[3.5] How Much Does 1GP = In The Real World

[Thurbane]

A couple of posts in this thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?525553) got me thinking: how would you equate the value of 1GP in "the real world" (i.e. our reality, modern day)?

Do you base it on 1/10th lb. of gold?

Do you base it on the relative value of common objects or trade goods listed in 3.5 (e.g. a goat, 10 feet of chain etc.)?

I've seen estimates so far varying between $USD 370.00 per GP to $USD 20,000 per gp.

I'm guessing there isn't going to be one homogenous consensus, but I'd love to see some varying estimates.

Cheers T

[logic_error]

Excellent question. However, the answer might disappoint/surprise you. In a game world where magic items are sold for hundreds of gold but the average wealth is much lower, the price of items would either go down or the value of gold would decrease. D&D 1GP is thus a fairly arbitrary measure for game purposes.

In reality, worth is allotted to gold because people desire gold. This fact combines with the reason that gold is rare is what makes it a possible currency. In D&D gold is not really rare if you take the books quite literally (you find gold on outlaws etc). But then the gold never really seems to enter the economy. This would be equivalent in reality to have a lot of Yacht shops in town but very few buyers. Yacht shops would either close due to the lack of demand or be forced to bring down prices until they meet the production cost + expenditure incurred to distribute. Since this last amount is still remarkably beyond the capacity of most people, you'd wonder why the shops bother selling these goods, which are now luxury items only affordable to adventurers.

Now there is another problem: what happens to the gold that the shopkeeper earns when he actually makes a successful sell? Despite the overheads, he will make a significant profit if you take the books seriously. So he must spend it to enjoy it. This would decrease the value of gold via inflation every time he does this. But that never seems to happen.

This can only be explained by the fact that dragons manage the economics of D&D. Whenever a shopkeeper gets to sell stuff they swoop down from their Magnificent mansion and steal it by force. You must credit their unselfish service to keep the gold prices consistent in D&D.

To really answer your question now, the price of gold in D&D in real $$ is a floating number that changes based on how much injection our world gold economy gets from D&D.

[HurinTheCursed]

You could check the value of 10g of gold but gold is not a stable value in our world, it is speculated upon.

More stable are wages. An untrained hireling costs 1sp a day, a trained one 3sp a day. That means a gold coin is worth 2 weeks of work for an untrained worker, and that a skilled worker would earn it in a third of that time.
That would be my base to recalculate the equivalent wage and inequalities so that you can compare in your own country. Most other prices depend on fantasy, technology level, economic model and I believe they are a lot harder to compare.

In France, the minimum wage is around 1100€ a month after all taxes and a trained worker earns a bit less than twice more, that would make 1gp around 450€. It's probably more $USD in the US since $ value is a bit lower than €'s, wages are higher, taxes are lower, but nothing is provided by the welfare state for free.

[Zancloufer]

I posted this a week or three ago about someone complain about preform income. It really comes down to buying power:

First I think that 1 GP is around 25 USD iirc.

Even if 1 GP is worth 25 modern USD the prices for common commodities is way off. 2 GP is a luxury inn (>$50), a days worth of higher end meals out is only 5 sp (~$10! Good luck eating a meal out ANYWHERE for that now). 1 GP gets you 50 loafs of bread. ~50cents a loaf.

~200GP will get a ~5 star Inn + top tier meals for almost three months. Which is about $5000 USD in income. I doubt most people could live luxuriously for ~$1600 USD today. Essentially if you convert gold to actual modern money your still way off as buying power makes relative wealth in 3.5 worth easily 5-15 times what it is today. This is all of course before you even get into magic items. Even the basic 2 GP/week From a decent profession check by a level 1-2 commoner (100% possible, there is a thread on it) is probably closer to 400-600 USD a week. That is GOOD money.

[Elkad]

A gold coin is 1/50th of a pound in 3.5

That's about $350.

Two problems with comparing to current prices.
One, machine made stuff.
Two, margins are much lower. If you compare vs what the PCs sell for (half value), it works out much better.

