I think it's easiest to just equate a silver to one dollar, so each gold piece is like a ten dollar bill. Then all you have to do is adjust wages to match, and everything else kind of falls into place.
Gygax implemented something like this in his Mythus game, which came out after he left TSR. He suggested calling the basic unit of currency the "buc" (or a similar acronym) and that to determine prices, just use real world values of comparable items. a sword would cost roughly the same as a gun, a horse the same as maybe a motorcycle, etc.
It doesn't really work cause money has relative value. Viral evergreen tweet that says "20$ is like an adult dollar." I completely agree. 10$ doesn't buy you sh!t, it buys you half of shit. You can't even clothes yourself or buy a meal except for off the street. Even fastfood meals cost over 10 bucks so no, 10$ unless you're living very cheaply will not amount to enough.
Puffin Forest recently did a video about this in 1st edition, Gary Gygax tried to counter players having an excess of gold by taxing them into the ground. A silver at every gate, for an inn to hold your horse, a tithe to different churches, You have to pay for audience to kings. It seems like an alright way to nickel and dime your players -or “silver and copper them” if you want to be a nerd- into having whatever your desired money amount is and to drive them to always seek work and therefore go on adventures
@@Seth9809 while I feel like this is good too, I wouldn’t do it as much. If a player feels like an NPC is charging too much for something they are inclined to either look somewhere else or feel like they are being cheated. If they look somewhere else and are still shorted then it will just make them feel like their DM just doesn’t want them buying things and their gold will feel useless. If you charge them for too much for things they want they will try to live without, If you tax them for things that they need, they will realize they HAVE to have money. The moment they don’t pay to stable their house, the horse could run off or get stolen or get sick. This will make them want to earn more money to stable their horse AND be happy if they have an excess of money because this expense that brought them trouble is now trivial!
I'm currently also dealing with the same shit. Changed how much my gold is worth, 100 silver = 1 GP, but in the end the big annoying thing is having to mess with all the prices. Rn I'm just playing it by ear as things go THOUGH money can honestly feel like an issue in my game and that is pretty fun to me.
The way I did it is to convert everything to dollars. I use the 10 copper = 1 silver, 15 silver = 1 gold, 2 electrum = 1 gold and 2 gold = 1 platinum model. I set my mind on 1/4 troy oz of metal per coin piece for all metals. So a 1/4 troy oz gold piece is worth 633$ in today's dollars. From there I assigned prices that would make sense to me in a medieval (no mass production) economy to everything and converted back to the metal based economy. I am sure some of the things are wrong, but compared to a system that makes 0 sense, I feel it's a huge improvement. In my world most items are worth copper and silver. A few very expensive things are worth gold (think of charriots and horses for example). For quick conversion when a spell calls for an expensive component, I simply divide the price by 10 on the fly.
I think the way you subtly jabbed at the imbalance of the price economy for things like castles and a potions with your delivery was pretty top-notch lmao
The designers have said that they don't assume you will do 6-8 encounters, that's a misconception. That's just the point at which they assume players will start getting tuckered out and *have* to stop. Next to no tables actually run 6-8 encounters a day.
It’s not a misconception, that figures taken directly from the DMG. You’re correct that designers have said that considering the rest system you should expect to be doing that amount. But saying “you will do 6-8 encounters before you NEED a long rest” actually supports my argument: that the designers do assume you’ll get to that point. That’s how the games set up even if no one plays that way. You can see my “resting is dumb” video, I address that very point. But even if that weren’t the case, the point still stands that it’s incredibly easy to get hilarious amounts of gold. That’s why I focus on treasure hoard table in my video.
First of your videos I've seen, I really liked it, congratulations on the house and Marriage btw! Yah the economy of a dnd world is sorta broken, however I've learned a few things from playing the game when it comes to this stuff. 1. Most players don't care about economics and won't notice. 2. I don't use the random money or treasure tables, which means that I determine what players earn and what they get by practicality and choice. 3. If you look at a d&d world through the idea that there are more adventuring parties than the one at your table, and combine that with nobility, secret organizations, and magical beings along with plane hopping economics, you can see why magic items and such are so expensive (because there is a demand for them). How most of my players are rewarded is as follows. Bounty based on the threat of the monster or task + loot at location + loot in Monsters or enemies possession. Sometimes the location and monster don't have anything because they wouldn't as the type wouldn't. So sometimes it's just the bounty. I'll give an example if anyone is curious as how'd I determine cost. Cool video again, I plan to look through your other ones 😀
Glad to see you back! Honestly I think it'd be difficult to introduce mid-campaign but I think since plenty of games have used a wealth stat it's not impossible to do. It's less granular control but you & the party both know where you stand with a system like that. Open Legend RPG is one such good example.
also i wanted to add: yes being an adventurer CAN be very lucrative, but remember that for that you need: extensive training and experience (thats if you are a meelee fighter, imagine the ammounts of money you would need to be a wizard, paladin, cleric or blood hunter), gear, connections to get a start and even then you are risking your life multiple times a day, a few bad luck rolls can and WILL mean death which is why most people arent adventurers and most adventurers will get rich quick soilders do risk their lives but not the same as adventurers, they are part of a structure, organized military that provides traning, status and security. you can become a guard, a watchman, a scout etc and even if you are part of an army you wont be going into the wilderness every day with another two dudes to kill 6 wraiths, you are gonna be in formation with another 40 dudes to kill maybe one or two other dudes! (this is all of course, IF there is a war, in peace time you are being paid to train and maybe do guard duty/reserves/train new recruits)
My campaigns are on a copper or silver standard. Figure an unskilled laborer makes 5 copper a month and can usually save 2 of those if he lives alone in a rented apartment for 1.5 copper a month. Briefly, 100 copper commons equal a silver noble and 100 silver nobles equals a gold sovereign and 100 gold equals a platinum. There are also electrum, bronze, brass and even iron coins, but you get the idea. Also, every realm uses the same ratio of precious to alloy substance so that their coinage isn't considered less valuable than that of another realm. Close allies will often mint the exact same coins (even jointly minting) as each other, with each side representing a different ally. This allows trade to flourish. Few have even ever seen a silver coin and NO ONE walks around with gold. Unless you are buying something EXTREMELY expensive like magic items or a caravan full of goods, they are hard to spend. Adventurers might find, after a hard fought plunder session for say 4th level characters, might waltz into town with .5-4 gold (in all kinds of bulky forms) for a party of 6. They have to sell their gains, at a loss compared to their actual face value of course, and then they can celebrate. Unless they have to replenish supplies anyway. What random things cost is a direct result of how plentiful the raw materials are, how many artisans can make the item and is there enough demand to actually make the item for inventory or are they special orders.
One of the fundamental conceits of D&D is that the story takes place in a dangerous and violent world, one in which travel between cities and towns is inherently dangerous, and so the average person leaves home only when there is no other choice. In such a world, an Adventurer is an anomaly, someone who not only braves the wilds, but does so by choice, and deliberately explores the dangerous and wild places that no one else will. In the 4E handbook takes pains to describe there there is just something *different* about the adventurer. Even at level 1, they are capable beyond the reach of a normal person. They might have a special destiny, or be one of only a scant few capable of casting magic, the scion of some forgotten god, or even a reborn god themself. Adventurers are special, and they only get more special as their power grows. I think that the economic setup of the world of D&D is meant to reflect this reality. A day's adventure for a level 1 party is worth nearly a nobleman's lifestyle specifically because it is beyond the capabilities of any but a foolhardy adventurer to survive such an experience. Those treasures were always in that cave for the taking, but naught but an army could have entered it and survived. And as your powers grows and you realize your special destinies, the rewards become even greater, rewards that will allow you to harness that special destiny and bend it to your will. In the end, an Adventurer could find themselves the lords of an estate, kings and queens, Generals in the Kingdom's Army, or even with funding enough to create a Kingdom of their own in the wilds they have tamed. The GP as a standard, with its value representing the average daily take home of a skilled laborer, exists to show you how much MORE your collected value is than that. it's not a broken economy, it's a special economy, one which only exists and works for the Adventurer and other higher-order beings.
2:28 You know, something like that happened in England once. It caused a giant economic crisis because people would buy English coins and sell it in France for more than they were bought in England and just keep going back and forth. The English economy was flooded with Franch currency and vice-versa.
The simplified way to resolve this is with trade rout maps. Min max on commodities. You know you have places where art sells at full price others where grain is at it's best. Economics is resource handling real sale items have an aria of effect centered from the point of origin. So using your world map bandwidth circles trade routs extending it you can calculate demand eventually reaching max shipping cost value damage. I know this seems a little complex but it can be applied to all items as a system. Plus if you study civics sandbox auto stories just tell themselfs.
