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

[aramis erak]

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

That looks remarkably close to the prices noted by Greg Stafford in Pendragon.

It's well worth noting that D&D pricing has never been realistic.

 

[Grainger]

Agreed. Neither has its handling of the medieval period in general; it's really a hotch-potch of Early Medieval (Dark Ages), High Medieval and a little Renaissance, filtered through (IMO) an Old West Frontier type of lens (I've tried to be more period-specific in my campaign, but that's a personal choice). I think it can be worth looking at this historical information, though, as it can help us build a convincing world, even if we're not worried about building a realistic one.

 

[Celebrim]

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

That's a poor analogy. Just because you can live for $5 a day in a developing region, doesn't imply that $5 has the same purchasing power in say Cuba, Nigeria, Ecuador, Sioux Falls and Boston. A person can't really live on $5 per day in Boston, regardless of how meager I live, even as a homeless beggar. The cost of living is too high, because everyone else around you has high priced labor and so its not possible to buy the goods and services they offer for $5. By contrast, $5 in an impoverished region were labor prices are low buys a large amount of goods and services which they have to offer at low prices for lack of any wealthy buyer or way to capitalize on their own labor. The same Venezuelan meal of beans, rice, and fried plantain that costs me $12.95 for lunch here in the USA, would cost me perhaps $3 in Venezuela and perhaps $1.50 in rural Ghana. A person with a daily income of $60 a day in Ghana would be able to live relatively comfortably, able to support many children, and perhaps even having house servants. A person with a daily income of $60 a day in the United States depending on where in the United States that they live, how old they are, and whether they must support children may well require subsidization to afford basic necessities.

So to speak of prices and incomes in different parts of the world provides us little additional clarity. We aren't even able to say what '$5' means in Egypt, Belgium or San Francisco without dividing it by the price of something and coming up with it's value in that other thing. I would be willing to bet that for the sort of handmade goods available in our hypothetical world, regardless of the money something is priced in, pricing in 'daily wages' or 'simple meals' remains fairly constant.

 

[Celebrim]

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).

While I agree that a true medieval campaign is not a cash economy, I don't find this a terribly meaningful objection to the question. Whether their exists currency as a medium of exchange or not, all currency is just labor. If I don't have a token to represent this labor, and I'm forced to trade the labor or goods directly for other labor or goods, the labor or goods I am trading can still be valued in monetary terms - even if in fact, coinage has not yet been invented in the society. Cash poor economies still have currencies, it's just not usually in coin. Easily commoditizable items end up getting used in place of coin, and become a defacto set of currencies by which goods and services are denominated. In a medieval society, these basic currencies might be things like 'bushels of wheat', 'bundles of staves', 'ricks of firewood', 'lambs', 'oxen', and hours of labor. The fact that these things are being traded rather than metal coins, doesn't really change their value. It just means we don't have a way to symbolize the value and thus suffer from various inefficiencies in trying to make exchanges.

I would suggest that almost no one goes out to 'earn money' even today. We don't value the money as a thing in and of itself, but what we can buy with it. Lacking that medium of exchange, I would still go out to work and my labor would still have value, it just wouldn't be measured in coin. If we say, "A copper piece equals a dollar", what we are saying is that we think a copper piece has about as much buying power as a dollar, and buys a dollar's worth of goods and services. That is a meaningful comparison. The main problem with it is not that medieval people didn't have a lot of coinage. If they didn't have coins at all, we could still use an abstraction like "Lets assume a copper piece buys a peck of wheat. If we knew how many pecks of wheat buys a cow, we could price cows in copper pieces." The big problem we have is that the price of goods relative to each other has changed drastically due to mechanization. The price of a nail relative to the price of a bushel of wheat has fallen greatly since the middle ages. If we answered the question, "How many nails would a bushel of wheat buy?", by looking at the prices of modern machined nails, we'd get an answer that wasn't consistent to the implied setting where machined nails didn't actually exist and had to be made by hand.

But if that wasn't the case, and the price of goods relative to each other had remained constant, then as soon as we figured out the value of a copper piece in dollars by seeing what a copper piece could buy and looking up the modern price for that same good, we could extrapolate the entire price list by looking at the modern price of the good and converting its price to 'copper pieces' according to the exchange rate we noted. The fact that copper pieces were scarce in the society in question wouldn't change this at all. Scarcity of coin, as with any other sort of economic scarcity, only increases the value of coinage. But this distortion would have already been accounted for when we set our exchange rate.