Machine made stuff, which all ends up with a huge discount.

3/8ths chain (10') is $50

1" Manilla Rope (50') is also $50

Swords are $300-$1000, only 1-3gp each (Cold Steel catalog). Again, machine made.


Now lets check some non-manufactured things.

A good goat is worth $100-300.
A milk cow is 10x that, at $1000-3000. Butchered steer is at the high end of that. (including butchering)
Good pepper. $100/lb
Saffron. $1500-5000/lb

Those work OK.

Horses don't fit. $1500 gets a decent riding horse. Even at half value (75gp), the $25,000 for a warhorse is insane, a Clydesdale isn't much more expensive than a riding horse.
But horses used to be your truck/tractor/whatever. Now they are a pure luxury (and we typically don't even eat them when they die, despite being tasty), so the price has fallen a lot.

[Zancloufer]

A gold coin is 1/50th of a pound in 3.5

That's about $350.


*Double Checks Gold Exchange Rates*

Okay. . . That is actually the correct value. So 1 GP = ~$350. 1 SP However is worth ~$5.42. About 64x as much as Silver IRL, but in 3.5 it's a 1:10 exchange rate.
Though all the prices make a lot more sense if you use SP as the baseline instead of GP. Also 1 PP = 10 GP, but IRL Platinum is only about 10% more valuable.

[Pugwampy]

I always did 1GP equals a 100 USD to make life easy for my NPC folk

[Long_shanks]

The one time I calculated something like this, I used the loaf of bread (1cp) as a base. Our real-life loaf costs about 3$, so 1gp is about 300$.
It's the figure our group has since used to marvel at the ridiculous prices of magic items. Hey, you want that vest of resistance +1, that will be 300 000$.

[Malroth]

If evil cultists really had spells you'd probably think 300K was a pretty good deal to increase the odds that they don't enslave your mind by 5%

[Long_shanks]

If evil cultists really had spells you'd probably think 300K was a pretty good deal to increase the odds that they don't enslave your mind by 5%

Dont get me wrong, resistance bonuses to saves are a staple for a reason, I'm not denying that. At 300k for a 5% better chance, I still don't class it a "good deal". :smallwink:

[Thurbane]

Excellent question. However, the answer might disappoint/surprise you. In a game world where magic items are sold for hundreds of gold but the average wealth is much lower, the price of items would either go down or the value of gold would decrease. D&D 1GP is thus a fairly arbitrary measure for game purposes.

<snip>

To really answer your question now, the price of gold in D&D in real $$ is a floating number that changes based on how much injection our world gold economy gets from D&D.

Yeah, I had a feeling it would be a highly variable number, based on the factors you mention.


More stable are wages.

The problem with wages is that they are so variable around the (real) world. There's a reason so much manufacturing and call centre work is carried out in poorer nations, where they pay much less for the same work.


A gold coin is 1/50th of a pound in 3.5

I thought it was 1/10th? Maybe I'm thinking of an earlier edition.


The one time I calculated something like this, I used the loaf of bread (1cp) as a base. Our real-life loaf costs about 3$, so 1gp is about 300$.
It's the figure our group has since used to marvel at the ridiculous prices of magic items. Hey, you want that vest of resistance +1, that will be 300 000$.

Interesting. See, here in Australia our dollar is worth less than the $USD, but I can buy a loaf of very basic bread for less than $AUD 1.00.

I once saw a forum post (here or somewhere else) about the various prices of a Big Mac around the world.

This articale from last year has some basics: https://spoonuniversity.com/place/big-mac-from-mcdonalds-costs-around-the-world

...just like labour, the basic cost of goods and services around the world can be hugely variable.

[Grod_The_Giant]

You can't, really, because there's no good point of comparison-- D&D prices are made up pretty randomly.