Adventurers aren't the only people with that kind of money. Royalty has it to. Soldiers put their lives on the line yes, for 40days with steady pay against other soldiers. While u fight things that can depopulate village's for fun... Monster slaying means people WILL die if they aren't adventures or of similar power. U aren't a normal person as an adventurer. Knights train their whole life and are stupid rich and get to be cr 3.Thats about level 5. U might earn a lot of money doing adventures, but that same knight just gives his lord an oath of service. He has land, a hold, servants and treasure. So he will fight for his lord on occasions and have a certain amount of peasents that he needs to make sure are in fighting condition when push comes to shove. In a fantasy setting they might need to fight monsters but there is a good Chance they don't always gotta, since a Knight's death would be inconvenient. SO, we have people equally and more powerful then knights, willing to risk their lifes to an INSANE degree, wich earn money and don't even get titles, lands, servants and treasure. They "just" get treasure. More treasure the more dangerous stuff they do yeah, but so does the ordinary mercenary on a victory and at the end of their campaign. Only they didn't fight terrific Monsters 8 times a day in a tiny group. They killed people, people like them. Adventures are a little like Landsknechte on steroids. Mercenary's known for their skill, having lots of money, extravagant clothes, celebrating a lot and having a wild, yet short life. They literally changed the laws for these guys so they could wear stuff only royals could wear. And for people who think knights were rare, england had 5-6k estates wich weren't necessarily knights, but the feudal system lends itself to the conclusion that most of them were.The hole give me military service and i give u land and status and that hole deal. So I'll just go with 4000 knights here. They had 2 Milion people, so 500 people to 1 knight and I've seen estimates with more knights per people. So no, the gold really isn't as weird as many people think, it happened in history and those guys didn't live a life nearly as dangerous , and they didn't have the ability to kill 40 man in 6 seconds with freaking flames, tank hits from a 3 meter dumb brute by just being angry or revive the dead... Adventures aren't Normal Just read those things again.Heck even in a fantasy setting that's not common. Sure they aren't unheard of by any means...i mean they might be, i don't know the setting and the connection between village's but seriously. Steroid Landsknechte with supernatural skill and or abilities fighting demons, dragons, undead, giants and all the other things hiding in the shadows will have a higher pay grade than freaking James the soldier.
the way the world treats some stuff like a beer being worth a few copper, or a meal can be a silver or two, and with a gold being worth a modest living, i imagine a gold being equal to roughly a hundred bucks, which comparably to a 14 gp biweekly, or $1,400 a paycheck, seems like a reasonable comparison. Compared to how adventurers attain insane amounts of money, i like to think that's what helps make a separation between the world of adventurers, and the world of the commoners, something that can drive adventurers, but that is an interesting point on how soldiers dont earn nearly as much as adventurers while putting their lives on the line. I like to play it out the adventurers are wild cards to society, and are NOTICED when coming through towns with their wealth sometimes literally just worn on their fingers or armor or in the scabards on display for all to see. like a terrifying visage of dispair or hope, especially when you consider the stats of commoners compared to even 5th level adventurers. play punch for punch with any adventurer and they'll knock out 10 commoners before going down. I personally think adventurers arent' targeted enough by opportunitists with like you said, years worth of modest living literally jangling around in their pockets like candy on halloween. loud and delicious sounding to any commoner with even a hint of selfishness and desperation. (i hate figuring out time and again where to fit in electrum, so i always make it some sort of thieves guild only currency)
this is one of the most complicated aspects of the game that most people leave alone completely simply because it's too much extra bookkeeping, unless you're an accountant or economics expert. it's worth considering in some respects, especially if you want realistic coinage in your world, and you don't even have to follow a gold standard. but you might also want to consider what impact a single party would have on a local economy when they flood it with money after their latest haul and what that might do to prices of even basic goods. how much realism is too much is what it comes down to for most groups, and it's something a DM has to decide for themselves ultimately.
Why does almost everyone make the same faulty assumption that every 'encounter' is going to result in a) combat or b) with all of the enemies being killed or c) with all of the enemies carrying loot. None of those conditions are required for an 'encounter'. Even the sample Sylvan Forest Encounters table has mostly non-combat encounters (assuming a non-murder-hobo party). Even if the party instantly attacks, at least some of the opponents could run away if they're obviously losing. If you are lucky enough to have competent players you could even include encounters which they need to retreat from to avoid a TPK. Beasts and other low intelligence creatures are highly unlikely to be carrying stuff around. Even those that do collect shiny things would leave them back in their lair which could be quite well hidden. Anyways, the flow of money and magic in the game is totally under the DM's control.
I am absolutely here for whatever you got to say and this video confirms that. Thanks for explaining an issue I have to as a DM, and I might use this to defend myself from some exacting players I have
In my world a gold dragon set up an international banking corporation to standardise the currency (and of course takes a service fee, interest and the like). I think its much easier than making the players exchange their currency at the border, and provides a reason why everyone would be using the same coins, instead of bartering for everything
I really recommend looking up when Matt Colville talked about talking to a Blackwater Merc back when working on Mercenaries (the video game). I really commonly have my adventurers that I play have this moment of contemplating retirement after a few levels, seeing that they really could be set for life... and then they blow their money on gear, vices, whatever, and that means they gotta get back on the adventuring trail... like Conan.
The thing is, in feudal economy. An adventurer would get taxed almost all of the gold abs treasure that they find, as its like a noble or group of nobles own that land.
Congrats on the house and marriage. I feel like adventuring is a weird and inconsistent profession. I'll be honest, I haven't read the dmg, except for the magic items section, so I don't know if it says that you have to give gold to your players at the end of every encounter, but it might say it. I almost never reward players with money at the end of every fight, a lot of times monsters don't have pockets or carry trinkets, specially if they have less than 3 intelligence, but that depends on the DM. You could argue that the value of the monster parts could be equivalent, but that relies on having someone that knows of their worth and how to extract them. As for adventures, I guess it depends on the rate on which adventures happen. Is there a problem every week? every month? How often do players go on adventures to actually earn their keep? Apparently in the Sword Coast you can't look away without a multi million gold worth cult rising to try to destroy the world. Economics start to get even more complicated when you begin to consider rate of employment. Point is, money is weird and magic item sellers should be way more paranoid about their stock.
I've found a decent way of re-rigging treasure in my games: The main issue is the assumptions laid out in the video (cost of labor, living expense, magic item costs) are skewed so far from where players usually experience the game, and magic items get so expensive so fast, it turns mid to high level play into extravagant nonsense. in other words, flatten the treasure curve. make the two extremes closer together. move unskilled labor to 1g per day, and skilled to 5g. wealthy living becomes 6g per day, and aristocratic becomes 20. This means the average person is doing pretty well, which will fit some settings more than others, but it makes adventurers tipping a gold less mind-bending. Then apply this simple rule of thumb to existing prices: divide the price of any item, property or reagent worth more than 500g by 3, and anything worth more than 5000g by 10. Round up to the nearest 5. This makes common magic items worth 25-100, uncommon 100-500, rare 500-1,500 very rare 1,500-4,500 and legendary >4.5k. This only creates a few tiny hiccups on the edges. make breastplate 200, halfplate 400, fullplate 600, and resurrection a 500g diamond. I think they priced rare and higher magic items/reagents by scaling them to the boosts of treasure from each tier of play, but it makes them unobtainable to anyone not wanting to drown players in mountains of coin, while STILL leaving them millionaires compared to the average joe. This tries to turn the worst of both worlds into the best of both. Hopefully this helps someone!
All that glitters (Silver/Copper mod:) if you want people to give a d__n about silver and copper, reduce the prices of goods and availability of money to 20%, making coppers worth the base game’s equivalent of half a silver, and silver the equivalent of half a gold. No one will ever care about electrum. (unless it serves a secondary purpose unique to your setting, like being the only currency accepted by a certain faction.)
Respectfully lifted and I have been needing to rerig my reacitonary economy in my game. Running Storm King's module book as my first campaign and I mistakenly was just going to allow the book to determine how I give gold and treaure. I've added in cool personalized magic items so sthat's resolved, but they're gold starved and I've felt trapped. This video helped express the issue and this system you explained will be my vessle, I hope!! Thakn you internet stranger Also, accidentally clicked your name and oh boy I want tips on fighting bears...
@@quincykunz3481 hahaha I recognize that they likely are and I am terribly sorry I uncovered secret knowledge. But definitely please do not deprive the world of that. Anyway, the Go Back Machine exists lol they already have been saved in some historical project likely. Steer into the swerve and make more now!!
Honestly, BECMI had a pretty decent economic balance overall... Mind you, coin weights were ridiculous, but the overall economy made relatively fair sense, given how XP was derived from income, not just from monster killing...
Adventurers make a lot of money and that's ok. They go out and risk there lives for their fortune. Tlthe money system is unbalanced because it's like that in real life. If they didn't go out and make life changing amounts of money there wouldn't be a reason to do it.
While I like to reward my players with gold, I like to reward them with world info and weapons more. Usually with my post fight treasure hoards, I do throw in some gold but most of the treasure is information, maps, and weapons/other tools for the party to utilize. I’ve been told that my party like this system more than just getting gold since they have rarely used their gold outside of minor shopping and one ship upgrade (which was most of their gold).
There are a lot of systemic problems with the gold/wealth system in D&D and before spending a LOT of time/trouble trying to fix it, I'd find out what the players want. Unless they're keen on 'winning at fantasy capitalism' (like we did back before 4/5E), I would recommend an abstract wealth system similar to what Reign uses for wealth. Each tier of wealth is a _vaguely_ logarithmic measure and the PC can spend up to one below their wealth affecting it. If they want to buy something that's equal to their wealth score, they CAN, but their wealth drops by 1. On the 'income' side, treasure that is converted into a wealth value (i.e. sold) more than the PCs wealth bumps it up to the sold value. If the treasure is equal to the PCs wealth, their wealth goes up by one. If it's below their wealth, it does nothing. The fly in the ointment is magic items, which can vary WILDLY depending on the world from 'kinda spendy' to 'beyond price'. Practical example: Bob the fighter has a wealth of 2. He comes back from adventuring with a hoard that, after taxes and haggling, is a wealth 2 treasure. That bumps his wealth to 3. Bob goes shopping, picking up a few daggers (wealth 0) and a new steel shield (wealth 2). His wealth is STILL 3, as he's not spent enough to deplete his wealth. He'd LIKE to buy a new set of armor, but he can't afford the full plate (wealth 4). He _could_ buy a suit of half-plate (wealth 3), but it would really dent his finances (reduce his wealth to 2). Hope that this helps.
you are asuming that players will get money from every encounter they have in a day (6-8 according to DMG), but encounters can be social encounters and other encounters except from fighting encounters, where you most likely will get money from the killed foes. Usually adventurers have 2-3 fighting encounters a day. So if you make your calculations with 2-3 encounters a day you would come to a somewhat better result. Coins or curencies should be very diffrent from place to place. It overcomplicates things tho. So i usually tend to vale the material the coin is made of, that material and its value can also vary, but at least your gold coin from Barovia will be taken by someone from the feywild because the material it is made of also has a value there. Materials vary in regions/cities acording to their availability and their trading with other cities/regions. If gold is hard to get in a region that is very far from other civilizations then gold might be worth more there. But if they have good trading routes with other cities they might trade in goods for gold so the gold price would also be somewhat similar to the trading cities. And after all coins are meltable. I try to take reference from ancient coinage and currencies, where every king used his own currency made of a material. Based on the material and the kings reputation the coin had more or less value in neighboring contries.
