D&D General Games Economies

[Stormonu]

You can sometimes be surprised with throwing it a little bit of "cosmetics" into the game for the PCs to spend their money, especially if it comes up play later some way. With the way some video games are these days, seems like it might be something players go for, especially if you had art for the item(s) in question.

Had a player once who recovered a 1,000 gp pearl necklace from a dungeon, and refused to sell it, keeping it for their own necklace. Came in quite handy during a court ball later down the road, with the PC using it to "wow" the attendees and get the party some aid they might not have otherwise received.

 

[TheAlkaizer]

The loop is treasure → more dangerous adventures → more treasure.

That’s why piles of gold tend to accumulate without a clear use

If your loop is about treasure, but treasure has no clear use, your loop is broken. It's not surprise so many people start ignoring them and finding some replacements for a motivation.

 

[Charlaquin]

RPGs don’t have economies. There are no market forces. Supply is unlimited and demand comes exclusively from three to five people. There are no natural resources and no labor being done to turn them into products. Even time isn’t really a resource because a few minutes of game time can be stretched out over weeks of play, and months or years can be skipped past with a sentence or so of narration. It’s impossible to simulate an actual economy under such conditions. The best you can do is attempt to create the illusion of market forces, though doing so requires having stock limits and fluctuating prices, which in my experience few GMs have any interest in bothering with. I think what most people actually mean when they’re talking about a game’s “economy” is verisimilar prices for goods and services, and reward structures that don’t outstrip those prices.

 

[Charlaquin]

If your loop is about treasure, but treasure has no clear use, your loop is broken. It's not surprise so many people start ignoring them and finding some replacements for a motivation.

This makes sense on paper, and yet, in my actual experience, players never seem to mind the fact that gold is useless. The “broken play loop” is mostly a theoretical problem that GMs get in our heads about, while players usually aren’t even looking at treasure that way. They’re busy using it as a high score system.

Nobody complains that points in arcade games aren’t “useful” in the games. Because our primate brains treat them as intrinsically valuable. We make number go up, and that makes us feel accomplished, so we try to make number go up more. Gold and other monetary treasure in D&D works mostly the same way. That’s why even long after players have accumulated enough money as for it to be no object, they still insist on haggling over every transaction, because transaction makes number go down, and number going up is how they know they’re winning.

Any resemblance to the behaviors of people who have more money than they could ever spend in real life is purely coincidental, I’m sure.

 

[Tonguez]

Personally I like the abstraction of Wealth mechanics where things are purchased via rolling Wealth v DC and Lumber Mill and Trade Route are Domain Assets.

The Bastion system could have been so much more if they had gone more in that direction.

Its easy enough to convert dungeon treasure to wealth tiers and vice versa Wirhin the adventure game loop

 

[Piperken]

A game like His Majesty the Worm partially addresses some of these questions by introducing things like taxes when the party returns to the City, which you're required to pay on the treasure you bring back.

The author also wanted to stay with the genre conventions you find in Conan or Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, which featured the protagonist(s) scoring big in riches, but by the start of the next story, having nothing in their pockets.

They put in a lot of different mechanics to help with facilitating these kinds of boom and bust cycles.

 

[Stalker0]

The problem at a fundamental level.... is Continual Flame.


Or put another way, the issue is less about the accumulation of coin than it is the accumulation of wealth. In actual medieval societies, the vast majority of things are degradable. The servants...die. Livestock....die. Your crops...die or are consumed. Most things produced require an incredible amount of effort just to maintain year to year and generation to generation.

So the wealth is in the permanent stuff, the land being the principal one (and the buildings on them). When you have land you have wealth, because the land is there generation after generation, the key to production. And land is limited, there is only so much of it, so it you have an innate supply and demand constraint. Everyone wants land, very few people get to have it, and those are the wealthy people for the most part.

