D&D General Games Economies

[TheAlkaizer]

So, I just read this blogpost by Justin Alexander.

This is one of my pet peeves in games. The challenges of having money make sense.

My personal preference is in more grounded, gritty campaigns. Often street-level. Having money matter is important to me and I've never followed the recommendations in 5E and most RPGs. 5E has the issue of gold not being that valuable very quickly. I've always added systems to act as money sink and have my players care about money. I did buy a few PDFs about realist prices in medieval societies. I haven't used them straight, I don't think realist pricing makes for the best experience, but it's a useful guide for the magnitude of differences.

When I got into the OSR, I had a similar issue where things were not that pricy and after one dungeon the players would find a hoard worth 40,000 GP. You have no reason to keep adventuring. I haven't implemented yet, but I've seen the silver standard tauted as a solution to this.

Other games have economies that make no sense, but it's very obvious that they were designed for play and not verisimilitude. An example would be Starfinder 1E price of equipment having a non-linear scale of progression. Something like 100, 1000, 10000. It's obviously been designed to have the players always strive to be able to upgrade their, while it being still challenging (I need more credits!).

I am very aware that you can design money for the dynamics you want to create in your game (Starfinder 1E), or try to make something realist. It might be possible to do both in some cases, but there might be incompatibility there in many cases. I'm not even sure that verisimilitude is really what I'm looking for. When I think about it, it's:

• Making sure that money matters
• Keep a sense of scale between what you earn, what things cost that makes sense
• Avoiding a huge inflationary pattern where we're dealing with hundreds of thousands of gold pieces

I'm not sure what my question is, I'm mostly interested to see what others think about it, if you also have this issue, if you think some games did it well, if maybe you were trying to fix this for years than waved it off, etc.

 

[Maenalis]

I am very disappointed that none of the big fantasy RPGs have a functional economy.
The only believable fantasy economy I saw from them was in Ptolus.
One of my favourite books is ... and a 10-foot Pole (1999) (Link: ... and a 10-foot Pole )
I highly recommend it.

Hackmaster, Rolemaster, Gurps and many others had great "economies", but for some reason they didn't become mainstream.

 

[Valetudo]

Making an economy work in the real world is hard enough. Think how magic mixes things up.

 

[Stormonu]

I've long made my peace with D&D's economy being akin to pricing found in Boomtown/Wild West areas where the prices are artificially inflated from the norm due to scarcity and general affluence being thrown about. I just run with the D&D standard and don't really care if it makes for an unbelievable economy - I'm not playing Papers & Paychecks and hoards of coins, gems and magic items being moved about doesn't really bother me. If the group became involved in some sort of practical business, I'd probably handwave the details for income and expenditures anyway, so like the cost of a rake or a glass mug level of detail isn't something I'd be tracking.

Using a silver standard for a more "realistic" take is probably the way to go if it is the sort of thing that bothers you.

In the end, while some games can be about the quest for gold, I find games a lot more interesting when it isn't about acquiring enough wealth to stop adventuring. I prefer that the adventure quests be more about being heroic, stopping problems, character exploration and story/backhistory resolution and the like, and the wealth is just a nice side effect.

 

[TiQuinn]

I think the problem with the D&D game economy is that if you have enough money, why would a PC keep adventuring, if indeed money is the objective?

Case in point with JA's blog post, the answer to the Mothership economy problem is that if your PC survives Gradient Descent or one of the other adventures, and comes out with millions of credits -- they've won. They've achieved the dream. Nice, cushy retirement on a pleasure planet somewhere. The idea of the campaign that continues on with a money motivation in mind is kind of failing at the start.

OH! You want the hero to have a reason to keep adventuring!? Well, that kind of contradicts the notion of a believable economy right there. Even in early D&D, you adventured until you had enough money for a stronghold of some sort, at which point, the game became something very different from what it used to be. It became about stronghold or domain management at that point -- how well it did this is something I debate but that's besides the point -- and you didn't need to be THAT guy going into the dragon's lair to pull out a hundred thousand gold pieces anymore.

