D&D 5E Capricious Home Rules and DM Pet Peeves

[Celebrim]

I agree 100%. I look at gold as similar to a $20 bill, many people will carry several around in their wallet without a second thought.

Sure. That's fine, if you have that as a uniform medium of exchange, that 1 gp having the purchasing power of a $20 bill is perfectly fine.

But nothing in the game directly states what the purchasing power of gold is within the campaign world. There are hints and such and we could perhaps reverse engineer it, but ultimately its just an individual GM making decisions about the availability of gold and the wealth of his campaign world.

In your game, 10 g.p. represents $200, not enough necessarily to tempt someone to take a risk. (Depending on the someone and the risk, I suppose.)

For example, in my game 1 s.p. has about $50 of purchasing power, and the exchange rate between silver and gold is 20:1. So, 10 g.p. would be offering someone a $10,000 bribe. But of course, in my game, because the PC's are used to gold being rare and valuable, they would never flippantly offer up 10 g.p. as a bribe as if it were not worthless, because the rest of the world's prices conform to that exchange rate.

Why does my game work that way? Well, for one, it means that if a player uses his intuitive expectation that if he offers someone 10 pieces of gold "it's a small fortune", that player's intuitive expectation will be correct and I won't find myself tempted to mock his ignorance for making a reasonable guess about how the world works based on his preexisting knowledge. If game economics works on principles similar to the real world, I don't have to give as lengthy of lectures to the players for them to be able to understand how the game world's economy works at a sufficiently deep level to get by. It just makes it easier for my players to play the game, and I don't get tempted to think of my player's lack of knowledge of how the game worlds works as anyone's fault but my own.

For another, it means that gold really is a useful medium of exchange, in that say 100lb of gold is worth something like $2,000,000 in my game as opposed to $20,000. So a person could reasonably carry enough gold around to buy a house or a horse or magic sword or whatever else might be expensive, without needing a wagon to cart it around. That means that I can rely on an economy that really is largely dependent on coin, rather than some other medium of exchange (probably paper script or bearer notes) and coin is only used for small purchases. It also means that I can at least to some extent relate prices in historical coinage to the game world, since historical coins would presumably have similar purchasing power since both the historical world and game world rely on a daily wage of 'a few silver coins', and in both gold is a rare and valuable substance rather than being counterintuitively chump change.

It also solves readily the problem of value decay that was observed in AD&D with its gold as the way they game keep's score, and exponentially higher scores needed to advance to the next level. If gold is not that valuable, then as with AD&D very quickly anything that is not valued in gold becomes valueless. AD&D's items tended to acquire truly fantastic value, and copper pieces weren't worth the trouble of bending over to pick them up right from 1st level on. Very quickly you moved on from gold to extraordinarily valuable gems and jewelry, each worth 1000's of g.p. If gold is so common place, treasure quickly loses its shine. At 10th level, my group is only now starting to find gold in quantity and only now starting to say things like, "If it isn't worth at least its weight in silver, we probably should leave it behind." Why, because 10 s.p. is not $10, but $500. What this means is the first time my players open a chest that is filled with gold, I expect them to literally gasp if not whoop, hoot and holler. I can satisfy their need for bling with something of a reasonable scale, rather than have them need to find a way to transport the horde of Smaug.

Do you have to do it this way? Of course not. It's certainly far more work than is reasonable if this sort of thing has never come up in your game before. But I've been playing since the early 80's, and it has come up in my game before and the changes are in response to real irritation with real problems caused by using D&D economic systems as written. It's a peeve; but by golly it's a well justified one.

 

[Oofta]

Has anyone else noticed that quite early on, this went from being a thread about your own pet peeves with the rules and what you did about them, to a thread where you voiced your irritation with other people's pet peeves?

I'm sure in a lot of cases the reason things are pet peeves are because other people hold diametrically opposed views. My player that thought 10 gold was fortune was looking at it from a historical perspective, I was looking at it from a PHB price list perspective.

Because honestly? I'm not a historian. I have no freakin' clue how much 10 penny size gold pieces* would be worth to a peasant.

