Veeky Forums, how can we fix fantasy rpg economies?

Pliny the Elder was full of crock.

Don't be autistic. Unless you're playing Spice and Wolf the RPG nobody but you cares.

Why are you guys sperging out over gold? Salt, books, and horses are more valuable

t. Confus Mandingo

This thread interests me. I have been wanting to remake the DnD economics for a while now, they are fucking retarded.

Given how important, powerful, and ubiquitous magic is in D&D (and many other fantasy systems), I imagine that Spell Components would shoot up in value and the harvest of them would be high demand industry. So much so you could possibly barter with them.

So you could probably pay for your inn-room with bat shit.

How old is that image text?

Gold spot: 1241.10 USD/ozt
Silver spot: 16.23 USD/ozt ~ 76.5x
Copper spot: 0.1848 USD/ozt ~ 6715.9x

Tue Jul 18 2017 23:24:02 GMT-0500 (Central Standard Time)

I want this so much

Was it? I thought it was something a seaman had in his meal everyday

As a sprinkle, sure. Sizeable quantities of salt were valuable.

...

Even if you think Pliny's account of the Salarium is a pop-history meme, it still remains that the salt industry was government controlled in Rome, and that the TERM for Salary DID come from Salt.

Furthermore:

In China c.2200 bce, Emperor Hsia Yu levied the first tax ever, and it was on salt.

In ancient Greece, slaves were sold for salt (a bad slave was "not worth his salt").

Marco Polo reported that in Tibet, cakes of salt were pressed with images of the emperor and used as currency.

Salt bars were, and reportedly are still used as money in parts of Ethiopia.

During the War of 1812, the American government, unable to pay their soldiers in coin, paid in salt brine.

You niggas are as bad as Sci. "Oh this account we've had for century can't be coabberated and it's probably bullshit because it's second hand and Pliny just made shit up"

Salt, like all goods in the world, varied in value.

While it certainly was a valuable commodity, able to season, preserve, and even clean some kinds of wounds, it was not the be all end all of currency. usually, it was not currency. You are listing the handful of times it was used as currency, when usually currency was a coin of precious metal, and by usually, I mean almost always. Metal coins are ancient and commonplace around the world, and one coin could often buy many times its weight in salt. The closer you were to salt mines of course the cheaper salt would be and vice versa. One coin may only buy you a few ounces of salt in one province whereas it could buy you over a pound in others.

>Salt was used as currency many times
>no it wasn't
>list of 5-6 times
>ok but those don't count

The framework of my statement is factual. Salt was used as currency "many" times.

Speaking of salt, how did cavemen and early civilization get enough salt into their diets?

Like said. Use smaller denominations: e.g. copper and silver instead of gold for smaller purchases.

Vary the purity and prevailing components of specie by region. Some kingdoms may use gold, others silver, etc. Many kingdoms might adulterate their coinage with base metals or may use different units of measurement, e.g. ounces vs troy ounces vs hectograms.

Use alternative commodities like salt or rice or assign value of some cheaply produced currency to be redeemable for such a commodity.

Allow your currencies to float (undergo random percent changes) over some period of time with an rng. If you have the know how, try integrating in a partial correlation matrix between commodities and regions.

Also have some innovative or desperate kingdom try fiat money, and then have it blow up in their face.

I'm not the other dude, I'm chiming in.
You're overselling salt, he's underselling it. It was important, but empires did not rise or fall because of it, ultimately salt is a super common thing. Its biggest value comes from the fact you have to actively use it to gain benefit from it so you constantly have to mine more salt. It's something you eat. So its value and rarity is directly related to how much of it is being used versus how much is being mined in the local area.

Salt is a spice.

Which varg video was this from?

Blood maybe. Most things need salt so they got it in their bodies. and there's always seawater

the spice must flow

Are you fucking retarded?

you guys realize that IRL they literally used copper and silver coins pretty much exclusively, right? A silver penny, in most medieval realms, was roughly 1/240th of a pound of silver or 1/20th of an ounce (a Roman-era standard), larger denominations went up to a pound (hence the pound sterling) and gold coins were usually just novelty items for aristocrats to store wealth or pay large debts. Average wage for somebody who was actually paid wages would be a few silver pennies a day.

what are the requirements for currency?

What's stopping the blacksmith from just forging more money?