I tend to ignore the medieval context of living costs and use a modern context for costs. Players tend to wrap their heads around it better. A gold piece is essentially a dollar in value. It’s a world of magic. Gold is everywhere. Its value is diminished relative to ours to that of a real world buck. Now a healing potion costing 50 gp isn’t astronomical to a regular npc but a joke to a player. It’s $50 bucks and attainable to most.
Realistically it should take closer to 40 years to get from 1-20. So if you want to expand out your dungeon to take 2 in game years so that your players receive a reasonable amount of money for time invested, go for it.
This is kinda dumb, because during the middle ages, lots of people used copper coins or copper pennies. Sure, people did pay their taxes in wheat and such, but it was very easy to convert wheat to copper coins. Also, any tradesperson had to be paid in coins most of the time. - Pathfinder 2e has basic goods be a lot cheaper and also has players get a lot less gold. - Early versions of D&D had the Fighter get a castle/keep at like level 5-7. So I imagine all the wealth they had would be dumped into sprucing up their fiefdom.
Honestly, if you want a “money stat” there are a few in Warhammer 40k- Influence in Dark Heresy 2 and Profit Factor in Rogue Trader- but I personally find these far more janky than currency standardization.
Divide the results from all the treasure charts by 10, but use silver instead of gold, so it still feels like the players get a lot of moolah Keep the rest of the prices the same, because otherwise you will inevitably forget what your own determined price was for things, and it is way easier if you can just consult the books for those things
Don't even get me started on where they store this wealth. In our home Adnd game we have literally had to buy horses and hire carts to move dungeon money to our loot rooms, Dm is a stickler with carry weight, but when you are waiting in game weeks to heal you kinda have the time. Lord knows we still don't use any kind of table for lifestyle living though.
Some small nitpicks: different currency systems are an optional feature, you can use it for flavour and immersion, but don't have to, and i'd imagine most people don't bother with it. Also being an adventurer should be a ludicrisly lucrative job, you fight freaking dragons for a livin' at some higher levels and are generally forced into extraordinary circumstances beyond that of mere mundane soldiers. Being a raging barbarian or skilled wizard in an adventuring party is a way more skilled and high-paying job than your average artisan, most adventurers need to have severely above-average stats and exceptional training to accomplish that level
Numenera solves by having a standard currency with shins, where you can have anything small of value (bits of metal, gems etc.) which is then totalled as shins, or GP value basically. But I do find in general 5e that GP value is all over the place and as you point out half way in video, the RAW values are just all over the place.
1- yes a person living at the level that his paycheck allows him to live should be considered paycheck to paycheck. So that a modest living working gain 1gp per day and spend 1 gp per day to live is reasonable make sense 100%. If he wants to save money, he needs to lower his lifestyle (maybe going halfway between modest and poor and pay just 5sp a day) and that is the same advice I'm giving my friend who complains they don't have enough money. You don't need to drink a Starbuck coffee every morning, brew your own coffee at home and save that 5$ Starbuck each day. 2- There is a huge difference between a soldier and an adventurer. In most armies, the soldier is being paid even if nothing is happening. In most armies, the equipment of the solider is given for free to the soldier (and he needs to give it back if he leaves the army) compare to the adventurer who is a mercenary, needs to provide his own equipment and receives no payment if there is no adventure available. So that is like comparing the nurse working at the hospital being paid less money than the nurse who comes from an agency that the hospital call when they need a nurse quickly and they have no more staff available. The agency nurse can easily be paid twice the salary of the regular nurse, but if no hospital is calling the agency, the agency nurse is not receiving any money. Being a part-time mercenary does pay higher wages than the regular always available guy because you need to pay the bill between 2 contract 3- The danger of your regular adventuring party is usually bigger than what the typical soldier needs to deal with. Why does the guard captain ask the adventurer to deal with the bandit on the road, rather than sending his own men? If the mercenary dies, he doesn't need to send money to the mercenary family, he doesn't need to fill up paperwork or anything The soldiers are already stretched thin and the guard captain is not having enough soldier so he need to hire "special emergency people" (see point 2) or the soldier does not have the skill set required to deal with the bandit. Their perception is not high enough to avoid the ambush, and their stealth is not good at all to get a surprise round on those bandits, so the kill count of the soldier would be much higher than sending a specialized adventurer team Even a level 1 fighter will usually have better stats and abilities than the common soldier living a modest lifestyle. the captain is probably up there at comfortable and the officer/knight near the aristocracy. Those are why the party of adventurer will be paid a lot more than the solider. - The average adventurer is an on-call mercenary so he's being paid a premium for the emergency nature of the position - the fee needs to include enough money to take care of the equipment that the average army would offer for free to their regular soldier - the higher skill level of the adventurer compare to the soldier - and have you said 8gp is reasonable at level 1. when you start looking at the higher reward table, the party is starting to face challenges that most armies cannot handle. Few groups of 4 combatants can deal with a dragon with 0 casualties. If the army send their 300 soldiers to fight that dragon 250 would easily be dead, 40 would most certainly be injured and the remaining 10 would have fled and the dragon might still be alive... An adventurer is like an artist. Very few of them actually manage to make good money and become successful. Why Celine Dion is super-rich, but that musician playing in the subway can barely buy a sandwich at the end of his day? and it's not even based on skill. Many people could argue that Celine Dion got lucky and was at the right place at the right time, met with the right person and her career skyrocketed at that moment. Same thing here, the common soldier are aplenty, but just very few are actually manage to get the right mission where he teams up with the right companion and survive it on a lucky roll to become famous and advance to the level 5 and started to do ludicrous among of money. And the problem you bring up with the disparity of money between a party of adventurers able to buy a potion of giant strength for the same price as a castle... Well, I don't want to disappoint you, but it also exists here in the real world. I'm pretty sure that amount of money Celine Dion pay her entourage, could allow a small village in Africa to get the basic infrastructure they need to have a good life. I'm not a big Jet7 guy, I don't know the popular actor and stuff, but I'm pretty sure everyone reading this can easily come up with an example of actor A having an item (a jewel or something that is worth more than my house. Or a CEO who wins more money in 1 hour than I win in an entire year. The adventuring party at higher levels are those big Actor, those Big CEO who win more money than the common folk can even comprehend. If you are trying to find a solution to that issue, good luck, economist with more time, more funding and more knowledge than you about economics are trying to find a solution and they all failed
I do not really see this as a problem. If you are an adventurer and risk your life, you should be able to live as a king. That is why you risked your life. If you wanted a safe life you shouldn’t be an adventurer.
I think the problem is more in the rewards tables. It turns the realism into video game logic. Why would a raiding pack of goblins have gold, where are they going to spend it? But in video games logic the goblins have gold because the players need a reward for defeating them and gold and xp are the universal rewards. Using randomized tables makes your games more video gamey, typically at the cost of realism. It's a balance the gm has to make. Too realistic can be a slog for players. Too gamey can become immersion breaking and the storytelling loses meaning. If your players don't care about the currency and economics of your world then random rewards tables should work well enough. I use current prices to approximate the economics, but magic messes with everything. My base is 1 oz of copper at $0.30. I also use 100s instead of 10s so 100 copper is 1 silver, and 100 silver is 1 gold. So if a job would be $15/hr that translates to 50 copper/hr. A $90 meal would be 3 silver. Full plate armour at about $9000 would be 3 gold. A longsword at $1200 would be 40 silver.
