"100 pounds of gold for a house? How does anyone make rent without a wheelbarrow?"
— The Dungeonomicon
In most modern video games - RPGs in particular - the principle of Money for Nothing strongly applies, to the extent that it's not rare to end some games with a cashflow in six or more digits. And several of these games depict money as collectible gold pieces. Tie these together and you have the Wallet of Holding, where a quantity of gold which would in reality amount to several tons (five million 24kt gold coins the size of the British fivepence piece would be over 41,000 kilogramsnote ) and take up a colossal amount of space (the same amount would cover a football pitch) tucks up nice and neatly into a completely disconnected part of the inventory where money takes up no space or weight.
This trope can be justified in futuristic settings, where the money you carry isn't physical, or even in present-day settings given the ubiquity of credit cards.
It has a tendency to be more prominent in games where you have a limited inventory or carrying capacity for objects.
This is usually used as an anti-frustration feature, unless the game is specifically trying to keep you from amassing too much wealth at once as part of an Anti-Grinding feature. An intermediate solution is the Wallet Upgrade, where there is a cap on the amount of money you can collect, but this will be increased one or more times in the game; another one is the In-Game Banking Services, where an institution offers players to hold their money.
See also Bag of Holding, Hollywood Density.
Straight examples:
open/close all folders
First Person Shooter
- In Borderlands and all of its sequels, money is depicted as an actual physical cash item that you pick up, and in some cases as other objects such as gemstones or crystals. You can literally be carrying millions of bucks in cash and it weighs nothing. This is actually justified in-universe, as everyone carries a Storage Deck Unit which "digistructs" material objects into a digital storage device that can be stored on one's belt. Later games add other currencies, such as Eridium, moonstones, and Torgue tokens that also take up no space.
MMORPG
- In World of Warcraft Gold coins can be carried in infinite amounts. Gold bars, on the other hand, can only be carried 20 per stack. Let's not even get into the fact that a gold bar is only worth 6 silver (0.06 gold). Of course, you can only carry gold in infinite amounts if you are a subscriber - if not, you can only carry 10 gold.
- Not only can you carry an infinite number of gold coins, you can always make change. If you have 6 gold, and you give 50 silver to another player who's carrying 7 gold, you end up with 5 gold 50 silver in your pocket and he ends up with 7 gold 50 silver. Where did those 100 silver pieces come from? Likewise, if you're carrying 2 gold 90 silver, and you loot 20 silver from a monster's corpse, you are now carrying 3 gold 10 silver - not 2 gold 110 silver. Like the Runescape example below, the amount you can carry is capped only by the signed 32-bit integer used to store it.
- In Runescape gold coins, or gp, are a weightless inventory item limited in quantity only by the game engine. The limit comes out to 2,147,483,647gp.
- The same thing is also true of other items in the game that are stackable in the inventory. For these items you can keep 2,147,483,647 of them in a single slot in your inventory. Most but not all items stack in the bank the same way even if they do not stack in the inventory.
- With the currency pouch update, the player can also store every other kind of currency in the game without taking any inventory space.
- Also played straight in Elsword. Money caps at 2 billion. Most shops only sell items in the thousands price range, so that's no problem for supply restocking. The only time you'll need to grind money forever and a day is on the player-controlled market, where rare costume pieces and gear can easily run hundreds of millions.
- The Elder Scrolls Online: Unlike the previous titles, your inventory is now limited by the number of unique objects and not their weight, even though septims are still 'weightless'. This is quite frustrating, as it puts a damper on the traditional loot sprees that Elder Scrolls players usually do to tiny items; carrying a greatsword is now less cumbersome than carrying two different types of extremely light crafting materials. Much of the gold in your wallet of holding will have to go towards purchasing a bigger bag, which is already ridiculous as they're made from poor-looking materials and are the size of a watermelon.
- The fact that Final Fantasy XI has this frustrates players to no end, as while you can hold millions upon millions of gil as soon as you start out, you have to jump through about 50 hoops to upgrade your 30 on-character and 50 at-home inventory spaces.
