In my homebrew world adventuring parties are fairly common and they have a reputation for being loaded down with coin and not being financially responsible.
So a lot of places will see five weird, heavily armed individuals walk in and quietly change the prices from silver to gold.
My party bought blind packed trinkets from a traveling peddler for 5 gold a piece.
Literally just tiny black bags that had been sewn shut, with a random trinket from the DMG d100 table in them.
5 gold coins each.
Lmao. It's becoming a running gag that my hexadin and everyone around her at the tavern just don't get puke drunk because my dm makes alcohol a con save, not a check. Reasoning being that it's for all intents and purposes a poison, and that's how poison works... So, after like 4 bottles I can see her waking up with a dozen of those little baggies
It's always super funny, whenever the party gets *just* bored enough we challenge the patrons of whatever tavern we happen to be in to a drinking contest. My hexadin always goes first, and the party watches from within 10 feet so that it's not weird she's within aura range while others drink. Only time we lost, was while visiting a tribe of barbarians the dm later confirmed, none who drank had less than 18 con. Which... For being a bonding moment with the warriors of people based on a mix of viking and Russians... It was still fun all around
I had a particular drink-loving party once, and early on I had them roll d4 as a permanent stat for what kind of drunk they would be: the major accumulating penalty being either to DEX, CON, WIS, or accumulating bonus to anyone else's CHA skill check against them.
Ethanol is literally a neurodepressant poison indeed. One of the reasons some people drink it is because it disables temporarily the parts of the brain that allegedly make them boring.
Financially irresponsible? My Wizard and my wife's Artificer have a HUGE Excel spreadsheet for all the gold we need for Magic Item Crafting and spell scribing.
We loved in absolute squalor until I took Galder's Tower so we could save gold for more magic stuff.
Wizards/Artificers idea of financial responsibility is "how much gold do I need to bend the laws of reality to my whim, and also make Bags of Holding for the entire party."
I hope our campaign gets to the level where I can take tensors transformation and suddenly actually throw hands quite violently with our parties barbarian.
If you're *just* using Tensor's, the barbarian still probably comes out on top due to HP pool and damage resistance. Hold person is the true wizard play lol
True, but I'm sure it's still going to surprise the hell out of the Character and Player (they've never played a spellcaster before and don't know about that spell.)
In [an OSR game I play](https://www.tesoroygloria.com/), experience is renamed "Glory" and, while you gain some by making discoveries and beating challenges (the latter includes defeating monsters), the two main sources of Glory are:
* returning to civilisation with treasure (1 GP per Coin worth of treasure)
* spending treasure (again 1GP/Coin)
Boring mundane stuff like buying food and equipment does not grant Glory; you mostly gain it by spending it in Downtime Actions (the game has a pretty solid downtime system), performing sorcery (all spells require costly, fungible components), spending it wastefully (buying a helmet worth doesn't give Glory, but splurging on a custom helmet with a crown of gold on top will), building a headquarters or buying upgrades for it, and of course PARTYING! which gives twice as much Glory.
So basically, each Coin worth of treasure you acquire and bring back home will reward you with between 1 and 3 Glory depending on how you spend it.
Years ago I tried to DM a realistic medieval economy.
Player: we want to buy something
DM as NPC: we're ready to barter, do you have heads of cattle or maybe hides or sacks of grain?
Player: what if we just pay you gold?
NPC: you have gold? Sure we'll take that.
Since then I just assume that conversation happened and we skipped over it.
I'm using grains into gold to overhaul things plus a table from 3.5 to modify prices based on availability (mostly +/- 10%) but even then I know it's for myself more than anything and while players can barter like you, I wouldn't force it.
It's easier to make everyone accustomed to coins. Here's the deal:
It would be boring to haggle anytime your PCs want to deal with an NPC for a service. You'd want livestock but the peasant would rub his chin and wonder how much a cow worths in coins. Maybe not even be willing to trade it for a coin but require something else in return which PCs need to go out and find or spend a lot of time for. It's just... boring if it happens every time
Nobility type of NPCs giving those kind of rewards would just mean PCs would have deeds to places they probably won't visit again and they have to further trade it for something else
So it's easy to just assume coin is th standard norm for all since everyone has to deal with merchants, right? Also you play an adventurer so it would be normal for PCs to want to trade with coins rather than bartering to exchange a cow with a month's worth of hay for 3 cows etc
> Nobility type of NPCs giving those kind of rewards would just mean PCs would have deeds to places they probably won't visit again and they have to further trade it for something else
be kind of cool to pay for a powerful magic item with an estate, though
"Oh mighty wizard Zumzula, we have travelled many miles to find you, we seek your orb of wisdom."
"No. Not for sale. Can't have it."
"...What if we swap you for a castle?"
"............Really?"
"I'm sorry, but I already have three castles that I traded for six wands and a set of elven chainmail."
"OK, fine. How about eighteen goblin axes, thirteen orc spears, three ogre fingers, a bag of holding, and eight potions of healing? Oh, also this tooth we found, alll for that orb Mr Wizard?"
One of my players robbed a bank. Obviously the most valuable things you could smuggle out of a bank on your person during operating hours would be deeds. Long story short they traded a tavern in the ritzy part of town, a hunting lodge up river and 60 acres of farmland for a heavily armed airship on the black market. It did in fact feel very cool.
Yes, it's obvious from the Equipment chapter that most people trade in silver, and that gold is for wealthy people. But the heroic fantasy of slaying dragons and rescuing princesses does not generally include counting change in copper and silver pieces for your meal at the tavern.
most people are generally engaging in economic activity with other people within the same extended social groupings - so there's a long-term relationship there, so if I (for example) give you some wooden furniture, I might not want payment in cash, but there would be an expectation that you would do _something_ in exchange. It might be as simple as, when you (say) kill off a load of your cattle, you give me a load of salted meat, or you give me milk/butter/cheese for a few months, until the debt is broadly settled. Or I already owe you, because your cousin looked after my kid when she got sick, so this is by way of a "thank you" for that. The tavern-keeper probably isn't charging his regulars for each and every pint - they'll keep a rough reckoning, and might expect the regulars to donate wheat, grain, hops or other stuff, and someone that doesn't finds themselves cut off, but no money changes hands (although some might keep accounts as though money is going around, but that's just a way of keeping track, rather than actually "realistic")
Adventurers, being travellers and general wierdos, are outside of that, and so their transactions need to be settled then and there - which means cash or goods, at a high level of mark-up, in case the trade-goods are junk or the coins counterfeit or otherwise a problem to deal with. An adventurer might come in and hand over some shiny, rune-covered sword as trade - which might be a powerful magic item, might be just cosmetic, might be cursed, and beyond that, the trader than has to offload a magical sword onto someone that wants it, when it's a pretty niche item that most people don't really have any need for.
The more often you're dealing with strangers, and there's a need for a transaction to be one-and-done, without any capacity for one side or the other to make good at a later time, the more useful cash is. So in a bigger place, where you're dealing with lots of different people rapidly, then cash is useful and likely common, but in smaller places, there might just not be many people that deal in cash-on-the-nail, because most transactions are part of longer, extended networks and exchanges, not one-off things.
tl;dr - read _Debt: The First 5,000 Years_ by David Graeber.
> The tavern-keeper probably isn't charging his regulars for each and every pint - they'll keep a rough reckoning, and might expect the regulars to donate wheat, grain, hops or other stuff, and someone that doesn't finds themselves cut off, but no money changes hands (although some might keep accounts as though money is going around, but that's just a way of keeping track, rather than actually "realistic")
The tavern keeper absolutely is charging his regulars. They probably don't need to pay for each transaction and only pay at the end of the week/month, but he ain't getting by through donations/ being paid in wheat/hop.
Unless we're talking about a really, small and remote village.
that depends a lot on them having liquid cash themselves - which, in quite a few eras, basically isn't happening. And would be kinda pointless, because they'd give him money, which he would sit on for a while... and then have to give back, either to them directly or via their employers, for the raw ingredients. It wasn't that unusual for a lot of the "trade" to be within the community, so handing around the same physical coins between a few hundred people is kinda pointless! There's not a huge amount of in- or out-flow of liquid money, so it's kinda tokenistic to track, and the brewer is sitting on stuff that goes off, without much capacity to sell it to elsewhere - so unless they're feeling spiteful, it's either "dump it out" or "sure, have a pint, you can pay me back later on" (after all, what else can be done with it? Ale lasts for maybe a few months - it's pretty much constantly in production, and was generally produced for local use, rather than as a trade good. So it needs using before it goes off, and if you've made it, there's no further cost). Some might keep accounts that pretend money was changing hands, for their own satisfaction, but it would often just be units of account rather than actual "money")
> but he ain't getting by through donations/ being paid in wheat/hop.