Yea, but if they have one week worth of modest living, and they choose to use their gold for just that, then their down time between adventures is gonna be boring and unproductive. If they have anything to do besides just live, that's going to shorten the time they can spend between adventures. One they're taking dragon hordes, they get to deal with powerful (or even royal) interests claiming parts of our that were allegedly stolen from their families, kingdoms or institutions etc. Mo money, mo problems, a they say
I think you are doing a mistake here in how you portray the tables in DMG. You can roll once individually yes. But if you have already planned to run 6 encounters, you have most likely planned out an adventure. At that you should use the Hoard instead. Here is how it can be used. Example: You make a dungeon for a 1-4th level party. Lets say we use the 0-4 Challenge hoard. I rolled (in real life with real dice) 1700cp 1000sp 60gp 01 for gems or art objects: which means none. So in this example we have 177gp to distribute through the dungeon. Even if it said that there were no gems or artwork in this dungeon, we can just buy it using the gold pot we have. We can use 25gp from the 60gp pool and get a 25gp artwork. Lets say a golden bracelet. We can then exchange 500sp to get 5x 10gp gemstones. We can then exchange the 10gp and 150sp for a signet ring of a local noble house worth 25gp. Then we also get some trade goods. 50 lb of salt (250cp), 40 sq.yd of canvas (400cp), 60 sq.yd of cotton cloth (300sp) and 100 lbs of iron (1000cp) So we then have: 50cp 50sp 25gp 2x 25gp art objects (a bracelet and a ring) 5x 10gp gemstones 50lbs salt 40 sq.yd of canvas 60 sq.yd of cotton cloth 100lbs iron So now lets make the dungeon. The mission is for the party to go to and old temple a clerical order has been using in the past, but it is now overrun by Goblins that uses it as a headquaters to rob merchants as they travel the road. The clerics have already sent a few people over to try and clear it out, but they have not returned. They have sent out a party made up of 4 people led by a roaming young knight. The clerics therefore pay 20gp (1 weeks wage for a skilled worker) to anyone who can go there and remove the goblins. When the party arrives at the temple they discover that the last group was killed by the goblins and have been strung up on poles to show their strength and scare people away. The bodies has been rotting for some time now and can not be carried for long. You only discover 3 of the people from the last group. You kill the guards at the front and take the bodies down. If you loot the dead bodies you discover that the 3 bodies have 10 cp and 10sp each. The goblins have nothing of value. They then continue in into the main hall where they encounter more goblins, but also get ambushed by a patrol that had just returned. After defeating the goblins in the main hall they notice that the 5 statues in the main hall depict great paladins of old. Each sword hilt has a small gem inside of it. If the players want they can climb up and steal the gems from the statues. Maybe they can blame the goblins for it. Then then continue on to the Goblin boss ( a bugbear or maybe a hobgoblin). He has made camp in the catacomb where clerics of the order were buried if proven worthy. After defeating the boss and his minions you find the last member from the team that was sent there before you. Turns out it was a 3rd son of a noble who went out to try and seek fame and glory as an adventurer, but was killed by the goblins. He has his signet ring on him as well as a money pouch with 5gp. In the boss room there is a few unopened graves. In one of them a skeleton has a golden bracelet that can be taken. Maybe blame the goblins again. The players can also find what remains after the goblins have plundered a merchant rather recently. Seemed to have been a goods transport. You can find salt, canvas, cotton cloth and iron. All of it is marked with the trade guilds iconography. If the players want to take the trade goods they can do so, but have issues selling the grade goods in town as it is marked by the guild and everyone will know it is stolen. However with the right connections it can be fenced. They can also hand the trade goods back to the guild who were most likely waiting for them, or can find where they were supposed to go. But the reward they get is only worth 75% of the value, so 1237cp and 225sp. Unless they have a connection with the guild and can get a favorable price, or maybe allow for someone who is persuasive to get a better deal. Since the bodies of the old adventurers are to rotten to recover. The bodies can be left there or buried on site. But if the signet ring is returned to the noble, he will reward you with the same value the ring is worth to sell. You also notice a small money pouch filled with the remaining money, 20cp and 20sp. It used to belong to the merchants. So. Lets say we play a good guy party that do not plunder temples or rob graves. You do take the money from the dead however. That means you will get the 50cp, 50sp, and 5gp. You recover the signet ring and get 25gp for that. You get the trade goods back and get 1237cp and 225sp You also get the reward for 30gp This means your reward for this is 321 cp, 69sp and 12gp each. So about 21 gp, 9sp and 21cp This means it will provide you with almost 2 weeks and 2 days of modest living. Or almost halfway to get a Studded Leather Armor instead of the Leather Armor you already have. But if you are more evil and loot the place more. You can get much closer to the 44gp each that the adventured offered. Like if you consider things like this. It isn't actually a problem. You should just consider the random tables as suggestions to see if you can create something that make sense. You should use it first get an idea of what and how much you should reward with, and then change it to be what you want. You should give out treasure as a reward or things that incentivize roleplaying. Give moral dilemmas between robbing the dead or destroying a temple for gain. The issues you bring up is what happens if you do not think about what you are doing. So the question will be. Why are you as a DM not thinking about the money you give out?
The economic system in D&D is completelly broken. In no way does it reflect reality. The way I went around it is to reprice everything. I changed the basic value of all the coins and reprices items based on the new value. The result is that silver is the base coin, has it has always been historicly. Copper purchases day to day items, silver is for big purchases and electrum, gold and platinum is reserved for the rich. I don't use the loot tables. I give loot to what I feel the enemy would normally carry based on his/it's profession or social class. For monsters, why would they have loot? I can't figure out what a basilisk would do with a gold pouch ;) Same goes for fees and expenses. The amount of gold needed to craft potions and scrolls is just insane. No one would ever do it if this was a real world. Think of it, who would spend 28 years to scribe a 9th level scroll and spend 500,000 gold to do it? Remember that 1 gold piece is 1/3 of an ounce of gold, so roughly 633$ each. So 316.5 million dollars to scribe the scroll... who would ever purchase that? Remember that this is base cost, it doesn't take into account profit for pretty much a lifetime of work. Just utter madness. Same goes for pretty much everything in the equipment lists. Everything is so expensive no one could ever purchase anything. A full revamp of the economic system is needed if you want a shread of realism to be present in your game.
As an armchair economic theorist, I infuse my setting with realistic & rational financial activity. To me, gold is gold, silver is silver, and it really doesn’t matter where it came from. The same processes extracted & refined the ore, and the only variations in value from place to place would derive from the cost of the labor & capital used to produce it (a negligible variation IMO). Think of gold on a worldwide scale, as a universal standard, allowing certain mundane items to cost more or less from place to place - while the value of gold remains the same. Where something is more scarce (imports & hard-to-produce items), it costs more. Likewise, certain things in a locale are more common or easily acquired, so they cost less. Just pick out several items in every city - study the resource legends of maps to help you - and let some of them be more expensive or less expensive. Labor prides, too, can vary from place to place, but, to me, the greatest problem is that labor prices listed in the DMG are too high. We must be careful not to allow our inflated real-world labor markets to influence our fantasy-world economies. Oddly, in our fantasy settings, we have a chance to get it RIGHT! Study your item price lists & do some quick & easy math. How much does it cost an average commoner to eat, drink, clothe themself, commute to work, visit family, or take a vacation each year? Add that up & divide by the number of days/year (I use 360, 36 tendays). This number will be 50%-70% or more of their earnings per day (lower % is a “consumer friendly” economy, while higher % represents more hostile or corrupt government). You are totally free to vary these percentages from place to place - let certain places be more friendly to labor, others more controlling & expensive. Thus, in some places, rare imports might be totally inaccessible by average workers, while in very rare circumstances, common laborers can live quite well on their average wage. Two gold pieces per day is IMO arbitrary & ridiculously high, and should immediately cause all prices to rise. The actual value of unskilled labor might be closer to 2 silver pieces, with increases commensurate with skill, experience, productivity, etc. In my setting, certain skilled laborers & craftsmen, busy merchants, military officers, etc., can earn 2 or more gp/day.
The non-standardized coinage is a whole problem onto itself. Assuming a standardized currency (GP), the real issue with RAW is it treats every reward as the equivalent of winning the lottery. In 5e, PC are not working adventurers or bounty hunters trying to make a living. They're game show contestants who win a million dollar jackpot every session. I've given a lot of thought to the money problem in 5e. I'm thinking about scaling the loot to be much smaller like a generous wage. Closer to the annual wages of workers = 72-720 GP per reward. Monsters and creatures with no ties to the economy will have no gold rewards. I've read about a few DMs on reddit talk about running cash strapped games which gives low GP and requires the party to budget. At the reward levels listed in RAW, money is essential meaningless. Money can only maintain value if there is a level of scarcity. Every party can't be walking around with Fort Knox in their bag of holding.
Well. I don't fully agree. If you are a DM that just have a chest full of gold at the end, then yes. It is like playing a lottery because that is how you designed it. But if you do not want it like that, you should instead dish out the reward through the dungeon. Like having a valuable ring if the players rob a tomb, giving the party a RP reason if they are willing to rob tombs or not. Having statues made out of ivory or obsidian in the dungeon, or a well made tapestry or rare books. That way the reward is technically there, but the player is required to grab it and recognize the value of it to gain the reward. Just because you roll on the table and get 600gp does not mean the adventure require that amount of gold as a reward.
Forgotten Realms is shit. It's overcomplicated, overburdened with lore, and just way too crowded. Stop using FR for your setting. On top of that, the modules give stupid amounts of treasure/gold. Like way beyond what a shopowner should have, especially considering what they charge for stuff. Ditch it all, have prices rise and fall for certain consumables where your party travels, and give random crap rather than gold more often. And by crap, i mean crap. A fancy red bottle, a silver button, a week's rations, etc. Just give them crazy amounts of random things. It's more realistic that people are carrying everyday items like a ham sandwich than their life savings in gold.
I get it making stupid videos pays. Don't invent your own solutions or use solutions that are used by others. Nope...make videos that insult D&D to make money!
For anyone interested in d&d and economies I'd strongly suggest buying Grain into Gold. It's on drivethrurpg. It's not light reading. But if you really want to dig down deep into your fantasy world and create one that functions on a realistic basis, it's indispensable. It details fantasy or medieval farming economies. I don't use all of it. But it drastically changed how I build small towns and hamlets. ===================== Also, I think you are falsely equating adventurers as soldiers in your example. Adventurers aren't level 0 commoners with a bow or a sword. They much more closely resemble high skill mercenaries. In the height of the war in Iraq it wasn't uncommon for security contractors to earn 200k-300k a year. Compare that with the annual salary of army grunt(~1100\month) during the same time. Also, adventuring is extremely dangerous. I think character death in 5e is much less common than it was back in the 70s and 80s. From players I've heard from it wasn't unusual for you to lose character after character until one finally managed to make it through the meat grinder to higher levels. I think it's assumed in most D&D settings that most adventurers don't survive long. Sure, the ones that do come back with wagons of gold, but most never return.
Thank you for the suggestion! Looking back, I wish I wouldn't have included the line comparing soldiers to adventurers. I guess the point I wanted to make was that EVEN if the job is dangerous, that doesn't warrant the above-nobility-level of wealth you can accumulate from it by nature of its danger ALONE. Certainly, like soldiers, there are other dangerous jobs that don't have near the level of compensation. It was a tangential point and wasn't well made. I think your last sentence there is a very good way of looking at it. Just doesn't fully convince me based on everything else.
Just reward player characters with exposure
Angry upvote
I think it's easiest to just equate a silver to one dollar, so each gold piece is like a ten dollar bill. Then all you have to do is adjust wages to match, and everything else kind of falls into place.
Great idea and yeah!! I think I set my gold to $50 but that might be a little inflated
Thats the system ive been using for 2 years, works pretty well
Gygax implemented something like this in his Mythus game, which came out after he left TSR. He suggested calling the basic unit of currency the "buc" (or a similar acronym) and that to determine prices, just use real world values of comparable items. a sword would cost roughly the same as a gun, a horse the same as maybe a motorcycle, etc.
