On character wealth an d game balance

Greenfield said:

The difference in scale is that sharp.

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It's vastly larger in game that in an appropriately inspiring historical period. Even if you assume that 1 g.p. is just a days wages, the Paladin just dropped the equivalent of a $5000 tip. Even fairly wealthy people don't drop $5000 that casually. If you assume that 1 s.p. is a day's wages, the Paladin just dropped the equivalent a $100,000 dollar tip.

And let's keep in mind, if 1 s.p. is a days wages, then the Paladin just gave away what amounts to a significant fraction of the income of the King of England during the period - 30,000 pounds of silver annually. (Yes, your PC in the game is wealthier in a sense than the King of England, assuming the campaign has been going on for less than a year game time.) The King couldn't have readily afford to spend 100 gold coins on his pleasure on a whim, and not run and maintain control of the Kingdom. Your paladin just displayed a gift of largess that not only would have astounded a medieval peasant, but might well have astounded the King.

I don't want to get into a huge argument regarding the way the economy worked in the middle ages, except to say that most people confuse the early modern with the middle ages or confuse stories about the middle ages with the middle ages. If by 'middle ages' we mean the period in Northern Europe from about 400 AD to 1400 AD, then for the most of that period there wasn't a very sharp economic divide between the wealthy and the poor because for the most part there wasn't enough goods for anyone to live what we'd think of as a lavish lifestyle. There were sharp differences in political power and legal rights, but the noble born mostly lived a slightly grander version of the peasant life and traded the security of being unlikely to starve to death, for the very real chance some other noble would come and stick a sharpened bit of metal through them. There wasn't any medicine to speak of, and poor and rich suffered alike. Food was common and coarse and little varied whether you were a villain or a noble - you just got meat a bit more often as a noble.

Note that, IRL, a wealthy merchant or even a minor noble might have buttons of silver and/or pearl that were worth more apiece than a peasant would see in half his life.

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No, this is exactly what I'm talking about. A silver button, containing no more silver than a silver penny, and having been worked by a haberdasher for less than a day, couldn't possibly be worth more than a couple days wages to a peasant. Granted, he might never see silver coin that often, and he might never have so much surplus income to waste on silver buttons, and there might be sumptuary laws that forbid him to wear silver buttons, but a whole set of silver buttons weren't half a years 'wages' much less half a life time. The same is true of the pearl buttons and we've have the bills of sale for pearls to prove that. A whole set of pearl buttons might be worth a couple months income for a peasant, but it's simply not possible for pearl buttons to be worth half a lifetime's income for a peasant - unless it takes a peasant half a lifetime to make them. They don't.

I value the D&D coin in modern spending terms I can understand, so to me:
Copper Piece = $1 Bill
Silver Piece = $10 Bill
Gold Piece = $100 Bill
Platinum Piece = $1,000 Bill

As to player characters, they are their own nation-state sized economies walking around, it's true... that's just part of the game. If I knew four people in real life who could pummel dragon-sized monsters or take on entire platoons of humanoids without breaking a sweat, I'd probably expect such individuals to dwarf Elon Musk's net worth, so it sorta makes sense to me.

I should note too, I figure the average peasant rarely deals in gold at all, so even for items that normally have gold listing prices, the usual medium of exchange is gonna be copper and silver. I think players dropping gold (or even worse, platinum) in small town economies is gonna have the same effect of trying to pay with $100 or $1,000 bills at a gas station where, "Keep the Change" will necessarily be a handy phrase.

Also, most peasants are gonna be dealing with commodities, barter and service trading as well so their "wages will significantly increase if you consider a portion of their "income" isn't counted in coin.

One final note, in modern era, the disparity between an AR-15 rifle and a dozen eggs at the grocery store is about the same disparity as we seem to find in game prices between a long sword and a chicken.

I wrote a lengthy response the other day, only to have Enworld go down for maintennce when I was trying to post it.

I'll try to be a bit more brief:

When I spoke of a "silver and/or pearl button", what I meant was "Silver and pearl or something-and-pearl". A finely wrought silver button can have have a jewelry value far beyond it's simple metal value, but there's still a sane limit. Still, the wealthy liked to show off their wealth.

For unskilled labor, by the book, a day's income is pretty poor. Silver a day or a GP a week for ongoing employment (yeah the rules do that kind of math a lot) would mean 52 gold a year for that man, largely in trade rather than cash. So that means 100 gp is about 4 gold short of two year's pay.