To usefully make use of the exchange rate between dollars and copper pieces, we have to be very careful to select goods whose price relative to labor probably hasn't changed all that much. A bushel of wheat in the USA isn't a good exchange, because wheat is mechanically produced here with an efficiency greater than 3-4 times that of medieval shallow till broadcast planting. But the price in a bushel of wheat relative to labor in a region still practicing subsistence farming probably hasn't changed all that much, and is certainly within the margin of error. Conversely, the price of non-imported handmade goods in the USA relative to the price of labor probably hasn't changed all that much, and for those items our exchange rate between dollars and copper pieces probably gives us a very good idea of the price a medieval might have paid for a similar item. For example, the price of hand tailored clothing, handmade furniture, handmade fight quality armor, if converted at say $65 to the silver piece, IMO actually gives a useful and meaningful set of prices for such goods. In the event that for example, you find your PC's lugging the armoire and the credenza out of the dungeon as treasure, googling up the price of an antique or modern handmade piece and being armed with a conversion rate is not IMO a bad idea in terms of consistency, believability and coherency.

In particular, it will probably avoid a serious problem I often see in price lists generated by less rigorous means, and that is that the price of goods in the list relative to each other is distorted. For example, in 1e, the price of labor was generally in s.p., but the price of adventuring goods was in g.p. A savvy investor wanting to play Papers and Paychecks, could buy labor, convert the labor into some simple good, and then convert the good into g.p. The only way to correct for this, and indeed the correction that would occur in the real world, would be to either inflate the value of the labor or deflate the value of the good. But IMO, it would be better to just have the prices in equilibrium to begin with, even if most people never notice the problem and fewer still capitalize on it.

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

This is really a meaningless distinction. Providing money is providing your labor, and providing labor is providing money. What you mean is that they provided labor and not coin. But this is only partially true. The lord also was coin poor and in general greatly preferred to be paid in coin whenever he could be. While taxes weren't usually paid in coin, it wasn't unusual to negotiate payment that had been specified by the tenant contract in corvee or bundles of staves or lambs or bushels of wheat in coin, seeing as the Lord could then use that coin to buy bundles of staves, lambs, or wheat if he wanted or if he didn't really need such things, he could buy a new gorget or a pound of nails. Over time, coin became the preferred payment method, and as silver and copper mining was mechanized in various places in Europe, people became less cash poor and more and more transactions were negotiated in coin. This was still at first really just another form of bartering, but eventually as the transaction became more common and the value of coin tended to stabilize, you start seeing taxes required to be paid in coin.

In short, I don't think the objection that middle ages were cash poor really nullifies the usefulness of having a rough idea of a coins purchasing power in modern terms. Rather, if you want to simulate a cash poor economy, simply adjust the valuation of coinage until it becomes something people are unlikely to have in significant quantities and adjust the percentage of stored wealth they have in coin. I seriously doubt many people however need that much depth to their economic simulation.

 

[Grainger]

Sure, I realise that ultimately labour = money, but I suppose my thinking was that asking about cash equivalents only gives part of the picture. Of course, D&D economies don't hardly ever approximate medieval ones - they're usually fairly modern economies with "Ye Olde" written in front of the shop names. However, if someone asks "what is the equivalent amount of money to $1", as a supposdely-historical question - that is, if the comparison is to have any meaning - then we have to consider that people weren't paid a salary into their bank account, which they then used to do the weekly shop. So, although a copper coin might approximate $1 (or whatever), it's not really the same thing; I get what you're saying that money is essentially a shortcut to trading services for other services, and that's how money developed - but the experience of doing work, and being "paid" for it, was totally different. One system might have evolved into the other, but they're not anything like the same thing.

As I suggested above, it's a side issue, really, as most D&D campaign economies are not even close to medieval, but I just thought it was food for thought (bartering food for ideas?), and could lead to extra flavour in a campaign, especially as the original question seemed (to me) to be hinting at some sort of historical equivalent to modern dollars.

 

[Celebrim]

That looks remarkably close to the prices noted by Greg Stafford in Pendragon.

They, and Gygax, all had the same sources.

It's well worth noting that D&D pricing has never been realistic.

Yes.

What's less appreciated I think is how relatively useless price lists like that one actually are. The problem is that such price lists collect prices from a wide variety of places and eras and put them side by side. What they don't actually show you that they need to show you is the price of coin at that place and time. By the high middle ages, you are already beginning to see the first inklings of inflation in the medieval economy. By the renaissance, coin has fallen in price enough that common laborers are demanding more than a single coin for a days labor. It's not necessarily that common laborer has gotten wealthier, it's just that there is more coin floating around and so it's price relative to labor has fallen. One of the most useful notes in the whole document concerns the fact that horse prices doubled between 1210 and 1310. Part of that may well be increased demand for horses, resulting from greater overall wealth in the society, or else greater scarcity of horses (resulting from economic hardship) and consequently greater value in horses. But most of that is in fact falling buying power of coin due to the number of coins per person increasing. Horses probably didn't in fact become twice as valuable between 1210 and 1310.

More comparisons like that would allow us to make more profitable use of prices of goods from 1200 and 1500 on the same list, but as it is, the price list contains the same sort of gross distortions you'd expect of a price list that listed the cost of a bushel of apples in 2014 next to the cost of tuition at Harvard in 1910 with no commentary regarding the changed value of the dollar.

 

[Jester David]

I apologize for my reaction.

