Currency and Pricing

[Captain Zark]

I'm pretty much finished with crafting a world, but a big issue I'm facing is an economy. Not in-depth (yet, at least). I want silver to be the most common form of currency, with copper being 2nd most and gold being rather uncommon for normal trading; and bartering is likely to be an even more likely occurrence than spending coin. I just don't know if I have to adjust pricings of armor, weapons, and other goods, and if so, how to go about it.

If it helps, light and medium armors are likely to be far more common than heavy armors; weaponry is about as common as is usual; I'll likely allow for mastercrafted items, but they require certain individuals in certain cultures (i.e.: Very skilled human blacksmith can make +1, Very skilled dwarf blacksmith can make +2, and a third race can make +3 and that's as high as it goes), but such equipment will likely be very expensive and hard to come across.

Any help will be appreciated. If there's anything needing clarification, just ask.

[Idkwhatmyscreen]

Silver should be comparable to 5's, 10's, and 20's -- they are taken easily with little thought

Copper is like 1's or change -- It is considered rude to pay in Copper

Gold is like 50's and 100's -- The merchant should bust out a scale and do other such tests to make sure that coinage is genuine.

As far as bartering goes, the PHB has a section about Trade Goods

Spoiler: Here is that table

Show

Trade Goods Cost Goods
1 cp 1 lb. of wheat
2 cp 1 lb. of flour or one chicken
5 cp 1 lb. of salt
1 sp 1 lb. of iron or 1 sq. yd. of canvas
5 sp 1 lb. of copper or 1 sq. yd. of cotton cloth
1 gp 1 lb. of ginger or one goat
2 gp 1 lb. of cinnamon or pepper, or one sheep
3 gp 1 lb. of cloves or one pig
5 gp 1 lb. of silver or 1 sq. yd. of linen
10 gp 1 sq. yd. of silk or one cow
15 gp 1 lb. of saffron or one ox
50 gp 1 lb. of gold
500 gp 1 lb. of platinum

Using this table will help you set bartering prices for goods. So for example a skilled hireling costs 2gp per day so rather the giving them 2 coins, they may want a sheep.

[Unoriginal]

Well, do you want things to be more/less expensive than what the book says? If not, you can just convert the prices in gold into the equivalent in silver, and simply say that the difficulty to negotiate prices is lower when using bartering when you're trying to trade the right goods (ex: a ship captain will probably be more interested in a bunch of solid planks than in a basket of fish).

As for the masterwork item thing: it's basically the same as saying only some crafters have the formula for +X magic weapons and armors.

[KorvinStarmast]

Some thoughts on various coin systems are here and I recommend you read all of them. Each takes a different look at the question of what to do about modifying the coin/currency system in D&D 5e, with my own following caveat:

D&D is a lousy emulator of an economy and an economic system. A GP isn't actually currency as you and I know it in the 20th/21st century. (Heck, our current pricing and currency might confuse anyone from the 1700's ..)

The GP value being more or less fixed is a gamism that has been in the game forever. (The old joke about there being problems with casting raise dead if the market gets flooded with 500 GP diamonds (whose price then goes down) is just that: a joke. )

The relatively fixed value is meant to be used as a baseline ... but I've seen a number of games where monkeying with the currency system has worked out just fine.

[Chugger]

Right, DnD is very much _not_ a reality emulator.

Don't even try.

The more you try to table-ize and codify and rule-ify this kind of stuff, the more you waste your time. It becomes unplayable, tedious, dice-heavy and yawnsville fast.

Wing it. Use it as fluff. And then guess what? Your job as a DM is not done. You've given the players one little aspect of your reality. You got a lot more to go - but broadstroke. You know those paintings that use a lot of dots to create an image, if you stand back far enough? Do that. Give them key dots (edit, so they can fill in the rest in their own heads) - do not try to explain everything. Never be "too realistic" (unless you and your players are really, truly into that - a few are - a lot think they are til they try it - been there done that - I speak from experience on this).

I mean heck, try it if you want. But I go for a dazzling and entertaining approach to DMing grounded by enough "token appeals to reality" - to balance it and keep it from being too top heavy. But I wing it - you want to get to the good stuff fast. And copper pieces vs silver .... not the good stuff - maybe important world-building - but again don't dwell on it (unless you're playing with a table of RL accountants or something....). Good luck.

[Christian]

It's not difficult to do, really. Any reasonable currency runs across about three orders of magnitude. I'll use U.S. currency as a reference here, as everyday real experience is good for shaping intuitions.