Another way of looking at it might be to relate it to the Profession rules-- you're maybe not going to get an absolute value that way, but you might get a relatable one. An "untrained laborer" earns 0.1 gold/day, for 2 gold/month, working 5-day weeks. The same month's worth of minimum wage work would earn you $1160 (pre-tax, at least). So you could peg a gold piece at around $600. But then, if you have a +4 modifier (4 ranks) for a basic trained laborer, you're making 28 gold/month; map that to an annual $35,000 (around what my partner makes as a clerk) and you get around $105/gold piece. if you have a +14 (7 ranks, +2 Wis, Skill Focus and a +2 feat) for a master craftsman type, that's 48gp/month. Map that to $125,000/year (averaging out doctor, lawyer, and professor average saleries according to the first thing that popped up on google) and you get $217/gold.

Sooo... yeah, crapshoot. I'd probably stick to $100=1gp if pressed; it doesn't really relate to anything, but it's easy to remember.

[Lazymancer]

how would you equate the value of 1GP in "the real world" (i.e. our reality, modern day)?
Well, since the real question is not "how much 1/50th lb. of gold is worth IRL", but the social (exchange) value that 1 gp has in D&D economy, the answer has to be based on goods that get traded on a daily basis. Except we had industrial revolution and our production costs of many goods are wildly different.

As it had been said already, it makes the most sense to use wages IRL and in D&D as a basis.

Assuming adventuring happens in some equivalent of Tajikistan, and unskilled labour for $10/day is equivalent to 1 sp/day we have rough estimate of 1 gp being equivalent of $100. On the other hand, $100/day translates into $1000 equivalence of gold piece IRL.

Consequently, the real question is: is D&D first world or third world?




In reality, worth is allotted to gold because people desire gold.
No. People desire gold because worth is allotted to it.


Despite the overheads, he will make a significant profit if you take the books seriously. So he must spend it to enjoy it. This would decrease the value of gold via inflation every time he does this. But that never seems to happen.
No. This is not how inflation works.

And - yes, I'm too lazy to explain why this all is so ... erroneous.

[hamishspence]

Worth is allotted to gold because of its decorative value - it does not corrode, and it's an attractive-looking metal.

That's why it was used in jewellery for so long - because it's more suited to it than other metals were, assuming a low-tech civilization.

[Florian]

That question is really hard to answer.

"Money" is a tool for trading and a short-hand for talking about estimated worth of a thing, no matter if object or service.
D&D uses pre-speculation values, so 1 SP gets you one day of skilled labour, 3GP´ll get you a month.

Trying to translate that gets hairy fast. For example, the German minimum wage is 8,66€/hour while the going rate for a Perth Kangaroo (Silver Coin) is around 13€, a full-sized Krüger Rand (Gold Coin) can cost up to 2,4K€ a piece.
So we have a discrepancy here. the silver coin should be worth approximately 70€, while one month wort of minimum wage should generate one hand a gp (1,4K€)

[HurinTheCursed]

Lower class worker only earn 1000GP during their life if they enough to work 40 years.
Comparing to the cost / revenue of aventuring means adventurers have equipment worth ~10 years of work even before they start, that they end as excentric multimilioneers (in $USD) and that d&d society is ultra inequalitarians (if it wasn't, I guess many adventurers would practice taxdodging anyway).

I hope magic item merchants form a guild, a franchise, something to even out investment and revenues cause the likelyness to sell pricey items is really low: low odds, high reward. They have to hope some high level adventuring group randomly enters their shop once in a lifetime to sell their loot and spend tens of thousands of GP on items. Outside "best sellers" like a +1 longsword, chances are they keep a huge stock uselessly.
Adventurers probably disrupt the economy wherever they go by spending and buying huge amounts if the money is not spread spacially in a guild. That's a lot of ressources accessible to a single profession but only about once if a lifetime. After that the shopkeeper could live on that benefit for generations, buy his own castle and have servants for anything.

[hamishspence]

1 SP is 1 day of extremely unskilled labor was the impression I got.

I think somebody did some estimates based on 3rd world poverty Cost Of Living, and on foodstuffs and the like (as many as possible and averaged out), to get a rough idea of what the corresponding values were.