Thank you. Have some xp.

It makes a lot more sense if you consider the idea that the artisans are likely massively more rare for the era in question than they are for the modern era.

It also makes sense if you consider that the cost of living is massively lower. They don't have utilities bills, taxes are probably a lot more simplified, and a lot more people working in the entertainment industry probably means entertainment is likely cheaper on the average.

Overall, if you adjust for the idea they don't need as much money and then factor in that the classes below merchants can survive entirely off of barter, it works out.

So, it may be easier to assume the artisans are middle class and work a comparison between artisans and middle class wages. But even then, we're going to be dealing with massive differences between them and us as far as cost of living, cost of supplies, and technology level.

I still say a comparison of how the currency is actually used may be best. A straight translation based on what currency can buy and what wages people make seems to be an area with a massive amount of problems, especially given entirely different lists of requirements for simple cost of living.

You bring up cost of living, which is a fair point. 1sp is the lowest of the Lifestyle Expenses on page 157, which does omit "utilities bills" but also means the person is living in "a leaky stable, a mud-floored hut outside the town, or a vermin-infested boarding house". It's a level of poverty below our common expectations that fills the gulf between "homeless" and "welfare recipient". Which makes sense as minimum wage really did increase the lowest standard of living.

So artisans might be a little better off, being a well-paid member of the small medieval middle class, since they can afford either the "modest" or "poor" lifestyle options. With minimum wage equating to someone who can afford the 2sp "poor" option but not quite the 1gp/day "modest" option.


I feel comfortable with my "split the difference" option with 5sp having roughly the same buying power as $50. Earning a gp a day ($100) is good, but you're barely middle class, and earning $10 makes living hard in the modern world.
It likely doesn't work out perfectly as the cost of so many items is based more on how available items are to adventurers and balance, plus the cost in earlier editions. A longsword has been 15gp for multiple editions. They likely didn't go through the book and calculate reasonable prices so much as eyeballed the value and went "eh, close enough".

 

[Celebrim]

the experience of doing work, and being "paid" for it, was totally different.

With that I can totally agree. Even more so, the sophistication with which we can discuss economics and the understanding demonstrated here is something completely beyond medieval ability to elucidate. Some of them might have 'got it' intuitively, or had complicated and round about ways to talk about it, but for the most part they just didn't have the language to talk about purchasing power parity or the insight to see coin as a commodity. Medieval economic systems were tumultuous in ways that we'd find really strange. The custom of having 1 silver piece be the wage of a laborer, was something designed to bring stability to a chaotic system, and dated back into antiquity. But at the time, they would have thought about this as if the silver was something inherently valuable, and thus reliable and desirable to have. The idea that the price of silver itself could change, or that the silver was only valuable because it represented a day's labor, wasn't something likely to occur to them - often with disastrous results.

To understand how this lack of understanding impacted society, it's useful to consider the economic turmoil that resulted when drastically different economies suddenly got brought together - most notably the extreme case of the paleolithic North America meeting the early modern Europe. When this happens, we see seemingly bizarre economic transactions occurring where it is clear to us that one side is getting cheated even though a free exchange is being made and no 'con' is taking place in the normal sense because the cheated party in this case knew exactly what they were buying. What they didn't know, and couldn't grasp, is that they were really buying and selling labor at grossly unequal rates. What they valued in terms of their own labor, was virtually valueless to the other side of the transaction in terms of their labor. The price of a commodity had drastically changed, and one side hadn't yet realized it. Both sides thought they were making a profitable transaction.

Hopefully, if we ever find ourselves orbited by aliens wanting to do some commodity exchange, we keep this in mind.

 

[Grainger]

Excellent stuff, Celebrim - all very interesting.

 

[TerraDave]

The technology of today is somewhat irrelevant. There is no way to correspond prices based on mass production.

But what can be done is to understand a relative value of x number of gold pieces.

At 1 CP = $1, many prices in the PHB make sense in players' minds.

A set of clothes for $50.
A mug of ale for $4 at a tavern.
A loaf of bread for $2.
A cab for $1 a mile in the city, $3 a mile outside the city.
A set of tools for a profession for $1000 to $3000. Ask a real world mechanic or carpenter how much he spent on his tools. A home business computer programmer will spend $500 minimum on a laptop (usually more) and many hundreds on needed software.

A modest living expense at $36,500 a year. Living expenses include food, rent, taxes, entertainment, clothes, and dozens of other expenses. Nobody has a modest living at $3650 (i.e. 1 GP per day at $10 per GP) a year in at least the U.S.

Given all the many caveats I think thats the right approach....

$1

... they increased the wage of the laborer to 2 silver pieces and adjusted the prices slightly to make that actually enough to support a poor lifestyle. (In 3e prices added up poorly--in 5e you can actually buy the things your lifestyle indicates you should be able to with the wages indicated for that lifestyle. Yay!)

...

This seals it. Global wage of unskilled labor is about $2 per day, maybe a bit more.