D&D 5E "reasonable" gold rewards for PC calculated on village/city size

Hello

I was bugged a bit in the other thread by the notion of "reasonable". What *is* reasonable anyway? Is a gut feeling sufficient, or can we calculate it? Turns out we *can*!

I will explain the math to arrive to this number in the second post (I know it's not everyone's cup of tea) and I'll just skip ahead to the result for the moment

So: The bigger the city/town/barony/village/community etc, the bigger the reward it can afford to offer. Of course, two communities could have the exact same number of citizens but have different level of wealth, but this is a baseline. You also have to consider the danger/importance of the task. If a goblin is stealing sheep, you don't offer 10 000 gp. Low importance/danger/priority tasks are "copper" level. Serious issues are silver. Dire ones are gold.

So take the number of people in the town, multiply by 2, then give that amount of coins in reward of the suitable level. Here are a few examples:

The road leading to a village of 400 people has been afflicted by a band of brigands, severely impeding trade. Task level serious (silver): 400 X 2 = 800 sp = 80 gp to take on the brigands.

A town of 3000 people, poorly fortified. An agressive tribe of orc is in the area and could raid the town, killing several people and inflicting major damage. Task level: dire (gold) so 3000 X 2 = 6000 gp to deal with the orcish threat.

A city of 50 000 people. Groups of convics are responsible to maintain the sewers, but some have disappeared. City guards have been unable to find anything. Divination magic indicates that the prisoners have not escaped but have been slain. City officials want to keep this quiet before panic follows. Task level low: 50 000 x 2 = 100 000 cp = 1000 gp

You will note that this means that the reward for a low threat is quite large for a large city. This doesn't meant they are throwing their money around. Rather, smaller threats are simply dealt by the people the city have on permanent employ. The city would simply send a company of horsemen to sweep the road clear of brigands for example. It's only when their own resources are insufficient/inadequate that they need to hire "specialists" - the PCs

So how are those numbers derived? Well, how does a town make money? Taxes! How much money is there to taxe? The PHB on page 157 gives us a good idea of people's income. So first we have to divide the people into income slices. Here are the numbers I came up with. They are based on the assumption that many people were simple peasants/laborers and thus poor.

20% non tax payers: this include people too poor to pay taxes, criminals, children etc
50% poor: their income is 2 sp/day
20% modest: income is 1 gp/day
8% comfortable: 2 gp/day
1% wealthy: 4 gp/day
1% aristocratic: 10 gp/day.

Using a spreadsheet you can easily calculate the population's total income per year, and then figure out the average income per citizen. I did this and calculated that it is about 220 gp/citizen year.

So how much of this income can be taxed by the city? Well... not as much as you may think. The people are also paying religious tax *and* taxes going to the king/emperor/duchess whatever. So the mayor/baroness/city council can't take too much. I've estimated this to be 10%.

So this mean that the city yearly budget is 22 gp/citizen. A city of 10 000 people therefore has 22 000 gp to run the city per year. I decided to round the numbers a bit to get 20 gp/citizen

A low threat would warrant a response representing 0.1% of the yearly budget. A wise mayor has probably money set aside for such events, which happen semi-regularly. that means 2 copper piece per citizen

A serious threat warrants a serious response, and 1% of the budget get devoted to this grave problem. That means 2 sp/citizen.

A dire threat is near catastrophic, and the town opens the coffers in the hope to lure powerful hero to save them! 10% of the budget - all that can be spared really - is devoted to this problem. Ie 2 gp/citizen.

There are threat levels which are quite frankly catastrophic, and deserve an even bigger response. However, at this point the sheer scope of the threat becomes more important than any rewards. The PCs will either go "The demon Shlub Megawrath from beyond the star is melting the bones of your children?!? This evil shall not stand!!!" .... or they will go "So you managed to anger 50 dragons eh? Thanks for letting us know. We have an urgent... appointment... in that other country we have to go to... good luck!"

You may disagree with my numbers. Maybe the tax rate is too low. Maybe my income proportions are not what you have in mind for your community. Feel free to tweak them as you wish!

But I think you will agree that the method is sound, and very easy to apply

Ancalagon said:

20% non tax payers: this include people too poor to pay taxes, criminals, children etc
50% poor: their income is 2 sp/day
20% modest: income is 1 gp/day
8% comfortable: 2 gp/day
1% wealthy: 4 sp/day
1% aristocratic: 10 gp/day.

Click to expand...

These are based off of lifestyles, right?
First, note that wealthy is 4gp per day, not 4 sp.

Second note that aristocratic is 10gp minimum, and can go way, way up from there.

Finally note that all these numbers are what people have left after they are taxed (ie - this is what they've got left to spend) and after they have bought things that are not lifestyle.

As for historical taxation? That's all over the place. The Romans levied 3% of wealth and land, but that was often levied against an entire community, not individuals.