Roguelike
- Angband plays this perfectly straight. By the time you win the game, you will have millions of gold pieces, which weigh nothing. Stranger yet, you can't drop it in your home or anywhere else, even though there are Bandit Mooks which can steal money from you.
- Elona also plays this straight.
- Noita: Values of collected gold nuggets and gold pixels are simply added to the total in the top left corner. Even the smallest gold nuggets are the size of Noita's head and bigger than Hämis they drop from. Biomes of Gold are rooms completely filled with gold powder, hidden in rock in certain parts of the world. While relatively small for a biome, it's still large enough to span from one side of the screen to another and all of that gold can be absorbed into the pockets of the Noita, even making valleys in its surface as the falling gold disappears into their being.
- Spelunky: Spelunkers pick up gold bars and gems in massive quantities without ever being weighed down by them, added to their score. The only precious things Spelunky Guy and his colleagues can't grab on the spot are golden/diamond idols and, from Spelunky 2, pots of Leprechaun gold, which are cashed out by bringing idols to the level exit or selling them to nearby shopkeepers and by beating out the coins from the pot by damaging them over and over until give up all of the coins. Any score run that gets anywhere near the leaderboards includes pulverizing the entire City of Gold and stuffing all of it inside player's pockets.
Role Playing Game
- The Elder Scrolls: Played straight in every main series game except for Daggerfall (see below). Septims, the series' standard currency of fairly large gold coins, do not have weight. With all of the Money for Nothing typically available as you progress through the games, players frequently end up carrying around hundreds of thousands or even millions of gold coins with no penalty. In Morrowind, the developers only made discrete models for dropped gold up to 500 coins. This means that a pile of 500 coins is identical to a pile of 500,000 coins. Oblivion and Skyrim replace stacks of dropped coins with brown coin pouches, but a pouch will look the same whether it contains 10 coins or 10,000.
- Fallout and Fallout 2. In the first one, the currency was Bottle-caps. In the second, there are actually 'coins', represented as physical bits of metal. In both, many items in your inventory has a measured weight, and your carrying-capacity is limited. In both, your money is entirely weightless.
- Fallout 3 stays squarely with its predecessors on this one. Bottle caps are weightless. Most health items (but not food) are weightless. Ammo, unlike the originals, is also weightless. That's right, a motorcycle helmet weighs 2 pounds, but those 50 mini-nukes in your back pocket? Weightless.
- Fallout: New Vegas continues the trend, except the ammo will have some weight in Hardcore mode. However, the updated crafting system leads to some weirdness, like empty syringes having weight, but not the stimpaks you can make from them.
- Neverwinter Nights most certainly isn't a subversion. You have an inventory weight system, sure, but gold isn't part of it.
- And likewise Mount & Blade. Oddly enough, you can store your excess items in chests and these chests do have their own money counters, but there's no way to actually transfer the money into them...
- Baldur's Gate:
- Gold is weightless, and plentiful. So plentiful, in fact, that you wonder why assassins risk their lives to kill you for 50gp when all they need to do is walk into a few noblemen's houses and rifle through their drawers.
- Gems and many items of jewellery are useless other than to sell for gold, but they take up inventory spaces. Thankfully, several merchants sell Bags of Holding specifically designed to hold said jewellery.
- Wizardry. Gold is fantastically plentiful. And there's not a whole lot of places to spend it at.
- In the Mario & Luigi series, you can pretty much carry as much money as you can find, despite not even having a wallet to put it in. To the point where in Mario & Luigi: Dream Team, the money cap is somewhere in the millions and expensive items can cost a few thousand coins each. It even works to power up certain weapons!
Aversions, etcetera
Action Adventure
- The various The Legend of Zelda games have an upper limit as to how many rupees you can carry at any given time. In later games, you can acquire larger wallets with a greater capacity as you go along and are required to purchase items that cost more than the initial wallet limit. Also in, Twilight Princess, opening a treasure chest containing a rupee when your wallet is full will cause Link to put it back, which keeps you from wasting money but can be frustrating for completionists.
