How do I determine roughly how much of a currency should exist in a fantasy game...

How do I determine roughly how much of a currency should exist in a fantasy game? I've got players who are sticklers for economic escapades, capitalism ho and all that.

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It's hard to find, but there are actually a few good threads about this in the 4plebs archive.

I've not managed to try applying attached PDF out in an actual game, but it's interesting reading.

It's an interesting question, but it's not one I know how to answer, unfortunately. That said, it's probably going to matter more how the money gets produced than how much of it there is at a give time. At least for the players. Similarly the nature of the world's various economies is going to matter, as will the nature of international trade.

When I design the economic systems of a setting, I tend to work with the stuff I know more about, and leave things as broad strokes early on. Set up nations/city-states/provinces/whatever, figure out what sort of industries they rely on, where raw materials come from, what sort of food comes from what places, their level of technology, how magic works, etc. Population figures are important too, and general politics between and within groups. Who grants what monopolies where is also big, as are laws relating to land ownership and the right to transport goods.

Usually along the way I'll find things I don't know enough about, but often enough I can get a good approximation on Wikipedia. If not... then probably the players won't know either, and I can fudge it.

That said, it's a good idea *not* to play that sort of game if any of your players are economists and you aren't. Unless you actually want to go out and do some work to find out about how the economy worked earlier in history, in which case you can have some really nice 'gotcha!' moment where they try something that works in the modern world, it doesn't work in-game, and you get to explain why.

Remind them that most D&D settings take place in worlds that experience periodic civilization-ending cataclysms that routinely push humans back to the stone age every few thousand years, and that there is no global economy. Most of the gold in a dragon's hoard is unaccounted for because the nation that minted it vanished ten thousand years ago.

That said, if your players will enjoy spreadsheets instead of dungeon crawls, more power to them.

On mobile atm, but one thing to remember is that gold wasn't used just because it was shiny: it was used as a method of boosting confidence. If everyone uses gold, no one can hyper inflate and rip everyone else off.

The problem is this puts a limit on growth, which is why we moved off of it. The economic model of D&D then, seems pretty obvious to me. All races in D&D are trying to maximise their share of the world's gold supply.

If you're the treasurer or fiscal head of a major kingdom, then having a bunch of adventurers go in and steal all the gold is incredibly effective and cheap. You eliminate a group of competitors, you bring their gold supply under human control. Yes, it's owned by adventurers, but adventurers are actually pretty fucking dumb, live quick die hard types. They're going to spend the money like the bejeesus, because they might die tomorrow. Thus adventurers act as walking, traveling stimulus.

Tl;dr- Keynesian stimulus in D&D is accomplished by genocide, and is the only way to continue growing the economy

That looks interesting, can't wait to read it

The purpose of a currency is to keep money flowing. Figuring out how to do this is hard, and why Kensyan economists are funny.

I get a dollar. I use that dollar to buy a burrito. The store breaks up that dollar to buying stock, and perhaps the largest part of that goes to an employee who buys cigarettes. The largest part of that goes to a tobacco distributor who uses the largest part of that to go on vacation to Disneyland, where a guy paid to wear a Mickey Mouse outfit twelve hours a day takes that money and stuffs it in a mattress, and then-

Hm.

Keep that flow in mind. Banks and treasuries do a lot of shit to keep that cycle long and endless, preferably with more going in than out, because otherwise someone somewhere is gonna run into problems and make problems for you.

One old canard is government spending as stimulus. In ye olden days, they debased the currency when they wanted to do that. It accomplishes about the same thing if the modern government is borrowing money to do that.

I mention all this because if your players are interested in getting ALL THE GOLD, eventually someone is going to debase the currency. If that happens, then you're on the road to the late Roman Empire.

Dial back all the gold and have almost everything be in silver and copper. Have clipped, shaved, or otherwise debased coins be a constant issue. If a government fixes the value of two precious metals in relation to each other (such as the ever present 1gp=10sp=100cp,) one or more of those coins will naturally be worth too much or too little compared to the metal it's made of, because the relative values of everything are always changing.

