D&D 5E silver standard

MostlyDm · Jan 12, 2017

Dorian_Grey said:
Why go silver? Go for broke and switch to a barter economy! I'm only partially kidding. I've always wanted to play a campaign where the characters had their class abilities but those were secondary to their skills/backgrounds. So if you're a fighter and a farmer, your primary concern is raising crops or tending animals and the adventures might focus around cattle theft and people trying to poison your plants. If you need a new suit of armor, you make a deal with the blacksmith to trade eggs for a shield, helmet, and breastplate.

Then a goblin raid hits the town, and the townspeople gather together to organize a response. So you and your neighbors (the other players) get together and attack the goblins. When you do so you find out that they have some stolen cattle, some furniture, and even some raw materials (lumber and ore). So you haul it all back to town and now are wealthy! One of the cattle is even marked as the baron's own. So you escort the cow back to the baron, who rewards you with 10 silver coins. Now you're super wealthy!

It could be a ton of fun. Maybe not most people's idea of fun, but I'd find it fun!

Yeah, that sounds amazing to me. I'd play or run that in a heartbeat, if I had a group interested.

MostlyDm · Jan 12, 2017

This is a fun conversation in general. In an E6, 3.x/Basic/5e mashup game I've been running for the last 5 years, we use a silver standard. We also changed the rate of exchange from 10:1 to 50:1. So 50 coppers to the silver, 50 silvers to the gold.

So, PHB prices all get converted from gp to sp. Any prices in sp are converted to 5 coppers per silver for convenience.

The party these days runs a mercenary company of 100+ elite troops and has begun managing a few small fiefs. They have a few hundred gold liquid, and probably a thousand or more tied up in trade goods and projects. But it's been quite the journey. Finding a gold piece is still a satisfying moment for most of the party.

Celebrim · Jan 12, 2017

pukunui said:
Every so often I come across someone who says they've switched to a silver standard for their D&D economy instead of the default gold standard. For some reason, the idea appeals to me, although I'm not entirely sure why, because I don't know what all it entails. Would someone please be so kind as to enlighten me? Thanks.

I switched to the silver standard out of verisimilitude of realism. There is no compelling reason to do so except (perhaps) to make treasure more portable. If you want to run an economy on a gold piece standard and fantastic amounts of gold, there is nothing wrong with that so long as everyone is on the gold piece standard.

Now, there are - as late as 3e - incongruities in the rules that trace back to problems in 1e AD&D economics, namely that Gygax consciously implemented two economic systems: a silver standard based on realism and his own historical research, and a gold standard based on gamist concerns that arose during play (namely, how to both treat treasure as the score AND also pull gold out of the PC's pockets). As long as you adhere to the economic model of frontier hyperinflation described in the 1e AD&D Player's Handbook, this isn't incoherent. Of course, in practice no one ever assumed that all games would take place during the fantasy equivalent of the 'Klondike Gold Rush' and as soon as you move the setting, the double standard becomes problematic. So part of my reasoning for switching to a coherent silver standard was to fix that, throw out the baggage of a setting dependency, and put PC's and NPC's on level economic terms.

In a nutshell, and in practice, my economic system can be described as follows:

a) Unless otherwise stated, where the rules refer to gold, they mean silver.

b) Price lists are adjusted as necessary with the following conventions:

c) 1 silver piece is about a days wages for a common laborer, with a buying power of about $50 US, in todays terms. Serfs or other ordinary laborers engage in economic activity worth 5-6 silver pieces a week, though they may not necessarily be paid in coin.

d) Silver is worth 1/20th that of gold, so a gold piece is therefore worth about $1000.

e) Manufactured goods are rare. To convert prices of an unknown manufactured good to silver pieces, find a handmade good (hand made furniture, hand tailored clothing, etc.) and divide its price by $50, generally rounding up. When in doubt or when data is available, make sure that price makes sense in terms of 'time to make this' and a daily wage. In general, use the rule 'labor is at least 2/3rds of the price of anything' For example, if you know it would take a craftsman 5 days to make something, it probably should be worth at least 23 s.p. (5 * 3 sp/day / 2/3)

f) The economy is roughly similar to the developing world, or the pre-modern world, in that agrarian goods are comparatively inexpensive and when buying simple goods or food - particularly in rural areas - purchasing power parity applies. Serfs can feed themselves, but can't necessarily afford multiple changes of clothing.

g) You'll very quickly note that AD&D's legacy prices for gems and jewelry are nuts and had more to do with Gygax making a gamist decision about addressing the portability/score problems than realistic gemstone prices.

