So I've spent a ton of time trying to tweak the currency system in the game. I feel that things often don't make sense versus their value sometimes a thing is very over valued and sometimes it is very undervalued. If a pint of Ale costs, lets say, 4 copper then that would be roughly equivalent to 4 dollars in our world. Then you get to the Lodging, a stay at an inn can run you anything from 7 copper to 400 copper, which the midpoint is in keeping with the standard for hotel stays of $50 - $400 (not sure where there are $7 or $10 lodgings but I'm going with hostels or YMCA or something). so if we keep this idea of 1 dollar equals 1 copper then it could be great until you get to weapons, you get things like a dart for 5 copper ($5 throwing star) sure no problem but then you get the short bow for 25 gold (2500 copper that's a bow for $2500), that seems very high even for a craftsman's work. I mean a bow in the modern world is in the $150 to $400 range, closer to 4 gold would seem right. But then we get to gems and magic items and that is when this all really falls off a cliff. Particularly gems for spells if we keep our copper to dollars parity then in order to cast revivify once you will have to have a diamond worth $30,000, it is a life and death spell so maybe that's worth it but it seems high if you are keeping your rewards in a more meaningful range for your players. but lets go with a common magical item such as a standard potion of healing 2d4 + 2. According to the DM guide common items can be sold for 100 gold, soothes pitiful potion is worth the same as 2,500 pints of ale... something there seems off to me. Does anyone have a way they do it to prevent giving so much money to their players as to render it meaningless and not exciting for them to get money anymore while also not breaking the magical/item economy.

It seems to me like you are trying to judge D&D by real-world standards, and that just doesn’t fly. We don’t work the way D&D works, and that’s fine. Players at low levels should be finding low amounts of gold because buying magic items, in general, is pretty rare. It’s like finding something very valuable at an antique store. Almost impossible. As they become higher level they will find gold in larger amounts, but it will stay roughly proportional. Players can’t really buy magic items until level 6. At that point they might be able to buy a couple uncommon or common items. Maybe one or two each. If they all pool their loot then it seems reasonable for them to have enough to get a rare item. Nothing in D&D RaW is set in stone, but pricing is pretty close. There is a table in the DMG that lists treasure in a hoard as characters level up, and this is a good guide for the total amount of gold that should be found within a dungeon, or perhaps a dragon’s horde. I’ve gotten the balance of gold-to-level down as I’ve GMed, but we’ll all have moments where it doesn’t seem right. If you’re comparing things that can’t be compared, like dollars and CP, or a potion and ale, then you will always come up with ridiculous numbers that just make the system seem wrong.

If you want to compare CP to dollars then you need to totally change the system to reflect that. Every price would be changed. An SP is closer to a dollar, but it’s still not exact. Frankly, you’ve done yourself a disservice by thinking about this. I rarely have magic items available for sale. I don’t know how you do it, but there is this one shop of curiosities that shows up often in my games. Lots of the stuff is crap, but there’s some sweet magical gear hidden in there sometimes. The problem you are posed with is the result of having too many items for sale, or at least it is as far as I can see it. The best way to fix this is to have magic items for sale be rarer and have the majority be found in dungeons. Gold is for things like hirelings, cool non magical things, bribing merchants, gambling, and having players be pick pocketed. If the only thing worth buying is magic items then there is a serious issue. I always have a variety of things available for players. They may not find +2 scale mail, but a fine suit of splint armor is available at the local blacksmith, which is expensive, but better than the fighter’s current armor. Maybe the Wizard or cleric wants some spell components, or the barbarian wants to buy a nice new handaxe (or ten) to hunt wild boar. Think about what your players want and enjoy and present opportunities for them to get those things! Leave your magic items in the dungeons and hoards.

If players aren’t spending their gold then it’s time to improvise. Have a thief target them, or perhaps they see something advertised as a magic item, but it’s just a rusty sword with a silent image spell cast on it.

I have more, but I’m hoping this will be enough to help. If not, then say it in here or a private message and I’ll be happy to elaborate.

I Actually think all the examples you provide scale pretty well. Bows are not mass produced, and a skilled worker make 1-5 gp per day, so this actually seems to scale quite well (5 days to source wood, bow string crafting,  handles, staining/laquer wood treatment etc.)

For the 30k$ example of the diamond for revivify - that makes pretty god sense too imo - it explains why not every citizen is throwing themselves into mortal combat without a care in the world. Most folk might know that that kind of magic exist, but they will never financially be able to get close to it
Potions of healing is a niche product for adventurers and soldiers - not something i think the common populace would be guzzling down in great quantities. But a potion of healing is probably the closest a regular citizen would come to return someone from near death - so is an incredible powerful thing in the statblock of a regular commoner (if they can raise that sort of cash). 

