Hey everybody, First of all, thanks for watching and leaving comments on your thoughts. A lot of you brought up using copper and silver. To be honest, that is something that I forgot to mention since my play group hasn't used those currencies for years. haha We figured that copper, silver, and gold are the same as pennies, dimes, and dollars (or on a higher scale 1 dollar bills, 10 dollar bills, and 100 dollar bills) so we simplified it down to just be the one currency, gold. This is a prime example of different play styles at different tables and I forgot to bring this up. Hopefully my main point, to make sure that everyone is on the same page about the value of whatever your currency you use, still came through. Again, thanks for watching and I appreciate everyone for sharing how they deal with their economy! ok bye
Just wanted to leave this here in case you don’t see it posted on the video: Whoever that Reddit post was from was WAY off. 1 GP in DND is nowhere near 100 bucks of current currency. It’s worth way less. Maybe 20-25 at best. I’m making a game myself and this is one of my biggest issues with TTRPGs and a lot of video games as well. Currency oftentimes isn’t valuable or the exchange of currency makes little to no sense. So I went back to Sumer and looked at exchange rates of items, specifically animals, and what people made per day, and this was pretty much true from 2300 BC - 1800 AD, before marginal reserve lending and inflation really started messing with the value of currency. I use soldiers as a mean for middle class workers cross cultures, however, there weren’t professional soldiers until late Classical era Greek society, or more specifically, the beginning of Hellenistic Greece with Alexander’s conquest. So, these are the exchange rates from my game based on Sumer animal exchange rates to Hellenistic time period. These would’ve been fairly close to the same in most cultures, absent a collapse or a wealth expansion. Barring that, these would be extremely static and were over almost all human history: Money 10 Copper = 1 Bronze 10 Bronze = 1 Silver 20 Silver = 1 Gold 20 Gold = 1 Platinum 1 Copper = Tart or sweets 3-5 Copper = Meal with no meat 10 Copper = Chicken 8 Bronze = Sheep 1 Silver = Goat 15 Silver = Horse 1 Gold = Bull (Plow Animal) 3 Gold = Hactare of Arable Land 5 Gold = House 20 gold = 8 Crew boat 100+ Gold = Manse 350 Gold = Largest Vessels I have one coinage above platinum, but because it’s so rare and gamebreaking, I won’t be putting anything about it here. The actual animal exchange rates are 100% accurate to history and how I managed to calculate what properties cost, plus I used some Roman housing costs to fill in the blanks based on area. As far as how much did a below officer(middle income) worker make in Greece and Rome? Roughly 6 silver ounces, or six silver dollars per week. This is actually the same exact monetary value of a worker’s compensation back in the early 1800s with a day’s work usually bringing in a dollar. And a dollar in America was 1 silver ounce. (Greeks were paid in Mina and Denars, but I calculated out the weight and it’s almost identical. So, 6 silver per week is a low middle income wage. Adventurers would likely get paid more than that, especially depending on the type of work and who was paying, but 100 gold is ridiculously inflated. Almost everything property wise outside of boats, or other giant business expenses or giant tracks of land were paid for with silver. No one exchanged gold except kings and merchants, so that’s where I put that kind of value. Gold was the currency of kings and was used for large purchases well outside the cost of normal people. A single parcel of land (the Greeks used Hectares and the Romans used Stadias) cost roughly 100 silver (5 gold) for the house itself and probably 20-25 silver for the 6 acres of land. If it was in prime area within the empire, it would be higher. But this was a middle income cost, roughly 125 (6 gold) for a homestead and farm, middle income. There was certainly cheaper options, and much more expensive ones. The cost of the normal kits like medical kits and climbing kits are I believe 1-4 gold each in the manual, depending on what it is. They should be 20x less expensive roughly 1-4 silver, if they were accurate to reality. DnD, gold is 10-100 times more common than it actually is based on costs. Usually people could afford to buy a home within 2-3 years and have it mostly paid for in cash if they were saving, or double that if they weren’t thrifty. Until the 1960s, the longest mortgage you could get in America was a 7 year mortgage, and those were rare. Most people took the other two options, a 3 or a 5 year. Again, the number is nearly identical to that time period from 2000-2300 years ago. One additional note: King’s ransoms were usually under 1000 gold and the life of a slave cost 40 silver (2 gold). So yeah. DnD currency is probably between 10-100 times inflated over actual historical currency rates. Before coming off the gold standard in 1973, a silver ounce was still worth 1 dollar and a gold ounce was worth 20. That’s been the standard throughout all history before the last 50 years was a roughly 20 to 1 cost. And additionally: most jobs were six days per week or even seven. And 6x52 = 312 silver for an entire years middle income worker. That means a year’s work is worth 15.5 Gold in actual real life currency. Bronze coinage was introduced by Caesar Augustus 2000 years ago, and it was one of the reasons the Roman Empire exploded in prosperity under his reign. Most artisans and blue collar workers would sell their goods for bronze level. Think of a single copper coin as a dollar or two. Bronze coin woiod be the 20-50 dollar equivalent and a silver coin would be a 100-500 dollar equivalent. Then you’ll be closer to what the real monetary value is currently vs what it used to be. - Most super small consumptive goods were bought with copper, and tools, appliances and the like would be bought with bronze.mortgages would be paid in silver. Something like the Taj Mahal or immensely opulent palaces would’ve been made for 1,000 to 10,000 GP and a lot of times, that’s what people get for a single quest at level 12. Lastly, when Alexander conquered Persia and took the vaults, the estimation on how much wealth he got by taking in the wealth of the largest empire was 180,000-250,000 talents of gold. A talent is roughly 60 pounds, which means it’s just under 1000 (960) gold ounces. This was roughly 1/6 maybe an 1/8 of the entire wealth of the world at the time. - This would be equal to 250,000,000 GP (actually a lot less but I’m being very generous. Estimates are that this was worth maybe 11-15 Trillion dollars by today’s standards, which means it’s enough to buy and own the entire EU. 10,000 GP would be in the millions of dollars, 500,000-1,000,000 GP would be billions. And a lot of magical +3 items are valued in the hundreds of thousands of GP in current edition. So, staying at a nice inn would cost 1 silver (100-500 dollars) per night. And a single GP would be closer to 10,000+dollars in today’s currency. You can buy a car (ox) for 1 GP.
So, finally: 1 Silver is unskilled Worker pay per day 4 Silver is upper middle class (skilled worker) and lowest ranked officer soldier pay 6+ Silver is skilled artisan or doctor (Or captain of the Guard or Centurion) pay per day Slave cost = 40 silver or 2 gold Bounty is minimum 40 silver Life of a man was minimum 2 gold. You could have goblins or other vermin worth less per head. Maybe they have to take out a goblin lair and there’s a total of 25 of them. 5 heads per 5 party members and each is worth half a man’s life, so they’d make 100 silver each. Worse criminals like a bandit king, it would be dozens of gold or even a hundred gold, if he’s Robin of Locksley. - So most of the time, the party has to receive at least a bounty cost, or more to make it worth their time. 40 silver is the starting minimum quest costs. A King’s ransom is roughly 1,000g (20,000 SP, About 5-10 million current dollars. You could easily start your own mercantile business for that). - So when you’re working for royalty, you’re likely to be paid in gold, but won’t get close to 1,000 GP unless you saved the king’s life. Or you might get paid 10x that if you take out the neighboring king. So I keep between 2-100g until after level 10. And you can get wild with 10,000g at level 20 by taking out other sovereigns. I like just paying mostly silver to players and when they get gold it’s a rare treat and platinum is straight jaw dropping. Each platinum piece is worth 400 SP, the normal currency. That’s a year’s worth of staying at the inn per piece. You could also buy a better than moderate homestead with acres of land for 1 platinum piece. So really, the only difference is that I would use silver instead of using gold, but my silver would be a bit more valuable than your gold pieces are in this scenario per piece. If your debt was something like 100 GP in a system like this, it would take you till level 10-15 to pay it off. Anyways, fun video.
@rhysproudmourne1646 Thank you, really helpful figures! If it helps add to this, I've been reading the "Little House on the Prairie" series to my daughter, which follows similar costs - the father earns a dollar a day when he works as a farm labourer, the mother charges people 25 cents per meal and for board when they pass through, and the land for their homestead costs 14 dollars to claim title for 160 acres - note that this is for wild prairie, though. Another family is far wealthier and has their own farm already - they raise horses and sell them at $200 dollars each for trained four year olds, plant fields and sell potatoes for a dollar a bushel (60lb) or hay for two dollars a bale, and the father teaches his son about money by suggesting buying a piglet at half a dollar, then raising a litter from that once grown that would each sell for $4-5 once grown. Sub in silver and copper as appropriate.
Indeed, using smaller denominations makes for a far better experience. I generally divide my recommended currency rewards by 10 after determining them, whilst also having custom goods prices such that copper and silver are the most commonly required currencies to purchase things.
@@chrismcclaughry6857 Regarding magic being rare: Magic *items* should be, perhaps, at least for those of Rare or higher quality, though I think it's fine to have magic casters floating around with relative abundance and NPCs + markets occasionally having singular common or uncommon magic items that the players could buy or steal with some difficulty/high price. These should be things which are always significant, coveted, and useful, so that there will either be others who also want them or people who will very much miss an item if it is taken. Occasionally, rulers of nations or famous heroes might have a rare or very rare item, with legendary ones only being in the possession of the most powerful kingdoms or monsters, and then only one. Each such legendary item will be unique for all intents and purposes, and will need a mythic name and story to go with it. Maybe multiple stories.
For most of western history silver was the standard currency metal too! As an example the US dollar, Japanese yen and Chinese Yuan were all introduced at values meant to have the value of Spanish silver dollar coins. And the British Pound was originally the value of a pound of silver (but the silver shilling was the day-to-day coinage until modern times)
This is why I use a converted currency system for my campaigns: 100 copper is 1 silver, 100 silver is 1 gold, and 100 gold is a platinum. It makes it so that a copper piece is basically just a penny that makes up a single dollar (silver), and it didnt make sense to me that gold, this beautiful, austere, symbol of wealth is the "basic unit of currency." So in my games, we basically treat copper as pennies, quarters, and dimes, silver as dollars, gold as hundred dollar bills, and platinum as basically a blank check in terms of rarity and use
I treat gold as 100 dollars and keep it in 10s. A silver is 10 bucks - four silver can buy you a night at a cheap inn, two silver is some decent food. Copper is about a dollar and if something costs money, thats as cheap as it goes.
I love the world of warcraft feel with that. We converted to this system a long time a go. 3.5 and 4e and when 5 came out we decided to go back to game as built cause our friend group changed. Non of us liked it so went back to this system lol
@@aetherkid I really like that idea! If a copper piece is the "dollar" that means it is in a higher circulation than silver, which is in turn in higher circulation than gold. I'm going to borrow that idea for my group if you don't mind. :)
Silver is the common folk's money. If you tell the prices in silver, it makes gold worth more. Players usually loot silver from other creatures and gold in treasures.
Displaying rewards in silver also makes bigger numbers, wich makes the rewards feel more rewarding, especially if you have everything in Silver anyways.
@@plueschhoernchen7550 Yes. It also adds value to the money itself. If you buy a sword and it cost 10 coins, it's cheap, if it costs 100, it's expensive, even if the price is the same with different currencies. It's psychological that bigger numbers add value to the items
Put more emphasis on copper and silver. Make it so poor/most common people do most transactions in copper, and then richer trader/educated people use more silver, and only noble people have easy access to gold. Then it makes it clear that gold is really valuable and any transaction made in gold will feel special. Going in an inn and paying your nights and meals with one gold should make you pass for a rich ass traveller, and put emphasis on the taverner's reaction to seeing a gold, like he doesn't see that often. That, plus setting down the cost of things, should do the trick. That's what we do in the campaigns i play in.
In addition to this: You also limit the store keep and others, dependent on social standings. Don't expect a village inn-keeper to have enough change for that gold piece. Not that they haven't enough funds on hand, they probably do, but they lack the desire to hand over all those coins for a single gold piece. For they will have to deal with the hassle of exchanging them back into coins the locals do actually use. Reverse happens too, having 10,000 coppers will not impress the armorer. Find someone to change it to gold and come back.... peasant.
@@gstreetwunderbar4266 Money changers were important. Not just for foreign currency to the local coin but different denomination as that random fruit vendor being paid with a gold just bought their entire stock, shop space, and they still probably won't have enough change.
One of the main things that threw me was how low the coin values are. 10 Copper = 1 Silver 10 Silver = 1 Gold 10 Gold = 1 Platinum 2 copper = one beer. The village drunk had 5 beers. That's 1 silver. The village drunk does this for 10 days, that's a gold. In a month it's a platinum. It's so easy to jump over to the next tier that it feels silly having 4 levels of money. It's really small numbers which makes it really hard to make the coins feel worth it. I've not really thought too much about it- until I tried running Mad Mage. The idea I had was that the players would go down into the dungeon for fame, riches, magical items and the sort. I started off being like 'Limited items, you have scraps'. They found a magic item or two, went up to the surface where- in the book- they could sell for 50 platinum... they bought the best gear they could then were like 'Wait, is there any reason why we should go back down? We have like... a ton of gold and such...' They've gone back down out of pure 'Well, we want to play the campaign' energy, but it felt kinda weird.
Agreed my man. in my system..... 20 copper = 1 silver 30 Silver = 1 gold I base prices with the real world. Prices are also dictated by location. 1 copper = 50 pence (or around 65 cents) 1 silver = £10 1 gold = £300 So a bag of apples in a village in the countryside might cost 2 coppers, but in the city 2 coppers might get you a single apple. Staying at a basic inn is 2s per night, while a fancy inn might be 20s. A chain hauberk is typically around 1g, a sword 20s. The key is to limit the amount of coin the players are awarded. I tend to give the players enough money for basic living plus about 20%.
If you think of that drunk spending 2cp or $2 USD on each beer (imagine buying a 6pack of beers for $12 which doesn't seem crazy). Then he drinks 5 drinks a night and then doing that 30 times that's $300 he's spent on beer in a month which would be 3gp not a platinum. But I think there are plenty of alcoholics that spend a lot more than $300 a month on alcohol, so it's not crazy.
Nobody is a drunk on 5 beers a night, that would be a fairly temperate individual in a pre-modern society. A drunk is drinking between 12-30 beers a day minimum, less if he's a wino, or liquor drunk though @@alexandergreen9480
@@stuartriddell2461I like to keep the base 10 system for easy math, but I consider a cp to be about a dollar, then add electrum pieces between gold and silver at 1ep=10sp 10ep=1gp, I use platinum pieces, as well as cut gemstones being circulated as a currency for larger denominations. This has the twin advantages of making gold valuable, and allowing for most book prices to be used for adventuring equipment, magic items etc.
I mean if you think of copper as a cent then silver is 10 cents, gold is 1 euro/dollar, 1 platinum is 10 euros/dollars and so on. That makes more sense to me. But you have to make custom prices for almost everything.
In my settings, 1 Copper is about a $1 in purchasing power and I scale up my coins by a factor of 10 (10c = 1s, 10s = 1g, 10g = 1p). Thus, commoners deal in copper and rarely silver, merchants deal in silver and rarely gold, nobles deal in silver and gold, and kingdoms deal in gold and platinum. It helps a lot to think in this scope for my DMing, with the other big element I ask myself is "how much skilled effort went into this product?" Automation has made pricing so much harder to figure out with how much it changed the amount of work we have to do to make things.
That's roughly how we do it in our BECMI campaign as well. I started by telling the players that all the prices in the RC rulebook that referenced gold pieces should be taken as silver pieces instead. Secondly, the weight of the coinage was changed from 10 coins per pound to 50 coins per pound. Platinum coin was dropped completely. So in the end, we had gold coins that for their weight, were about 50 times as valuable as the RAW gold coins, but it didn't really matter since all the treasure in the module went through the same transformations. This made it so that the lead sling bullets were no longer worth their weight in silver. And actually made silver weapons cost something reasonable. Now the other thing I did to keep it more interesting was that I deliberately downgraded the treasure that the PCs would find at low levels, but I would still give them full XP (or rather, I just used milestone advancement, tweaking it a bit between classes to take account the required XP differences). Anyway, the end result was that the party is now on 4th level (started from 1st), and they are still looking for their 'Big Score'. They are relatively well equipped (with normal equipment, plate mails for the fighters and so forth), but they are not brimming with magical gear (I was very aggressively removing all magical weapons from the B modules for levels 1-3; some random bandit would not have a +1 weapon). They are becoming more well-known and they have their little nest egg of investment if they can get their cargo to the next city without incidents, etc.
Perhaps a good place to start is by asking "how much does a common unskilled laborer need to make per day to live"? That would include at least one if not two meals and a roof, with enough left over to replace clothing or crude tools once a month or so. Anything below that amount is 'poor or poverty', and more is moving up the social standing ladder. Then start adding to this by asking what does a "bouncer" or thug or guard make? What does a common soldier make if they enlist? Peasants can subsist on their land, but must yield a portion to their Lord --- what does a parcel of land allow in produce, and how much less spendable cash do peasants have than common laborers, and so on. I think you will find that an economy is better served on a silver standard than a gold standard, and only middle and upper class persons have any gold at all. By the time you work in taxes and tithes, it is easy to see why 100 gold is a lot, and thousands is insanely rich. Also, Skilled Labor and products that result from it (like Armor and such) is expensive, costing tens and hundreds of silvers if not thousands. Financing a standing army is insanely expensive. And so on.
exactly. the player's handbook (under the "lifestyle expenses" section) says that an unskilled laborer needs about 2 silver per day to live. half of that is for housing, and the other half covers food, clothing, and equipment upkeep. the "middle class" spends about 1 gold per day, and "upper middle class" is 2 gold per day. even the wealthy are still only spending 4 gold per day. that's 1460 gold per year, which is still not enough to buy a suit of plate armor (which costs 1500 gold).
I’ve been dming a pirate themed campaign, early in the campaign the party’s Rogue discovered that he was the heir to a kingdom so he fell into wealth. 30-40 thousand gold. A couple sessions later, I gave the party a chance to buy a bigger and stronger ship that cost 18,000 gold. A stronger ship was beneficial to the future of the campaign, so it was rewarding and they enjoyed customizing the ship. The party’s ship is their base of operations, since they’re always traveling (the world is primarily made of islands) so upgrading it felt awesome for them.
@@LevoneMD They named the ship the Songbird (named after the Captain’s Songbird daggers). They are on a journey to find the One Piece, with their own personal goals along the way of course.
It helps to think of copper pieces as dollars and silver as 10 dollars, with gold being the C-notes. I was able to answer questions about what furniture costs (if a cheap couch in real life is $600, that'll be 600 copper, or 6 gold). A cheap beer in D&D is 3 cp, that's close enough.
I think the issue of a gold coin's value is mostly dependent on if you are using the other coin types. If you're only using gold in a campaign, then I agree that one gold =one usd, but if you throw in copper, silver, and platinum, one gold equaling a hundred dollar bill makes more sense.
Gold is VERY important in the TSR editions of D&D( 1e, Basic/Expert, BECMI, 2e). Gold=xp. Its exploration and adventure heavy. Avoiding combat if you can. The players had to work together using their wits to overcome the obstacles and challenges within the world to survive, not your charactersheet. Gold was how you earned those better weapons and armour ( as opposed to starting out with the best weapons and armour), built strongholds, wizard towers, your own lair. Raised armies and conquered territories. When Wotc took over, D&D became an entirely different game altogether. Slaying monsters=xp. It became more of a superhero, combat focused game. Gold=xp completely changes the way the game is played. The D&D versions being played today, are far removed from the game they see being played in Stranger Things, or the golden-era of D&D in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
So a little bit in line with this, a group of mine is playing Pathfinder with the Spheres of Power ruleset, in a homebrew world. Something that we established about the world early (since the DM was letting us players help with the early development of it) was that: 1: The world is largely unexplored/undocumented. There's plenty of crazy shit that exists, especially since spheres gives you so much power to build creatures or antagonists, but very little of it has actually been recorded for in-game knowledge purposes. This means that there's a lot of new discoveries to be had throughout the game. 2: Leveling up isn't easy anymore (depending on your method). We wanted to take the game in a more exploration and discovery angle, and we wanted to emulate some of the wackiness of anime like One Piece, so we reduced the rate at which ANYONE earns XP by fighting monsters down to 1/5th, but we introduced "Celestial Amber". The amber was a special plant the blossoms on the convergence of the world's magical leylines, which move and shift with time. How any given character 'used' the amber to level up was unique to them for the most part, but bushels of the stuff were the main way to gain bunches of experience, since monster-hunting was less effective now. 3: Now, not only was the amber used for leveling up, but it was also used in the creation of majority of magical items. The problem here being that celestial amber loses it's potency after some time (I don't remember the exact time-scale, but it couldn't have been longer than a week at most), meaning that the working of the amber into a project must be done rather quickly, or the amber will lose ALL value, both as a leveling tool you could sell, or as a crafting reagent. This made the game focus on the idea of exploration again, since finding patches of amber was the best way to level up, was a decent way of making money, and allowed for a lot of conflict, as we run into other groups searching for the same bundles, or monsters that are guarding some sprigs, or seeing a bundle through a spyglass at the top of a dangerous mountain climb. This mattered due to the fact that we made it a general rule that those with access to sphere abilities took a suit of boons and drawbacks that made them earn only 50% gold, but they got a bunch of inherent bonuses to things like AC and magical weapon level and such as they level up. So gold became literally someone that characters only need for their own luxuries or interests, instead of for increasing their math.