- In Star Fox Adventures, at first Fox can only carry up to 10 Scarabs (the only wallet he has is that of his own clothes), but after helping a character in SnowHorn Wastes he receives a Scarab Bag that allows him to store up to 50. As the game progresses, he'll get subsequent larger wallets to carry up to 100, and then to 200.
- In Ōkami, the money purse is one of the attributes you can upgrade as you gather enough Praise points from the characters you help, as well as the plants and animals you make happy. Each upgrade increases the current cap by one digit, thus going from 99999 to 99999999 (four upgrades).
- The Guardian Legend has Red Landers.
- In Hype: The Time Quest, not only can Hype have a wallet upgrade by completing Wellet's race during the Second Era, he can also upgrade the maximum amounds of each good he can carry once through the game, usually by completing a race or getting rids of all the bees plaguing either Torras or the forest.
- In Tomb Raider (2013), the closest thing to money is salvage, which there is no limit for. In the sequels, salvage is divided into sub-categories, each of which has an (upgradeable) upper carrying capacity, plus actual money is introduced into the system. There is no upper limit to the amount of gold Lara can carry, but in Rise of the Tomb Raider a practical upper limit is introduced by the fact that there's only a finite amount of gold (sufficient to buy everything at the game's sole store) to be obtained in the first place. This goes away in Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
First Person Shooter
- BioShock limits how much money you can carry to $500 (despite the four-digit money counter; presumably a leftover from an earlier version). In BioShock 2, the limit rises to $600, and can be further upgraded to $800. Played straight in Bioshock Infinite.
- Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4 both have limited wallet space, which must be upgraded by skinning animals and crafting bigger wallets out of them.
Hack And Slash
- In the original Diablo, 5000 gold coins would take up an inventory slot, which led to a glitch where you can't buy the best armor in the game because you can't hold enough money. An item added in the expansion to the game doubled your gold capacity. All subsequent versions eliminated this, although Diablo II still caps the amount you can carry.
MMORPG
- Averted in Mabinogi, where money takes up inventory space but can be collected in money bags that take up less space. These bags can only hold a certain amount, meaning you can end up with quite a few bags in your inventory. The one blessing is that you can buy a bag that holds an infinite amount, and money is fairly hard to come by.
- Plus, for high-value transactions, you can pay NPC vendors directly from your bank account, and withdraw gold as cheques for trading with other players.
- There seems to no longer (as of 2013) be an infinite-storage bag for gold, presumably because gold coins are now usable as a form of ammunition. The secondary currency introduced around the time this became possible is either weightless or given to you in pouches which disappear when used, though as you can only gain ducats through trade with NPCs who have banking connections (they're not looted or stolen, and are untradeable between players) it's possible they have no representation beyond letters of credit or somesuch.
- EverQuest money has weight; for this reason, a lot of transactions took place near banks because the amounts of money needed for some trades would weigh you down so much that you couldn't move. The banks will also exchange your lower-valued coins for more valuable ones.
- Tibia: Everything weighs at least little bit. Each gold coin weights 0,1 of an in-game ounce and they can only be stacked up to 100 per slot. While slots themselves can be expanded by just stuffing more backpacks inside your backpacks (inside backpacks inside backpacks...) they themselves have weights that imposes limits on how much stuff one can bring back from the hunt. As even Shop Fodder grows more lucrative from more difficult enemies, many high-level players don't even bother with picking up mere gold coins, leaving them to rot within the inventories of corpses.
MUDs
- Averted in BatMUD, where every coin weighs exactly one gram. There are a whopping 11 different types of coins, with the most worthless having the relative value of 0.01 gold coins, and the most expensive having the relative value of 500 gold coins. That means, if you are carrying money worth 80000 gold coins, it can weigh anything from just 0.16 kilograms (a small pile of mithril coins) to eight metric tons (8000 kg, a COLOSSAL mountain of mowgles coins, an amount which probably no character in the game can carry). If you deposit it all into a bank and then withdraw it, you get 80000 gold coins (80 kg) regardless of what kind of coins you deposited. Shopkeepers also accept all types of coins, and generally pay in gold coins. As a peculiar quirk, if you are only carrying highcoins, and you get robbed by a thief, who robs a random sum measured in gold, the thief will sometimes pay you small coins in exchange.
