If a gold piece is so valuable, shouldn't adventurers be more charitable?

d&d economics makes no sense. Everything should be listed in gp and 1gp should not be a lot of money even for a peasant. Given the abundance of weapons, magic, monstrous beasts of burden, and every other tool that would simplify labour there is no reason why a peasant can't make 8gp a day at LEAST. Players should have to SPEND their fing money like it's going to dry up, not make enough to live for the rest of their lives in good status after a series of 5 dungeon crawls

>For the price of a single spyglass you can feed a thousand starving peasant families
What retarded cartel runs this economy?

I once played a Priestess of Shallya in a WFRP campaign and gave away almost every piece of gold I got. Didn't stop my character from doing her job and saving the world. Most good DMs will reward roleplaying and in-character altruism with less tangible or non-monetary rewards.

I recognize that reference!

Probably the fatass spyglass producers.

That makes sense.

>start throwing seemingly gigantic sums of money at people
>thinks this wont fuck the local economy
>thinks this will actually do anything other than hider people in the long run
Look at shitty south american socialist nations and africa as an example of this
if you really want to help the peasants you will loan them the money rather than give it
and buying the land from their landlord and slowly letting them pay off their debt to you is even better

Who cares about peasant families?

Best way I've heard it described is 1 copper roughly equals 1 real world dollar.

So while $100 is pretty nice and will solve most people's immediate needs it'll still run out in 1-4 weeks.

Actually 1 gold coin is a month of manual labor.

In AD&D both Monks and Paladins were required to donate a certain percentage of their earnings to maintain their class abilities.
I can't recall if clerics did, but it would make sense to extend that to them too.

>Hey you have a lot of money
>which you earned with your own hard, life-threatening work
>WHY AREN'T YOU GIVING IT ALL AWAY
>YOU ARE A BAD PERSON COMRADE

Did you give all your money directly to peasant families? If you did, I fail to see how you'd get any real reward other than maybe peasant hospitality / loyalty. Which, of course, can be quite nice.

If you had played a knight or a wizard, you'd need a lot of gold for better gear or grimoires / other magical gear.

If you were interested in making a difference, you could probably have used the gold to fund the army to better deal with the many threats to the common man (from bandits to beastmen / orcs to undead or chaos/heresy).

My point is that giving your gold directly to peasant families will not really change anything. It might actually cripple the nation.
>Food producers suddenly come into A LOT of money
>They might cease working the farms
>The vacant farms may be used by inexperienced city dwellers or homeless people etc, or perhaps they're not used at all
>National storages slowly dwindle

And? You'll find a lot of poor people in the world who get maybe $100 a month to live off.

I thought 1 silver piece was a week's labor.

>used the gold to fund the army
>le nobleman face
Shouldn't it be the fat king who collects heavy taxes from all classes (farmers, artisans and merchants) to finance the army?

Pretty sure it's 2 CP for unskilled labor a day (and that's more or less equivalent of what you'd pay some random in China, Africa etc) and 2 GP per day for a skilled worker (Lawyer, accountant etc).

If you suddenly give farmers 50 gold it will probably not be taxed. In a lot of settings taxes from the common folk comes in the form of food (which is distributed to the places where they are needed, or put in storage for crises), or work done at resource nodes to produce materials for public infrastructure. (bridges, walls, buildings)

In either case, the king is probably already paying for the army, or the kingdom's defenses.

Ask yourself this, in a fantasy setting, why are the peasants starving?
The most likely answer is that their lands are threatened by monsters, so they can't really farm properly. Without the monsters, the farmers would be free to, well, farm. And without monsters, clerics and wizards would be able to help bless the dirt or summon food.

True, but they live subhuman. My point was that 1 gp was more valuable than $100.

And the value is getting higher and higher.

The real lesson here, which shouldn't need to BE a lesson after so many years, is that your typical D&D-esque fantasy economy is utterly fucked up beyond reasonable logic. It's frankly why high-sum gold rewards are kind of dumb, and you'd be better off just giving magic items out as rewards rather than the whole "Ye Olde Magic Weapon Shoppe" in every town thing.

True but this is all assuming it's a single income family, much like older times the children could be working as well as having mature adults still at home until they marry.

Still, you forget that the basic of feudalism is that the King protects his realm. That's like the only reason peasants endured tyrants, because only they had the funds to field massive armies.

Giving money to the army is like giving money to the king, who is already the most richest person in this setting.

And what is the problem, here?
If they are genuinely attempting to protect the kingdom, but have trouble doing so because jesus christ there's a lot of monsters out there, why are you so opposed to giving them a helping hand?

Or you roll a profession (farmer) or whatever and make half your roll in gold for a week

Put points in your skill and that's gold in your pocket

Hauling a ton of gold out of the ground doesn't increase the production of food.

Gold is exchangeable, but not magically convertible to goods and services.

>Every edition is 3.X

>it's a "the economics of D&D aren't internally consistent" episode

>And what is the problem, here?
That's there is something wrong if the Liège cannot provide the basic of feudalism.

>If they are genuinely attempting to protect the kingdom, but have trouble doing so because jesus christ there's a lot of monsters out there, why are you so opposed to giving them a helping hand?
I wouldn't be so opposed if the king wasn't, as I said before, a fat guy in gold brocade clothes who sit on top of a vault full of money. So yes, normally he isn't doing his 'best'.

If however you met a king who actually put the people first, well then that's another case. But we both know that is a rarity.

>implying they arent just electrum coins plated with gold

I generally either gave it right to needy people, or bought food to give to the needy.

>implying that would be a bad thing
The nation would move to a service economy. Oh no, they will have to import food now.

I'm overhauling my world's economy. Finally it's starting to make at least some sense.
The thing is, when I counted it all, on 3rd level PCs have now 4 years worth of median wage on each of them.
I believe they're going to go through some financial crisis.

Someone should make a RPG game with inflation, like mixing the gold and silver with ordinary metals... just like in Rome!

You win the thread. It's a pretty crappy thread, but you win it anyway.

c

>Gold taxes from peasants.
>Implying the plebs have gold.

The king is collecting material goods from his peasants, aka the people who work his land. Any gold given to the king via tax is simply the revenue generated from the trade of said goods. I mean over time, and in some areas the peasants may have some gold, but it's the kind of people who probably bury said gold in secret patches of dirt so the tax man doesn't take it.

Starvation and disease are not actually major problems in most D&D settings, gods typically handle it in the background because it's easy faith. Send a couple clerics to a famined region and cast Create Food and Drink for a few days and boom, you get 20 new acolytes and a church.

Now, magically induced starvation and disease are different stories, and gold won't help there at all.

All that would do is cause inflation.

>Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day
>Teach a man to fish and he breaks up the rod for firewood
>Or he trades it for a fish