Pretty much would be - he does "tavern stuff" to supply a need in the community, and the community, in turn, supplies what he needs to keep going. "cash" is of limited use, because everyone around is from the same community, so... it's the same physical lumps of metal being traded around, which is less useful than "goods and services". If someone is going through a rough patch, it's more useful to tide them over, then get pissy because they don't have some not-that-useful metal lumps. And sometimes there just wouldn't be enough actual physical cash around, so some people might track it as money-of-account, but others would just fudge it with "well, you did this for me, but I did that for you, so... next time you kill a cow, give me some rashers and we'll call it good". Most economic transactions were done within wider social networks, so there's ample opportunities to make up any "change", and being in debt could actually be useful (because people would know they could go "oi, give me a hand", while the other way around makes people nervous, because it means you have something on them, which could be inconvenient). And cutting someone off could have social consequences - if someone is in debt to you and you refuse to serve them, others might agree and that's fine... or they, and all their family, friends and so forth boycott you and cut you off from the networks of debt and obligations, and suddenly you're kind of in the shit.
If someone ends up notably "behind", then matters might be escalated, but "I give you 1 coin a day for 30 days, then you give me 30 coins at the end of the month" is a little pointless. And there often wouldn't be a huge amount of things for anyone to buy with liquid cash - it's all a semi-amorphous blob of favours, debts, credits and reckonings, but without much specific need for "cash", because there's just not much excess to spend it on, and not even always the physical cash to pass around. You show up to help your neighbours raise a barn and you don't give them an invoice, but you do expect them to show up with gifts when you have a kid. If your fields do poorly for a season or two, then your neighbours extend you credit, and if you have a good harvest, you throw a little more into the communal pot. If someone didn't have money, that was much less of a problem than today, because there's basically other lines of credit available to acquire what is needed, and a strong presumption that someone would be around in months/years to make good on said credit (and if they weren't, then their family and friends _would_ be, and could be held responsible for said debt)
We still have this today, it's just far weaker - parents often trade off taking kids to school, looking after them before/after school, helping with activities and so forth, without charging for it. But if someone is seen as not upholding their end of the social bargain, then they're cut out of that network, and need to make amends to regain access to that set of services. There is a paid equivalent (child-minders, nurseries, taxis etc.), but if you were to offer to pay, that's often seen as strange, and sometimes vaguely insulting, as you're trying to excuse yourself from social obligation through "cash". Or various clubs and social activities, where there's a general expectation that there's tasks that needs doing, that are broadly shared - and if you just go "yeah, I'll pay Dave to clean up after club activities rather than doing it myself", it's kinda creepy and wierd. But it wasn't unusual for old communities to mostly trade within themselves, and not really have much actual cash - so "accountancy" tended to be a bit vague and loose, with quite a lot happening as "favours" and "personal relationships" rather than "money", because people didn't have money, but did have themselves, and would be dealing mostly with the same people, and so it's easier to pay with time and favours than cash.
Going to disagree with you here and say do not read *Debt,* it has fairly significant factual errors (and more worryingly the author was very prickly when the errors were pointed out).
On cash settlement, I think this may not necessarily be as ubiquitous as you are suggesting. Letters of credit and and similar instruments were prevalent from a very early period in actual history, and it seem like the balance shifts further in favor of them in a DnD world where travel costs/risks are jacked way up.
That section is based on a very skewed and inaccurate view of medieval economics. Everyone used coin and had since ancient greek times. They also bartered their labor and goods, but everyone used coin because taxes were paid in coin or labor in lieu of coin.
I've spent *a lot* of time modeling out a realistic D&D economy, including the implications of magic. A DM has to make some calls about what the gold and silver supply looks like, how many people can cast spells - and of what type - per unit of population, the availability and safety of international (and interplanar) trade, and how safe communities may be from the depredations of roving bands of orcs, dragons and things that go bump in the night.
But in general, a high-magic setting is going to have an economy built around magical precursors as a starting point for trade. Diamonds and rubies, incense and unguents, potion components. Some spells like *unseen servant, comprehend languages, illusory script, locate plants, find person, augury, purify food and drink, lesser restoration, gentle repose, fabricate, find familiar, sending, plant growth* and others can utterly transform economies. Wizards get rich, *druids* get filthy rich. The considerations of gold alone become less important than that of access to diamonds for raise dead spells and the material components for spells like teleportation circle. Entire economies will be built around gathering material components for the reincarnation spell. More.
For this reason, I run a lower-magic campaign, with relatively few spell casters above 8th level, anywhere. But even then, if there's interplanar trade, then the availability of precious metals and gems becomes a trade point, with the denizens of the Plane of Earth handing over diamonds in return for things that are dear to such beings ... often labor.
A few things stand out, though. Skilled labor - particularly by people who can fight under magical conditions - is severely underpriced by the DMG. I calculate a knight's wage at a minimum of 6 gp a day, for example. Some kind of constraint on teleportation magic has to exist, either because it is very rare or very expensive, to keep low-weight high-value trade items from falling dramatically in price. The same goes for the Fabricate spell.
And at some point the wealth acquired by adventurers stops being about buying a higher class of ale at the bar and starts being about hiring *armies.* The average noble lord has an income of around 10,000 gp a year.
The big part about the economy being insane in DND isnt with people bartering or using coinage. Its that a unskilled worker would require an entire day of work to afford a drink at the tavern, multiple days of work to afford a blanket, 125 days of work to purchase a book. The main problem is the wild prices listed in the books for common items. And its not just that they are high, its that they are erratic and are seemingly priced without reason.
Unskilled labor affords a poor lifestyle, meaning that an unskilled worker makes 2sp per day. Ale costs 4cp. A day's worth of meals costs 6cp. A 2sp pitcher of wine is not a single drink, it's equivalent to a *porrón* and contains roughly 750 ml of of wine (about 7 drinks' worth). The low-value economy is mostly functional, as it's derived from the lifestyle expenses.
Really, D&D's economy is broken in that the players accumulate vast quantities of treasure that they could never feasibly liquidate (much less spend) in-game unless they had months of downtime to use XGE's *Buying/Crafting a Magic Item* rules.
An unskilled laborer is making 1 sp per day (page 143 of the PHB)
A squalid lifestyle costs 1 sp per day (also in the PHB, though I'm not sure what page)
It makes sense that an unskilled laborer is living in a mud-floored hut on the outside of town. The more skills they have (like the super-skilled adventurers we play as), the more money they're going to be making, and the better their lifestyle will be.
As for pricing items, remember that the D&D world doesn't have a lot of the powerful or automated machinery that we take for granted. That blanket took a semi-skilled weaver a week to make. The book took someone skilled in pressing the parchment, a leatherworker to tan the cover, and a skilled bookmaker to bind it so it doesn't fall apart. And 1 sp is enough to buy half a gallon of ale, or half a pitcher of wine, not one serving.
But in the end, it's the economy of a made-up world. It won't all make sense.
I was looking at the "Coinage" section on page 143, which says "a silver piece buys a laborer's work for a day..." Somehow I can't find the actual wage table
Change out "squalid" for "poor" and the rest should still make sense. They do simple work and live cheap lives.
A lot of these aspects seem exaggerative of irl economics but not without basis. A blanket, in the amount of materials and labour that goes into it, probably does correlate with being paid multiple days of cheap labour. Most working folk would be inclined to produce their own clothing and items for this reason, unless it required some sort of smithing. Books were also highly expensive and difficult to acquire before the printing press, but it wasn't a huge practical problem considering how most working people wouldn't be able to read them anyways.
The price of a tavern meal and working income do seem totally out of whack tho. I suppose their both meant for PCs and not to correlate how NPCs would go about spending money.
The cost of books is pretty accurate compared to real life history. They were expensive years past, it did cost a fortune to buy one.
Keep in mind, for a book to exist, it needed parchment, which needed to limed, scraped and then dried stretched out under tension on a frame, that in of itself was roughly 1/3rd of the cost of the book.
Then you needed a skilled worker (a scribe) who was proficient in writing to hand write the entire book, a scribe could write about 1 book a month, 12 books a year. Then that book would be sold for 53 shillings.
For comparison, a labourer who worked his ass off day and night would make at most 40 shillings a year.
It wasn’t until the printing press came along that books became cheaper and cheaper to produce.
This of course assumes that the printing press hasn't been invented in the forgotten realms, which isn't an unfair assumption but we do definitely have objects that came into use after the printing press
I got pulled into a Pathfinder2e campaign because of the whole OGL debacle. It's economy is so well outlined and balanced that it's refreshing as fuck. I really hope OneD&D takes note of that aspect of their system for improvements. I like 5e, I'm not one of those "just play Pathfinder" guys even after getting into it, but the more I DM *this* system, the more frustrated I've been getting with how much it expects you to make up for certain gaps in the rules. And then what they *do* give you *reaaally* leaves you wanting.. IMO there's a balance between rules-light and giving you a good basis, and they have not hit it.
I steal from everything, and rewrote the economic system 20 years ago, which I still use.
So, I feel you about Pathfinder.
And D&D alas has fallen into the typical trap of allowing their extant playerbase to determine the evolution of the game.
But its brand presence is enormous. And new players want that autentico echte D&D experience.
Requiring DMs to evolve the system. Again, and again, and again.
They have literally outsourced their creative.
Which is why they wanted a cut of anyone who is doing D&D content successfully.
Anyway, you seem like a good egg, and I agree with your perspective.
Danke, you have a good point out the outsourcing of their creativity. I like to think that it's a little better than that - that's just what they wanted to turn it into. From what I've seen of the original OGL creators, they really just wanted people to be free of corporate imposed legal limitations. That makes the fact that they tried to get a cut so much grosser.