@gergernzero6904 OH definitely!! I just received a copy of the 2e players handbook. I'm looking at the wizard (mage) progression chart....3,500,000xp required to reach level 20. Years of playing! Starting at 12th level as a Druid, you must defeat another druid as only so many of that level may exist in the world. At 16th level only one Grand Druid can exist. Sounds a little like Highlander. "There can be only one!"
I agree to just equate the coin to your own local currency. However, use copper to the lowest spendable value. So in US a copper is a dollar and a silver is 10 and a gold is 100. Poor places don't reward you in gold, but a reputation or a favor can go a long way. Its easier for my mind to rationalize the gold as a 100 dollars because it makes magic items so much more valuable as they would be. I guess 500 dollars is still pretty expensive though. But I also look at coppers and recognize that they should also be of value so that the party values gold more.
@@sirhanser3523 Oh good not just me then. Also I realized I didn't mention this but a gold being a dollar is crazy because a gold is supposed to represent a days expenses. I don't know about a dollar a day working out on that.
@@9553shadowa beer does not cost 2 cents to be fare it does not cost only 2 dollars either but value of currency shifts coppers as a dollar is not a bad starting point the base 10 exchange does make math easy but I am. Ot sure the limits it imposes are worth the easy math. Particuraly since if you are having trouble with the math just pull out your smart phone and use the calculator. Though if you do change the copper to silver and silver to gold exchange you would need to modify prices but considering you will probaly do this any way if you taking this partvof the game seriously it not going to change much
@@9553shadowsorry I said lowest spendable value meaning the lowest value that can actually get you something. While there are things that cost less than a dollar I think it is better to start with gold and determine the others from there. The PHB explains that a gold is the cost of living a modest life style is 1 gold. If thats the case we can better figure the value of a gold if we calculate the value of our own money in terms of what is considered a modest life style. According to a calculator I found that breaks down average modest life style for New England, the cost is approximately 41k annually and 112 daily (41000/365) I just round this down to 100 bucks and then equate that 100 modest living expense to a 1 gold living expense and so connect a gold coin to a 100 dollar bill. I think this varies significantly based on where you live and the cost of living there, but for me a 100 seams reasonable. This makes more sense when you think about shopping in dnd. We don't pay for food and drinks in gold, unless we have a massive feast. These things are valued in copper or silver. Thinking about it it makes sense, how many apples does it take to equal a gold coin? The answer is a lot! It is far more reasonable to think of this as being a copper. An apple at my own local store can typically be about 2 per pound with each apple waying maybe half a pound i think. That would make an apple cost 1 copper a piece. which I think feels right.
Thank you. This is a helpful discussion. The problem is that there is no economy in DnD. No market values of anything. No real limits on the amount of gold that is circulating. Another solution is to pick a functioning medieval economy, such as the Byzantine Empire. How much could a gold coin purchase? How easy was it to put your hands on a gold coin. I've tried to solve this problem by using "The Silver Standard" and then saying that 100 coppers = 1 silver and 1000 silvers equal 1 gold. In one campaign that I ran, it was understood that only nobility and rich merchant dealt in Gold pieces.
I think the biggest issue with gold prices that i have found is Magic Items. Especially things like potions. "Hello yes i would like to spend hundreds if not thousands of gold on single use items plz"
i agree with that statement. mighty magic items with permanent enchantment should be expensive or without a pricetag, but let potions and scrolls be affordable. even for a peasant that is saving a year or two for a potion of remove sickness in case he needs it for his children.
@@koljaleffek7290 Eh, I'd say make scrolls reusable (and keep them class restricted) while keeping them expensive. Replace them with a consumable classless equivalent, like spell tokens or spell spheres (things like those ninja tools in Boruto that are basically limited-use ninjutsu for non-ninja).
@@DBArtsCreators i would argue against reusable scrolls. either use them as you would use a spellbook when your charakter has the ability to cast this kind of magic, or let anyone use it that can read the scroll. (i love the idea from the khoras setting that there are a few writing systems used for magic, and when you can read them you can use what is written in that system)
@@koljaleffek7290 No real sense in not making scrolls reusable. Just make them require attunement and they provide a method for a character to have more spells 'prepared' than they usually can (the reason why they would be class-restricted - they would require your to have spell slots and to be of the class whose spell list the scroll's spell was derived from). Tokens/spheres would fill the other roll of consumable spells that anyone can utilize (since they'd have no attunement requirement and would have their own 'spell reserve' for their single cast). Can also look to Tasha's Culdron of Everything for Spell Tattoos - make that the third option. They require attunement but don't allow you to use your spell slots for the castings. Instead, they have a handful of charges that are restored on a short or long rest (depending on tattoo), and thus can be attuned to by characters of any class (perhaps some unique ones are class-specific, but the generic spell-tattoo ones wouldn't be).
This is a topic I have struggled with for many years... probably one of the things that bothers me the most about D&D... going all the way back to Treasure Type tables where some monster lairs could randomly contain thousands of gold pieces. That said, while I appreciate your idea and approach, in my opinion, I can foresee an issue with making a gold piece equivalent to a dollar. The trouble with this is that it necessarily scales down silver and copper, which essentially makes those coins valueless - especially after a few levels. I think gold should be in less circulation than silver or copper... this makes gold rarer, as it should be. A serf working in a field shouldn't be paid with gold pieces - that just seems weird to me that peasants are walking around with gold (even if it's only a few coins). If peasants have gold coins, then who is walking around with silver? Children maybe? Then who is walking around with copper? I think it makes more sense to start with copper as the baseline currency, where most shops in a small hamlet almost exclusively have copper in the till save for maybe a few silver pieces. In fact, showing up with gold might create a problem for the store owner as he may not be able to provide change for the gold. I would make gold more common in bigger towns or cities, but in mid-sized towns or smaller, a silver piece might be the most valuable coin a villager has ever seen. Thanks for posting! You've inspired me to try to sort this out for my group (again).
Yeah this was my thought as well. If coppers are your dollar unit and you scale up from there it makes the most sense to me. You drop a gold down at the Fabric merchant and their like I'm not giving change for that.
Exactly. If you say a labourer makes maybe a silver a day, but you make that silver worth 100 copper, then that labourer can actually afford to go to the pub with the 5 copper meal and 1 copper ales. Niw make a gold 100 silver, and suddenly that gold piece is 10,000 copper. Nobody is dropping a gold in a pub. You are also not finding gold as a rookie adventurer solving a goblin raiding problem.
I make sure players always have something to do with that money. It is part of why I love running naval campaigns. Ships cost a fortune, you need to pay your crew, you need supplies. Crafting is heavily encouraged and streamlined. You need to outfit your crew, make repairs...there is always a money sink available to the players.
The way I started handling gold in my 5e games is by requiring pcs to purchase xp at a rate of 1gp per xp (think of it like paying for training). That coupled with domain-level play (excellent suggestion of Strongholds & Followers) has helped balance gold in 5e for my group (we always found that pcs had too much gold and nothing to spend it on).
One big problem is just not having enough opportunities to spend money in many campaigns. I think that it also makes a big deal when it comes to spell-casting components, but also food, lodging, clothes etc.. When a campaign doesn't really pay attention to that sort of stuff, which is quite common, it also means the gold isn't used up very fast & just accumulates. As you touch on later, there aren't so many ways people have to spend money that don't feel cosmetic, but then on the other hand many players get upset when a DM is too crunchy. Another way to get around this is to have a quest to support a poor town/orphanage, or a villain that involves paying off a bribe, or something like that, so that money is leaving the players' hands more often
So true. Unfortunately, it's too easy to take a shortcut in world creation by omitting money consumption and instead, for example, governments, guards, and armies operate for free even if in reality they require money to run. For example, to fix this cities may have gate tolls, bridge tolls, taxes, fire tax, oven tax, protection fees and etc.
My players felt rich. They had a bunch of money from adventuring and came into town to vacation at their mansion and go gambling for a few months of downtime All their money was gone in like two months. Didn't even buy anything- that was just the cost of servants staffing their house and making dinner for guests. "Ten gold a day for 20 servants and booze? I can afford that."
In my game I have an eerie merchant that you can summon (within the next 1-5 work days). He does about anything for money and money is his sole goal. His items cost more due to conviniece fees. He provides whatever service you need but speed and quality of the job is all dependant on your coin purse. My party was handed a stupid 5k gold for saving the daughter of a goldsmith guild's leader. That also entailed some hush money for other reasons. We established that they could retire now. They were rich and good to live a relaxed life for the next few years. But the party still had stuff to do. They ran into the merchant. Afterwards they already spent 3500 gold on items and information gathering services. Once you give a group of players a lot of spending money, make sure there are ways they can burn it and they will burn it. It hasn't been a week since they got that pay check and they are almost broke again.
What I think people forget a lot of the time is that the gold in D&D is a decimal system (meaning that each coin is made of a smaller increment). The porridge at the in doesn't cost 1 gold it costs 1 silver coin. And using the standard ratio of 10:1 for copper, silver and gold keeps things nice.
When you said “you can’t carry that much gold,” then mentioned bills I had a moment where I realized “hey that’s how modern money systems started, bills that represent gold value. Great video!
What I did was scrapped the standard D&D currency, and used medieval British currency based on the pound sterling. The replacement for GP was a Silver Crown, basically the Pound Stirling, which was sterling silver. SP was the Shilling (more copper than silver) CP was the Penny I also had Haypennies (half pennies) and Farthings (quarter pennies). Actual gold was used for the Gold Royal, which was worth 100 Silver Crowns. By the way, I like that you brought up paper money, because the Chinese invented banknotes in the 7th century AD, slowly introducing them until they were widely accepted in the 13th century AD. They had copper coins out the wazoo that were cumbersome to carry around, so these banknotes were printed to be worth rather large sums of coins at a time. At any time, you could exchange these notes at a bank with a processing fee of 1 copper coin per note and receive its value in coin.
There are lot of good references in history to help this. Sun Tzu's art of War, Roman and Jewish writings all closely match on certain values. 1 silver piece was about the equivalent of a day's wage for soldiers, and commoners. IIRC, 1 silver for them was about the equivalent of 1/10 a troy oz of silver in today's units. So for simple terms. 1 silver is a Commoners days wage. Travel is expensive. And like real life, it's cheaper to buy ingredients and stay home than it is to travel and eat out.
I use the 1 gold = 100 bucks exchange rate, but what I do differently is that I don't give my players prices in specific coin types, I give its cost in "coin," which they can pay with whatever currency they have on them. "How much is this book? 15 coin? Alright, here's a silver and 5 copper." Pulling out a shiny gold piece is akin to whipping out a nice crisp Benjamin. When players earn money, I give them the value in coin. I only bother with specific kinds of coins are used if I have a reason to for story or flavor, such as an NPC employer plunking down 1 gold coin for each PC at the table. My players are accustomed to thinking of money in "coin" now and it works great.
I DM for young kids, we started when they were around 6 and the group is now in middle school. Converting gold to dollars was very necessary when DMing for little kids because they don't really appreciate money yet, so introducing a new currency was a non-starter. I decided on $20 for 1 gold. That made a silver $2 and a copper about a quarter. My players could wrap their heads around that. An added bonus was that it required a bit of math so it helped build good mental math skills when they were in grade school. I based my conversion rate on a glance through the equipment table. A lot of the stuff that was listed for one gold was stuff I figured an average person would pay about $20 for. Some of the copper math gets a little fiddly but that's ok. My favorite thing about backing gold with dollars is when I tell my players what their reward will be for a quest and I see them doing the mental math then their faces all light up lol
From Isekai and similar manga, Healers could often cost based on mana potions necessary to recover, unless youre working for same boss Something similar could be in DnD
Also one thing that most DM's neglect in D&D is that most clergy are not clerics and do NOT have spells. That is actually incredibly rare. That village priest wont have magical services. He'll just be a priest, not a cleric. A true Cleric, blessed by the Gods, is a rare thing. Magical services are very rare, and very expensive. And if a Temple has a cleric, they would usually restrict those services from that Cleric to important members of the clergy, or important people that would help bolster the reputation of the Temple.
@@JohnDoe-bf7hb its all fiction and it all differs Most places wont even have a real church if they dont have someone with actual god given powers, i think
@@joe_rival Now that, I also agree with, conceptually (even if the books don't say so): If their gods walk around smiting Melee style & endowing people with supernatural powers, it would start to feel weird to tithe at a temple that hasn't been aided in a while; avatars would probably be pretty busy touring every place of worship? How well favored a site/worshipper is, might even affect which forms of aid are granted... As one of our DMs once said, "There will be a temple, but they may not observe your gods." _To which a party-member, helpfully added: "and if it's a temple to Kelemvor, they may only do funerary rites"!_
One thing you need to do as a DM is make your players spend money after each adventure. Nickel and dime them for every gold piece they have. Make them replace expended gear and give them access to upgrades in gear. Also help them buy or build a base of operations. And charge them for every spoon, chair, attendant, rug and bedsheet. And then after each big treasure hoard, they should expand it and hire more attendants, build more buildings, libraries, churches, temples, towers, etc. etc. Bleed them dry so they need to keep adventuring.
I did some of this in the low levels (1-2), since I wanted it to feel like the PCs were just trying to break into this adventuring business and see if it worked. It didn't help that they were based in a pretty good (but not high-class) inn at the capital, so the prices were somewhat salty. They really needed to look for ways to make some extra coin, look if the equipment of the defeated enemies was worth hauling back for a sale, and so forth. But once they reached 3rd and now 4th level, they are able to demand higher rewards. At that point, the daily costs of food and accommodation start becoming smaller issues. But yeah, if they want to buy horses, or a ship, or start base-building, hiring crew/attendants/guards and so forth, yeah, those would start taking chunks out of their loot. But I think those should be mainly player-driven rather than demanded by the GM. And to be honest, I have better things to do with my life than keep track of every teaspoon the PCs buy. "I drop 100 gold on the furnishings of my bedroom, is it nice?" "Yep, it is very nice, mark it up and let's move on."
Something that requires a bit more math as well but is insanely useful is also having your currency evenly divisible by both 2 and 3. This means that cash can easely be divided by the number of players. And if you still get an uneven number you can always add a pool of cash for the party to facilitate the division. If you got 5 pcs add 1/6th of the rewards to a communal cash pool to pay for room and board for example. Another thing you can do is have them hire the people to help support an adventuring party. In older editions of DnD it was expected that most parties would have hirelings, workers and beasts of burden to help them haul arround their loot. Having these payed workers also helps you keep in mind how much things should cost since their cost of living would be factored in. Basically having your party running an adventuring caravan. Plus the hirelings and workers can easely serve as a diegetic way to keep backup characters for your party. They don't meet a random stranger in the next Tavern to fill in for Lothal the Barbarian. Instead Dave the Angry Woodcutter that's been with the caravan for 3 years and dealt with all the bullshit and adventuring party attracts and is ready to take out all that rage in some meat instead of firewood!
I thought of a base 16. 16 copper = 1 Silver. 8 Silver = 1 Gold. 4 Gold = 1 Platinum. Which makes 1 Gold 128 copper and 1 Platinum 512 copper. This makes it where gold is a lot more rare but useful. Though a base 12 might be better or even a Base 8 for making the economy more grounded. After all, the British pound before the decimalization was base 12 i believe
@@smitty_qw 12 is a little easier so you don't have to bust out a calculator. 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6. That's all you need to know and it's extremely unlikely that you'll have more than 6 players in a party. 5 is the only odd one out(lol) Plus depending on what you want and how you want to flavour it you can be more or less complex in these matters. I'd say lean in the abstraction a bit and have the "denominations" be values of accounting rather than specific coins. This not only makes it easier to keep track of weight if you want to use encumberance with the money, but more importantly let's you flavor the money however you want without having to do a lot of work. 1 copper isn't a literal copper coin, it's a handful of copper coins or a few silver ones. A silver is just the most common expenditure you'll make as a group, sort of like like a shilling. A gold? That's like a whole pound of money, stuff you keep in a little box so you don't loose it. You could even remove platinum entirely depending on how far you take your game. With this kind of approach by the time you reach platinum you'd be dealing with the expenditures of a small polity. There's also the Darklands approach where you say fuck it and just convert it all into coppers so you don't have to keep track of it all.
@@Umcarasemvideo i agree with all of these points. The only reason i consider base 16 was a way of showing how devalued a currency became after an empire fell. I do want to use the 'pieces' as just general terms to introduce my group to more values and the like as currency. So a penny coin could be 1/8 of a copper piece. But I am keeping it simple for now :) Edit: my original purpose was for easy accounting but tldr: this system is for accounting reasons while more lore names and coins can/will be used
@@smitty_qw Makes sense, if you don't mind the sugestions, It might make it a little easier the make things more expensive instead. Basically what would cost 1 silver in a 16 base now costs 1 silver 4 copper instead. That's basically how inflation works anyways and it's pretty intuitive.
Totally agree with this idea. I understand the need to simplify things in a d&d game for speed, but most purchases take place in down time, and gaining wealth feels more rewarding if the currency is set to a more common use standard, and coins given names and even denominations. For example, I divide all gold item costs by 90, and it's becomes the smallest of 3 silver coins. There are also 2 copper denominations and 3 gold coins My "1 gold coin" is that smallest silver coin, and it's value is based on the daily wage of an untrained worker, a coin with a hen on it, called a Henny. Why do I think this is better? Well instead of saying, you've found 50 gold coins (which feels like it means nothing) you might say, you find 20 silver Henny (worth 20 days common wages), 3 silver Grave (the next silver coin worth 15 days wages each) and 1 gold Oxcart (aka an Oscar, the smallest of 3 gold denominations worth 3 months common wages) Consider, it makes flashing a gold coin more enticing. You might find a heavy chest of coins filled with copper Songs (1/10 a Henny) and need to find a money changer. You might need to change your hundreds of heavy silver coins into some traveling gold that you can hide on your person. It always bothered me that finding a gold ring or necklace was dumb, as melting it down it would likely be less gold than a single gold coin in value. Now jewelry is meaningful because you're wearing a gold amount on your finger or neck, and gold is actually worth something.
@@DBArtsCreators Artwork for sure. Jewelry for me still doesn't make sense if the weight of a gold coin (worth conceptually $1) is twice that of a ring, and the ring is supposed to be valued 100x. Makes no sense
@@ghostfaceknuts Makes perfect sense, unless you are trying to claim that absolutely no effort was put into making the jewelry. The only difference between artwork & jewelry is that you can't wear artwork, while jewelry is meant to be worn.
I really love some of the ideas here. My current party, I'm running owns a tavern. And I think it'd be really cool that they could pay golden to upgrade it and stuff.
Don't make gold valuable. Make copper valuable. 300 copper for helping an orphanage. Dinners 15cp, drinks are 7cp, 20cp for a bed or 90cp for a room for 2.
I love the idea of a base, playing Shadowrun our DM gave us a bar as our home base in session 0 and one of my fav memories wasn't even a session just a night when me and the other players were together to work on our characters and learn the rules (the DM was very busy so he wasn't there) and we ended up going into detail about how we run the bar and made me think that would be a cool way to run a game. Owning a business together also is a brilliant way to bind the party they have the one goal that can go any direction.
According to the DND manual an unskilled laborer makes 2sp per day. You can equate this to minimum wage. So using the us minimum wage of 7.25 times 8 hours of work to make a days wage, we get that 2sp = $58 or 1 SP= $29 Given that 1 GP = 10 SP, that would mean that 1 GP = $290.
such a good thought, money in dnd makes zero sense so giving ideas on how to make it make sense is so helpful. Cause if a bowl of porridge is 1gp and a warhorse is 400gp but in real life a bowl of porridge is a few cents and a normal horse can easily be 10,000 dollars that doesn't make a whole lot of sense
I think of gold as 60 dollars, the reason being that it says that a comfortable living is a gold a day, and I think one person can survive on 60 dollars a day (in a world where rent and gas prices)
I'm doing a Curse of Strahd sequel campaign set in a fantasy 1850s type of setting, and it's been fun equating 1850's USD to 5e's system. I've definitely felt the same way you do about currency, and equating it pretty much 1 for 1 to an older value has helped us all understand the local economy better.
Here's the thing about gold in 5E. It's a holdover from earlier editions. To maintain power progression in earlier editions, you needed magic items and they cost a lot of money. Players complained about how frustrating it was to have to be a walking magic shop to remain powerful at higher levels. Responding to that criticism, Wizards designed 5e to focus on making character classes be what makes characters powerful rather than the character gear. The problem is now, if you're not buying gear, what do you do with gold? That's a nut they haven't yet cracked. However, that's why it's a problem. Personally, I find that if you just take out the gold pieces from treasure drops and just give them the art and gems, that fixes the problem.