Weight, color, the way it reacts to heat or even skin.
A fake coin would get its maker put to the sword in pretty much any ancient kingdom. Also, because of the difficulty of creating a coin in ye olden days, only a select few people would be capable of doing it. Even blacksmiths would have trouble creating counterfeit money. Coins were coined from very limited and closely guarded molds.

Even if you could get the other aspects correct, you still have to make it LOOK right too. Could be done with a clay mold mind you.

If they're by the sea, clay pots and boiled sea water. If before farming they got it from animals who could get it from salt lick spots that occur naturally.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfeit_money

Reminder that salārium also means "meal"

>Emperor Hsia Yu levied the first tax ever
First recorded tax, not first tax. Also, /everyone/ bought salt
sidenote: The Chinese government monopolized the salt trade more often than not

>a bad slave was "not worth his salt"
That phrase comes from salārium, not from sal

>Tibet, cakes of salt were [...] used as currency
Prices varied over time, but 2.223 to 3.335 kg of salt was worth 1 g of gold in ancient Tibet

>Ethiopia
112 pounds of salt are worth 20 Birr (86¢) there.
It turns out salt costs less next to deserts made of salt.

>During the War of 1812,
They boiled salt brine to supply their soldiers with salt during a shortage.
>unable to pay their soldiers in coin, paid in salt brine.
I'm not going to say that's a lie.
But I /am/ going to say I couldn't find a credible source for that.

>Coins were coined from very limited and closely guarded molds.
Can I make this a plothook or would it destroy the economy?

What do you mean?
That someone's counterfeiting coins? They stole a legit mold?
Yeah that's a fine plothook, either one really. It would indeed destroy the local economy by flooding it with nearly impossible to detect forgeries or legitimate coinage coined illegitimately. Could show that by a hike in local prices as the king or duke desperately tries to find the forgers.

Yes.

>A fake coin would get its maker put to the sword in pretty much any ancient kingdom.
Counterfeiting was lèse-majesté. You weren't just debasing the currency, your were debasing the king's honesty.
They put the king's face on the coins because he "personally" assured the weight and composition of each coin.

This and oddly enough, Bread Fraud, would get your ass executed yeah

>word gets out of an alchemist that succeeded in turning lead to gold
>the king orders the players to seize the gold
Dungeon stuff happens
>the king then orders the players to thoroughly destroy an enemy nation's economy by using the seized gold to by anything and everything they can from the enemy
The players then need to make it back to their kingdom while protecting a huge shipment of valuables from the enemy nation

six posts before this nigga showed up to shill his blog

jesus

>implying the players won't turn on the king
PCs are a bunch of greedy fucks.

Yeah, that's probably what would happen

Like this.

Coins are made of porcelain, not gold. The number of the coins is strictly controlled by the God of Currency & Trade.

based

>cavemen
OK. So. Caves are hella rare.
Consequentially, people rarely lived there.

There's a lot if really good ancient shit in caves.
Not because caves were busier than not-caves.
But because caves are barely exposed to the elements.

To answer your question,
Early humans evolved on the spider infested coast of Souf Afrika.

As it happens, beaches are really close to salt.
Indigenous niggers farther from salt mostly get it by burning marsh grass.

No pepper is a spice and it's as expensive as gold back in the day

Makes good fertilizer, too. Kind of a miracle substance, honestly.

magic would affect soooo much of a medieval society. Especially with D&D type magic. 20th level casters would rule the world for one

Effectively, we can't. The gameplay needs of the party easily outweigh the value of trying to make a historically accurate market system which is why game economies are distorted to begin with.

Save the tax policy, save the world

It doesn't work in D&D due to ubiquitous magic in the setting.

A world where even basic wizards and members of the clergy can cure wounds and diseases, produce food and fresh clean water en masse means you're actually describing a sci-fi setting in terms of 'technology'. Your average D&D world has better 'technology' than we can muster now for the most part. You also have the ability to send messages over any distance ( i.e e-mailed) this would allow kingdoms to co-ordinate far more efficiently, and larger potential for markets and growth. You'd have massive population growth due to the usual inhibitors such as disease , access to food and fresh water don't exist. And this is only assuming the bread and butter spells, beyond that there's the likes of control weather which we can't even do now and you can use in conjunction with other spells to literally geoform landscapes to your desire. You can teleport multiple people wide distances instantly , make clone or simulacrum armies and literally raise the dead extending life. This all would have to be considered when designing any economy.

