D&D 5E Money System in D&DN?

[JamesonCourage]

Well, if we're going for verisimilitude here[SNIP]

I mean really, that's the point here right? To play with all the cool monies?

I have no idea how your first assumption leads to the "play with all the cool monies".

At any rate, you objecting sarcastically doesn't matter much. I'm just kinda glad that people are hovering around 82% for a silver standard (as compared to about 9% that are for a gold standard), and I hope that WOTC goes along with the majority. As always, play what you like

 

[Sword of Spirit]

I voted silver standard 10:1. But basically what I mean is that they actually base the economy around the tantalizing cue to their thought processes found in the 3e PHB statement that the daily wage of a laborer is 1 sp. That directly connects it to the Roman denarius--a silver coin that was the daily wage of the laborer. I think that was intentional.

Many of the prices in the books make sense if you look at it like that, but many of them don't. I'd love to see them revise the rest of the game around that assumption.

I mentioned some more details in a couple of posts in this thread:

http://community.wizards.com/dndnex...currency_writeup!?post_id=520259403#520259403

@zoroaster100
I thought I was the only one that noticed that. I think they were trying to get across that you can't sell magic items for any reasonable profit, but they didn't properly take account of the relative pricing. I'd like it if armor came down a bit across the board, as long as they don't mess up the balance between them.

 

[Balesir]

Well, I would really like to see D&D stick to gold, because, well, it's D&D!

I think gonzo gold-seekers is what D&D actually does well, when it's at its best, but it seems many folk want to slide it over to a pseudo-realistic faux-medieval game. Pity - I think other systems have always done that better (DragonQuest, HârnMaster, RuneQuest, GURPS, Melee and Wizard, Ars Magica, Chivalry & Sorcery...), but what the market wants, the market gets

 

[dd.stevenson]

I see this sort of criticism a lot, and it strikes me as a bit too flip. Obviously there is the potential for PCs to cause local inflation if they pull a lot of money out of a dungeon and then dump it all in a small town. But a few thousand gold pieces, even a few tens of thousands, won't upend the economy of a medieval kingdom. It's quite possible for D&D to provide consistent and sensible prices for items assuming adventurers are rare and their treasure hauls limited. Then you can toss in some guidelines for DMs to deal with how things might change if they depart from that model.

But those assumptions aren't true for Forgotten Realms. Or Greyhawk. Or for most other major current settings, with Eberron standing out as the major WotC exception of which I'm aware.

And even allowing that those assumptions are true for a given setting, I'm still going to argue that the discovery of several tens of thousands of gold pieces still has the potential to create devastating levels of monetary inflation, depending on the details of the economy into which the gold is dropped.

In the end, I think that's the problem: a well-thought out macroeconomy will be pretty setting-specific. I don't think that inflationary concerns prevent a person from thinking out the economy of a given setting, but they do prevent a person from writing out a single, coherent price list that encompasses even a majority of the ways that the game actually gets played.

OTOH, I can see a good, detailed essay going over the creation of a D&D economy and detailing the important decision points in the creation process. Not confident about the market for this product, though.

I disagree. I give you ACKS, the game I bought only because it got the a meaningful and consistent in-game economy.

ACKS is different than your typical D&D game in that ACKS players are expected to spend their loot on private and public sector investment. Games like this do happen, but I don't think it's reasonable these days to consider this stuff typical for D&D. (I say this despite being a huge Birthright fan.)

Not strictly true - history tells us what happens to an economy when there's a gold rush on.

There are lots of historical examples of commodity currency inflation. (The spanish empire makes a great case study, IMO.) I'm suggesting that these scenarios would be pretty restrictive to place upon D&D in general--although they certainly run closer to what I would expect to see in a world that responded realistically the PCs actions.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Perhaps to capture a medieval Imperial measurement feel the monetary system should be based on primes:

13 coppers to the silver;
11 silvers to the gold;
7 silvers to the electrum;
5 gold to the platinum;

 

[MoonSong]

Of course, in the time period we're discussing, Platinum was far more difficult to come by.

Need to read more posts downthread, I agree, but actually Platinum was completely unknown to europeans before XV or XVI century, the name is even a neologism, not being native to latin.

Voted Silver, though I really believe it should be bronze instead of silver and include electrum and whit gold too, this way is Copper(.1 the NPC currency)-> Bronze(1 the PC currency)-> Silver(10)-> Electrum(100)-> Gold(1,000)-> White Gold(10,000)-> Platinum (100,000 if used at all). Again for all of the familiar reasons, it makes gold special instead of a dollar bill, and copper is soemthing worth of being accounted for. Anyway even a standard coper-silver-gold standard works for me.

(Personally I also don't like the gold standard because it invites the platinum, which IMHO has no actual intrinsecal value beyond it's rarity, I can only think of it as "that crappy metal for snobs that fails to be prettier than silver")

 

[cmbarona]

(Personally I also don't like the gold standard because it invites the platinum, which IMHO has no actual intrinsecal value beyond it's rarity, I can only think of it as "that crappy metal for snobs that fails to be prettier than silver")

For what it's worth, platinum is also valuable because it doesn't tarnish like silver does, so it makes very good jewelry. And potentially coins that will not lose weight over long periods of time.

 

[Ainamacar]

I prefer a single generic currency that let's the GM pick whatever monetary systems or specific currencies they think is appropriate for the setting. The scale factor of a system is, strictly speaking, arbitrary, but to keep calculations simple the value of the weakest valuable things (to an adventurer) should be on the order of 1. Much more important to D&D is relative value, which is where things typically fall apart.

I don't particularly care if 1 unit of generic currency is 1 gold or 1 silver or 1 electrum or 1 cat's tooth. And I like not having to care, so that people who do care can use whatever they want without requiring them to convert "default gold" (or whatever) to their campaign's gold. Because people who find unit conversions difficult in general find unit conversions between units with the same name but different contexts even worse.

 

[MoonSong]

For what it's worth, platinum is also valuable because it doesn't tarnish like silver does, so it makes very good jewelry. And potentially coins that will not lose weight over long periods of time.

Yeah, still it is the kind of material you'd wish to make tools and other heavy duty machinery out of if it was viable, instead of the precise and fine things you can do with silver. (Did I mention I love silver?)

 

[Kavon]

And even allowing that those assumptions are true for a given setting, I'm still going to argue that the discovery of several tens of thousands of gold pieces still has the potential to create devastating levels of monetary inflation, depending on the details of the economy into which the gold is dropped.

Be that as it may, basing the prices on an abnormality instead of everyday life seems to me to be absurd.
Give guidelines for DMs to adjust prices when these things happen, if you really want to emulate this sort of thing. If your level 1 greenhorn (who by all counts would be your average commoner) has to pay prices for goods as if he just hauled in a motherload, it just isn't very.. What's the word I'm looking for?

Also, while these inflated prices might work for certain campaign worlds, it's absolutely imaginable that a DM would not wish to have their world's economy to work like this by default. How are they supposed to get realistic/normal prices for goods, services, etc? Do they have to hit the library to do their own research? Why shouldn't the people of WotC do this for us?