Economics in fantasy

"Realistic" economies would be silver based and have an absolute assload of currencies. Most would be valued by weight based on their material makeup and dimensions. Only the most well established nations would have more abstract value for their coins. Ancient coins might still be in circulation here and there, and their value could occasionally spike from collectors. Some areas wouldn't produce coins per se, just silverware and jewelry that could be cut up and broken down to make change. Letters of trade can exist, but they're more like open contracts for a certain amount of goods than real money bills.
In all cases, merchants have extensive educations regarding the different material purities, thicknesses, and other relative values between different coins that are nominally worth the same amount.

Don't coins have a canon weight?

Also, that gold bar definitely does not contain the properly scaled-up amount of gold compared to the coin, assuming that these are a commodity currency and not a fiat currency.

Yup, it's 50gp weigh one pound. So if you haven't been giving weight penalties for players carrying thousands, you've been doing it wrong.

Miniature bags of holding that only hold currency and gems. They are bottomless. Everybody has them and nobody knows where they came from, but nobody complains because they're super useful.

Meanwhile, on the elemental plane of jews, there is a big bank that all those pouches are connected to. The money gets dumped in and they use it to make loans and things. They almost went bankrupt one time and shut down the money pouches. A war started over it.

>The PCs bought or were rewarded with the rights to demand taxes in name of the local lord/kingdom etc: each place must pay a census-determined amount, the PCs getting the excess. This can be a single adventure or continuous side-quest for the campaign. Possible situations include:
>1.Calculate dues based on things like amount of doors or windows and other wacky RL pre-modern ways.
>2.Convince people to pay, be it peasants or lords, without violence.
>-Taking bribes.
>3.Deal with payments such as live cattle and wagons of pottery.
>4.To help or not to help people whose goods were stolen by bandits?
>5.Decide what to do when the fixed amount is much more or much less than the locals can pay.
>6.The census isn't up to date because a flood happened since then. Do the players cover it from their own pockets or do they try to convince the kingdom to lower it?
>7.They more than twice what was estimated. Do they simply take without telling the authorities? Or do they tell them that past collectors were cheating? What will latter do if the PCs tell on them?

>Little ways to fluff out and/or expand a world/setting?
I have the god of travel and commerce with a cult which acts as bank. It is a hipogryph BTW. The credit Illuminated scrolls are for someone which deposits a certain amount of money. The person can retrieve a part of it at any other temple. Every deposit and withdrawal is charged 5% and illuminations are added to mark this and further dificult forgeries.

Anyone which steals a temple coffer gets a few divine curses: unable to run; unable to read maps; mounts refuse to serve him. And that's besides guards, locks and traps.

The bar might be more pure.

The problem with "everyone who's anybody has a bag of holdin" is that it kinda fucks up the the medieval logistical system. I mean, canonically a bag of holding is "just" 500 pound of payload, but one would guess a savy duke would ask the mages' guild if it might possible to do a 1000 ton one, to boost incredibly his quarry business.

Actually it might be pretty interesting, as in DND and derivatives seem to imply it's pretty easy to transport shit, but...

Assuming 10gp=1pp (which is D&D standard, and this seems like D&D-talk), then that gold bar is worth 10,000 of those coins. If the bars were completely pure, the coins would need to have a tiny speck of gold somewhere and have the rest be nickel or something in order for those values to work out. There's no way those bar values could work out correctly in a commodity currency.

PF has four tiers of Bags of Holding, capping out at 1,500 lbs.

>alleviates the logistics of having 1,000,000 gold pieces in a belt pouch and not taking an encumbrance or stealth penalty
You mean debt?

>elemental plane of jews
i laughed quietly to myself alone in this room.

Coinage in RPGs has always annoyed me as an econfag

IRL an ounce of gold is currently $1286 (and it would have been quite a bit higher before the discovery of the New World IIRC), silver is $17, copper is around 20 cents an ounce, and the typical per capita GDP of someone from the medieval era would have been around $1000, hence there's a lot of historical statements to the effect of a gold coin being worth roughly what a peasant makes in a year and most people never seeing a real gold coin in their lives and poor people stabbing each other in the back over a single gold coin

A million ounces of gold would take several large trucks to transport and would be worth over a billion dollars, that's probably about what a fleet of Spanish treasure galleons might have carried

I always figured that the various commodity prices of metals was messed up in RPG worlds by the mining activity of dwarves etc but damn, reading the economy parts of the PHB if you know what the actual prices of those things should be is kind of a trip

Most of those settings are basically post apocalypse, and there are more than one example of gold crashing hard (see also, Musa I, who singlehandedly crashed and then regrew the gold economy by handing it out like candy until it was worth nothing, and then borrowing it back at such a high interest rate that it rectified).
If the big ancient empire that used to exist found an assload of gold, and there isn't a Musa to fix it, the value of gold could be extremely low.