I just made a carnival last night. They're only level 3, and costs were almost exclusively in copper and silver. They're practically broke now, but they have their basics, a job for more cash lined up, and more importantly, they had an absolute blast and felt it was money well spent. Give your players fun things to buy with their money, and remember that things can also just be experiences!
In my survival horror campaign, I encouraged my players to use their silver pieces to melt down into weapon and armor pieces. Helps keep pockets empty and provides a use all at once.
I've always thought a gold piece was about $20 USD, but honestly, I made that calculation for the first time about 20-25 years ago, so by now maybe $100 is inflation adjusted at this point.
I ran a dnd game set in our real world with parallel fantasy elements and had to do some numbers for this. Using the lifestyle table I concluded that 1 GP = 50 USD. Which worked really well for our table.
A full suit of armor could take a year for a noble to pay for and acquire in medieval times. So full plate in dnd at 1,500gp could represent a years worth of income for a lord. That’s 125gp a month! Realistically any hopes of fulfilling a power fantasy would require an entire kingdom bankrolling you.
@@prophetzarquon1922 True, but to me its more of a timing thing than a likelihood thing. PCs shouldn't have access to that stuff until they have an exceedingly wealthy noble as a patron or if a faction is about to go to all out war. Rescuing an entire town probably wouldn't cut it. I don't think realism plays well with balance if PCs have to wait that long to earn a few thousand gold.
@@OurayTheOwl Oh, I agree; there's definitely no resolving the economics of 5e rationally. In fact, I feel the only reasonable explanation for the pricing described, would be a deity setting fixed prices the way things used to be done in late period Rome. Now, I do think that ending up with entire kingdoms bankrolling you _after some considerable playtime,_ makes a certain kind of sense, if your party is adventuring constantly; that's a lot of power & loot moving all at once. More than one quest in just a couple years, potentially makes for a _lot_ of change effected. But yeah, one party's starting equipment alone costs enough to bankrupt a local lord, & that's before even getting into magic items or 1000gp gems to revive ya with.
Fair point but then what stops our party from looting the suit from some bandit and selling it for a ton of gold? IMO, in a world with magic it shall be much easier to work with metals.
@@alexmin4752 to keep with the analogy, plate is strictly the armor of nobility, a bandit would never be in a suit of armor. Highwaymen, bandits, or brigands would have no reason to go marauding if they could live like a lord by selling it.
This is something I have also struggled with, and so I looked at history. Historically (until about 1950) gold by weight was 20x the cost of silver. In today's values, silver is about $20 US per ounce. So, the D&D silver coin (about 1/3 oz or 10 gm) would be "worth" about $7 US today. In early 1900's USA the average salary was around 25 cents per hour (or one silver quarter for around 1/6 oz). D&D 5e quotes a "laborer salary of 2 Silver pieces per day" or about 20 gm of silver, $15 US for today's silver prices. So, I look at different sizes of coins to make the D&D prices work and make sense. I also reduce the treasure amounts expected from the DM guides. I make the D&D silver piece about the size of a US half dollar (assuming it is not very pure, but quite thin). I give most player costs in Silver piece amounts, but assume there are 1/2 SP silver coins the size of a US quarter. This makes the Gold piece about 1/6 oz, 5gm and the size of a US nickel or UK Pound (and thin). This is similar to a US $5 gold from the year 1911. It is such a small coin that I use it as a value, but when treasure is found I tell players they found gold in 8 gold piece coins (or gold dragons, or whatever flavor for the area they are in). Copper, there is no reason that it is as valuable as a 1/10 silver, so I have made the copper coins large with one Copper Piece the size of a US silver dollar, or UK 50P commemorative coin. I also assume that there are fourths or farthing coins smaller than a full copper piece. I also add details (and sometimes clues) by describing the specific coins that are found (from NPCs or treasure) corresponding to where the coins come from. So I may say "you find 30 in silver, including several 5 silver piece coins with a 2 headed snake on the front side, and curious writing on the back." This allows me to have minimal changes to the published prices, but to treat coins as an active part of the game and not just numbers on the player's sheet.
That’s why I like using copper, silver, gold, and platinum in my games. Breaks up the monotony of just gold based games my players are used to playing. Plus then it sets the tone of the mission on what my players can expect for difficulty.
If you gave 7 players a total of *301* gp, it would come out even. Also, long ago, in Gygax's second frpg, Dangerous Journeys, he suggested what you are. The main currency, whatever you call it, is equal to $1 or whatever. So everything the pc's need is understandable by comparing it to modern prices. And all tech is relative. A horse might cost what a motorcycle costs, a fine sword the same as a gun, and so on. And I should say, originally, D&D wasn't intended to make the pc's rich easily. There were a lot of rules and guidelines for expenses, upkeep, etc. They weren't supposed to just keep it, consequence free. Life is expensive.
Rarely had issues with too much gold... the door kicker party member made sure of that. Started fining the barbarian for every door he kicked to pieces in towns, villages and other places where a door knob was the polite option.
Old school d&d had rules for this. Spell components, especially weird ones cost gold, upkeep and taxes on properties, wages for hirelings, crafting materials, etc. Also, in order to level up, you had to find and hire a trainer to teach you. Paladins had to give most of their wealth to their order/church, rangers could only keep what they could carry, etc. And after all that, if you had too much gold, you become a target for thieves and bad businessmen. Having wealth should just be another way of adding to the game, giving characters another tool to weild power, and another way for the d.m. to lure them into foolhardy adventures in order to protect their hard won gains.
to my table: 1 Copper is 1 Dollar. 1 Silver is 100 Dollars 1 Gold is 10,000 Dollars 1 Platinum is 1,000,000 Dollars. For prices, a basic iron sword is 20 copper, a bowl of porridge and a glass of water is 5 copper. sleeping at the tavern is 5 copper, where as staying in a personal room at a city inn is 1 silver. basically, we made gold valuable, something only the nobles have. so when the King of Boonthracka offers us 10 gold each to kill a Dragon, its life changing money for a task that is basically suicide. side note, we all died to that Dragon.
0:30 Dude, that is 100% on the DM. Apparently most people playing dnd care way more for magic items and stuff than gold but that is tbh not even realistic. Most people care for money and even if they don't focus on making it they still like getting and saving it it. Even adventurers need a rainy day fund once they get too old or too sick or injured (or cursed or something). An adventurer (i.e. anyone going on an adventure regardless of what class, background, etc.) may also lose all or most of their magic items and with a lot of gold you they could buy good replacements. Not to mention adventurers only ever caring about adventure and never about the future is only something PCs without good roleplay do. And then it's money spent and gained, the DM decides this and it's all on the DM whether you get a ton of gold and have to spend very little or if it's the opposite and you constantly struggle to pay the inn fee or buy a single potion Why did you get so much money so easily? Normally making money is really hard and even if you take quests and get paid, do you just luckily stumble upon manageable quests without any competition to drive the rewards down? Cause you'd think in a world with dnd (or other system)classes where people can become super strong that there would be quite a lot of them doing this to make money which means that even small villages may not be desperate and won't be 100 gold but only 25 since even if they'd have to send someone to a bigger city it to fetch an adventurer to do their quest it would only cost them like 40 gold and the only reason the PCs are getting this job is because it's easier for the village, not because the villagers have no one else to turn to. Likewise you'd think magic stuff and even just high quality stuff is expensive. Especially magic items, potions, etc. are balancing out gold received from quests, etc. perfectly because very simply in a world where magic is common enough for magic items and potions to not be insanely expensive people doing the same job as the PCs are common enough for this to not pay overly much. On the other hand in a world where magic is rare and the party can rack in tons of gold from quests as few others are capable of doing the same, magic items and potions are extremely rare and extremely expensive. If it's about money making schemes like a trader it again comes to the DM to deice how successful the players are, how little competition they face. how high the profits are, etc. If you really wanted to make money matter in dnd you'd make a campaign designed to be more realistic and to not heap tons of gold onto the players at every corner because even with no money and a debt, evidently your party obtained huge amounts of gold at every opportunity while having to spend very little.
I ran a Grand Theft Auto RPG campaign once that started with people scamming for sandwiches living in a veterans homeless shelter. 100 sessions later, people were doing multi-million dollar heists to support the fees on their superyacht. One of my favorite campaigns.
I DM for my kids as part of our homeschool. Copper=penny, Silver=nickel, Electrum=dime, Gold=quarter, Platinum=dollar. I know it isn't the most direct crossover, but it works.
With this in mind, I took a look at my game and the extended shop list I'm using and the rewards in the modules and decided on 1 GP = 5 USD. It already feels more intuitive to look at. We do use CP and SP (and at least acknowledge EP) and simple shop items like candles or cups costing a few nickels works out
I like using silver a the base $1 currency. The stronghold idea is really great and I have done that before. I made a spreadsheet with lots of upgrade options for the castle and lands they acquired though each upgrade also had an upkeep cost associated with it. The book you mentioned Strongholds and Followers influenced how I did things as it is a great resource but I mostly did my own thing.
When a friend and I ran D&D (later known as AD&D) gold was extremely rare, as rare as a +2 magic items. We also studied the economics of the Medieval age. Silver pieces were rare while copper was common. Mostly, characters were paid in copper, sometimes silver. Thieves were everywhere! So "when" characters suddenly had wealth, well it didn't stay safe for long! Royalty believed wealth belongs with them too. And yes, cost of living isn't cheap, and SAFE place to sleep cost way more!!
in our campains (usually low level) the rewards for quests are usually smaller and differ from the quest provider (an orphanage would give no more than 10 gold, maybe even ask for free), while it is quite easy to talk a drunken lord into a 500 gold reward.
I came up with the same number some years ago that 1 gold is $100, although my friend prefers $50 and that works well for him. I use a system for leveling up that uses gold and downtime to train to level up and that makes gold way more important. It also becomes way more important to give the players important events that if they spend a ton of time and gold leveling the villains will take advantage. I like it a lot.
Quick note from the player's Handbook. A skilled hireling earns 2 gold per day of work. To me, this means a gold piece is worth half of whatever you consider to be a skilled person to earn in one day. Let's assume someone earns $15 an hour (just to use a number). In an 8 hour work day, they earned $120. In D&D 5e, this would mean 1 gold is worth about $60. Just one way to look at it
One loaf of bread is 2copper in 5e. An average loaf of bread in the US is $3.99 so we will round to $4. So 1 Copper is $2. 100 copper = 1 gold. 2x100 = 200. So, 1 gold is approximately equal to $200. See, gold in DND 5e fluctuates. If I wanted to buy a full suit of armor (plate) it would be around $3,000. In 5e that same suit of armor would cost 1,500 gold. 1,500x200=300,000. It is very hard to find the absolute value of things in a fictional world when the pricing is not stagnate. I personally make up the prices of everything everywhere the party goes so it adds an economy to the game that differs from city to city.
The moment you mentioned fantasy setting ≠ medieval context was a clear call on worldbuilding and lore. Obviously an economy will run very different than the standard "precious metal is valuable bc is called precious metal for a reason, duh". The original Fallout games handled well it with the bottle caps being actually tokens used to exchange with pure water in the purification plant that basically was assuming the role of a Central Bank. Water was an universal necessity so the ones capitalizing it were able to stablish an actual "barter economy" with a currency everyone could use (bottle caps). In my fantasy setting everyone lives in living mountains (+2000km stone titans) that produce mineral resources naturally but the industry is rampant and the military even more so offer and demand is constant. The economy now runs by gold and platinum as currency bc those are the most used metals, so the "neutral mountains" can trade with the belic ones for their technology and, sometimes, protection; meanwhile those powerful use their "savings" (overaccumulated gold/platinum) to purchase food/materials and hire working labour from the non-belligerent (a nearly perfect cycle). The economy is regulated by an alliance of guilds around the continent processing most of the gold/platinum to turn it into coins and ingots, guaranteeing their purity and weight, then publishing exchange and price charts according to the current monetary mass, productivity and demand.
My friends and I all agreed that we didn’t want to roleplay/gamify financial struggles since we do that shit in real life every day hahaha We keep money relatively abstract in our ttrpgs.
I actually changed the money system a little bit. I changed the lowest type of coin from a copper piece to a nickel (which is just a smaller, thinner piece of copper), then the second most valuable coin is copper, followed by silver (which is what the base value of most things is calculated in for trade purposes, rather than gold), then gold (which is a relatively rare sight), and finally platinum (which is a type of coin only really seen by the elite). I then just divided the price of everything by ten and lowered rewards accordingly. I also introduced more lower level magic cheap magic items along with used armour and weapons. My players will still get rich eventually, but it's a little more of a struggle, and the elite feel richer by comparison.
I personally love Campaigns that utilize copper and silver peices. Gold is a day labor for a skilled Artesian. That's about $200 dollars US a peice. It's also nice to have a bank systems in your games.
If you want gold to matter, introduce your characters to merchants with useful magic items on sale. Yes, it can be that simple a solution. Old-school parties would go adventuring to get gold and valuables to resell in order to buy the new shiny items. It'd become a quest loop.
As someone that plays in a much lower-magic Greyhawk game, setting gold to $100 and copper to $1 is the way to go about it. The vast majority of places your party is going to go is a small town of 500 people that has at most 10 gold per NPC (including children); more expensive things are simply beyond their means unless they're in positions of privilege or stored their wealth over a long time with no one to spend it on. At the same time, you never need to floor your party with 5-gold cups of ale because again, you know roughly what things cost: a single can of Budweiser or Pabst will be some watery 5-copper swill-ale, the good stuff is pushing a silver or even two, and the top-shelf gourmet whiskeys and such will be in the multiple-gold ranges. Veggies are generally cheaper than meat, but some places will have more meat than veggies based on where they are and what they produce. This doesn't stop hundreds and thousands of gold from becoming relatively worthless in the long run though. The big trick lots of people forget is that Gygax was a puzzle man, he wanted things to make sense. His young dragon harassing the starting town wouldn't have a hoard of 500 gold coins, because that would fit in a single sack and wouldn't look very impressive splayed around to sleep on. The dragon would have 500 gold-worth of copper and silver pieces, meats fresh and dried, maybe even some jewelry, weapons, or a suit of armor, because that's what the townspeople had to be stolen from them in the first place. At the same time, by removing the medium of money as an easy means of transporting wealth, your party drowning in money will require thought, effort, and luck to actually retrieve in the first place; getting that suit of Scale Mail back to town without wearing it is 45 lbs of weight for 50 gold of value. As another example from a converted module I ran, it lists a pure-ivory statue of a Naga, valued at 3k gold, but weighs 10k gold (which at 1 lb/50 coins, is still 200 lbs that won't fit in a bag of holding). It is a massive slab of dentine and collagen, and any damage that befalls it while removing it from the dungeon will tank the item's value. You also have to find someone rich and weird enough to actually want to pay $300,000 for a statue of a human-faced snake monster, and that someone will absolutely not be anywhere near the dungeon you pulled out from. So with hoards that are that low in value and that unwieldy, you're not going to be gaining wealth very quickly. Additionally, Gygax built a gold sink into the level-up system. In order to become more skilled, your characters had to be instructed, and those instructors required payment because they need to eat too. As such, when you eventually did get your fat stacks of loot, they were immediately consumed by the need to improve your skillset, purchase a base of operations, hire NPCs to maintain said base of operations (you don't want to get burgled) and/or pay the NPC hirelings you brought with you (with hazard pay!) Don't have a base of operations? You're still going to have to pay for food and lodging, with variable cost between running a business and how much the townsfolk appreciate your services. You'll be there for a while as well. Without a Cleric you only heal 1hp/day, so getting back up from 1 to your max of 15 will set you back two week's worth of daily expenses. Forget going shopping for magic items at that point. You'll have to ask the blacksmith in town if he can put aside most of his projects (or push them onto his kid) to start building a single mundane weapon for you guys, since that's a good lot of effort to make something durable enough to be worth $1,500 worth of 15 gold like the PHB says. Forget getting something like a Bag of Holding or a Flame-Tongue Greatsword anywhere besides prying it from something's cold, dead hands, likely after they already used it against you. Now I'm not saying to go full edition reversal, just have the NPCs match their means and maybe be a bit shrewd. Again, the orphanage won't have much money to spare for clearing out their rat problem. The town won't be able to give you enough money to buy a castle, but they might be willing to build you guys a small fort over the course of a few months. Money doesn't show up in ways that make it easy to use, when it does there's not a lot of it, and getting it easy to use will require finding and hiring a merchant, banker, or exchequer to convert your treasure into what you want it to be. The level 5 Cleric NPC has a lot of responsibilities and would like a donation to their church in order to make arrangements for things to continue in their absence. Getting the Archmage NPC to cast a single spell for you sellswords will require a service of your ability for a duration worth the power of the spell. My party needed a homebrew material to upgrade one of their weapons, and the only way to get it was with multiple uses of the Flame Strike spell. They had a Cleric of their own, but he could only cast it twice a day out of a necessary 7, and so they had to go to the capitol to find a Cleric of a high enough level. They didn't want to dip into their funds, and instead temporarily sold their currently-popular likeness rights in order to balance out her having to both join in casting spells and also procure expensive spell scrolls to make up the difference (as she was also only about party-strength). The party has since had to roleplay interacting with fanatics that want their merchandise marked, it's hilarious. They also previously helped out said capitol with an Orc invasion (that they instigated) and were rewarded for their taking responsibility, valorous leadership to prevent loss of life, and initiative in funding those few widowed and orphaned by the battle, not in coin but with knightly titles and a base they've yet to visit. I get to call them "Sire" and annoy them into humility when they just want to be seen as comrades instead of cool people, as well as get folks traveling from the starting town asking when they intend on finally swinging by. They recovered a dragon's hoard of dyes and other trade goods for a nobleman, who gave them no payment for its return and whose wife is going to send them a care package of good clothes and foodstuffs with an apology as the nobleman is preoccupied with a quest hook for them. It really makes the economy feel like an exchange of goods and services instead of a shopping list, and it makes roleplay opportunities.
I use gold as a 'universal spell component'. If a spell needs an item to be cast, you can substitute it for the item cost x spell level gold. The gold is destroyed by the casting.
Three things I suggest: keep prices in gold but only hand out silver (1 sp instead of 1 gp). Make leveling up something you have to pay for (say 50 to 100 gp/lvl). That way a reward might actually be to be given a trainer without having to pay for her next time you level up.
The easiest way I find to make currency have more value is to have overly powerful shopkeepers who are hard (but not impossible) to steal from stocking some of the best gear the players will want. Have them doing quests and looting dungeons to earn money to buy the gear, rather than their main source of high level equipment and enchanted items being found at the end of dungeons and stories. The players can see what they want from the moment they browse a shop, they can try to haggle for it, they can try to steal it, or they can work towards buying it. An OP shopkeeper discourages alternative means of acquisition while they're low-level, but players can still try their luck. They have choice, but they're encouraged to grind a little and feel like they earned it.
A few notes on the historical value of coins: This is not really compatible with the official D&D coinage system, but it explains where the idea of 1GP = $100 comes from. The US$ is based on the Spanish Peso, which was 1 ounce of Silver. Historically, this was quite a lot of money. The Peso was subdivided into 8 parts. (Hence: Piece of Eight) So if you're looking for an equivalent to one modern-day US$, you should probably use ⅛ of a silver piece. For many centuries of human history, the conversion rate of silver to gold has been somewhere close to 15/1. So 1GP would be worth 15 x 8 = 120 modern-day dollars. Now, the actual value of silver and gold in any given world greatly depends on how much of each commodity is available. D&D sets the conversation rate at 10/1, which should mean that either gold is much more abundant, or silver is much rarer than in our world. In either case, the purchasing power of 1GP should still be much more than $1.
sinks are super important. not just for pen and paper but for any kind of game. Because players (and npcs) generate resources out of thin air. Once in a while there have to be upkeep costs. They need to have food, starving for a while should have lasting negative effects. Armor and Weapons need to be repaired (tampered, re-grinded, ...). Even sorcerers should have some form of resource they need to restock (be it mana-potions, herbs or whatsoever). yeah, they might get 30 gold per person for a quest. But that quest took them 2 days, eating for two days at 2 gold each day. The Warriors shield has craked and needs to be either replaced or fixed. The roques has his lockpicking tools broken. The druid lost his right boot (can now decide to buy a new pair or run around with two different boots :) ), .... so in the end to total earn per person will be more like 10-15 gold. Also, give them opportunities early to take loans. Yeah, you can have this nice sword... oh you can't afford it, what about... take it now, pay later. interest rate is 3-6% per day (rounded up each day). If they don't pay for a while, send thugs after them (that either take what they have as a partial payment, or fight them (even if the party has luck and the thugs lose, they flee)), sued by law (guards, prison, ....), .... this makes the players think about taking the loan, calculating how many days it will require to earn the money back, where a misjudgment means they maybe need to do one more scenario, increasing the loan further.