I frequently find having to explain to characters that weaponsmiths, armorers, potion makers etc do not have a warehouse full of stuff that they have already produced - but rather make a lot of things to order. For regular traders and draftfolk - the ingredients invested in crafting something needs to be released for new materials and making a living (e.g. folks don't have venture capital companies injecting sacks of gold to increase production and turn around times in my setting). 

D&D is not an economic simulator. The prices are based on game balance, not on actual value, cost to produce and transportation, etc. Really, a longsword shouldn’t cost the same in different places. Iron may be more scarce, smiths more plentiful, demand will fluctuate. But, no matter where you go in the multiverse, it’s the same price. Trying to impose order on the system will just drive you nuts.

I think it’s mostly designed to regulate when you can get better armor. Studded leather pretty quickly, plate mail by around 4-5 level. Other that that, you rarely spend much anyway.

Economics and D&D are not good, close friends. Economics is a real world structure that has multiple scales and often competing systems. D&D is a game of pretend, lol.

My knee jerk snark out of the way, let me get into the deets of what you are doing.

First, while it is perfectly ok to say “a copper piece is equal to a dollar”. It is just as okay to say “I will use our real world (local) costs for things.” I have to say that because I want you to know that what you did wasn’t wrong, but there it is, lol.

So, for most large scale sociohistoric economic examinations, what folks look at is the price of a standard for the time amount of a beverage, a loaf of bread, and a place to sleep. Really. Like, in real world terms. So to help determine the economy of your world, you need to know what the costs of those things are.  On earth, in most “western” history, the base beverage was a low alcohol content beer that was thicker, heavier, and more nutritious, alongside a loaf of bread that we would call a Demi loaf, for each meal. Vegetables were included, and if they were very lucky, meat or eggs.

Bread’s cost impacts the cost and availability of grains to produce it, a tiny bit of salt (historically not cheap), and water. A day might take a bushel of wheat and an ounce of salt per person. This is just a very simplified and basic example.

So now you know that bushel and that salt have their own prices, and you add in the price for the baker, and those are the parts that go into the deciding of the cost of a loaf of bread — and give you baselines for comparative estimates of other goods, since beer and bread basically take the same ingredients.

Now you have to look at what it takes to feed a family — families were larger — 3 to 5 kids, two parents. Call it 6 for a rough number. Two meals a day (because they aren’t going to be rich in time or money), 12 loaves, 12 pints of beer.  Hon much does that cost in a day. That gives you an idea of how much a Household has to make each day to feed itself (clothing and the rest is optional and added in later).

That can be used to figure out what the annual income is — and that is your baseline set up. Most folks use a Serf or Peasant — someone who is tied to the land and serves a lord in a system that takes advantage of a feudal structure like this one. THey are not the poorest (those would be beggars) but they are the lowest rung and the most overwhelmingly common one. So they become the baseline.

Knowing how much they have to earn and the price of bread means you can now look at how ugh other things should cost in terms of days it takes or whatever. So, for example, if a loaf of bread costs 1 cp in your world, then a sword is going to cost enough to cover the two days of labor, the metal, and the skill to forge it. Two days of labor is 24 loaves and 24 beers. Metal is going to cost something that varies according to rarity — a sword has a few pounds, call it 5, of the ready ore, call it 20 cp a pound, so 100 cp plus 48 cp plus you went to a basic, just starting out Smith who mostly does farrier work, and made the sword on a lark, so we will say another 10 cp and now you have the cost of a short sword coming in at around 158 cp, or 160 cp for rounding and ease. That’s 16 sp or 1.6 gp, but you could argue that makes it 2 gp and now you have the basis for other weapons to determine cost.

So, one cp for a loaf of bread, 2 gp for a short sword, 1 cp for a pint of beer. Probably a cp for a night in a barn. wine is going to be more expensive because there is less of it, so cheap sour wine is 2 cp. Whiskey is 2 or 3 or 4 cp. 

Now, let’s say that a character finds a gold piece. That means they can buy 20 nights in a barn with food and still be able to gamble a little or splurge for a good whiskey.

That’s one possible example — deeply oversimplified, lol, of how you can figure out what the basic necessities are and then you can look at how that compares to not just the treasure you give, but the costs in the game.

I doubt they gave much thought to prices in the game on this level — they likely said a short sword costs X, everything else is varied from here.

Now, when iit comes to the idea of “mass producing”, well, that depends on the setting. In the current, ending campaign, there is no mass production. The prices of weapons are high and they take time to make and folks do’t have a lot of stock. In the upcoming campaign, the world has a whole set up for mass production using a rosin and structural inserts for bows that has spread all over the civilized world and the bows are fairly fixed in their capabilities and such as a result — and the price is a little lower.

I also created a coin called the Bit. It is pretty much the basic coin, 8 of them equals a cp, and that was my base unit of value — a cp is a day’s worth of work for one person. I shifted all the prices in my game to an SP base instead of a GP base. This makes Gold Pieces much more exciting, because there are few of them, and now I can do something else: copper is wha they find until 5th level, then silver and electrum, then at 10th level they start finding gold, then at 15th they start finding platinum, and now they can compete on the same stage as nobles and such.