So don't try it in D&D unless you want a headache as it's not really feasible. In other medieval systems just look up how the feudal system worked and make a model of that.

>1 pound of salt is equivalent to 1 pound of meat
WRONG

Gold was something kingdoms would use to settle debts between them. You'd occasionally see very high ranked nobles use them but even then it was a rarity.

As adventurers you're effectively freelance mercenaries so that puts you into upper middle class (middle class being skilled labor) and means you normally accept payment in silver. Think of a silver coin as a $20-50 dollar bill depending on how available silver is and how trusted is the mint that made the coin.

You can introduce modern banking and paper money into a setting if you want, though. The nuts and bolts of it are complicated but essentially you've got a letter of credit work X amount of money and can be redeemed at any branch of the bank you got it from for X amount or at another bank for X-a fee. It's a handy way of carrying around vast sums of money without a cart or greater bag of holding.

You seem unreasonably upset about a post on Veeky Forums.

It is stopped by the coin being worth the metal in the coin. It is not fiat currency.

Do not allow Usury.
It is sin and gives (((them))) power.

No they weren't. Not monetarily. Salt's value in medieval society was to preserve meat. You need a fuck ton of salt to preserve meat, especially fish. Good thing there's this thing called an oh sheen, just fucking full of the stuff.

>pic
What system is that?

>Good thing there's this thing called an oh sheen, just fucking full of the stuff.

That's real fucking stupid, user. Extracting usable quantities of salt from the ocean takes significant infrastructure, and before modern technology can only be done in certain geographic areas.

And plenty of salt was harvested from non-oceanic sources (read about China's salt production some time), but that also took a lot of know-how and infrastructure to accomplish.

>Salt's value in medieval society was to preserve meat.

Salt's use as a preservative after the collapse of Roman trans-Euro trade routes actually only really shot up again after the discovery of the massive cod fisheries in the New World.

Skerples shills/shits up one of the better generals.

Ecronomicon or some such. The just of it is that only feeble mortals consider bits of metal worthwhile. Anyone capable of doing anything planer is going to be trading in the crystallized happiness of a child's first love or some equally arbitrary magic bullshit.

You want magical stuff? You're paying for it with magical stuff.

>You want magical stuff? You're paying for it with magical stuff.

Except that every D&D spell with material components lists its fixed, objective value in gold pieces.

> Extracting usable quantities of salt from the ocean takes significant infrastructure
Or a proper tidal region and your bare hands.

Yeah the entire point is to get rid of that, or are you too simple to get that?

Yeah that makes sense for high level stuff which is supported by the game anyway but create water is a level 0 cantrip that Clerics cast ostensibly from the power of their god. Numerous other basic spells like that , create food, cure disease etc vastly change how the economics of a world works. You can limit these of course but you'd have to limit them to players too and so you'd be playing a different game.

Your guys are: Talking about pre modern currencies
You think that: Trade mediums are equal to currencies(they are), and that trade mediums can be used for everything like modern currencies(they can't).

In fact, pre modern currencies act like trade mediums: They can only be traded if you find somebody willing to accept them, at barter price & barter stock, so trading IS rare.
And very few people is actually trading. Or there might be seasonal trade, but only by the CEO's of feudalism: The fucking landlord

Nothing.
But only a tiny part of society will engage in currency trade, unlike modern times EVERYONE OF AGE.
There is also other bottlenecks, such as mining/recycling of materials to make coins. Or that wrong metals are wrong weight and have wrong properties.

So to counterfeit you need:
1. Access to the material used, to coat
2. A metal mix that that weights the correct weight, and can still be used to make the core
3. Forged coins will still be detected if they can be bitten to check for legitimacy
4. If the core is unevenly placed, the coin isn't balanced
5. Coating stuff is hard. So most likely the first few batches will be at a loss
6. And the only profit to be gained are if the cores are cheaper than making a real coin.
7. You now got coin. You can only spend them if your blacksmith guild actually deals in coinage for barter. Otherwise you can't really spend them, since coins isn't a good method of barter.

And we didn't mention the most important aspect: Realistically you can only trade coins in city states, which are really small areas. So their use is even less useful.
Meanwhile in Modern Times, "forgery" is profitable because the materials needed for currency is worth less than what it takes to produce them.

I am also interested, which system is that?

>there is an unstranlated Mononoke monster race
Someone translate it?