I do: 4 copper to a Silver. 20 silver to a Gold. A copper piece is a day's food, a day's wages, or a meal and night at a tavern. It being equal pay and expense for most per day really gives the hand-to-mouth poor a good feel. Two copper is unlimited drinks at the tavern for a night; (the cheap stuff.) So a copper is roughly a 10$ bill. Barter, legers, and haggling cover change if necessary. Copper is also physically worthless - it is all FIAT currency backed by guilds and local lords, so one town's copper tokens might not trade the same rate in another. A silver is roughly a $50. This is the highest denomination a shop-keep might have, and is DE-FACTO value, so it trades by weight everywhere. This also means size matters. It's prone to overspending, since basic merchants have a 50% chance of not having silver change, and having to settle in local (copper) scrip, or barter. Pickpockets love it. A gold is about $1000. This is used for buying houses, weapons, and payments between lords and governments. In the USA a new, Military-ish rifle usually costs about 1-2k dollars, but can go into the tens of thousands for automatic weapons, or high-end optics. Same with swords, and military weapons in my games. First you need a license, then it's a gold base, and double the price for every added +1 bonus. Gold will also attract armed thieves and bandits if you show it off too much. For you it's a +2 Mace. For them, it's almost a year of food, booze, and shelter if their mates don't slit their throat for it on the way home. Edit: It also gives a sense of what the origin of a given treasure is at a notice. Several trunks of copper coins - Local taxes, probably. Someone will be looking for this. A small chest of silver - An expensive purchase by a well-to do individual. You're probably off scott-free. A cartload of gold coins - Funds for a war, or a kingdom's ransom to a True Dragon. "Did you just rip off the FEDS MAN!?" (Unlimited money, but also practically unspendable. Would be an entire adventure trying to launder it without attracting deadly amounts of attention.)
Depending on the fantasy setting but the economy is always super broken. A gold per day is considered very good living standard costs and also yeah is 100 coppers. I do what you do, I treat gold as though it were $1.00 per gold piece. It’s understandable and now that 50 gold light heal potion or 1,500 gold platemail makes sense to modern players.
I have local currencies, the silver from one lord can be more valuable than another lords, or that Dimas coins are not welcome here, so the party had to find a blacksmith to melt the coin so someone can accept it, but later outside the town they would encounter an NPC that only accepts the Dimas coins in exchange for information.
I have always played with fantasy economies being two-tier. Gold is the bottom tier, it's the currency of the masses. So even large sums of gold may be useful if you are trying to raise an army or build a castle, or for an adventurer to commission masterwork arms and armor. But you're unlikely to find anyone who is willing to part with magic items (beyond the lowest level consumables such as potions) for gold, at least not at prices that are highly inflated. So when it comes to the really valuable items that adventurers actually want, these items are basically the top tier, where a barter economy exists, or an economy of rare materials that are necessary to craft magic items can sometimes substitute.
Easiest way to figure out the conversion between any two types of money, is to look at the cost of bread in the nations that that money is used. In the US, on average, a loaf of bread is roughly 2 dollars. So, the way you figure out DND’s monetary equivalent, is to look at what the players handbook says a loaf of bread cost. And then just figure out the conversion between the two.
In my D&D, the financial system is so well balanced, that this is session 20 and their entire fortune consists of 40 silver coins called hrivna, 20 iron coins called grajciar and a pouch full of rings. They actuall just last session lost that as they are captive. It is entirely homebrew and in my fantasy world that i´m writing a book in. The only time they´ve even seen gold was like for 1 minute.
Simple solution is to make gold a requirement for leveling up. 1 xp = 1 gold piece for leveling purposes. Every dnd enemy has xp, so give rewards from quest givers for a certain amount of enemies slain. Treasure has monetary value, so provide that exchange after every session-tabulate what in your prep the group got and what they missed and give them the gold budget. You’ll be the “bank” for their earnings in the game, which will keep them coming back for more! Players can’t hoard their gold without harming their leveling, and players are incentivized to dungeon delve to train for higher levels. Gold must be spent to level-wizards take classes, warlocks pay their patrons, clerics donate, barbarians carouse on the town and fighters pay for training and armor maintenance. Thieves pay their boss's boss and pocket a bit on the side if they can sneak it. Another important part is not just having a “base” but having an impact on the community. You’re a paladin? Your gold helps buy soldiers to protect the town where you are. Thieves have guilds, monks have monasteries, and wizards can be patrons of libraries. All of these can have in-game benefits of course, but the real goal is to make your players feel like they are becoming part of the fabric of the community.
In my system a full gold piece is worth 500 dollars and is used only by the wealthiest individuals. Most people use bits or pieces of 8 which are gold or silver coins cut into 8 pieces so the pieces are fairly small copper pieces are used more like the dollar bill and farthings (8th of copper pieces) act as your "change"
I would definitely like to revamp the economy in my games, because the value of a gold piece is honestly all over the place, even from the purchasing side alone. One gold piece buys a goat or a set of dice. What the game states, though, is that people typically deal in silver more so than gold, so I think I’d make silver pieces the dollar equivalent with prices reflective of times when the US dollar was actually backed by something (either gold or silver depending on the era).
When lucky enough to play at a table, I make higher level currency physical tokens at the table (Sliver, Gold, Platinum). Then I even have Copper and Iron pieces, so 1 Iron Piece is like $1, and 1 Copper Piece is like $100, and 1 Silver Piece is like 100 Copper Pieces, and 1 Gold is like 100 Silver pieces, and 1 Platinum is 1,000 Gold Pieces. So, if a player gets to hold a physical Platinum Coin (metal token) in their hand, and they know it equals in this world $1,000,000,000, things can get pretty crazy. This means you have to make higher currency super rare. You can adjust the zeros down to make it a little more reasonable, or get rid of Iron Pieces, but you get the idea.
I have studied money and to simplify the concept, when copper, silver, gold and platinum coins are used as money based on their weight, then their value is tied to what those metals would buy in the marketplace as commodities (the same as swords, bread, etc.) Since these metals tend to hold relative to each other over time, I use their real world relation for D&D and throw the rulebook values and correspondents out the window. A one ounce silver coin from any location can buy a whole chicken or steak dinner (around $20 more or less). A one ounce copper coins is about a 1/100th of that so $0.20, (100 copper = 1 silver). A one ounce gold around is $2000 or 100 Silver coins, and a one platinum coin is $1000 or 50 silver. Then price the value of items in terms of their equivalent values. I do not allow the use of paper money because in most of the world, that wasn't a thing until the 18th century (there are historical exceptions but always lead to inflation and hyper-inflation). I don't use electrum since that is an alloy of silver and gold and would therefore vary in vale depending on what ratio was used by the minter and that just makes it more complicated because that realistically could vary by location. But this puts the value of the coins in real relation to each other and provides corresponding dollar values to make it familiar to our modern unbacked fiat money. I do allow a form of check though, but the Adventurers have to take it to the treasury of the town where the metal coins are being held and withdraw it or transfer it into their account at that location or open an account if they don't have one. to transfer money to a different location without the adventurer's withdrawing it, requires a wax-sealed letter from them using a signet ring obtained from the treasury and they have to wait the appropriate time for he letter to arrive at the treasury and then for the treasury to physically move the coin to the new location at a different treasury. Definitely not the speed of modern EFT transactions.
Currently a 5th level party with no magic items and 112 gold between the 5 of us. Our forge cleric made us a cart piece by piece over a number of sessions, and we are using a tamed giant scorpion to pull it through the dessert
Some additional complications to make gold feel important: 1 play other system: or at least read them. Red Markets is an independently designed rpg specifically about making money matter (and also zombies, but those aren't important). Instead of counting every coin or tracking every exchange, it uses an abstract concept of Bounty to track monthly expenses. 1 Bounty = 1 month survival. So buying a gun for 3 Bounty translates directly to selling 3 months of your life for a weapon. You could easily homebrew something based on that concept to fit your table. 2 the Breaking Bad problem: what good is having piles and piles of money if you can't spend it? Maybe the PCs have a reputation so no one will trade with then, so a shop who will deal with them becomes a quest reward. 3 the post-WW1 Germany problem: the PCs are (or were very recently) very rich, but the fantasy economy has crashed, so commodities cost 100x or 1,000x more in gold pieces (or you can better 4 the Conquistador problem; the PCs are in an area where the culture doesn't value gold as a currency. What DOES this society is instead of gold, and how do your players acquire it?
We play Savage Worlds, but same concept. I had a campaign based on the Hundred Years war. The characters started off as surviving low level mercenaries on the side of a victorious, but costly, battle. I had wages for various types of mercenaries (common foot soldiers, bowmen, etc) and that's what they got. They were looting corpses for equipment early on. By the end of the campaign, they were variously high ranking church members, nobles, etc. Still, money mattered because the higher they rose socially the more financial responsibility they had. You're a duke? Cool. You make money from your lands, but you owe your leige lord taxes and must pay for men at arms 3 months a year. Don't forget your 10% to the church. Your border fortress needs upkeep or you'll be at a disadvantage against your neighbor. Bandits hit one of your granaries, raise your own troopw or hire mercenaries? King of Cyprus needs you to provide troops for this battle and you have to pay for naval transport. You're a little short? No problem, Italian banker at the port will lend you money at 15%. It was one of my groups favorite campaigns because the progress was more than just 'get stronger, hit bigger monsters'. The social and economic advancement became very rewarding. And crushing when a member crit failed a persuasion role with an archbishop about to get him a cherry priory for his lands... :D
Before watching the video, here's what I'd do: Give yourself a CLEAR comparison. One of the biggest issues is not "feeling" the worth of money in the campaign. That said, if I were to use a Gold/Silver/Copper system, then I'd just do it like this: 1 Copper (c) = 1 Cent 1 Silver (s) = $1 (100 cents) = 100 Coppers (AKA 100 Cents) 1 Gold (g) = $100 = 100 Silver = $100 So I'd use this, and think to myself "How much would this cost irl?", and apply that price. And I'd only change the price of stuff that I think would have just a different value in a medieval/fantasy setting. For example, food is more difficult to come by to, so naturally its price would be higher. I could test it out, and increase the price of food by 20%, for starters. So, something that you'd need $1 for would be $1.20, AKA 1 Silver and 20 Copper (or 120 Copper). I'd also add Exchange Offices, so that you find value in having change, and sometimes wanting more of it. (ofc, if I wanna go a bit more in-depth) Granted, it would be a base idea, but it's not a bad starting point. And it works better than just giving a bare approximation. Additionally, you can always take into account several factors: 1. IRL, we pay for so much shit, so we almost never get 100% of our salaries for just ourselves, and our fun, as a lot of it goes on bills, food, taxes, etc., so you can always make that more of a thing; 2. Another thing that never seems to matter is "having a home". You can always just sleep in a barn, or a Tavern, and not care. Taverns should be ripping you off as much as a Hotel would. Or at least close enough (since maybe a Medieval time would have more people who have no homes, but can find a job easier than people nowadays, since anyone can do pure physical labour). So either make Taverns cost more per night, so your character goes there ONLY IF THEY HAVE TO, or to just get themselves an actual house of sorts. (which is not as interesting in DnD, since you can't really have an easy visual on your home, to decorate it in your free time, but still) 3. Following No. 2, make it harder for your characters to just...sleep outside. Add guards that shoo people off the streets, or add a looming presence that haunts the nights. Make it so that your characters would PREFER to avoid sleeping outside at night. (or if they want to, they have to try harder at it, like actually spending some time finding a proper spot where they can't be easily found by guards, etc.) 4. If you use the similar comparison method I brought up above, make sure to think more about salaries for jobs. If you get paid, let's say, 50 gold for a job for one day, then that would be equivalent to getting $5000. For one day. Nuts, right? Whereas getting paid hourly, like, $3-$5 would make more sense (for some sort of minimum wage, depending on where you live), so in 8 hours, you'd make between $24-$40, which would be like 24s-40s. (s = silver) 5. Having only Gold doesn't work as well, since there's definitely things that would feel like being worth in smaller increments. And also, it makes Gold abundant, being the only currency that's even used, thus leading to a form of inflation. So no wonder it "feels" like 50 gold isn't a lot. But if you used other smaller currencies next to it, like Silver and Copper, then you make it just easier for yourself, since you don't have to put food at like 1-2 gold, but you can go even smaller, and go for Copper values, and such, thus giving Gold "more value" in a player's mind. (note, having a Gold/Silver/Copper system isn't the only one you should have 100%, like, you can come up with your own! But this one is something a lot of people know, especially from stuff like WoW, and such! Witcher uses Doucats, Crowns, Demerits, etc, which differ from region to region, so you can play with that too, and give more importance to Exchange Offices as well!) There's probably more, but this is off the top of my mind! Now, I'll watch the video, and see your points, to check if any coincide (pun unintended, but self-appreciated), for funsies. And I'll add my thoughts on it as an edit at the bottom! Tho, no matter what, having a proper comparison makes the WORLD of difference. WATCHING EDITS: -Okay, so, I WAS expecting something akin to mentioning the comparison to irl currency. But I didn't really except stuff like "what gold would be worth" to be reaching a similar amount, which is cool! -On your note of "5 players get 300 gold, to spread amongst themselves for a job", I just wanna note that it may feel a bit more "satisfying" if players are paid "per person", and not "here's this money that you'll feel worse about because there's more of ya". They'd probs feel better if you started off with "This job is worth 60g a day, per person.", and then they do it, and get 60g, which feels better than being told "It's 300g in general, so if you do it alone, there's more for you than if you did it with people". You can make some exceptions, for people who just need some kind of job done, like "slaying a monster for revenge on their family members who were killed by it", but only have a certain amount of money, so they'd give it all, no matter who does it, and how many people do it. -Mentioning the "clerics can heal you, etc, it's a high-fantasy" is a very good point! Again, like I mentioned, some things have different values in a medieval/fantasy setting. Tho, while clerics can heal you, at the end of the day, they are the only ones that CAN do it completely, with no downsides, whereas going to a doctor would help, but couldn't just magically make you fully healed, with no diseases, ailments, etc. So one could make a setting where Clerics demand a HIGH price for their services, BECAUSE they are usually the only ones who can do it. (and if you have a Cleric in your party who wants to do good deeds, and heals people for free, it could literally backfire by making the church go after them, because they're literally disrupting the system they've built, thus adding an interesting new problem that arose from doing good) -On one hand, yes, the Player Party is composed of, effectively, often superhero-esque beings, so they'd make money easier than your average farmer, etc. But they also often start off being lvl 1 superhero-esque beings. Maybe even in a world with an Adventurer's Guild, where they're even surrounded by people who are like them. Such Guilds are always a fun thing to play around with, tho, and their existence usually makes sense, since such a world is filled with dangers that your average person can't handle. So they need people who can handle them. So one would think that there would come a point where there's a decent amount of Adventurers. Or, you could have a similar plotpoint, like in One Punch Man, where the monsters just kinda keep getting so much more powerful that the casual C or E class heroes feel no different than police officers, or even anything below high A class, because huge numbers and power of heroes give rise to stronger monsters, because of their need to survive, and overcome. Tho, that's just a random mention. But could always be an opportunity for a new event to throw at your players! So far the things I wanted to comment on the most. All in all, a great video, and a fantastically good talking point! I've had my fair share of getting to a point where I have too much Gold for anything, ABSURDLY quickly. Getting rich can be fun and exciting, and rewarding as well. But, like, around in 80-90% of the campaign's completion. Not within the first 5-10%. Just loses its charm.
I saw that reddit post and it's not really correct in many of it's assumptions. Mainly in the fact of it's based on the cost of goods, but not on the buying power of money and salaries. There was a great comment to it though, from 5 years ago by deleted account (it has a table in it), which came to 20$ per gp. I personally prefer 10$ since it makes it easier to track, but still, 100$ is waaay too much. And your solution work too! Just making it as valuable as you need so that everyone understands what you are talking about is a great solution.
been doing 1 gp = $1 has been a great move just like you stated. I would add having a monthly maintenance fee or taxes via king city as also another way outlet for the players funds.
I like the idea of giving players outlets for excess cash. I had one of my characters buy gems with excess gold because they were easier to carry around and had a fun gravity to them.
I once did some math about it myself, and according to the PHB, "A skilled (but not exceptional) artisan can earn one gold piece a day." Also according to the PHB, 1 gold piece a day gets you a "modest lifestyle", which is normally being lived by, "soldiers with families, laborers, students, priests..." and puts them in poorer neighborhoods, which I took to be right about the threshold between upper poor and lower middle class or so, which is about $28k a year. $28k a year is about what a person makes for $15 an hour for an 8 hour day, which comes to $120 per day, which these days affords about the modest lifestyle described from my experience. I think the disconnect is that you're looking at gold pieces as what the commonfolk would use as $1's or $10's when the book describes them as $100's. Commonfolk aren't buying meals with gold, they're using copper ($1's) or silver ($10's). It's probably not wrong to think that most commonfolk only have a couple of gold pieces as savings, and most of their expenses are paid with silver because that's what they get paid in. I agree that a regular orphanage wouldn't pay a group 100 gold to help because that's an absurd amount of money for them to have, and if a single person is paying 5 gold for an overnight stay at an inn, you're paying for a night at an aristocratic inn and leaving a 1 gold tip. Aristocratic is the highest wealth class there is, mostly composed of politicians, guild leaders, high priests, and nobility. 2 people staying at a modest inn would be charged 1 gold ($100) for a day. I admit I don't stay at hotels, well, ever, but $60 to $100 is the average hotel daily stay in my area. A comfortable inn stay is 8 silver per night per person, so 5 gold for 5 players to stay at the inn would cover the night with a tip. The biggest groups that deal with large amounts of gold as described are guilds, military, and governments, and they're the only ones that could afford to have major bounties. A small village might be able to cobble together 20 to 50 gold (in silver pieces) for a bounty, but that's the village leader going around to all the families to get the coin together in the hope that some person or group that can handle the danger comes along to accept the bounty. Coming back to the orphanage, depending on the problem, it wouldn't be the orphanage that pays 100 gold, since it's likely to be a public building anyway, but it would be the government paying 100 gold to deal with a problem that sending the city guard either hasn't worked or is too dangerous for standard guards to have a hope at. In conclusion, low level characters should be far more accustomed to be being paid and paying in copper or silver, and then move up to gold as they level up and can take on much more serious threats that the big 3 would actually put bounties on rather than throw their own men at. I think devaluing gold to being worth $1 not only makes copper or silver completely worthless (which many might not care about, depending on what you're going for), but how much more does gold cheapen as the characters get higher and higher in level? Are there million gold piece bounties? Do ancient dragons have hoards of billions of gold coins? Establishing the worth of a gold as being worth $100 is mostly a DM's narrative responsibility (players need to go along with it, of course), and is far more important at early levels when the characters should be dealing with a lot more copper and silver. Finding inns lower level characters can afford might lead them to only being able to afford poor inns (1 silver a day), and they need to deal with violence, crime, and disease, or they might need to go down to squalid (7 copper a day), where the guards likely won't even help if their stuff gets stolen because the guards tend to avoid that area.
DND isn’t actually a game about Hero’s fighting ancient evils and saving the realms, or demigods leaping into domain of demons and gods to do endless epic battle. DND is about making ends meet, a commoner uses copper pieces if they use coinage at all, a knight from the capital would put a silver piece on the table and heads will turn. A noble leaves home for an indeterminate amount of time with 10 gold pieces of value and considers it sufficient. Also, you have materials, spell components, roguish tools, the standard issue collapsible 10 ft pole. You have to pay for and carry everything you need or you will die of starvation a failed adventurer. And once you reach a point where you aren’t worrying about where your next meal is coming from, then you can worry about the world.
Hey everybody,
First of all, thanks for watching and leaving comments on your thoughts. A lot of you brought up using copper and silver. To be honest, that is something that I forgot to mention since my play group hasn't used those currencies for years. haha We figured that copper, silver, and gold are the same as pennies, dimes, and dollars (or on a higher scale 1 dollar bills, 10 dollar bills, and 100 dollar bills) so we simplified it down to just be the one currency, gold. This is a prime example of different play styles at different tables and I forgot to bring this up. Hopefully my main point, to make sure that everyone is on the same page about the value of whatever your currency you use, still came through.
Again, thanks for watching and I appreciate everyone for sharing how they deal with their economy!
ok bye
I toss Electrum some times to be funny to mess with my players.
Just wanted to leave this here in case you don’t see it posted on the video:
Whoever that Reddit post was from was WAY off. 1 GP in DND is nowhere near 100 bucks of current currency. It’s worth way less. Maybe 20-25 at best.
I’m making a game myself and this is one of my biggest issues with TTRPGs and a lot of video games as well. Currency oftentimes isn’t valuable or the exchange of currency makes little to no sense.
So I went back to Sumer and looked at exchange rates of items, specifically animals, and what people made per day, and this was pretty much true from 2300 BC - 1800 AD, before marginal reserve lending and inflation really started messing with the value of currency.
I use soldiers as a mean for middle class workers cross cultures, however, there weren’t professional soldiers until late Classical era Greek society, or more specifically, the beginning of Hellenistic Greece with Alexander’s conquest.
