A few years ago, I took the time to find out exactly how much 1 Copper is, in relation to the real world.
Basically, 1 Copper should be equivalent to 1 USD. But that really only solves half the problem.
I’m starting a new campaign, and one of my new players really wants to know how much money they make from adventuring, and how much money things cost. This is not an unfair question, it’s just not how I’ve been running the game lately. My last campaign was Curse of Strahd, wherein you could not buy the solution to any problem, the entire game was about doing favors, making and breaking alliances, and everything had to be improvised. The campaign before that was set in Eberron, where the PCs were finding huge treasure hoards, and invited to exquisite rooftop galas, and the idea of tracking money for food was useless, as the PCs were ordering custom magic weapons from shops.
My new campaign is a fun simple one, two local townsfolk are hired as Thanes, and their job is to defend the town from the weekly monster threat, before returning home for the night. It is a very Monster of the Week, Supernatural, Buffy, kind of episodic monster killing game. I initially wasn’t going to track money, because both characters still live at home with their parents, and get a steady retainer paycheck for their services. But, like I said, one player reasonably wants to know how much money these jobs are.
So now I find myself asking “How much do things cost in Emirace? How much money can you make from adventuring?”
The Goal of Money
The reason my player wants to track money isn’t because she finds bookkeeping exciting, it’s because she wants to have interesting choices to make. She wants the acting of using that money to be dramatic! So, in making economic choices in my game, my goal will be Gameplay focused, with Realism as a secondary priority. So what does it mean for something to be dramatic?
Drama is Tension and Resolution.
-Matt Colville
Tension comes from uncertainty. So the first goal of money is that the players should not be confident that they will always have the funds necessary to accomplish the task. If we want money to be Dramatic (aka Interesting) it has to be little enough that there is financial insecurity.
No game does this better, in my opinion, then Red Markets. Red Markets is a zombie apocalypse game, but really it’s a poverty simulator. In Red Markets, you are a scavenger in the post-apocalypse, and your job is to go into the zombie-infested wasteland, to collect specific loot that someone will pay you for. Not only is haggling over the price a part of the game, but specifically in the context of how much money it will cost you to do the job. You have equipment that breaks, you have to buy food, you have family that is relying on you for income. Sometimes you finish a job, and you’ve spent more on it than you earned from it. You are now poorer than you started.
I don’t want THAT much uncertainty, again this game is a hometown hero type, but it’s worth looking at Red Markets if you haven’t before, to see a way the economy of a system can be a major factor.
The other half of Drama, is Resolution, the moment where you find out if you can afford it. If the answer is “Yes”, that is a satisfying conclusion, but only if the question was genuine. If the answer is ALWAYS “Yes”, then there is no true uncertainty. So the answer SOMETIMES has to be “No.” How often is often enough that you wonder, but you aren’t frustrated? The answer is between 66%-75%. If one of every three to four attempts to do something fails, then it never is guaranteed, but it also isn’t demoralizing. I am having trouble finding the study, but research shows that if you succeed at something only half the time, it will feel like less than half.
So money can successfully be a solution about 1/3-1/4 times. Now we have a dramatic, and therefore interesting, formula for using money as gameplay.
I should say the solutions I come to today are for the style of gameplay I’m looking for. I might change my mind if I go back to an Eberron style campaign.
Easy Answers
So looking at the table of adventuring equipment in the PHB, as well as the prices of food, drink, lodging, and services, we can keep things were they are. We can adjust the cost of a spyglass and a book to more reasonable price, because it’s not exciting if a pair of binoculars cost $100,000, even if it is “realistic” to “medieval” technology.
Everything non-magical on the Adventuring Gear table can reliably be in any town general store, say 95% of the time. If you roll a Nat1, they are sold out of that particular item that day, and the next shipment is in 1d4 days.
Everything magical on the Adventuring Gear table, as well as Common Magic items, like a Potion of Healing, can be found if either the town has a resident spellcaster, such as a court mage, herbalist/apothecary, nearby druid grove, etc. Let’s drop that down to 80% chance, if you want to keep magic feeling special.
If there is an Uncommon Magic Item, you have to go to a City for that, where non-magical and Common items are 100% available, and the Uncommon is now 80%.
