Money

[darkscizor]

How do you tend to use monetary systems and currency in your games, specifically values of items?

The average working laborer in D&D would make: 2sp x 360 days/year worked x 50 years worked = 36000 sp

With expenses, they would likely have 1000 sp saved over the course of their life...





So what do you usually do for things like this?

[Keltest]

I completely handwave it. The party found an entirely disproportionate mass of gems and gold early on, which they have since invested in various businesses to guarantee them a supply of cash when they need it. I stop things from getting out of hand by restricting availability to things like adamantium full plate, because lets be real. Nobody is going to have that stuff just sitting around in a blacksmith's shop, that would have to be a custom order.

[Anonymouswizard]

My current project is a post apocalyptic game inspired by (but not truly based on) China and Wuxia, so while yuan from the old empire still exists and is accepted as currency, just as much trade is barter of goods and services (so a merchant might give a jian to a martial artist in exchange for the martial artist doing a stint as a bodyguard). The PCs are unlikely to come across more than a handful of yuan per session, and the average peasant might scrap together a couple a year by selling excess. The entire setting is intended as money light.

[Maglubiyet]

They probably keep their pile of coins in a sack or box under floorboards in their houses or buried in a hidden spot on their land.

Reference Silas Marner or the Icelandic Sagas, for two examples of how commoners kept their wealth.

[Spojaz]

What else are you going to go do? Subsistence farming has never been a great financial move, and adventuring probably gets you dead.
I think the 2 sp you quoted includes working and living expenses. Most craftsmen would probably make a little more or less than that, depending on whether they are baking bread, forging tools or dying silk.

[JeenLeen]

I prefer low it's handled by White Wolf games like in World of Darkness and Exalted. There is a 'money' stat (usually represented by 1-5) as a background. Your rate in this stat determines your standard of living, cash on hand, etc.

In Exalted, items have a rating. Anything lower than your Resources stat, you can buy. Anything equal, you can buy, but it strains your resources such that your Resources stat goes down by 1. Anything above is prohibitively expensive and you can't afford it.

There's room for abuse, yes, but it makes things simpler. Although, I think this only works for systems where you don't have a 'Magic Mart' as is the idea often found in D&D. Having a lot of money does not correlate to having or being able to buy magical gear.*

*well, in Exalted there is 'mundane' magic, but I mean artifacts. And, yes, you could probably trade a million bucks for an artifact in World of Darkness, but that should strain the resources of most PCs.

[Maglubiyet]

In Fate Core, one of the default skills they list is Resources. It represents general access to material wealth, through a combination of cash savings, land holdings, material goods, investments, lines of credit, debts, etc.

It's intentionally not represented as a currency amount, because most people have a variety of resources available they can draw on if they need to make a big purchase or pay a debt. The goal is to not bog down play dickering over coins.

A laborer would probably have Mediocre (0) Resources. If he had to pool his funds in order to buy a new sword, for example, he might need to make a roll at +1 to get it. For a sailing ship he might need to roll at +4. If he rolls and exceeds the number it means he manages to purchase the item. If he ties, he still might get it, but would have to take on a penalty (e.g. - Mortgaged Land or Owes Loan Sharks). Then you move on with your game.

[JeenLeen]

In agreement with Maglubiyet and in follow-up with what I wrote above, but also in contrast, I think a lot of it depends on what money is for in your game system, setting, and campaign.

In a game like D&D where money fairly strongly correlates to power, the money system needs to be fairly precise. A D&D char with a ton of gold is far more powerful than a poor char, and a poor char cannot make up for it since gold, in most D&D games, correlates to magic items.
In games where money is more 'far away' from power, like World of Darkness or (I gather) Fate, it's fine to have it be looser. A char in these systems with a ton of gold has some options and abilities a poor character lacks, but the disparity is easily made up for with other means. (Instead of Resources, they have Allies or Artifacts or something, to use Exalted terminology.)

In a game like D&D, I generally ignore how unrealistic it is to have hordes of money compared to the few silver a commoner might have in their life savings. (I also generally have money be volume-less and weight-less, for purposes of carrying gold coins and having it on hand for spending, but that's an ease of play thing. You can abstract money via carrying capacity without abstracting it from how it correlates to power.)

Personally, I like the abstracted money method because I find it annoying to track how much gp I have, but I do agree that tracking gp matters for certain systems.

[Sith_Happens]

In agreement with Maglubiyet and in follow-up with what I wrote above, but also in contrast, I think a lot of it depends on what money is for in your game system, setting, and campaign.

In a game like D&D where money fairly strongly correlates to power, the money system needs to be fairly precise. A D&D char with a ton of gold is far more powerful than a poor char, and a poor char cannot make up for it since gold, in most D&D games, correlates to magic items.
In games where money is more 'far away' from power, like World of Darkness or (I gather) Fate, it's fine to have it be looser. A char in these systems with a ton of gold has some options and abilities a poor character lacks, but the disparity is easily made up for with other means. (Instead of Resources, they have Allies or Artifacts or something, to use Exalted terminology.)

This. In fact, the Resources skill in Fate specifically has a sidebar saying that you might want to modify it for games where money is important, and the Fate System Toolkit has an entire section on possible variant rules for wealth.

[Maglubiyet]

This. In fact, the Resources skill in Fate specifically has a sidebar saying that you might want to modify it for games where money is important, and the Fate System Toolkit has an entire section on possible variant rules for wealth.

Yeah, Fate Core just lists Resources as one of their example default skills. If it doesn't make sense for the game you're playing then you can come up with something on your own or use another pre-gen system. But realistically, why would you want to?

