DnD Low Level Money Distribution

[ddude987]

Hey Playground I've got a question! couple questions!

For DnD, be it 3, 3.5, or 3.PF (or other editions you've played), how many levels, if any, are silver peices relivent and actually used?

Why or why not?

Does anyone think 4ed's idea of making 100 sp = 1 gp would make silver more useful?

Any general quick fixes for making silver relivent longer?

The why:
In case you are wondering why I am asking these questions, its because I feel like for earlier levels silver should be more relivent for gold. I think it adds versimilitude to the game. Being as I run and play in a primarily e6 and e8 games, if silver were to be more prominent in the early levels, it would actually be useful for most of the leveling progression. Thoughts, comments, discussions, experiences?

[Kazudo]

Well while I appreciate what you're trying to accomplish and I understand that you have some goals to accomplish, a hastily pointed out counter-argument could very well be ease of access.

Aside from some a-la-cart equipment charts in the PHB, everything else is usually measured in GP. GP are, despite historical reference, the popular coinage to the point that subconsciously even I as a player just mentally convert any troves of silver and hoards of copper into their associated GP value.

Now, as a DM, you control the way that the economy works. Maybe (as is joked occasionally) an adventuring guild has moved through this area and thoroughly spoiled the value of GP, but SP are still being accepted at their normal rate.

The crap of it is that it's more and more bookkeeping and really if you changed 100SP to be 1 GP, then the same thing would happen unless you changed the base value of the GP. Now, it's worth mentioning, that if you WANT Silver to be more important during the early levels, your best bet for doing so is to make that the primary form of getting treasure. "You open the chest and find *crackle clack clack um...then that table and then ok. good.* Two THOUSAND Silver pieces!" and the party goes wild. As opposed to "200gp and some stuff". Make shopkeepers wary of GP because of the number of counterfeiters that live around the city, but silver (as far as they know) hasn't been touched yet, so they give all of their prices in silver. Want to buy a bow? A thousand silver. Want a Potion of Cure Light Wounds? Five hundred silver will get it. That kind of thing. Then maybe, as more experienced adventurers, they have people for that kind of thing that source products traded using GP.

Some groups wanting more immersion than that might do most of their low-level trading in trade goods. What need have we of gold and silver when what we REALLY need is livestock? The blacksmith will trade you one fine sword for ten oxen. Enough to pull his large team of delivery wagons. That sort of thing.

[Slipperychicken]

Some groups wanting more immersion than that might do most of their low-level trading in trade goods. What need have we of gold and silver when what we REALLY need is livestock? The blacksmith will trade you one fine sword for ten oxen. Enough to pull his large team of delivery wagons. That sort of thing.

Hilarity ensues when the party finds the dragon's massive hoard herd of cattle and needs to move it around the countryside to sell it off (since no one town has the wealth or need for so many cows). Everyone puts ranks in Ride and Handle Animal, and the campaign suddenly becomes about cowboys.

[Kazudo]

Hilarity ensues when the party finds the dragon's massive hoard herd of cattle and needs to move it around the countryside to sell it off (since no one town has the wealth or need for so many cows). Everyone puts ranks in Ride and Handle Animal, and the campaign suddenly becomes about cowboys.

That. That would be a hilariously fun game. This is brilliant. I want that. Have an internet.

[holywhippet]

That. That would be a hilariously fun game. This is brilliant. I want that. Have an internet.

Ever read the Knights of the Dinner Table comic? They had one story arc (it might have been a stand alone comic actually) where some players are trying to herd cattle to a certain destination. They end up discovering that if the cattle stampede they can literally wipe out an entire town. A cattle based extortion racket soon emerges.

[Firechanter]

FWIW, in the low-magic, Sword&Sorcery adaptation Conan D20, the silver piece is the standard denomination. Basically a D&D Gold Piece is a silver piece in Conan, so a chainmail costs 200sp and so on (but Full Plate was around 6000sp). Which means that a bag of gold is a really nice treasure.
In my games, I even took it a bit further and defined the silver piece as a medieval silver penny, 240 to the pound. And when the players found a silver treasure, I usually just gave its weight in pounds. "9 pounds of silver" which translates to "over 2000sp".

