the missing daughter quests worth is on purpose its a noblemans daughter as for hostages their worth varies enough that rng can reduce the money making potentual of them each one is worth 0,1000,4000 tp which means you do need to grab a lot of them to get gold coins out of it

Same issue, pretty sure it's a bug? All I did was rescue 3 hostages from the Missing Caravan mission and I got a gold coin +  went from lv.15 to lv.37. It was nowhere near as rewarding a few versions ago.
happened on ver 9.8.0.6

A fix if anyone wants it. In the following script:
LonaRPG\Data\Scripts\Editables\480_EventCharacterBatch.rb

There is a function called: 

def victimBasicMove

replace it with the following code:

def victimBasicMove(tmpRegion=50,tier="HostageSavedRich") #self.basicMove
        tmpRange = self.report_range($game_player)

        if @follower[1] == 1 && self.region_id == tmpRegion
            set_this_event_follower_remove

            if tier && !@hostage_saved

                $story_stats["HostageSaved"] = Hash.new(0) if $story_stats["HostageSaved"] == 0

                $story_stats["HostageSaved"][tier] += 1

                @hostage_saved = true

                prp "Hostage saved: #{tier}, #{$story_stats["HostageSaved"][tier]}"

            end

            fadeout_delete_region(7, tmpRegion)

        elsif tmpRange < 17 && @follower[1] == 1

            if [true,false].sample

                @wait_count = rand(15)

            elsif tmpRange == 2 && self.x != $game_player.x && self.y != $game_player.y

                move_goto_xy($game_player.x,$game_player.y)

            else

                companion_chase_character_back($game_player)

            end

        end

    end



A note for the dev:

victimBasicMove is called a lot of times before the hostage instance is removed, making the story_stats["HostageSaved"][tier]  being pumped up about a few dozen times for each hostage. I just added a boolean check. It seems to work fine.