(my actual levels are 5, 9, 13, and 17 because there is a mastery system in place)

All the prices in my new campaign are set to this new standard.  All rewards are as well — this means that finding a spell, collecting monster parts (ick!), using trade goods found in that ransacked merchant caravan, and even really simple magic items becomes a big deal. And as they go up in level, the possible rewards do as well. THe baseline yearly income for my bottom level people is 12,000 copper pieces a year. Finding 50 gold in a chest is a huge sum to an average person, and to an adventurer it’s kind the expected. Finding 500, which a lot of them expect, is nearly half a year’s wages for the peasants — but since the average yearly for the very rich is about 1000 pp, it is enough to make them feel like the hoist toity or merchant level types.

But they have a lot of copper and silver, and it spends just as easy. Why, they could rent a room in a pricey, fancy Inn now, or maybe even consider buying a house or a base or something.

Which is a lot of extra complicated stuff that isn’t important to the general game — but when some of those material components are 1500 gp, it can get a bit hard to justify a better economic basis for the game unless you plan to take the time to rewrite the equipment tables and make some changes to those.

I hope this helps.

Quote from VoxEterna>>

So I've spent a ton of time trying to tweak the currency system in the game. I feel that things often don't make sense versus their value sometimes a thing is very over valued and sometimes it is very undervalued. If a pint of Ale costs, lets say, 4 copper then that would be roughly equivalent to 4 dollars in our world. 

Then you get to the Lodging, a stay at an inn can run you anything from 7 copper to 400 copper, which the midpoint is in keeping with the standard for hotel stays of $50 - $400 (not sure where there are $7 or $10 lodgings but I'm going with hostels or YMCA or something).

so if we keep this idea of 1 dollar equals 1 copper then it could be great until you get to weapons, you get things like a dart for 5 copper ($5 throwing star) sure no problem but then you get the short bow for 25 gold (2500 copper that's a bow for $2500), that seems very high even for a craftsman's work. I mean a bow in the modern world is in the $150 to $400 range, closer to 4 gold would seem right.

But then we get to gems and magic items and that is when this all really falls off a cliff. Particularly gems for spells if we keep our copper to dollars parity then in order to cast revivify once you will have to have a diamond worth $30,000, it is a life and death spell so maybe that's worth it but it seems high if you are keeping your rewards in a more meaningful range for your players. but lets go with a common magical item such as a standard potion of healing 2d4 + 2.

According to the DM guide common items can be sold for 100 gold, soothes pitiful potion is worth the same as 2,500 pints of ale... something there seems off to me. Does anyone have a way they do it to prevent giving so much money to their players as to render it meaningless and not exciting for them to get money anymore while also not breaking the magical/item economy.

 I you want to run a Low Magic Campaign or No Magic Campaign, there are hints on how to do this in Creating a Campaign. 

Otherwise, consider shifting the perspective that every common person has ready access to the funds that the PCs do. Only the very rich and very powerful will have the ability to afford these items on a recurring basis. An adventuring party could skew the local economy very quickly. Take an economic glance at any small town outside of a military installation.

I agree with what people have said.  

The one thing I would add is that it although this is a fantasy game, if you are thinking about societies 1000 years ago, mass production manufacturing did not exist.  The standard of living across the world has doubled very fast in the last 100 years, the D&D world knows nothing of buying cheap goods from China on Amazon.  A bow for $2500, isn't unrealistic at all if you consider that.  

I like to keep magic scarce as well.  And certainly, magical items available for purchase are often fakes.  The legit ones the players do come upon are rare and/or very expensive.  

As an aside, I have an ex-business partner who was a mildly serious bowhunter.  I say mildly serious because once a year he would travel one state away to hunt deer and turkey.  He did not hunt every weekend in our state like some people do nor did he travel across continents to hunt.  His bow costs $2500.  So perhaps an entry level bow is <$1000, but even a middle of the line product is several times more.

I do shoot guns a lot.  A cheap shotgun is <$500.  A decent trap and skeet shotgun is $1000-2000.  A good trap (only) or skeet (only) shotgun is $20K; good guns have only one purpose.  These guns would be terrible to hunt with by the way.  Olympians shoot guns that are even more expensive.  So if I was going to buy a +1 shotgun, I would be spending 40K to shoot trap and skeet.  (Two guns x 20K each).  +2 would be much more if I could find one at all.  

So all that to say, if my life depended on a weapon, I would pay whatever it took to get the best quality weapon I could have.  And in a fantasy world without a robust trading system or mechanization, that would be an expensive weapon indeed and may not have multiple purposes (e.g, one bow for long range, one for accuracy, etc).