Maybe an interesting reference is the Danegeld, an amount of money raised in order to pay off vikings. At it's high point, that came to 6/20ths of a pound of silver per year, per family. That comes out to 1.5 gp per year, per family according to phb prices for silver.

It seems reasonable to use that as a yardstick.

Apparently across the whole of Britain, a total of 82,500 pounds were collected and paid (or 412,500gp) for one year's danegild to one viking king. Which gives you an idea of what adventurers could be offered to save a fairly prosperous kingdom.

This is a very interesting thread.

I think the OP's method of basing reward on threat level and town pop is as good as any, and quite quick to calculate. It also makes the DM consider how many people are living in this particular town, which is also useful when thinking about guard numbers, item availability, # of spell casters, and so on.

For me personally, I prefer a low gold approach. I think it is important to keep players hungry for gold in an adventurer style game (as opposed to "heroic" game). At low level the adventurers use their gold for fire pots, healing potions, cold iron swords, etc, then at higher levels they are paying for Keeps, Wizard Tower maintenance, standing army costs, etc. The moment the adventurers have way too much is the moment they retire.

Our games often only span about 10 or 12 levels (for whatever reason). Based on that expectation, my rough guide to gold is that monster "carry loot" should be up less than 100 gp most of the time (for a whole group, not just one monster), and "lair" treasure less than 1000 gp, up until about 6th level, or halfway through the campaign.

In the second half of the campaign, Carry loot might double, and Lair treasure up to a 1,000-5,000, maaaybe up to 10,000 by the very end stages of the game. I dont ever think hundreds of thousands of gold is appropriate, or if it is, you have reached the end of the campaign life cycle, and the adventurers retire.

Perhaps this is too stingy. I'm not sure. But I suspect it is better to err on the side of stingy than go monty haul and hand out too much $$

Per capita GDP of 220gp/year looks high to me, I'd expect a much higher non-productive or dependent population (especially children) and most of the population at subsistence level, traditionally 1 sp/person/day - so a family of 5 needs 5 sp/day or 15gp/month. I use that as the 'small farm' baseline.

20gp/person/year tax seems quite close to OD&D's tax rate of 10gp/person/year, and could be accounted for by inflation if subsistence is now 2 sp/day instead of 1 sp/day.

10% of GDP as tax cash income looks reasonable to me; the total value of GDP extracted in tax will normally be higher,but mostly not in cash and not available to pay adventurers (unless they accept bags of
flour as payment).

Saeviomagy said:

These are based off of lifestyles, right?
First, note that wealthy is 4gp per day, not 4 sp.

Second note that aristocratic is 10gp minimum, and can go way, way up from there.

Click to expand...

That was a typo and it was fixed, thanks. I used a 4 gp value in my calculations. I also noted that the aristocratic value could be higher, but I also worried that my number of non taxpayers was too low, so I figured they would balance out...

Finally note that all these numbers are what people have left after they are taxed (ie - this is what they've got left to spend) and after they have bought things that are not lifestyle.

Click to expand...

I will have to re-read the expenses section carefully to see if taxes are mentioned or not, but I was under the impression they were included. I'm not sure what you mean by "after they bought things that are not lifestyle"?

As for historical taxation? That's all over the place. The Romans levied 3% of wealth and land, but that was often levied against an entire community, not individuals.

Maybe an interesting reference is the Danegeld, an amount of money raised in order to pay off vikings. At it's high point, that came to 6/20ths of a pound of silver per year, per family. That comes out to 1.5 gp per year, per family according to phb prices for silver.

It seems reasonable to use that as a yardstick.

Click to expand...

All over the place indeed. Interesting data

Apparently across the whole of Britain, a total of 82,500 pounds were collected and paid (or 412,500gp) for one year's danegild to one viking king. Which gives you an idea of what adventurers could be offered to save a fairly prosperous kingdom.

Click to expand...

Is this using the same amount? that amounts to 284 000 families, ie probably about a million people. That is *far* less tax than what I had figured.

I think Danegeld could be reasonable as to how much a community would pay to get rid of all the serious and dire threats for a year. The Danegeld was the tribute to avoid raids, not the total tax.

England has no silver (or gold) mines, so there was a lot less silver & gold around in Dark Age Britain than the D&D norm, and silver/gold was worth more. D&D norm is closer to eg classical Athens with its Attic silver mines.

Ancalagon said:

Is this using the same amount? that amounts to 284 000 families, ie probably about a million people. That is *far* less tax than what I had figured.

Click to expand...

That's the figure from above, with 10,500 pounds of silver added in as an extra payment from London.

As has been said, this was exclusively the amount of money paid to the Viking king to avoid raids for the year, so it's a reasonable point of comparison for "avoid all notable external threats for a year".

I think the thing to be remembered is that people in general were living much much closer to subsistence, so the idea that most people could afford to pay 30% or more in taxes would be ludicrous.