3 Great Alternate Rewards instead of Boring Loot! 

Absolutely Fantastic Comments here! I love the ideas presented! I hope you all can be inspired from one another ❤️

Same quest with different people asking about it. If they give the merchants the treasure more items and discounts but if they bring it to the people who were robbed they will be heroes of the people and have a free round at every tavern and lots of gossip. If they give the egg to the church a monthly allotment of holy water and easier time chatting with them about other missions problems and healing or if the give it to the wizard he will teach them all a cantrip. If they tell everyone the king who waited outside dealt the final blow and gave him the head then he will give them political power that leads to a coup being thwarted. The more effort they put into it the more people they can endear themselves to .Make some of the objectives opposed to each other and others complimentary and write down the results, this is the REALLY IMPORTANT part, make these effect long term in the game. Now the people love them and they hear tons of rumors from both tavern and the castle but the church isn't very helpful with the vampires and the wizard makes their orders his top priority while haggling is a bit more cutthroat with some merchant's but others who were not in on the cut give them better deals to steal them away.

"Having my own stronghold and spending the spoils of my adventures on the people and infrastructure therein was one of my favorite rewards." - Ezio Auditore

We did this once. We went up to yak to this storm giant in his cloud castle. He set us on our quest, but offered no reward, didn’t help us fight when people attacked us in his home, and was generally a Dick, so we killed him. The dm said the castle fell from the sky, and our sorcerer had to use magic to control an orb to recover its balance. At that point we now owned and controlled a flying castle that could conveniently pick us up and drop us off at quest locations, be a pocket dimension for people who missed sessions, and was also home to a griffin roost.

Castles & Custodians: Fantasy Medieval Economics Simulator that ultimately results in Eberron setting. Alliances & Access: Fantasy Medieval organized crime simulator that ultimately results in halfling mobsters. Stats & Stories: step back from the table, make room for the wargames, where the outcome has consequences in the TTRPG, that ultimately results in Dragonlance. Fantastic presentation 👏 👌 👍 🙌 😀

Great video! I find the easiest reward to give is information beneficial to the characters, such as a grunt having a note on his body about a secret passage into the Big Bad's lair, or learning important tidbits about an NPC important to a quest, etc.

Gold. I solved the "nothing to spend it on" problem by allowing the players to spend gold on profession-specific things in exchange for XP. So, fighters can spend gold on combat trainers. Thieves can buy a bunch of locks and practice lock picking. Clerics can spend gold to build shrines. Etc. As long as the task/item/whatever they spend it on is directly related to their main skill, then gold for XP is allowed with an amount of gold/day limit set (I have it set at 100gp/day right now). I had two fighters shell out gold to set up a mock combat game with prizes and food stands to raise the morale of the local militia and townsfolk after a large bloody confrontation. We ran it as a mini-game.

I’ve had a party clear a haunted mansion and make it their own

I am a first time DM for an actual campaign and I am home brewing it all the way. We are a year in (tomorrow is the anniversary of session 1), and I gave two of my players each a magic item that grow with them when they do specific roleplay specific tasks. One character, a Paladin, got a shield that aligned them with a specific order of their god and if they showed mercy or defended another enough times the shield leveled up, basically giving them access to special abilities. Another, a Rogue, got a special tattoo as a reward related to a side quest involving their background and their missing family. As they continue that storyline via periodic side quests then the power of the tattoo would grow. Another player, a Warlock, has a renown meeter going which they basically get special rewards from their patron for converting believers and such. A few newcomers to the table still need those ideas crafted for them. I really like magic items that grow with character and are meaningful to their background. Additionally, we are using milestone leveling, so I definitely need rewards other than leveling up for side quests.

Castles and custodians sounds like it should be a video game or munchkin setting..lol

Try and find out what your players are missing or not liking about the current game and give out rewards that deal with that. Your players don't like travelling by foot - give them access to an (air=ship or a staff of teleportation. They want to build their own base? - reward them with a suitable home, The fighter is bored with spamming attacks? Give him a magical weapon that adds complexity to battles So don't just give them random magic items that just make them stronger, try to be specific about the actual needs of the players.

I found a post about a "bag of scolding" it's a bag of holding that insults people. My group loves Matt berry so I deep faked his voice for the bag. My party loves it

I really like to give my players weird stuff. Once, we had a battle with elementals, and my players were very creative in how they handled it. There was lots of magic flying around near a portal to the elemental chaos (some from the party and some from another enemy, plus the elementals themselves), so I gave everyone an elemental (player's choice) boost to damage on their weapons that they used (or carried) in the battle. Another time, they helped a celestial entity escape some kind of trap (been a while, don't remember the exact details), so they were granted the ability, once per day, to drop to zero, and pop back up at 1/2 at the beginning of their next turn. They all thought those were so much better than loot (which they did not get in either instance)

Second video I’ve seen on how to utilise your players’ wealth. Great vid. Definitely buying political favours or repairing a monster bastion are great ideas

