Today’s guest article was written by our most prolific guest author, Tom Puketza. If you run a game that features loot — which is most of them! — then read on. Thanks, Tom! –Martin
My group defends a city from a goblin horde, fights off undead, kills a teleporting monster wizard thing. Understandably, they decide to kick back at their inn to celebrate and order “the finest bottle of X.” And this, of all places, is where I get stumped. “How much WOULD that bottle of X really cost???”
Economics might be a strange issue in gaming, but the well known flaws in the pricing for goods and services create a lot of headaches. Likewise, income from loot and cash rewards can be hideously out of whack with “average” salaries, which can lead to balancing issues.
None of this is news. Functional economies in games like Dungeons and Dragons have turned into a quest for a better mouse trap. Plenty of people have plenty of good ideas. (Actually, the amount of thought put into this issue is a little disconcerting. A quick Google search of “D&D Economics” reveals a disturbing amount of thought and research.) My personal problem with most of the solutions I’ve seen is that, quite simply, they’re almost too intelligent. You can also read this as “I’m too lazy to follow these rules,” or “UGH! I DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THIS.” Nothing against these systems, they’re just not serving my purposes.
And yet, I’m just picky enough to want something that does in fact make sense. For this reason, the quick fixes also espoused (like for example tying price to the number of syllables in the item) also don’t quite work for me.
Oddly enough, a solution that worked for me was right there in the rule books the whole time. Well, part of the solution. Or rules in one part, but not the other. (Just keep reading…)
According to the crafting and profession rules in D20/Pathfinder, an average laborer makes roughly 7 silver pieces per day, or (rounding up) 5 gold per week. Not everyone arrives at exactly this number, and different systems may have their own measurements, but the main point is that, according to the rules provided, you should be able to arrive at a baseline salary. This salary gives you an idea of what to pay your player characters.
Payment, rewards, and loot also used to stump me. History tells us that medieval mercenaries were paid fairly high wages, but high in the way a doctor is highly paid today. A problem I have always had is that player characters across games, genres, and systems tend to accumulate fortunes that rival celebrities and the proverbial 1%. This is not just a GM’s fault. This is often the fault of many systems, and a way of thinking. Monsters that have no business carrying coin purses somehow have hundreds of gold pieces in their possession. Difficulty is linked with wealth. In the end, it often makes no real world sense, but the logic is so ingrained people get upset if they can’t grab cash from a dead body.
Two thoughts changed this for me:
- The player party are hirelings. Why not pay them accordingly? (See baseline salary mentioned above.)
- Unless it has a reason to carry a wallet, don’t drop cash. (Also known as IGNORE TREASURE TABLES ALMOST ENTIRELY. Just ask what possessions are valuable and why creatures have them.)
This is not to say that players won’t loot valuables. It just changes what the loot is, and most importantly how much they come home with. People carry some money, but mostly tools, weapons, and gizmos. Wildlife is valuable for its carcass, or for parts of its anatomy. In either case, treasure needs a good reason to exist, and this scales it in a much more manageable way.
In the end, the big idea here is to think of everything in terms of that baseline salary. How much would this person/thing really have on them? What can be sold? How much, exactly, should a player expect per day on the job? Just like that, RPG economics start to make functional sense using the price lists as written. Better, more “realistic” or “accurate” economic models may exist, but a solution like this emphasizes functionality, simplicity, and keeps one from having to import or create an entirely new economy (which must then be taught to players). In all storytelling, internal consistency is often more important than accuracy and realism. Fantasy economics don’t need to reflect history, they just need to make internal sense.
It should also be noted that a nice side effect (to me, at least) of all this is that cost of living becomes a legitimate issue. Mercenaries (aka adventurers) never did know where the next meal or bed would come from. Food and shelter is a powerful motivator, and good for cutting munchkins down to size.
