Coinage and the Tyranny of Fantasy 'Gold' | Hacker News Reader

Coinage and the Tyranny of Fantasy 'Gold'

acoup.blog

The thing is that “gold” in D&D is just some abstract indicator of value and we can just assume that in this fantasy universe, gold is cheaper and less scarce than in our own. Same with the arbitrary relations between gp, sp, cp and pp (and the less common ep). Given that the rulebook (at least used to state—I don’t know if it still does) that a coin had a weight of 1/10 of a pound, the contemporary value of a gp would be high in any real-world scenario (around $3800 according to the first site I found that would give me a number).

That said, I remember reading either in one of the old AD&D rulebooks or maybe Dragon magazine that GMs should consider the idea of adventurers showing up in town with sacks full of gold and loot being the impetus for an inflationary moment in town as all this new money enters the local economy. One could even imagine the townspeople being resentful of their food prices rising thanks to these interlopers showing up with all their gold and this being the impetus for its own little mini-adventure (perhaps even a quest for your players to boot a different bunch of adventurers out of town because they’re making things too expensive for the locals).

I remember a few decades ago an argument broke out at the table between player and DM about how the price in gold for food, weapons, armor etc. was unreasonably unrealistic and something along the lines of how looking at the average income for different NPC trades in the DMG vs the prices paid would mean no one in any town would actually be able to afford to live even on the barest of essentials. The DM eventually laid it to rest by saying something along the lines of, those by the book prices are a sucker tax used by locals to rip off rich looking out of town strangers.

I remember one RPG (possibly one of the Exile or Avernum games?) that said something to the effect of "it's not actually, like, a bunch of gold coins, it's an abstraction for valuable and easily portable trade goods". Which is a fitting explanation in a lot of games, really.

I did a bit of casual research on premodern coinage and currency a while back, acoup and https://memdb.libraries.rutgers.edu/about-spufford-currency was a great launching point. I later compiled a bunch of findings into an incomplete webpage that I stored at https://github.com/Bashmelek/MakariosEngine/blob/master/arti...

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