D&D 5E Why are potions of healing so expensive?

[Coroc]

Actually I totally disagree. The prices, while a bit weird in a few places, make sense overall if you use 1gp is about 50 to 100$.
A pint of beer, 4cp, around 2 to 4 dollars in a bar. Works perfectly.
A warhorse at 300gp which is 30k dollar, a good new car.

Converting that to silver? If you want silver to be worth that much, ok. But strange.

I probably misspoke : Put silver in place of gold for every price given in the PHB for a first approach to be more realistic.

20 gp today is worth about your 30k $ if you asume 1 gp is something like a kruegerand (which i do) so your modern times comparison is not quite correct.

Translated back your 5gp (might be wrong on that but lets assume its 5gp for a dagger) results in your dagger costing 7500 $. I hope you understand what i am trying to point out now.

 

[Coroc]

On the subject of gold: when people think gold piece they think massive gold doubloons when historically they were typically the size of a dime. Second, who's to say a fantasy world has such a limited supply of gold as earth? Every once in a while alchemists really do figure out how to turn lead into gold, but the process is not free. Or perhaps dwarves are just so good at finding it that there's a much bigger supply.

I consider a GP to be roughly the equivalent of a $20 bill. You can change to silver pieces if you want of course, I'm just too lazy to always be switching the prices in my head and I don't care about replicating anything with any historical accuracy.

EDIT: ninja'd a bit by @UngeheuerLich , although we'd have to figure out the proper scale/conversion factor.

The Kruegerand is a bigger coin, but it is worth 1600 $ atm. I sold a very tiny gold coin about the size of a penny several years ago, and i got 100$ for it so as well as @UngeheuerLich you also got the wrong assumptions.

And it is quite easy to correct just replace Gold prices with the same amoutn of silver and voila you are half way there. Of course there still might be few items requiring additional adjustements but for a start that brings you back to usable economics. And that is much more simple imho than starting to theorize how rare gold is in your fantasy world, because:
Let us take your approach and assume a gold piece is not worth much, say liek today 20 dollars. then a copper is 2 cents. so some other items ridicously cheap now.

Compare your mug of ale, or any other items in the PHB with silver or copper prices to those items liek weapons or armor which are mainly priced in gp then yo ufind out what is wrong quite fast.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I probably misspoke : Put silver in place of gold for every price given in the PHB for a first approach to be more realistic.

20 gp today is worth about your 30k $ if you asume 1 gp is something like a kruegerand (which i do) so your modern times comparison is not quite correct.

Translated back your 5gp (might be wrong on that but lets assume its 5gp for a dagger) results in your dagger costing 7500 $. I hope you understand what i am trying to point out now.

Ah ok, I understand whar you mean.
1gp is about 1.5k while I just translated it to 100 Dollars to get about realistic prices.
I think the 1GP = 100 Dollars is better. My players (and me too before I did some calculations) are always surpriced that one gp is that much. They would be even more in disbelief if I told them 1 gp is 1500 Dollars.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

Doesn't everyone make the assumption that D&D gold coins are heavily adulterated with cheaper metals?

 

[UngeheuerLich]

The Kruegerand is a bigger coin, but it is worth 1600 $ atm. I sold a very tiny gold coin about the size of a penny several years ago, and i got 100$ for it so as well as @UngeheuerLich you also got the wrong assumptions.

And it is quite easy to correct just replace Gold prices with the same amoutn of silver and voila you are half way there. Of course there still might be few items requiring additional adjustements but for a start that brings you back to usable economics. And that is much more simple imho than starting to theorize how rare gold is in your fantasy world, because:
Let us take your approach and assume a gold piece is not worth much, say liek today 20 dollars. then a copper is 2 cents. so some other items ridicously cheap now.

Compare your mug of ale, or any other items in the PHB with silver or copper prices to those items liek weapons or armor which are mainly priced in gp then yo ufind out what is wrong quite fast.

Thanks for the input. But copper on that scale would be 20ct.