So, these are the exchange rates from my game based on Sumer animal exchange rates to Hellenistic time period. These would’ve been fairly close to the same in most cultures, absent a collapse or a wealth expansion. Barring that, these would be extremely static and were over almost all human history:
Money
10 Copper = 1 Bronze
10 Bronze = 1 Silver
20 Silver = 1 Gold
20 Gold = 1 Platinum
1 Copper = Tart or sweets
3-5 Copper = Meal with no meat
10 Copper = Chicken
8 Bronze = Sheep
1 Silver = Goat
15 Silver = Horse
1 Gold = Bull (Plow Animal)
3 Gold = Hactare of Arable Land
5 Gold = House
20 gold = 8 Crew boat
100+ Gold = Manse
350 Gold = Largest Vessels
I have one coinage above platinum, but because it’s so rare and gamebreaking, I won’t be putting anything about it here. The actual animal exchange rates are 100% accurate to history and how I managed to calculate what properties cost, plus I used some Roman housing costs to fill in the blanks based on area.
As far as how much did a below officer(middle income) worker make in Greece and Rome? Roughly 6 silver ounces, or six silver dollars per week. This is actually the same exact monetary value of a worker’s compensation back in the early 1800s with a day’s work usually bringing in a dollar. And a dollar in America was 1 silver ounce. (Greeks were paid in Mina and Denars, but I calculated out the weight and it’s almost identical.
So, 6 silver per week is a low middle income wage. Adventurers would likely get paid more than that, especially depending on the type of work and who was paying, but 100 gold is ridiculously inflated.
Almost everything property wise outside of boats, or other giant business expenses or giant tracks of land were paid for with silver. No one exchanged gold except kings and merchants, so that’s where I put that kind of value. Gold was the currency of kings and was used for large purchases well outside the cost of normal people.
A single parcel of land (the Greeks used Hectares and the Romans used Stadias) cost roughly 100 silver (5 gold) for the house itself and probably 20-25 silver for the 6 acres of land. If it was in prime area within the empire, it would be higher. But this was a middle income cost, roughly 125 (6 gold) for a homestead and farm, middle income. There was certainly cheaper options, and much more expensive ones.
The cost of the normal kits like medical kits and climbing kits are I believe 1-4 gold each in the manual, depending on what it is. They should be 20x less expensive roughly 1-4 silver, if they were accurate to reality. DnD, gold is 10-100 times more common than it actually is based on costs.
Usually people could afford to buy a home within 2-3 years and have it mostly paid for in cash if they were saving, or double that if they weren’t thrifty.
Until the 1960s, the longest mortgage you could get in America was a 7 year mortgage, and those were rare. Most people took the other two options, a 3 or a 5 year. Again, the number is nearly identical to that time period from 2000-2300 years ago.
One additional note: King’s ransoms were usually under 1000 gold and the life of a slave cost 40 silver (2 gold). So yeah. DnD currency is probably between 10-100 times inflated over actual historical currency rates. Before coming off the gold standard in 1973, a silver ounce was still worth 1 dollar and a gold ounce was worth 20. That’s been the standard throughout all history before the last 50 years was a roughly 20 to 1 cost.
And additionally: most jobs were six days per week or even seven. And 6x52 = 312 silver for an entire years middle income worker. That means a year’s work is worth 15.5 Gold in actual real life currency.
Bronze coinage was introduced by Caesar Augustus 2000 years ago, and it was one of the reasons the Roman Empire exploded in prosperity under his reign. Most artisans and blue collar workers would sell their goods for bronze level.
Think of a single copper coin as a dollar or two. Bronze coin woiod be the 20-50 dollar equivalent and a silver coin would be a 100-500 dollar equivalent. Then you’ll be closer to what the real monetary value is currently vs what it used to be.
- Most super small consumptive goods were bought with copper, and tools, appliances and the like would be bought with bronze.mortgages would be paid in silver.
Something like the Taj Mahal or immensely opulent palaces would’ve been made for 1,000 to 10,000 GP and a lot of times, that’s what people get for a single quest at level 12.
Lastly, when Alexander conquered Persia and took the vaults, the estimation on how much wealth he got by taking in the wealth of the largest empire was 180,000-250,000 talents of gold. A talent is roughly 60 pounds, which means it’s just under 1000 (960) gold ounces. This was roughly 1/6 maybe an 1/8 of the entire wealth of the world at the time.
- This would be equal to 250,000,000 GP (actually a lot less but I’m being very generous. Estimates are that this was worth maybe 11-15 Trillion dollars by today’s standards, which means it’s enough to buy and own the entire EU.
10,000 GP would be in the millions of dollars, 500,000-1,000,000 GP would be billions. And a lot of magical +3 items are valued in the hundreds of thousands of GP in current edition.
So, staying at a nice inn would cost 1 silver (100-500 dollars) per night. And a single GP would be closer to 10,000+dollars in today’s currency. You can buy a car (ox) for 1 GP.
So, finally:
1 Silver is unskilled Worker pay per day
4 Silver is upper middle class (skilled worker) and lowest ranked officer soldier pay
6+ Silver is skilled artisan or doctor (Or captain of the Guard or Centurion) pay per day
Slave cost = 40 silver or 2 gold
Bounty is minimum 40 silver
Life of a man was minimum 2 gold. You could have goblins or other vermin worth less per head. Maybe they have to take out a goblin lair and there’s a total of 25 of them. 5 heads per 5 party members and each is worth half a man’s life, so they’d make 100 silver each.
Worse criminals like a bandit king, it would be dozens of gold or even a hundred gold, if he’s Robin of Locksley.
- So most of the time, the party has to receive at least a bounty cost, or more to make it worth their time. 40 silver is the starting minimum quest costs.
A King’s ransom is roughly 1,000g (20,000 SP, About 5-10 million current dollars. You could easily start your own mercantile business for that).
- So when you’re working for royalty, you’re likely to be paid in gold, but won’t get close to 1,000 GP unless you saved the king’s life. Or you might get paid 10x that if you take out the neighboring king.
So I keep between 2-100g until after level 10. And you can get wild with 10,000g at level 20 by taking out other sovereigns.
I like just paying mostly silver to players and when they get gold it’s a rare treat and platinum is straight jaw dropping. Each platinum piece is worth 400 SP, the normal currency. That’s a year’s worth of staying at the inn per piece. You could also buy a better than moderate homestead with acres of land for 1 platinum piece.
So really, the only difference is that I would use silver instead of using gold, but my silver would be a bit more valuable than your gold pieces are in this scenario per piece.
If your debt was something like 100 GP in a system like this, it would take you till level 10-15 to pay it off.
Anyways, fun video.
@rhysproudmourne1646 Thank you, really helpful figures!
If it helps add to this, I've been reading the "Little House on the Prairie" series to my daughter, which follows similar costs - the father earns a dollar a day when he works as a farm labourer, the mother charges people 25 cents per meal and for board when they pass through, and the land for their homestead costs 14 dollars to claim title for 160 acres - note that this is for wild prairie, though.
Another family is far wealthier and has their own farm already - they raise horses and sell them at $200 dollars each for trained four year olds, plant fields and sell potatoes for a dollar a bushel (60lb) or hay for two dollars a bale, and the father teaches his son about money by suggesting buying a piglet at half a dollar, then raising a litter from that once grown that would each sell for $4-5 once grown. Sub in silver and copper as appropriate.
@@mcfaning Did those Electrum pieces happen to have the face of a certain tyrannical vampire etched into them?
I use copper for most transactions and give most rewards in copper or silver. 100 silver feels a lot better than 10 gold.
Indeed, using smaller denominations makes for a far better experience. I generally divide my recommended currency rewards by 10 after determining them, whilst also having custom goods prices such that copper and silver are the most commonly required currencies to purchase things.
Agreed. I make magic and gold very rare.
@@chrismcclaughry6857 Regarding magic being rare: Magic *items* should be, perhaps, at least for those of Rare or higher quality, though I think it's fine to have magic casters floating around with relative abundance and NPCs + markets occasionally having singular common or uncommon magic items that the players could buy or steal with some difficulty/high price.
These should be things which are always significant, coveted, and useful, so that there will either be others who also want them or people who will very much miss an item if it is taken.
Occasionally, rulers of nations or famous heroes might have a rare or very rare item, with legendary ones only being in the possession of the most powerful kingdoms or monsters, and then only one. Each such legendary item will be unique for all intents and purposes, and will need a mythic name and story to go with it. Maybe multiple stories.
For most of western history silver was the standard currency metal too! As an example the US dollar, Japanese yen and Chinese Yuan were all introduced at values meant to have the value of Spanish silver dollar coins. And the British Pound was originally the value of a pound of silver (but the silver shilling was the day-to-day coinage until modern times)
Meanwhile, I don't hear about _anyone_ using *electrum* pieces
This is why I use a converted currency system for my campaigns: 100 copper is 1 silver, 100 silver is 1 gold, and 100 gold is a platinum. It makes it so that a copper piece is basically just a penny that makes up a single dollar (silver), and it didnt make sense to me that gold, this beautiful, austere, symbol of wealth is the "basic unit of currency." So in my games, we basically treat copper as pennies, quarters, and dimes, silver as dollars, gold as hundred dollar bills, and platinum as basically a blank check in terms of rarity and use
I treat gold as 100 dollars and keep it in 10s. A silver is 10 bucks - four silver can buy you a night at a cheap inn, two silver is some decent food. Copper is about a dollar and if something costs money, thats as cheap as it goes.
I love the world of warcraft feel with that. We converted to this system a long time a go. 3.5 and 4e and when 5 came out we decided to go back to game as built cause our friend group changed. Non of us liked it so went back to this system lol
@@aetherkid I really like that idea! If a copper piece is the "dollar" that means it is in a higher circulation than silver, which is in turn in higher circulation than gold. I'm going to borrow that idea for my group if you don't mind. :)
I've done similar since 2e; 1 gold crown = $100, 1 silver mark = $10, 1 bronze bit = $1, 1 copper penny = $.10
All that does is make me wonder why every fantasy kingdom has Venezuela levels of inflation for their base currency to be worth so little.
Silver is the common folk's money. If you tell the prices in silver, it makes gold worth more. Players usually loot silver from other creatures and gold in treasures.
Displaying rewards in silver also makes bigger numbers, wich makes the rewards feel more rewarding, especially if you have everything in Silver anyways.
@@plueschhoernchen7550 Yes. It also adds value to the money itself. If you buy a sword and it cost 10 coins, it's cheap, if it costs 100, it's expensive, even if the price is the same with different currencies. It's psychological that bigger numbers add value to the items
Put more emphasis on copper and silver. Make it so poor/most common people do most transactions in copper, and then richer trader/educated people use more silver, and only noble people have easy access to gold. Then it makes it clear that gold is really valuable and any transaction made in gold will feel special.
Going in an inn and paying your nights and meals with one gold should make you pass for a rich ass traveller, and put emphasis on the taverner's reaction to seeing a gold, like he doesn't see that often. That, plus setting down the cost of things, should do the trick. That's what we do in the campaigns i play in.
In addition to this:
You also limit the store keep and others, dependent on social standings.
Don't expect a village inn-keeper to have enough change for that gold piece. Not that they haven't enough funds on hand, they probably do, but they lack the desire to hand over all those coins for a single gold piece. For they will have to deal with the hassle of exchanging them back into coins the locals do actually use.
Reverse happens too, having 10,000 coppers will not impress the armorer.
Find someone to change it to gold and come back.... peasant.
Making change for a gold piece? This is why people used to clip coins.
@@gstreetwunderbar4266 Money changers were important. Not just for foreign currency to the local coin but different denomination as that random fruit vendor being paid with a gold just bought their entire stock, shop space, and they still probably won't have enough change.
One of the main things that threw me was how low the coin values are.
10 Copper = 1 Silver
10 Silver = 1 Gold
10 Gold = 1 Platinum
2 copper = one beer.
The village drunk had 5 beers. That's 1 silver.
The village drunk does this for 10 days, that's a gold. In a month it's a platinum. It's so easy to jump over to the next tier that it feels silly having 4 levels of money. It's really small numbers which makes it really hard to make the coins feel worth it. I've not really thought too much about it- until I tried running Mad Mage.
The idea I had was that the players would go down into the dungeon for fame, riches, magical items and the sort. I started off being like 'Limited items, you have scraps'. They found a magic item or two, went up to the surface where- in the book- they could sell for 50 platinum... they bought the best gear they could then were like 'Wait, is there any reason why we should go back down? We have like... a ton of gold and such...'
They've gone back down out of pure 'Well, we want to play the campaign' energy, but it felt kinda weird.
Agreed my man. in my system.....
20 copper = 1 silver
30 Silver = 1 gold
I base prices with the real world. Prices are also dictated by location.
1 copper = 50 pence (or around 65 cents)
1 silver = £10
1 gold = £300
So a bag of apples in a village in the countryside might cost 2 coppers, but in the city 2 coppers might get you a single apple.
Staying at a basic inn is 2s per night, while a fancy inn might be 20s.
A chain hauberk is typically around 1g, a sword 20s.
The key is to limit the amount of coin the players are awarded. I tend to give the players enough money for basic living plus about 20%.
If you think of that drunk spending 2cp or $2 USD on each beer (imagine buying a 6pack of beers for $12 which doesn't seem crazy). Then he drinks 5 drinks a night and then doing that 30 times that's $300 he's spent on beer in a month which would be 3gp not a platinum. But I think there are plenty of alcoholics that spend a lot more than $300 a month on alcohol, so it's not crazy.
Nobody is a drunk on 5 beers a night, that would be a fairly temperate individual in a pre-modern society. A drunk is drinking between 12-30 beers a day minimum, less if he's a wino, or liquor drunk though @@alexandergreen9480
@@stuartriddell2461I like to keep the base 10 system for easy math, but I consider a cp to be about a dollar, then add electrum pieces between gold and silver at 1ep=10sp 10ep=1gp, I use platinum pieces, as well as cut gemstones being circulated as a currency for larger denominations. This has the twin advantages of making gold valuable, and allowing for most book prices to be used for adventuring equipment, magic items etc.
I mean if you think of copper as a cent then silver is 10 cents, gold is 1 euro/dollar, 1 platinum is 10 euros/dollars and so on. That makes more sense to me. But you have to make custom prices for almost everything.
In my settings, 1 Copper is about a $1 in purchasing power and I scale up my coins by a factor of 10 (10c = 1s, 10s = 1g, 10g = 1p). Thus, commoners deal in copper and rarely silver, merchants deal in silver and rarely gold, nobles deal in silver and gold, and kingdoms deal in gold and platinum. It helps a lot to think in this scope for my DMing, with the other big element I ask myself is "how much skilled effort went into this product?" Automation has made pricing so much harder to figure out with how much it changed the amount of work we have to do to make things.
That's roughly how we do it in our BECMI campaign as well.
I started by telling the players that all the prices in the RC rulebook that referenced gold pieces should be taken as silver pieces instead. Secondly, the weight of the coinage was changed from 10 coins per pound to 50 coins per pound. Platinum coin was dropped completely.
So in the end, we had gold coins that for their weight, were about 50 times as valuable as the RAW gold coins, but it didn't really matter since all the treasure in the module went through the same transformations. This made it so that the lead sling bullets were no longer worth their weight in silver. And actually made silver weapons cost something reasonable.
Now the other thing I did to keep it more interesting was that I deliberately downgraded the treasure that the PCs would find at low levels, but I would still give them full XP (or rather, I just used milestone advancement, tweaking it a bit between classes to take account the required XP differences). Anyway, the end result was that the party is now on 4th level (started from 1st), and they are still looking for their 'Big Score'. They are relatively well equipped (with normal equipment, plate mails for the fighters and so forth), but they are not brimming with magical gear (I was very aggressively removing all magical weapons from the B modules for levels 1-3; some random bandit would not have a +1 weapon). They are becoming more well-known and they have their little nest egg of investment if they can get their cargo to the next city without incidents, etc.
Perhaps a good place to start is by asking "how much does a common unskilled laborer need to make per day to live"? That would include at least one if not two meals and a roof, with enough left over to replace clothing or crude tools once a month or so. Anything below that amount is 'poor or poverty', and more is moving up the social standing ladder. Then start adding to this by asking what does a "bouncer" or thug or guard make? What does a common soldier make if they enlist? Peasants can subsist on their land, but must yield a portion to their Lord --- what does a parcel of land allow in produce, and how much less spendable cash do peasants have than common laborers, and so on.
I think you will find that an economy is better served on a silver standard than a gold standard, and only middle and upper class persons have any gold at all. By the time you work in taxes and tithes, it is easy to see why 100 gold is a lot, and thousands is insanely rich. Also, Skilled Labor and products that result from it (like Armor and such) is expensive, costing tens and hundreds of silvers if not thousands. Financing a standing army is insanely expensive. And so on.
underated comment
exactly. the player's handbook (under the "lifestyle expenses" section) says that an unskilled laborer needs about 2 silver per day to live. half of that is for housing, and the other half covers food, clothing, and equipment upkeep.
the "middle class" spends about 1 gold per day, and "upper middle class" is 2 gold per day.
even the wealthy are still only spending 4 gold per day. that's 1460 gold per year, which is still not enough to buy a suit of plate armor (which costs 1500 gold).
I’ve been dming a pirate themed campaign, early in the campaign the party’s Rogue discovered that he was the heir to a kingdom so he fell into wealth. 30-40 thousand gold. A couple sessions later, I gave the party a chance to buy a bigger and stronger ship that cost 18,000 gold. A stronger ship was beneficial to the future of the campaign, so it was rewarding and they enjoyed customizing the ship. The party’s ship is their base of operations, since they’re always traveling (the world is primarily made of islands) so upgrading it felt awesome for them.
Did they name their ship the Going Merry and are they on a quest to find the One Piece?
@@LevoneMD They named the ship the Songbird (named after the Captain’s Songbird daggers). They are on a journey to find the One Piece, with their own personal goals along the way of course.
@@analyticsystem4094 that's awesome!
Good ol' skulls and shackles.
It helps to think of copper pieces as dollars and silver as 10 dollars, with gold being the C-notes. I was able to answer questions about what furniture costs (if a cheap couch in real life is $600, that'll be 600 copper, or 6 gold). A cheap beer in D&D is 3 cp, that's close enough.
I think the issue of a gold coin's value is mostly dependent on if you are using the other coin types. If you're only using gold in a campaign, then I agree that one gold =one usd, but if you throw in copper, silver, and platinum, one gold equaling a hundred dollar bill makes more sense.
Gold is VERY important in the TSR editions of D&D( 1e, Basic/Expert, BECMI, 2e). Gold=xp.
Its exploration and adventure heavy. Avoiding combat if you can. The players had to work together using their wits to overcome the obstacles and challenges within the world to survive, not your charactersheet. Gold was how you earned those better weapons and armour ( as opposed to starting out with the best weapons and armour), built strongholds, wizard towers, your own lair. Raised armies and conquered territories. When Wotc took over, D&D became an entirely different game altogether. Slaying monsters=xp. It became more of a superhero, combat focused game. Gold=xp completely changes the way the game is played. The D&D versions being played today, are far removed from the game they see being played in Stranger Things, or the golden-era of D&D in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
Yeah, people who started before 3.5 are basically from a whole different game.
@maxmccullough8548 For sure! Funny thing is, I started with 5e, then I discovered TSR era D&D, and haven't looked back.
Don't forget that it cost a lot to lv up and was not free and took time.
So a little bit in line with this, a group of mine is playing Pathfinder with the Spheres of Power ruleset, in a homebrew world. Something that we established about the world early (since the DM was letting us players help with the early development of it) was that:
1: The world is largely unexplored/undocumented. There's plenty of crazy shit that exists, especially since spheres gives you so much power to build creatures or antagonists, but very little of it has actually been recorded for in-game knowledge purposes. This means that there's a lot of new discoveries to be had throughout the game.
2: Leveling up isn't easy anymore (depending on your method). We wanted to take the game in a more exploration and discovery angle, and we wanted to emulate some of the wackiness of anime like One Piece, so we reduced the rate at which ANYONE earns XP by fighting monsters down to 1/5th, but we introduced "Celestial Amber". The amber was a special plant the blossoms on the convergence of the world's magical leylines, which move and shift with time. How any given character 'used' the amber to level up was unique to them for the most part, but bushels of the stuff were the main way to gain bunches of experience, since monster-hunting was less effective now.
3: Now, not only was the amber used for leveling up, but it was also used in the creation of majority of magical items. The problem here being that celestial amber loses it's potency after some time (I don't remember the exact time-scale, but it couldn't have been longer than a week at most), meaning that the working of the amber into a project must be done rather quickly, or the amber will lose ALL value, both as a leveling tool you could sell, or as a crafting reagent.
This made the game focus on the idea of exploration again, since finding patches of amber was the best way to level up, was a decent way of making money, and allowed for a lot of conflict, as we run into other groups searching for the same bundles, or monsters that are guarding some sprigs, or seeing a bundle through a spyglass at the top of a dangerous mountain climb.
This mattered due to the fact that we made it a general rule that those with access to sphere abilities took a suit of boons and drawbacks that made them earn only 50% gold, but they got a bunch of inherent bonuses to things like AC and magical weapon level and such as they level up. So gold became literally someone that characters only need for their own luxuries or interests, instead of for increasing their math.