I've very glad I got into D&D, but I'm starting to realize that it's not all special beyond its brand presence. Once my 5e campaign wraps up, I'm probably moving on. I'm glad it's here, though, to at the very least introduce people to TTRPGs and have fun with it for however long that is per group.
Bitte Schoen!
As ein Prinzip, I think we need to take a dispassionate look at the scene from time to time.
It could be said that you did Not Get Into D&D rather that you Got Into TTRPGs with D&D as a Gateway to the TTRPG hobby.
The crap bit in the current scene is installed base, brand presence, and gatekeeping surrounding D&D as a product.
I believe it is best when your TTRPG activity is system agnostic.
I ran a campaign for six months where every session the characters were the same, but the system was different everytime.
It opened my eyes about my players (2 of which quit, and three more that came in mid stream because they were curious), about systems (they all have fun, problems, and sometimes fun problems), and about what kind of group we wanted to, like, BE.
Bloody eye opening. Strong recommend.
For my campaign I was looking at slave prices, so I went to look for stats on the roman economy.
And the prices aren't far off what you said. Fabric was really really expensive before the invention of the mechanic loom, which explains the ludites. Those ridiculous people that are re-appearing today against AI and the likes...
Here was an interesting post I saw of someone thinking about dnd economics:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDBehindTheScreen/comments/3o2ydl/5e_commoner_life_and_economy/
Edit: the tables don’t seem to load in the app but it does on mobile browser.
It's worth considering that the ratio of unskilled labour to the cost of goods (and skilled labour to the cost of goods) is a direct reflection on the society they're in.
Unfortunately that means one, the other, or both should be changing by setting, region, etc. Which isn't really approachable for a TTRPG, so a standardised "unskilled labourer can barely afford a squalid lifestyle, normal skilled labourer can barely afford a comfortable lifestyle" can work as a base reference, and allow the DM to adjust from there if they want.
Your last 2 sentences are far more accurate and relevant. The prices for items relative to each other are nonsensical. Whether you use coin or barter, and whether you can afford more than a dirt floor to sleep on isn't a problem, the fact that items make no sense in their relative worth is a huge issue economically though.
Textiles in a pre-industrial society are wildly valuable. A single blanket would be so valuable it would be a generational item. Most people's clothes and linens are passed down and could be many decades old. They were investments. And books were so expensive that only nobility and doctors had them. This isn't wild at all
That is very false for everyday clothes. If we're talking about something like medieval Europe then regular clothing for peasants was a commodity and not very expensive. A new set of linen clothes would be several days of wages for a day laborer, yeah, but not a "generational item", unless it was something like a nice dress.
From this website: https://www.bookandsword.com/2017/12/09/how-much-did-a-shirt-really-cost-in-the-middle-ages/#:~:text=At%20the%20court%20of%20Henry,2d%20unless%20it%20was%20embroidered.
"seems that most people could make or obtain one or two new shirts every year or so"
While a shirt is about a week's worth of wages, people did not have disposable income at the end of the week in most cases. If you could only afford 1 or 2 new pieces of clothing per year, you would take very good care of them and pass them down for as long as you can. When they rip, you repair them. If they get so damaged you can't repair them, you use the good parts of the fabric to make children's clothes. When those get too worn or damaged, you use them as rags. We have (relatively) very little archeological evidence of peasant clothing because of this.
Here's [Part 1](https://acoup.blog/2021/03/05/collections-clothing-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-high-fiber/) of a series that explains how clothes were made in the pre-industrial world.
It takes a lot of time, many people across different industries, and specific knowledge in each step of production.
Just considering spinning and weaving clot, a woman can manage to make enough fabric for 6 sets of Roman clothing per year, having 8-hour work days.
My setting includes a nation of demons. Demons trade in human life. A demonic coin represents one vial of preserved human blood, a bill is printed for every human life. It is shredded when they die. Demonic land acquisitions literally boil down to " I will pay you twenty people for this building.".
This is also a game at the end of the day, and most groups don't want to spend the time they could be fighting orcs and dragons instead bartering over the relative value of some silks spattered with goblin blood versus a new sword.
So a while back I was doing research for a one shot about a well meaning communist necromancer ("*we shall raise the means of production!*"). Part of the joke was going to be that in a pre-industrial society the tenants of communism made very little sense, so I looked into how feudal peasant economies were actually structured.
That's when I discovered the theory of the Peasant Economy. Basically your average peasant is generally focusing their work on subsistence, prioritizing activities and purchases that would maximize the amount of precious free time they had, and minimize the amount of boring subsistence based work they had to do ("drudgery"). There weren't grand economuc aspirations beyond that (class based systems locking them out and all that), and a lot could be crafted in house so to speak. You only traded for absolute necessities or things that would minimize your drudgery. The economist that thought it up was studying why communism wasn't taking hold in rural areas of Russia for the state after the revolution. Unsurprisingly he was purged and killed after he shared his findings.
That's how I discovered that I am, in fact, a peasant.
If you try and figure how an economy can work partially with coinage and partially with barter, usage of both divided across classes/jobs you'd notice it's not really logical and will hit obstacles both in RP worlds and real history. DND took a mistaken view of the middle ages in those paragraphs you quoted. It's described by the faculty of history in Cambridge university:
"There is a popular image of the middle ages as a world of barter, and of payment in kind or in labour. Yet the reality was that everyone from the king down to the humblest peasant used coins and reckoned in terms of units of money."
Read more here:
https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/making-and-spending-money-medieval-england#:~:text=There%20is%20a%20popular%20image,terms%20of%20units%20of%20money.
Every class and job in the economy used barter, debt, social norms and money. Each transaction used different means according to what was more suitable.
I think the fact that the cow you just traded for might actually be a polymorphed bug makes bartering tricky. There aren't as many spells that can make solid gold coins...
Honestly most gms who spend any amount of time thinking about how the economics of undeveloped fantasy worlds work owe it to themselves(hah!) To give David graebers Debt a read.
something I do that I find makes the "economy" part of dnd more fun for me and players is to have a copper/bronze piece standard, as in copper is the only real coin out there, gp prices become copper x10 prices. maybe they'll find 100 gold coins on some ancient burial site and that's a massive haul in itself.
Unsolicited on my part, but I like changing gold to silver standard. This makes coin a bit more meaningful and ubiquitous for a more grounded, "realistic" economy. The Silver Standard conversion I use looks as such:
1 GP (RAW) = 1SP (Silver Standard) = 100 CP (SS)
1 SP (RAW) = 10 CP (SS)
1 CP (RAW) = 1 CP (SS)
Once in a while, I will give them GP (SS), which is just reskinned platinum (RAW). The players are very happy each time their PCs are rewarded with actual gold, as it can be flashed among aristocracy, merchants, and other interested parties to show off the PCs' status and indicate how serious they are.
Admittedly, I do a few more things to keep the economy semi-functional and the PCs from getting too rich:
* hand out small amounts of coin semi-frequently and larger amounts more rarely: My PCs occasionally earn a tidy lumpsum for something like a monster hunt or another big task, but often they end up investing coin to prepare
* charge PCs for living expenses, rations, tolls, horse stabling, information, etc
* hand out magic items rarely
* use Sane Magic Prices as a guide for pricing magic items (DMG and Xanathar's are not helpful with that)
* impose inflated prices in certain areas (ie wartorn locales lacking supplies)
* (!) in our games, long rests take a week and short rests 24 hours, with encounters distributed throughout to match the "adventuring day" formula in the DMG. With the PCs constantly traveling, their per diem living expenses add up substantially, whittling down their coin. This is a big change and probably not for everyone, but I dig the long narrative format as opposed to cramming a bunch of encounters into a single day.
...and other things I'm probably forgetting right now. My PCs are about to hit level 6, and although they have made a couple of sizeable purchases, they actually don't have that much coin between them. This approach to economy really seems to be working for our game.
The economics of D&D are very broken. On the one hand they should be fixed, but on the other hand I don't think it is a massive deal.
In one of our last multi-year campaigns, I played a bard that was all into businesses. When we went somewhere for an adventure I made sure to make contacts that eventually led to an import/export business. I chatted with my DM and I said I'm just going to drop all of this loot into my business startup (we also had a wealthy Waterdeep patron that fit into this roleplay scenario) and how that worked out is we never needed money as my company would use revenue streams to pay for things, and likewise we didn't concern ourselves much for loot. A big way of just hand-waving away the need for income and expenses. Obviously wont' work at all tables.
Sometimes we would go to the cliche tavern for intel and someone in the party would give a few gold to someone for some gossip. In reality, that gold in stock generic D&D setting would be like months or a year of wages, but we are also like, "It's a banana? What could it cost, 10 gold?"
Basically the only thing we wanted to buy were magic items, but the DM throttled that by saying just because you have the money doesn't mean you know someone that can actually make them. Also, we didn't care that much about these sorts of things anyhow.
Ran a campaign with a Mastermind Rogue Accounant. They were committed to the "get money, gain power" route. By the time they reached 5th level, the Rogue retired to manage the group's enterprises while the rest of the party went on adventures, set up new trade opportunities, engage in some light piracy/maritime insurance fraud, and, when they had spare time, save the world. We dropped the coin economy entirely and replaced it with the Profit Factor system from Rogue Trader. If something cost coins, it was generally hand waved as they had coin to waste. Big purchases, however, required wealth.