I have been playing this way for 6 years and it has never failed me
It doesn't really work cause money has relative value. Viral evergreen tweet that says "20$ is like an adult dollar." I completely agree. 10$ doesn't buy you sh!t, it buys you half of shit. You can't even clothes yourself or buy a meal except for off the street. Even fastfood meals cost over 10 bucks so no, 10$ unless you're living very cheaply will not amount to enough.
Puffin Forest recently did a video about this in 1st edition, Gary Gygax tried to counter players having an excess of gold by taxing them into the ground. A silver at every gate, for an inn to hold your horse, a tithe to different churches, You have to pay for audience to kings. It seems like an alright way to nickel and dime your players -or “silver and copper them” if you want to be a nerd- into having whatever your desired money amount is and to drive them to always seek work and therefore go on adventures
You could also just have people overcharge them, or have goods travel large distances and thus have markups along the way.
@@Seth9809 while I feel like this is good too, I wouldn’t do it as much. If a player feels like an NPC is charging too much for something they are inclined to either look somewhere else or feel like they are being cheated. If they look somewhere else and are still shorted then it will just make them feel like their DM just doesn’t want them buying things and their gold will feel useless. If you charge them for too much for things they want they will try to live without, If you tax them for things that they need, they will realize they HAVE to have money. The moment they don’t pay to stable their house, the horse could run off or get stolen or get sick. This will make them want to earn more money to stable their horse AND be happy if they have an excess of money because this expense that brought them trouble is now trivial!
I'm currently also dealing with the same shit. Changed how much my gold is worth, 100 silver = 1 GP, but in the end the big annoying thing is having to mess with all the prices. Rn I'm just playing it by ear as things go THOUGH money can honestly feel like an issue in my game and that is pretty fun to me.
The way I did it is to convert everything to dollars. I use the 10 copper = 1 silver, 15 silver = 1 gold, 2 electrum = 1 gold and 2 gold = 1 platinum model. I set my mind on 1/4 troy oz of metal per coin piece for all metals. So a 1/4 troy oz gold piece is worth 633$ in today's dollars. From there I assigned prices that would make sense to me in a medieval (no mass production) economy to everything and converted back to the metal based economy. I am sure some of the things are wrong, but compared to a system that makes 0 sense, I feel it's a huge improvement. In my world most items are worth copper and silver. A few very expensive things are worth gold (think of charriots and horses for example). For quick conversion when a spell calls for an expensive component, I simply divide the price by 10 on the fly.
Wait, wait, wait.
You got married and a new house??
Congratulations dude!
Haha it’s been a busy year!
I think the way you subtly jabbed at the imbalance of the price economy for things like castles and a potions with your delivery was pretty top-notch lmao
The designers have said that they don't assume you will do 6-8 encounters, that's a misconception. That's just the point at which they assume players will start getting tuckered out and *have* to stop. Next to no tables actually run 6-8 encounters a day.
It’s not a misconception, that figures taken directly from the DMG. You’re correct that designers have said that considering the rest system you should expect to be doing that amount. But saying “you will do 6-8 encounters before you NEED a long rest” actually supports my argument: that the designers do assume you’ll get to that point. That’s how the games set up even if no one plays that way. You can see my “resting is dumb” video, I address that very point. But even if that weren’t the case, the point still stands that it’s incredibly easy to get hilarious amounts of gold. That’s why I focus on treasure hoard table in my video.
First of your videos I've seen, I really liked it, congratulations on the house and Marriage btw! Yah the economy of a dnd world is sorta broken, however I've learned a few things from playing the game when it comes to this stuff. 1. Most players don't care about economics and won't notice. 2. I don't use the random money or treasure tables, which means that I determine what players earn and what they get by practicality and choice. 3. If you look at a d&d world through the idea that there are more adventuring parties than the one at your table, and combine that with nobility, secret organizations, and magical beings along with plane hopping economics, you can see why magic items and such are so expensive (because there is a demand for them). How most of my players are rewarded is as follows. Bounty based on the threat of the monster or task + loot at location + loot in Monsters or enemies possession. Sometimes the location and monster don't have anything because they wouldn't as the type wouldn't. So sometimes it's just the bounty. I'll give an example if anyone is curious as how'd I determine cost. Cool video again, I plan to look through your other ones 😀
Glad to see you back! Honestly I think it'd be difficult to introduce mid-campaign but I think since plenty of games have used a wealth stat it's not impossible to do. It's less granular control but you & the party both know where you stand with a system like that. Open Legend RPG is one such good example.
You might have not been on youtube
but you never left my heart
also i wanted to add: yes being an adventurer CAN be very lucrative, but remember that for that you need: extensive training and experience (thats if you are a meelee fighter, imagine the ammounts of money you would need to be a wizard, paladin, cleric or blood hunter), gear, connections to get a start and even then you are risking your life multiple times a day, a few bad luck rolls can and WILL mean death which is why most people arent adventurers and most adventurers will get rich quick
soilders do risk their lives but not the same as adventurers, they are part of a structure, organized military that provides traning, status and security. you can become a guard, a watchman, a scout etc and even if you are part of an army you wont be going into the wilderness every day with another two dudes to kill 6 wraiths, you are gonna be in formation with another 40 dudes to kill maybe one or two other dudes! (this is all of course, IF there is a war, in peace time you are being paid to train and maybe do guard duty/reserves/train new recruits)
My campaigns are on a copper or silver standard.
Figure an unskilled laborer makes 5 copper a month and can usually save 2 of those if he lives alone in a rented apartment for 1.5 copper a month.
Briefly, 100 copper commons equal a silver noble and 100 silver nobles equals a gold sovereign and 100 gold equals a platinum. There are also electrum, bronze, brass and even iron coins, but you get the idea.
Also, every realm uses the same ratio of precious to alloy substance so that their coinage isn't considered less valuable than that of another realm.
Close allies will often mint the exact same coins (even jointly minting) as each other, with each side representing a different ally.
This allows trade to flourish.
Few have even ever seen a silver coin and NO ONE walks around with gold. Unless you are buying something EXTREMELY expensive like magic items or a caravan full of goods, they are hard to spend.
Adventurers might find, after a hard fought plunder session for say 4th level characters, might waltz into town with .5-4 gold (in all kinds of bulky forms) for a party of 6.
They have to sell their gains, at a loss compared to their actual face value of course, and then they can celebrate.
Unless they have to replenish supplies anyway.
What random things cost is a direct result of how plentiful the raw materials are, how many artisans can make the item and is there enough demand to actually make the item for inventory or are they special orders.
One of the fundamental conceits of D&D is that the story takes place in a dangerous and violent world, one in which travel between cities and towns is inherently dangerous, and so the average person leaves home only when there is no other choice. In such a world, an Adventurer is an anomaly, someone who not only braves the wilds, but does so by choice, and deliberately explores the dangerous and wild places that no one else will.
In the 4E handbook takes pains to describe there there is just something *different* about the adventurer. Even at level 1, they are capable beyond the reach of a normal person. They might have a special destiny, or be one of only a scant few capable of casting magic, the scion of some forgotten god, or even a reborn god themself. Adventurers are special, and they only get more special as their power grows.
I think that the economic setup of the world of D&D is meant to reflect this reality. A day's adventure for a level 1 party is worth nearly a nobleman's lifestyle specifically because it is beyond the capabilities of any but a foolhardy adventurer to survive such an experience. Those treasures were always in that cave for the taking, but naught but an army could have entered it and survived. And as your powers grows and you realize your special destinies, the rewards become even greater, rewards that will allow you to harness that special destiny and bend it to your will. In the end, an Adventurer could find themselves the lords of an estate, kings and queens, Generals in the Kingdom's Army, or even with funding enough to create a Kingdom of their own in the wilds they have tamed. The GP as a standard, with its value representing the average daily take home of a skilled laborer, exists to show you how much MORE your collected value is than that. it's not a broken economy, it's a special economy, one which only exists and works for the Adventurer and other higher-order beings.
2:28
You know, something like that happened in England once. It caused a giant economic crisis because people would buy English coins and sell it in France for more than they were bought in England and just keep going back and forth. The English economy was flooded with Franch currency and vice-versa.
The simplified way to resolve this is with trade rout maps. Min max on commodities. You know you have places where art sells at full price others where grain is at it's best. Economics is resource handling real sale items have an aria of effect centered from the point of origin. So using your world map bandwidth circles trade routs extending it you can calculate demand eventually reaching max shipping cost value damage. I know this seems a little complex but it can be applied to all items as a system. Plus if you study civics sandbox auto stories just tell themselfs.
Adventurers aren't the only people with that kind of money.
Royalty has it to.
Soldiers put their lives on the line yes, for 40days with steady pay against other soldiers.
While u fight things that can depopulate village's for fun...
Monster slaying means people WILL die if they aren't adventures or of similar power.
U aren't a normal person as an adventurer.
Knights train their whole life and are stupid rich and get to be cr 3.Thats about level 5.
U might earn a lot of money doing adventures, but that same knight just gives his lord an oath of service. He has land, a hold, servants and treasure. So he will fight for his lord on occasions and have a certain amount of peasents that he needs to make sure are in fighting condition when push comes to shove.
In a fantasy setting they might need to fight monsters but there is a good Chance they don't always gotta, since a Knight's death would be inconvenient.
SO, we have people equally and more powerful then knights, willing to risk their lifes to an INSANE degree, wich earn money and don't even get titles, lands, servants and treasure.
They "just" get treasure. More treasure the more dangerous stuff they do yeah, but so does the ordinary mercenary on a victory and at the end of their campaign.
Only they didn't fight terrific Monsters 8 times a day in a tiny group. They killed people, people like them.
Adventures are a little like Landsknechte on steroids. Mercenary's known for their skill, having lots of money, extravagant clothes, celebrating a lot and having a wild, yet short life.
They literally changed the laws for these guys so they could wear stuff only royals could wear.
And for people who think knights were rare, england had 5-6k estates wich weren't necessarily knights, but the feudal system lends itself to the conclusion that most of them were.The hole give me military service and i give u land and status and that hole deal.
So I'll just go with 4000 knights here. They had 2 Milion people, so 500 people to 1 knight and I've seen estimates with more knights per people.
