Many people claim that gold has no value in D&D 5e, mostly because rules as written, you cannot buy powerful magic items if your DM does not allow it, and the normal equipment is so cheap that you can afford the best of everything pretty soon.
What are balancing counterpoints you can use to address this without changing any rules? And, if you accept the premise that the rules as written are no good, what are good ways to fix them?
For reference, here is a chart of typical wealth per level and character for 5e, here is another for the whole party from David Hartlage using data from other blogs. Both are based on DMG encounter guidance, as there is no fixed table for this from the DMG like in Pathfinder. The numbers vary a little based on the assumptions made, but the order of magnitude is similar.
1. Equipment is still dear in the early levels
No matter how you look at it, in the first four levels of play the characters will struggle to buy the best equipment that is available in a city. A typical character at the start of level five has maybe 600 gp. That is far off from buying the best armor - a full plate clocking in at 1,500 gp. A silvered weapon as proxy for a magic weapon you can buy is going to cost 100 gp, too. Many useful items like Holy Water, Healing Potions, a Mastiff or Horse also cost 25 to 50 gp each. Low level scrolls may be bought sometimes for 50 to 150 gp.
2. There is a lot of useful things to do with money besides magic items
Just like in the real world, money is power. You can use it to buy services of others, to bribe officials, to improve your social standing, to live in luxury, or to hire help. For example, there are rules for hirelings, which for a skilled one start at 2 gp per day. Firepower-wise, hiring a squad of crossbow-men is likely stronger bang for the gp than a magic item in the mid-levels. If you allow for more experienced NPCs to be hired at higher rates, there are a lot of useful effects. Hire a low-level wizard instead of having a wand of knock and a ring of invisibility. Of course, the downside to this is overhead in managing these troops and helpers, and the DM may also rule that they will earn their share of the XP in encounters. In the original D&D campaign, higher level characters had whole armies to follow them around, and that is what used up much of their gold.
3. Spell components and research
While not every party has a wizard, the class is cash-hungry. On early levels they need diamonds, pearls and the like for up to 100 gp apiece as components for some spells. Even if those are not consumed in the casting, wizards need to buy them first. Other spells like find familiar have components of gold value that are consumed. Raise dead will cost 500 gp. At higher levels components get more costly, for example 1,000 gp for a scrying crystal ball. Several spells consume diamond dust or jewels worth 1,000 gp or more, a good way to burn extraneous wealth. Spells cost 50 gp per spell level to transcribe, so transcribing a spellbook can be dear, with a single mid-level spell costing several hundred gp. Spell casters may also create their own magic items or scribe scrolls if the GM agrees, with optional rules provided in Xanathar's Guide to Everything, so this is a semi-official solution, if the players spend the time and effort on it.
OD&D had rules for this, and I think this was brilliant. As the characters become rich and powerful in the game world, they take a leading role in society, and acquire land and property. This can open up an entire sub-game where you manage your castle and domain, troops, towns and villages. It can be a cause of adventure as you clear your domain from monsters, fend off new monsters to protect your peasants, venture out to kill the dragon who has taken residence in the old ruins, wage war against neighboring lords, forge alliances, deal with intrigue at court, and so forth. It gives you a wider perspective beyond just becoming the most efficient killing machine you can dream of, and provides a sense of community and belonging.
This can easily consume a lot of coin for both building and maintaining those keeps and troops in the medium-high levels. A fortified tower already costs 15,000 gp and a keep costs 50,000 gp. That alone would be enough to consume the entire party's funds up to about level nine. A full blown castle costs 500,000 gp and would consume all their money up to level 17. They likely will win the original keep as payment for an adventure, or take the half-ruined castle the bad guys occupied before, but even then, remodeling, repairs, buying off the legal owners etc. can be costly.
In one of my campaigns, the PCs won a sailing ship as a reward, and used it to trade goods as a side income source, but on one trip they of course got into a terrible storm and had to throw all the cargo out and were settled with a huge repair bill. That put them quite a bit into the red, and they went on a side adventure plundering an old tomb to try and make some cash to close the gap.
Granted, most people play D&D to head out to adventure, not to run a Pendragon campaign to establish their family, a Warhammer tabletop battle game, or an economics simulation to optimize crop yields. Furthermore early editions, Pendragon and Warhammer all provide support to the GM on how to run this. 5e does not. There are no downtime rules for this.
5. Accept it
The world is not only about dungeon delving. If the PCs have no interest in the things that gold can buy, then, at some point gold will lose its usefulness to them. There is no need to fix that. If you are a mendicant, gold has no value to you.
Based on all these counterpoints, I think at least until level seven, a typical party is not swimming in gold they cannot use. And if you engage them with property, they may be struggling to get enough funds up to about level eleven. For the levels beyond, by the book there is no great use for gold, unless you move into warfare with armies and castles, and I would argue the best course of action is to accept this.
For our group, with the DM being more stingy, and us unwilling to sell off magic items, the point where we hit enough treasure that even with copying spells, and costly components, we were flush with money was around level 15-16. By then we had tens of thousands of gps in reserve, and just not enough time to transcribe all those spells.