[noob]

A chicken costs 2 pc.
In the past chickens were a lot more expensive than now:you did not raise them in battery and they needed to eat a lot more and meat(as well as eggs) was useful.
Now if we say that an adult chicken is worth around 5 dollars it means that one gold coin is worth 250 dollars.
The problem is that from the same table there is one pound of flour which have the same value.
It do not make sense at all to have a chicken have the same value as a pound of flour: it is just silly.

[noce]

Based upon Italy prices.

A GP equals to:

100 gr of salt: 0,02€
250 gr of ginger: 1€
25 kg of flour: 25€
250 gr of pepper: 32€
500 gr of cinnamon: 45€
50 kg of wheat: 125€
1 kg of tobacco: 180€
30 gr of saffron: 250€
50 chickens: 300€
10 gr of gold: 365€


So, a GP appears to vary greatly in value, but it is mostly because certain goods are more common today than in Middle Age (e.g. salt and ginger), and others are rarer (saffron) or overtaxed (tobacco).

If we ignore said goods, and ignore chickens based on the fact that their weight can vary from 500 gr to 3 kg, and ignore gold to avoid tautology, a gold piece seems to equal 50-100 € (or $).

[logic_error]

Consequently, the real question is: is D&D first world or third world?




No. People desire gold because worth is allotted to it.


No. This is not how inflation works.

And - yes, I'm too lazy to explain why this all is so ... erroneous.

Sure. Do explain both your statements.

[EccentricCircle]

I worked it out for my campaign using the listed price of a loaf of bread. This is consistently a couple of copper pieces across most versions of D&D.

At my local supermarket the price of a loaf is generally between 50p and £1 (GBP for the record, although I doubt converting between modern currencies is going to make much difference).

So if we assume that our 2cp loaf is a cheap one a Gold piece is worth approximately £25. If we assume a moderately priced loaf then a gp is approximately £50.

The £25 exchange rate works quite well for most of the general equipment listed in 3.5 and 5e, although there are a few discrepancies.
I can imagine paying £50 for a good backpack or a chest (2gp), but it seems a bit much for a crowbar or spade. The former only costs £5 on Amazon, while the later can be bought for £15. In medieval times such items can't be mass produced, so would probably be more expensive, but on the other hand, when everyone is a farmer I'd imagine spades wouldn't exactly be in short supply.

[Schattenbach]

The official exchange value should be, according to the table found in "Future Meets Fantasy" web enhancement, be exactly 1 gp = 20 Dollars (the D20 Modern/D20 Future dollars). It isn't outright stated but by dividing the listed wealth DCs values provided in the D20 Future? rulebook - to be exact, the table that lists actual dollar values for wealth DCs - through the amount of gp listed in the "Future Meets Fantasy" web enhancement pretty much ends up with exactly that value. As inflation is a thing, though, and the value of money changes quite a bit over more than ten years, this might not be exact even if they might've used US dollars (no idea about that) to the values they came up with for their stuff, I've no idea though if this is of any help to you.

[Lazymancer]

Worth is allotted to gold because of its decorative value - it does not corrode, and it's an attractive-looking metal.

That's why it was used in jewellery for so long - because it's more suited to it than other metals were, assuming a low-tech civilization.
You are wrong. Jewelry is about showing off, demonstrating your wealth, status, power (also portable wealth). Being pretty is secondary. We don't value artificial diamonds and natural the same, despite difference being noticeable only with high-grade equipment, do we?

I'd guess people were saying that it is natural to be attracted to iron and glorified decorative value of rust (such noble colour! such intricate patterns! how could slimy shine of gold compare?) - during Bronze Age, before metallurgy kicked in and made iron abundant. And - yes. Iron jewelry was a thing then.

Or should I mention bitcoin? People are attracted to it because of mathematically pretty combination of numbers, yes?



1 SP is 1 day of extremely unskilled labor was the impression I got.
2 sp/day will net you a mercenary who is not a rent-a-cop, but can stab people.

[EccentricCircle]

As a side note, There is a great historical example of adventurers with absurdly large amounts of wealth breaking the economy of the towns they visit.