So no, the gold really isn't as weird as many people think, it happened in history and those guys didn't live a life nearly as dangerous , and they didn't have the ability to kill 40 man in 6 seconds with freaking flames, tank hits from a 3 meter dumb brute by just being angry or revive the dead... Adventures aren't Normal
Just read those things again.Heck even in a fantasy setting that's not common. Sure they aren't unheard of by any means...i mean they might be, i don't know the setting and the connection between village's but seriously. Steroid Landsknechte with supernatural skill and or abilities fighting demons, dragons, undead, giants and all the other things hiding in the shadows will have a higher pay grade than freaking James the soldier.
the way the world treats some stuff like a beer being worth a few copper, or a meal can be a silver or two, and with a gold being worth a modest living, i imagine a gold being equal to roughly a hundred bucks, which comparably to a 14 gp biweekly, or $1,400 a paycheck, seems like a reasonable comparison.
Compared to how adventurers attain insane amounts of money, i like to think that's what helps make a separation between the world of adventurers, and the world of the commoners, something that can drive adventurers, but that is an interesting point on how soldiers dont earn nearly as much as adventurers while putting their lives on the line.
I like to play it out the adventurers are wild cards to society, and are NOTICED when coming through towns with their wealth sometimes literally just worn on their fingers or armor or in the scabards on display for all to see. like a terrifying visage of dispair or hope, especially when you consider the stats of commoners compared to even 5th level adventurers. play punch for punch with any adventurer and they'll knock out 10 commoners before going down.
I personally think adventurers arent' targeted enough by opportunitists with like you said, years worth of modest living literally jangling around in their pockets like candy on halloween. loud and delicious sounding to any commoner with even a hint of selfishness and desperation.
(i hate figuring out time and again where to fit in electrum, so i always make it some sort of thieves guild only currency)
this is one of the most complicated aspects of the game that most people leave alone completely simply because it's too much extra bookkeeping, unless you're an accountant or economics expert. it's worth considering in some respects, especially if you want realistic coinage in your world, and you don't even have to follow a gold standard. but you might also want to consider what impact a single party would have on a local economy when they flood it with money after their latest haul and what that might do to prices of even basic goods. how much realism is too much is what it comes down to for most groups, and it's something a DM has to decide for themselves ultimately.
Why does almost everyone make the same faulty assumption that every 'encounter' is going to result in a) combat or b) with all of the enemies being killed or c) with all of the enemies carrying loot. None of those conditions are required for an 'encounter'. Even the sample Sylvan Forest Encounters table has mostly non-combat encounters (assuming a non-murder-hobo party). Even if the party instantly attacks, at least some of the opponents could run away if they're obviously losing. If you are lucky enough to have competent players you could even include encounters which they need to retreat from to avoid a TPK.
Beasts and other low intelligence creatures are highly unlikely to be carrying stuff around. Even those that do collect shiny things would leave them back in their lair which could be quite well hidden. Anyways, the flow of money and magic in the game is totally under the DM's control.
I am absolutely here for whatever you got to say and this video confirms that. Thanks for explaining an issue I have to as a DM, and I might use this to defend myself from some exacting players I have
In my world a gold dragon set up an international banking corporation to standardise the currency (and of course takes a service fee, interest and the like). I think its much easier than making the players exchange their currency at the border, and provides a reason why everyone would be using the same coins, instead of bartering for everything
So tweak it. Rule number one is everything is up to the discretion of the DM.
This is why when I Dm the only currency is nft's.
I really recommend looking up when Matt Colville talked about talking to a Blackwater Merc back when working on Mercenaries (the video game). I really commonly have my adventurers that I play have this moment of contemplating retirement after a few levels, seeing that they really could be set for life... and then they blow their money on gear, vices, whatever, and that means they gotta get back on the adventuring trail... like Conan.
Or like Pirates, Pirates wouldn't bury their money, they would spend it all on women, wine, and song.
Also shoes.
The thing is, in feudal economy. An adventurer would get taxed almost all of the gold abs treasure that they find, as its like a noble or group of nobles own that land.
Congrats on the house and marriage.
I feel like adventuring is a weird and inconsistent profession. I'll be honest, I haven't read the dmg, except for the magic items section, so I don't know if it says that you have to give gold to your players at the end of every encounter, but it might say it. I almost never reward players with money at the end of every fight, a lot of times monsters don't have pockets or carry trinkets, specially if they have less than 3 intelligence, but that depends on the DM. You could argue that the value of the monster parts could be equivalent, but that relies on having someone that knows of their worth and how to extract them. As for adventures, I guess it depends on the rate on which adventures happen. Is there a problem every week? every month? How often do players go on adventures to actually earn their keep? Apparently in the Sword Coast you can't look away without a multi million gold worth cult rising to try to destroy the world. Economics start to get even more complicated when you begin to consider rate of employment. Point is, money is weird and magic item sellers should be way more paranoid about their stock.
I've found a decent way of re-rigging treasure in my games: The main issue is the assumptions laid out in the video (cost of labor, living expense, magic item costs) are skewed so far from where players usually experience the game, and magic items get so expensive so fast, it turns mid to high level play into extravagant nonsense. in other words, flatten the treasure curve. make the two extremes closer together. move unskilled labor to 1g per day, and skilled to 5g. wealthy living becomes 6g per day, and aristocratic becomes 20. This means the average person is doing pretty well, which will fit some settings more than others, but it makes adventurers tipping a gold less mind-bending.
Then apply this simple rule of thumb to existing prices: divide the price of any item, property or reagent worth more than 500g by 3, and anything worth more than 5000g by 10. Round up to the nearest 5. This makes common magic items worth 25-100, uncommon 100-500, rare 500-1,500 very rare 1,500-4,500 and legendary >4.5k.
This only creates a few tiny hiccups on the edges. make breastplate 200, halfplate 400, fullplate 600, and resurrection a 500g diamond.
I think they priced rare and higher magic items/reagents by scaling them to the boosts of treasure from each tier of play, but it makes them unobtainable to anyone not wanting to drown players in mountains of coin, while STILL leaving them millionaires compared to the average joe. This tries to turn the worst of both worlds into the best of both. Hopefully this helps someone!
All that glitters (Silver/Copper mod:) if you want people to give a d__n about silver and copper, reduce the prices of goods and availability of money to 20%, making coppers worth the base game’s equivalent of half a silver, and silver the equivalent of half a gold. No one will ever care about electrum. (unless it serves a secondary purpose unique to your setting, like being the only currency accepted by a certain faction.)
Respectfully lifted and I have been needing to rerig my reacitonary economy in my game. Running Storm King's module book as my first campaign and I mistakenly was just going to allow the book to determine how I give gold and treaure. I've added in cool personalized magic items so sthat's resolved, but they're gold starved and I've felt trapped. This video helped express the issue and this system you explained will be my vessle, I hope!! Thakn you internet stranger
Also, accidentally clicked your name and oh boy I want tips on fighting bears...
@@michaelnelson2976 oh, gosh. Those videos are old highschool stuff. I should probably remove them.
@@quincykunz3481 hahaha I recognize that they likely are and I am terribly sorry I uncovered secret knowledge. But definitely please do not deprive the world of that. Anyway, the Go Back Machine exists lol they already have been saved in some historical project likely. Steer into the swerve and make more now!!
Honestly, BECMI had a pretty decent economic balance overall...
Mind you, coin weights were ridiculous, but the overall economy made relatively fair sense, given how XP was derived from income, not just from monster killing...
Adventurers make a lot of money and that's ok. They go out and risk there lives for their fortune. Tlthe money system is unbalanced because it's like that in real life. If they didn't go out and make life changing amounts of money there wouldn't be a reason to do it.
While I like to reward my players with gold, I like to reward them with world info and weapons more. Usually with my post fight treasure hoards, I do throw in some gold but most of the treasure is information, maps, and weapons/other tools for the party to utilize. I’ve been told that my party like this system more than just getting gold since they have rarely used their gold outside of minor shopping and one ship upgrade (which was most of their gold).
There are a lot of systemic problems with the gold/wealth system in D&D and before spending a LOT of time/trouble trying to fix it, I'd find out what the players want. Unless they're keen on 'winning at fantasy capitalism' (like we did back before 4/5E), I would recommend an abstract wealth system similar to what Reign uses for wealth.
Each tier of wealth is a _vaguely_ logarithmic measure and the PC can spend up to one below their wealth affecting it. If they want to buy something that's equal to their wealth score, they CAN, but their wealth drops by 1. On the 'income' side, treasure that is converted into a wealth value (i.e. sold) more than the PCs wealth bumps it up to the sold value. If the treasure is equal to the PCs wealth, their wealth goes up by one. If it's below their wealth, it does nothing. The fly in the ointment is magic items, which can vary WILDLY depending on the world from 'kinda spendy' to 'beyond price'.
Practical example: Bob the fighter has a wealth of 2. He comes back from adventuring with a hoard that, after taxes and haggling, is a wealth 2 treasure. That bumps his wealth to 3. Bob goes shopping, picking up a few daggers (wealth 0) and a new steel shield (wealth 2). His wealth is STILL 3, as he's not spent enough to deplete his wealth. He'd LIKE to buy a new set of armor, but he can't afford the full plate (wealth 4). He _could_ buy a suit of half-plate (wealth 3), but it would really dent his finances (reduce his wealth to 2).
Hope that this helps.
you are asuming that players will get money from every encounter they have in a day (6-8 according to DMG), but encounters can be social encounters and other encounters except from fighting encounters, where you most likely will get money from the killed foes.
Usually adventurers have 2-3 fighting encounters a day. So if you make your calculations with 2-3 encounters a day you would come to a somewhat better result.
Coins or curencies should be very diffrent from place to place. It overcomplicates things tho. So i usually tend to vale the material the coin is made of, that material and its value can also vary, but at least your gold coin from Barovia will be taken by someone from the feywild because the material it is made of also has a value there.
Materials vary in regions/cities acording to their availability and their trading with other cities/regions.
