Do you realize the kind of inflation you'd have in a rabbit poo based economy ;D
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D&D 5E New Q&A: Starting Gold, Paragon and Prestige Paths, and bounded accuracy vs. Feats
- Thread starter gyor
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Do you realize the kind of inflation you'd have in a rabbit poo based economy ;D
howandwhy99
Adventurer
D&D usually works on a barter system that is determined by rules for PCs interacting with NPCs. As part of that system most "civilized" D&D cultures use a material-based currency (not a numbers-based record of one as we use today). A material-based bartering economy is one of the Medieval parts of the game. Feel free to change it to make it as fantastical or Modern as you desire.
People barter not only because they need more than what they have, but because the animals, land, crafted/worked goods, services, and information they do have differ in value between themselves and other people. Add to that changes over time for all individuals and acquiring other resources becomes highly desirable to all living creatures. That means trade rather than self-sufficiency for lawful creatures. Or, in the case of chaotic ones, forcibly taking from others.
A Material-based currency is usually adopted by lawful cultures because of its Reliability. One or more resources are chosen that are considered more or less finite and unchanging in amount. This is supposed to provide for a stable economy.
Of course, other elements affect what currency is chosen.
Perceived Value - based on how much the creatures partaking in the economy value the material (gold is pretty as are jewels, iron and and steel good for metal crafts, slaves good for labor, etc.)
Utility Value - The actual value of the material in relation to all the goods and services capable of and performed by a community. (This leaves out unknown goods and services, so information has value too.)
Portability - How much currency can easily be moved about for trade?
Rarity - If you have too much or too little of the material around for trade then small denominations for the poorest become untenable.
For a Medieval European economy I think D&D has a fine starting point of a mixed metals and gems currency with open barter as the base. Their rarity also determines a large portion of the setting's available Natural Resources for communities to gather and refine/craft. This also helps define what crafted works are available by region prior to trade. These defined natural resources means you can balance the game world across large populations without giving any one a significant advantage, at least not a material one. (Of course that can be played with too once you account for all the other resources the game includes.)
People barter not only because they need more than what they have, but because the animals, land, crafted/worked goods, services, and information they do have differ in value between themselves and other people. Add to that changes over time for all individuals and acquiring other resources becomes highly desirable to all living creatures. That means trade rather than self-sufficiency for lawful creatures. Or, in the case of chaotic ones, forcibly taking from others.
A Material-based currency is usually adopted by lawful cultures because of its Reliability. One or more resources are chosen that are considered more or less finite and unchanging in amount. This is supposed to provide for a stable economy.
Of course, other elements affect what currency is chosen.
Perceived Value - based on how much the creatures partaking in the economy value the material (gold is pretty as are jewels, iron and and steel good for metal crafts, slaves good for labor, etc.)
Utility Value - The actual value of the material in relation to all the goods and services capable of and performed by a community. (This leaves out unknown goods and services, so information has value too.)
Portability - How much currency can easily be moved about for trade?
Rarity - If you have too much or too little of the material around for trade then small denominations for the poorest become untenable.
For a Medieval European economy I think D&D has a fine starting point of a mixed metals and gems currency with open barter as the base. Their rarity also determines a large portion of the setting's available Natural Resources for communities to gather and refine/craft. This also helps define what crafted works are available by region prior to trade. These defined natural resources means you can balance the game world across large populations without giving any one a significant advantage, at least not a material one. (Of course that can be played with too once you account for all the other resources the game includes.)
Neither does a gold standard. In 3E, the standard treasure value for a great wyrm red dragon is 720,000 gold pieces. If you're envisioning an immense heap of gold, think again. At D&D's standard of 50 coins to the pound, and assuming 40% of the volume is taken up by spaces between the coins, that's one largish chest of coins about 4 feet by 2 feet by 2 feet. Of course, that chest would weigh over seven tons (gold is heavy, yo), so you couldn't carry the hoard, but it wouldn't take up much space; certainly not enough to be a bed for a Colossal dragon.
Anyway, you're trying to base the entire currency system on a single trope about a single monster. I'd rather just accept that the legendary dragon lying on a bed of gold has All The Money, and if the PCs somehow kill it, they too will have All The Money. Then the rest of the system can be reasonable.
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That's the treasure value that the *PCs get*. There can be as much ornamental/descriptive extra treasure as you want, as long as the PCs don't get it.
Either you care how much space the gold would realistically take up, or you don't. If you do, then a Smaug-style dragon hoard is going to make your PCs unfathomably, inconceivably rich no matter what. If you don't, then just give the PCs however much gold you think appropriate and describe it as a vast glittering mound. 72,000 gold pieces or 720,000, what's the difference?