In the 1300s Mansa Musa was the King the extremely rich country of Mali, in western Africa. When he went on the a pilgrimage to Mecca he managed to spend and give away so much money that he massively changed the price of gold in the regions he passed through.

Quoth Wikipedia:
"Musa's generous actions inadvertently devastated the economy of the regions through which he passed. In the cities of Cairo, Medina, and Mecca, the sudden influx of gold devalued the metal for the next decade. Prices on goods and wares greatly inflated. To rectify the gold market, on his way back from Mecca, Musa borrowed all the gold he could carry from money-lenders in Cairo, at high interest."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_I_of_Mali#Islam_and_pilgrimage_to_Mecca

So this is pretty much what happens whenever a bunch of PCs show up with a dragons hoard...

[Necroticplague]

Impossible to calculate. Most of the numbers for the metallic currency in DnD are based off of 100% fiat, without any math, or much thought, behind them. For one thing, as I've proven in another thread on this topic (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?504812-The-price-of-Diamond-and-other-materials), DnD's gold doesn't have the same properties as real life gold. Just for starters, it's roughly 1/3rd as dense (density of .21 vs. .7). Thus, given how it has different properties, it's not the same substance, so we wouldn't expect their values to line up in any way. So 'market price of gold' it out.

Meanwhile, we also can't use the price of base goods as a useful standard, because those are all over the place. If we use various trade goods as the standard, we end up with values all over the place, some of which are hilariously low. A pound of salt is roughly half a dollar, so that puts a GP at being worth a dime. Price of cinamon leaves a GP at $7 a pound. A cow could be roughly $950, so that leaves the GP at $95. A pound of flour is roughly 50 cents, leaving the GP at $250. Any attempt to bring the price of a GP into the real world produces different results based on what you use as standard.

[logic_error]

As a side note, There is a great historical example of adventurers with absurdly large amounts of wealth breaking the economy of the towns they visit.

In the 1300s Mansa Musa was the King the extremely rich country of Mali, in western Africa. When he went on the a pilgrimage to Mecca he managed to spend and give away so much money that he massively changed the price of gold in the regions he passed through.

Quoth Wikipedia:
"Musa's generous actions inadvertently devastated the economy of the regions through which he passed. In the cities of Cairo, Medina, and Mecca, the sudden influx of gold devalued the metal for the next decade. Prices on goods and wares greatly inflated. To rectify the gold market, on his way back from Mecca, Musa borrowed all the gold he could carry from money-lenders in Cairo, at high interest."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_I_of_Mali#Islam_and_pilgrimage_to_Mecca

So this is pretty much what happens whenever a bunch of PCs show up with a dragons hoard...

Pretty much. Its not easy to have the same economy after a huge cash injection. Since the goods produced are the same in amount at least for the time, and the demand more due more household income, inflation is a natural outcome.

[Nupo]

Years ago I went through this thought process, and realized you can't really translate between D&D prices and real life. Some things translate well, but the more you look into it the less it makes sense.

At the same time, for game purposes, I got to wondering how big a gold piece is. This is a little easier to figure. In 1st edition a gp was 1/10 of a pound. That's a really big coin. A Krugerrand isn't even that big at 1/13 of a pound.

In 3rd edition a gp is 1/50 of a pound. That makes it heavier than a US quarter, which is 1/80 of a pound, but if a US quarter was made out of pure gold it would be 1/43.4 of a pound. Most real life gold coins are not pure gold. The above mentioned Krugerrand is 91.67% gold. So assuming D&D gold pieces are not pure gold either, that would make a D&D gp almost exactly the same size as a US quarter.

[Necroticplague]

Years ago I went through this thought process, and realized you can't really translate between D&D prices and real life. Some things translate well, but the more you look into it the less it makes sense.

At the same time, for game purposes, I got to wondering how big a gold piece is. This is a little easier to figure. In 1st edition a gp was 1/10 of a pound. That's a really big coin. A Krugerrand isn't even that big at 1/13 of a pound.