Another thing that helps you immensely is something that incidentally makes sense in the world: things are always changing, and the players' knowledge of the world is incomplete at best. If you make the price of a thing weird and want to take it back, it turns out it was a local fluke and the market stabilizes soon. If they find some loophole that lets them make a killing, soon the market crashes or every trade guild in the land conspires against them. If you accidentally give them too much coin, it turns out it was ancient or regional currency and they can't exchange it at its full market value, instead having to haggle with a moneychanger.

Or you introduce debt and credit.

bump for interest

Inflation was a constant problem in primitive economies until the advent of central banking, government-set interest rates and international bank settlement systems.

Add those. They'd all be run by dwarves & dragons anyway.

This user is right: price-information is the real currency of any world. Money is simply the physical expression of information about the prices of things. In a medieval economy, information is very hard to come by and often wrong.

use "the king's favour" as base currency, and fluctuate everything else around that.

one week the king likes gold. the next he has enough gold and prefers goats.

that way a coin can be issued with fiat value like today. and you can dictate everything. and everything else falls into barter - which is where almost the entire economy would exist - given the reality of serfdom etc.

this can also allow the value of acts and abilities to supersede a material currency.

of course possession of "the king's favour" for any one person, or group, is but momentary. attainment negates almost all other value - including in a strange way its own. and on a whim the king may change the worth of his favour or take it away.

and a king may be overthrown...

I like the path of exile approach to currency: currency items all have some intrinsic use which determines that their value will never fall below the value of their usefulness.

You could achieve this by using spices as currency, or magical reagents if your realm is a magical one.

Much like path of exile it will eventually run into the same problem that any non zero sum economy does, but it should work well for that time

While not a direct answer to your question, I highly recommend you read this article, it may prove useful. It's about methods of rewarding players without having to give them financial wealth, or severely limiting that wealth while still granting them a full reward.

campaignmastery.com/blog/breaking-the-bank/

>That said, if your players will enjoy spreadsheets instead of dungeon crawls, more power to them.

D&D is built around 30,000gp piles of treasure protected by 100,000,000gp dungeons. You can annihilate it completely with just common sense, what spreadsheets do to it is obscene. I remember an old game that ended in three sessions because we managed to unite twelve kingdoms, Guild of Mages and a merchant consortium against the Evil Wizard by negotiating exploitation rights of the remains of his golem & monster army.

Sounds like your group kicked off one of those cataclysms

>negotiating contracts between sovereign entities as if they were modern corporations
What enforces your right to the exploited property? If it's that valuable, what stops one of the parties from claim jumping you?

And what value are dead monsters and wrecked golems (which might be on the other side of the continent from some of your clients, if there are twelve kingdoms in play)?

I would start by modelling the economic situation on the street. Let's say for example that the average peasant or craftsmen handles a few copper per day, with maybe a handful of silver coins representing his life savings and portable wealth. Everything else is bound up in property and things he can produce or barter with.

False price information can really wreck a party's harebrained schemes. Consider this: as late as the 17th century, Scotland invested literally all of its money on the hope that the people of Panama would want to buy Scottish wool. (Also on the hope that they could dig a canal without 20th century machinery, but that's another kind of false price information in a sense.)

>that money and stuffs it in a mattress, and then-

Stop right there keynesian scum! First it's very unlikely that the guy is going to actually store money in a matress instead of putting it in some form of direct or indirect investment, but even if enough people did actually store their money in a matress to impact its availability in the economy what would happen is that the value of money would rise up or rather the value of some goods and services would lower in relation to it, prompting people to go ahead and spend their money anyway.

Okay you got me. I know a couple people who really do the whole mattress thing, but the idea was to make a point about medieval economics. Banking wasn't a super common thing then.

Then again, the OP hasn't given a lot of direction for this thread, so I'm not sure what helpful advice to give.

Besides, we all know that the ultimate stopping point of all money is the wallets of the creditor class

Golems are pretty easily recycled desu senpai

Anyone else kind of want to run a campaign where the PCs are tax collectors now?

These two articles are amazing, and I am definitely going to be using the ideas from both in my games.

Simple. remember that players are at best making minimum wage in the most profitable and stable of professions (being level 1) or even downright hobo-tier (being a bunch of roaming filth) and plan accordingly.

If a gold piece is a week's pay make sure the players have to invest about 5 days of moderate labor to acquire it.