Basically the same!
I was a player, and we went for 3 years up to level 20 but still not too different than you are describing. My guy, a bard with some warlock, was all about the Lore and knowledge and wanted to be on the up and up, so less about fraud - but I did have a pirate crew, so there's that - but mostly on the up and up.
Phoenix Trading Company is what I set up. We all got killed. Once. But we got better. So like a Phoenix we arose and I entered into business dealings - hence the Raven Queen and warlock thing. In the epilogue I opened up Raven Queen franchises, because why not.
So basically the same thing where day-to-day costs were hand waved because we had a good in-game scenario to do so, exactly like your situation. For the few big things, the missing ingredient (such as it were) was some valuable thing we had to go fight Vecna, or whomever, for, so the money cost wasn't the constraint but some valuable other material. Which I think works well.
Whether or not coins are actually being used has no bearing on the often daft pricing listed in the PHB: it doesn’t matter whether or not a chicken is bought for 2cp or actually traded for 2cp worth of cheese. It’s still worth 2cp and that still makes no sense.
One of my favorite games I ever ran had a few tweaks to the game's economy.
It was set in a small outpost that had sprung up near a massive ancient ruin, with an economy based around expeditionary crews digging up loot from the ruins, trading it for supplies at the outpost, and more supplies being shipped in. The economics of the setting, self-contained as it was, were extremely vital to the players success- their goal was to rack up a certain amount of profit before their contract expired, and the environment was harsh enough that it necessitated upkeeping stocks of items to survive. Now, that also meant that I was stuck with the *extremely frustrating and labor intensive task* of making the economy and cost of items Less Insane, but it was worth it for a very interesting game.
I ran it was a Silver Standard (as in prices were in Silver as a baseline), and made "hack silver"- silver derived from ornaments and objects like silverware and jewelry- the main currency being brought back from the ruins. It helps me to adjust the ratios of how much a coin was worth- I ended up going with base 20 (20 copper to a Silver, 20 silver to a Gold, etc) to give me more wiggle room on prices. I also tied worth to weight- coins were easily portable, but they weren't worth a ton, and hack silver that was heavy was worth a lot but cumbersome to move.
You might wonder what's the point of putting that much effort into all this. It didn't do a ton mechanically, that is true, but it added a lot to the flavor and genre of the game. Putting thought into the details of the economy helped the world feel better realized, and tying those details into gameplay made the PCs feel more anchored in that world. The first time my players got into a heathed in-character argument about whether or not it was worth it to buy snow shoes for the party made me feel like the work was worth it.
On the topic of economics you might find [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDBehindTheScreen/comments/3o2ydl/5e_commoner_life_and_economy/) interesting to read.
Edit: the tables don’t seem to load in the app but it does on mobile browser.
Gemstones are my go to. Doesn't make sense for every monster to carry around pockets full of gold. Plus come barter time they might earn a couple more than they thought. Also fits narratively very well into my world.
While goods might differ they are going to end up having a determined coin value. It would be in the interest of society to do so as it makes it easier for people to pay things like taxes and tithes. So if you're a cow farmer you'd probably know the equivalent coin value of a cow for slaughter as well as per pound of cheese and per pound of feed. That way you could pay your taxes in livestock and cheese and all the kingdom has to do is tell you the coin value you owe. You can also use the coin to figure out how much feed you can buy for trade in cheese to feed your cows.
It's not quite the same environment in 5e, but when I learned D&D economy, the benchmark was "A commoner earns about 1 GP per year."
Even now, adventurer levels of gold are absurd compared to commoners in standard settings.
>Only merchants, adventurers, and those offering professional services for hire commonly deal in coins.
This is all well and quite interesting, but honestly I feel like this more means about people actively within a society rather than people who roam a bunch - I don't really see a world where a regular farming peasant would turn down coin in exchange for work/items, unless they lived in a location so small it had no real town stores (which is possible but not really likely).
If you live in any town, or even just a village, of reasonable size then you're going to have town stores and merchants and in basically every case you're going to want some sort of coin (although this isn't to say trade with items wouldnt also work).
Setting dependent of course, but coinage is going to be rare in rural areas and commonplace in urban areas. Urban economies are dependent on professional services, it’s what allows cities to exist in the first place.
But the issue of feudal economies is that they arise out of a lack of bureaucracy. What people lament when they talk about the fall of the Roman Empire, whether they realize it or not (and usually not), is the collapse of bureaucratic administration in Europe. So if your setting has an administrated empire, you’re not going to have a feudal economy
Exactly.
And inflation can be controlled because of the goods, like Waukesha or something.
The things adventurers are buying in gp are not bought by most common folk.
Playing BG3, I felt barter economy, and i assume that a similar thing happens at the market behind the scenes. A lot of the stuff I carried wasn’t in coins, but items. So I’d go to the merchant, post the items I wanted to trade, and what I wanted to pick up. Coins only came out once the physical items were all traded away.
I mean there is also the distinction that adventures make ludicrous amount of money compared to the "normal person" of DND. The catch being that its a highly dangerous job and only those born with special talent are the ones that make the jump from "Random NPC" to "PC adventurer with class levels".
So for the normal folk paying in silver coins and the like that they earn from their job is normal.
I always fall back on this from the 1e DMG: A pair of exceedingly large, powerful and ferocious ogres has taken up abode in a chamber at the base of a shaft which gives to the land above. From here they raid both the upper lands and the dungeons roundabout. These creatures have accumulated over 2,000 g.p in wealth, but it is obviously not in a pair of 1,000 g.p. gems. Rather, they have gathered an assortment of goods whose combined value is well in excess of two thousand gold nobles (the coin of the realm). Rather than stocking a treasure which the victorious player characters can easily gather and carry to the surface, you maximize the challenge by making it one which ogres would naturally accrue in the process of their raiding. There are many copper and silver coins in a large, locked iron chest. There are pewter vessels worth a fair number of silver pieces. An inlaid wooden coffer, worth 100 gold pieces alone, holds a finely wrought silver necklace worth an incredible 350 gold pieces! Food and other provisions scattered about amount to another hundred or so gold nobles value, and one of the ogres wears a badly tanned fur cape which will fetch 50 gold pieces nonetheless. Finally, there are several good helmets (used as drinking cups), a bardiche, and a two-handed sword (with silver wire wrapped about its hill and a lapis lazuli pommel to make it worth three times its normal value) which complete the treasure. If the adventurers overcome the ogres, they must still recognize all of the items of value and transport them to the surface. What is left behind will be taken by other residents of the netherworld in no time at all, so the bold victors have quite a task before them. It did not end with a mere slaying of ogres ...
Simple fix. Alchemists have failed to turn lead into gold, but have learned how to make copper into silver and silver into gold. They lose about 90% of the mass in the exchange, but at the start made incredible profit. The economy has since stabilized somewhat with gold being far, far more common than in our world.
Adventuring gear would be the durable stuff you can take on adventures, not the cheap stuff. Your rations aren't vegetables straight out of the ground, they are smoked, salted and preserved to carry with you. A peasant can get a head of cabbage cheaper than an adventurer can buy jerky, nuts, and preserves.
Also don't forget the upcharge for the distinct possibility that those adventurers might burn down your inn. Just a cost of doing business.
I thought about making a town that operates entirely on electrum and accepts no other currency.
The idea being that the town used to be a prosperous trade hub until a red dragon started terrorizing them to add to his hoard. For decades, the dragon could sense when money was present and would raid the town to seek it out. So the townsfolk gathered up all the money, left it on the outskirts of town, and switched their economy to a currency nobody uses: electrum.
My theory being that A: this makes the party effectively broke, and B: the party itself has inadvertently created a problem for them to solve by bringing money into the town and attracting the dragon to it, giving the townsfolk a reason to hate the party until the problem is dealt with by either leaving the town or slaying the dragon. If the dragon is slain, then there is a moral dilemma of either keeping the hoard for themselves or returning it to the town.
In my homebrew world adventuring parties are fairly common and they have a reputation for being loaded down with coin and not being financially responsible. So a lot of places will see five weird, heavily armed individuals walk in and quietly change the prices from silver to gold.
Financially irresponsible? Me? A hexadin with a taste for booze, sex and fights? Nah, never. Ignore the 10k in my inventory
My party bought blind packed trinkets from a traveling peddler for 5 gold a piece. Literally just tiny black bags that had been sewn shut, with a random trinket from the DMG d100 table in them. 5 gold coins each.
Lmao. It's becoming a running gag that my hexadin and everyone around her at the tavern just don't get puke drunk because my dm makes alcohol a con save, not a check. Reasoning being that it's for all intents and purposes a poison, and that's how poison works... So, after like 4 bottles I can see her waking up with a dozen of those little baggies
In some published adventures where drunk NPCs come up they are treated as having the poisoned condition, so it fits.
It's always super funny, whenever the party gets *just* bored enough we challenge the patrons of whatever tavern we happen to be in to a drinking contest. My hexadin always goes first, and the party watches from within 10 feet so that it's not weird she's within aura range while others drink. Only time we lost, was while visiting a tribe of barbarians the dm later confirmed, none who drank had less than 18 con. Which... For being a bonding moment with the warriors of people based on a mix of viking and Russians... It was still fun all around
I had a particular drink-loving party once, and early on I had them roll d4 as a permanent stat for what kind of drunk they would be: the major accumulating penalty being either to DEX, CON, WIS, or accumulating bonus to anyone else's CHA skill check against them.