I think it's just a legacy of D&D style games, where everyone is used to counting stacks of gold pieces, that makes some people reluctant to adopt a more generic method of applying wealth like Fate Core. But if you really think about it, why is it necessary to become an accountant or bookkeeper to play a game about high fantasy? Unless accounting is your thing, it's tedious and unfulfilling. I don't remember Conan ever sitting around budgeting out his loot.

[VoxRationis]

The thing is, a "Resources" or "Bankroll" stat applies better to certain genres, where the PCs can be assumed to have off-screen jobs or estates, than it does to adventuring genres in the vein of D&D, in which the players are frequently wanderers with little real connection to any resources they might have at home—even if you're playing the Prince of Somewhere, you're in Elsewhere, and your estates back home are impractically far away to draw any real financial support from in a medieval society. Furthermore, genre touchstones for D&D like Lord of the Rings or the Fafhrd & Grey Mouser books often had the heroes be pretty cash-strapped and concerned with resource conservation: Fafhrd & the Mouser were broke most of the time, meaning that they usually had to find, win, or steal resources, and the Fellowship's journeys across improbably wild lands meant that their resources were limited to their personal inventories. (I recall that there were passages in Lord of the Rings accounting for Legolas' exact arrow count and usage.) In that vein, it makes sense that you have to count every penny.
When my players aren't falling under that assumption of separation from income, I handwave costs according to their stations.

[TheCountAlucard]

360 days/year workedThe "average D&D worker" gets five days a year off? :smallconfused:


With expenses, they would likely have 1000 sp saved over the course of their life...Why? Realistically, why should any money be in his hands at a particular given time at all?

The idea that Joe Villager is expected to just go to Yon Tavern and plunk down a mass of semiprecious metal that he has on hand (having received it as the wages of his toil) for his drink is way ahead of the vaguely-medieval model that D&D runs on. It doesn't just dance around anachronistic; it jumps up and down on top of it.

Fact of the matter is that most folks never had silver cross their palms even once in their lives, even in places where silver was the official currency. The de facto currency was generally credit, and the economy of most communities was a massive web of I.O.U.'s.


So what do you usually do for things like this?Adventurers and other outsiders are an exception to the above rule. Adventuring's a risky business, filled with travel and violence. You don't want an I.O.U. from a guy who might perish in the Dungeons of Doom before you can call in his debt, nor do you want one from the sorceress who might disappear to another plane of existence for forty years, nor do you want a hulking barbarian to get annoyed at you for holding a debt over his head. If you can, you deal with them in physical currency; you take their coins, and you give them coins (if you don't have coins, you start cashing in some of those debts of yours until you do).

Cities are another exception; cities have too many people. You'll still have your debt networks, but you'll want to take hard currency from outsiders (which in this case may just mean someone two streets over). City folk will have some cash in reserve, but the "average D&D worker" isn't living in a city.

[Vitruviansquid]

I much prefer money to be abstracted than having to be counted.

As for attempts to simulate a medieval economy... most players barely know what a medieval economy was, so I don't see the point. You could just make anything up about currency, how wealthy different segments of society are, what was considered valuable, how people handled money, and so on, and players would easily be fooled into believing that's the medieval economy. Part of this is because there were so many medieval economies - "medieval" refers to a lot of places and times that were quite different from each other.

[mephnick]

The "average D&D worker" gets five days a year off? :smallconfused:

I feel like that's not actually out of line. I don't think "days off" was really a thing until relatively recently, especially for the labour class.

[Knaight]

I feel like that's not actually out of line. I don't think "days off" was really a thing until relatively recently, especially for the labour class.

It absolutely was. The term wasn't used, but things like feast days, holidays, etc. used to be way more ubiquitous than they are now, and the entire concept of dedicating a particular day of the week to rest (when possible) is extremely old and extremely ubiquitous. There was a bit of a dip in a lot of cases when a society transitioned from a more agricultural to a more industrial system, at least partially because agricultural labor tends not to be anywhere near evenly distributed through the year, but in a medieval context? The days off added up.

[BayardSPSR]

It absolutely was. The term wasn't used, but things like feast days, holidays, etc. used to be way more ubiquitous than they are now, and the entire concept of dedicating a particular day of the week to rest (when possible) is extremely old and extremely ubiquitous. There was a bit of a dip in a lot of cases when a society transitioned from a more agricultural to a more industrial system, at least partially because agricultural labor tends not to be anywhere near evenly distributed through the year, but in a medieval context? The days off added up.

Sounds like less "I'm on leave :smallcool: " and more "but master, you wouldn't make me work on [holiday], would you? :smalleek: :smallwink: "

[Segev]

Sounds like less "I'm on leave :smallcool: " and more "but master, you wouldn't make me work on [holiday], would you? :smalleek: :smallwink: "

Same difference in effect. "You wouldn't make me work on [holiday], would you?" worked because people wouldn't. Just as people now won't make you work when you're on agreed-upon leave.

[VoxRationis]

I'd say it depends a lot on who's asking for days off. To my recollection, a peasant farmer paid taxes in working a set number of days for the lord. Outside of those days, no one would be compelling them to work, so long as their production was high enough to eat and pay any other taxes that came up.

[SowZ]

I feel like that's not actually out of line. I don't think "days off" was really a thing until relatively recently, especially for the labour class.

Actually, we work more hours a week now than a medieval farm-hand. That isn't too say we have less free time, considering how long mundane tasks took. But with the exception of harvest season, common people weren't working back-breaking hours. The idea of the peasant who is constantly laboring for his pittance is incorrect.

[Venom3053000]

How do you tend to use monetary systems and currency in your games, specifically values of items?

The average working laborer in D&D would make: 2sp x 360 days/year worked x 50 years worked = 36000 sp

With expenses, they would likely have 1000 sp saved over the course of their life...





So what do you usually do for things like this?

Only if they don't have any points in the profession skill

Then their paid in gold