D&D and the magic economy

I’m thinking about running the Orcus conversion of Keep on the Shadowfell after a roleplaying hiatus. It’s the first version of D&D I’ve looked at as a potential game since playing 1st edition way back when.


There are things about 4e I really admire. Especially the way party co-operation is hardwired into the mechanics. I think that’s a truly innovative and interesting approach to a tabletop RPG. I’m interested in finding out whether that ‘co-operation’ mechanic has a pay-off in terms of satisfaction for the players.


But I’m also seeing a lot of stuff reminding me why I always found D&D ludicrous. One of the most blatant (IMO this isn’t just a fourth edition blip) is that the economics of both magic and treasure are simply ridiculous.


Magic is not rare and wondrous in D&D. Magic is a consumer accessory subject to prices and values out of all scale to anything else in the world. Treasure isn’t rare either. There are piles of gold and gems everywhere. Huge piles of gold. Economy re-adjusting piles of gold. In every bloody cave, crypt and castle you can name.


A meal in the inn is 2sp and a room is 5sp. An innkeeper with 6 rooms and never-ending trade is turning over 42sp a day. Assuming the inn is not permanently full, but with some extra bar trade, our innkeeper might turn over 7gp a day. Assuming he’s taking 20 per cent as profit, he and his family are living off 14sp a day.


The Dwarven smith in Neverwinter will make you a military weapon in a day (5 to 15gp) and a superior weapon in a week (25 to 30gp). So on rare custom jobs the town blacksmith has a turnover of 5 to 15gp a day. More often he’s churning out buckets and hinges and repairing wheels for far less. After materials, he’s making a living wage in the same order as the innkeeper.


The resident Lord of Neverwinter can muster a quite colossal 100gp reward for saving his entire town. And truly, our innkeeper or smith would look at 100gp as the kind of cash they can only dream about.


Within 2 encounters inside the Keep on the Shadowfell our players have picked up a set of Bloodcut Hide Armour +1. This, apparently, retails at 840gp. Go the DMG, look at the Nentir Vale and find me someone with 840gp in spare cash to buy that kind of item. Our prosperous innkeeper – he owns his own inn FFS! – has to put away 4sp a day for 5 years and 9 months to have that kind of money. Who, in the entire region, has 840gp to spare?


Even assuming our PCs are stupid enough to sell for 168gp something that retails at 840gp (and seriously folks, if I were playing, I’d be putting posters up around town advertising that sucker for the bargain price of 650gp) who in Winterhaven or even Fallcrest has even 168gp to spare? And who in the name of Orcus needs Bloodcut Hide +1 in their life?


See, the price of something is determined by its desirability. There is almost no-one in the Nentir Vale who wants, needs or can use a set of Bloodcut Hide armour. And certainly no-one who wants to pay for it in a shop or market. It is, in reality, almost entirely without value. Its worth is far, far, less than that of a cart, horse, plough, inn or bakery.


And this is for a trivial +1 item. At +3 we’re talking twenty-one thousand gold pieces. At +6 it’s 2.6 million. That’s like assuming that instead of that tiresome trek to Mordor, Frodo could have popped down to Bree, sold the One Ring for 5 million and bought his own country somewhere out of harm’s way. It’s utter nonsense.


The fallacy is to assume that there is a market demand for Bloodcut Hide +6 or The One Ring which will sustain that price. Which there patently isn’t. If our innkeeper wins the Nentir Vale lottery, safe to assume that +6 Bloodcut Hide is nowhere to be seen on his wishlist. The only people who might have that item on a wishlist is the PCs. This is the phoney basis of the listed price – the supposed desirability of an item for the players not the market.


So what D&D 4e has done (and I think D&D has always been a terrible game for this) is marry a completely broken consumer approach to magic weapons, armour, bracers, boots and rings with a feudal economy of subsistence peasants, silver-a-day guards, gold-a-day innkeepers and craftsmen, and a reigning nobility/clergy.


It compounds this farce by creating an economy in which 100gp is the kind of money a Lord will offer to save an entire town while simultaneously giving a no-mark hobgoblin in Bloodcut Hide +1 armour, and an in-game lifespan of around 30 seconds, a whopping 55gp in loose change. Looting the first level of the keep is worth over 800gp in coin alone.


In my view this kind of boundless cash creates a disconnect between PCs and the world they inhabit. It insulates them from the struggles of the community they supposedly represent. And in the campaign I’m looking at based on some sort of ‘greater good’ in defeating the plans of Orcus it’s ironic that with the RAW the PCs would be the most relentlessly mercenary characters in the story.


So I’m not going to show my players the PHB. I’m not having some D&D equivalent of Cash Converters for magic items. And I’m not having them walk back into town with enough money to buy it. If and when they find Aecris in Lord Keegan’s tomb it will be the kind of weapon someone will want to carry for a long, long time. The Glamdring of a campaign based around Orcus and his undead horde.


It looks to me like the first step in GM-ing D&D 4e is to regain some measure of control over treasure, magic and money. To avoid starting with GPs and magical pluses as the default units of value in the game, doled out as of right for each dead goblin and kobold. And to make magical items iconic and memorable, unsaleable and unbuyable, use it or lose it. It’s a theme I want to explore further.

First, Welcome to ENWorld!

Second, you seem awfully knowledgeable about D&D terms, house-rules, and forum-isms for someone who hasn't played since 1e days. Are you a long-time forum lurker, a "buy the books, never play" sort of guy, or a "lots of research before I make my post" sort of guy? I ask out of curiousity.

Third, fourth edition in particular tends to avoid looking at the world and focusing entirely on the PCs. Make of that what you will.

