Give a villager a gold coin

Astral Diamonds are fucking crazy if you use them outside of interplanar settings

Because 2AD is like the treasury of some kingdoms

>Anyone who says that peasants only make a copper piece is deluded
Or they've read the D&D DMG.

I remember I was doing an adventure where we had to get to this tomb in the middle of a lake.

The DM told us that to get there we needed a boat, but unfortunately, the island tomb was considered cursed so no one wanted to go near it.

After three failed Diplomacy rolls, I lost my patience, and bought a rowboat off a fisher man for 100 GP.

According to the DM I could've bought fifty rowboats for that, but I replied that we were in a hurry, and we didn't know how to use a sailboat, so rowboat it had to be.

The party made me row though.

This is one of the reasons silver is the standard in all of my campaigns. Having the Gold Piece as the standard currency is insane. Silver makes far more sense.

This is why I'm glad D&D 5e got rid of that fucking ridiculous magic item economy.

>a peasant typically lives off of 1 or 2 copper coins a day
>a spyglass is 1000 gold
Sailors must be fucking loaded

the lowest of low in medieval England could still earn like 1 or two pounds each year. A pound is 240 pennies so giving someone a single penny is like giving him a single days wage.

I am not sure if they had actual shilling and pound coins back then.

1 silver piece a day.

Yeah, now money is an number that doesn't do anything because you can't buy anything you care about. Improvement!

>A peasant makes $15000 dollars a year
>A Navy Long Range Radar system costs fifty million dollars
Sailors must be fucking loaded

>Find Familiar
>Spell component is 10 gold's worth of Charcoal
>1 GP is a week's wages (roughly)
>Convert that to the real world equivalent
>Let's say you earn a net $10/h
>40 hour workweek, for ten weeks
>15lbs bag costs $10
>(40x10)x15 = 6000lbs of charcoal

My players tend to toss around gold as tips or for information. They generally get swamped by others who want similar hand outs.

>Spell ritual involves a fire pit
What's your fucking problem? You hate barbecue, bruh?

>A gold coin is a year's wage for a villager.
>In every D&D edition since AD&D a fucking dagger costs 2gp
I checked AD&D, 3.pf, 3e, 4e, and 5e.

I once gave my players something like 1200 lbs of silver ingots instead of coin, because I found the currency system so ridiculous. They were really excited, but it wasn't actually worth very much and they had to lug it around to multiple towns to sell it all. Then they got mad. Then I gave them several thousand pounds of brass ingots for another quest.

NIGGA DO YOU EVEN BRIBE?

Read the rest of my post, someone who earns that little is doing things like shoveling cow shit or something else that requires zero skill

That's also the current cost of charcoal, where its commercialized.
I doubt there's a factory churning anything close to the same amount in any city you visit, so charcoal is likely much more expensive in DnD.

Or the writers don't know shit about economics.

We have a running joke in our campaign that the prices listed in the PHB for goods and services are all super inflated because everyone jacks up their prices for adventurers.
So while adventurers are paying 2 gold or whatever for a shovel, a regular farmer is paying a tenth that.

If you still wanted to break the game economy you can abuse the crafting mechanics. Wizards can make a full suit of plate armor out of commodity grade iron once they know the Fabricate spell and can use blacksmithing tools.

Less magical people can gather up hundreds of laborers and start a shipbuilding business, which is by far the easiest way to make money in 5e.

DMG 'peasants' are serfs. They are an inch away from slaves.
It's not that adventurers are super well paid, it's that serfs aren't.

My wandering hedge knight once gave a random stablehand a single gold coin.

It was deliberate, he knew what it was worth. He was trying to appear selfless and good so nobody suspected him of the massive plot he had against the family

5e peasants live off 2sp/day, skilled labor is 2gp/day

AD&D it was 1gp/day

I'm guessing 3.pf just couldn't do even one thing right.