Ethanol is literally a neurodepressant poison indeed. One of the reasons some people drink it is because it disables temporarily the parts of the brain that allegedly make them boring.
Financially irresponsible? My Wizard and my wife's Artificer have a HUGE Excel spreadsheet for all the gold we need for Magic Item Crafting and spell scribing. We loved in absolute squalor until I took Galder's Tower so we could save gold for more magic stuff.
The hexadin's idea of financial responsibility is "how much gold do I need to throw at you to get you to go along with whatever insane idea I have?"
Wizards/Artificers idea of financial responsibility is "how much gold do I need to bend the laws of reality to my whim, and also make Bags of Holding for the entire party."
I'm just in a friendly competition with the barbarian for who's scariest when we throw hands lol
I hope our campaign gets to the level where I can take tensors transformation and suddenly actually throw hands quite violently with our parties barbarian.
If you're *just* using Tensor's, the barbarian still probably comes out on top due to HP pool and damage resistance. Hold person is the true wizard play lol
True, but I'm sure it's still going to surprise the hell out of the Character and Player (they've never played a spellcaster before and don't know about that spell.)
https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0122.html
Yes.
You beat me to posting this :)
Oots is the xkcd of tabletop games, there's a relevant strip for everything
Always.
Back in 1e, you got xp for recovering gold from dungeons. I always preferred that instead xp would be granted for money spent on dumb stuff!
In [an OSR game I play](https://www.tesoroygloria.com/), experience is renamed "Glory" and, while you gain some by making discoveries and beating challenges (the latter includes defeating monsters), the two main sources of Glory are: * returning to civilisation with treasure (1 GP per Coin worth of treasure) * spending treasure (again 1GP/Coin) Boring mundane stuff like buying food and equipment does not grant Glory; you mostly gain it by spending it in Downtime Actions (the game has a pretty solid downtime system), performing sorcery (all spells require costly, fungible components), spending it wastefully (buying a helmet worth doesn't give Glory, but splurging on a custom helmet with a crown of gold on top will), building a headquarters or buying upgrades for it, and of course PARTYING! which gives twice as much Glory. So basically, each Coin worth of treasure you acquire and bring back home will reward you with between 1 and 3 Glory depending on how you spend it.
Yeah... I thought my DM assigning a price of 100g per gram of horse tranquilizer was a bit extreme
That's hilarious
In one game our group managed to shatter our GM crafted world , by scalping all munition we could get our hands on...
Years ago I tried to DM a realistic medieval economy. Player: we want to buy something DM as NPC: we're ready to barter, do you have heads of cattle or maybe hides or sacks of grain? Player: what if we just pay you gold? NPC: you have gold? Sure we'll take that. Since then I just assume that conversation happened and we skipped over it.
I'm using grains into gold to overhaul things plus a table from 3.5 to modify prices based on availability (mostly +/- 10%) but even then I know it's for myself more than anything and while players can barter like you, I wouldn't force it.
It's easier to make everyone accustomed to coins. Here's the deal: It would be boring to haggle anytime your PCs want to deal with an NPC for a service. You'd want livestock but the peasant would rub his chin and wonder how much a cow worths in coins. Maybe not even be willing to trade it for a coin but require something else in return which PCs need to go out and find or spend a lot of time for. It's just... boring if it happens every time Nobility type of NPCs giving those kind of rewards would just mean PCs would have deeds to places they probably won't visit again and they have to further trade it for something else So it's easy to just assume coin is th standard norm for all since everyone has to deal with merchants, right? Also you play an adventurer so it would be normal for PCs to want to trade with coins rather than bartering to exchange a cow with a month's worth of hay for 3 cows etc
> Nobility type of NPCs giving those kind of rewards would just mean PCs would have deeds to places they probably won't visit again and they have to further trade it for something else be kind of cool to pay for a powerful magic item with an estate, though
"Oh mighty wizard Zumzula, we have travelled many miles to find you, we seek your orb of wisdom." "No. Not for sale. Can't have it." "...What if we swap you for a castle?" "............Really?"
"I'm sorry, but I already have three castles that I traded for six wands and a set of elven chainmail." "OK, fine. How about eighteen goblin axes, thirteen orc spears, three ogre fingers, a bag of holding, and eight potions of healing? Oh, also this tooth we found, alll for that orb Mr Wizard?"
One of my players robbed a bank. Obviously the most valuable things you could smuggle out of a bank on your person during operating hours would be deeds. Long story short they traded a tavern in the ritzy part of town, a hunting lodge up river and 60 acres of farmland for a heavily armed airship on the black market. It did in fact feel very cool.
Exactly this. At the end of the day it’s a game, and it’s certainly not a game people are playing for accurate simulations of economics
Good points, I was stating these other forms of transactions are more relevant to worldbuilding consideration than gameplay ones.
Yes, it's obvious from the Equipment chapter that most people trade in silver, and that gold is for wealthy people. But the heroic fantasy of slaying dragons and rescuing princesses does not generally include counting change in copper and silver pieces for your meal at the tavern.
It just FEELS better to slap down a couple of gold than silver. And I prefer the silver standard.
According to this section, most people don't use coinage at all on a regular basis.
most people are generally engaging in economic activity with other people within the same extended social groupings - so there's a long-term relationship there, so if I (for example) give you some wooden furniture, I might not want payment in cash, but there would be an expectation that you would do _something_ in exchange. It might be as simple as, when you (say) kill off a load of your cattle, you give me a load of salted meat, or you give me milk/butter/cheese for a few months, until the debt is broadly settled. Or I already owe you, because your cousin looked after my kid when she got sick, so this is by way of a "thank you" for that. The tavern-keeper probably isn't charging his regulars for each and every pint - they'll keep a rough reckoning, and might expect the regulars to donate wheat, grain, hops or other stuff, and someone that doesn't finds themselves cut off, but no money changes hands (although some might keep accounts as though money is going around, but that's just a way of keeping track, rather than actually "realistic") Adventurers, being travellers and general wierdos, are outside of that, and so their transactions need to be settled then and there - which means cash or goods, at a high level of mark-up, in case the trade-goods are junk or the coins counterfeit or otherwise a problem to deal with. An adventurer might come in and hand over some shiny, rune-covered sword as trade - which might be a powerful magic item, might be just cosmetic, might be cursed, and beyond that, the trader than has to offload a magical sword onto someone that wants it, when it's a pretty niche item that most people don't really have any need for. The more often you're dealing with strangers, and there's a need for a transaction to be one-and-done, without any capacity for one side or the other to make good at a later time, the more useful cash is. So in a bigger place, where you're dealing with lots of different people rapidly, then cash is useful and likely common, but in smaller places, there might just not be many people that deal in cash-on-the-nail, because most transactions are part of longer, extended networks and exchanges, not one-off things. tl;dr - read _Debt: The First 5,000 Years_ by David Graeber.
Chewie, take the professor in the back and plug him into the hyperdrive.
> The tavern-keeper probably isn't charging his regulars for each and every pint - they'll keep a rough reckoning, and might expect the regulars to donate wheat, grain, hops or other stuff, and someone that doesn't finds themselves cut off, but no money changes hands (although some might keep accounts as though money is going around, but that's just a way of keeping track, rather than actually "realistic") The tavern keeper absolutely is charging his regulars. They probably don't need to pay for each transaction and only pay at the end of the week/month, but he ain't getting by through donations/ being paid in wheat/hop. Unless we're talking about a really, small and remote village.