If gold is hard to get in a region that is very far from other civilizations then gold might be worth more there. But if they have good trading routes with other cities they might trade in goods for gold so the gold price would also be somewhat similar to the trading cities.
And after all coins are meltable. I try to take reference from ancient coinage and currencies, where every king used his own currency made of a material. Based on the material and the kings reputation the coin had more or less value in neighboring contries.
I tend to ignore the medieval context of living costs and use a modern context for costs. Players tend to wrap their heads around it better. A gold piece is essentially a dollar in value. It’s a world of magic. Gold is everywhere. Its value is diminished relative to ours to that of a real world buck. Now a healing potion costing 50 gp isn’t astronomical to a regular npc but a joke to a player. It’s $50 bucks and attainable to most.
Realistically it should take closer to 40 years to get from 1-20. So if you want to expand out your dungeon to take 2 in game years so that your players receive a reasonable amount of money for time invested, go for it.
was gonna make a Golden pun, but it's not Worth it.
What's funny is early editions had a solution to this problem....Taxs
The book Grain to Gold dose wonders in helping one format a working encomony in an rpg setting.
He's back!!!!
This is kinda dumb, because during the middle ages, lots of people used copper coins or copper pennies.
Sure, people did pay their taxes in wheat and such, but it was very easy to convert wheat to copper coins.
Also, any tradesperson had to be paid in coins most of the time.
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Pathfinder 2e has basic goods be a lot cheaper and also has players get a lot less gold.
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Early versions of D&D had the Fighter get a castle/keep at like level 5-7. So I imagine all the wealth they had would be dumped into sprucing up their fiefdom.
Honestly, if you want a “money stat” there are a few in Warhammer 40k- Influence in Dark Heresy 2 and Profit Factor in Rogue Trader- but I personally find these far more janky than currency standardization.
Glad to see you back, Fel. :D
Divide the results from all the treasure charts by 10, but use silver instead of gold, so it still feels like the players get a lot of moolah
Keep the rest of the prices the same, because otherwise you will inevitably forget what your own determined price was for things, and it is way easier if you can just consult the books for those things
Don't even get me started on where they store this wealth. In our home Adnd game we have literally had to buy horses and hire carts to move dungeon money to our loot rooms, Dm is a stickler with carry weight, but when you are waiting in game weeks to heal you kinda have the time. Lord knows we still don't use any kind of table for lifestyle living though.
Some small nitpicks: different currency systems are an optional feature, you can use it for flavour and immersion, but don't have to, and i'd imagine most people don't bother with it.
Also being an adventurer should be a ludicrisly lucrative job, you fight freaking dragons for a livin' at some higher levels and are generally forced into extraordinary circumstances beyond that of mere mundane soldiers. Being a raging barbarian or skilled wizard in an adventuring party is a way more skilled and high-paying job than your average artisan, most adventurers need to have severely above-average stats and exceptional training to accomplish that level
Algorithmic punch
I dont think the game was meant to go deep into economy. A huge undertaking for the DM to keep track of scales of economy.
Numenera solves by having a standard currency with shins, where you can have anything small of value (bits of metal, gems etc.) which is then totalled as shins, or GP value basically. But I do find in general 5e that GP value is all over the place and as you point out half way in video, the RAW values are just all over the place.
1- yes a person living at the level that his paycheck allows him to live should be considered paycheck to paycheck. So that a modest living working gain 1gp per day and spend 1 gp per day to live is reasonable make sense 100%. If he wants to save money, he needs to lower his lifestyle (maybe going halfway between modest and poor and pay just 5sp a day) and that is the same advice I'm giving my friend who complains they don't have enough money. You don't need to drink a Starbuck coffee every morning, brew your own coffee at home and save that 5$ Starbuck each day.
2- There is a huge difference between a soldier and an adventurer.
In most armies, the soldier is being paid even if nothing is happening.
In most armies, the equipment of the solider is given for free to the soldier (and he needs to give it back if he leaves the army)
compare to the adventurer who is a mercenary, needs to provide his own equipment and receives no payment if there is no adventure available.
So that is like comparing the nurse working at the hospital being paid less money than the nurse who comes from an agency that the hospital call when they need a nurse quickly and they have no more staff available. The agency nurse can easily be paid twice the salary of the regular nurse, but if no hospital is calling the agency, the agency nurse is not receiving any money.
Being a part-time mercenary does pay higher wages than the regular always available guy because you need to pay the bill between 2 contract
3- The danger of your regular adventuring party is usually bigger than what the typical soldier needs to deal with. Why does the guard captain ask the adventurer to deal with the bandit on the road, rather than sending his own men?
If the mercenary dies, he doesn't need to send money to the mercenary family, he doesn't need to fill up paperwork or anything
The soldiers are already stretched thin and the guard captain is not having enough soldier so he need to hire "special emergency people" (see point 2)
or the soldier does not have the skill set required to deal with the bandit. Their perception is not high enough to avoid the ambush, and their stealth is not good at all to get a surprise round on those bandits, so the kill count of the soldier would be much higher than sending a specialized adventurer team
Even a level 1 fighter will usually have better stats and abilities than the common soldier living a modest lifestyle. the captain is probably up there at comfortable and the officer/knight near the aristocracy.
Those are why the party of adventurer will be paid a lot more than the solider.
- The average adventurer is an on-call mercenary so he's being paid a premium for the emergency nature of the position
- the fee needs to include enough money to take care of the equipment that the average army would offer for free to their regular soldier
- the higher skill level of the adventurer compare to the soldier
- and have you said 8gp is reasonable at level 1. when you start looking at the higher reward table, the party is starting to face challenges that most armies cannot handle. Few groups of 4 combatants can deal with a dragon with 0 casualties. If the army send their 300 soldiers to fight that dragon 250 would easily be dead, 40 would most certainly be injured and the remaining 10 would have fled and the dragon might still be alive...
An adventurer is like an artist. Very few of them actually manage to make good money and become successful. Why Celine Dion is super-rich, but that musician playing in the subway can barely buy a sandwich at the end of his day? and it's not even based on skill. Many people could argue that Celine Dion got lucky and was at the right place at the right time, met with the right person and her career skyrocketed at that moment. Same thing here, the common soldier are aplenty, but just very few are actually manage to get the right mission where he teams up with the right companion and survive it on a lucky roll to become famous and advance to the level 5 and started to do ludicrous among of money.
And the problem you bring up with the disparity of money between a party of adventurers able to buy a potion of giant strength for the same price as a castle... Well, I don't want to disappoint you, but it also exists here in the real world. I'm pretty sure that amount of money Celine Dion pay her entourage, could allow a small village in Africa to get the basic infrastructure they need to have a good life. I'm not a big Jet7 guy, I don't know the popular actor and stuff, but I'm pretty sure everyone reading this can easily come up with an example of actor A having an item (a jewel or something that is worth more than my house. Or a CEO who wins more money in 1 hour than I win in an entire year.
The adventuring party at higher levels are those big Actor, those Big CEO who win more money than the common folk can even comprehend.
If you are trying to find a solution to that issue, good luck, economist with more time, more funding and more knowledge than you about economics are trying to find a solution and they all failed
I do not really see this as a problem. If you are an adventurer and risk your life, you should be able to live as a king. That is why you risked your life. If you wanted a safe life you shouldn’t be an adventurer.
I think the problem is more in the rewards tables. It turns the realism into video game logic. Why would a raiding pack of goblins have gold, where are they going to spend it? But in video games logic the goblins have gold because the players need a reward for defeating them and gold and xp are the universal rewards. Using randomized tables makes your games more video gamey, typically at the cost of realism. It's a balance the gm has to make. Too realistic can be a slog for players. Too gamey can become immersion breaking and the storytelling loses meaning. If your players don't care about the currency and economics of your world then random rewards tables should work well enough.
I use current prices to approximate the economics, but magic messes with everything. My base is 1 oz of copper at $0.30. I also use 100s instead of 10s so 100 copper is 1 silver, and 100 silver is 1 gold. So if a job would be $15/hr that translates to 50 copper/hr. A $90 meal would be 3 silver. Full plate armour at about $9000 would be 3 gold. A longsword at $1200 would be 40 silver.
Yea, but if they have one week worth of modest living, and they choose to use their gold for just that, then their down time between adventures is gonna be boring and unproductive. If they have anything to do besides just live, that's going to shorten the time they can spend between adventures. One they're taking dragon hordes, they get to deal with powerful (or even royal) interests claiming parts of our that were allegedly stolen from their families, kingdoms or institutions etc. Mo money, mo problems, a they say
Oh damn long time no see.
Missed you
I think you are doing a mistake here in how you portray the tables in DMG. You can roll once individually yes. But if you have already planned to run 6 encounters, you have most likely planned out an adventure. At that you should use the Hoard instead. Here is how it can be used.
Example:
You make a dungeon for a 1-4th level party. Lets say we use the 0-4 Challenge hoard.
I rolled (in real life with real dice)
1700cp
1000sp
60gp
01 for gems or art objects: which means none.
So in this example we have 177gp to distribute through the dungeon. Even if it said that there were no gems or artwork in this dungeon, we can just buy it using the gold pot we have.
We can use 25gp from the 60gp pool and get a 25gp artwork. Lets say a golden bracelet. We can then exchange 500sp to get 5x 10gp gemstones. We can then exchange the 10gp and 150sp for a signet ring of a local noble house worth 25gp. Then we also get some trade goods. 50 lb of salt (250cp), 40 sq.yd of canvas (400cp), 60 sq.yd of cotton cloth (300sp) and 100 lbs of iron (1000cp)
So we then have:
50cp
50sp
25gp
2x 25gp art objects (a bracelet and a ring)
5x 10gp gemstones
50lbs salt
40 sq.yd of canvas
60 sq.yd of cotton cloth
100lbs iron
So now lets make the dungeon. The mission is for the party to go to and old temple a clerical order has been using in the past, but it is now overrun by Goblins that uses it as a headquaters to rob merchants as they travel the road. The clerics have already sent a few people over to try and clear it out, but they have not returned. They have sent out a party made up of 4 people led by a roaming young knight. The clerics therefore pay 20gp (1 weeks wage for a skilled worker) to anyone who can go there and remove the goblins.