Personally, I agree with your assessment, but just ignore the logical fallacy and roll with it. Recently, we've come to the conclusion that we hate tracking individual gold pieces, and that a wealth check (a la d20 modern) might be the way to go with our campaign. It seems like an idea worth investigating. We've already dropped magical items as a reward (Players choose their own magic items to keep them equal in terms of character power, but fluff-wise, those magical items are instead just character abilities - I occasionally reward wondrous items, outside of the treasure packet assumption).

Magic items have had a theoretical cash value going back to 1e so this is not an issue peculiar to 4e.

But unless the DM decides to include stores that specialize in magic items it is, and always has been, an entirely theoretical problem.

Well, in slight defense of the system, wealth is unequally concentrated in the hands of the few. The mayor of a town with 500 people who make 1 gp a week might still make a few hundred gp in taxes in a year. Bandits who attack supply caravans might have tons of money they can't easily do anything with. Hell, sometimes local drug dealers living in a slum manage to buy expensive machine guns, gold chains, and fancy spinning rims for their car, while their neighbors make do with second-hand tennis shoes.

PCs in D&D get paid like Blackwater does in reality. They risk their lives and kill some people, and get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. They spend that money on equipment that is only marginally better than cheaper, wholesale versions -- holographic sights instead of red-dot sights, ceramic-plate armor with kevlar weave instead of just kevlar, stuff like that.

But yeah, the PCs shouldn't be able to offload that stuff in a village, any more than drug dealers can sell their gold-plated AK-47s so they can trade up for a diamond-encrusted sniper rifle.

One thing to consider:

The Enchant Magic Item ritual guarantees a vast amount of consumption to go with the vast amount of treasure--altho someone needs to be in the reagent business.

You are absolutely right. The D&D economy is ridicoulus.

It can be fixed with house rules.

One approach is seperating the economy into a "Real World" and a "D&D" economy. The Real economy is the one where a peasant earns a silver a day and the PCs use "Real Gold" to purchase mundane items. The D&D economy is the one where the gold and treasure collected in dungeon crawling are just another form of XP. The PCs might have a lot of magical bling-bling but otherwise be quite poor because the "dungeon gold" can't be converted to real silver pieces.

Another approach I use is to make all money abstract. The PCs each have a belt pouch with unspecified amount of cash for purchasing mundane items and drinks at the bar. Magic items must be found as treasure although occasionally a magic item might be crafted as an adventure reward. Rituals have no component cost but new rituals are only acquired as treasure and adventure rewards. Potions and alchemical items are treated like the Essential Assassin's Poison Use class feature which are a kind of Daily Powers. A PC who knows the Brew Potion ritual might be able create a single dose of Potion of Healing after an extended rest.

Thanks for the replies so far guys.

- Wik

Yeah, I've not played D&D for a long, long time. But in that time I have played in and run a lot of other systems (from biggies like Vampire or Call of Cthulhu to little 3rd party stuff like HeroWars and Sorceror) and I've peered into D&D land now and then to see what's going on. Maybe for nostalgia reasons it's a game I've always wanted to like, even when I hated it. Fourth edition is a game I want to like. I have the PHB1 & 2, DMG, MM1 and KotS to get me started and I can see lots of potential in it. Have been browsing for a few weeks looking for ideas and resources

- Alisair

I like the "d&d economy" idea... all that surplus gold could just be nominal as a sort of extra pool to get the occasional (and probably useful rather than critical) downtime magic item...


I've been thinking about avoiding the magic item trade-up routine as well by a) making them very, very rare and b) upgrading the weapon or armour when the PC reaches the level specified on that weapon or armour.

So you got a +1 sword? When you reach level x it becomes a +2 sword. Or maybe a +2 flaming sword. That way, if you get a magic sword, you might stick with it to find out what it's gonna do in a few level's time. You might keep such a weapon from level 1 right up to level 30.

It's more an idea for named magic items which ought to be iconic but look like they become obselete. I think Aecris - as a sword which historically slaughtered a knight's family and a good proportion of his soldiers - might have plenty of hidden secrets...

Check out inherent bonuses and page 138 of the DMG2.

That, and don't allow characters to buy or sell magic items unless it is part of the narrative and I think your problem is mostly solved.

PC's are the DnD equivilant to the real world's ludicriously rich. That magic item is like owning a viper, or your own plane. You can't just sell it to anyone. You have to find someone able and willing to buy it. That's where the traveling merchants come in. That bloodcut armor may be worth more than the entire town of winterhaven on paper, but no one outside of fallcrest could afford it. And assuming you've made your way back to fallcrest no merchant is going to shell out full price. The 20% (or 20/50/100% for rarity) system is just a quick and easy way to keep the game moving. If you want to add a little Accountants & Merchants to your Dungeons & Dragons feel free.

Any PC beyond first level can wreck the economy if they really try. The system has a built buffer in that the PC's should be primarily dealing with the rich and the high dollar merchants. Not haggling over the price of a bowl of soup.

I think the easiest way to suspend the disbeleif and keep the fun rolling is to accept that there are two economies. I hope that helps.

But yeah, the PCs shouldn't be able to offload that stuff in a village, any more than drug dealers can sell their gold-plated AK-47s so they can trade up for a diamond-encrusted sniper rifle.

Click to expand...

Ran into this in 3.5s RttToEE- the party was rolling in loot, but we couldn't sell or buy everything we wanted in the little town that served as our base of operations.

While we had lots of sellable loot, nobody had the necessary funds to buy it from us unless we were giving a 90% discount. Likewise, we couldn't buy everything we wanted simply because things were not available: my PC was never able to get the masterwork Dire Heavy Pick he wanted- the local smith was clueless as to it's construction.

Had we felt we had the time, we COULD have made a journey to a bigger settlement and had more success with our shopping & selling.

No special rules were needed or used, just a little common sense on the DM's part.