In 3rd edition a gp is 1/50 of a pound. That makes it heavier than a US quarter, which is 1/80 of a pound, but if a US quarter was made out of pure gold it would be 1/43.4 of a pound. Most real life gold coins are not pure gold. The above mentioned Krugerrand is 91.67% gold. So assuming D&D gold pieces are not pure gold either, that would make a D&D gp almost exactly the same size as a US quarter.

Dracomonicon explicitly gives us the dimensions of a GP: it's slightly over an inch across, and about a tenth of an inch thick. That leaves is at roughly twice as big as a quarter, in terms of volume.

[Nupo]

Dracomonicon explicitly gives us the dimensions of a GP: it's slightly over an inch across, and about a tenth of an inch thick. That leaves is at roughly twice as big as a quarter, in terms of volume.If you use that reference and thus make gold 1/3 as dense as it is in real life, there would be a ripple effect all throughout the game. That would make gold very light, not quite as light as aluminum, but a fair bit lighter than silver. Instead I prefer to just ignore that one poorly calculated reference.

[martixy]

It really comes down to buying power

Thank you!

I posit to this thread that this task is both possible and doable. If only 90% of the people here didn't draw false equivalences, it might get somewhere. Like to real-world gold, or modern day salt prices... I mean, really?

Can we please stop drawing absolute comparisons?

What gets you somewhere is determining the relative earning power of various classes vs the price of goods. Too busy ATM to do it myself, but google is your friend.

[5ColouredWalker]

Horses don't fit. $1500 gets a decent riding horse. Even at half value (75gp), the $25,000 for a warhorse is insane, a Clydesdale isn't much more expensive than a riding horse.
But horses used to be your truck/tractor/whatever. Now they are a pure luxury (and we typically don't even eat them when they die, despite being tasty), so the price has fallen a lot.

Not really. War Horses had to be incredibly well trained.
Have you met a horse? They're skittish a f***. A trained Warhorse will charge into a line of soldiers and bite them as it charges through.

Sure, the mule that gets a farmer through the day, or a horse for a messenger, those train easy. Warhorses are an entirely different kettle of fish.

[Elderand]

Some rough estimate put a single GP at about 138 dollars.

From the dmg we can see under upkeep that 45 gp a month covers a common lifestyle inside taverns. Which is noted as being mildly expensive.
Poor is at 12 gp a month and is the basic of basic of traveler accommodations.

We can therefore reasonably estimate that the average upkeep cost for someone not staying at an inn everyday would be somewhere in the middle.
Around 28 gp.

Which is incidentally how much a first level peasant with 4 ranks in profession makes on average

Now looking at lower middle class revenue in the US we can see that is between $32,500 and $60,000.
Which, again, splitting things down the middle give us an average income of $46,250 per year
Divide that by 12 and you get $3,854.17 which is equal to the 28gp

And so you get the value of a gp at $137.65

[stanprollyright]

Real midieval societies based their currencies on the value of silver, which usually remains relatively constant compared to the highly fluctuating value of gold.

Using this (http://dungeons.wikia.com/wiki/Silver_Piece) for reference with today's silver values, 1 sp would be worth ~$5-6, which seems reasonable for a pre-industrialized unskilled day laborer.

HOWEVER, today's silver values don't tell you much about the purchasing power, only the value of the coin itself if you were to sell it today. For purchasing power, it might be better to look at prices under the Roman Empire (https://web.archive.org/web/20130210071801/http://dougsmith.ancients.info/worth.html), which were more standardized. Circa 1 AD, a soldier made ~1 silver denarii a day, which is an easy comparison to 1sp.

[Thurbane]

So, from the varied responses I've read so far, there seem to be three basic approaches:

1. Base it on the actual weight equivalent of 1/50 lb. of gold in the real world.
Issues:
- This breaks comparison rates for other coins (copper, silver, platinum) based on a similar calculation
- An odd reference in Draconomicon throws out the size/weight calculations if included in the process

2. Base it on the earning power of various professions in D&D compared to real world analogues.
Issues:
- massive disparity around the real world of equivalencies in earning power
- allowing for medieval economics and compared to modern day economics

3. Base it on the price of equivalent trade goods or purchasing similar items
Issues:
- similar to point 2, there is massive disparity globally among prices of common items

...am I missing anything significant so far?