Banknotes run by a consortium of state and private banks with reserve fractional banking.

>salt from the ocean takes significant infrastructure
Like hell it does.

You carve out a shallow canal.
The tide comes in.
The tide goes out.
Water pools in the canal.
The sun dries out the canal.
You scrape out the salt.
The tide comes in...

Why are imperial Chinese men smarter than every medieval European kingdom? Bear in your mind that imperial Chinese men were like 500BC while medieval Europe was like 1000AC, how could Europeans be so...dare I say it, medieval and barbarians, compared to china?

I really don't get it, its like Europe never developed much beyond Greece

>Why are imperial Chinese men smarter than every medieval European kingdom?
They weren't. But literacy was widespread and most good ideas were written down.
Not used, mind you. But at least kept.

The reason Rome was so great had nothing to do with invention. They stole all their great ideas. But whenever they got something good, they spread it everywhere and used the shit out of it.
As for Europe being an uncivilized wasteland parroting Greece/Rome, that's because they were so far away from any Cradles of Civilization (like 5 huge fertile river valleys).

Kamigakari

How is the system?

Too much focus on combat, I'd say.

Rome tried to mix more led with there silver coins and they got hit with bad inflation

an items value was measured in money but was usually payed for in a commodity that was of equal value. only the unusually wealthy could afford actual coins instead of smelting them to make tools.

any metal is hard to obtain and requires the following
>mining
people mining wont be farming and will need society to feed them

a slow process that yealds small shards of mineral rich rock
>smelting
skilled experts that don't farm (starting to see a pattern)

large quantities of mineral rich rock is needed to produce a small amount of metal
>smiting
yet another profession that dosn't allow enough free time to farm

skilled labor that takes years to learn, years to master and is in high demand

I think this is a good point. Another one is that with widespread literacy, and being a large state, you also get more ideas written down, which mostly don't get used, but again: Statistics is a bandaid to all economics of scale.

Yeah, what's your point?

Holy shit, someone's committed.

what are you implying, that there should be a mage behind them to feed them or something?

Came here to make sure someone posted this.
Good work, user.

If I read this pdf from front to back, will I learn how much money I should give my PCs per adventure?

I use Redemptors. Made by the Mercane and Arcane (Spelljammer and Planescape), Redemptors are issued in return for political favors. The Redemptor itself is a tiny disk shaped like a 20 point star and is an indestructible artifact.

The Redemptors can be redeemed for artifacts or magic items made by the Mercane and Arcane at set prices only payable in Redemptors. These include Spelljammer Helms, planeshifter devices, and other items unreproducable and vital to the cosmos.

The Redemptors are spread across the cosmos, found on every planet and plane, with value set by the universal prices set for artfacts. In any region with widespread trade the value of local coinages become synced to the Redemptors.

Magic. Magic is an unseen but malleable force. Long ago, a wizard learned how to crystallize magic into Arcane shards.
they can be very precisely balanced to differing weights (although all shards are feather light compared to their supposed size) and are extremely sturdy (being impossible to damage by mundane means) their only weakness is that a mage forming a connection with one causes that shard to return to its natural state, if not done carefully, this can be violent. This can be avoided by encasing the shards in lead, a material soft enough to fairly easily remove while being common enough to easily cast and just sturdy enough to allow movement.
The denominations are as follow.
A Spark
A Flash
A Bolt
A Flare
all are in 100 to one ratios. A spark is roughly equal to a penny in weight, but a quarter in size. A common trick for wizards to find magic-sensitives is to rub the coating off of a spark and let a person concentrate on it til it gets activated. this is a small amount of energy similar to a firecracker going off.
A typical laborer is paid in sparks. A single spark is enough to pay for a cheap meal for one. The average laborer earns about 1 flash a week. one day's work can feed a family of five 4 times each.

Simple values are as follows:
1 spark, 1 meal
1 flash, a decent quality tool, weapon or the like.
1 bolt, a reasonably sized house
1 flare, a small mansion

If you're forging it with the full about of metal, who gives a shit? If you debase it your coins will come out looking funny and you'll be arrested and killed in a gruesome fashion.

All you did is take a standard RPG GP economy and lazily slap some magicy sounding bullshit over it.

yeah, but it at least gives a reason for it existing. its the next step in shit fantasy economies.

>magic money that blows up if you don't activate it right.