Rare items are in cities 20%, but can be ordered, and you have to wait for delivery, which can take 2d4 days. Very rare requires a short side-quest to locate the item, and travel to get it. Legendary items aren’t for sale, and must be acquired via adventuring, and are adventure-revolving targets.
As far as other treasure, the gems and art objects, I would probably knock it down to 1/10th, so a small gold bracelet is now $250, as opposed to $2,500. Diamonds don’t need to be $500,000, no matter how non-mechanized the mining industry is. If you want diamonds to matter, which they do for about a dozen spell components, then they have to be affordable to someone besides the upper nobility.
Harder Answers
Now for the hard questions. How much should magic items cost? How much should monster hunters get paid? How much treasure should you get in the hoard at the end of a dungeon?
Well, what rate do I want magic items to come around in my game? I’m comfortable with common items, specifically Potions of Healing, to be affordable enough that they would be sold in a town by the local spellcaster. Besides adventurers, who in town would actually purchase them? Probably only the town guard, unless the local noble has an affinity for sport. If the Baron’s hobby includes sword fighting, then he probably will have a handful on hand. Either way, not many people are actually buying them, so they can be priced for the guards and the nobles. If the real world had a product that was a few ounces, like a 5-Hour Energy shot, that had adrenaline, a pain reliever, and boosted white blood count and blood coagulation, so you scab over faster, I could see a product like that costing a few hundred dollars over the counter. Again, not a focus on realism, a focus on dramatic gameplay. If something like that is a few hundred dollars, then people in dangerous jobs would probably have a few on them, but wouldn’t drink it every time they got a papercut.
So let’s put the Common magic items around $200, or 2gp. That is roughly 1/25th the cost the DMG lists. Legendary items are one-of-a-kind pieces of history. In movies and shows, those items are always in the millions of dollars range. So if the book lists Legendary items at 50,000g, or $5,000,000, we can cut it down to, at most, 1/5th, or even just leave it as it is. So the value of magic items has to scale differently than it does in the book. When the time comes to buy those items, how much do you think creates interesting gameplay?
Next, how much should monster bounties cost? Well, in the Wild West, where bounty hunting is ripe for storytelling, bounties were usually in the $100 range. Adjusted for today, that’s a little over $3,000, or 30gp. Bounty hunting still exists today, for people who skip out on bail. According to BountyHunterEDU.org:
Assuming a bounty hunter takes on 100 to 150 cases per year, he or she stands to earn an average salary in the range of $50,000 to $80,000
So that’s $330-$800 dollars per bounty, or 3gp-8gp per bounty. Let’s use that as a good range. If a monster bounty is new, and not seen as generally dangerous, it can start way down at the 3gp range. If a monster has been a problem for a while, and a lot of people have been hurt or killed, it can get up to the 30gp range. Now we have a scale for a working monster hunter.
Back to my game, if a healing potion is 2gp, and as Thane my PCs are expected to kill about 1 monster per week, I could see them getting paid in the 4-8gp per week. Let’s go with 5, because they are on call, but probably need another job during the downtime. Now we have Tension, because they can’t afford much more than 2 healing potions per job, and resolution, as if they save up, they can get specialized equipment. Again, my PCs have food and lodging already established, and they live in an agricultural town, so having funds stay low is reasonable for the story.
Finally, how much should be in the hoard at the end of a monster hunt? Well, this campaign has a focus on beasts and monstrosities, so probably not much for most monsters, as monsters have no need of hoards, so it’s just however many people they’ve killed, roll that many times on the Individual Treasure chart on pg 136 of the DMG, and only add in gems or art objects if it is valuable to the story. They only have magic items if their victims had magic items.
If they kill goblins, or other humanoids/demi-humans, then there probably will be more, as those monsters are gathering money specifically to use. If they have magic items, make sure they are actually using them in battle. It makes no sense for a goblin to have a rusty shortsword, and then you find a +1 shortsword in some treasure pile that they weren’t using.
Conclusion
1 Copper piece is equivalent to $1 USD, and 1 Gold piece is equivalent to $100 USD.
My PCs, as Thanes of their town, will be paid a weekly retainer rate of 5gp.
Non-magical adventuring items will be available about 95% of the time, for the listed price, except for books and curved glass items, which will be adjusted to reasonable real world prices.
Common magical items will be available 80% of the time, starting around 2gp.
Monster hoards will be wildly dependent on the story, not predictable as a source of income, nor directly tied to the difficulty of the monster.