[logic_error]

If you find a reliable way to find the transfer cost for gold and goods in 'middle ages' please let me know! Cheers! 😊

[Schattenbach]

...am I missing anything significant so far?

As mentioned before, there's also this ... http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dnd/20061020a




Yet while D&D uses a cash system of gold pieces to determine wealth, d20 Modern uses an abstract system of purchase DCs and wealth checks. By converting a mecha's purchase DC into a gold piece value, you can determine the minimum level a NPC must be in order to possess a particular type of mecha (assuming it's somehow available to them!). This in turn will allow you to determine the level of the encounter. To simplify conversion between the two systems, use the table below:
Mecha
Purchase
DC Gold Piece Value Minimum NPC Level




36 10,000gp 9
37 13,750gp 10
38 17,500gp 11
39 25,000gp 12
40 32,500gp 13
41 45,000gp 14
42 60,000gp 15
43 75,000gp 16
44 100,000gp 17
45 137,500gp 18
46 175,000gp 19
47 250,000gp 20


If I remember right, then the actual D20 Modern/D20 future Dollar values for wealth DCs can be found in the D20 Future? books. It pretty much always ends up as 1gp = 20 dollars (the d20 modern/d20 future dollars) for the wealth DCs listed here.

[Yahzi]

how would you equate the value of 1GP in "the real world"
$100.

1) It's close enough, keeping in mind that D&D communities are 3rd world countries.

2) It's a nice round number. :smallbiggrin:

[Elderand]

You also have to keep in mind that....there is no such thing as a GP.
Like a lot of dnd, it's an abstract system. Not every country will employ the shape or weight of coins, not every price is actually the price listed in the book. It's all been fuzzed up and approximated to standard value for ease of play.

[Guizonde]

disclaimer: i'm no economics major. that said, my dad does work finances and came up years ago with a yardstick rule regarding purchasing power which has helped me somewhat since.

purchasing power differs radically between countries and even cities in the same country. his solution? rather than crunch math, look at the price of a metro ticket. in toulouse, france, that's about 1,60€ for one trip. in paris, iirc it's 2,20€. paris has a stronger purchasing power for the same commodity. london's is ~6€. that makes london a rip-off if you're on a budget. for a typical londonian, however, toulouse's metro system is beyond cheap.

alright, so you don't have a subway system in dnd. what else do you use as a yardstick (instead of being an economics nerd)? a cup of coffee? i don't remember a fixed price for that in dnd, what i do remember is a pint of ale. that's what? 2cp? add another 2 pints, and 3 loaves of bread, and you've got your three square meals a day if you're a laborer (which is kinda sorta equivalent to what most unskilled laborers consumed in the 13th century). that's a grand total of about 12cp per day. that means as a barebones minimum, you need 12% of a gp per day to survive. that's 360 coppers a month, or 3.6 gp excluding rent. let's round that up to 4gp a month for a laborer.

now, we've got our yardstick. 4gp a month as barebones survival. notice i'm not converting the price of a pint to today's standard. in the 13th century, small-beer or wine were the staple drink, not water. a laborer would not be blowing 3€ on bread and 20€ on beer a day (around about the cost where i live). i majored in medieval military history, not economics history, but i do know the books exist for referencing purchasing power in southern france in the 13th century.

what i do know, is that if i'm adventuring and i'm paying more than 2 bits for a pint, i'm either getting ripped off, it's damn good beer, or the city i'm in has a much higher purchasing power than where i was before.

using the yardstick method (which is more than sufficient in your average game), you need to find your yardstick staple, convert the worth from dnd to the equivalent century worth (if you've got black powder, look closer to the 15th century and beyond), then check the reference for today. it's slightly better than an wild guess. not by much though. if you skip that step, you'll end up with crazy inflation worthy of fallout pre-2077. (55$ a pint of beer? really, obsidian/bethesda?) i don't think an unskilled laborer would be able to live and spend 150€'s worth of beer a week. let alone 600€ a month. then again, let's double the figure to account for the price of the bread (yup, 600€ in bread a month. realistic i know). you've got 1200€ in food, without rent. let's round that up to 1600€, which is a very good salary where i live to account for rent. that's 4gp? divide by four and i come up with the same figure as you guys, about 400€ for a gp. i know it's off, but the method seems sound, if completely arbitrary.

