Nergal Pendragon
First Post
One of the 4E manuals? Or one before 3E? Never seen it in 3E or 3.5E, and definitely not finding it in 5E.
D&D 5E Copper piece value in U.S. dollars?
- Thread starter machineelf
- Start date
One of the 4E manuals? Or one before 3E? Never seen it in 3E or 3.5E, and definitely not finding it in 5E.
Celebrim
Legend
Assuming that value is denominated in gold pieces and that 100 copper to the gold, probably about $0.65. Keep in mind a couple of things.
a) The price lists in D&D are mostly gamist, with things being valued based on their worth to an adventurer and not on the cost of production.
b) The price of everything is roughly equivalent to the price of the hand made version of that thing. So for example, a shirt should probably be priced at around $400, or roughly speaking about 6 g.p.
c) The economy is roughly medieval, so other than hand made goods, the price you would pay for food and labor is roughly what you'd expect somewhere in the developing world.
c) On your question regarding the inn, the $90 is what you'd pay for a respectable hotel room in the United States with the usual business class comforts in an area with relatively low land values. The 5 c.p. for a night's stay in an inn is more equivalent to buying a bed in a flop house. Accommodations would be inferior to the level of a hostel, and much more equivalent to getting a bed in a homeless shelter. You have no privacy, no security, some of the neighbors are drunk, or insane, or violent, or simply loud and annoying and have bathed none too recently. To get the sort of private room with nice beds, a window, a chamber pot and a fireplace with logs in it that you might expect of a 'hotel' would be more like 1-2 g.p. per night. Hopefully, this is reflected in the price list.
Nergal Pendragon
First Post
Real world prices from which era? Because those are real-world prices that actually did exist in America at one point.
That's part of what I meant when I discussed the changes in technology affecting pricing; even with real-world currency, they have completely changed how much we value clothes and services. And that is a technological change of only two centuries; the typical DnD world is massively more technologically divergent from the modern world.
I can't find it now, but it had to be something in 5E because I was working on a new character and remember seeing it in something official done by WotC. Still looking for it.
I can say, though, that quite a lot of people have done some pretty interesting calculation estimates over the years, though, from 1E to now, and some start the base cost by what beer/ale costs, others by what inns/hotels cost, and yet others by daily minimum wages for basic labor. Here's one for 3.5E era if that helps:
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?612628-D-amp-D-Economy-just-for-fun-How-much-is-1-gp
Celebrim
Legend
The calculation there for the value of coin based on labor is reasonable. What's not reasonable is that he doesn't notice that 3e has retained 1e's broken two tier pricing system. Prices in the 1e PH for adventuring gear are based on a gamist gold piece standard explained in the text with the color that the player's are adventuring in an area of hyper-inflation akin to the Yukon during the gold rush. On the other hand, prices for common labor in the 1e DMG, taxation in the PH, and other non-adventuring items are based on Gygax's own historical research and simulationist instincts. The result is that the price of gear and the amount of treasure the PC's are hauling out of dungeons is vastly out of scale with the price of labor. It is in fact more reasonable for most of the prices in the 1e and 3e books to be converted to silver pieces on the assumption that a commoner's days wages are 1 s.p. per day, and take Gygax's word for it that the pricing of goods in gold pieces is a local, temporal phenomenon that doesn't reflect their normal prices.
I suspect that the relative price of handmade fight quality weapons and armor is not that different now than it was in the high middle ages.
Last edited:
aramis erak
Legend
Metal Value method
9.07g of metal - that's 1/50th of a avoirdupois pound.
US spot price for copper in the last 24 hours from http://www.kitco.com/texten/texten.html
Copper currently $2.51 per pound for $0.0502 per cp.
Silver, per troy ounce: $16.86—$17.31 for $4.72—$4.86 per sp
Gold, per troy ounce: $1227.80—$1244.10 for $343.79—$348.34 per gp
Platinum, per troy ounce: $1233.00–$1253.00 for $345.24—$350.84 per pp.
Not a good method.
annual average income model
According to http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD , US GDP per capita is $53042
Moderate income is expenses of 1gp per day, medieval taxes are 20% off the top (a tithe, or tenth, each to church and liege-lord), meaning that's 80%... assuming 365 days per year... 1*365/0.8=456.25gp/year. Let's add a GP a week for entertainment, so 52GP more (also taxed) adding 65gp/year - call it 520 GP a year as a roundish number, or 10gp/week.
Dividing it out, the GP is worth about $101.76 2014 US dollars. Which puts the cp at $1.02
Better, but still not perfect. Better still would be to compare a number of items on a standard reference list... but we lack the D&D details for that.
9.07g of metal - that's 1/50th of a avoirdupois pound.
US spot price for copper in the last 24 hours from http://www.kitco.com/texten/texten.html
Copper currently $2.51 per pound for $0.0502 per cp.
