold mine; surprised when players grind for infinite gold. You can generalise adventuring as a profession. Odd jobs pay for a Modest lifestyle (1 gp/day), guild work pays for Comfortable (2 gp/day). Entertainment is unstable, but pays a Wealthy sum (5 gp/day). So, make the output of adventuring a step above that -- Aristocratic (basic, 10 gp/day). Each day that the party dedicates to adventuring (use your own judgement here), add 10 gp/player to your budget -- you can spend that budget to drop loot into the dungeon. Hold some of it back for big hauls. Now you've got a predictable income for your players, which you can balance out with expenses. Additionally, the value that players extract from dungeons and inject into economies has to go somewhere. You don't have to simulate every coin-purse in your world -- just keep a tally of the value within a settlement overall. Can their production output match the players' purchasing power, or do they refuse trades because they need food more than money? Does injecting coinage improve the overall quality of life in the village, by allowing them to import resources? Does it attract bandits, mercenaries, or dragons?

i can't help but see this thing as a campaign setting issue more than anything. I'll take a guess and say it was some kind of Danmachi universe like campaign. but the world of danmachi work around this infinite respawning dungeon. so good quality gear is worth years or decade of looting in the first few floors. leveling up in this universe is incredibly hard and death on the following floor is everywhere. It's a high lethality world. conclusion : yes 5e economy is shit, but don't make it worst with a campaign setting that make no sens economically either

This should just be retitled, "Don't do what I did as a new DM."

What shop would buy all that shit?

Why the F would I even ever consider doing that? I just wing prices and set limitations on availability and funds... No, the jeweler doesn't have 8K for all your gems you've been hording...

I would've follow the BG3 game rule. -2.5% to sell items. Remember the rules are only there as a suggestion. Not actually written in stone, and it's your table to choose how you want to run the game.

high fantas is ok, but what annoys me is the modern player thinks this is the default, with no other options and its ANNOYING AF :D easiest wya to run a Low Magic campaign, is when you create your setting and then run your session zero, only allow 1 full caster, and possibly one half caster (both cant be arcane) and limit the racial and class options to those that FIT your setting.

There's a couple of simple fixes to the problems outlined in this video. When the party tries to pry up and sell every single floor board and flagstone in a dungeon, hit them with the law of diminishing returns. The platemail worn by enemies killed by the raging barbarian, the great weapon master fighter, and the glaivelock are not going to be salvageable. Your PCs are going to be sifting through corpse piles, pulling out scraps of metal that used to be plate armor. This is doubly true for victims of casters. Fireballs don't leave pristine platemail with all the leather straps and buckles intact. They leave melted slag fused with a wire mesh that used to be chainmail wrapped around charred skeletons like tin foil wrapped around a baked potato that was forgotten in the campfire overnight. As for dismantling and selling traps, you're getting into what the NPC store keeper is willing to buy. If the PCs roll up with a wagon loaded with random trash from a dungeon, most shops will simply say, "Sorry, we don't buy junk." Or, "I'll give you fifty gold for the lot." The party will need to find a specific NPC fence or wholesaler willing to do business with them, and even then, the cut that middleman takes will consume too much of the profit margin to ever make the whole thing worthwhile. The main issue, though, is the dungeon itself. If the party clears out one floor of the dungeon and then decides to steal literally everything, they've committed to spending extra hours in a combat zone they just made a lot of noise in. Sneaking down a 100 foot hallway may take less than a minute, but removing the doors from the hinges, traps from the walls/floors, and every shiny tile and stone in the 50 foot mosaic of the blood war is going to take hours. The average dungeon is inhabited by creatures that move around. It doesn't matter if the PCs "cleared" the first floor. Someone from the next floor will have heard the noise from the battle. When no one comes down the stairs, the residents of the lower floor will go upstairs to investigate. If the party is long resting in the hallway while they dismantle the dungeon, they will be sitting ducks. There's two main mechanics to use that will solve this player behavior. 1. Random encounters and exploration turns. Make or use a random encounter table full of whatever creatures and factions are in the dungeon. Roll on that table once for every ten in-game minutes that passes without the party fighting anything that lives in the dungeon. Wandering patrols and nosey neighbors are common in dungeons. Every time the party stops in the dungeon, they should be forced to weigh the risk of getting caught against the reward of possible extra loot. "Sure. You guys can take a crowbar and pry all the rubies, emeralds, and diamonds off of the twenty foot tall jewel encrusted statue. It's going to take at least an hour. Do you have the spell slots and hit dice to last through six more fights in this room, and then the minimum of three fights it will take to get back to the entrance of the dungeon?" 2. Treasury dice. There's a few ways to track resources. One of the best is resource dice. You could write 500 arrows on your character sheet and simply never look at your inventory again as you handwave away the wheelbarrow full of arrows your character must be pushing. Or you say you have a d10 arrow die because you bought extras the last time you were in town. Take the different items your character has packed away but uses all the time and assign each of them a dice. D4, d6, d8, d10, d12, or d20. Each dice size represents roughly how much stock you have left of that resource. At the end of a fight, roll your arrow die to see how your stockpile is doing. When you set up camp for the night, roll the rations die and the water die. If you spam fireball in one adventuring day, roll your spell components die to see if you need to stock up on bat guano. If you roll a 1 or a 2, the dice size for that resource goes down one step. Roll a one after a fight, and your d10 arrow stock becomes d8. Roll a 2 on food and the d8 you left town with becomes a d6 because pests got into the big bag or rice you bought. Roll a 1 on that d4 water die while traveling through the desert, and suddenly, you have a lot of hard choices to make. You can track gold pieces literally piece by piece, or you can assign the party or each individual player a treasury die. Loot a dungeon, and the die goes up one. Loot a dragon hoard, and the die might go up two. Suffer a losing streak in a social encounter at a casino, and your treasury die goes down one. This is also nice because it replaces all the haggling over every individual item purchased in a shopping trip session with a single roll of the party's treasury die. No more tracking copper and silver piece conversions for the trivial sums spent on food and boarding while in town. Just have the party leader and the party face go to the market square to stock up before every journey. They buy everything the party needed that they could reasonably find in whatever town they're in, and then roll the party treasury die to see if they broke even or if the party is broke.