- Played with in a variety of MUDs. Some games have multiple coins with varying weights for them, others have weightless money. Averted more often in Fantasy settings than Science Fiction settings.
Roguelike
- Ancient Domains of Mystery: 1000 gold pieces weigh 1 stone (Which conveniently is 50 grams or about 0.11 pounds instead of the usual 14 pounds or about 6.3 kilograms). Your inventory can hold unlimited items, but if you collect enough gold (or anything else), eventually its weight will start to become a problem.
- Nethack has gold Zorkmids as currency, which do have weight; 45000zm weighs as much as a suit of plate mail. Players looking to boost their endgame score by accumulating wealth are advised to convert the gold into gemstones (100zm weighs as much as one gem, and even the least valuable gem is worth 200zm) to avoid getting so weighed down they can't climb the stairs.
- In Scarab of Ra, the gold you collect while exploring the pyramid does slow you down... but wherever you see the words "Bank of RA" written on a wall, you can magically deposit it into your outside-world bank account. The net effect on realism is actually negative.
- Darkest Dungeon: Over the course of a run, the limited party inventory starts out with purchased supplies which are gradually exhausted and hopefully replaced with found/looted gold and valuables instead. Gold coins have a stack limit of 1500 which can be increased to 2000 by including an Antiquarian into the party, who can also find otherwise inaccessible minor and major trinkets (which convert to more money). If slots are lacking, the player needs to make decisions on what to keep and what to dispose of, such as whether to get rid of yet unused supplies which may or may not find use or choosing between base upgrade currencies, eg. paintings, and gold. The easiest case is throwing away lowest tier gemstones such as citrons, which have only monetary value after the expedition and even with a full stack are less money than a slot full of gold coins.
Role Playing Game
- In Albion, gold coins have a weight. It is low, but definitely noticeable, especially when you try to cash large amounts of high-level loot.
- In the Ultima Underworld games, each coin weighs one tenth of a weight unit, placing quite a restrictive limit on the amount you can carry.
- Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura coins have weight, as do all forms of ammunition, though an unlimited number can be carried in a small stack in your Grid Inventory.
- In Spiritual Successor to Betrayal at Krondor, Betrayal in Antara, money (like all items) is weightless; but it is stored in a separate limited-space inventory, so most likely the protagonists will have to store excess money in chests. For some reason, money shares this separate inventory with the party's food.
- In the sequel to Betrayal at Krondor, Return to Krondor, gold is heavy, but the characters always buy small low-quality gems when they leave a town, so that wealth is easily transportable. But if you don't visit a town for a while, you have a problem...
- Realmz: Money has weight, and for this reason, it can be exchanged from gold to gems for a fee at any business.note This is rendered less dire by the introduction of banking, which allows excess money to be stored at certain businesses, whereupon it can be obtained at any other banking business in the scenario, but it's still necessary to load up all your net worth in order to play the same characters in a new scenario.
- In the Quest for Glory series, money does have weight. This can cause problems in the earlier games, where it is possible to acquire enough gold to take up a significant percentage of the weight you can carry with your relatively low strength without there being many useful items you can spend it on.
- The old Dungeons & Dragons Gold Box games averted this. Fortunately, it had a share option, which would divide the money among your party members based on their carrying capacity.
- Money has weight in Super Hydlide.
- There is a third party Fallout: New Vegas mod averting
the bottomless wallet trope.
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has mods to give coins weight, and such mods recommend that you also use the mod that gives you the option to convert it into Merchant notes (or similar) with have a smaller weight/value ratio but cannot be directly exchanged at merchants, instead you need to find another exchanger to turn your notes back into gold (thankfully there is no exchange tax).
- Averted in The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, where money has a weight. The game has an extensive banking system to allow players to transfer their wealth into notes of credits. You can also put it into a bank account, but each region has their own separate banking system and the only purchases that can draw directly from the account are houses and ships (as those are bought from the banks themselves).