When the party arrives at the temple they discover that the last group was killed by the goblins and have been strung up on poles to show their strength and scare people away. The bodies has been rotting for some time now and can not be carried for long. You only discover 3 of the people from the last group. You kill the guards at the front and take the bodies down. If you loot the dead bodies you discover that the 3 bodies have 10 cp and 10sp each. The goblins have nothing of value.
They then continue in into the main hall where they encounter more goblins, but also get ambushed by a patrol that had just returned. After defeating the goblins in the main hall they notice that the 5 statues in the main hall depict great paladins of old. Each sword hilt has a small gem inside of it. If the players want they can climb up and steal the gems from the statues. Maybe they can blame the goblins for it.
Then then continue on to the Goblin boss ( a bugbear or maybe a hobgoblin). He has made camp in the catacomb where clerics of the order were buried if proven worthy. After defeating the boss and his minions you find the last member from the team that was sent there before you. Turns out it was a 3rd son of a noble who went out to try and seek fame and glory as an adventurer, but was killed by the goblins. He has his signet ring on him as well as a money pouch with 5gp.
In the boss room there is a few unopened graves. In one of them a skeleton has a golden bracelet that can be taken. Maybe blame the goblins again.
The players can also find what remains after the goblins have plundered a merchant rather recently. Seemed to have been a goods transport. You can find salt, canvas, cotton cloth and iron. All of it is marked with the trade guilds iconography.
If the players want to take the trade goods they can do so, but have issues selling the grade goods in town as it is marked by the guild and everyone will know it is stolen. However with the right connections it can be fenced. They can also hand the trade goods back to the guild who were most likely waiting for them, or can find where they were supposed to go. But the reward they get is only worth 75% of the value, so 1237cp and 225sp. Unless they have a connection with the guild and can get a favorable price, or maybe allow for someone who is persuasive to get a better deal.
Since the bodies of the old adventurers are to rotten to recover. The bodies can be left there or buried on site. But if the signet ring is returned to the noble, he will reward you with the same value the ring is worth to sell.
You also notice a small money pouch filled with the remaining money, 20cp and 20sp. It used to belong to the merchants.
So. Lets say we play a good guy party that do not plunder temples or rob graves. You do take the money from the dead however.
That means you will get the 50cp, 50sp, and 5gp.
You recover the signet ring and get 25gp for that.
You get the trade goods back and get 1237cp and 225sp
You also get the reward for 30gp
This means your reward for this is 321 cp, 69sp and 12gp each. So about 21 gp, 9sp and 21cp This means it will provide you with almost 2 weeks and 2 days of modest living. Or almost halfway to get a Studded Leather Armor instead of the Leather Armor you already have.
But if you are more evil and loot the place more. You can get much closer to the 44gp each that the adventured offered.
Like if you consider things like this. It isn't actually a problem. You should just consider the random tables as suggestions to see if you can create something that make sense. You should use it first get an idea of what and how much you should reward with, and then change it to be what you want. You should give out treasure as a reward or things that incentivize roleplaying. Give moral dilemmas between robbing the dead or destroying a temple for gain. The issues you bring up is what happens if you do not think about what you are doing. So the question will be. Why are you as a DM not thinking about the money you give out?
Divide by half and switch to a Silver Standard.
The economic system in D&D is completelly broken. In no way does it reflect reality. The way I went around it is to reprice everything. I changed the basic value of all the coins and reprices items based on the new value. The result is that silver is the base coin, has it has always been historicly. Copper purchases day to day items, silver is for big purchases and electrum, gold and platinum is reserved for the rich. I don't use the loot tables. I give loot to what I feel the enemy would normally carry based on his/it's profession or social class. For monsters, why would they have loot? I can't figure out what a basilisk would do with a gold pouch ;) Same goes for fees and expenses. The amount of gold needed to craft potions and scrolls is just insane. No one would ever do it if this was a real world. Think of it, who would spend 28 years to scribe a 9th level scroll and spend 500,000 gold to do it? Remember that 1 gold piece is 1/3 of an ounce of gold, so roughly 633$ each. So 316.5 million dollars to scribe the scroll... who would ever purchase that? Remember that this is base cost, it doesn't take into account profit for pretty much a lifetime of work. Just utter madness. Same goes for pretty much everything in the equipment lists. Everything is so expensive no one could ever purchase anything. A full revamp of the economic system is needed if you want a shread of realism to be present in your game.
As an armchair economic theorist, I infuse my setting with realistic & rational financial activity. To me, gold is gold, silver is silver, and it really doesn’t matter where it came from. The same processes extracted & refined the ore, and the only variations in value from place to place would derive from the cost of the labor & capital used to produce it (a negligible variation IMO). Think of gold on a worldwide scale, as a universal standard, allowing certain mundane items to cost more or less from place to place - while the value of gold remains the same. Where something is more scarce (imports & hard-to-produce items), it costs more. Likewise, certain things in a locale are more common or easily acquired, so they cost less. Just pick out several items in every city - study the resource legends of maps to help you - and let some of them be more expensive or less expensive. Labor prides, too, can vary from place to place, but, to me, the greatest problem is that labor prices listed in the DMG are too high. We must be careful not to allow our inflated real-world labor markets to influence our fantasy-world economies. Oddly, in our fantasy settings, we have a chance to get it RIGHT! Study your item price lists & do some quick & easy math. How much does it cost an average commoner to eat, drink, clothe themself, commute to work, visit family, or take a vacation each year? Add that up & divide by the number of days/year (I use 360, 36 tendays). This number will be 50%-70% or more of their earnings per day (lower % is a “consumer friendly” economy, while higher % represents more hostile or corrupt government). You are totally free to vary these percentages from place to place - let certain places be more friendly to labor, others more controlling & expensive. Thus, in some places, rare imports might be totally inaccessible by average workers, while in very rare circumstances, common laborers can live quite well on their average wage. Two gold pieces per day is IMO arbitrary & ridiculously high, and should immediately cause all prices to rise. The actual value of unskilled labor might be closer to 2 silver pieces, with increases commensurate with skill, experience, productivity, etc. In my setting, certain skilled laborers & craftsmen, busy merchants, military officers, etc., can earn 2 or more gp/day.
The non-standardized coinage is a whole problem onto itself. Assuming a standardized currency (GP), the real issue with RAW is it treats every reward as the equivalent of winning the lottery. In 5e, PC are not working adventurers or bounty hunters trying to make a living. They're game show contestants who win a million dollar jackpot every session. I've given a lot of thought to the money problem in 5e. I'm thinking about scaling the loot to be much smaller like a generous wage. Closer to the annual wages of workers = 72-720 GP per reward. Monsters and creatures with no ties to the economy will have no gold rewards. I've read about a few DMs on reddit talk about running cash strapped games which gives low GP and requires the party to budget. At the reward levels listed in RAW, money is essential meaningless. Money can only maintain value if there is a level of scarcity. Every party can't be walking around with Fort Knox in their bag of holding.
Well. I don't fully agree. If you are a DM that just have a chest full of gold at the end, then yes. It is like playing a lottery because that is how you designed it. But if you do not want it like that, you should instead dish out the reward through the dungeon. Like having a valuable ring if the players rob a tomb, giving the party a RP reason if they are willing to rob tombs or not. Having statues made out of ivory or obsidian in the dungeon, or a well made tapestry or rare books. That way the reward is technically there, but the player is required to grab it and recognize the value of it to gain the reward. Just because you roll on the table and get 600gp does not mean the adventure require that amount of gold as a reward.
Forgotten Realms is shit. It's overcomplicated, overburdened with lore, and just way too crowded. Stop using FR for your setting.
On top of that, the modules give stupid amounts of treasure/gold. Like way beyond what a shopowner should have, especially considering what they charge for stuff. Ditch it all, have prices rise and fall for certain consumables where your party travels, and give random crap rather than gold more often.
And by crap, i mean crap. A fancy red bottle, a silver button, a week's rations, etc. Just give them crazy amounts of random things. It's more realistic that people are carrying everyday items like a ham sandwich than their life savings in gold.
127 like
I get it making stupid videos pays. Don't invent your own solutions or use solutions that are used by others. Nope...make videos that insult D&D to make money!
I don't know if this was meant to be a dig on my video, but to be clear: I don't make any money from these videos.
For anyone interested in d&d and economies I'd strongly suggest buying Grain into Gold. It's on drivethrurpg.
It's not light reading. But if you really want to dig down deep into your fantasy world and create one that functions on a realistic basis, it's indispensable.
It details fantasy or medieval farming economies. I don't use all of it. But it drastically changed how I build small towns and hamlets.
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Also, I think you are falsely equating adventurers as soldiers in your example.
Adventurers aren't level 0 commoners with a bow or a sword. They much more closely resemble high skill mercenaries.
In the height of the war in Iraq it wasn't uncommon for security contractors to earn 200k-300k a year. Compare that with the annual salary of army grunt(~1100\month) during the same time.
Also, adventuring is extremely dangerous. I think character death in 5e is much less common than it was back in the 70s and 80s.
From players I've heard from it wasn't unusual for you to lose character after character until one finally managed to make it through the meat grinder to higher levels.
I think it's assumed in most D&D settings that most adventurers don't survive long. Sure, the ones that do come back with wagons of gold, but most never return.
Thank you for the suggestion! Looking back, I wish I wouldn't have included the line comparing soldiers to adventurers. I guess the point I wanted to make was that EVEN if the job is dangerous, that doesn't warrant the above-nobility-level of wealth you can accumulate from it by nature of its danger ALONE. Certainly, like soldiers, there are other dangerous jobs that don't have near the level of compensation. It was a tangential point and wasn't well made. I think your last sentence there is a very good way of looking at it. Just doesn't fully convince me based on everything else.
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