Except for the problem of how wealth is transported, the problems I'm trying to address here are pretty esoteric as far as most campaigns are concerned. Unless it really bugs you or one of your players, I wouldn't bother.

Celebrim · Jan 12, 2017

Dorian_Grey said:
Why go silver? Go for broke and switch to a barter economy! I'm only partially kidding. I've always wanted to play a campaign where the characters had their class abilities but those were secondary to their skills/backgrounds. So if you're a fighter and a farmer, your primary concern is raising crops or tending animals and the adventures might focus around cattle theft and people trying to poison your plants. If you need a new suit of armor, you make a deal with the blacksmith to trade eggs for a shield, helmet, and breastplate.

Then a goblin raid hits the town, and the townspeople gather together to organize a response. So you and your neighbors (the other players) get together and attack the goblins. When you do so you find out that they have some stolen cattle, some furniture, and even some raw materials (lumber and ore). So you haul it all back to town and now are wealthy! One of the cattle is even marked as the baron's own. So you escort the cow back to the baron, who rewards you with 10 silver coins. Now you're super wealthy!

It could be a ton of fun. Maybe not most people's idea of fun, but I'd find it fun!

I have at times tried to go this realistic, and IMO, it's really not worth it. It might work if all the players were fully on board, but as a GM, you are so reliant on PC's to help you with bookkeeping, that if you make it hard on them, you're making it doubly hard on yourself. I'd definitely do more realistic modeling in a computer RPG they let me design, but like several other things I'd like to do - realistic languages and numinous flavorful magic for example - realistic coin/trade, is just more trouble than it is worth.

pukunui · Jan 12, 2017

[MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION]: Thanks for the response. Where were you 18 months ago when I first asked this question?

Celebrim · Jan 12, 2017

MG.0 said:
Ironically, that coin wouldn't have been enough to cover half the price of a pickax during the California gold rush 85 years before it was minted. A pair of boots would have cost 5gp. http://michaellamarr.com/grprices.html

Not at all ironic, in that per Gygax, the prices of adventuring supplies in the 1e Player's Handbook were taken from or inspired from the costs of supplies during the Klondike gold rush.

You are trying to align a fantasy world's currency system to mining production and historical prices on Earth. What's the point? It's fantasy. I'm pretty sure the number of owlbears in D&D is unrealistically high compared to medieval europe too...

Are you going to ask this as a serious question, or are you going to assume you know the answer, and that any thing anyone else undertakes you don't understand, must perforce be stupid?

Warmaster Horus · Jan 12, 2017

Most D&D adventurers have the following approach to money...

1) carry some GP for sundry purposes.
2) a handful of coppers are retained for tossing as a diversion or determining depth or some such thing where some metal disks would be handy.
3) Divide the rest of your wealth by 500 or 1000gp and convert that to gems.
4) Wealth reduced by buying more magic items where possible, unless you have a stronghold-building campaign, in which case that's where a lot of it goes.

Sunseeker · Jan 12, 2017

thalmin said:
Maybe it is causative, maybe it's a byproduct, but it more than coincidence that dragons and magic exist on worlds where so much gold exist.

I was about to say the same thing. I mean there are spells to turn one metal into another metal, there are spells to literally create matter out of mag*cough*energy*cough*ic. There are monsters that eat precious metals, there are monsters that poop precious metals, there are whole planes made out of precious metals! With the right spell, you too can make one!

There's a manifold issue with gold in D&D which DMs could use to address the overabundance of gold issue:
Gold coins have been minted for thousands of years by thousands of civilizations throughout history. There's no reason that a gold coin from Ancient Kingdom A should be worth as much as a gold coin in Current Civilization B, which leads to my second point. All gold has raw material value of course, but minting gold coinage gives it a social and economic value beyond it's simple material value. Even in historical reality minted precious metal coins had value in part because they were produced by a stable government that could back up, regulate and enforce their use. Raw gold still held value of course, but less because the cleaning, melting and minting process costs money.

To make a long story short: the coins players loot from an ancient dragon trove may be worth absolutely no real monetary value and instead only worth their raw gold value. The only thing you can really do with these coins to get real money are A: sell them to collectors (and your overabundance of them just brought down their value) or B: sell them at an exchange for a fraction of their value. There's absolutely no reason a barkeep or a trader would accept a strange coin over a familiar one.