Level 0: small change. Nickels and dimes. (When there are 'take a penny/leave a penny' dishes everywhere, the penny isn't currency, it's a nuisance coin.)

Level 1 (~10x level 0): useful change. Quarters, half dollars, dollar bills. Coins/bills you'll buy something with a small pile of, leave as tips, or give to beggars. (Nobody gives a beggar a nickel or a dime--that's just mean.)

Level 2 (~100x level 0): everyday currency. Fives, tens, and twenty-dollar bills. Bills you buy everyday things with with one or a couple.

Level 3 (!~1000x level 0): big bills. Fifties and hundreds. You don't generally carry these, and some places won't make change for them. Used for large purchases, but you'd usually write a check or buy on credit instead.

Bigger bills than that are novelties, and aren't regularly printed, although a few may be in circulation. If you want to buy something and a small stack of hundreds won't do it, you're not going to pay cash (unless you're making illegal purchases on the black market or something). Usually, you won't pay cash if a small stack of twenties won't work.

D&D kindly has a decimal currency system, just like the United States. (Maybe Ben Franklin was originally from the Forgotten Realms? It would explain a lot ...) In the standard currency, the copper piece is level 0, the silver piece level 1, the gold piece level 2, and the platinum piece level 3. So the gold piece is the everyday currency unit, and the silver piece is useful change. If you want to make the silver piece everyday and the gold piece the 'big bill', just change all references to gold pieces to silver pieces, and change platinum pieces to gold pieces.

Your problem is then figuring out what to put into level 1. The truth is, 100:1 is a fairly reasonable value ration for copper and silver, so you can be forgiven for just eliminating it--convert all of your prices listed in silver pieces into copper pieces and run for the hills. This does leave your peasants carting around inconveniently heavy pouches of many dozens of copper pieces, though.

Historically, the slot is filled by ... smaller silver coins. That 1/50 pound silver piece is a pretty big lump of silver--nearly twice the weight of a U.S. quarter dollar coin. A silver coin 1/10th of that weight is pretty small, but smaller coins than that have been circulated. If you do that, you need to track two different kinds of silver pieces, though--you should probably give them each their own name.

Making less sense, but easiest to deal with, is to use bronze pieces to fill that gap. Hard to justify in that bronze is an alloy of mostly copper, but requires less brain work in game.

[Unoriginal]

Also note: it's not a big effort to make some things cost more or less depending on the location and the offer/demand that comes with it, but it's still not necessary to do this effort either.

[JackPhoenix]

I think Grain into Gold is a great source for creating fantasy economy (and for some understanding of medieval-ish economy in general)

[Lord Vukodlak]

Rename the currency but keep the acronyms the same.
Example
PP=Penni Pieces made from gold
GP=Genni Pieces made from silver
SP=Sanni Pieces made from copper and silver
CP=Still copper pieces.
Those names are just off the top of my head but now silver and copper are the most common currency and no translations are neccessary.

[Cespenar]

I'm currently trying something like this, and not to toot my own horn but it goes pretty well. The main idea is to make the most change with the smallest tweaks.

So it basically goes like this:

Divide all armor and weapon costs by 5. Services, food and other stuff are perfectly fine as is. That's it. Of course, adjust the rewards accordingly. In my campaign, a job pays about 20 to 50 gold pieces per person, for example.

I've even thought about dividing them by 10, but haven't tried it.

If you want to make gold more rare, other people's suggestions sound pretty okay to me.

[Malifice]

I'm pretty much finished with crafting a world, but a big issue I'm facing is an economy. Not in-depth (yet, at least). I want silver to be the most common form of currency, with copper being 2nd most and gold being rather uncommon for normal trading; and bartering is likely to be an even more likely occurrence than spending coin. I just don't know if I have to adjust pricings of armor, weapons, and other goods, and if so, how to go about it.

If it helps, light and medium armors are likely to be far more common than heavy armors; weaponry is about as common as is usual; I'll likely allow for mastercrafted items, but they require certain individuals in certain cultures (i.e.: Very skilled human blacksmith can make +1, Very skilled dwarf blacksmith can make +2, and a third race can make +3 and that's as high as it goes), but such equipment will likely be very expensive and hard to come across.

Any help will be appreciated. If there's anything needing clarification, just ask.

Silver pieces are abbreviated to 'GP'.

So a sword that costs 10gp, actually costs 10 silver.

Done.