@gergernzero6904 OH definitely!! I just received a copy of the 2e players handbook. I'm looking at the wizard (mage) progression chart....3,500,000xp required to reach level 20. Years of playing! Starting at 12th level as a Druid, you must defeat another druid as only so many of that level may exist in the world. At 16th level only one Grand Druid can exist. Sounds a little like Highlander. "There can be only one!"
I agree to just equate the coin to your own local currency. However, use copper to the lowest spendable value. So in US a copper is a dollar and a silver is 10 and a gold is 100.
Poor places don't reward you in gold, but a reputation or a favor can go a long way.
Its easier for my mind to rationalize the gold as a 100 dollars because it makes magic items so much more valuable as they would be. I guess 500 dollars is still pretty expensive though. But I also look at coppers and recognize that they should also be of value so that the party values gold more.
This is how we saw it at my table as well.
@@sirhanser3523 Oh good not just me then. Also I realized I didn't mention this but a gold being a dollar is crazy because a gold is supposed to represent a days expenses. I don't know about a dollar a day working out on that.
Wouldn't a copper be a cent in that case if we are using the lowest value?
@@9553shadowa beer does not cost 2 cents to be fare it does not cost only 2 dollars either but value of currency shifts coppers as a dollar is not a bad starting point the base 10 exchange does make math easy but I am. Ot sure the limits it imposes are worth the easy math. Particuraly since if you are having trouble with the math just pull out your smart phone and use the calculator. Though if you do change the copper to silver and silver to gold exchange you would need to modify prices but considering you will probaly do this any way if you taking this partvof the game seriously it not going to change much
@@9553shadowsorry I said lowest spendable value meaning the lowest value that can actually get you something. While there are things that cost less than a dollar I think it is better to start with gold and determine the others from there.
The PHB explains that a gold is the cost of living a modest life style is 1 gold. If thats the case we can better figure the value of a gold if we calculate the value of our own money in terms of what is considered a modest life style. According to a calculator I found that breaks down average modest life style for New England, the cost is approximately 41k annually and 112 daily (41000/365) I just round this down to 100 bucks and then equate that 100 modest living expense to a 1 gold living expense and so connect a gold coin to a 100 dollar bill.
I think this varies significantly based on where you live and the cost of living there, but for me a 100 seams reasonable.
This makes more sense when you think about shopping in dnd. We don't pay for food and drinks in gold, unless we have a massive feast. These things are valued in copper or silver. Thinking about it it makes sense, how many apples does it take to equal a gold coin? The answer is a lot!
It is far more reasonable to think of this as being a copper. An apple at my own local store can typically be about 2 per pound with each apple waying maybe half a pound i think. That would make an apple cost 1 copper a piece. which I think feels right.
Thank you. This is a helpful discussion. The problem is that there is no economy in DnD. No market values of anything. No real limits on the amount of gold that is circulating.
Another solution is to pick a functioning medieval economy, such as the Byzantine Empire. How much could a gold coin purchase? How easy was it to put your hands on a gold coin.
I've tried to solve this problem by using "The Silver Standard" and then saying that 100 coppers = 1 silver and 1000 silvers equal 1 gold. In one campaign that I ran, it was understood that only nobility and rich merchant dealt in Gold pieces.
I think the biggest issue with gold prices that i have found is Magic Items. Especially things like potions. "Hello yes i would like to spend hundreds if not thousands of gold on single use items plz"
_"Thank you sir may I have another!"_
i agree with that statement.
mighty magic items with permanent enchantment should be expensive or without a pricetag, but let potions and scrolls be affordable. even for a peasant that is saving a year or two for a potion of remove sickness in case he needs it for his children.
@@koljaleffek7290
Eh, I'd say make scrolls reusable (and keep them class restricted) while keeping them expensive. Replace them with a consumable classless equivalent, like spell tokens or spell spheres (things like those ninja tools in Boruto that are basically limited-use ninjutsu for non-ninja).
@@DBArtsCreators i would argue against reusable scrolls. either use them as you would use a spellbook when your charakter has the ability to cast this kind of magic, or let anyone use it that can read the scroll.
(i love the idea from the khoras setting that there are a few writing systems used for magic, and when you can read them you can use what is written in that system)
@@koljaleffek7290
No real sense in not making scrolls reusable. Just make them require attunement and they provide a method for a character to have more spells 'prepared' than they usually can (the reason why they would be class-restricted - they would require your to have spell slots and to be of the class whose spell list the scroll's spell was derived from).
Tokens/spheres would fill the other roll of consumable spells that anyone can utilize (since they'd have no attunement requirement and would have their own 'spell reserve' for their single cast).
Can also look to Tasha's Culdron of Everything for Spell Tattoos - make that the third option. They require attunement but don't allow you to use your spell slots for the castings. Instead, they have a handful of charges that are restored on a short or long rest (depending on tattoo), and thus can be attuned to by characters of any class (perhaps some unique ones are class-specific, but the generic spell-tattoo ones wouldn't be).
This is a topic I have struggled with for many years... probably one of the things that bothers me the most about D&D... going all the way back to Treasure Type tables where some monster lairs could randomly contain thousands of gold pieces.
That said, while I appreciate your idea and approach, in my opinion, I can foresee an issue with making a gold piece equivalent to a dollar. The trouble with this is that it necessarily scales down silver and copper, which essentially makes those coins valueless - especially after a few levels. I think gold should be in less circulation than silver or copper... this makes gold rarer, as it should be. A serf working in a field shouldn't be paid with gold pieces - that just seems weird to me that peasants are walking around with gold (even if it's only a few coins). If peasants have gold coins, then who is walking around with silver? Children maybe? Then who is walking around with copper? I think it makes more sense to start with copper as the baseline currency, where most shops in a small hamlet almost exclusively have copper in the till save for maybe a few silver pieces. In fact, showing up with gold might create a problem for the store owner as he may not be able to provide change for the gold. I would make gold more common in bigger towns or cities, but in mid-sized towns or smaller, a silver piece might be the most valuable coin a villager has ever seen.
Thanks for posting! You've inspired me to try to sort this out for my group (again).
Yeah this was my thought as well. If coppers are your dollar unit and you scale up from there it makes the most sense to me. You drop a gold down at the Fabric merchant and their like I'm not giving change for that.
Exactly. If you say a labourer makes maybe a silver a day, but you make that silver worth 100 copper, then that labourer can actually afford to go to the pub with the 5 copper meal and 1 copper ales. Niw make a gold 100 silver, and suddenly that gold piece is 10,000 copper. Nobody is dropping a gold in a pub. You are also not finding gold as a rookie adventurer solving a goblin raiding problem.
I make sure players always have something to do with that money. It is part of why I love running naval campaigns. Ships cost a fortune, you need to pay your crew, you need supplies. Crafting is heavily encouraged and streamlined. You need to outfit your crew, make repairs...there is always a money sink available to the players.
The way I started handling gold in my 5e games is by requiring pcs to purchase xp at a rate of 1gp per xp (think of it like paying for training). That coupled with domain-level play (excellent suggestion of Strongholds & Followers) has helped balance gold in 5e for my group (we always found that pcs had too much gold and nothing to spend it on).
In my new campaign I am going to give xp by the players spending gold on gold sinks of their choice which is basically this.
One big problem is just not having enough opportunities to spend money in many campaigns.
I think that it also makes a big deal when it comes to spell-casting components, but also food, lodging, clothes etc.. When a campaign doesn't really pay attention to that sort of stuff, which is quite common, it also means the gold isn't used up very fast & just accumulates. As you touch on later, there aren't so many ways people have to spend money that don't feel cosmetic, but then on the other hand many players get upset when a DM is too crunchy.
Another way to get around this is to have a quest to support a poor town/orphanage, or a villain that involves paying off a bribe, or something like that, so that money is leaving the players' hands more often
So true. Unfortunately, it's too easy to take a shortcut in world creation by omitting money consumption and instead, for example, governments, guards, and armies operate for free even if in reality they require money to run. For example, to fix this cities may have gate tolls, bridge tolls, taxes, fire tax, oven tax, protection fees and etc.
My players felt rich. They had a bunch of money from adventuring and came into town to vacation at their mansion and go gambling for a few months of downtime
All their money was gone in like two months. Didn't even buy anything- that was just the cost of servants staffing their house and making dinner for guests. "Ten gold a day for 20 servants and booze? I can afford that."
In my game I have an eerie merchant that you can summon (within the next 1-5 work days). He does about anything for money and money is his sole goal. His items cost more due to conviniece fees. He provides whatever service you need but speed and quality of the job is all dependant on your coin purse.
My party was handed a stupid 5k gold for saving the daughter of a goldsmith guild's leader. That also entailed some hush money for other reasons.
We established that they could retire now. They were rich and good to live a relaxed life for the next few years. But the party still had stuff to do. They ran into the merchant. Afterwards they already spent 3500 gold on items and information gathering services.
Once you give a group of players a lot of spending money, make sure there are ways they can burn it and they will burn it. It hasn't been a week since they got that pay check and they are almost broke again.
What I think people forget a lot of the time is that the gold in D&D is a decimal system (meaning that each coin is made of a smaller increment). The porridge at the in doesn't cost 1 gold it costs 1 silver coin. And using the standard ratio of 10:1 for copper, silver and gold keeps things nice.
When you said “you can’t carry that much gold,” then mentioned bills I had a moment where I realized “hey that’s how modern money systems started, bills that represent gold value. Great video!
I also wonder if you kept 1 gold equal to $100, then silver and copper pieces make more sense to be used more commonly.
What I did was scrapped the standard D&D currency, and used medieval British currency based on the pound sterling.
The replacement for GP was a Silver Crown, basically the Pound Stirling, which was sterling silver.
SP was the Shilling (more copper than silver)
CP was the Penny
I also had Haypennies (half pennies) and Farthings (quarter pennies).
Actual gold was used for the Gold Royal, which was worth 100 Silver Crowns.
By the way, I like that you brought up paper money, because the Chinese invented banknotes in the 7th century AD, slowly introducing them until they were widely accepted in the 13th century AD.
They had copper coins out the wazoo that were cumbersome to carry around, so these banknotes were printed to be worth rather large sums of coins at a time. At any time, you could exchange these notes at a bank with a processing fee of 1 copper coin per note and receive its value in coin.
I'm planning an economy-focused campaign, this literally couldn't be more relevant to what I've been mulling over. Thank you for this upload!!
There are lot of good references in history to help this. Sun Tzu's art of War, Roman and Jewish writings all closely match on certain values. 1 silver piece was about the equivalent of a day's wage for soldiers, and commoners. IIRC, 1 silver for them was about the equivalent of 1/10 a troy oz of silver in today's units.
So for simple terms. 1 silver is a Commoners days wage. Travel is expensive. And like real life, it's cheaper to buy ingredients and stay home than it is to travel and eat out.
I use the 1 gold = 100 bucks exchange rate, but what I do differently is that I don't give my players prices in specific coin types, I give its cost in "coin," which they can pay with whatever currency they have on them. "How much is this book? 15 coin? Alright, here's a silver and 5 copper." Pulling out a shiny gold piece is akin to whipping out a nice crisp Benjamin. When players earn money, I give them the value in coin. I only bother with specific kinds of coins are used if I have a reason to for story or flavor, such as an NPC employer plunking down 1 gold coin for each PC at the table. My players are accustomed to thinking of money in "coin" now and it works great.
I love this idea!
I DM for young kids, we started when they were around 6 and the group is now in middle school. Converting gold to dollars was very necessary when DMing for little kids because they don't really appreciate money yet, so introducing a new currency was a non-starter.
I decided on $20 for 1 gold. That made a silver $2 and a copper about a quarter. My players could wrap their heads around that. An added bonus was that it required a bit of math so it helped build good mental math skills when they were in grade school.
I based my conversion rate on a glance through the equipment table. A lot of the stuff that was listed for one gold was stuff I figured an average person would pay about $20 for. Some of the copper math gets a little fiddly but that's ok.
My favorite thing about backing gold with dollars is when I tell my players what their reward will be for a quest and I see them doing the mental math then their faces all light up lol
From Isekai and similar manga, Healers could often cost based on mana potions necessary to recover, unless youre working for same boss
Something similar could be in DnD
💯! Healing does cost; it says most places expect donation or service
Also one thing that most DM's neglect in D&D is that most clergy are not clerics and do NOT have spells. That is actually incredibly rare. That village priest wont have magical services. He'll just be a priest, not a cleric. A true Cleric, blessed by the Gods, is a rare thing.
Magical services are very rare, and very expensive. And if a Temple has a cleric, they would usually restrict those services from that Cleric to important members of the clergy, or important people that would help bolster the reputation of the Temple.
@@JohnDoe-bf7hb its all fiction and it all differs
Most places wont even have a real church if they dont have someone with actual god given powers, i think
@@joe_rival Now that, I also agree with, conceptually (even if the books don't say so): If their gods walk around smiting Melee style & endowing people with supernatural powers, it would start to feel weird to tithe at a temple that hasn't been aided in a while; avatars would probably be pretty busy touring every place of worship?
How well favored a site/worshipper is, might even affect which forms of aid are granted...
As one of our DMs once said, "There will be a temple, but they may not observe your gods."
_To which a party-member, helpfully added: "and if it's a temple to Kelemvor, they may only do funerary rites"!_
One thing you need to do as a DM is make your players spend money after each adventure. Nickel and dime them for every gold piece they have. Make them replace expended gear and give them access to upgrades in gear. Also help them buy or build a base of operations. And charge them for every spoon, chair, attendant, rug and bedsheet. And then after each big treasure hoard, they should expand it and hire more attendants, build more buildings, libraries, churches, temples, towers, etc. etc. Bleed them dry so they need to keep adventuring.
That works, but doesn't sound fun.
I did some of this in the low levels (1-2), since I wanted it to feel like the PCs were just trying to break into this adventuring business and see if it worked. It didn't help that they were based in a pretty good (but not high-class) inn at the capital, so the prices were somewhat salty. They really needed to look for ways to make some extra coin, look if the equipment of the defeated enemies was worth hauling back for a sale, and so forth.
But once they reached 3rd and now 4th level, they are able to demand higher rewards. At that point, the daily costs of food and accommodation start becoming smaller issues. But yeah, if they want to buy horses, or a ship, or start base-building, hiring crew/attendants/guards and so forth, yeah, those would start taking chunks out of their loot. But I think those should be mainly player-driven rather than demanded by the GM. And to be honest, I have better things to do with my life than keep track of every teaspoon the PCs buy. "I drop 100 gold on the furnishings of my bedroom, is it nice?" "Yep, it is very nice, mark it up and let's move on."
Something that requires a bit more math as well but is insanely useful is also having your currency evenly divisible by both 2 and 3. This means that cash can easely be divided by the number of players. And if you still get an uneven number you can always add a pool of cash for the party to facilitate the division. If you got 5 pcs add 1/6th of the rewards to a communal cash pool to pay for room and board for example.
Another thing you can do is have them hire the people to help support an adventuring party. In older editions of DnD it was expected that most parties would have hirelings, workers and beasts of burden to help them haul arround their loot. Having these payed workers also helps you keep in mind how much things should cost since their cost of living would be factored in. Basically having your party running an adventuring caravan.
Plus the hirelings and workers can easely serve as a diegetic way to keep backup characters for your party. They don't meet a random stranger in the next Tavern to fill in for Lothal the Barbarian. Instead Dave the Angry Woodcutter that's been with the caravan for 3 years and dealt with all the bullshit and adventuring party attracts and is ready to take out all that rage in some meat instead of firewood!
I thought of a base 16. 16 copper = 1 Silver. 8 Silver = 1 Gold. 4 Gold = 1 Platinum. Which makes 1 Gold 128 copper and 1 Platinum 512 copper. This makes it where gold is a lot more rare but useful. Though a base 12 might be better or even a Base 8 for making the economy more grounded. After all, the British pound before the decimalization was base 12 i believe
@@smitty_qw
12 is a little easier so you don't have to bust out a calculator. 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6. That's all you need to know and it's extremely unlikely that you'll have more than 6 players in a party. 5 is the only odd one out(lol)
Plus depending on what you want and how you want to flavour it you can be more or less complex in these matters.
I'd say lean in the abstraction a bit and have the "denominations" be values of accounting rather than specific coins.
This not only makes it easier to keep track of weight if you want to use encumberance with the money, but more importantly let's you flavor the money however you want without having to do a lot of work.
1 copper isn't a literal copper coin, it's a handful of copper coins or a few silver ones.
A silver is just the most common expenditure you'll make as a group, sort of like like a shilling.
A gold? That's like a whole pound of money, stuff you keep in a little box so you don't loose it.
You could even remove platinum entirely depending on how far you take your game. With this kind of approach by the time you reach platinum you'd be dealing with the expenditures of a small polity.
There's also the Darklands approach where you say fuck it and just convert it all into coppers so you don't have to keep track of it all.
@@Umcarasemvideo i agree with all of these points. The only reason i consider base 16 was a way of showing how devalued a currency became after an empire fell. I do want to use the 'pieces' as just general terms to introduce my group to more values and the like as currency. So a penny coin could be 1/8 of a copper piece. But I am keeping it simple for now :)
Edit: my original purpose was for easy accounting but tldr: this system is for accounting reasons while more lore names and coins can/will be used
@@smitty_qw
Makes sense, if you don't mind the sugestions, It might make it a little easier the make things more expensive instead. Basically what would cost 1 silver in a 16 base now costs 1 silver 4 copper instead.
That's basically how inflation works anyways and it's pretty intuitive.
@@Umcarasemvideo exactly! I took quite a bit of inspiration from the british pound before decimalization of their currency for how prices are
Totally agree with this idea.
I understand the need to simplify things in a d&d game for speed, but most purchases take place in down time, and gaining wealth feels more rewarding if the currency is set to a more common use standard, and coins given names and even denominations.
For example, I divide all gold item costs by 90, and it's becomes the smallest of 3 silver coins. There are also 2 copper denominations and 3 gold coins
My "1 gold coin" is that smallest silver coin, and it's value is based on the daily wage of an untrained worker, a coin with a hen on it, called a Henny.
Why do I think this is better?
Well instead of saying, you've found 50 gold coins (which feels like it means nothing) you might say, you find 20 silver Henny (worth 20 days common wages), 3 silver Grave (the next silver coin worth 15 days wages each) and 1 gold Oxcart (aka an Oscar, the smallest of 3 gold denominations worth 3 months common wages)
Consider, it makes flashing a gold coin more enticing.
You might find a heavy chest of coins filled with copper Songs (1/10 a Henny) and need to find a money changer.
You might need to change your hundreds of heavy silver coins into some traveling gold that you can hide on your person.
It always bothered me that finding a gold ring or necklace was dumb, as melting it down it would likely be less gold than a single gold coin in value.
Now jewelry is meaningful because you're wearing a gold amount on your finger or neck, and gold is actually worth something.
Jewelry & artwork are meant to be valued for their aesthetics & implications remember, not just their inherent material value.
@@DBArtsCreators Artwork for sure. Jewelry for me still doesn't make sense if the weight of a gold coin (worth conceptually $1) is twice that of a ring, and the ring is supposed to be valued 100x. Makes no sense
@@ghostfaceknuts
Makes perfect sense, unless you are trying to claim that absolutely no effort was put into making the jewelry.
The only difference between artwork & jewelry is that you can't wear artwork, while jewelry is meant to be worn.
I really love some of the ideas here. My current party, I'm running owns a tavern. And I think it'd be really cool that they could pay golden to upgrade it and stuff.
That idea of balancing golds with our local currency is really smart. I'm gonna use that for certain. Thanks !
Don't make gold valuable. Make copper valuable. 300 copper for helping an orphanage. Dinners 15cp, drinks are 7cp, 20cp for a bed or 90cp for a room for 2.
I love the idea of a base, playing Shadowrun our DM gave us a bar as our home base in session 0 and one of my fav memories wasn't even a session just a night when me and the other players were together to work on our characters and learn the rules (the DM was very busy so he wasn't there) and we ended up going into detail about how we run the bar and made me think that would be a cool way to run a game. Owning a business together also is a brilliant way to bind the party they have the one goal that can go any direction.
According to the DND manual an unskilled laborer makes 2sp per day. You can equate this to minimum wage.
So using the us minimum wage of 7.25 times 8 hours of work to make a days wage, we get that 2sp = $58 or 1 SP= $29
Given that 1 GP = 10 SP, that would mean that 1 GP = $290.
such a good thought, money in dnd makes zero sense so giving ideas on how to make it make sense is so helpful. Cause if a bowl of porridge is 1gp and a warhorse is 400gp but in real life a bowl of porridge is a few cents and a normal horse can easily be 10,000 dollars that doesn't make a whole lot of sense
I think of gold as 60 dollars, the reason being that it says that a comfortable living is a gold a day, and I think one person can survive on 60 dollars a day (in a world where rent and gas prices)
I'm doing a Curse of Strahd sequel campaign set in a fantasy 1850s type of setting, and it's been fun equating 1850's USD to 5e's system. I've definitely felt the same way you do about currency, and equating it pretty much 1 for 1 to an older value has helped us all understand the local economy better.
