Gold value

What kind of value do you put on currency in your game?
>how much do you give during quest rewards?
>do your players actually like monetary gain or do they only care about magic items?
When ever my players buy food or drink and it comes to anything less than a gp they ALWAYS just give away a whole gp to whoever they buy it from. It kind of pisses me off because it's essentially tipping $50 on a $2 meal

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I'm the DnD game I ran, the value of a single GP kept coming up and we constantly had endless arguments about it. The players ended up not willing to do anything for less than 1000 GP, even when they were simply killing goblins for peasants.

We're currently playing Savage Worlds where everything is priced in dollars. You get starting funds of $500, and everything is about what it would cost in American dollars. I thought it would bother me at first, but we just call them silver dollars and the change copper pennies. It's so fucking nice to have everything cost similar to what we are used to in real life. There's no confusion anymore.

I always try to use multiple currencies and try to make it clear that gold is rare and valuable but 2 sessions in it always turns into 1 gold= €1.

I should just give up and call them gil or royal dollars or something.

Currencies run the gamut so everyone tends to barter, haggle, and/or suck off.

Rai stones became oddly common on one archipelago, housecats were made a currency for all of two days in a particularly incestuous republic the PCs had managed to wreck, and a thalassocracy straight out of the Ordovician succeeded where all others had failed by using copper-gold alloy.

I don't really care much about individual iterations of currency, but I do try to always make it so that the amount of things that they want will cost vastly more than the amount of money they'll ever get their hands on.

>but I do try to always make it so that the amount of things that they want will cost vastly more than the amount of money they'll ever get their hands on.
Why?
I never get this fucking thing, and yet I see it all the time.
What is the fucking point? The players is buying a castle. Well, it's fucking great, you can do a lot with a castle, with the servants, with the political shit and envy that can happens with a castle.

Everything that cost a lot of gold is really good for plothook. The players is happy and the GM too. Why the fuck do you want them to always starve for money?

I allways thought that 1 GP "felt like" 100 dollars.
Since adventurers are socially outlier professionals willing to face insane danger, they casually carry around half a million in equipment and cash like modern-day arms dealers and think nothing of wasting tons of money to get the job done. When you face life and limb regularly then normie bullshit like having a job or saving for retirement don't mean much.

I'm making a game in a weird city. Currency is circular in value and deliberately confusing, both so I can encourage the players to do favors for the things they want and to also have an excuse to sick the money cult on them if they try to abuse the system.

Because the game is about making choices, and deciding what to spend a limited resource on a course of action is inherently rewarding. Flip the question around. Your party is drowning in wealth. Anything you decide your guys want, assuming it's up for sale, you get without thinking about it. What have you added beyond a cheap sense of entitlement?

>What have you added beyond a cheap sense of entitlement?
A SHIT ton of plot hooks. The game will start to revolve around the need to defend their emotional investments, which will engage the players much more than railroaded BBEG du jour.

I have no idea how you get the difference from here to there. The PCs needs will go beyond more gear, and maintaining any houses, horses, paying for information, supporting friends in a covert manner, bribing that corrupt official, etc. are all things that the PCs are going to want. And yes, maybe it means that if you want that castle, you can't get the +X axe of killingness. And trying to decide which one they want more is part of the game, or at least the sub-game as to how to best optimize.

They shouldn't be dirt poor, because if you have no money for anything but bare essentials, you also have no choices, but they shouldn't be so wealthy that they can just buy all of the above and not really think about it.

coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/03/currency-in-osr-games.html

I use 1gp = 10sp =100cp.
For estimations, I use $1 modern dollar = 1cp = 1 denier
The fiction supports 9 types of coin, but it's a bit tricky to balance on the fly, so I talk about "silver groats" and "ha-pennies" and then we do the actual math in gp, sp, and cp.

> ALWAYS just give away a whole gp to whoever they buy it from. It kind of pisses me off because it's essentially tipping $50 on a $2 meal
Rich people are nuts. Most PCs come from impoverished backgrounds. Of course they're going to spend like crazy people. Happens with athletes all the time. Don't worry about it.

>do your players actually like monetary gain
They want money more than magic stuff. Money means investments and castles and proper retirement packages. They want to start a revolt soon.

Agreed.

Money doesn't always work. You can buy off the FIRST barbarian horde, but then they'll show up more regularly than Jehovah's Witnesses.

Oh you have feudal obligations now? Great. Did I mention I'm your liege? We're going to war with not!France, saddle up. Round up some of your peasants, you'll need cannon fodder.

>Oh you have feudal obligations now? Great. Did I mention I'm your liege? We're going to war with not!France, saddle up. Round up some of your peasants, you'll need cannon fodder.
Yup!

