NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7005876" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.</blockquote>

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