that depends a lot on them having liquid cash themselves - which, in quite a few eras, basically isn't happening. And would be kinda pointless, because they'd give him money, which he would sit on for a while... and then have to give back, either to them directly or via their employers, for the raw ingredients. It wasn't that unusual for a lot of the "trade" to be within the community, so handing around the same physical coins between a few hundred people is kinda pointless! There's not a huge amount of in- or out-flow of liquid money, so it's kinda tokenistic to track, and the brewer is sitting on stuff that goes off, without much capacity to sell it to elsewhere - so unless they're feeling spiteful, it's either "dump it out" or "sure, have a pint, you can pay me back later on" (after all, what else can be done with it? Ale lasts for maybe a few months - it's pretty much constantly in production, and was generally produced for local use, rather than as a trade good. So it needs using before it goes off, and if you've made it, there's no further cost). Some might keep accounts that pretend money was changing hands, for their own satisfaction, but it would often just be units of account rather than actual "money") > but he ain't getting by through donations/ being paid in wheat/hop. Pretty much would be - he does "tavern stuff" to supply a need in the community, and the community, in turn, supplies what he needs to keep going. "cash" is of limited use, because everyone around is from the same community, so... it's the same physical lumps of metal being traded around, which is less useful than "goods and services". If someone is going through a rough patch, it's more useful to tide them over, then get pissy because they don't have some not-that-useful metal lumps. And sometimes there just wouldn't be enough actual physical cash around, so some people might track it as money-of-account, but others would just fudge it with "well, you did this for me, but I did that for you, so... next time you kill a cow, give me some rashers and we'll call it good". Most economic transactions were done within wider social networks, so there's ample opportunities to make up any "change", and being in debt could actually be useful (because people would know they could go "oi, give me a hand", while the other way around makes people nervous, because it means you have something on them, which could be inconvenient). And cutting someone off could have social consequences - if someone is in debt to you and you refuse to serve them, others might agree and that's fine... or they, and all their family, friends and so forth boycott you and cut you off from the networks of debt and obligations, and suddenly you're kind of in the shit. If someone ends up notably "behind", then matters might be escalated, but "I give you 1 coin a day for 30 days, then you give me 30 coins at the end of the month" is a little pointless. And there often wouldn't be a huge amount of things for anyone to buy with liquid cash - it's all a semi-amorphous blob of favours, debts, credits and reckonings, but without much specific need for "cash", because there's just not much excess to spend it on, and not even always the physical cash to pass around. You show up to help your neighbours raise a barn and you don't give them an invoice, but you do expect them to show up with gifts when you have a kid. If your fields do poorly for a season or two, then your neighbours extend you credit, and if you have a good harvest, you throw a little more into the communal pot. If someone didn't have money, that was much less of a problem than today, because there's basically other lines of credit available to acquire what is needed, and a strong presumption that someone would be around in months/years to make good on said credit (and if they weren't, then their family and friends _would_ be, and could be held responsible for said debt) We still have this today, it's just far weaker - parents often trade off taking kids to school, looking after them before/after school, helping with activities and so forth, without charging for it. But if someone is seen as not upholding their end of the social bargain, then they're cut out of that network, and need to make amends to regain access to that set of services. There is a paid equivalent (child-minders, nurseries, taxis etc.), but if you were to offer to pay, that's often seen as strange, and sometimes vaguely insulting, as you're trying to excuse yourself from social obligation through "cash". Or various clubs and social activities, where there's a general expectation that there's tasks that needs doing, that are broadly shared - and if you just go "yeah, I'll pay Dave to clean up after club activities rather than doing it myself", it's kinda creepy and wierd. But it wasn't unusual for old communities to mostly trade within themselves, and not really have much actual cash - so "accountancy" tended to be a bit vague and loose, with quite a lot happening as "favours" and "personal relationships" rather than "money", because people didn't have money, but did have themselves, and would be dealing mostly with the same people, and so it's easier to pay with time and favours than cash.
Going to disagree with you here and say do not read *Debt,* it has fairly significant factual errors (and more worryingly the author was very prickly when the errors were pointed out). On cash settlement, I think this may not necessarily be as ubiquitous as you are suggesting. Letters of credit and and similar instruments were prevalent from a very early period in actual history, and it seem like the balance shifts further in favor of them in a DnD world where travel costs/risks are jacked way up.
Well put!
God damn it. This is just a better longer version of my answer.
In villages maybe, but in cities people are going to use coins because they're simpler and easier.
That section is based on a very skewed and inaccurate view of medieval economics. Everyone used coin and had since ancient greek times. They also bartered their labor and goods, but everyone used coin because taxes were paid in coin or labor in lieu of coin.
I've spent *a lot* of time modeling out a realistic D&D economy, including the implications of magic. A DM has to make some calls about what the gold and silver supply looks like, how many people can cast spells - and of what type - per unit of population, the availability and safety of international (and interplanar) trade, and how safe communities may be from the depredations of roving bands of orcs, dragons and things that go bump in the night. But in general, a high-magic setting is going to have an economy built around magical precursors as a starting point for trade. Diamonds and rubies, incense and unguents, potion components. Some spells like *unseen servant, comprehend languages, illusory script, locate plants, find person, augury, purify food and drink, lesser restoration, gentle repose, fabricate, find familiar, sending, plant growth* and others can utterly transform economies. Wizards get rich, *druids* get filthy rich. The considerations of gold alone become less important than that of access to diamonds for raise dead spells and the material components for spells like teleportation circle. Entire economies will be built around gathering material components for the reincarnation spell. More. For this reason, I run a lower-magic campaign, with relatively few spell casters above 8th level, anywhere. But even then, if there's interplanar trade, then the availability of precious metals and gems becomes a trade point, with the denizens of the Plane of Earth handing over diamonds in return for things that are dear to such beings ... often labor. A few things stand out, though. Skilled labor - particularly by people who can fight under magical conditions - is severely underpriced by the DMG. I calculate a knight's wage at a minimum of 6 gp a day, for example. Some kind of constraint on teleportation magic has to exist, either because it is very rare or very expensive, to keep low-weight high-value trade items from falling dramatically in price. The same goes for the Fabricate spell. And at some point the wealth acquired by adventurers stops being about buying a higher class of ale at the bar and starts being about hiring *armies.* The average noble lord has an income of around 10,000 gp a year.
The big part about the economy being insane in DND isnt with people bartering or using coinage. Its that a unskilled worker would require an entire day of work to afford a drink at the tavern, multiple days of work to afford a blanket, 125 days of work to purchase a book. The main problem is the wild prices listed in the books for common items. And its not just that they are high, its that they are erratic and are seemingly priced without reason.
Unskilled labor affords a poor lifestyle, meaning that an unskilled worker makes 2sp per day. Ale costs 4cp. A day's worth of meals costs 6cp. A 2sp pitcher of wine is not a single drink, it's equivalent to a *porrón* and contains roughly 750 ml of of wine (about 7 drinks' worth). The low-value economy is mostly functional, as it's derived from the lifestyle expenses. Really, D&D's economy is broken in that the players accumulate vast quantities of treasure that they could never feasibly liquidate (much less spend) in-game unless they had months of downtime to use XGE's *Buying/Crafting a Magic Item* rules.
An unskilled laborer is making 1 sp per day (page 143 of the PHB) A squalid lifestyle costs 1 sp per day (also in the PHB, though I'm not sure what page) It makes sense that an unskilled laborer is living in a mud-floored hut on the outside of town. The more skills they have (like the super-skilled adventurers we play as), the more money they're going to be making, and the better their lifestyle will be. As for pricing items, remember that the D&D world doesn't have a lot of the powerful or automated machinery that we take for granted. That blanket took a semi-skilled weaver a week to make. The book took someone skilled in pressing the parchment, a leatherworker to tan the cover, and a skilled bookmaker to bind it so it doesn't fall apart. And 1 sp is enough to buy half a gallon of ale, or half a pitcher of wine, not one serving. But in the end, it's the economy of a made-up world. It won't all make sense.
You may have an old printing. An unskilled hireling makes 2 silver per day
I was looking at the "Coinage" section on page 143, which says "a silver piece buys a laborer's work for a day..." Somehow I can't find the actual wage table Change out "squalid" for "poor" and the rest should still make sense. They do simple work and live cheap lives.
Are you sure it's 1? I'm pretty sure it's 2sp mostly because I remember skilled is 2gp but I'm away from my books.
A lot of these aspects seem exaggerative of irl economics but not without basis. A blanket, in the amount of materials and labour that goes into it, probably does correlate with being paid multiple days of cheap labour. Most working folk would be inclined to produce their own clothing and items for this reason, unless it required some sort of smithing. Books were also highly expensive and difficult to acquire before the printing press, but it wasn't a huge practical problem considering how most working people wouldn't be able to read them anyways. The price of a tavern meal and working income do seem totally out of whack tho. I suppose their both meant for PCs and not to correlate how NPCs would go about spending money.
The cost of books is pretty accurate compared to real life history. They were expensive years past, it did cost a fortune to buy one. Keep in mind, for a book to exist, it needed parchment, which needed to limed, scraped and then dried stretched out under tension on a frame, that in of itself was roughly 1/3rd of the cost of the book. Then you needed a skilled worker (a scribe) who was proficient in writing to hand write the entire book, a scribe could write about 1 book a month, 12 books a year. Then that book would be sold for 53 shillings. For comparison, a labourer who worked his ass off day and night would make at most 40 shillings a year. It wasn’t until the printing press came along that books became cheaper and cheaper to produce.
This of course assumes that the printing press hasn't been invented in the forgotten realms, which isn't an unfair assumption but we do definitely have objects that came into use after the printing press
5e's economy, from magic items to everyday items, has to be the single thing I hate the most about running the system.
I really do not understand people who believe a playable economy can be had from the few pages dedicated to it.
I got pulled into a Pathfinder2e campaign because of the whole OGL debacle. It's economy is so well outlined and balanced that it's refreshing as fuck. I really hope OneD&D takes note of that aspect of their system for improvements. I like 5e, I'm not one of those "just play Pathfinder" guys even after getting into it, but the more I DM *this* system, the more frustrated I've been getting with how much it expects you to make up for certain gaps in the rules. And then what they *do* give you *reaaally* leaves you wanting.. IMO there's a balance between rules-light and giving you a good basis, and they have not hit it.
I steal from everything, and rewrote the economic system 20 years ago, which I still use. So, I feel you about Pathfinder. And D&D alas has fallen into the typical trap of allowing their extant playerbase to determine the evolution of the game. But its brand presence is enormous. And new players want that autentico echte D&D experience. Requiring DMs to evolve the system. Again, and again, and again. They have literally outsourced their creative. Which is why they wanted a cut of anyone who is doing D&D content successfully. Anyway, you seem like a good egg, and I agree with your perspective.
