D&D 5E Copper piece value in U.S. dollars?

[PnPgamer]

I can mix up the pot even more by saying that as dnd was made in the seventies and the prices within havent changed much, so shouldnt this be compared to a dollar in seventies?

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Page 143: It's still 1sp per day.

I know what the hireling page says, but that is not a specific mention and more of a general for players hiring unskilled people, which given the professions mentioned seems to be more of an average.

That said, the rest of your post makes sense and explains the costs on page 159.

I should have brought up that the PHB has an error in it. Page 143 has the following text:

"One gold piece is worth ten silver pieces, the most prevalent coin among commoners. A silver piece buys a laborer's work for a day, a flask of lamp oil, or a night's rest in a poor inn."

Refer to p. 43 of the Player Basic D&D rules. The text is identical except for the bolded text.

"One gold piece is worth ten silver pieces, the most prevalent coin among commoners. A silver piece buys a set of dice, a flask of lamp oil, or a night’s rest in a poor inn."

The Basic D&D rules pdf document is more recent than the PHB, and updates are effectively errata.

 

[Nergal Pendragon]

Well, crap. You just invalidated the last... two to three pages of my posts.

Will need to go back and see what I can salvage of what I was saying.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Glad I could help (or apologies as the case may be, lol).

I'd fairly extensively examined this issue in the past, so when the thread popped up I had a gleeful "I know this one!" response.

 

[aramis erak]

No one today can manage a modest living using a pure barter economy, and yet according to the Player's Handbook they manage it for the typical DnD world.

It creates a problem that a simple banquet costs $1,000 per person under that economy. I can think of no banquet I have ever been to that cost that much per plate.

Also, you are forgetting that most tend to live on 1 silver a day, or about $10 under your calculation (Source: Player's Handbook, page 143). Using the figures provided by Celebrim on the previous page, that means the typical person lives on only $3,100 a year.

Most Africans live on under $5 per day.
It's pretty meager, but it's doable.

 

[Grainger]

I honestly don't think it's a terribly meaningful question, for the reasons mentioned above (e.g. it's a pre-industrial economy), and for others. Firstly, if this is not a later medieval campaign, it's not a cash economy. Most currency is in labour (even nobles don't have large amounts of coin). Also, the home ownership rate is far, far lower - the vast majority of people are tenant farmers, and by tenant, that means they provide their labour, not money, in return for "their" land (which actually belongs to the Lord of the Manor). But even the Lord of the Manor isn't awash with cash; his land is owned by the King, and he gets most of his "income" in the form of labour.

I realise that a D&D style world doesn't usually mirror this very closely, but it's still worth considering, because the medieval mindset wasn't similar to that of today, where we go out to work in order to earn money, and then we use that to pay for our food, accommodation and then luxury goods and services. It's not even close to the same world, so to say that 1 copper piece equals a dollar, isn't, I don't think, a very useful comparison. We can say it of course, but what does it actually mean?

If your campaign really is "modern people in jerkins" then sure, $1 = 1cp (or whatever). But...

 

[Grainger]

I used this as part of the background research for my campaign... might be useful:

Medieval price list (but see the caveats at the top before you raid it for prices):
http://medieval.ucdavis.edu/120D/Money.html

 

[delericho]

Thanks for the reply, but I didn't mean what actual copper is worth in the real world in U.S. dollars. I meant, what the buying power of a copper piece in D&D 5th edition would translate to in real U.S. dollars.

Once upon a time, I heard that the price of beer had actually stayed pretty constant relative to household earnings since the middle ages. Which is a convenient and flavourful ballpark to use. (It may, of course, be totally wrong!)

According to the basic rules, a gallon of ale costs 2sp, and a mug of ale costs 4cp. (I would presume, therefore, that a 'mug' is about a pint, allowing for a decent markup.)

A two-minute Google search seems to indicate that a pint in a US pub costs an average of $3.75.

Based on that, I would suggest using an approximate conversion of 1cp = $1. It's not exact of course, but it does have the beauty of using nice round numbers.

So, that would be my suggestion, and the reasoning behind it.

 

[fuindordm]

I love this kind of discussion.

Another possible benchmark is the cost of monopolistic services, i.e. spellcasting, compared to the amount of liquid cash in the economy and what people will actually pay.

What would be a comparable service in the real world? A spellcaster can:
* open a locked chest whose key has been lost, without damaging the contents. So can a master locksmith.
* levitate a statue into place. So can an engineer, who would come and build a crane.
How much would a small town be able to pay the locksmith or engineer to travel from the city and fix their problem?

 

[Grainger]

It depends on the town, and the historical period, basically. Towns changed a lot over the course of the medieval period, so it depends what period your campaign is loosely based on. As most D&D campaigns are not very historical, I'd say it's all moot, and you should just pick some numbers, make a note of them, and be consistent.