>right
>thinking twice
>about economy
>in a fantasy setting

So, Alchemy 101 teaches kids fresh out of high school how to transmute base metals into gold? Then the gold market collapses overnight. Same with diamonds or whatever. Magic is why bean-counting is the LEAST important aspect of RPing and exists only to give newbies some sense of priority when considering their initial kit and to make finding loot seem like a just reward for all the hard work of turning off their fucking phones for 40min at a time. tl;dr:

If a nickel can feed a family for a year, that's up to the GM - not the mineral or the system.

PS - These shekel-stacking topics always bring out the OCDs.

I find the best gm's don't over inflate the price of food and board. Copper for food, silver for room.

Fucking this.

Only in Dark Sun.

In a way hording the money didn't do anything for anyone so I just traveled around giving it to street urchins and beggars.

Usually after I made some of them fight for my amusement.

Once a player offered a gold coin out of the bat for info, and some villagers simply started to make shit up so he would give the coin.

Hand me a source on that? I want to read more about it.

Seconded.

D&D just has weird prices for player gear and services. Their wages are pretty much correct, though. During the middle ages, silver and gold existed as currencies so that businesses, banks, and governments didn't have to cart arounds tons and tons of copper (the standard currency) to deliver large sums. Silver was the currency of merchants and nobility, while gold was the currency of states. D&D does this backward by having gold as the standard denomination with silver and copper as forms of centage. In reality, copper was just hacked into bits by weight for anything less than a copper, because coins back then were actually worth their weight instead of an arbitrary value. Realistically, level 20 characters should have only amassed a couple gold over the entire course of their adventuring careers.

Fucking this, even more than this

Level 20 characters are practically demi-gods. Or even actually demi-gods.

While I agree that every adventurer ending up with hundreds of thousands of gold is retarded, someone like that would be able to amass at least a few pounds of gold worth of wealth, or even considerably more if they spent time wisely investing

I certainly hope that's covered in some sort of sealer.

Yeah, I kept having people chase after me begging for Gold.
So instead I just set up a Charity and funnelled all non-essential funds to that.
Turns out funnelling money into socially beneficial projects is a lot better on the whole than dumping a small fortune in some farmer's lap.

I usually cut out the awkward economics and just award wealth-appropriate gear as loot to my players, while keeping their coinage low to make mundane purchases continue carrying weight after first level. Nobody short of a king is going to buy magical gear for the tremendous amount it's worth, so usually they get rid of old or unwanted loot by tracking down NPCs who have something to trade (which, when they're trying to trade up to a more powerful magic item, means they have to resolve a sidequest as part of the bargain).

i certainly hope they got the IRSs' approval

Keep in mind that the vast majority of peasants and laborers in the cities got paid in nature, and that peasants relied on barter so much that they were rarely expected to pay their taxes in coin, because they rarely had enough coin at hand. A boy becoming an apprentice for a wage of a couple of bits and bobs a week doesn't mean he was starving to death, or that two chipped copper coins represented a living wage; he got his food, shelter, and likely clothes from the master he was apprenticed to. Money was primarily important to wealthy people, because it is easy to keep, and to merchants, because it is easy to transport.

> Realistically, level 20 characters should have only amassed a couple gold over the entire course of their adventuring careers.
Realistically, a level 6 PC would shit so much gold and influence he'd be able to build his own castle. Being a renowned mercenary was the quickest and most surefire way to better one's position for most of the Middle Ages.

Is this a solid way to unfuck the D&D economy? Definitely something that has always bothered me about the game.

There were probably whole third party sourcebooks for 3E that tried fixing it.

Actually, you can still buy magic items from rare and exotic sellers, but at wildly varying prices.
In other words, you get charged what the DM wants to charge instead of disturbingly imbalanced book values.

If you do that and make silver coins around five times less valuable than they are in the standard game, relative to food and livestock but not to weapons and tools, then you'll get at least a superficial semblance of realism. It will inevitably fall apart because your martials still need twenty different priceless artifacts just to do their jobs, but you can at least pretend.

Secret Service.

I've not read the DMG on the matter, but the 3.5 PHB quite clearly states that anyone with any ranks in Profession could expect to turn over, on average, 5 gold per week. That's at level 1, with 1 rank in Profession. Your typical peasant would likely have 4 ranks in Profession and if they get feats Skill Focus for it. With just a 12 in Wis, they bump that up to 9 gold per week on average.