 

[Oofta]

The Kruegerand is a bigger coin, but it is worth 1600 $ atm. I sold a very tiny gold coin about the size of a penny several years ago, and i got 100$ for it so as well as @UngeheuerLich you also got the wrong assumptions.

And it is quite easy to correct just replace Gold prices with the same amoutn of silver and voila you are half way there. Of course there still might be few items requiring additional adjustements but for a start that brings you back to usable economics. And that is much more simple imho than starting to theorize how rare gold is in your fantasy world, because:
Let us take your approach and assume a gold piece is not worth much, say liek today 20 dollars. then a copper is 2 cents. so some other items ridicously cheap now.

Compare your mug of ale, or any other items in the PHB with silver or copper prices to those items liek weapons or armor which are mainly priced in gp then yo ufind out what is wrong quite fast.

If you're doing it for verisimilitude or some sense of historical accuracy, gold coins were commonly used for currency well into the 10th century so it's not that far fetched. In addition, I think you're significantly off on the size of the coin. The standard gold solidus (later called the nomisma) was 4.5 grams (0.156 ounce) or even smaller.

It also sets up having to do math like is a longbow 50 SP or 5 GP or actually having to worry about copper pieces and change. Some of it probably depends on how much money matters in your game. For the most part I hand wave living costs and my GP is roughly equivalent to a $20 bill is just to give a people a rough idea of scale, not an exact exchange rate.

In any case, it's all just based on assumptions. You assume gold is as rare as it is on earth, the coin is quite large by historical standards, that the DM or the players care. You simply have different assumptions than I do.

 

[Nefermandias]

Potions of healing are pretty instant. Your average person would probably visit an herbalist or some other kind of magewright in an emergency to get something that worked over a period of hours days or more in a setting like eberron while in one like FR they just hope they don't die before it heals. Unfortunately rather than adding anything like the old 3.5 blessed bandages or something wotc twisted the whole system around magic hit dice doing it free so it's difficult to change much without structurally making changes to 5e

The problem is WoTC carrying over mechanics from older editions without really thinking about the full implications. Back in 4e, all that healing potions really did was allowing you to spend a healing surge during combat. I didn't matter if you had a thousand healing potions on your bags, the uses were limited by your healing surges.

 

[Emerikol]

It really has nothing to do with realism, as we are talking magic here, and everything to do with controlling the game economy. If the price is too low, there will be potions everywhere for everyone. Personally, I am not a big fan of magic item stores and that includes potions so I tend to make potion creation never worth the price - unless you are dying. No normal person will pay the price just to recover hit points that could otherwise heal from rest.

 

[S'mon]

About the most unrealistic thing you can do is think in terms of the modern value of gold. Across history gold:silver value ratio was only about 20:1, falling to 10:1 in some gold producing areas. I rem from Classical History class that during the Peloponnesian War the ratio in Greece fell from 20:1 to 10:1 due to the influx of Persian gold - Persia backing the Spartans against Athens. And a silver piece was a pretty typical day's wage in many eras.

PHB arms and armour prices, along with some adventuring gear prices, definitely are inflated though - dividing by 10 (ie 'silver standard') would give prices much closer to historically accurate. The arms and armour are on 'adventuring economy' prices - and so are potions of healing, of course. This is deeply embedded in D&D norms and I don't see an easy way to change it; but you can make some cheaper gear (& potions) available in your game.

Edit: On the non-adventuring-economy scale a GP seems to be about $100. On the adventuring economy scale it's about $10. These aren't really reconcilable, the best we can do is fudge it a bit.

 

[Emerikol]

I view gold as an imaginary currency just like if I invented my own version of a dollar. So the market reflects certain things. For example, you can make the manufacture of potions so hard and costly that no one will buy them but higher level adventurers and then only in smaller quantities. You'd do this if you didn't want magic mart. If you don't mind magic mart, then you might make the cost of creating a potion cheaper. As GM you should determine the kind of world you want and then make the magic follow that pattern.

In the case of non-perishable magic items, you can even make it lost knowledge so the only way to find an item is to adventure for it. You can also make it clear cut like in 3e. The GM decides how his world works and should think this through ahead of time.