The silver standard?

[amerigoV]

Then set up a real money auction house and allow players to buy gold with dollars/euro

We don't need the Greeks to ruin D&D economies as well as real ones...

 

[Agamon]

Mearls said in the recent Reddit "ask me anything" thread that they're looking into how to "flatten player wealth," so I would expect that to include not having item prices skyrocket with each additional level.

Silver and gold are just words. This info is much more important.

 

[Dragoslav]

Hopefully they mean to flatten character wealth? Or was it a Freudian slip by WotC design team? ;p

Haha yes, expect all of those optional modules they keep talking about to cost $5.99 each.

Also, I wrote that past after I had been awake for all of 5 minutes, and at first I had written, "flatten player math"... be lucky that it's intelligible at all.

 

[Sunseeker]

The type of currency doesn't matter so long as players are able to afford their needs. Repair costs(if they exist) room and board in a basic inn, food, the occasional supplies.

Big, flashy things should generally come as quest rewards, loot from tombs, that sort of thing.

So really I agree that player wealth is severely bloated, but changing it from gold to silver and adding a zero on the end of every price won't really change much.

 

[Libramarian]

IIRC, the 1e AD&D PHB goes to some length to describe why gold is the standard - the adventurers find themselves in the fantasy world equivalent of a gold rush town, where adventurers saturate the economy, and certain goods see ridiculous inflation.

Since then, the explanation seems to have gone away, but the standard has remained and spread through many, many other games. I mean, is it really so broken that this common language should be lost?

Personally, I don't really care either way and would be willing to live with it if it meant new players better understood.

Like the explanation of hitpoints in 1e, this isn't actually why it is like it is; it's a justification made up afterwards. The reason for the gold standard in D&D is so high level treasure hoards are huge.

It's so you can find a dragon sleeping on a pile of gold rather than guarding a little sack in the corner.

If you move to a silver standard but keep treasure as mostly gold, then treasure hoards become 10 times smaller (or 20 times by the 1e conversion rate).

 

[GX.Sigma]

I don't care even a tiny little bit what the "standard of currency" is, whatever that means.

I do care (quite a lot) about compatibility, so I vote for using the scale that 1e and OSR use, rather than making something up that is incompatible with everything for no good reason.

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

Having a logical economy would be a huge selling point for me. It doesn't have to be perfect, but I care about how wealth and currency work in my games.

D&D has been getting worse about the in-setting economy with every edition, so I'm really glad that they're taking the time to address this.

 

[DEFCON 1]

One advantage of the silver standard is that it makes copper pieces and platinum pieces viable again.

The main problem using gold is that it made copper so worthless in comparison that it just did not end up being worth the trouble gathering it all up and carrying it out of the dungeon. In order for copper to seem like "real" treasure... treasure that actually had some worth... you had to have such HUGE piles of it that it basically became prohibitive to carry it out. I mean, we are basically talking about pennies here. And if you broke into a place and found a water bubbler jug full of pennies (but which was actually worth only about $10), would you really grab that thing and try to carry it off with you? I wouldn't. It's not worth the trouble. I'd grab a couple DVDs or some knicknacks which were probably just as valuable as that jug. But by moving to silver... suddenly those copper pieces are like dimes. And if I see a stack of dimes on the bureau, then sure, I'll sweep them up and carry them out. Those copper pieces now have worth for their weight.

And platinum pieces? When platinum was only worth 10 gold... getting platinum was rather ho-hum. You'd find a pile of treasure with 500 gold coins and 25 platinum... and the big haul was the gold. The platinum was only worth 250, so it was not as exciting. But in the silver standard... those platinum pieces are now worth 100 silver pieces. Suddenly, those pieces are exciting again. I can state for a fact that because I used the silver standard in my Caves of Chaos playtest... and the party found something like 150 silver pieces, 25 gold pieces, and just TWO platinum pieces... even those two platinum were enough to get the party excited. Because those two solitary coins were worth more than the entire stack of silver pieces they looted from all the bodies. Platinum was now exciting again.

(And let's not even talk about the re-introduction of electrum as a "speciality" currency... which is kind of 'eh' when it was a 50 cent piece on the gold standard, but is a bit more thrilling as a 2 dollar piece on the silver.)

 

[Mattachine]

I don't even like the "platinum piece" idea at all. It doesn't fit the pseudo-medieval cultures that D&D usually works around.

 

[trancejeremy]

It's impossible to say something is realistic or not because D&D is not set on Earth. We don't know how common metals are.

Same thing goes for this supposed medieval stuff. While that might describe the technological level to a degree (Renaissance would be closer, IMHO), culturally it came about thanks to a fairly unique set of circumstances.

A better model would be the ancient world, pre-Roman. But again, D&D is not trying to model the real world in any way. It's just trying to be D&D.