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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7005928" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.  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).</blockquote>

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