So, if the objective is to motivate players to keep adventuring, or have a reason for their PCs in game to keep adventuring, you either go with the gamified "Everything now costs 10X", provide a number of previously unattainable magic items that eats up that 100,000 GP ("YOU get a Vorpal Sword! And YOU get a Vorpal Sword!...) or you forego the economy aspect entirely, and go with narrative goals that transcend money.

 

[DinoInDisguise]

My question here is pretty simple. Is this a game design issue or a table issue?

To me, and I might be cynical, you can't actually fix the issue you cite with game design. The game design you try to do would have to be heavy-handed. Heavy handed in a way that prescribes every reward, every merchant, every price. If you miss a single link in the chain, the house of cards collapses.

This is because the DM largely decides cash flow, cash sinks, and, well cash everything. And you would need to remove the DM from every one of those decisions, every treasure placement, every reward, every little gold piece, in order to fix the economy. If you don't, it just takes one wrong price, one reward that's too high, one mistake by a human. And the entire system pulls a London bridge.

If a table wishes money to matter, they can do that. But it requires full DM buy-in. Anything short of that, and you just have 30 pages of a book describing something in theory, that fails in practice, because humans make mistakes.

And DMs are human. So I don't know if it's really feasible in practice.

 

[TheAlkaizer]

I think the problem with the D&D game economy is that if you have enough money, why would a PC keep adventuring, if indeed money is the objective?

Case in point with JA's blog post, the answer to the Mothership economy problem is that if your PC survives Gradient Descent or one of the other adventures, and comes out with millions of credits -- they've won. They've achieved the dream. Nice, cushy retirement on a pleasure planet somewhere. The idea of the campaign that continues on with a money motivation in mind is kind of failing at the start.

That's exactly one of my issues.

That works perfectly fine with one-shots. Relatively ordinary but skilled individuals decide to risk it, venture into a dungeon and comes out with life-changing money.

But in a longer campaign, that hardly works. At least for my table. I've always tried to frame it as "adventuring is risky, but offers a chance at retirement and generally more income than the average joe. But it doesn't make you rich overnight"

 

[TiQuinn]

That's exactly one of my issues.

That works perfectly fine with one-shots. Relatively ordinary but skilled individuals decide to risk it, venture into a dungeon and comes out with life-changing money.

But in a longer campaign, that hardly works. At least for my table. I've always tried to frame it as "adventuring is risky, but offers a chance at retirement and generally more income than the average joe. But it doesn't make you rich overnight"

I guess my point is that in most fiction, acquiring money is not the primary reason for sustaining a storyline because once it's gotten, the storyline is over. If you want a long running campaign, the economy is probably best left as an incidental thing.

Perfect example: I played Red Dead Redemption 2 recently. There's all kinds of videos out there about hacks to get yourself virtually unlimited cash. But to what end? By the third chapter of the game, you easily have enough money just by playing the game to buy pretty much anything you want in the game. Few of the options give you any advantage or bonus, and mostly you're spending money on cosmetic changes. It's the one gotcha in the story. You can have millions of dollars, and the gang will still never, ever have enough money to move on. The economy becomes irrelevant once you are out of the early stage of the game, and it's the narrative that matters from that point onwards.

 

[TigerDude]

I think that as a player I want to adventure, not spend my efforts shopping for things I can't afford. Obviously if you make you players righ quickly they'll have plate mail as soon as they can afford it. If you let them buy magic items then they'll be decked out with everything if you let them get rich. It takes a pretty high level mob to have 40,000 GP, that's a CR 11-16 hoard according to the 2024 DMG.

 

[Umbran]

So, I just read this blogpost by Justin Alexander.

This is one of my pet peeves in games. The challenges of having money make sense.

Well, there's a major question about how much sense money actually makes in the real world, too. Money is a matter of consensual reality, not some objective measures of value.