Fun fact. King Richard I, the famous Richard the Lionheart, may have died while trying to get treasure a peasant found in a field. Adventurers, eh?

Oh yes, because king and duke historically have NO problem and NO want. They're basically fine.

Bribing a corrupt official? Whoops, he doesn't want the bribe at all and the cops are on your ass.
Paying for information? Whoops, the information is bad/fake, because the informer wanted money/work for the ennemy faction/he's a crook and think you're a good mark.

Making plothook with wealth is fucking easy. My players can go around with tons and tons of gold, and the only thing I have is more plothook.

>What have you added beyond a cheap sense of entitlement?
I now have a PC working his way up the merchant's guild, adding ton of interesting scenario.
I now have a PC making an enormouns magic book collection that is wanted by every fucking wizard in the country.
I now have a PC that bought a title. He's a count! Well, fuck, it come with actual responsibility.

What I noticed between my games when players aren't starved for money and the game I played in where we were starving, is way less scenario around what the players want/have, because we're always working for money, or because we simply cannot do some of the thing we want, because we need the money to do it.

I also noticed that all my players changed their way of thinking and now give money freely during their games.

Are you deliberately making a strawman, or are you just colossally bad at grasping the point?

This, 1gp is about $100. I wanted to keep smaller amounts of coinage relevant instead of just having explosive in-game inflation where anything that wasn't a meal in a tavern cost multiple gold coins.

The other week my players were betting on dice matches and to make matters interesting the bard put down 10gp and was very concerned about the logistics of losing $1000 on a few rolls of the dice, it was kinda nice.

When he of course inevitably lost his money on the bet, he convinced the people in the establishment he was betting in that the other guy had loaded dice and got his money back. Can't have it all, I guess.

Running a Pirate Game, I'm roundign everything to the nearest 10 gp. So the game doesn't get bogged down when dealing with crew pay, and ship refitting and upkeep costs.

>I now have a PC that bought a title. He's a count! Well, fuck, it come with actual responsibility.
What the hell kind of feudal system lets you BUY a COUNTY?

It helps that PCs in my games tend to wildly oscillate between 2,000gp in hand and then near-poverty after banking, investing, spending, or drinking it all.

Or spending it on a fancy horse (historically accurate).

>Running a Pirate Game, I'm roundign everything to the nearest 10 gp. So the game doesn't get bogged down when dealing with crew pay, and ship refitting and upkeep costs.
>Pirate Game... crew pay
>Pirate Game
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_game

Please tell me you don't DM 3.pf

Not if I can help it. Dragonquest and a homebrew system a buddy made based off of the Jeff Vogel Exile games are my favorites.

The kind with a desperate King in need of making some quick money.

You people have autism

so, how much money should one give them?

How much is not enough, how much is barely enough, and how much is enough to do many things with the money?

What kind of campaign are you running? The amount of money you need in a post-apoc survivalist game (if there even is any money to speak of) is going to be different to a Star Wars on the fringe sort of campaign, which will be different to a stereotypical high fantasy campaign. What do you want to portray?

Since most of the people here talk about gold currency I assume most of the people here talk about a D&D edition or pathfinder.

That's a system, not a type of campaign. Again, how much money "is appropriate" will vary with the theme and the power level of the campaign. Shining warriors fighting the Dark Lord in an epic, no hold barred cosmic war should probably be given more resources than a game based around a single city's thieves guild war with a new mob muscling in.

my motto is keep em hungry
couple gold here, maybe 25 gold each at the end of the dungeon, maybe a special loot "coupon" they can use to craft into a magic item eventually

Hackmaster player here.
What's a gold coin? 28 sessions in with my group and we've yet to see one except on some dudes tavern sign.
Someone tells me that there's even platinum coins out there, but I think that's a myth.

...

Silver should always be the standard currency.
With copper to fill in for small purchases.

I like to reward players with a mixture of coin and stuff. Really depends on the quest. Bunch of peasants need help? Well you'll get some meager amount of money, maybe some chickens, some sausages, and the good will that comes from doing the right thing (and xp).

I'm very fond of rewarding players with way too much money in terms of valuable items, paintings, statues, jewelry worth more than just its gold content. Then its up to them to make use of that wealth. They could either pawn it off as quickly as possible, get those liquid assets, or they could try to find someone willing to pay top dollar for their shit. They're never entirely sure how much the rewards are worth. All of this weighs a lot more than coins mind you. So their money becomes a little game of cost benefit analysis that is entirely skippable if they're willing to deal with the feeling that they could have gotten more.