In my rulings I usually have
1cp = 1cp
1sp = 20cp
1gp = 20sp
1gp = 400cp

Standard commodities, necessities, and services running anywhere form 5 - 25cp on average, low-grade arms, armors, and luxury items typically running between 1 - 5sp, or 20-100cp, and such high-grade items ranging anywhere from 5-20cp, or 20-400cp, or 1gp. Players are typically rewarded with goods, services, or sacks of copper coinage, passed a silver piece or two, or a single high grade item. Gold is extremely rare, typically reserved typically for wealthy merchants and international trade deals.

I also don't normally play D&D, but it's still applicable. Extending it further 1pp would then = 20gp, or 400sp, or 8000cp. I've never really bothered with figuring in bars, as it wouldn't really be applicable to the majority of adventuring experiences.

As far as D&D goes, just treat gold as a standard by which all other currencies are measured. Convert expensive items into costing half as many of the lower money type, and reward players with goods and services, instead of inexplicable sacks of gold that the town was apparently keeping in a safe for the next time some adventurers rolled through.

+1 this. It drives me up the wall when a game says copper and silver coins exist but any equipment costs at least one gold piece.

Is it just me, or is a 1:10 ratio kinda silly? It means that cp are to gp as cents are to dollars, and cp are to pp as cents are to $10 bills. That doesn't seem like enough granularity for the high-end of business transactions.

What if you used 1:100 between each of the steps? If you used everything's current cp values, that would mean you could replace all gp with sp (as others have suggested) and reserves gp as being big deals, and platinum as basically just being used by nations and huge organizations.

This is the easiest answer.
Just don't forget to renegotiate the approximate wealth of a settlement as well.
A little village in the woods isn't going to have a sack of silver to throw around, and towns are probably going to want to give out goods instead of raw coin, since it's easier to manage and could have practical or sentimental value on top of their base market value; plus they don't have to haggle and could potentially give you what would end up being a bigger purchase for you or a harder sell for them.

thanks for this post, further reading on Musa I is really enjoyable

Paper Money. Not those tiny slips used to day, but the 8x10 sheets that promise the holder to be paid the amount on the paper.

If a transaction requires the metallic stuff paid upfront, the receipt can be exchanged and payment rendered. Otherwise they can just lug their fortune around with them without it weighing them down.

This works as long as the world has stable enough institutions to back those papers.

One variant of this solution that I've seen, specifically for a mildly Tippy D&D world, was to have a global mage's guild, and the papers were essentially IOU's for casting services, where what's backing them isn't gold, but the promise of a spell being cast, as those spellcasts have set market prices (can find the values in PHB). You can go to any mage's guild location to cash in one of these, but mostly they're used as currency for high-level adventurers.

Yeah, uou have to readjust things to treat silver more like gold, especially to the common people, but in turn that means that you can have small things priced in reasonable amounts of copper and have it actually matter.

I've wasted a ridiculous amount of money on tavern bills because all I was carrying was platinum pieces and went "fuck it, i'l buy a round for the whole hamlet, and that room is permanently mine on retainer"

Bank notes.

In my world currency comes in three types, each in gold, silver, copper & iron.

There are rings, coins and strips.

Rings are the standard.

Here is the breakdown I'm considering.

1 Gold Strip = 10 Gold Coins = 20 Gold Rings = 200 Silver Rings = 2,000 Copper Rings = 20,000 Iron Rings

Why is copper ten times as valuable as iron?

I don't have a solid reason other than needing a cheaper metal than copper.

My thinking is that copper is valuable for artifice so it's value get's a bit inflated. idk.

I'd love a better suggestion.

Why not just use a magical credit card?

I use the basic currency rules and just fluff them differently as currency interactions beyond going to a moneychanger tend to amount to dreary bookkeeping in practice.
Once the players get back to civilizations they can bank them at a credible institution or convert them into a small amount of gems of equivalent value.

Make them clay coins/rings.
They're backed by x amount of agricultural produce.

That's a great idea but I don't think it would fit in my setting.

These coins need to work across national borders. So a fiat currency wouldn't work. The material of the coin itself needs to have value.

I'm not gonna get so deep as to have certain coins worth more/less depending on supply/demand of an area.

Tin might work better than Iron.