Treasure as XP in 5th Edition

While listening to the GGNORE podcast, I learned their GM has modified the XP system in D&D 5E: He converts XP values into treasure.
This got me thinking about how this system might affect how players play the game, and how I might modify the game to accommodate this shift. After a few google searches, I have written out the most interesting points and summarized them here.

Treasure doesn't turn into XP until it's brought back to civilization. This is important. Once treasure is recovered, the value of the gold is usable as XP 1-for-1. One variant might require players to spend their gold on something before it gets scored. I might implement such a system, because spending money is more interesting than not spending money.

You no longer have to kill monsters to get their XP. Once players figure this out, they will be highly motivated to find ways to avoid combat, simply stealing gold as often as possible. This puts a premium on skills such as sneaking, sleight-of-hand and clever planning.

This will dramatically increase the amount of wealth in the world. This means that players need options for things to buy. I'm talking houses, vineyards, ships, businesses. By the end of 5th level, a player will have acquired a minimum of 10,400 gold! That's dramatically more than I usually give out. One idea to reduce this issue is to require players to pay for "training" to level up, but that feels like taxes, and taxes are never fun. Alternatively, you make 1 XP = 1 silver piece, which seems better to me.



 Here's a good money dump.

Money has to weigh something. If players clear out a cave of two dozen kobolds (normally 25 xp each), they've suddenly earned 600 gold. I can't just have players scooping up all the treasure and going on their way. I would implement Dungeon World's surprisingly easy method for tracking weight. 100 coins is 1 "weight." Whether those coins are copper, silver, electrum or gold. Let's say your players find a dragon's hoard containing 10,000 gold in the form of copper coins. One gold is worth 100 copper, so this means it was a whopping 1,000,000 coins, totaling 10,000 weight in my system. How do you bring that back to civilization?

Transporting piles of treasure is difficult and dangerous. Just by changing the underlying system in this small way, we've dramatically changed the way the game is played. In the scenario above, transporting a million coins would be a logistical challenge that would require players to hire an army of servants (laborers, wagon-drivers, horses, security, etc.) to help them collect, transport and store their wealth. This in itself becomes an adventure. That's to say nothing of protecting their caravans from bandits on the road.

Anyone who floods the local economy with thousands of gold is sure to attract unwanted attention. This may be as tame as constant harassment from beggars, or other adventurers following the players around to pick up the scraps, or something more serious like a local mayor seizing the party's assets, or a thieves guild robbing their vault, or someone kidnapping one of the players and demanding a king's random. After all, the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.

Now I want to try this.