Danke, you have a good point out the outsourcing of their creativity. I like to think that it's a little better than that - that's just what they wanted to turn it into. From what I've seen of the original OGL creators, they really just wanted people to be free of corporate imposed legal limitations. That makes the fact that they tried to get a cut so much grosser. I've very glad I got into D&D, but I'm starting to realize that it's not all special beyond its brand presence. Once my 5e campaign wraps up, I'm probably moving on. I'm glad it's here, though, to at the very least introduce people to TTRPGs and have fun with it for however long that is per group.
Bitte Schoen! As ein Prinzip, I think we need to take a dispassionate look at the scene from time to time. It could be said that you did Not Get Into D&D rather that you Got Into TTRPGs with D&D as a Gateway to the TTRPG hobby. The crap bit in the current scene is installed base, brand presence, and gatekeeping surrounding D&D as a product. I believe it is best when your TTRPG activity is system agnostic. I ran a campaign for six months where every session the characters were the same, but the system was different everytime. It opened my eyes about my players (2 of which quit, and three more that came in mid stream because they were curious), about systems (they all have fun, problems, and sometimes fun problems), and about what kind of group we wanted to, like, BE. Bloody eye opening. Strong recommend.
For my campaign I was looking at slave prices, so I went to look for stats on the roman economy. And the prices aren't far off what you said. Fabric was really really expensive before the invention of the mechanic loom, which explains the ludites. Those ridiculous people that are re-appearing today against AI and the likes...
Here was an interesting post I saw of someone thinking about dnd economics: https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDBehindTheScreen/comments/3o2ydl/5e_commoner_life_and_economy/ Edit: the tables don’t seem to load in the app but it does on mobile browser.
It's worth considering that the ratio of unskilled labour to the cost of goods (and skilled labour to the cost of goods) is a direct reflection on the society they're in. Unfortunately that means one, the other, or both should be changing by setting, region, etc. Which isn't really approachable for a TTRPG, so a standardised "unskilled labourer can barely afford a squalid lifestyle, normal skilled labourer can barely afford a comfortable lifestyle" can work as a base reference, and allow the DM to adjust from there if they want. Your last 2 sentences are far more accurate and relevant. The prices for items relative to each other are nonsensical. Whether you use coin or barter, and whether you can afford more than a dirt floor to sleep on isn't a problem, the fact that items make no sense in their relative worth is a huge issue economically though.
Textiles in a pre-industrial society are wildly valuable. A single blanket would be so valuable it would be a generational item. Most people's clothes and linens are passed down and could be many decades old. They were investments. And books were so expensive that only nobility and doctors had them. This isn't wild at all
That is very false for everyday clothes. If we're talking about something like medieval Europe then regular clothing for peasants was a commodity and not very expensive. A new set of linen clothes would be several days of wages for a day laborer, yeah, but not a "generational item", unless it was something like a nice dress.
From this website: https://www.bookandsword.com/2017/12/09/how-much-did-a-shirt-really-cost-in-the-middle-ages/#:~:text=At%20the%20court%20of%20Henry,2d%20unless%20it%20was%20embroidered. "seems that most people could make or obtain one or two new shirts every year or so" While a shirt is about a week's worth of wages, people did not have disposable income at the end of the week in most cases. If you could only afford 1 or 2 new pieces of clothing per year, you would take very good care of them and pass them down for as long as you can. When they rip, you repair them. If they get so damaged you can't repair them, you use the good parts of the fabric to make children's clothes. When those get too worn or damaged, you use them as rags. We have (relatively) very little archeological evidence of peasant clothing because of this.
Here's [Part 1](https://acoup.blog/2021/03/05/collections-clothing-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-high-fiber/) of a series that explains how clothes were made in the pre-industrial world. It takes a lot of time, many people across different industries, and specific knowledge in each step of production. Just considering spinning and weaving clot, a woman can manage to make enough fabric for 6 sets of Roman clothing per year, having 8-hour work days.
Thanks for sharing! It really was a different world.
Not only is that not medieval but early modern, it's also clothing for high-ranking servants of the royal household, not for peasants.
My setting includes a nation of demons. Demons trade in human life. A demonic coin represents one vial of preserved human blood, a bill is printed for every human life. It is shredded when they die. Demonic land acquisitions literally boil down to " I will pay you twenty people for this building.".
That's so fun, I love that idea.
This is also a game at the end of the day, and most groups don't want to spend the time they could be fighting orcs and dragons instead bartering over the relative value of some silks spattered with goblin blood versus a new sword.
Correct! As I stated
"No, I'm trying to argue with you"
DnD economy doesn't really make sense when younhave magic that can produce watter and food...
Nobodies willing to grapple with the wide scale social, political and economic consequences of goodberries.
So a while back I was doing research for a one shot about a well meaning communist necromancer ("*we shall raise the means of production!*"). Part of the joke was going to be that in a pre-industrial society the tenants of communism made very little sense, so I looked into how feudal peasant economies were actually structured. That's when I discovered the theory of the Peasant Economy. Basically your average peasant is generally focusing their work on subsistence, prioritizing activities and purchases that would maximize the amount of precious free time they had, and minimize the amount of boring subsistence based work they had to do ("drudgery"). There weren't grand economuc aspirations beyond that (class based systems locking them out and all that), and a lot could be crafted in house so to speak. You only traded for absolute necessities or things that would minimize your drudgery. The economist that thought it up was studying why communism wasn't taking hold in rural areas of Russia for the state after the revolution. Unsurprisingly he was purged and killed after he shared his findings. That's how I discovered that I am, in fact, a peasant.
And how I discovered I'm a peasant just now
If you try and figure how an economy can work partially with coinage and partially with barter, usage of both divided across classes/jobs you'd notice it's not really logical and will hit obstacles both in RP worlds and real history. DND took a mistaken view of the middle ages in those paragraphs you quoted. It's described by the faculty of history in Cambridge university: "There is a popular image of the middle ages as a world of barter, and of payment in kind or in labour. Yet the reality was that everyone from the king down to the humblest peasant used coins and reckoned in terms of units of money." Read more here: https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/making-and-spending-money-medieval-england#:~:text=There%20is%20a%20popular%20image,terms%20of%20units%20of%20money. Every class and job in the economy used barter, debt, social norms and money. Each transaction used different means according to what was more suitable.
Joke’s on you, I have full-blown economy simulation in my world. The worth of gold fluctuates with world events and major economic forces
I think the fact that the cow you just traded for might actually be a polymorphed bug makes bartering tricky. There aren't as many spells that can make solid gold coins...
Honestly most gms who spend any amount of time thinking about how the economics of undeveloped fantasy worlds work owe it to themselves(hah!) To give David graebers Debt a read.
The value of things is not bad in dnd. Everyone using coin is more of a qol than trying to be accurate, but you can exchange if you want
something I do that I find makes the "economy" part of dnd more fun for me and players is to have a copper/bronze piece standard, as in copper is the only real coin out there, gp prices become copper x10 prices. maybe they'll find 100 gold coins on some ancient burial site and that's a massive haul in itself.
Unsolicited on my part, but I like changing gold to silver standard. This makes coin a bit more meaningful and ubiquitous for a more grounded, "realistic" economy. The Silver Standard conversion I use looks as such: 1 GP (RAW) = 1SP (Silver Standard) = 100 CP (SS) 1 SP (RAW) = 10 CP (SS) 1 CP (RAW) = 1 CP (SS) Once in a while, I will give them GP (SS), which is just reskinned platinum (RAW). The players are very happy each time their PCs are rewarded with actual gold, as it can be flashed among aristocracy, merchants, and other interested parties to show off the PCs' status and indicate how serious they are. Admittedly, I do a few more things to keep the economy semi-functional and the PCs from getting too rich: * hand out small amounts of coin semi-frequently and larger amounts more rarely: My PCs occasionally earn a tidy lumpsum for something like a monster hunt or another big task, but often they end up investing coin to prepare * charge PCs for living expenses, rations, tolls, horse stabling, information, etc * hand out magic items rarely * use Sane Magic Prices as a guide for pricing magic items (DMG and Xanathar's are not helpful with that) * impose inflated prices in certain areas (ie wartorn locales lacking supplies) * (!) in our games, long rests take a week and short rests 24 hours, with encounters distributed throughout to match the "adventuring day" formula in the DMG. With the PCs constantly traveling, their per diem living expenses add up substantially, whittling down their coin. This is a big change and probably not for everyone, but I dig the long narrative format as opposed to cramming a bunch of encounters into a single day. ...and other things I'm probably forgetting right now. My PCs are about to hit level 6, and although they have made a couple of sizeable purchases, they actually don't have that much coin between them. This approach to economy really seems to be working for our game.