*I always assume gold coins are roughly penny/dime size, not huge honkin' Spanish doubloons. Of course that's probably somebody else's pet peeve.

 

[MNblockhead]

Has anyone else noticed that quite early on, this went from being a thread about your own pet peeves with the rules and what you did about them, to a thread where you voiced your irritation with other people's pet peeves?

Yeah, inevitable really.

I've also noticed that all the capricious rules are in-game based, nothing about capricious table etiquette.

One at-table thing that I thought I would enforce was no electronic devices at the game table, but I've given up on that. Maybe for shorter sessions or for games where a very specific ambiance was desired, this might be something I would enforce. However, as long as folks are engaged, not disruptive, and ready to roll on their turn I don't mind. I think my initial annoyance is age related.

I do, however, have some capricious at-table rules:

Physical dice. No iPhone apps, Hero Lab rolls, etc. I sometime regret it when it comes to rolling fire-ball damage and saves, but the rolling of dice is a big part of the game for me. I may be willing to change for some types of role or if we used a VTT in conjunction with in-person play, but I just don't think I would enjoy the game as much without physical dice.

Roll in the open. We all roll, DM included, in the open, on the table where we can all see the results. Beyond that, though, I don't really care how you role. If I had an issue with someone cheating, I just would stop inviting them to my games. Seems over the top to require rolling with a cup etc.

Actually, that is another capricious "rule"...I'll personally never role from a cup. The tactile feel of dice in hand is too important to me. But...I suppose if a DM required it and the game was otherwise great, I would use a dang cup.

 

[Celebrim]

I always assume gold coins are roughly penny/dime size, not huge honkin' Spanish doubloons. Of course that's probably somebody else's pet peeve. [/I]

I prefer something of the sort as well, for a variety of reasons. One reason is that the historical wage was paid in relatively small silver coins (shilling, denarius, etc.), and it's handy to have coins of nearly the same weight when tabulating encumbrance, which implies the standard gold coin is slightly smaller than the standard silver one.

Realistic coinage tends to have silver coins in a variety of sizes and weights, and exchange rates between different issuers of currency, and devaluation and inflation and things of that sort. If someone wants to go there, by all means, but I've tried it out before and its not worth the overhead (to me). I might do it in an open world cRPG if someone gave me the design reigns, but in PnP it's too much bookkeeping to do real currency.

 

[Oofta]

But nothing in the game directly states what the purchasing power of gold is within the campaign world. There are hints and such and we could perhaps reverse engineer it, but ultimately its just an individual GM making decisions about the availability of gold and the wealth of his campaign world.

The prices in the PHB are kind of ... well ... a mess. But a modest lifestyle is 1 GP/day. Obviously 10 GP is not enough for someone that will be required to set up a new life.

The rough equivalence may be more like $10 per GP as a SWAG. But that's overthinking it. Some things are going to seem expensive (2GP for a sledge) while others (8 SP per day at a comfortable inn) but that can be justified as the iron for the sledge is expensive. The comfortable inn probably means sharing a room and getting the equivalent of a buffet.

Anyway, I haven't put a lot of thought into it. A GP being valued between 10 and 20 dollars gives me a quick idea of how much gold is worth and seems to match up somewhat closely to the prices in the PHB.

 

[MNblockhead]

I briefly entertained the idea of realistic coinage, including different coins for different realms, exchange rates, etc. But creating my own currency-exchange tables is not why I decided to start playing RPGs again. Like many other things in the game, I just assume that this is all going on and that the coins are just an abstract representation. Most players just don't get all that excited about role playing a visit to the money lender, so why go through all the work of creating realistic economic systems.

Now, that still hasn't stopped me from researching greek coin storage, weights of coin-laden chests, etc. But that is usually for specific challenges. Otherwise I abstract or hand wave.

Same goes with how encumbering coins are. Other than the one player in my group who has Hero Lab that calculates this all for him and like to have things on his sheet tidy with now HL warning, I just assume that players exchange coin for gem stones. I don't make them go through the book keeping. The GP they have doesn't necessarily mean the number of coins, it is the value of whatever "money" they have on them.

