D&D 5E How much is 1.000.000 GP?

[Jfdlsjfd]

The current highest output gold mine in the real world (with double the output of its nearest competitor) is the Muruntau mine in Uzbekistan which produces 73 million grams per year, or about 160,000 pounds, or about 8 million D&D gold pieces. Now this is the biggest mine in the world and using full on modern, industrial strip mining operation. Adjusting down for lack of technology and having perhaps only one of the richest veins of gold in your fantasy world rather than the richest, and then adjusting up for fantastical dwarven mining aptitude I think giving their mine an output of a million gold pieces a year is reasonable enough, making the Dwarven interpretation of the deal be that they would set aside a year's output from each generation and Mammon's plan being that he would demand exactly all the gold they've ever produced and protest that it wasn't his fault they made a bad deal and didn't save up their money. Mammon's actual plan is presumably, of course, to have them default on the deal and demand their souls or what have you.

This is an extremely good value. Having the Archdevil of Greed offer a boon that could be repaid by gaining exactly nothing and accepting to giving back exactly what you got is great from a storytelling point of view. It's not that the dwarves can't repay, as if Mammon asked billions of gold pieces; It's that they just gained nothing and feel cheated. Since 10,000 workers (out of a population of 15,000 that's even a lot but it makes calculations easy) are expected to be paid 1 sp a day of labor, the output of the mine could be calculated to leave a yearly surplus of 250,000 gp. So Mammon could exactly make the leaders fall because of their greed, and not because of their inability to read an infernal compact correctly before signing (though it was the expected result) an impossible demand. "But you could have paid me in full, dear Dwarven Lord, had you not bought fine wines, silken linen and not constructed grand statues of yourself to adorn your city... now your whole city will merge into my layer of Hell..."

 

[MarkB]

This is an extremely good value. Having the Archdevil of Greed offer a boon that could be repaid by gaining exactly nothing and accepting to giving back exactly what you got is great from a storytelling point of view. It's not that the dwarves can't repay, as if Mammon asked billions of gold pieces; It's that they just gained nothing and feel cheated. Since 10,000 workers (out of a population of 15,000 that's even a lot but it makes calculations easy) are expected to be paid 1 sp a day of labor, the output of the mine could be calculated to leave a yearly surplus of 250,000 gp. So Mammon could exactly make the leaders fall because of their greed, and not because of their inability to read an infernal compact correctly before signing (though it was the expected result) an impossible demand. "But you could have paid me in full, dear Dwarven Lord, had you not bought fine wines, silken linen and not constructed grand statues of yourself to adorn your city... now your whole city will merge into my layer of Hell..."

Another option, if we assume that it's a magically binding contract, is that every gold piece sourced from that mine does immediately go into Mammon's coffers when he comes to collect, regardless of where it's ended up. Mammon goes home happy, and the dwarves don't have to deal with him at all.

Instead, they have to deal with dozens of powerful and angry creditors whose money has just disappeared from their vaults, and the entire region is thrown into economic chaos as a significant percentage of the total wealth currently in circulation just disappeared.