Here's the thing about gold in 5E. It's a holdover from earlier editions. To maintain power progression in earlier editions, you needed magic items and they cost a lot of money. Players complained about how frustrating it was to have to be a walking magic shop to remain powerful at higher levels. Responding to that criticism, Wizards designed 5e to focus on making character classes be what makes characters powerful rather than the character gear. The problem is now, if you're not buying gear, what do you do with gold? That's a nut they haven't yet cracked. However, that's why it's a problem.
Personally, I find that if you just take out the gold pieces from treasure drops and just give them the art and gems, that fixes the problem.
I just made a carnival last night. They're only level 3, and costs were almost exclusively in copper and silver. They're practically broke now, but they have their basics, a job for more cash lined up, and more importantly, they had an absolute blast and felt it was money well spent. Give your players fun things to buy with their money, and remember that things can also just be experiences!
In my survival horror campaign, I encouraged my players to use their silver pieces to melt down into weapon and armor pieces. Helps keep pockets empty and provides a use all at once.
I've always thought a gold piece was about $20 USD, but honestly, I made that calculation for the first time about 20-25 years ago, so by now maybe $100 is inflation adjusted at this point.
"Free health care"
Looks at the table for hiring a spell caster
An interesting concept. Thank you for sharing.
My campaign is a futuristic setting, converted all gold to silver, renamed it credits and it works pretty well so far.
I ran a dnd game set in our real world with parallel fantasy elements and had to do some numbers for this. Using the lifestyle table I concluded that 1 GP = 50 USD. Which worked really well for our table.
A full suit of armor could take a year for a noble to pay for and acquire in medieval times. So full plate in dnd at 1,500gp could represent a years worth of income for a lord. That’s 125gp a month! Realistically any hopes of fulfilling a power fantasy would require an entire kingdom bankrolling you.
If you don't end up with at least two factions bankrolling you while you pit them against each other, I feel like you're doing D&D economics wrong?
@@prophetzarquon1922 True, but to me its more of a timing thing than a likelihood thing. PCs shouldn't have access to that stuff until they have an exceedingly wealthy noble as a patron or if a faction is about to go to all out war. Rescuing an entire town probably wouldn't cut it. I don't think realism plays well with balance if PCs have to wait that long to earn a few thousand gold.
@@OurayTheOwl Oh, I agree; there's definitely no resolving the economics of 5e rationally. In fact, I feel the only reasonable explanation for the pricing described, would be a deity setting fixed prices the way things used to be done in late period Rome.
Now, I do think that ending up with entire kingdoms bankrolling you _after some considerable playtime,_ makes a certain kind of sense, if your party is adventuring constantly; that's a lot of power & loot moving all at once. More than one quest in just a couple years, potentially makes for a _lot_ of change effected.
But yeah, one party's starting equipment alone costs enough to bankrupt a local lord, & that's before even getting into magic items or 1000gp gems to revive ya with.
Fair point but then what stops our party from looting the suit from some bandit and selling it for a ton of gold? IMO, in a world with magic it shall be much easier to work with metals.
@@alexmin4752 to keep with the analogy, plate is strictly the armor of nobility, a bandit would never be in a suit of armor. Highwaymen, bandits, or brigands would have no reason to go marauding if they could live like a lord by selling it.
This is something I have also struggled with, and so I looked at history. Historically (until about 1950) gold by weight was 20x the cost of silver. In today's values, silver is about $20 US per ounce. So, the D&D silver coin (about 1/3 oz or 10 gm) would be "worth" about $7 US today. In early 1900's USA the average salary was around 25 cents per hour (or one silver quarter for around 1/6 oz). D&D 5e quotes a "laborer salary of 2 Silver pieces per day" or about 20 gm of silver, $15 US for today's silver prices. So, I look at different sizes of coins to make the D&D prices work and make sense. I also reduce the treasure amounts expected from the DM guides.
I make the D&D silver piece about the size of a US half dollar (assuming it is not very pure, but quite thin). I give most player costs in Silver piece amounts, but assume there are 1/2 SP silver coins the size of a US quarter.
This makes the Gold piece about 1/6 oz, 5gm and the size of a US nickel or UK Pound (and thin). This is similar to a US $5 gold from the year 1911. It is such a small coin that I use it as a value, but when treasure is found I tell players they found gold in 8 gold piece coins (or gold dragons, or whatever flavor for the area they are in).
Copper, there is no reason that it is as valuable as a 1/10 silver, so I have made the copper coins large with one Copper Piece the size of a US silver dollar, or UK 50P commemorative coin. I also assume that there are fourths or farthing coins smaller than a full copper piece.
I also add details (and sometimes clues) by describing the specific coins that are found (from NPCs or treasure) corresponding to where the coins come from. So I may say "you find 30 in silver, including several 5 silver piece coins with a 2 headed snake on the front side, and curious writing on the back."
This allows me to have minimal changes to the published prices, but to treat coins as an active part of the game and not just numbers on the player's sheet.
>Free healthcare.
The cleric in town: "Bring me a diamond worth five hundred gold and you can see your friend again."
That’s why I like using copper, silver, gold, and platinum in my games. Breaks up the monotony of just gold based games my players are used to playing. Plus then it sets the tone of the mission on what my players can expect for difficulty.
If you gave 7 players a total of *301* gp, it would come out even. Also, long ago, in Gygax's second frpg, Dangerous Journeys, he suggested what you are. The main currency, whatever you call it, is equal to $1 or whatever. So everything the pc's need is understandable by comparing it to modern prices. And all tech is relative. A horse might cost what a motorcycle costs, a fine sword the same as a gun, and so on. And I should say, originally, D&D wasn't intended to make the pc's rich easily. There were a lot of rules and guidelines for expenses, upkeep, etc. They weren't supposed to just keep it, consequence free. Life is expensive.
Rarely had issues with too much gold... the door kicker party member made sure of that. Started fining the barbarian for every door he kicked to pieces in towns, villages and other places where a door knob was the polite option.
Old school d&d had rules for this. Spell components, especially weird ones cost gold, upkeep and taxes on properties, wages for hirelings, crafting materials, etc. Also, in order to level up, you had to find and hire a trainer to teach you. Paladins had to give most of their wealth to their order/church, rangers could only keep what they could carry, etc. And after all that, if you had too much gold, you become a target for thieves and bad businessmen. Having wealth should just be another way of adding to the game, giving characters another tool to weild power, and another way for the d.m. to lure them into foolhardy adventures in order to protect their hard won gains.
to my table:
1 Copper is 1 Dollar.
1 Silver is 100 Dollars
1 Gold is 10,000 Dollars
1 Platinum is 1,000,000 Dollars.
For prices, a basic iron sword is 20 copper, a bowl of porridge and a glass of water is 5 copper.
sleeping at the tavern is 5 copper, where as staying in a personal room at a city inn is 1 silver.
basically, we made gold valuable, something only the nobles have. so when the King of Boonthracka offers us 10 gold each to kill a Dragon, its life changing money for a task that is basically suicide. side note, we all died to that Dragon.
I love the idea of upgrading your base as a fulfilling use for excess currency
0:30 Dude, that is 100% on the DM. Apparently most people playing dnd care way more for magic items and stuff than gold but that is tbh not even realistic.
Most people care for money and even if they don't focus on making it they still like getting and saving it it. Even adventurers need a rainy day fund once they get too old or too sick or injured (or cursed or something).
An adventurer (i.e. anyone going on an adventure regardless of what class, background, etc.) may also lose all or most of their magic items and with a lot of gold you they could buy good replacements.
Not to mention adventurers only ever caring about adventure and never about the future is only something PCs without good roleplay do.
And then it's money spent and gained, the DM decides this and it's all on the DM whether you get a ton of gold and have to spend very little or if it's the opposite and you constantly struggle to pay the inn fee or buy a single potion
Why did you get so much money so easily? Normally making money is really hard and even if you take quests and get paid, do you just luckily stumble upon manageable quests without any competition to drive the rewards down?
Cause you'd think in a world with dnd (or other system)classes where people can become super strong that there would be quite a lot of them doing this to make money which means that even small villages may not be desperate and won't be 100 gold but only 25 since even if they'd have to send someone to a bigger city it to fetch an adventurer to do their quest it would only cost them like 40 gold and the only reason the PCs are getting this job is because it's easier for the village, not because the villagers have no one else to turn to.
Likewise you'd think magic stuff and even just high quality stuff is expensive. Especially magic items, potions, etc. are balancing out gold received from quests, etc. perfectly because very simply in a world where magic is common enough for magic items and potions to not be insanely expensive people doing the same job as the PCs are common enough for this to not pay overly much.
On the other hand in a world where magic is rare and the party can rack in tons of gold from quests as few others are capable of doing the same, magic items and potions are extremely rare and extremely expensive.
If it's about money making schemes like a trader it again comes to the DM to deice how successful the players are, how little competition they face. how high the profits are, etc.
If you really wanted to make money matter in dnd you'd make a campaign designed to be more realistic and to not heap tons of gold onto the players at every corner because even with no money and a debt, evidently your party obtained huge amounts of gold at every opportunity while having to spend very little.
I ran a Grand Theft Auto RPG campaign once that started with people scamming for sandwiches living in a veterans homeless shelter. 100 sessions later, people were doing multi-million dollar heists to support the fees on their superyacht. One of my favorite campaigns.
I DM for my kids as part of our homeschool. Copper=penny, Silver=nickel, Electrum=dime, Gold=quarter, Platinum=dollar. I know it isn't the most direct crossover, but it works.
With this in mind, I took a look at my game and the extended shop list I'm using and the rewards in the modules and decided on 1 GP = 5 USD. It already feels more intuitive to look at.
We do use CP and SP (and at least acknowledge EP) and simple shop items like candles or cups costing a few nickels works out
I like using silver a the base $1 currency. The stronghold idea is really great and I have done that before. I made a spreadsheet with lots of upgrade options for the castle and lands they acquired though each upgrade also had an upkeep cost associated with it. The book you mentioned Strongholds and Followers influenced how I did things as it is a great resource but I mostly did my own thing.
When a friend and I ran D&D (later known as AD&D) gold was extremely rare, as rare as a +2 magic items. We also studied the economics of the Medieval age. Silver pieces were rare while copper was common. Mostly, characters were paid in copper, sometimes silver. Thieves were everywhere! So "when" characters suddenly had wealth, well it didn't stay safe for long! Royalty believed wealth belongs with them too. And yes, cost of living isn't cheap, and SAFE place to sleep cost way more!!
in our campains (usually low level) the rewards for quests are usually smaller and differ from the quest provider (an orphanage would give no more than 10 gold, maybe even ask for free), while it is quite easy to talk a drunken lord into a 500 gold reward.
I came up with the same number some years ago that 1 gold is $100, although my friend prefers $50 and that works well for him. I use a system for leveling up that uses gold and downtime to train to level up and that makes gold way more important. It also becomes way more important to give the players important events that if they spend a ton of time and gold leveling the villains will take advantage. I like it a lot.
Quick note from the player's Handbook. A skilled hireling earns 2 gold per day of work. To me, this means a gold piece is worth half of whatever you consider to be a skilled person to earn in one day. Let's assume someone earns $15 an hour (just to use a number). In an 8 hour work day, they earned $120. In D&D 5e, this would mean 1 gold is worth about $60. Just one way to look at it
One loaf of bread is 2copper in 5e. An average loaf of bread in the US is $3.99 so we will round to $4. So 1 Copper is $2. 100 copper = 1 gold. 2x100 = 200. So, 1 gold is approximately equal to $200. See, gold in DND 5e fluctuates. If I wanted to buy a full suit of armor (plate) it would be around $3,000. In 5e that same suit of armor would cost 1,500 gold. 1,500x200=300,000. It is very hard to find the absolute value of things in a fictional world when the pricing is not stagnate. I personally make up the prices of everything everywhere the party goes so it adds an economy to the game that differs from city to city.
The moment you mentioned fantasy setting ≠ medieval context was a clear call on worldbuilding and lore. Obviously an economy will run very different than the standard "precious metal is valuable bc is called precious metal for a reason, duh".
The original Fallout games handled well it with the bottle caps being actually tokens used to exchange with pure water in the purification plant that basically was assuming the role of a Central Bank. Water was an universal necessity so the ones capitalizing it were able to stablish an actual "barter economy" with a currency everyone could use (bottle caps).
In my fantasy setting everyone lives in living mountains (+2000km stone titans) that produce mineral resources naturally but the industry is rampant and the military even more so offer and demand is constant. The economy now runs by gold and platinum as currency bc those are the most used metals, so the "neutral mountains" can trade with the belic ones for their technology and, sometimes, protection; meanwhile those powerful use their "savings" (overaccumulated gold/platinum) to purchase food/materials and hire working labour from the non-belligerent (a nearly perfect cycle). The economy is regulated by an alliance of guilds around the continent processing most of the gold/platinum to turn it into coins and ingots, guaranteeing their purity and weight, then publishing exchange and price charts according to the current monetary mass, productivity and demand.
My friends and I all agreed that we didn’t want to roleplay/gamify financial struggles since we do that shit in real life every day hahaha
We keep money relatively abstract in our ttrpgs.
I actually changed the money system a little bit. I changed the lowest type of coin from a copper piece to a nickel (which is just a smaller, thinner piece of copper), then the second most valuable coin is copper, followed by silver (which is what the base value of most things is calculated in for trade purposes, rather than gold), then gold (which is a relatively rare sight), and finally platinum (which is a type of coin only really seen by the elite). I then just divided the price of everything by ten and lowered rewards accordingly. I also introduced more lower level magic cheap magic items along with used armour and weapons. My players will still get rich eventually, but it's a little more of a struggle, and the elite feel richer by comparison.
I personally love Campaigns that utilize copper and silver peices. Gold is a day labor for a skilled Artesian. That's about $200 dollars US a peice. It's also nice to have a bank systems in your games.
If you want gold to matter, introduce your characters to merchants with useful magic items on sale. Yes, it can be that simple a solution.
Old-school parties would go adventuring to get gold and valuables to resell in order to buy the new shiny items. It'd become a quest loop.
As someone that plays in a much lower-magic Greyhawk game, setting gold to $100 and copper to $1 is the way to go about it. The vast majority of places your party is going to go is a small town of 500 people that has at most 10 gold per NPC (including children); more expensive things are simply beyond their means unless they're in positions of privilege or stored their wealth over a long time with no one to spend it on. At the same time, you never need to floor your party with 5-gold cups of ale because again, you know roughly what things cost: a single can of Budweiser or Pabst will be some watery 5-copper swill-ale, the good stuff is pushing a silver or even two, and the top-shelf gourmet whiskeys and such will be in the multiple-gold ranges. Veggies are generally cheaper than meat, but some places will have more meat than veggies based on where they are and what they produce. This doesn't stop hundreds and thousands of gold from becoming relatively worthless in the long run though.
The big trick lots of people forget is that Gygax was a puzzle man, he wanted things to make sense. His young dragon harassing the starting town wouldn't have a hoard of 500 gold coins, because that would fit in a single sack and wouldn't look very impressive splayed around to sleep on. The dragon would have 500 gold-worth of copper and silver pieces, meats fresh and dried, maybe even some jewelry, weapons, or a suit of armor, because that's what the townspeople had to be stolen from them in the first place. At the same time, by removing the medium of money as an easy means of transporting wealth, your party drowning in money will require thought, effort, and luck to actually retrieve in the first place; getting that suit of Scale Mail back to town without wearing it is 45 lbs of weight for 50 gold of value. As another example from a converted module I ran, it lists a pure-ivory statue of a Naga, valued at 3k gold, but weighs 10k gold (which at 1 lb/50 coins, is still 200 lbs that won't fit in a bag of holding). It is a massive slab of dentine and collagen, and any damage that befalls it while removing it from the dungeon will tank the item's value. You also have to find someone rich and weird enough to actually want to pay $300,000 for a statue of a human-faced snake monster, and that someone will absolutely not be anywhere near the dungeon you pulled out from. So with hoards that are that low in value and that unwieldy, you're not going to be gaining wealth very quickly.
Additionally, Gygax built a gold sink into the level-up system. In order to become more skilled, your characters had to be instructed, and those instructors required payment because they need to eat too. As such, when you eventually did get your fat stacks of loot, they were immediately consumed by the need to improve your skillset, purchase a base of operations, hire NPCs to maintain said base of operations (you don't want to get burgled) and/or pay the NPC hirelings you brought with you (with hazard pay!) Don't have a base of operations? You're still going to have to pay for food and lodging, with variable cost between running a business and how much the townsfolk appreciate your services.
You'll be there for a while as well. Without a Cleric you only heal 1hp/day, so getting back up from 1 to your max of 15 will set you back two week's worth of daily expenses. Forget going shopping for magic items at that point. You'll have to ask the blacksmith in town if he can put aside most of his projects (or push them onto his kid) to start building a single mundane weapon for you guys, since that's a good lot of effort to make something durable enough to be worth $1,500 worth of 15 gold like the PHB says. Forget getting something like a Bag of Holding or a Flame-Tongue Greatsword anywhere besides prying it from something's cold, dead hands, likely after they already used it against you.
Now I'm not saying to go full edition reversal, just have the NPCs match their means and maybe be a bit shrewd. Again, the orphanage won't have much money to spare for clearing out their rat problem. The town won't be able to give you enough money to buy a castle, but they might be willing to build you guys a small fort over the course of a few months. Money doesn't show up in ways that make it easy to use, when it does there's not a lot of it, and getting it easy to use will require finding and hiring a merchant, banker, or exchequer to convert your treasure into what you want it to be. The level 5 Cleric NPC has a lot of responsibilities and would like a donation to their church in order to make arrangements for things to continue in their absence. Getting the Archmage NPC to cast a single spell for you sellswords will require a service of your ability for a duration worth the power of the spell.
My party needed a homebrew material to upgrade one of their weapons, and the only way to get it was with multiple uses of the Flame Strike spell. They had a Cleric of their own, but he could only cast it twice a day out of a necessary 7, and so they had to go to the capitol to find a Cleric of a high enough level. They didn't want to dip into their funds, and instead temporarily sold their currently-popular likeness rights in order to balance out her having to both join in casting spells and also procure expensive spell scrolls to make up the difference (as she was also only about party-strength). The party has since had to roleplay interacting with fanatics that want their merchandise marked, it's hilarious. They also previously helped out said capitol with an Orc invasion (that they instigated) and were rewarded for their taking responsibility, valorous leadership to prevent loss of life, and initiative in funding those few widowed and orphaned by the battle, not in coin but with knightly titles and a base they've yet to visit. I get to call them "Sire" and annoy them into humility when they just want to be seen as comrades instead of cool people, as well as get folks traveling from the starting town asking when they intend on finally swinging by. They recovered a dragon's hoard of dyes and other trade goods for a nobleman, who gave them no payment for its return and whose wife is going to send them a care package of good clothes and foodstuffs with an apology as the nobleman is preoccupied with a quest hook for them. It really makes the economy feel like an exchange of goods and services instead of a shopping list, and it makes roleplay opportunities.
"Most good… some bad.”
This is my gaming group to a T.
I use gold as a 'universal spell component'. If a spell needs an item to be cast, you can substitute it for the item cost x spell level gold. The gold is destroyed by the casting.
Three things I suggest: keep prices in gold but only hand out silver (1 sp instead of 1 gp). Make leveling up something you have to pay for (say 50 to 100 gp/lvl). That way a reward might actually be to be given a trainer without having to pay for her next time you level up.
It makes sense to tie the value of gold to something that the players can relate to and get a feel for.
The easiest way I find to make currency have more value is to have overly powerful shopkeepers who are hard (but not impossible) to steal from stocking some of the best gear the players will want. Have them doing quests and looting dungeons to earn money to buy the gear, rather than their main source of high level equipment and enchanted items being found at the end of dungeons and stories.
The players can see what they want from the moment they browse a shop, they can try to haggle for it, they can try to steal it, or they can work towards buying it. An OP shopkeeper discourages alternative means of acquisition while they're low-level, but players can still try their luck. They have choice, but they're encouraged to grind a little and feel like they earned it.
A few notes on the historical value of coins:
This is not really compatible with the official D&D coinage system, but it explains where the idea of 1GP = $100 comes from.
The US$ is based on the Spanish Peso, which was 1 ounce of Silver. Historically, this was quite a lot of money.
The Peso was subdivided into 8 parts. (Hence: Piece of Eight)
So if you're looking for an equivalent to one modern-day US$, you should probably use ⅛ of a silver piece.
For many centuries of human history, the conversion rate of silver to gold has been somewhere close to 15/1. So 1GP would be worth 15 x 8 = 120 modern-day dollars.
Now, the actual value of silver and gold in any given world greatly depends on how much of each commodity is available. D&D sets the conversation rate at 10/1, which should mean that either gold is much more abundant, or silver is much rarer than in our world.
In either case, the purchasing power of 1GP should still be much more than $1.
sinks are super important. not just for pen and paper but for any kind of game.