The gold inflation displayed in D&D is really a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it breaches SoD for anyone who expects halfway historical value standards. A chainmail for 150gp, which means 3 pounds of gold or 30 pounds of silver? No, this is indeed not on by historical standards. But even worse than that, the DMG gives a cost of 50GP per month, or one pound of gold, for a _plain_ lifestyle. And here it's getting pretty absurd.

However, players love finding large treasure hoards. And we have something called WBL, which tells you how much treasure a party of 4 is supposed to find between level n and n+1.

But wait, it gets more ridiculous: think of dragons. Think of dragon hoards. Your mental image is probably that of a big red winged lizard lying on a huge pile of gold. Think again. In truth, by D&D standards, it's gonna be more like a shoe carton.
An Adult Red Dragon, for instance (CR15, so a good boss fight for a level 11-ish party), is worth "Triple Standard" treasure, or 66.000GP. Normally, this will be split in gold, gems, art objects and magic items. But even if the entire hoard was just gold coins, it would only be 1 cubic foot of coins. A bed of coins? More like a single sheet, and only if you spread it out thin. If that dragon wants to lie on a bed of coins, he'd have to invest in copper, and even then it would be rather slim.

So my point is: real life values and archetypical treasure hoards and WBL don't mix. If you make the hoards awe-inspiringly big, you are gonna bust WBL by a few orders of magnitude. If you make prices realistic, and maintain WBL, you have to shrink the hoards so much that the next party of adventurers will pass around a hat for the poor dragon.
That's the dilemma, and I know no good way out. You're always gonna break verisimilitude at some point.

[ddude987]

Huh, I never thought of simply saying all gp is sp. That's a good idea. Thanks!

Knowing my players, they would find someway to flesh to salt the cows, put them in bags, bring them to the town square, rebuild the salt as a multi-winged three headed dinosaur statue, and salt to flesh it into being.

[Kazudo]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that usage of WBL wrong? Isn't WBL just a table in the DMG that's used to ascertain starting gold for starting characters at above normal level? Or is there more on that than I'm aware of in the actual rules?

[Firechanter]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that usage of WBL wrong? Isn't WBL just a table in the DMG that's used to ascertain starting gold for starting characters at above normal level? Or is there more on that than I'm aware of in the actual rules?

Yes and no; those numbers are there for a reason. As the DMG puts it,
There’s a relationship between Table 5–1: Character Wealth Level, Table 3–5: Treasure, and Table 3–2: Encounter Difficulty. (p. 54)

Long story short, if you take the standard treasure per encounter, multiply it by the encounters required to reach a certain level, divide it by number of party members, and subtract ~10-15% for upkeep and consumables, you come out at WBL.

[ddude987]

But aren't consumables supposed to be refunded and not count towards wpl? Or is that a houserule I've played with for years without knowing it

[Firechanter]

Not really _supposed_ to, but you can do it either way, basically. But the DMG rule's idea is to hand out treasure as per the tables, which overshoots WBL by roughly 15%. So players who play smart and get by with few consumables may come out ahead, while careless players who burn through lots of inefficient consumables may come out below par.

For instance, picture two parties, identical in most respects, except that P1 uses Wands of Lesser Vigour for healing, while P2 thinks Potions of CMW are the cat's pyjamas. If you do the math, you'll quickly find out that P1 pays 1,36GP per HP while P2 burns through a whopping 25GP per HP. That's almost 20 times as much, just for healing!
(Odds are, in fact, that P2's characters are also way less optimized in terms of offense and defense, so they'll also take a lot more damage, and might effectively pay about 40-50 times as much gold for healing compared to P1.)

And now you might think that that's just too hypothetical, and no one in their right mind would ever buy CMW pots. Think again. I experienced exactly this behaviour in a PF group I joined last year. They had no Cleric, but 2 Rangers in the party, but didn't think of acquiring a Wand of CLW (2,7GP/HP), until I brought a Cleric to the table and used my level 4 WBL to buy just that item for the party.

In another, heavily houseruled game (with a fluctuating player pool instead of a fixed party), I realised that healing costs could be a really big budget factor. So I figured that investing in AC really paid off, and I was proven right. Players who didn't invest in AC were always broke because they spent so much on healing, which was a vicious circle because they never were able to afford better AC -- you get the idea. Some friends and I invested heavily into AC from the beginning, and soon had more money than you could shake a stick at.