D&D Economy

[MonasticBastard]

I've started Dming for my group after a long break, so I decide to run a quick five room dungeon to get myself reacquainted with everything. The enemies were bandits so I thought it would make sense to have expensive trade goods as loot (i.e. silk and spices) instead of stacks of coins and magic items.

I figured selling the goods would be an interesting little diversion for my players, certainly not something we'd spend much time on.

My players disagreed: they are now merchants. They enjoyed trading and haggling so much, I find myself worrying now about medieval trading, markets, supply and demand; scary economic stuff like that.
Do you fellas have any tips about making a complicated, believable, and interesting economy in D&D?

[Adept_Scholar]

Pages 38-40 in the "Arms and Equipment Guide" may provide you with some ideas. :smallsmile:

[watchwood]

You can probably do it by DM fiat a lot, and assume that the base prices for everything are an average economy.

As for supply and demand, prices will naturally fluctuate a bit depending on location. Grains and Cheeses might be cheaper in an inland farming town, whereas fish products and oils and such might be cheaper in a coastal fishing town. For the players, exploring around to find good markets and prices will be a big part of the fun (I've enjoyed it myself when it was an option in a game).

[MonasticBastard]

Pages 38-40 in the "Arms and Equipment Guide" may provide you with some ideas. :smallsmile:

I had a look, it seems like a great reference. Thanks very much!

[lsfreak]

Depending on how realistic you want to get, currency and pricing has come up before in the Real World Weapons & Armor Thread.

[digs through 350 open firefox tabs]
[why do i have links to formosan grammar pages up three different times?]

Here we go (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=238042&page=24). Likely more detail than you'd want to get into, but maybe of interest. Crops up again in more detail on page 28 and imo is worth a read to anyone (shows that the dirt-poor peasants we're used to weren't actually a thing, at least not everywhere).

[Cirrylius]

Later on, expect 'em to use Teleport and Bags of Holding to make a fortune on small, expensive luxury goods like cinnamon and pineapples.

[SinsI]

Watch anime "Wolf and Spice". Best lesson on what medieval economics looked like.

[Firechanter]

I didnt find the link you mentioned, but there's a page out there that gives a verbose price list for goods and services in England around ~1400. Very useful. Actually it works out surprisingly well with a lot of the D&D prices if you account for about 400% inflation. I'll post more details when I'm back on the PC.

[Alent]

Watch anime "Wolf and Spice". Best lesson on what medieval economics looked like.

I second this. The plot arc on Pyrite is one of the best ways to explain the insanity of a speculative market I've ever seen.

[Haldir]

This sounds like a fantastic group to have. They're begging for distant adventures in far off lands all in the name of profit. Merchant-adventurers. Love it.

On topic- I own a book called "Spice" which gives the specifics of the trade routes that spanned Eurasia. Very fantastic history.

[BowStreetRunner]

If your players are into the medieval economy that much, it may be time to introduce a market-based plot hook! You should consider some of the more convoluted financial schemes you've heard of from either real-life or fiction and maybe throw something along those lines into the story the next time you need to give the players a push in a particular direction.

Personally, I've always wondered what would happen when the local necromancer started building his army and bought up every black on (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/animateDead.htm)yx gem (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/createUndead.htm) he could get his hands on...

[Firechanter]

Okay as promised, here's the pricelist:
http://www.amurgsval.org/feng-shui/prices.html

Note: "d" is short for a penny = 1/240 lb. of silver. So around 1,8 grams or so.
For simplicity, I'd just set that to 1 silver piece in D&D, even though that weighs about 9 grams according to the PHB.

A typical daily workman's wage is around 3-5sp.

As I said, a lot of the PHB prices work out reasonably well, but amusingly, all the components you need for a Full Plate only sum up to around 600gp. In other words, we are getting ripped off in D&D. =D

[SinsI]

Personally, I've always wondered what would happen when the local necromancer started building his army and bought up every black on (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/animateDead.htm)yx gem (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/createUndead.htm) he could get his hands on...

Remember one of the OOTS strips - an apprentice haggles the price of a gem down and gets yelled at by his master as the spell requires amount worth a certain amount of gold?
Same here - as he keeps depleting the market, the amount of onyx necessary for the spell is going to go down.
He might even buy, say, 100 gems, this causes the price to double. So he only needs 50 gems now, and cheerfully sells the rest, making the whole material component expense free for him.

[Wargamer]

Reminds me of something I did once. My party were engaging in a spot of banditry and acquired a cartload of silk. Silk was a luxury item in this locale, but nothing out of the ordinary. Indeed, half the party had silk outfits at home for formal events!

And yet all their sources suggested this cart was full of wealth beyond measure... so after all efforts to find hidden loot failed, they knuckled down to do some research and discovered the merchants were planning to travel east to Utmaar - a fortress in the heart of the Desolation.

To explain, Utmaar is a blasted, desert hell. However, its cellars and dungeons reach deep enough to locate vast quantities of subterranean water, and so they became powerful. They used that power to begin mining operations and amassed lots of gold, silver, gemstones and other precious ores, which they then flog periodically to the passing desert caravans.

The reason this silk was so valuable was twofold: the first is that the only way to get silk to Utmaar is to haul it through two weeks of desert that was formed by someone accidentally leaving a portal to the Elemental Plane of Fire open in the sky (which also means it is perpetually daytime due to said portal), which means nobody in their right mind would do it. The second is they were being paid in gold. Not gold coin, but gold. Pure gold.

In short, if the party made the trip, made the exchange and got back without losing their cargo, they would have enough pure gold to buy a small castle!

How's that for a mercantile plot hook? :smallwink:

[Omegas]

Merchant players can be fun and it can be good to encourage, but I have had alot of experience with players like this and there is a fine line when creative money generation should be limited.

What you will find is that they will start generating more wealth then characters of their level. You will face not being able to throw accurate CR encounters at them and if you up the CR you risk exposing them to creatures that could potentially TPK.

Recommendation = Have them form an affiliation PHB2 pg 163 to 189. This will consume any over wealth by level funds they generate while giving them a sense of progress. They can call it anything they choose like a Trade Federation or East Kingdom Trading Company.

If their wealth overly exceeds their level then you will need to introduce thieves, exorbitant tariffs, competitive merchants lowering demand, granting them exp for their trading efforts, or other ways to control profit / level.

[veti]

Ready-made enemies: other merchants (whose livelihood they're muscling in on), who will arrange all sorts of dirty tricks. Sabotaging their goods, nobbling their suppliers, slandering their good name in the markets - the possibilities are endless, and your players better be able to keep up.

What's not endless, however, is their market. Depending on where they're trading to, there's likely only so many people who actually want (or can afford) 'silk and spices', and pretty soon they'll have all they want. So your players will have to seek out new markets, and deal with all dirty tricks the merchants there can come up with.

Trading is no soft option. Ask any Elite veteran.