Economic Monkey Business

[xerxez]

It occurred to me this week that to move a monetary system in the game closer to real medieval equivalencies and not break the game, one could reduce gold and silver wealth found or earned by characters in real money in the game but multiply it by a factor for XP purposes and likewise reduce it when large quantities of gold pieces are needed for things like magical research.

This would reduce encumbrance and problems of large coin quantity storage and transport.

Being great at neither math nor economics I'm a bit stumped where to begin.

Say I wanted to have something like a Sovereign be the highest physical coinage value-- how many g.p. would a historical Sovereign be worth in the D&D economy?

[Finarvyn]

I suppose that a decent starting point would be to find the actual price of a few items in the real world for whatever era you want to simulate, and then look up the game prices for those same items. (OD&D, AD&D, whatever. AD&D has a more realistic scale, I would imagine, and certainly more items in the price list.) Then see if you find a common ratio between the two lists.

For example, if a 5 GP item is 1 Sovereign and a 10 GP item is 2 Sovereigns, you have a 5:1 scale and can just convert everything from one chart to another with ease.

In reality, I suspect that most RPG cost charts are just made up numbers so there won't be a nice ratio from one to the other. In that case, you might just make up a price for everything on your own, or maybe do some research to see if you can create a cost list from scratch.

As to XP, the purpose of the experience point is to regulate the rate of level growth so you can come up with whatever ratio of money to XP that you like.

[delta]

Many of us use the "silver standard" which does a pretty good job of solving a lot of these problems in one go. That is: The basic currency unit is one silver piece; the OD&D equipment list is read with prices in silver; XP is award at 1 per silver piece; coin treasures are cut by a factor of 10 (lighter, but simultaneously more economic value); gems & jewelry are reinterpreted in silver values; etc.

For this purpose, I read "silver piece" as something like a Groat (1/3 shilling), and one "gold piece" as something like a Noble (1/3 pound sterling).

The times I've performed this analysis, comparing units in OD&D equipment list to those of the Medieval Sourcebook, say, the closest approximation is that the units in the OD&D list are indeed about 1/3 shilling each (a Groat), so it seem pretty straightforward to refer to that as a "silver piece". Someday I should probably do a formal linear regression because this eternally comes up over and over (and with good reason).

Some links from my blog:

• deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2010/03/on-money.html
• deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2010/05/money-results.html
• deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2017/09/castle-construction-costs.html

[Finarvyn]

I've used the silver standard for years, but am thinking of trying a copper standard instead.

1 GP = 10 SP = 100 CP = 1000 IP (Iron Pieces); 1 CP is a lot like a dollar.

Essentially it would work as delta described in the first paragraph above, except by a factor of 100 instead of a factor of 10.

Imagine going into the local pub, ordering an ale, and dropping a GP on the barkeep. Don't expect him to have change, however.

[retrorob]

The OD&D list price has nothing to do with "realism", as in medieval Europe there was no gold standard (not enough gold).

You can surely find some medieval list price on the internet. Take note though that it's very hard to simulate medieval economics. Coins had different size, weight and silver content, and there were many regulations. For example some cities had their own local coin and using another one was strictly forbidden by the authorities. Monarchs have also tried to force the use of the official coin in order to boost the economy. Moreover, one have to stop thinking of the medieval economy in terms of money-goods economy, as large part of it was still measured in services and natural goods (grain, animals, honey, eggs, furs etc.), with elements of barter still existing. For example, in the 13th century Poland one could buy a village for a good horse or a ring.

I use the list price as stated in vol. I, however, sometimes changing a little up or down because of inflation/deflation, as campaign developes. I changed only wages for mercenaries from vol. III as they are extremely low in comparison with food prices. And waging war in the Middle Ages consumed most of the state coffers.

[tetramorph]

I must admit I rule things also a bit more like retrorob on this one.

Gold pieces are part of the abstraction.

The differences between gold, silver and copper pieces is an abstraction for the problem of encumbrance, in my game, not necessarily literally about what the character is holding in his hand.

I make the ratio 1:2:3 just to make my players interested in dealing with the encumbrance of anything other than gold.

[xerxez]

All very helpful, thank you! Even as a kid playing D&D the gold flooded economy bothered me a little, as well as having to deposit mountains of gold in a dungeon to get characters to level! I can see a hoard like that in Erebor in certain places but not as a general rule!

[aldarron]

You might find my Dragon Economics LINK useful - couple others there under economics you might like too but they mostly deal with troop costs.

ACKS has also dealt with this topic in detail: This Post LINK covers a lot of what you are interested in, I think. (yeah that's me being an ass in the comments on the post)

[asaki]

May 5, 2019 8:56:48 GMT -6 retrorob said:

For example some cities had their own local coin and using another one was strictly forbidden by the authorities.

I've seen this in official (A)D&D supplements, I know BECMI's Mystara setting features it.

They also kind of feature different economies for different cities, but they leave most of the actual pricing of goods up to the DM. For example, one city might charge more for imported metal goods, but might be abundant in cheap agricultural goods.

It's an idea I use sometimes, but would like to get into more deeply...I feel like it makes shopping a whole lot more interesting for the players, and a lot more realistic.

[rustic313]

May 4, 2019 22:00:13 GMT -6 delta said:

Many of us use the "silver standard" which does a pretty good job of solving a lot of these problems in one go. That is: The basic currency unit is one silver piece; the OD&D equipment list is read with prices in silver; XP is award at 1 per silver piece; coin treasures are cut by a factor of 10 (lighter, but simultaneously more economic value); gems & jewelry are reinterpreted in silver values; etc.

For this purpose, I read "silver piece" as something like a Groat (1/3 shilling), and one "gold piece" as something like a Noble (1/3 pound sterling).

The times I've performed this analysis, comparing units in OD&D equipment list to those of the Medieval Sourcebook, say, the closest approximation is that the units in the OD&D list are indeed about 1/3 shilling each (a Groat), so it seem pretty straightforward to refer to that as a "silver piece". Someday I should probably do a formal linear regression because this eternally comes up over and over (and with good reason).

Some links from my blog:

• deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2010/03/on-money.html
• deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2010/05/money-results.html
• deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2017/09/castle-construction-costs.html

This is what I do.

As it was historically, the pound becomes a useful "unit of account" for larger projects like construction.

[delta]

I did take everything I could find on historical medieval pricing that relates to something in the D&D price charts and perform a linear regression on it; that's on my blog today.

The basic equipment list has a lot of variation and is not super-well correlated with real values; the primary outliers observed are armor (very undervalued in D&D) and mid-level warhorses and carts (overvalued in D&D). On average the units in D&D related to about 75% of a real shilling.

The castle construction costs seem better correlated (actually 100% correlated with the 5 data points I found). The D&D units there seem to represent about 40% of a shilling each.

The men-at-arms costs are at a distinctly different scale with the rest of the system. Correlation there is 92%, with one D&D unit representing about 5 shillings (i.e., one-quarter of a pound sterling or something close to a real gold noble).

Very broadly speaking, and ignoring the men-at-arms costs, it seems like the best we can say is that on average the D&D price units convert to about a half-shilling each.