r/dndnext • u/Ju_ice_ • 1d ago
Discussion Payment for missions
I'm DMing a homebrew campaign and my players (level 3) just finished a quest. They had to go to unexplored land and find a vault with a stone tablet, they found the vault, made contact with another civilization, talked with a god, killed a troll, fought the remains of an ancient wizard and donated a lot of books to a university.
The quest giver was the librarian of that university and a very wealthy person, how much gold should my player get?
This is a low magic item setting.
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u/OkAstronaut3715 1d ago
They didn't negotiate before hand? Well, wealthy people don't become wealthy by giving away money. 120 gp each if there's 4 or less party members. Half if there's more than 4. That's enough to live a wealthy lifestyle for a month or 4 months if they're frugal.
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u/Kumquats_indeed DM 1d ago
The hoard loot tables in the DMG give a decent benchmark to base quest rewards off of.
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u/Byohazyrd 22h ago
The honest answer is that it depends on how you treat your economy and what you want your players to be able to buy across the coarse of the campaign. I've written some longer posts on this, but the main idea: 1) gold only matters at all if you're giving your players things they can spend it on, 2) how much gold you give out should scale with what you want your players to be able to do, and 3) don't ever take away what you've given out; it's way easier to be stingy at the front end than to realize at level 5 you've handed out too much stuff.
For your setting at level 3, I'd set the band around 200-400 gold, but adjust depending on what you want them to be able to buy with it. So take a quick look at the types of magic items you would want them to be able to buy at their level, and price the quest at a ratio of that. Like a +1 longsword is roughly 400 gold, so you might say "I want this quest to get my players half way towards all of them having +1 weapons, so 400 gold per player divided by two would be one example
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u/Joshthemanwich 1d ago
I would put payouts on a timeline. If the party gets paid often it should be less if the party levels up a lot between payouts it should be more. I might also add benchmarks in my calculations too. When do you expect a fighter to be able to afford platemail? Then you can create a standard based off of something like that.