So, I'm building a campaign, and I don't want to bother (or make the party bother) with making change and such from purchases. I've decided it would be easier to only use gp for prices and loot. However, one of my players is concerned that it will unbalance the economy if everything that's under a gold RAW gets priced at 1 gp instead. I'm hoping to avoid that by (a) giving the players enough gold that spending one on a meal isn't a big deal, and (b) changing some of the quantities (e.g. 1 gp buys you not one candle but multiple).
If you accept the premise of only using gold, how would you handle the inflated value of cheap items? I'd rather not go through and figure out how to up the price on every item.....
If you want to justify things that should be less than a gold costing a gold piece, you could always have it that regular townfolk don't like/trust adventurers and know that they have the excess gold to spend so they don't mind overcharging.
Or, if the PCs are staying at an inn, you could have them pay for the week or whatever and have that be meals included.
Or if you don't keep track of ammo, rations, etc... that excess money can just be explained away that way too.
"After re-stocking on arrows, rations, spell components, and other supplies (torches, lamp oil, etc...), as well as paying for your food and shelter for the week, you spent x gold pieces"
Remember, armor and weapons typically need to be repaired, equipment gets worn out, etc... so you can easily explain away random amounts of non-gold by rounding up.
“It is a better world. A place where we are responsible for our actions, where we can be kind to one another because we want to and because it is the right thing to do instead of being frightened into behaving by the threat of divine punishment.” ― Oramis, Eldest by Christopher Paolini.
Historically silver was the coinage of the common man, and most coins were of silver.
Copper usually traded for a similar weight of silver at 40 to 1 or more.
Silver for gold at 16 to 1 up to 20 to 1.
Gold was more commonly the coinage of nobles and wealthy merchants.
In modern terms a silver piece was worth around $5 and a gold piece perhaps $70 to $100. Gold coins were small and thin, and it took a lot of them to make a pound of gold.
One pound of pure gold was a small fortune.
I'd be more inclined to switch to a mostly silver-and-copper economy. Historically speaking a sword ought to cost 2 to 5 gold pieces, or 32-100 silver depending.
It's not that big a deal I suppose since we typically use a purely fantasy setting rather than a historical one.
Fading Suns deals with this problem slightly differently.
For currency to small to matter on the "PC Scale" they call "talons", and talons are what ever is the local currency for small trade.
And so they spend 1 gold to get n t talons.
I'm normally the party treasurer. I just keep everything in a spreadsheet with collumns for every currency, which then after up the good value at the end.
I also divide all loot by the party +1, for the party fund. The party fund pays for tolls, food, loggings, and healing.
Thanks for all of your ideas! The main thing I want to do is simplify what's being kept track of (though, Goshin, the nerd in me loves your post!) so I'm toying with introducing a "half-gold" as solution. I don't anticipate them needing to shop for very many small things anyway, as I'm not making them keep track of ammo or food.
For those who are interested.... I've done some digging and I was a little off on my estimates above....
Recent average values for gold, silver, and copper... $1250 gold.... 17.50 silver... Copper 2.6
That would make for an exchange rate by weight of roughly 7c = 1s and 71s = 1g.
This actually isn't in line with historical worth... either gold is currently overvalued or silver undervalued... probably the latter.
Did some digging and historically silver coinage was almost universal. Copper doesn't appear to have been used much prior to the 20th century for coins. A few copper coins appear in history here and there, the obol or obole for one, trading at about 25 to 1 for silver but I'm not sure of the weights. Sometimes brass or bronze was used, or an alloy of copper and silver. Copper, a "base metal", simply didn't have the value to be much use for coinage.
Instead silver in different weights and purity was used. The most common example is the English coinage, based on Roman, where a penny or pence was a silver coin that could be cut into halves or quarters for change. A skilled workman could expect 3-6 pence in wages per day.
A shilling was a somewhat larger silver coin worth 12 pennies, and 20 shillings were equal to a pound sterling (used as a currency of account long before it was an actual monetary unit). Therefore 240 silver pennies were one pound of sterling (0.925) silver. Upper middle class commoners might make 2-3 pounds a year.
A cheap sword for a peasant might cost 6 pence; a quality knight's sword perhaps 6 shillings.
Armor (utilitarian armor) ran around 100 pence to to a few pounds.
Gold coins were not in common use. The Guinea was an early example... set at 44.5 coins to the pound it should have weighed about half what a shilling weighed, and its value was set at 21 shillings... but values of precious metals fluctuated over time depending on how much was on the market.
A couple of links for those interested in looking at some of the source material....
I think if anything, you should use silver, not gold as your single currency.
I recently saw a documentary about one specific chinese epoch (don't remember which) where the economy was incredibly booming but the coinage lost a lot of it's value. People started to have to pay a hundred or more coins for simple items so they first started to pull them on a chain or thread (they had holes in the middle) and paid with "hundred coin strings".
As this became more and more tiresome, the emperor commissioned the first paper money.
Just a clarification. That 16 - 20 to 1 Silver to Gold ratio, that was "after" the Spanish and the New World. Prior to that, in western Europe, the ratio was closer to 50+ to 1, which shows just how much gold was getting dumped into the general economy after the treasure ships came back.
Of course this is a debate in a vacuum, I don't see a way to fiddle with D&D canon on D&D Beyond for home brew campaigns, probably something to do with WoTC and branding or copyright.
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Hey y'all--
So, I'm building a campaign, and I don't want to bother (or make the party bother) with making change and such from purchases. I've decided it would be easier to only use gp for prices and loot. However, one of my players is concerned that it will unbalance the economy if everything that's under a gold RAW gets priced at 1 gp instead. I'm hoping to avoid that by (a) giving the players enough gold that spending one on a meal isn't a big deal, and (b) changing some of the quantities (e.g. 1 gp buys you not one candle but multiple).