Magic use in itself is just another form of labor....skilled labor to be sure...but labor nonetheless. Magic users have to be trained, they have a certain amount of productivity, most of them probably never amount to beyond 1-2nd level spells at most...and then eventually they die. Its an important and powerful resource....but still a limited one at an economy level. Now if magic is easy to learn...then schools and education programs can markedly increase that resource. But dnd suggests that spellcasting is just really hard to do, and it takes a certain person above and beyond the base intellect to really get the hang of it. So again, a limited resource.

But once you get into magic items...its a brand new ballgame, continual flame being the most basic example. Now we take a consumable labor resource and convert their time into generating a permanent magical benefit. That is not just a resource...that is WEALTH. That is a benefit that can be cultivated, stored, and built over time. A community starts with a handful of continual lights. Fast forward a generation....and the entire city is fully illuminated.

Permanent Magic items shatter the feudal economies that dnd would seem to simulate at first glance. Therefore, your first step to making an economy realistic....permanent magic items have to go. Either they are gone gone, or they require expensive recharging periodically, they fade to nothingness after X amount of time...etc.

 

[Valetudo]

I throw alot of money sinks in my games to shed players of their hard earned gold. Traveling ain't cheap(especially if you want safe travel). And people treat adventurers as outsiders for hire. Sometimes prices are higher because the party hasn't gotten the trust of a small town. Plus airships are expensive(especially when you challenge dragons to a race).

 

[Jacob Lewis]

If your loop is about treasure, but treasure has no clear use, your loop is broken. It's not surprise so many people start ignoring them and finding some replacements for a motivation.

I think there’s a mix-up here about what “treasure” really means in the D&D loop. It was never just about gold. The real rewards were always the things that made characters stronger—levels, magic items, and other sources of power that let them keep pace with the campaign’s escalating challenges.

Gold itself isn’t the goal; it’s the pacing mechanism. It ensures characters have just enough resources to stay on the curve—buying equipment, services, or upgrades where needed—until the next tier of rewards comes from play itself. The real motivation in these games has always been growth and power, with magic items woven into that equation to varying degrees depending on edition.

So when gold piles up with nothing to spend it on, it isn’t that the “treasure loop” is broken—it’s that the currency has lost its function as a pacing tool. The actual reward loop, based on growth and escalation, is still very much intact.

And this circles back to why gold tends to lose impact over time. If it only functions as a pacing tool for gear and upgrades, then once those needs are met the piles of coin don’t carry much weight. Players stop caring about the day-to-day because the loop is designed around high adventure, not about whether the characters can afford their next meal or pay the rent.

If you do want gold to retain value, you have to shift the frame of play. That means treating money as more than just a step toward the next fight—making it matter for lifestyle, debts, upkeep, or influence. But that pushes the game toward a grittier, street-level tone, which doesn’t always mesh with the heroic combat and high fantasy assumptions baked into most editions of D&D.

So the real choice is whether you want gold to serve as a scoreboard in the background, or as a meaningful constraint on the characters’ lives. Both can work—but they point the campaign in very different directions.

 

[Shiroiken]

I think that lifestyle expenses should be a greater aspect of games. In the old Conan rpg, you basically spent 90% of your wealth between each adventure, because you lived a lavish lifestyle. If you live it up (which most people with coin are going to do), then you need to go back out to get more after a while. Unfortunately, this doesn't mesh with either the listed lifestyle expenses, nor the way most players play, not to mention the higher expenses some characters have (i.e. spell components).

You can sometimes be surprised with throwing it a little bit of "cosmetics" into the game for the PCs to spend their money, especially if it comes up play later some way. With the way some video games are these days, seems like it might be something players go for, especially if you had art for the item(s) in question.

Had a player once who recovered a 1,000 gp pearl necklace from a dungeon, and refused to sell it, keeping it for their own necklace. Came in quite handy during a court ball later down the road, with the PC using it to "wow" the attendees and get the party some aid they might not have otherwise received.

If there's a gem or jewelry in the loot pile that I can afford to take as part of my split, I try to do this too. Not only does it make more sense, but technically it's easier to carry that stuff than thousands of gold coins.