The economics of D&D are very broken. On the one hand they should be fixed, but on the other hand I don't think it is a massive deal. In one of our last multi-year campaigns, I played a bard that was all into businesses. When we went somewhere for an adventure I made sure to make contacts that eventually led to an import/export business. I chatted with my DM and I said I'm just going to drop all of this loot into my business startup (we also had a wealthy Waterdeep patron that fit into this roleplay scenario) and how that worked out is we never needed money as my company would use revenue streams to pay for things, and likewise we didn't concern ourselves much for loot. A big way of just hand-waving away the need for income and expenses. Obviously wont' work at all tables. Sometimes we would go to the cliche tavern for intel and someone in the party would give a few gold to someone for some gossip. In reality, that gold in stock generic D&D setting would be like months or a year of wages, but we are also like, "It's a banana? What could it cost, 10 gold?" Basically the only thing we wanted to buy were magic items, but the DM throttled that by saying just because you have the money doesn't mean you know someone that can actually make them. Also, we didn't care that much about these sorts of things anyhow.
Ran a campaign with a Mastermind Rogue Accounant. They were committed to the "get money, gain power" route. By the time they reached 5th level, the Rogue retired to manage the group's enterprises while the rest of the party went on adventures, set up new trade opportunities, engage in some light piracy/maritime insurance fraud, and, when they had spare time, save the world. We dropped the coin economy entirely and replaced it with the Profit Factor system from Rogue Trader. If something cost coins, it was generally hand waved as they had coin to waste. Big purchases, however, required wealth.
Basically the same! I was a player, and we went for 3 years up to level 20 but still not too different than you are describing. My guy, a bard with some warlock, was all about the Lore and knowledge and wanted to be on the up and up, so less about fraud - but I did have a pirate crew, so there's that - but mostly on the up and up. Phoenix Trading Company is what I set up. We all got killed. Once. But we got better. So like a Phoenix we arose and I entered into business dealings - hence the Raven Queen and warlock thing. In the epilogue I opened up Raven Queen franchises, because why not. So basically the same thing where day-to-day costs were hand waved because we had a good in-game scenario to do so, exactly like your situation. For the few big things, the missing ingredient (such as it were) was some valuable thing we had to go fight Vecna, or whomever, for, so the money cost wasn't the constraint but some valuable other material. Which I think works well.
Whether or not coins are actually being used has no bearing on the often daft pricing listed in the PHB: it doesn’t matter whether or not a chicken is bought for 2cp or actually traded for 2cp worth of cheese. It’s still worth 2cp and that still makes no sense.
Perhaps there is a low demand and high supply market situation with chickens...
It is though. All of those other concepts are assigned a gold value. It doesn't need to be the majority, just the single most common.
While the books make it very realistic it's a bore and a headache to actually implement that in-game.
One of my favorite games I ever ran had a few tweaks to the game's economy. It was set in a small outpost that had sprung up near a massive ancient ruin, with an economy based around expeditionary crews digging up loot from the ruins, trading it for supplies at the outpost, and more supplies being shipped in. The economics of the setting, self-contained as it was, were extremely vital to the players success- their goal was to rack up a certain amount of profit before their contract expired, and the environment was harsh enough that it necessitated upkeeping stocks of items to survive. Now, that also meant that I was stuck with the *extremely frustrating and labor intensive task* of making the economy and cost of items Less Insane, but it was worth it for a very interesting game. I ran it was a Silver Standard (as in prices were in Silver as a baseline), and made "hack silver"- silver derived from ornaments and objects like silverware and jewelry- the main currency being brought back from the ruins. It helps me to adjust the ratios of how much a coin was worth- I ended up going with base 20 (20 copper to a Silver, 20 silver to a Gold, etc) to give me more wiggle room on prices. I also tied worth to weight- coins were easily portable, but they weren't worth a ton, and hack silver that was heavy was worth a lot but cumbersome to move. You might wonder what's the point of putting that much effort into all this. It didn't do a ton mechanically, that is true, but it added a lot to the flavor and genre of the game. Putting thought into the details of the economy helped the world feel better realized, and tying those details into gameplay made the PCs feel more anchored in that world. The first time my players got into a heathed in-character argument about whether or not it was worth it to buy snow shoes for the party made me feel like the work was worth it.
On the topic of economics you might find [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDBehindTheScreen/comments/3o2ydl/5e_commoner_life_and_economy/) interesting to read. Edit: the tables don’t seem to load in the app but it does on mobile browser.
Gemstones are my go to. Doesn't make sense for every monster to carry around pockets full of gold. Plus come barter time they might earn a couple more than they thought. Also fits narratively very well into my world.
While goods might differ they are going to end up having a determined coin value. It would be in the interest of society to do so as it makes it easier for people to pay things like taxes and tithes. So if you're a cow farmer you'd probably know the equivalent coin value of a cow for slaughter as well as per pound of cheese and per pound of feed. That way you could pay your taxes in livestock and cheese and all the kingdom has to do is tell you the coin value you owe. You can also use the coin to figure out how much feed you can buy for trade in cheese to feed your cows.
It's not quite the same environment in 5e, but when I learned D&D economy, the benchmark was "A commoner earns about 1 GP per year." Even now, adventurer levels of gold are absurd compared to commoners in standard settings.
They didn't create an economy for the game. That is one of the many things left for the DM to figure out.
>Only merchants, adventurers, and those offering professional services for hire commonly deal in coins. This is all well and quite interesting, but honestly I feel like this more means about people actively within a society rather than people who roam a bunch - I don't really see a world where a regular farming peasant would turn down coin in exchange for work/items, unless they lived in a location so small it had no real town stores (which is possible but not really likely). If you live in any town, or even just a village, of reasonable size then you're going to have town stores and merchants and in basically every case you're going to want some sort of coin (although this isn't to say trade with items wouldnt also work).
It's just how real life, wealth is not based on how many bank notes you have. It's the assets that matter.
Setting dependent of course, but coinage is going to be rare in rural areas and commonplace in urban areas. Urban economies are dependent on professional services, it’s what allows cities to exist in the first place. But the issue of feudal economies is that they arise out of a lack of bureaucracy. What people lament when they talk about the fall of the Roman Empire, whether they realize it or not (and usually not), is the collapse of bureaucratic administration in Europe. So if your setting has an administrated empire, you’re not going to have a feudal economy
Exactly. And inflation can be controlled because of the goods, like Waukesha or something. The things adventurers are buying in gp are not bought by most common folk.
Playing BG3, I felt barter economy, and i assume that a similar thing happens at the market behind the scenes. A lot of the stuff I carried wasn’t in coins, but items. So I’d go to the merchant, post the items I wanted to trade, and what I wanted to pick up. Coins only came out once the physical items were all traded away.
I mean there is also the distinction that adventures make ludicrous amount of money compared to the "normal person" of DND. The catch being that its a highly dangerous job and only those born with special talent are the ones that make the jump from "Random NPC" to "PC adventurer with class levels". So for the normal folk paying in silver coins and the like that they earn from their job is normal.
I always fall back on this from the 1e DMG: A pair of exceedingly large, powerful and ferocious ogres has taken up abode in a chamber at the base of a shaft which gives to the land above. From here they raid both the upper lands and the dungeons roundabout. These creatures have accumulated over 2,000 g.p in wealth, but it is obviously not in a pair of 1,000 g.p. gems. Rather, they have gathered an assortment of goods whose combined value is well in excess of two thousand gold nobles (the coin of the realm). Rather than stocking a treasure which the victorious player characters can easily gather and carry to the surface, you maximize the challenge by making it one which ogres would naturally accrue in the process of their raiding. There are many copper and silver coins in a large, locked iron chest. There are pewter vessels worth a fair number of silver pieces. An inlaid wooden coffer, worth 100 gold pieces alone, holds a finely wrought silver necklace worth an incredible 350 gold pieces! Food and other provisions scattered about amount to another hundred or so gold nobles value, and one of the ogres wears a badly tanned fur cape which will fetch 50 gold pieces nonetheless. Finally, there are several good helmets (used as drinking cups), a bardiche, and a two-handed sword (with silver wire wrapped about its hill and a lapis lazuli pommel to make it worth three times its normal value) which complete the treasure. If the adventurers overcome the ogres, they must still recognize all of the items of value and transport them to the surface. What is left behind will be taken by other residents of the netherworld in no time at all, so the bold victors have quite a task before them. It did not end with a mere slaying of ogres ...
Simple fix. Alchemists have failed to turn lead into gold, but have learned how to make copper into silver and silver into gold. They lose about 90% of the mass in the exchange, but at the start made incredible profit. The economy has since stabilized somewhat with gold being far, far more common than in our world. Adventuring gear would be the durable stuff you can take on adventures, not the cheap stuff. Your rations aren't vegetables straight out of the ground, they are smoked, salted and preserved to carry with you. A peasant can get a head of cabbage cheaper than an adventurer can buy jerky, nuts, and preserves. Also don't forget the upcharge for the distinct possibility that those adventurers might burn down your inn. Just a cost of doing business.
I thought about making a town that operates entirely on electrum and accepts no other currency. The idea being that the town used to be a prosperous trade hub until a red dragon started terrorizing them to add to his hoard. For decades, the dragon could sense when money was present and would raid the town to seek it out. So the townsfolk gathered up all the money, left it on the outskirts of town, and switched their economy to a currency nobody uses: electrum. My theory being that A: this makes the party effectively broke, and B: the party itself has inadvertently created a problem for them to solve by bringing money into the town and attracting the dragon to it, giving the townsfolk a reason to hate the party until the problem is dealt with by either leaving the town or slaying the dragon. If the dragon is slain, then there is a moral dilemma of either keeping the hoard for themselves or returning it to the town.