The Problem of Loot

Treasure used to be why adventurers did their thing. OSR games like ACKs try to reclaim this. See, back in 1e, your xp was linked almost directly to how much gold you were able to drag out of the specific necrotic hellhole you and your compatriots decided to go to. That's why you were adventurers. You dealt with kobolds, goblins and type VI demons because they had shiny gold, that you wanted to procure and spend on wenches, ale and strongholds.

This mercenary aspect faded away as time went on.

Folks like the RPG Pundit over at this link think that this is partially because of a change over to a more story or 'novel' approach to RPGs.

I kind of agree. I mean, 1e D&D gave the referee the express title of 'Dungeon Master' whereas modern games use a softer Games Master, or even Storyteller. A series of adventures in D&D was referred to as a "Campaign," Pathfinder RPG seems to prefer 'Chronicle.' However, the change from mercenary adventurers to story heroes, resulted in a problem.

That problem was loot.

See. Money can be exchanged for goods and services. When you want to procure it to spend on fortresses, nights with friendly company, buying off your father's house's mortgage or paying off gambling debts, that money is a pretty good motivator. The money is the end. Its what you're doing the stuff for.

In a story based campaign though, and most modern systems, money is a means. The hero in 1e who found 10,000gp in a chest had 'won' his adventure and would fill his pockets and run back home to spend it. The hero in pathfinder who finds 10,000gp likely spends it immediately on some item to use against the big bad, or to craft. These sound similar, but there's a major difference.

In 1e and OSR, you couldn't spend money on magic items, or stat boosters, or the like. Once you graduated past a certain point, money became something you horded up, or something you turned into businesses or castles, or the like. When you have 85k in the kitty, and a few beers and a night's company cost 100gp, you start thinking bigger and start buying land and saying 'to hell with spinning wheels.' ACKs actually made pissing your money away on stuff like lavish parties or fun trips a game mechanic for building up the xp of successor characters, making the point that gold is either used for something useful, or for xp even clearer.

Meanwhile, modern Pathfinder and D&D are mired by wealth by level. The idea that you should only be so rich at a certain level, because being able to buy magic items, devices, and the like results in you having a gear advantage over others. This causes problems because now things like truly impressive treasure hordes risk severely imbalacing the game.

In OSR if your party of adventurers took down a dragon and came to town with 250k each to their name, they'd either be parted with it by a collection of conmen, fritter it away, or discover that they had to find a good place to hide it. Or they'd retire.

So, our problem these days boils down to the fact that players want money, cool treasure and they want it in sufficient piles to justify their effforts, with the unfortunate irony that people don't seem to appreciate the glittering gold and precious baubles for what they are unless they can spend them to buy an upgrade to their magic armor.

We've got 17th level adventurers with zero liquidity these days. Its kind of weird. The OSR valued money above all else, modern adventuring seems to have no value for it at all unless its buying new weapons/armor/spells. On one hand, we have heroes who are only interested in the mercenary, and on the other we have ones who are walking poor except for having pants on that could bankrupt a small country.

I honestly have no idea how to 'fix' this though.