What does that mean for that man? It means that he and his family won't be tossed off their farm if he's sick or there's a crop problem that forces him to miss a rent or tax payment. It means that he can buy an apprenticeship for one of his children, so that they can have a hope at a real trade and a better life. It's like telling a man trying to raise a family on minimum wage that his kid can go to college.

It's literally life changing.

As for the economy of the middle ages v the game world: The game world is incredibly cash-rich compared to the middle ages.

In the real world, all of the gold ever mined and refined, from the ancients up to modern times, would just about fill an Olympic sized swimming pool. That's every bit of jewelry, the gold plating from every circuit board, every scrap of gold in Fort Knox, every gold filling adorning the teeth of anyone, all of it.

In the Lord of the Rings film, they had more than that in Smaug's hoard, and that much more ready to pour into that solid gold statue they used to almost kill Smaug.

That means the King Under the Mountain had a larger gold reserve than the US treasury, the Russian government, the Chinese government, the entire nation of India, and all the other banks and nations in the world. Twice over.

IRL a cubic foot of gold is a shade less than a tonne. (It's 19 hundred and some high change pounds.) In our game worlds, that would be a bit under 100,000 gold. There are swords that sell for more than that.

How, visually speaking, is a "huge" dragon hoard that would fit in a 10 gallon bucket play out with players? Is that an image a DM is going to be happy with?

Every gemstone pictured in every bit of gaming art is at least 25 carats, or about the diameter of an American quarter. That's the minimum in game terms. IRL that stone will buy you a nice house, nice car, and nice lifestyle for the rest of your life. As in, the bidding starts at $10,000,000 and goes up.

In game terms every city should suffer huge inflation whenever adventurers come to town, because they drop so much raw coinage, casually. In real life, any nation that depends on a precious metal standard traditionally suffers at the tottering edge of a *deflation* economy, since the government can't casually mint more money as the economy grows. The silver or gold needed doesn't just spring into being as needed, and the government can't just go and buy it even if it does exist: What would they buy gold bullion with? Gold coins of equal value?

So we know that the D&D economy is another fantasy aspect of our fantasy world. As schytzophrenic and dysfunctional as it is, it's what we have and what we play with. We have to accept it because nobody really wants to worry about market driven commodity prices and seasonal shifts in the supply of, well, supplies. Too much work, not enough payout.

Or simply put, fixing the fantasy economy isn't economical.

I think DM of the Rings said it best.

DM of the Rings said:

On one hand, it makes no sense for the monsters and encounter areas of the gameworld to come pre-stocked with loot. It also makes no sense for feral beasts and the shambling undead to walk around carrying fabulous cash prizes.

On the other hand, gold coins are shiny and make a fun jingling sound when you have lots of them.

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Greenfield said:

What does that mean for that man? It means that he and his family won't be tossed off their farm if he's sick or there's a crop problem that forces him to miss a rent or tax payment. It means that he can buy an apprenticeship for one of his children, so that they can have a hope at a real trade and a better life. It's like telling a man trying to raise a family on minimum wage that his kid can go to college.

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It's letting them tell their kid, "Son/daughter, here's 100 gp. You wanted to be an adventurer. Now you can. Send a few coin back to your ol' mum and da when you can."

And so the circle of utterly fictional, utterly unrealistic D&D life closes the loop again...

4th edition fixed the "PCs can get really rich" issue by breaking the economy even more.

Everything, magical or mundane, sells for exactly the sum of the material costs, which means that nobody can make a living. The only thing that keeps the economy running is the adventurers, who bring in loot from the field and sell it at half price.

One of the many features of 4th edition that I love. (to laugh at.)

Greenfield said:

4th edition fixed the "PCs can get really rich" issue by breaking the economy even more.

Everything, magical or mundane, sells for exactly the sum of the material costs, which means that nobody can make a living. The only thing that keeps the economy running is the adventurers, who bring in loot from the field and sell it at half price.

One of the many features of 4th edition that I love. (to laugh at.)

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The prices are for PCs only. NPC merchants surely can get things and sell them at different prices.

Igwilly said:

The prices are for PCs only. NPC merchants surely can get things and sell them at different prices.

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Where does it say that? (Not a challenge, just curiosity.)

There are a lot of games where I know the holes in the rules far better than I know the rules. For some reason the absurdities stand out when I read things.

One of my favorite 4e absurdities was that you could take a room, fill it with dynamite, padded with gun-cotton, soaked in nitroglycerine, and hit it with a Fireball, and nothing would happen. Unlike all previous editions, they left out the text that said it affected everything else in the area. as written it affects "targets" in the area, with "Targets" defined as "living creatures". So the explosives are perfectly safe.