If you accept the premise of only using gold, how would you handle the inflated value of cheap items? I'd rather not go through and figure out how to up the price on every item.....
1 cp = 1 gold
1 sp = 10 gold
1 gp = 100 gold
It's a simple matter of adding some 0s to anything over copper.
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both" -- allegedly Benjamin Franklin
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If you want to justify things that should be less than a gold costing a gold piece, you could always have it that regular townfolk don't like/trust adventurers and know that they have the excess gold to spend so they don't mind overcharging.
Or, if the PCs are staying at an inn, you could have them pay for the week or whatever and have that be meals included.
Or if you don't keep track of ammo, rations, etc... that excess money can just be explained away that way too.
"After re-stocking on arrows, rations, spell components, and other supplies (torches, lamp oil, etc...), as well as paying for your food and shelter for the week, you spent x gold pieces"
Remember, armor and weapons typically need to be repaired, equipment gets worn out, etc... so you can easily explain away random amounts of non-gold by rounding up.
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“It is a better world. A place where we are responsible for our actions, where we can be kind to one another because we want to and because it is the right thing to do instead of being frightened into behaving by the threat of divine punishment.” ― Oramis, Eldest by Christopher Paolini.
Historically silver was the coinage of the common man, and most coins were of silver.
Copper usually traded for a similar weight of silver at 40 to 1 or more.
Silver for gold at 16 to 1 up to 20 to 1.
Gold was more commonly the coinage of nobles and wealthy merchants.
In modern terms a silver piece was worth around $5 and a gold piece perhaps $70 to $100. Gold coins were small and thin, and it took a lot of them to make a pound of gold.
One pound of pure gold was a small fortune.
I'd be more inclined to switch to a mostly silver-and-copper economy. Historically speaking a sword ought to cost 2 to 5 gold pieces, or 32-100 silver depending.
It's not that big a deal I suppose since we typically use a purely fantasy setting rather than a historical one.
Goshin makes a lot of sense. I was going to reply with something similar until I saw that reply.
Fading Suns deals with this problem slightly differently.
For currency to small to matter on the "PC Scale" they call "talons", and talons are what ever is the local currency for small trade.
And so they spend 1 gold to get n t talons.
I'm normally the party treasurer. I just keep everything in a spreadsheet with collumns for every currency, which then after up the good value at the end.
I also divide all loot by the party +1, for the party fund. The party fund pays for tolls, food, loggings, and healing.
Party members can borrow from the fund.
Thanks for all of your ideas! The main thing I want to do is simplify what's being kept track of (though, Goshin, the nerd in me loves your post!) so I'm toying with introducing a "half-gold" as solution. I don't anticipate them needing to shop for very many small things anyway, as I'm not making them keep track of ammo or food.
"Half-gold" is already a thing, it's called Electrum. It's worth 5 silver or 1/2 gold.
For those who are interested.... I've done some digging and I was a little off on my estimates above....
Recent average values for gold, silver, and copper... $1250 gold.... 17.50 silver... Copper 2.6
That would make for an exchange rate by weight of roughly 7c = 1s and 71s = 1g.
This actually isn't in line with historical worth... either gold is currently overvalued or silver undervalued... probably the latter.
Did some digging and historically silver coinage was almost universal. Copper doesn't appear to have been used much prior to the 20th century for coins. A few copper coins appear in history here and there, the obol or obole for one, trading at about 25 to 1 for silver but I'm not sure of the weights. Sometimes brass or bronze was used, or an alloy of copper and silver. Copper, a "base metal", simply didn't have the value to be much use for coinage.
Instead silver in different weights and purity was used. The most common example is the English coinage, based on Roman, where a penny or pence was a silver coin that could be cut into halves or quarters for change. A skilled workman could expect 3-6 pence in wages per day.
A shilling was a somewhat larger silver coin worth 12 pennies, and 20 shillings were equal to a pound sterling (used as a currency of account long before it was an actual monetary unit). Therefore 240 silver pennies were one pound of sterling (0.925) silver. Upper middle class commoners might make 2-3 pounds a year.
A cheap sword for a peasant might cost 6 pence; a quality knight's sword perhaps 6 shillings.
Armor (utilitarian armor) ran around 100 pence to to a few pounds.
Gold coins were not in common use. The Guinea was an early example... set at 44.5 coins to the pound it should have weighed about half what a shilling weighed, and its value was set at 21 shillings... but values of precious metals fluctuated over time depending on how much was on the market.
A couple of links for those interested in looking at some of the source material....
http://medieval.ucdavis.edu/120D/Money.html
http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~marc-carlson/history/coin.html
I think if anything, you should use silver, not gold as your single currency.
I recently saw a documentary about one specific chinese epoch (don't remember which) where the economy was incredibly booming but the coinage lost a lot of it's value. People started to have to pay a hundred or more coins for simple items so they first started to pull them on a chain or thread (they had holes in the middle) and paid with "hundred coin strings".
As this became more and more tiresome, the emperor commissioned the first paper money.
Just as an inspiration.
Just a clarification. That 16 - 20 to 1 Silver to Gold ratio, that was "after" the Spanish and the New World. Prior to that, in western Europe, the ratio was closer to 50+ to 1, which shows just how much gold was getting dumped into the general economy after the treasure ships came back.
Of course this is a debate in a vacuum, I don't see a way to fiddle with D&D canon on D&D Beyond for home brew campaigns, probably something to do with WoTC and branding or copyright.