I mean, when you play a modern RPG or futuristic one, your probably don't bother with role-playing breaking bills, ATM transactions, and the like, except in the rare instances where it is a plot device. Why do we get more hung up on it in fantasy games? Yes, you need to figure out how to get the treasure out of the dungeon. But beyond that I don't want to spend too much time on resource management in my games.

 

[SkidAce]

It is a fantasy game with magic, after all. Though physics and even, sometimes, logic defy many of the common practices used in the game, magic aside, as long as they are not interfering with game play in such as way as to halt its enjoyment, I never bother with it after inception.

It's like reading Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality. Considering physics and in many cases throughout this series, common sense, ruins the readability of this, at one time, very popular set of books. The opposition to this, if one likes the sciences, would be Jack L. Chalker's Rings of the Masters series, which is a phenomenal read.

I guess in all this, my only real peeve that can effect game play is a person who assumes they know everything and their only seeming intent is to be contentious. When one person ruins game play for the others, that person is not invited back to play.

XP for something written by Jack Chalker.

Way to go!

 

[Celebrim]

The rough equivalence may be more like $10 per GP as a SWAG. But that's overthinking it. Some things are going to seem expensive (2GP for a sledge) while others (8 SP per day at a comfortable inn) but that can be justified as the iron for the sledge is expensive. The comfortable inn probably means sharing a room and getting the equivalent of a buffet.

The actual origin of the mess in D&D prices appears to me the dual economy that Gygax created and explained (or tried to) in the 1e AD&D player's handbook regarding prices. Gygax was enough of a historian that prices for non-adventuring commodities as well as taxation that a lord might levy on his peasant subjects are rendered in rather realistic prices based on a silver piece economy. But his prices for adventuring items - and indeed pretty much anything that the PC's are going to want to buy - are rendered in a gamist gold piece economy designed to drain away player wealth and limit access to equipment. Gygax explicitly justifies this by saying that the outrageously high prices for adventuring goods (like a hammer) are based on the assumption that the players are adventuring in an environment similar to the Klondike gold rush, where gold is relatively plentiful but goods are extremely scarce.

The problem comes when you try to take these ideas and use them as the basis of a general world economy, rather than in a small haven in a remote wilderness area near a vast megadungeon that Gygax takes as the default (and universal) setting of the game. No edition there after significantly departed from this pattern, though 3e at least started to move in the direction of a universal gold economy with everything being priced in gold.

Anyway, I haven't put a lot of thought into it.

Thirty plus years to think about this and decide how 'the next time' I was going to run the game. It's not the 'next time' for me. It's the next next next next next time (or some such).

 

[Celebrim]

But beyond that I don't want to spend too much time on resource management in my games.

If I could figure out a good methodology for abstracting wealth I would. I've never seen an abstract wealth management system that can stand up to the complexities of real play without at least as much work as concretely tracking it.

Indeed, one of these days electronics are going to be so ubiquitous that there is probably going to be an app for managing PnP inventory that is actually convenient to use, and when 'handing out treasure', I won't merely describe it verbally, I'll click a little button and transfer it to some other player's inventory - automatically managing both value and encumbrance all that other good stuff that frays so easily in a PnP game.

 

[MNblockhead]

If I could figure out a good methodology for abstracting wealth I would. I've never seen an abstract wealth management system that can stand up to the complexities of real play without at least as much work as concretely tracking it.

Indeed, one of these days electronics are going to be so ubiquitous that there is probably going to be an app for managing PnP inventory that is actually convenient to use, and when 'handing out treasure', I won't merely describe it verbally, I'll click a little button and transfer it to some other player's inventory - automatically managing both value and encumbrance all that other good stuff that frays so easily in a PnP game.

Hero Lab is close, except for the last part--there is not collaboration. You can't sync character info, "send stuff" to your player, etc.

Using a VTT like Fantasy Grounds may be closer, I don't know if FG allows for distribution of treasure etc.