Because players (and npcs) generate resources out of thin air. Once in a while there have to be upkeep costs. They need to have food, starving for a while should have lasting negative effects. Armor and Weapons need to be repaired (tampered, re-grinded, ...). Even sorcerers should have some form of resource they need to restock (be it mana-potions, herbs or whatsoever).
yeah, they might get 30 gold per person for a quest. But that quest took them 2 days, eating for two days at 2 gold each day. The Warriors shield has craked and needs to be either replaced or fixed. The roques has his lockpicking tools broken. The druid lost his right boot (can now decide to buy a new pair or run around with two different boots :) ), ....
so in the end to total earn per person will be more like 10-15 gold.
Also, give them opportunities early to take loans. Yeah, you can have this nice sword... oh you can't afford it, what about... take it now, pay later. interest rate is 3-6% per day (rounded up each day). If they don't pay for a while, send thugs after them (that either take what they have as a partial payment, or fight them (even if the party has luck and the thugs lose, they flee)), sued by law (guards, prison, ....), ....
this makes the players think about taking the loan, calculating how many days it will require to earn the money back, where a misjudgment means they maybe need to do one more scenario, increasing the loan further.
I do:
4 copper to a Silver. 20 silver to a Gold.
A copper piece is a day's food, a day's wages, or a meal and night at a tavern. It being equal pay and expense for most per day really gives the hand-to-mouth poor a good feel.
Two copper is unlimited drinks at the tavern for a night; (the cheap stuff.)
So a copper is roughly a 10$ bill. Barter, legers, and haggling cover change if necessary. Copper is also physically worthless - it is all FIAT currency backed by guilds and local lords, so one town's copper tokens might not trade the same rate in another.
A silver is roughly a $50. This is the highest denomination a shop-keep might have, and is DE-FACTO value, so it trades by weight everywhere. This also means size matters. It's prone to overspending, since basic merchants have a 50% chance of not having silver change, and having to settle in local (copper) scrip, or barter. Pickpockets love it.
A gold is about $1000. This is used for buying houses, weapons, and payments between lords and governments. In the USA a new, Military-ish rifle usually costs about 1-2k dollars, but can go into the tens of thousands for automatic weapons, or high-end optics.
Same with swords, and military weapons in my games. First you need a license, then it's a gold base, and double the price for every added +1 bonus.
Gold will also attract armed thieves and bandits if you show it off too much.
For you it's a +2 Mace. For them, it's almost a year of food, booze, and shelter if their mates don't slit their throat for it on the way home.
Edit:
It also gives a sense of what the origin of a given treasure is at a notice.
Several trunks of copper coins - Local taxes, probably. Someone will be looking for this.
A small chest of silver - An expensive purchase by a well-to do individual. You're probably off scott-free.
A cartload of gold coins - Funds for a war, or a kingdom's ransom to a True Dragon. "Did you just rip off the FEDS MAN!?" (Unlimited money, but also practically unspendable. Would be an entire adventure trying to launder it without attracting deadly amounts of attention.)
i mean, having the loot be components instead of currency is also interesting.
the orphanage has no money but it has a beautiful cinderpetal bush in the courtyard garden.
Depending on the fantasy setting but the economy is always super broken. A gold per day is considered very good living standard costs and also yeah is 100 coppers. I do what you do, I treat gold as though it were $1.00 per gold piece. It’s understandable and now that 50 gold light heal potion or 1,500 gold platemail makes sense to modern players.
I have local currencies, the silver from one lord can be more valuable than another lords, or that Dimas coins are not welcome here, so the party had to find a blacksmith to melt the coin so someone can accept it, but later outside the town they would encounter an NPC that only accepts the Dimas coins in exchange for information.
I have always played with fantasy economies being two-tier. Gold is the bottom tier, it's the currency of the masses. So even large sums of gold may be useful if you are trying to raise an army or build a castle, or for an adventurer to commission masterwork arms and armor. But you're unlikely to find anyone who is willing to part with magic items (beyond the lowest level consumables such as potions) for gold, at least not at prices that are highly inflated. So when it comes to the really valuable items that adventurers actually want, these items are basically the top tier, where a barter economy exists, or an economy of rare materials that are necessary to craft magic items can sometimes substitute.
Easiest way to figure out the conversion between any two types of money, is to look at the cost of bread in the nations that that money is used. In the US, on average, a loaf of bread is roughly 2 dollars. So, the way you figure out DND’s monetary equivalent, is to look at what the players handbook says a loaf of bread cost. And then just figure out the conversion between the two.
In my D&D, the financial system is so well balanced, that this is session 20 and their entire fortune consists of 40 silver coins called hrivna, 20 iron coins called grajciar and a pouch full of rings. They actuall just last session lost that as they are captive. It is entirely homebrew and in my fantasy world that i´m writing a book in. The only time they´ve even seen gold was like for 1 minute.
Simple solution is to make gold a requirement for leveling up. 1 xp = 1 gold piece for leveling purposes. Every dnd enemy has xp, so give rewards from quest givers for a certain amount of enemies slain. Treasure has monetary value, so provide that exchange after every session-tabulate what in your prep the group got and what they missed and give them the gold budget. You’ll be the “bank” for their earnings in the game, which will keep them coming back for more!
Players can’t hoard their gold without harming their leveling, and players are incentivized to dungeon delve to train for higher levels. Gold must be spent to level-wizards take classes, warlocks pay their patrons, clerics donate, barbarians carouse on the town and fighters pay for training and armor maintenance. Thieves pay their boss's boss and pocket a bit on the side if they can sneak it.
Another important part is not just having a “base” but having an impact on the community. You’re a paladin? Your gold helps buy soldiers to protect the town where you are. Thieves have guilds, monks have monasteries, and wizards can be patrons of libraries. All of these can have in-game benefits of course, but the real goal is to make your players feel like they are becoming part of the fabric of the community.
In my system a full gold piece is worth 500 dollars and is used only by the wealthiest individuals. Most people use bits or pieces of 8 which are gold or silver coins cut into 8 pieces so the pieces are fairly small copper pieces are used more like the dollar bill and farthings (8th of copper pieces) act as your "change"
"Or whatever your local currency is"
Now I'm imagining folks throwing around gold coins like their yen or pesos.
I would definitely like to revamp the economy in my games, because the value of a gold piece is honestly all over the place, even from the purchasing side alone. One gold piece buys a goat or a set of dice.
What the game states, though, is that people typically deal in silver more so than gold, so I think I’d make silver pieces the dollar equivalent with prices reflective of times when the US dollar was actually backed by something (either gold or silver depending on the era).
When lucky enough to play at a table, I make higher level currency physical tokens at the table (Sliver, Gold, Platinum). Then I even have Copper and Iron pieces, so 1 Iron Piece is like $1, and 1 Copper Piece is like $100, and 1 Silver Piece is like 100 Copper Pieces, and 1 Gold is like 100 Silver pieces, and 1 Platinum is 1,000 Gold Pieces.
So, if a player gets to hold a physical Platinum Coin (metal token) in their hand, and they know it equals in this world $1,000,000,000, things can get pretty crazy. This means you have to make higher currency super rare. You can adjust the zeros down to make it a little more reasonable, or get rid of Iron Pieces, but you get the idea.
I have studied money and to simplify the concept, when copper, silver, gold and platinum coins are used as money based on their weight, then their value is tied to what those metals would buy in the marketplace as commodities (the same as swords, bread, etc.) Since these metals tend to hold relative to each other over time, I use their real world relation for D&D and throw the rulebook values and correspondents out the window. A one ounce silver coin from any location can buy a whole chicken or steak dinner (around $20 more or less). A one ounce copper coins is about a 1/100th of that so $0.20, (100 copper = 1 silver). A one ounce gold around is $2000 or 100 Silver coins, and a one platinum coin is $1000 or 50 silver. Then price the value of items in terms of their equivalent values. I do not allow the use of paper money because in most of the world, that wasn't a thing until the 18th century (there are historical exceptions but always lead to inflation and hyper-inflation). I don't use electrum since that is an alloy of silver and gold and would therefore vary in vale depending on what ratio was used by the minter and that just makes it more complicated because that realistically could vary by location. But this puts the value of the coins in real relation to each other and provides corresponding dollar values to make it familiar to our modern unbacked fiat money. I do allow a form of check though, but the Adventurers have to take it to the treasury of the town where the metal coins are being held and withdraw it or transfer it into their account at that location or open an account if they don't have one. to transfer money to a different location without the adventurer's withdrawing it, requires a wax-sealed letter from them using a signet ring obtained from the treasury and they have to wait the appropriate time for he letter to arrive at the treasury and then for the treasury to physically move the coin to the new location at a different treasury. Definitely not the speed of modern EFT transactions.
Currently a 5th level party with no magic items and 112 gold between the 5 of us. Our forge cleric made us a cart piece by piece over a number of sessions, and we are using a tamed giant scorpion to pull it through the dessert
Some additional complications to make gold feel important:
1 play other system: or at least read them. Red Markets is an independently designed rpg specifically about making money matter (and also zombies, but those aren't important). Instead of counting every coin or tracking every exchange, it uses an abstract concept of Bounty to track monthly expenses. 1 Bounty = 1 month survival. So buying a gun for 3 Bounty translates directly to selling 3 months of your life for a weapon. You could easily homebrew something based on that concept to fit your table.
2 the Breaking Bad problem: what good is having piles and piles of money if you can't spend it? Maybe the PCs have a reputation so no one will trade with then, so a shop who will deal with them becomes a quest reward.
3 the post-WW1 Germany problem: the PCs are (or were very recently) very rich, but the fantasy economy has crashed, so commodities cost 100x or 1,000x more in gold pieces (or you can better
4 the Conquistador problem; the PCs are in an area where the culture doesn't value gold as a currency. What DOES this society is instead of gold, and how do your players acquire it?
"We're not doing taxes" Someone hasn't played with my old DM 😢
We play Savage Worlds, but same concept. I had a campaign based on the Hundred Years war. The characters started off as surviving low level mercenaries on the side of a victorious, but costly, battle. I had wages for various types of mercenaries (common foot soldiers, bowmen, etc) and that's what they got. They were looting corpses for equipment early on. By the end of the campaign, they were variously high ranking church members, nobles, etc. Still, money mattered because the higher they rose socially the more financial responsibility they had. You're a duke? Cool. You make money from your lands, but you owe your leige lord taxes and must pay for men at arms 3 months a year. Don't forget your 10% to the church. Your border fortress needs upkeep or you'll be at a disadvantage against your neighbor. Bandits hit one of your granaries, raise your own troopw or hire mercenaries? King of Cyprus needs you to provide troops for this battle and you have to pay for naval transport. You're a little short? No problem, Italian banker at the port will lend you money at 15%. It was one of my groups favorite campaigns because the progress was more than just 'get stronger, hit bigger monsters'. The social and economic advancement became very rewarding. And crushing when a member crit failed a persuasion role with an archbishop about to get him a cherry priory for his lands... :D
Before watching the video, here's what I'd do:
Give yourself a CLEAR comparison.
One of the biggest issues is not "feeling" the worth of money in the campaign. That said, if I were to use a Gold/Silver/Copper system, then I'd just do it like this:
1 Copper (c) = 1 Cent
1 Silver (s) = $1 (100 cents) = 100 Coppers (AKA 100 Cents)
1 Gold (g) = $100 = 100 Silver = $100
So I'd use this, and think to myself "How much would this cost irl?", and apply that price. And I'd only change the price of stuff that I think would have just a different value in a medieval/fantasy setting.
For example, food is more difficult to come by to, so naturally its price would be higher. I could test it out, and increase the price of food by 20%, for starters.
So, something that you'd need $1 for would be $1.20, AKA 1 Silver and 20 Copper (or 120 Copper).
I'd also add Exchange Offices, so that you find value in having change, and sometimes wanting more of it. (ofc, if I wanna go a bit more in-depth)
Granted, it would be a base idea, but it's not a bad starting point. And it works better than just giving a bare approximation.
Additionally, you can always take into account several factors:
1. IRL, we pay for so much shit, so we almost never get 100% of our salaries for just ourselves, and our fun, as a lot of it goes on bills, food, taxes, etc., so you can always make that more of a thing;
2. Another thing that never seems to matter is "having a home". You can always just sleep in a barn, or a Tavern, and not care. Taverns should be ripping you off as much as a Hotel would. Or at least close enough (since maybe a Medieval time would have more people who have no homes, but can find a job easier than people nowadays, since anyone can do pure physical labour). So either make Taverns cost more per night, so your character goes there ONLY IF THEY HAVE TO, or to just get themselves an actual house of sorts. (which is not as interesting in DnD, since you can't really have an easy visual on your home, to decorate it in your free time, but still)
3. Following No. 2, make it harder for your characters to just...sleep outside. Add guards that shoo people off the streets, or add a looming presence that haunts the nights. Make it so that your characters would PREFER to avoid sleeping outside at night. (or if they want to, they have to try harder at it, like actually spending some time finding a proper spot where they can't be easily found by guards, etc.)
4. If you use the similar comparison method I brought up above, make sure to think more about salaries for jobs. If you get paid, let's say, 50 gold for a job for one day, then that would be equivalent to getting $5000. For one day. Nuts, right? Whereas getting paid hourly, like, $3-$5 would make more sense (for some sort of minimum wage, depending on where you live), so in 8 hours, you'd make between $24-$40, which would be like 24s-40s. (s = silver)
5. Having only Gold doesn't work as well, since there's definitely things that would feel like being worth in smaller increments. And also, it makes Gold abundant, being the only currency that's even used, thus leading to a form of inflation. So no wonder it "feels" like 50 gold isn't a lot. But if you used other smaller currencies next to it, like Silver and Copper, then you make it just easier for yourself, since you don't have to put food at like 1-2 gold, but you can go even smaller, and go for Copper values, and such, thus giving Gold "more value" in a player's mind. (note, having a Gold/Silver/Copper system isn't the only one you should have 100%, like, you can come up with your own! But this one is something a lot of people know, especially from stuff like WoW, and such! Witcher uses Doucats, Crowns, Demerits, etc, which differ from region to region, so you can play with that too, and give more importance to Exchange Offices as well!)
There's probably more, but this is off the top of my mind! Now, I'll watch the video, and see your points, to check if any coincide (pun unintended, but self-appreciated), for funsies. And I'll add my thoughts on it as an edit at the bottom! Tho, no matter what, having a proper comparison makes the WORLD of difference.
WATCHING EDITS:
-Okay, so, I WAS expecting something akin to mentioning the comparison to irl currency. But I didn't really except stuff like "what gold would be worth" to be reaching a similar amount, which is cool!
-On your note of "5 players get 300 gold, to spread amongst themselves for a job", I just wanna note that it may feel a bit more "satisfying" if players are paid "per person", and not "here's this money that you'll feel worse about because there's more of ya". They'd probs feel better if you started off with "This job is worth 60g a day, per person.", and then they do it, and get 60g, which feels better than being told "It's 300g in general, so if you do it alone, there's more for you than if you did it with people". You can make some exceptions, for people who just need some kind of job done, like "slaying a monster for revenge on their family members who were killed by it", but only have a certain amount of money, so they'd give it all, no matter who does it, and how many people do it.
-Mentioning the "clerics can heal you, etc, it's a high-fantasy" is a very good point! Again, like I mentioned, some things have different values in a medieval/fantasy setting. Tho, while clerics can heal you, at the end of the day, they are the only ones that CAN do it completely, with no downsides, whereas going to a doctor would help, but couldn't just magically make you fully healed, with no diseases, ailments, etc. So one could make a setting where Clerics demand a HIGH price for their services, BECAUSE they are usually the only ones who can do it. (and if you have a Cleric in your party who wants to do good deeds, and heals people for free, it could literally backfire by making the church go after them, because they're literally disrupting the system they've built, thus adding an interesting new problem that arose from doing good)
-On one hand, yes, the Player Party is composed of, effectively, often superhero-esque beings, so they'd make money easier than your average farmer, etc. But they also often start off being lvl 1 superhero-esque beings. Maybe even in a world with an Adventurer's Guild, where they're even surrounded by people who are like them. Such Guilds are always a fun thing to play around with, tho, and their existence usually makes sense, since such a world is filled with dangers that your average person can't handle. So they need people who can handle them. So one would think that there would come a point where there's a decent amount of Adventurers. Or, you could have a similar plotpoint, like in One Punch Man, where the monsters just kinda keep getting so much more powerful that the casual C or E class heroes feel no different than police officers, or even anything below high A class, because huge numbers and power of heroes give rise to stronger monsters, because of their need to survive, and overcome. Tho, that's just a random mention. But could always be an opportunity for a new event to throw at your players!
So far the things I wanted to comment on the most. All in all, a great video, and a fantastically good talking point! I've had my fair share of getting to a point where I have too much Gold for anything, ABSURDLY quickly.
Getting rich can be fun and exciting, and rewarding as well. But, like, around in 80-90% of the campaign's completion.
Not within the first 5-10%. Just loses its charm.
I saw that reddit post and it's not really correct in many of it's assumptions. Mainly in the fact of it's based on the cost of goods, but not on the buying power of money and salaries. There was a great comment to it though, from 5 years ago by deleted account (it has a table in it), which came to 20$ per gp. I personally prefer 10$ since it makes it easier to track, but still, 100$ is waaay too much. And your solution work too! Just making it as valuable as you need so that everyone understands what you are talking about is a great solution.
been doing 1 gp = $1 has been a great move just like you stated. I would add having a monthly maintenance fee or taxes via king city as also another way outlet for the players funds.
I like the idea of giving players outlets for excess cash. I had one of my characters buy gems with excess gold because they were easier to carry around and had a fun gravity to them.
“Make gold $1.”
Bruh that’s what Copper is for.
I once did some math about it myself, and according to the PHB, "A skilled (but not exceptional) artisan can earn one gold piece a day." Also according to the PHB, 1 gold piece a day gets you a "modest lifestyle", which is normally being lived by, "soldiers with families, laborers, students, priests..." and puts them in poorer neighborhoods, which I took to be right about the threshold between upper poor and lower middle class or so, which is about $28k a year. $28k a year is about what a person makes for $15 an hour for an 8 hour day, which comes to $120 per day, which these days affords about the modest lifestyle described from my experience. I think the disconnect is that you're looking at gold pieces as what the commonfolk would use as $1's or $10's when the book describes them as $100's. Commonfolk aren't buying meals with gold, they're using copper ($1's) or silver ($10's). It's probably not wrong to think that most commonfolk only have a couple of gold pieces as savings, and most of their expenses are paid with silver because that's what they get paid in.
I agree that a regular orphanage wouldn't pay a group 100 gold to help because that's an absurd amount of money for them to have, and if a single person is paying 5 gold for an overnight stay at an inn, you're paying for a night at an aristocratic inn and leaving a 1 gold tip. Aristocratic is the highest wealth class there is, mostly composed of politicians, guild leaders, high priests, and nobility. 2 people staying at a modest inn would be charged 1 gold ($100) for a day. I admit I don't stay at hotels, well, ever, but $60 to $100 is the average hotel daily stay in my area. A comfortable inn stay is 8 silver per night per person, so 5 gold for 5 players to stay at the inn would cover the night with a tip.
The biggest groups that deal with large amounts of gold as described are guilds, military, and governments, and they're the only ones that could afford to have major bounties. A small village might be able to cobble together 20 to 50 gold (in silver pieces) for a bounty, but that's the village leader going around to all the families to get the coin together in the hope that some person or group that can handle the danger comes along to accept the bounty. Coming back to the orphanage, depending on the problem, it wouldn't be the orphanage that pays 100 gold, since it's likely to be a public building anyway, but it would be the government paying 100 gold to deal with a problem that sending the city guard either hasn't worked or is too dangerous for standard guards to have a hope at.
In conclusion, low level characters should be far more accustomed to be being paid and paying in copper or silver, and then move up to gold as they level up and can take on much more serious threats that the big 3 would actually put bounties on rather than throw their own men at. I think devaluing gold to being worth $1 not only makes copper or silver completely worthless (which many might not care about, depending on what you're going for), but how much more does gold cheapen as the characters get higher and higher in level? Are there million gold piece bounties? Do ancient dragons have hoards of billions of gold coins? Establishing the worth of a gold as being worth $100 is mostly a DM's narrative responsibility (players need to go along with it, of course), and is far more important at early levels when the characters should be dealing with a lot more copper and silver. Finding inns lower level characters can afford might lead them to only being able to afford poor inns (1 silver a day), and they need to deal with violence, crime, and disease, or they might need to go down to squalid (7 copper a day), where the guards likely won't even help if their stuff gets stolen because the guards tend to avoid that area.
DND isn’t actually a game about Hero’s fighting ancient evils and saving the realms, or demigods leaping into domain of demons and gods to do endless epic battle. DND is about making ends meet, a commoner uses copper pieces if they use coinage at all, a knight from the capital would put a silver piece on the table and heads will turn. A noble leaves home for an indeterminate amount of time with 10 gold pieces of value and considers it sufficient. Also, you have materials, spell components, roguish tools, the standard issue collapsible 10 ft pole. You have to pay for and carry everything you need or you will die of starvation a failed adventurer. And once you reach a point where you aren’t worrying about where your next meal is coming from, then you can worry about the world.