Silver, per troy ounce: $16.86—$17.31 for $4.72—$4.86 per sp
Gold, per troy ounce: $1227.80—$1244.10 for $343.79—$348.34 per gp
Platinum, per troy ounce: $1233.00–$1253.00 for $345.24—$350.84 per pp.
Not a good method.
annual average income model
According to http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD , US GDP per capita is $53042
Moderate income is expenses of 1gp per day, medieval taxes are 20% off the top (a tithe, or tenth, each to church and liege-lord), meaning that's 80%... assuming 365 days per year... 1*365/0.8=456.25gp/year. Let's add a GP a week for entertainment, so 52GP more (also taxed) adding 65gp/year - call it 520 GP a year as a roundish number, or 10gp/week.
Dividing it out, the GP is worth about $101.76 2014 US dollars. Which puts the cp at $1.02
Better, but still not perfect. Better still would be to compare a number of items on a standard reference list... but we lack the D&D details for that.
Nergal Pendragon
First Post
It's not in 5E, from what I have seen. Neither in basic rules nor in the books themselves. I've been keeping an eye out for that just in case. Might be stated somewhere on the official website? If so, we need that quote.
And, I've taken a look at those and nodded. It does depend a lot on which material you go by as to what value you end up with. I've also seen calculations that ended up with a gold piece equal to a dollar.
It gets worse when you get into the technological differences, as you're dealing with translating from a high-technology, machine-reliant capitalist society to a proto-capitalist, hand-worked, low-technology society. So, that is why I eventually suggested going by commonality of currency denomination usage; otherwise, we're going to run into a lot of problems with translation and resulting figures that are flat-out insane at times.
And that's before you hit the fact that some materials and goods are simply a lot cheaper or a lot more expensive due to technological differences or practical necessity (alcohol, for example, used to be much more commonly available than it is today).
Celebrim
Legend
Mostly because mining has been industrialized to such a degree compared to the middle ages that the availability of metal is no longer comparable. The price of copper and silver relative to gold has plummeted over the last 400 years and especially during the last 100.
My main quibble is that US average income is not a good measurement for median income in an agrarian community. Since it is useful to use US pricing, I think that 'common labor is more equivalent to the bottom quintile of US labor, or about $19,178 per year. In the agrarian community though, this standard of living (or its equivalent) makes up about 80% of the population. Of course, we could all scale that down to some impoverished area - wages in Cuba or the Sudan, for example - but we'd also have to adjust to cost of living in those locations as well, and overall, things would be no less distorted by modernism.
I also prefer the assumption of 20 s.p. to the gold piece, since the 1 = 10 'metric' ratio is typical of fewer eras and regions, and I consider it less well supported.
That remains to only whether we are pulling the taxes out of the equation. In point of fact, I don't think we should. Medieval common laborers demanded a silver coin per day, and still had to pay out 30% of their income in taxes. However, we do have to pull out the Sabbath (at least the Christian one) so only at most about 310 working days a year. So I work the math as $19,178/310 = $61.86 a day of equivalent buying power for our D&D resident, keeping in mind that nothing that is mass manufactured is available to him but that since everyone has low wages, labor and its low skill products (handicrafts) are fairly cheap.
If 1 day's labor = 1 gold, and 1 gold = 100 copper, then about $0.62 a day (very close to my rough guess earlier).
As I said, I prefer 1 day's labor = 1 silver, with 20 silver = 1 gold and 10 copper = 1 silver, making a copper than worth about $6.19, and a gold worth $1240. Interestingly, this calculation (purely by accident) matches well with the spot price for gold.
Unfortunately, detailed historical prices are really hard to come by, so in practice I find you have to work out your price list from your income assumptions rather than the reverse.
Not sure what to say, other than being sorry I can't find it now myself. I don't have the basic set, and the "huh, that's interesting" moment that I had today while working on my new character had to have been while I was using one of the manuals. I don't remember having anything else open at the time (definitely not a web page), and I wasn't working with any older materials. I do remember the odd moment because my thought was, "never saw them do that before, I guess 1gp = $100 would roughly pay for a basic night at a Comfort Inn or something similar."
I really wish I could find it, because now it's bugging me. But even if I did, I'm not sure it would help anything. People would still argue about variances and oddities in exchange comparisons, precisely for the reasons you and Celebrim have noted.
Nergal Pendragon
First Post
I personally think it would help because it would give Secondhander an answer and give us an actual translation rate. Plus, it would save me a lot of math and comparison because I could then just pull up a reference copy. It may not be entirely accurate, but I don't think accuracy matters that much in this case. After all, it's a game where we can fight dragons using lightning
I'm hunting for it as well, just because I would like a definite answer to give in the future when people ask.
Similar Threads