I didn't realize until I watched this video, but I had a group where I felt very unrewarded for my RP because the GM did not let the characters deviate from the class progression. Long story short, we went through a short arc where my character's class abilities went mostly unused due to the environment. I managed to cobble together some excuses for why I could attempt checks using substitute skills, like, "since I've seen so many of these runes since we've come here, can I use Spot instead of Knowledge to see any patterns?" At the end of the arc, I was left with a dilemma. Because my character had been trying new things instead of fighting, it made thematic sense for me to take a feat or add skills related to what we had actually done to reflect what I had actually learned, while the class progression gave me purely combat-oriented improvements. I practically begged the GM to let me get something related to the roleplaying I had done: a point in a non-class skill or a highly situational feat that granted no combat advantage. The GM flatly said no. It was really disheartening. Watching this video made me realize I would have been way, way more satisfied with receiving a new skill or ability than just EXP and gold at the end of that arc.

A poor town of dwarves couldn't pay for a mission, so each neighbor offered something of their own: the cleric flasks of holy water, the tattoo artist a magical tattoo, the blacksmith upgrades the weapons... They are not very extraordinary things, but overall it is a good reward (and makes you empathize with the town)

My DM let me bully the cultists into following me. Then I took the evil demon summoner's lair. Now I'm the head of the cult. I feel heard.

Best reward I ever gave my players? +2 inches D size, party-wide. It ultimately did break my campaign, though.

I like to make contacts relevant, and sometimes have separate sessions between the main sessions to allow the players to role-play downtime. They have communal goals, but each has individual goals as well. One play hunting for sempai, one really really gready and giving up a bit of his body to grow a plant that had magical golden fruit, one wants a pet... a griffon... that they are hatching from an egg - though I am not sure how much it will match the expectation given the amount of time they have been in the feywilds), and one wanted special armour that he had to sing different songs from different cultures to empower each piece - it is also made from a metal gifted to the group by an ancient dragon...they have magic items, but some of them they make their own. Anything they are directly given as some risk-reward built-in due to them being mostly through fey-pacts. I mean warlocks do that all the time, what could go wrong...

"...bravely defeated the dragon." "...adverbially verbed the noun." Sorry. I'm an English teacher. I couldn't help myself.

subscribed cause this video I needed this reminder

Good ideas. Rewards ought to be the natural result of their actions, the consequences of their efforts, directly related cause-and-effect style, and not just the token trophy they getting for completing your clever obstacle course.

Giving your party NPCs that like them is maybe the best reward. Especially if they're interested in politics and empire building in a dungeon-raiding game. Your party wants a keep but has no ability to manage one. Give them farmers and householders that owe them their lives and will serve them loyally. Are they fighting a big-bad that outclasses them, let them rescue soldiers of a rival noble and win a debt of gratitude from their commander.

Imagine recruiting people they save who have nothing better to do

I feel like gold was a much more interesting reward in previous editions (and other systems) where there's actual guidance on buying and selling magic items. If I, as a player, have an idea of what kind of items I want for my character and have a realistic idea of how accessible those items will be and how much they might cost to buy, then I can enjoy watching my wealth grow so I can afford better equipment. In 5e gold is kind of meaningless because magic items are available purely at the whims of the DM, and even if your DM is kind and has magic item shops available, there is no (useful) guidance on what things should cost or how available they should be (since the default answer is that they shouldn't be) so you can't reliably plan out what items you want or how much money to save up to acquire them. If there is no magic item economy, then there is no practical difference between having five hundred gold vs five million gold, so you very quickly reach the point where money is just arbitrary "numbers go up" that has no meaningful impact on anything. Like, it's nice when there's actually stuff to spend money on, like the estate building suggested in the video, as then you have expenses for upkeep, renovation, expansion, feeding and equipping underlings, etc. But most campaigns don't tend to have that stuff, and of the campaigns I've been in that did, only a couple actually implemented it well. Personally, as a DM, I like doing a combination of the Alliances & Access and the Stats & Stories bit. In my games multiclassing is restricted, you need to have an in-game explanation for just *how* you managed to acquire the new abilities of your new class, if you have a particular multiclass in mind, you let me know and I'll work *with* you to come up with a story for you to unlock it in-game, but there are also certain entities you can impress seeded throughout my setting that when the party levels up you find you've been granted power and I'll provide a list of appropriate multiclass options that are now available to you, and if you don't take them, then there's an alternative boon like a feat or spell or something similar that you get instead (I try to make these *less* powerful than the multiclass options offered, so you still feel like you're getting something, but there's actual temptation to follow this new path available to you instead of continuing down where you've been going). There are also a number of factions that you can ally with and rise in to get access to various resources and secrets, most apparent being the Adventurer's Guild, a global organization of with sufficient power to topple kingdoms if those at the top could ever agree on a goal long enough to do it. Most of my campaigns involve the players being part of the Adventurer's Guild, and as they rise through the ranks they get access to better quests, better connections, better markets, etc. There's some shops that will only sell to you if you have a B-rank license with the guild due to the nature or potency of what they sell, for instance.

pets! let them have pets and mounts flying mounts. whatever! make them spend gold on food and items for living creatures! make them take care of them!

Do I hear another Geordie?

A What??!!

A what?