The top end for most published official campaigns is also around level 11-15, so a use for gold is not the only problem you will have with high level parties. It might be the best solution to retire your characters once they are on that level. The game was never designed to play with PCs that had access to level seven or higher spells as part of their daily repertoire, certainly not to reusable wish and its ilk (which can create 25,000 gp just like that). The magical powers of movement and divination that players have access to and the firepower they command in combat make it difficult to write good adventures for those levels anyways.
In this case, for the bulk of the play time of your campaign, gold is going to be a meaningful resource. Some ideas on how to address gold for play on higher levels follow, if the above is not sufficient. None of these are rules as written, obviously:
1. Fix: Hand out less treasure
If the issue with gold is that there is so much of it that it is not valuable to the PCs, lower how much you hand out. Issue fixed. But being super stingy is no fun for the players.
2. Fix: Make some Magic Items purchasable
This is the most straightforward solution, and the one that scales best into mid-to-high levels. It also is what according to surveys, over 90% of DMs do.
I understand why magic items beyond simple healing potions can not be bought: it turns magic from being something mystical that you adventure for to something mundane. But I think there are ways to conserve the adventure and still allow players to buy some.
If there are sufficient numbers of such items in the campaign world, there must be a market for them. The way I (and our other DM) handle this is: magic items are only available in large metropolises where there are enough powerful characters and wealth for a market to develop, or in highly magical cities like those of the drow. Even then, only a random handful of items may be found, not whatever the PCs like, and, for the most part, uncommon or rare items. Further, you only can buy them if you have connections.
We allow ordering uncommon items such as axes, hammers, swords and metal armor from dwarves with whom the PCs are in friendly standing, or bows, boots, cloaks and arrows from elves, but you may have to perform a quest for them before you get into their good books and they agree to it. These made-to-order items will have an appropriate crafting and delivery time. If the PCs are under time pressure, the delay of a day per 25 gp for a +1 weapon that costs 2000 gp and more is very real. Even if several dwarven smiths work on it together, it will still likely take a month, and express manufacture will cost extra.
They key is to have item prices that are fair compared to the power of the items. I use homebrew prices that are based on Pathfinder ones and can be found in my DM screen. Sane Magic Item Prices is a also a good resource for 5e D&D.
We also allow to buy spell scrolls of up to level 5, if there is a mage who knows the spell and is willing to scribe it, or if the wizard is a member of a guild, school or organization that can provide them, with the cost of the scrolls more than doubling with each level. Most smaller towns will not have a wizard that can write level five or even level four spells, and we use the gp limit charts from 3e or Pathfinder to govern this. We allow buying low level scrolls (first, sometime second level) in any town. The type of scroll available however is often restricted. Wizards that live in town and make a living by identifying items will not sell a scroll for that. (Although in 5e, identify techinically is not needed any more).
Schools or Guilds or Magic Shoppes might also have a library from which you can copy some spells, often at a cheaper price than buying the scroll. For example in Dragon Heist, the owner of the Bookworm store allows you to do that, charging half the price of a scroll. Theprices given in Dragon Heist for scrolls are 50 gp for level one, 150 gp for level two, 300 gp for level three, 600 gp for level four and 1,500 gp for level five.
3. Fix: Masterwork
This is a fix mostly around the low to mid levels, not helping with the high level amounts of gold. I do not understand why 5e dropped rules for non-magical masterwork items. I house rule that you can buy weapons that deal 1 point of extra damage (to keep within bounded accuracy), armor that is 10% lighter, or tools or equipment that that are 10-30% lighter or have a higher DC for locks and manacles, a +1 skill bonus for tools, if you buy masterwork items, for 100 gp extra per item (or per 20 arrows or bolts), or 50% of the price extra, whatever is higher. This is weaker than the simplest magic weapons, but allows the players to pimp their PCs with superbly wrought tools, light clothes and backpack, spirited horses etc. that give them a little edge in exchange for a few 1,000 gp per PC.
4. Fix: Gygax Nastyness
Have fireballs melt and destroy unworn/unprotected equipment, have deep drops into pits crush potions and break bows or longish weapons and dent plate armor. I know players hate having their stuff destroyed, never mind the administrative pain to re-buy it all, so I do not usually do this. But if you are desperate, go ahead. Also go right ahead and destroy magic items if a PC fails a saving throw and the item does too. That will make them really miserable and fear energy effects in a way they never have: there is now a risk for permanent damage that can not be healed away.
5. Fix: gold XP awards
This would likely be most work to balance right, and is the deepest change to the game mechanics, but you could just award XP for gold spent, and less XP for monsters, if you use indivudual XP awards instead of milestone advancement. This would provide a strong incentive for PCs to seek out treasure.
I'd try 1 XP per 10 gp the PCs find and award only 80% of the book XP for monsters. This would generate roughly similar amounts of XP, a little slower progression in the first few levels, and faster in the last few.
I personally think that making some magic items available for purchase provides enough of an alternative way to transform gold into additional power so that this is not necessary.
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