My game uses only Gold Coins and has for many campaigns. Everyone who plays finds it too much of a hassle keeping track of Copper, Silver, and Gold.
Now that I'm DM'ing in my group for the first time, I'm struggling a bit coming up with a good balance for pricing; e.g. how much GP should a beer, a room, a cloak of protection cost?
Does anyone have any experience and advise for this?
the DMG has magic item listings in gold I believe, and the PHB has a table for living expenses if that helps
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Alignment: Lawful Evil
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For other items, my campaign we take what we have started calling the "John Wick" approach. We use the standard equipment tables for costs, but anything that is priced in silvers is just rounded up as one gold. Anything that is priced in coppers, we just say they paid it but don't worry about tracking the coppers. Our campaign has been fairly easy in terms of earning enough gold to have enough in pocket most of the time that the couple extra silvers they wind up paying over what things would cost exactly doesn't make a difference. A different campaign, where lack of funds or it being harder to earn gold was an aspect of the story it would be a different story, but it works for ours.
Have you considered using fractions of a gold piece? For example, 1/2 gold piece or 1/8 gold piece. I wouldn't use anything other than 1/2, 1/4, and 1/8, but it would give you a little more granularity. That is literally how change was made in the distant past--by cutting a coin into pieces. The term "piece of eight" comes from the fact that a coin could/would be cut into 8 pieces, called bits. The term "two-bit <something>" means it's worth or costs a quarter of a coin (2 bits being 2/8 of a coin or 1/4).
With 8 pieces, you can get the granularity down to about that of a silver piece (1 bit is approximately 1 sp [1/8 versus 1/10]), but unless you allow for smaller fractions, you can't get much lower than that. Besides that, in game, characters telling the difference between 1/10 and 1/12 (if you allowed those smaller fractions) would be difficult (although I guess you could require the use of weight using a balance scale when you need to get that exact). But at that point, I think it might be easier to just use silver and copper pieces.
I've found silver to be a much more practical mono-currency for my games. I convert everything listed in gold in the books into silver instead. Anything listed in Copper I usually just don't worry about tracking, unless my players are buying a lot. You'll end up with large amounts of silver (potentially tens of thousands) by the time you reach high level, but it beats doing conversions all the time.
Relevant detail: my campaigns typically take place in urban settings if I'm bothering to use currency at all, so my PCs aren't lugging around all this silver everywhere they go.
As most have said I use the D&D Beyond prices as listed under Game Rules > Equipment. In saying that I have changed some prices to more correspond with what my group has. I choose to say each store has it's own prices and I set them based on a variety of factors.
If the only unit is gold, then everything costs a minimum of one gold and is packaged as such. Need one candle? Well, they're sold in a pack of 100 for one gold. Need rations? A pack of two for one gold. Etc..
another thing to keep in mind, since the majority of time I would think your party would be together and coordinating buying stuff, even if they are buying things that are less than one gold, in silvers and such, their total is going to usually be at least one gold regardless. Lets say you have a party of 5, lodging and meals for the night? 8 silver a piece RAW, so 40 silver, which is 4 gold anyways. The majority of time the final bill for things will add up to more than 1 gold anyways, so it will come up less than you probably think, especially after you are a few levels in and the party isn't scraping by meal to meal.
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My game uses only Gold Coins and has for many campaigns. Everyone who plays finds it too much of a hassle keeping track of Copper, Silver, and Gold.
Now that I'm DM'ing in my group for the first time, I'm struggling a bit coming up with a good balance for pricing; e.g. how much GP should a beer, a room, a cloak of protection cost?
Does anyone have any experience and advise for this?
the DMG has magic item listings in gold I believe, and the PHB has a table for living expenses if that helps
Pronouns: Any/All
About Me: Godless monster in human form bent on extending their natural life to unnatural extremes /general of the goose horde /Moderator of Vinstreb School for the Gifted /holder of the evil storyteller badge of no honor /king of madness /The FBI/ The Archmage of I CAST...!
Alignment: Lawful Evil
Fun Fact: i gain more power the more you post on my forum threads. MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!
For magical items, the DMG has a table you can use for pricing things that is handy:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/treasure#MagicItemRarity
For other items, my campaign we take what we have started calling the "John Wick" approach. We use the standard equipment tables for costs, but anything that is priced in silvers is just rounded up as one gold. Anything that is priced in coppers, we just say they paid it but don't worry about tracking the coppers. Our campaign has been fairly easy in terms of earning enough gold to have enough in pocket most of the time that the couple extra silvers they wind up paying over what things would cost exactly doesn't make a difference. A different campaign, where lack of funds or it being harder to earn gold was an aspect of the story it would be a different story, but it works for ours.
Have you considered using fractions of a gold piece? For example, 1/2 gold piece or 1/8 gold piece. I wouldn't use anything other than 1/2, 1/4, and 1/8, but it would give you a little more granularity. That is literally how change was made in the distant past--by cutting a coin into pieces. The term "piece of eight" comes from the fact that a coin could/would be cut into 8 pieces, called bits. The term "two-bit <something>" means it's worth or costs a quarter of a coin (2 bits being 2/8 of a coin or 1/4).
With 8 pieces, you can get the granularity down to about that of a silver piece (1 bit is approximately 1 sp [1/8 versus 1/10]), but unless you allow for smaller fractions, you can't get much lower than that. Besides that, in game, characters telling the difference between 1/10 and 1/12 (if you allowed those smaller fractions) would be difficult (although I guess you could require the use of weight using a balance scale when you need to get that exact). But at that point, I think it might be easier to just use silver and copper pieces.
Lee
I've found silver to be a much more practical mono-currency for my games. I convert everything listed in gold in the books into silver instead. Anything listed in Copper I usually just don't worry about tracking, unless my players are buying a lot. You'll end up with large amounts of silver (potentially tens of thousands) by the time you reach high level, but it beats doing conversions all the time.
Relevant detail: my campaigns typically take place in urban settings if I'm bothering to use currency at all, so my PCs aren't lugging around all this silver everywhere they go.
As most have said I use the D&D Beyond prices as listed under Game Rules > Equipment. In saying that I have changed some prices to more correspond with what my group has. I choose to say each store has it's own prices and I set them based on a variety of factors.
If the only unit is gold, then everything costs a minimum of one gold and is packaged as such. Need one candle? Well, they're sold in a pack of 100 for one gold. Need rations? A pack of two for one gold. Etc..
another thing to keep in mind, since the majority of time I would think your party would be together and coordinating buying stuff, even if they are buying things that are less than one gold, in silvers and such, their total is going to usually be at least one gold regardless. Lets say you have a party of 5, lodging and meals for the night? 8 silver a piece RAW, so 40 silver, which is 4 gold anyways. The majority of time the final bill for things will add up to more than 1 gold anyways, so it will come up less than you probably think, especially after you are a few levels in and the party isn't scraping by meal to meal.