I do believe that was just about as “system-neutral” as you can get! That was immediately helpful, can be used in all of my campaigns, and was fairly simple as well. Furthermore, it took me longer to register to make a comment than it took me to actually read the article (don’t get me wrong, I like a good long read, but for this topic the author was right: less is more)! Thanks again, Stew-Crew! And special thanks to Tom Puketza!
PCs should realistically receive a lot less treasure than they do. Goblins, Orcs, and other common enemies should have a couple of copper, maybe a silver or two, at most, and some weapons that are next to worthless. Undead, unless they are biggies like vampires and liches, should have even less. And monsters usually make up a lot of encounters, and would have nothing unless maybe their fur was useful.
As far as cost, look to real-life gold-booms. When some people bring in a lot of loot, costs skyrocket. That leads to problems for everyone else, which would make for some good role-playing opportunities.
Finally, for cost of consumable luxuries, the percentage of loot spent matters more than specific costs. When people celebrate they usually don’t pick a specific item and then worry about the cost, they figure out how much they are willing to spend. Let the PCs spend, say, 10% of their loot on a big blow-out where they by a few rounds for the house, get a big meal, and stay in a good room. The specific cost of each item doesn’t matter, just assume that they bought whatever the best they can get for 100 GP (or whatever). It’s not like it’s going to have long-term benefits anyway.
Its an interesting approach, and I would entertain it in a campaign, but I would also posit that despite the trappkng wealth is usually given in RPGs it really is about as abstract as hit points or XP in most games.
What I find most useful is to tell players to think of a gold piece in the game as an equivalent to modern money. For example, you said that in D&D the average laborer makes 5 GP a week, so 1 GP a day (ish). A modern laborer makes about $100 a day (again, ish). So in that game I would tell my players to look at a gold piece the same way a modern person would look at a $100 bill. Once that’s done it makes way more sense for NPCs to be carrying only a few silvers on them, because how many people today carry more than $100 on them at any given time? This also make the question of how much the “finest bottle of X” costs easier. Again to use a modern equivalent, the finest bottle of wine at a nice restaurant will probably cost $100-$200, so the “finest bottle of X” in the game would be 2 GP. The issue with this, and with any discussion of RPG economics and using the “base-salary” method of determining prices and value, is that those laborers making 5 GP a week are spending 4 of their 5 gold pieces on the basic cost of living, as would Player characters. If 80% of most people’s wages go to cost-of-living expenses, then that 2 GP drink is no longer “what you make in 2 days,” it’s “what you make in 2 weeks, after paying your bills.” Naturally in most game the players have no interest in micro-managing their “cost of living,” so as a GM I’ve just gotten in the habit of doing it myself and telling the players what they have left over. So when the players ask “how much did we make for this job” I answer with “after your expenses you have X left over.”
I take similar approaches:
1) I consider a standard D&D gold piece to be worth anywhere from $10-50 in contemporary US currency, and use that to quickly set prices for unusual goods or services. The reason for the range is the relative ease/difficulty of producing an item in the game setting versus the modern world.
2) I also set prices relative to monthly incomes. This works well when discussing with my players what an unusual item or service costs or how to reward an NPC. This really puts it into perspective whether the PCs are paying top dollar for the best work or looking to scam something on the cheap.
3) I simplifying costs for food, drink, housing, mundane gear, etc. into a monthly “cost of living” amount IF the PCs are settling down into a particular lifestyle pattern AND it’s well within their means. I make those two stipulations because, under those circumstances, negotiating the price of individual things like a bottle of imported wine or a carriage ride across town becomes uninteresting. On the other hand, if the PCs are trying to live beyond their means, or move from the palace one night to the gutter the next, then talking about what each thing costs usually becomes an important part of the storytelling.
One thing that I do is create treasure hoards that are heavy on magic items. This way, each individual orc (or whatever) might have only one or two silver on them, but after the PCs fight the frost giant, they find his rumored collection of magic items. This has the advantage of keeping the characters where they should be in terms of total wealth while minimizing the unrealistic “You find a chest of 7,000 gp” effect. It’s surprising how quickly a relatively large treasure budget can be spent by filling a hoard with magic items! Also, I make sure that only one or two magic items are really powerful or consistently useful… a ring of feather fall or a folding boat are both worth a fair amount of gold, but giving them to the PCs will not unbalance the game — after all, how often does one really need a ring of feather fall compared to, say, a +5 sword?