Please note, I'm not picking on 4e or any of those who play it. Every game has its holes, the things left out or mishandled. I'm just laughing at rules oddities in general.

JBGarrison72 said:

I value the D&D coin in modern spending terms I can understand, so to me:
Copper Piece = $1 Bill
Silver Piece = $10 Bill
Gold Piece = $100 Bill
Platinum Piece = $1,000 Bill

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Yeah, for most campaigns that's about what I use (or 1 sp = £5, 1 gp = £50), with 1 sp being daily subsistence for an adult human. A typical peasant farm produces several sp in value daily, I use 5 sp/day as a guide, so 150 sp/month or 15gp. That farm probably has 2 adults and 3 children and gives a small surplus the Lord can extract in taxes
without starvation.

Some settings are wealthier, especially those where population density is very low, but these
numbers give a reasonable basis for tax incomes etc. I have a campaign where one PC is the
Sultan of Ylaruam, his realm of 500,000 has been giving him a net cash income of
80,000gp/year to play with, with which he is very happy.

In my Ghinarian Hills Wilderlands game on Saturday, after a tough battle with Black Sun
assassins on the road outside Ahyf, the high level 5e PCs (Fighter 11th, Barbarian 14th & Barbarian 17th plus 2 NPCs) sought shelter for the night at a nearby fortified farmhouse (9 people). After diplomatising their way in they gifted the farmer the 35gp they'd taken from the assassins - so about 35x50=£1750, enough to buy several oxen or half a trained riding horse (although in horse breeding areas I use 25gp/horse not 75gp). The farmers were pretty happy and weren't terrified at the thought of this money being discovered. They're not living in France AD 1200 after all.

I think if you want a setting where huddled masses of disarmed peasants are more terrified of their Lord than the
local monsters, that is actually fairly unusual for D&D. If I wanted that I'd maybe use Gary
Gygax's Great Kingdom from World of Greyhawk (with population increased to 50 million from 5
million), a lawful evil realm that could do 'high medieval France' quite well.

Comparing to the real world, I generally find Ancient World Mediterranean standards fit D&D better
than medieval western Europe, due to the lack of coin in Europe from the Dark Ages Islamic conquests
causing the collapse of Mediterranean civilisation. 1gp=10sp fits the period in Greece from the
Peloponnesian War onwards, when there was an influx of Persian gold; 1gp=20sp for the earlier
period.

Athenian Hoplite and trireme rower wages seem to have been in the 1sp to 2sp/day range, which fits Gygaxian economics, but for D&D I would typically use around x5 if you expect to be recruiting actual trained
mercenaries for your war, rather than levy citizenry, so 15-30gp/month perhaps (plus looting rights!).
Likewise a man can live on 1sp/day, but if you want to hire a linkboy or bearer for your dungeon/wilderness expedition expect to be paying 5sp/day or more.

Igwilly said:

The prices are for PCs only. NPC merchants surely can get things and sell them at different prices.

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Actually in 4e PCs normally sell their loot at 1/5 of list price (except treasure with a listed sale value). List price is what they pay, except for magic items, for which list price is the enchantment/creation cost. For magic items there is a typical markup of up to 40% on list price. So a mage (PC or NPC) who works on commission to create a 1st level magic item pays 360gp for the components (arcane reagants etc) then sells at a markup of 10-40%. Somewhat
reminiscent of historical goldsmiths & silversmiths I think, where the value added by crafting and the sale
markup was a relatively small proportion of the inherent value of the materials.

AFAICT 4e does not list component costs for mundane goods, but the 1/5 figure used for adventurer dump sales seems like a good ballpark. Obviously if you work a business you can expect to sell goods retail at list price or similar, but unless there's an extreme shortage you won't be selling them retail as fast as you can make them. Perhaps you sell
30-100gp of goods a month that way, eg a basic plate harness costs 50gp list price so you spend 10gp on
good steel per suit and sell average 1 suit in the month, for an income of 40gp.
If you sell 2 suits you make 80gp. If you are adding value at 5gp/day it took you 16 days to make those two suits (which seems a bit quick, but 4e plate armour is cheap) - mind you mail armour took a lot longer than plate, which is why it fell out of use.
If you are selling to merchants they may buy as fast as you can make but will want a nice fat markup so you maybe selling those suits at 25-35gp. The merchants then transport them to areas without plate armour makers and sell at 50gp
(or apply the 10-40% markup for items with a real shortage).