>Hey, did you hear that [user] left town last night?
>yeah, shame that we'll just have to go back to farming our land like we've done for generations
>I know right, but at least we have enough money saved up to keep us fed through any droughts
Was your character low intelligence or affected by some sort of mental magic?

>will inevitably fall apart because your martials still need twenty different priceless artifacts
notif you make magic items something you need to dungeon delve for

>Realistically, a level 20 Wizard with the ability to turn his enemies into solid gold should only have a couple gold to his name
There should be a name for the tendency for people to go full retard in their attempts to combat retardation.

I don't think you understand the problem. How does crippling martials even more with respect to caster improve anything?

I always treat gold etc. transmutation like Fusion power, always costs at least slightly more than you get out of it.

Real world money is made of worthless paper.

Currency is not exactly valuable because of what it is made of.

Hypercorrection. It's a term from linguistics for applying rules when they don't apply, but it fits.

Well, it says they make 1 to 2 copper. And if you have a profession, you're not really a peasant, you're a craftsman.

No, if you have a Craft, that'd make you a craftsman. Farmer is one of the listed professions in the book, which is what I assume the majority of peasants do. And they'd probably be the commoner class, which quite clearly has both craft and profession available to it. To top it all off, the PHB does state in multiple places, including under both Craft and Profession descriptions, that an unskilled laborer earns 1 silver piece per day.

Well, in my first pathfinder game our Alchemist gave the bartendkeep 50 gold for a bunch of beers... From that moment on, he always got free drinks and he kept wondering why the woman had a soft spot for him.

Is your DM home brewing that shit to have a DC that's not fixed? Because by level 5 or 6, everything should be easily passing those Saves.

You underestimate it.
Two-three generations worth of various policies you introduce that ensure people completely rely on you and are devoid of any useful skills go a long way for destroying any meaningful semblance of society.

He said he did it many times. He literally funded the entire population of a town for several generations over and over again without anybody noticing the pattern? That's the shittiest lich plot ever.

Hey, it got rid of THACO, give it some credit.

>He literally funded the entire population of a town for several generations over and over again without anybody noticing the pattern?
Western world does it right now, and anyone who notices the pattern it cheerfully ignored.

That's fiat currency. Currency based on precious metal content is literally worth its content in precious metals. Early Byzantine gold coins remained in circulation in Europe long after the nation that issued them went to the dogs, because of high gold purity and consistent gold content.

t. Mansa Musa

>Perform to earn coin and get creative with that oil and 10 ft poles

Heh
This.
>tfw people think farmers actually own their farming equipment

I had a character that would generously overpay an absurd amount on 28th those results, but never had a GM that would have it happen over 1 gold.

Someone needs to post From Grain to Gold in this thread.

Are you saying that I can't apply my modern understanding of wages, payment, and employee protection to a setting that is at least superficially based on a feudal era???

Here you go senpai.

Port towns back in the day often based half their economy around sailors boozing and whoring it up once they got leave from the ship.

Thank you.
This is the only currency or price guide I use.

3.pf unskilled labourers make a silver piece per day, not copper. Ordinary skilled labourers make an average of just over 2 GP per day.

Once again, 3.pf critics just make shit up and don't know a thing about what they hate.

Traditional Games is not about knowing everything about what you hate, it's about hating everything about what you know.

It used to be. Our paper money was once backed by a specific amount of precious metals at certain secure locations.

And long before that we just made coins out of precious metals directly.

Where do you get the 2 GP per day number if I may ask? From what I've seen of the rules which I mentioned here it should be closer to 1 GP per day. Though I'm quoting rules for players so other sources may be more appropriate for NPC wages.

The only time economy ever becomes an issue in games I play is when a player character comes up with new technology and a npc sells that technology for them. In 5e we killed a crazy old man who just happened to have invented zippers and never told anybody. Our sorcerer stole his plans and set up a deal with a merchant to produce them, and of course forgot about that merchant and never collected his cut. Our fighter nat20 a craft roll and now owns the world's only waffle maker, so she sells those sometimes wherever we are. Just little flavor shit like that.