It's easy to make plate mail? Just about every martial wants to get their hands on this top notch armor as early in the game as they can. It's easy to make plate mail?

Not to be mean but I was caught in a trance thinking this guy would bite off his tongue at any moment

If you wanted to be really extreme, you could have a system like Call of Cthulhu. Spells have no levels, anyone can learn and use a spell, but there is no caster class, spells are rare and have to be discovered, and every time you use one there is a risk of madness or losing control of the spell.

I too use crystals. Carving magic runes makes them alternatives to scrolls. More to it but I am curious about your twist. My “post apocalyptic” world, an incursion from the “Dark Astral” has caused magic to be cursed. This “Arcane Dysphoria” makes wizards go mad and some mutations occur. Warlocks came to be avoiding this Dysphoria by enlisting alliances with other creatures. Sorcerers came to be because the nature of magic in the world seeks to find its way to continue.

I consider gold itself a rarity. If you have a whole chest full of it you're basically a billionaire. At this point your problem is not what you can afford because you can afford everything. Your problems change into trying to locate the desired manufacturers of the items you need. Getting in a room with that particular Grandmaster Dwarven Armour Smith to even start bartering over a price is an adventure in and off itself that involves traveling by ship, by caravan and you will have to pay for everything along the way at abysmal exchange rates because 99.9% of the people you encounter along the way will have zero ability to trade at "gold levels". And by the time you actually get to the place the coffers are drained and you suddenly can no longer afford the Armour. You also can't afford the journey home. And you don't speak the local language. Meanwhile there's not really a market for anything that cannot be crashed quickly. If you can pump out 10 daggers in a year you have effectively saturated the market in a large town for the next decade and dagger number 11 will collect dust for years. People aren't buying "dagger of the year" they hold onto the dagger grandpa bought for generations until it's literally worn down to a nub. Because gold doesn't grow on trees and the money adventurers consider "pocket change" is "unfathomable wealth" to the common peasant.

LOL DUDE! I been GMing for 40+ years and I have never suffered your problems.

You ran into an artifact of early DnD. In the first versions of DnD, 1 gold piece found equaled 1 experience point. Sure, combat awarded XP, but it was extremely dangerous and awarded far less than stumbling in a room full of gems. Magic items weren't sold either, but found as treasure. So, what did you spend this massive amount of gold on when there were only cheap, mundane items for sale? You built a base and staffed it. This was a time before the fantasy book nerds got in on the DnD action, and morphed the game into the complex narrative driven storytelling we know today. It was a little corner of wargamers who mixed their hobby with RPG mechanics. They played would-be army generals, who adventured out of the necessity of amassing the funds needed to build a base and field an army to protect their loot from other players. At this stage, when you were incredibly rich, you then battled other players, either by commanding armies in the field or by planning a heist. Have you ever had to curb rivalries at your table? Back in the day, half the game was built around it. The wizard towers were codified. Many spells we know today were invented by players out of the necessity to build a secure magic base. Downtime activities were later added, where the gold you found could be used to finance activities like crafting, charity, carousing, and more. These activities awarded yet more XP, doubling the mileage you could get out of the gold found, as well as adressing the issue of what the heck do you do with all this gold. Healing was 1 HP per IRL day, and downtime was calculated in IRL days where your character was unavailable, encouraging you to roll some more stats and try out other classes. It was basically an MMORPG that ran on sheets of paper instead of computers. It's was a very different beast, one I wish I could try someday.