Simulation Game
- Dwarf Fortress: If you made coins back when the fortress economy was still a thing, then your dwarves would spend a huge amount of time walking to the coin stockpile to pick up their pay, carrying it, taking it home, and then going home to get some when they want to buy food or whatever. Just not making any coins at all (or making them and locking them away in an inaccessible vault deep in the fortress somewhere) meant they apparently just calculated everything from memory instead. This and many other annoyances is why the whole mechanic was Dummied Out pending a complete rework.
- Kingdom: Since money is used to not only pay for things but also represents your Monarch's health, your coin purse can only hold a certain amount of coins and gems before any extra coins will spill out and fall into the water (gems will simply fall to the ground since it's used for permanent unlocks). This encourages the player to not hoard their wealth and use it when possible.
Tabletop Games
- GURPS gives a weight for coins, albeit it advises the GM to gloss over it. Also notable in that the Dungeon Fantasy points out that a good challenge for the players would be how to handle the logistics of transporting the loot they find.
- The One Ring: Each point of Treasure is worth one point of Encumbrance, so adventurers will quickly amass more than they can physically carry and need to find a safe place to deposit it.
Mixed
MMORPG
- Dungeons & Dragons Online, coins are weightless. Despite this, different denominations (platinum, gold, silver, copper) are tracked independently, although the latter three are rarely found in significant quantity, and are automatically spent first with vendors before using platinum.
Western RPG
- In TaskMaker, you can only hold up to 41 items in your pouch, including forms of money. However, you can deposit the money into an Auto Teller, and your balance will always be available whenever you enter a shop. If you die, any un-deposited currency will get lost to thieves.
Roguelike
- Averted in Castle of the Winds where cash has weight and doesn't automatically convert. Played straight in that it has no volume. And played straighter yet justified when you hit town and just dump the stuff at the bank in favour of a letter of credit.
Simulation Game
- Partial aversion in the Animal Crossing series. Your wallet can carry a very healthy amount of money, as in 99,999 bells. However, it starts taking space in your inventory after you hit the cutoff point: 30,000 bells per slot in the GameCube game or 99,000 bells per slot in the DS and Wii games. Very few things cost tens of thousands of bells or more, and in the Wii game, most of those can be bought with a debit card that accesses the player's bank deposit.
- In Dwarf Fortress Adventurer Mode, stacks of coins have weight based on quantity, rounded to the nearest Urist. Many stacks of double-digits or more will have weight appreciably increasing with the success of the adventurer. But the same coin could be have 0 encumbrance, if they're sorted into blindingly spammy single-digit stacks.
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- Depending on the edition (and the Dungeon Master, as always) D&D either plays this completely straight or does not, by core rules, support it. By standard, 50 coins weigh a pound. This is regardless whether it's copper, silver, gold, platinum or steel, and whether it's freshly minted, taken from an ancient hoard, or received through wishing magic. At a certain point many players won't bother with cheap copper (unless they have quick access to money exchangers or are just that greedy). Gems and artwork treasures have a full selling price, so they can work pretty well as a money alternative. Sometimes you may even hold on to particularly expensive weapons and armor simply because they weigh less than the money you'd get for them. Which makes a certain sense, as the merchant who'd want to buy a +5 lance is also the person who'd be likely to sell the stuff you want to buy.
- Older editions, in which the logistics of getting one's loot out of the dungeon were very much intended to be part of the challenge (even if the actual rules didn't always communicate this intent clearly) and experience points were awarded for the actual gold piece value of the treasure thus retrieved, could go as far as having 10 coins regardless of type weigh a pound. Bags of holding, portable holes, and similar means of carrying more stuff without being weighed down by it were highly sought after for just this reason.
- The AD&D book Oriental Adventures introduced paper money, which was much lighter, but also more fragile, and not accepted in more rural areas.
Wide Open Sandbox
- In Assassin's Creed II and Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, there is an upper limit to how much money your treasury/bank can hold at any one time, which is a function of the value of your collections/renovations. Any amount earned above that is pocketed by Claudia or the bank. However, there is no upper limit to how much money Ezio can carry on his person. Meaning that Ezio can run around the rooftops of Rome without a sign of encumberment with half a million florins in his pocket while his bank vault is overflowing with a mere 80,000 florins in it.
