Julian Levallon originally posted:
I've been thinking about tavern prices, and this got me thinking about the value of money. In RL, a gold piece was what the Romans paid soldiers for a year of service. Yet in B1, a mug of honey mead is listed at 1gp. A whole year's pay? (There's also something called Roast Joint for 2 gp, but I don't allow characters to smoke weed in my campaign...ha ha). Clearly there's a different currency valuing system at play. So how much does a gold piece buy in your campaign? What do you base your prices on?
I blame the Gold Rush style inflation brought on by speculator adventurers dragging coffers full of gold out of the depths and into the local economy.
ReplyDeleteI think it depends on what you want in your game. If you are striving for realism you can change the prices using silver instead of gold. Or as is usually the case in a typical dungeon crawl, not worry about it and keep prices as written.
ReplyDeleteI like to use silver for gold, so that a chest full of gold is a fabulous treasure, not a month's wages.
ReplyDeleteLamentations of the Flame Princess does a silver standard with prices in SP and 50 silver to the gold piece. It also gives 1 XP per silver piece instead of per gold piece. That's more in line with real world economics.
ReplyDeleteBlame dwarves. Dwarves dump enormous amounts of refined precious metals on the market. Dwarves are also responsible for the glut in cheap steel, and the arms and armor made from it. Dwarves put human miners and smiths right out of business - a source of historical friction in some regions - though establishment powers tend to find allying with the dwarves more economically attractive, and then putting their out of work miners into dwarfmade armor with dwarfmade weapons and sending them out to expand the kingdom. The dwarves do just fine in this relationship, happily supplying whichever power-mad human dictator rules the agoraphobic surface.
ReplyDeleteBlame dwarves for goblins too.
Mining all that gold requires certain secret and quite fantastically poisonous alchemical processes, and what's a dwarf to do with the slops and tailigs and slag and the pools of acidic arsenic water?
Dump them down into the Deeps, where no right-thinking being would ever go. There are holes down there without bottoms, so they say. Holes they could never fill up. Holes inhabited only by the twisted poison-green goblin. Skulking, hated, and for some reason, absolutely hateful about the creatures living above them. Funny that.
Those prices are down to the global inflation resulting from a 1 gp = 1 XP exchange rate.
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of having chaotic money. The same coin won't be worth the same in the next kingdom. Coins are unique to a local ruler. All prices fluctuate based on a reaction roll. That sort of thing.
ReplyDeleteI've messed with dispensing with money as it exists - which is pretty modern - and replacing it with an exchange rate based on precious metals as a commodity, with coinage existing as an official guarantee of quantity of metal (with all the shenanigans that enables).
ReplyDeletePrice lists based on a certain weight of metal form the basis for the economy, with modifies based on regional conditions.
"In Kalak Dur, the creeping desert consumes more cropland every season, and the land that remains is dry, the soil poor. Rich in steel though they may be, the people of the Dur are hungry."
x3 cost for items on the Provisions list, x2 on the Hospitality list, x2 on the Agriculture list, x.8 for items on the Metals list.
Well, if a single garlic bud costs 5 GP, imagine the cost of a roast...
ReplyDeleteWow! Great ideas! Treasure types where a hoard is measured in 1000's of gp doesn't help either. I'm much more measured than I was in my youth!
ReplyDeleteIf you're shooting for a realistic approach I highly recommend the supplement "Grain into Gold - A Fantasy World Economy." It goes into excellent detail on the worth of items in your campaign. Included is a master price list of 500 items in silver standard with variation based on distance from the source.
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