I guess I’m somewhat in the minority in that when GMing fantasy games I’ve always used a “realistic” approach to loot from bad guys/monsters, and viewed the loot tables gold reward as an example of how much the creatures head is worth as a bounty.
In 99% of my fantasy games when the party kill random monsters the chances of them being in possession of gold is usually pretty nil. (unless they are goblins or another race that might actually value coins)
Other monsters may have a few scattered pieces of treasure left around their lairs from the corpses of their former victims (whatever didn’t fall off during the dragging of the corpse back to the lair and/or wasn’t destroyed when the monster ate the body.
Even those humanoids that are bandits and the like usually are on the poor side, (if they were rich chances are they wouldn’t be robbing wandering travelers) or smart enough to keep their gold stashed somewhere hidden in case they should be captured. (also it’s hard to fight or sneak with a sack of coins swinging from your hip pouch.)
To keep the profit from killing such monsters “worth the trouble/effort” I usually placed a reasonable bounty on most monster types, usually posted by the king, or perhaps town baron, or even collection pot from concerned locals. (some monster parts were also worth a bit to alchemists if the characters had the skill to know what pieces and how to harvest them.)
This allowed my adventuring parties to slay all manner of nasties and simply bring back “proof” (usually in the form of a pair of ears, or set of fangs etc..) to the near by spot of civilization to be reimbursed for their efforts rather then conveniently finding stacks of gold/treasure on owl bears and dire boars.
As far as expensive bottles of wine and the like go, I usually prefer the random 4-8d6x10 Gold cost roll since it nicely represents the widely fluctuating value of goods in a medieval economy where supply and demand can vary wildly between towns (or even merchants in the same city.)
Also one can expect the average tavern owner to privately adjust the price upwards for such specialty goods based on what the celebrating heroines can appear to “readily afford.” (and it makes that 150G bottle of wine appear that much more “classy” if the heroines are charged 375G for it)
Alternatively, the returning heroes, carousing it up at the local tavern, might be attracting so much business that the barkeep gives them ‘some of the good stuff’ at cost or even on the house to keep them there attracting more ordinary patrons. it might be worth it to give them a $2X bottle of wine/ale in order to keep 30 people there drinking for an extra 2-3 rounds.
I’ve become of the mind that treasure just doesn’t matter. Most GM’s are going to allow players appropriate items for their characters at appropriate “levels.” Instead of having players hoard treasure to purchase those choice items, place the items as treasure when the time is right. Thus monsters hoarding treasure doesn’t have to “happen” because players are not saving to buy big ticket items. It makes more sense for an owlbear to have a +1 short sword in its lair (it belonged to a bard the creature ate) than it does for the same owlbear to have 2,000 gp sitting around.
Another great idea I use came from the Beasts & Barbarians setting for Savage Worlds (at least it’s where I found it). Characters never keep treasure beyond a small savings based on level. As larger than life heroes, they have larger than life appetites, so any treasure not spent on the replenishment of basic items is spent on drink, companionship, food and fun. They wake up hungover, sated and broke, thus they need to go out and adventure again. If characters are stinking rich, why would they continue to adventure? This speaks to Scott’s issue yesterday.
The savings rule with well thought out magic item placement is a winning combination. Players don’t feel jipped out of treasure because the GM provides what they need via the story.
Like Mercutior, I’ve decided to simplify treasure, but not quite as much as he has.
I listen to what items the PCs want and I occasionally drop one of those items into a treasure horde when it makes sense. But not all encounters should have that kind of stuff.
When the party is low level, we track gold pieces, not silver and copper.
When the party is mid level, we track platinum, not gold.
When they are high level, we’ll track whatever comes after platinum in the system.