I have been running Fantasy RPGs off and on for 40 years. Here are my suggestions: 1. Dungeons full of varying monsters and dozens/hundreds of levels don't make sense. Ask yourself what the smallest structure someone would build is to accomplish the goal of the entity that built the structure. If the place is some dwarven (or other underground living race) and the location is a major city (e.g., NYC, LA, etc.), it would surely be big. 2. Gold is valuable because it is pretty and relatively rare. So, finding lots of gold doesn't make a lot of sense. Let the players find copper and silver coins instead. 3. How much does it weigh? Getting a 'bag of holding' should be extremely unusual. The players should be stuck with whatever they can carry. Also, if a party is traveling from point A to B, they will need to pack animals to carry food, water, and supplies for the animals they have. Even coins have weight. Taking the weight of a Spanish gold doubloon as an average weighted gold coin, if the players end up with 1000 gp, it is 14 pounds of dead weight. Full plate armor weighs 65 pounds (also dead weight). 4. Look for loot alternatives that make sense. Bandits who raid villas will have stolen coins, maybe armor/weapons, expensive candlesticks, non-perishable food, art, furniture, etc. So, turn some of the easy-to-carry-off loot into something of the same value but harder to carry. 5. If the players flood the local market with swords, armor, and other loot, they will quickly find that they can't sell any more items because the merchants can't unload what they already have. So then the players are stuck with "valuable" junk that can't be sold. The last problem can create some great adventures. The party buys a wagon, donkeys, or oxen, goes to lesser-known locations, and sells their excess goods. They can meet people on the road and get a few sidequests. Maybe they find a small village trying to outfit every person capable of fighting because they are being attacked by monsters or raiders.

TL;DR: Economy should just be: Players need X, I will drop X+10 gold or whatever As I told my friend when he was gonna be the GM and he read up on "Grain and Gold", hoping to really delve into a meaningful economy, AND THEN one of the players took over a silvermine instead of letting one of the VIP NPCs take it back etc, AND the player then wanted to make deals and sell resources and make investments and counted every copper coin. . . The most complicated an RPG eceonomy should be is: You find enough to stay alive, the quest items, and if the GM wants you to have 5 torches, a bucket and 20 meters of rope by the next session, you will find enough to buy that, plus some extra loot that may be cool to have.

Bart economy sounds like a great idea. It can lead to all sorts of quests, all based on what the players want. For gold economy, I recommend studying Spice and Wolf.

Back in the day, we awarded XP for GP _spent_ and required the heroes to spend money on a lifestyle and to level up. A baron doesn't hire hoboes to solve his problems. And you could donate gold to the church and get a vision of where to find the specific magic item or other goal you wanted.

Depending on what it is you want out of 'Low Magic' you can do what I call "High Magic Low Interpretation." Think about a non-magic mideival village. It will still have clerics, and the evil eye, and witches and such. So when the crusty religious old father says grace over the dinner table he is casting Purify Food+Drink. When the superstitious old lady holds her fingers up to ward of evil she is casting Protection from Evil. Perhaps the material components for fireball are salt-peter, sulfur, and charcoal wrapped in small leather pouch which you set on fire, and the verbal component is you shout FIRE IN THE HOLE in latin. In other words still use all the mechnical effects on game play, but make the interpretations seem "mundane."

Use the Expenses guide in 5e. The PC party needs to earn the quest information they receive. Some guy in a tavern isn't going to tell them about a dragon's hoard in a dungeon somewhere. They need to employ an Agent that is constantly looking for their next quest. The Agent's lifestyle determines the types of people he may contact. An aristocratic Agent might cost thousands per year. The Agent may throw banquets with bottles of fine wine and hireling musicians and dancers. The aristocrats that attend may expect bags of bling. Such a party might cost thousands of gold coins and that is just one small party. The players may need to employ more than one Agent to get good quests.

Also why is the dungeon respawning, and why isnt he enforcing cash restrictions, like isnt there a handy chart in the DMG that lists a towns gold capacity. I dont know i threw out my 5e books out a while ago.

Why use D&D for a survival campaign, create food, create water, Tiny Hut are existing spells etc.... Also assuming you're using the rules as written in 5E D&D players should be getting more money as they level up, better saves etc... I personally think games that don't require as much house ruling work better when I want to change up the genre or focus of the game significantly. I have even been on a panel at convention about it. I'd love to talk about rulesets and a games themes and focus if you want to.

One frustrating thing is Berserk Barbarians getting exausted and the rest of the party ok after hours of fight, its fare to kare other cgaracters also exausted

Has any player ever made a video about how fun it is to homebrew extra exhaustion into their game? It always seems to be the forever DM that likes it. As a player I hate exhaustion. It's never been fun. I especially hate it when DMs try and force it on us with changes to the rules. If you're players had fun, fine, but for the record you definitely are not following for rules on material components: Material components rules: Casting some spells requires particular objects, specified in parentheses in the component entry. A character can use a component pouch or a spellcasting focus (found in chapter 5, “Equipment”) in place of the components specified for a spell. But if a cost is indicated for a component, a character must have that specific component before he or she can cast the spell. If a spell states that a material component is consumed by the spell, the caster must provide this component for each casting of the spell.

Why would they still get exhausted when eating Goodberry? They should cover all their food needs for the day.

Wait cant druids and rangers conjure goodberries out of nothing??? Isnt that their thing? The 5e spells dont say anything about how you need a source? Unless your homebrewing they need actual berries?

Yes. It's called low fantasy or low magic.