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New Q&A: Starting Gold, Paragon and Prestige Paths, and bounded accuracy vs. Fe
That's what I said, yep!
That's what I said, yep!
keterys
First Post
http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/medprice.htm
For this purpose, turning "pound / 20 shillings" into $, where $ is an unknown quantity of appropriate dnd currency.
Cow: .5$
Rent or College: 2$ per year
Chainmail: 5$
Warhorse: 10$
Castle: 6000$
By the time PCs are killing the Smaug (ancient dragon) in this equation and looting him, they should probably have enough for everyone in the group to have one or more castles and arm hundreds and/or thousands of normal soldiers. Smaug, in turn, should have the ability to trivially destroy castles and collect tithes (in money and cows) from one or more countries.
Still, that only gets you a scale difference of maybe 4-5 figures (x1000 to x100,000) difference, which may not be enough to justify piles and piles, by volume.
I do actually like the x100-ing of copper -> silver -> gold -> platinum, personally. I'm not sure what's wrong with astral diamonds, either, since it's supposed to be currency for _gods_.
For this purpose, turning "pound / 20 shillings" into $, where $ is an unknown quantity of appropriate dnd currency.
Cow: .5$
Rent or College: 2$ per year
Chainmail: 5$
Warhorse: 10$
Castle: 6000$
By the time PCs are killing the Smaug (ancient dragon) in this equation and looting him, they should probably have enough for everyone in the group to have one or more castles and arm hundreds and/or thousands of normal soldiers. Smaug, in turn, should have the ability to trivially destroy castles and collect tithes (in money and cows) from one or more countries.
Still, that only gets you a scale difference of maybe 4-5 figures (x1000 to x100,000) difference, which may not be enough to justify piles and piles, by volume.
I do actually like the x100-ing of copper -> silver -> gold -> platinum, personally. I'm not sure what's wrong with astral diamonds, either, since it's supposed to be currency for _gods_.
So how many gold pieces would be a reasonable number for Smaug's hoard to contain, ignoring what that gold could potentially buy?
I mean, nothing wrong with working backwards from there
Interesting question, that. Smaug's hoard is described thusly:
No size is given for Smaug himself; I suppose we could go off his boasts that his claws are like spears and his teeth swords, which would put his teeth around 12 inches at the absolute minimum. A T-rex is 50 feet long and has 6-inch teeth (give or take) so let's say Smaug is 100 feet long. If he coils up, and his tail loops halfway around again, that'd give us a circle about 20 feet in diameter. But the hoard "stretches away" across the floor, so it's got to be substantially bigger than Smaug himself. Let's say 40 feet across. That's still pretty darn small given the description, but I'm trying to be conservative here.
Now, how tall is it? The hoard is high enough that when Bilbo, standing at its edge, spots the glint of the Arkenstone, it's "above him." On the other hand, Bilbo is not exactly the tallest person around. Let's figure it's maybe 3 feet deep at the center, tapering evenly toward the edges. Apply the formula for the volume of a cone, and we come up with just over 1,250 cubic feet.
Again assuming 40% of that volume is empty air, that'd be 45 million gold pieces if it were all gold. Yow. However, Tolkien gives us an out by mentioning "silver red-stained in the ruddy light." If we change the hoard to mostly silver, we get 25 million silver pieces (gold is a lot denser than silver). That's 2.5 million gold; split among a party of 5, you've got 500K per character, which is an enormous haul but not necessarily game-wrecking. You just need to provide some suitable outlets, like castles and armies. If you adopt the 4E convention of 100 silver to the gold, it's only 50K per character, which is almost stingy.
To convert to a silver standard, we could go one step further, swap out silver for copper, and have 21 million copper pieces, or 2.1 million silver (210,000 under the 4E convention). This makes sense when you think about it. If copper is the most common coinage in use, then surely it ought to make up the bulk of a dragon hoard.
So, I have to concede that as long as you don't feel the need to make it all gold, you can in fact give out a Smaug-sized dragon hoard without destroying the economy. However, you can also do it under the silver standard. Of course, the real issue is that the weight of metal involved is simply staggering, as Smaug is at pains to point out to Bilbo*. Hauling all that money back to civilization would be an adventure in itself... but to me, that's a feature rather than a bug. Nothing should ever be easy.
*At 50 coins to the pound, you have 100,000 coins to the ton. So a copper hoard would weigh 210 tons, a silver hoard would weigh 250, and an all-gold hoard would come in at a whopping 450 tons.
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