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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Greenfield" data-source="post: 7646476" data-attributes="member: 6669384">Does anyone remeber Smaug's bed in the Hobbit movie?  Or how much gold the Dwarves had, molten and ready to pour over him?All of the gold there is in the real world (and I'm including the gold fillings your great-great grandfather got buried with) could fill an Olympic sized swimming pool.So how could Middle Earth have more gold available when they didn't even have modern extraction techniques?IT'S A FANTASY!!!<Tangent>Once, when playing AD&D, our group found themselves in an odd place which we determined to be the land of the Archmage Disney.  Every inch of the place was paved, except for one pitifully small "farm" called Big Thunder Ranch.  (Yes, there used to be such a place in Disneyland.)  And there were more people per square foot than anyone in the party had ever seen, outside of a city under siege. (The whole countryside would head for the fortified castle for safety when an invader came, after all.)  But nobody seemed even a little anxious, and there weren't any guards to be seen.Because there used to be an actual government certified assay office in Frontierland, and because the bank on Main Street USA did currency exchange, and because of the Krugerand, the Canadian Mapleleaf and the Chinese Panda, they were ready to trade paper money for gold and silver coins.  (D&D 3e gold and the current exchange rate would place each GP at about $400 American.)We had the option between the gray-and-green stuff with the faces of somber men, or the colorful stuff with fantasy creatures on them.  We chose the "good" stuff, of course. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />We figured out why there were only seven Dwarves in the entire kingdom:  There wasn't a drop of beer in the place.But yeah, we shopped like crazy.  It worked out that a gold piece was about 100 dollars at the time, so it didn't take a lot of our coin to be able to spend like madmen.  I mean, we saw rows and rows of near perfect glassware, every piece exactly like the others, obviously the work of master craftsmen.  And the shops?  The wrapped most of our purchases in pieces of paper that were worth more than the goods themselves.  (AD&D listed paper at a GP per sheet.)One of the PCs decided to get stinking rich by buying up every blank journal and sketch pad he could find, knowing what they'd sell for back home.  (DM didn't let that work out, but it was a lot of fun.)The clothing available was poor quality for the most part, of course, but they served meat AND cheese everywhere, available in even the most common meals.  Surely the sign of a truly rich kingdom.The party Dwarf (my PC) had a real problem with the Big Thunder Mine Car ride:  First, it didn't seem to go anywhere.  It looked odd that it went *up* into a "mine", and the inside was huge compared to a real mine.  But even my Dwarf, an idiot, knew that you didn't ride *in* the mine cars.  Yet people were lined up to go essentially nowhere in such carts at insane speeds with no working brakes.The party ranger nearly plunked a dozen arrows into the "evil queen" of the Captain Eo show (the character looked so much like the Spider Queen it was insane.)And when the party Cleric ( a perpetually tipsy Cleric of Bacccus) ended up in the Pirates of the Carribean ride he came up terrified.  I mean there were talking skeletons that he wasn't able to turn, there was apparently a slave trade down below, and much of the undercity seemed to be on fire!  We had to evade security after that.  He really made a scene.</tangent>The point of that little interlude is to emphasize that it's almost impossible to compare real world prices to game world prices because we hardly trade in the same goods, and mass production skews the quality and sheer volume for many things.  You're comparing apples to goldfish.If a game character were in the real world, say a Cleric, his ability to heal traumatic injuries would make him the most in-demand person on earth.  Remove Disease?  Priceless.A wizard type would be the same.  Nobody cares about Magic Missile, but Teleport or even D-Door?  Richest smuggler in the world.  Scrying?  Sir, the CIA is here and they have an offer you wouldn't believe.You see?  Relatively common things in the game world are priceless here, and relatively common items IRL are incredibly expensive there, if they're available at all.So let's keep these two separate things separate.</blockquote>

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