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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 8177538" data-attributes="member: 6988941">I think incorporating barter in is great, but insisting on it as the only route just creates player frustration and legitimate argument about "realism".  I think it's great to have barter be the norm for transactions in a village by villagers, and perhaps to reflect this in nobody ever being able to pay them coin for anything, and insisting that if they want to trade in those 4 shortbows they took off the goblins it will be bartering for other goods. I think its great to have money be rare in the world and to have them rarely find much wealth in the form of money. Shortage of coin compared to what we are used to was historically a major aspect of many societies and players are fairly likely to buy into dealing with this on some level if it is well presented.I think it's great to put more economic value in food and mundane goods than we typically do when we bring 21st century economic assumptions to D&D. In some communities in Tudor England it was common for someone's will (typically written on their death bed) to indicate which of their heirs would receive a particular wheel of cheese in their possession. In the late middle ages clothing and other textiles might not only see generations of use, before eventually becoming repurposed as rags, but then even at the end of their useful life as rags the rags would be broken down to make paper. Which is all to say that I think you can get some good worldbuilding flavor out of having the ordinary people of a village see real value in the mundane items our heroes find in a bandit hoard.But barter because the society is short on coin and barter because the society has no interest in coin are two different things. If you give the players coin then it should be readily exchangeable for goods and services wherever they go and people, even those who don't usually handle coin, should be all the more eager to accept it because there is a shortage of coin.If instead you are trying to insist that the society has no interest in coin because "you can't eat gold" or whatever, well keep in mind that our base D&D assumptions tend to be of a fairly economically advanced situation where a village is wont to have dedicated merchants and inns which would be unlikely to exist in a truly pure barter society. It may be interesting to play out visiting a town where the only "tavern" is a widow who brews beer to make ends meet and the only "merchants" are people coming to the market day once a week to trade their various produce for that of others, and in a situation like that it might ring true to have people discount the value of money vs. things they need (though even there I don't see insiting on pure barter making sense). But trying to map a pure barter system or even a barter preferred system onto the relatively advanced, differentiated economies we interpolate into the average D&D small town, with an inn, a blacksmith, a general goods merchant, etc. is trying to model an economy that never existed and can't really make sense.</blockquote>

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