[Lazymancer]

purchasing power differs radically between countries and even cities in the same country. his solution? rather than crunch math, look at the price of a metro ticket. in toulouse, france, that's about 1,60€ for one trip. in paris, iirc it's 2,20€. paris has a stronger purchasing power for the same commodity. london's is ~6€. that makes london a rip-off if you're on a budget. for a typical londonian, however, toulouse's metro system is beyond cheap.
It's called Big Mac index.



i don't remember a fixed price for that in dnd, what i do remember is a pint of ale. that's what? 2cp? add another 2 pints, and 3 loaves of bread, and you've got your three square meals a day if you're a laborer (which is kinda sorta equivalent to what most unskilled laborers consumed in the 13th century). that's a grand total of about 12cp per day. that means as a barebones minimum, you need 12% of a gp per day to survive.
Why not take the wages, my upper-case deficient friend?

I mean, you can't be certain if 2 cp is what peasants actually pay for pint of ale, or if that is the price reserved for ripping off outsiders (adventurers). But, regardless of how you compute it, daily wage (3 gp/month) cannot go below sustenance level - it's guillotine time, if it does.

[Guizonde]

It's called Big Mac index.



Why not take the wages, my upper-case deficient friend?

I mean, you can't be certain if 2 cp is what peasants actually pay for pint of ale, or if that is the price reserved for ripping off outsiders (adventurers). But, regardless of how you compute it, daily wage (3 gp/month) cannot go below sustenance level - it's guillotine time, if it does.

to be fair, i told you i was no economics major :smallbiggrin: didn't know the big mac index by that name or reference. i substitute a pint, since i'm more familiar with that. the end result is the same, if somewhat more personnal.

i hope i was clear in stating that my way was not hard and fast, just a good ballpark estimate. problem is that in order to get a good accurate result, we'd need to run it through an index of purchasing power equivalence 13th vs 21st century. it wouldn't account for magic items, but master-crafted goods did cost a horrendous amount back then. a masterwork sword costing 400gp, or 10 years wages, is not out of question.

(hope the no-caps thing doesn't bug too much people around here. it's been one of my trademarks in the forum-sphere since 2003 as a way of recognizing who i am)

[Florian]

@Guizonde:

Don´t go there, Genosse, or anywhere near it, as the answer to it can only be depressing.
IRL, Adams would put a 12 gauge to his head right now, knowing how we screwed up the ask and demand market mechanics.

We apparently are "neighbors" within the EU, so we must live with the fact that total cost of living is more an artificial and political thing than based on actual market values.

Edit: This is no political comment. It´s just knowing and understanding the difference between France <> Germany <> Poland in regard to the 1GP question.

[Thurbane]

You know, for my own uses, I think either using the d20 modern conversation rate, or the simplified rate of 1GP = $USD 100 is going to be the easiest.

Trying to calculate more realistic or detailed conversions can only lead to massively varying results that virtually no two people will agree on.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions and input.

[Lazymancer]

@Thurbane: yes. $100 = 1 gp is the most intuitive approximation.



Edit: This is no political comment. It´s just knowing and understanding the difference between France <> Germany <> Poland in regard to the 1GP question.
This is a nonsensical comment.

De-industrialized nations are objectively incapable of offering comparative advantage. There is nothing artificial about inability to re-introduce 12-hour workday 7-days a week (as per Adams). If you try to pull it off, you'll get Europe haunted by the old spectre again.

[Guizonde]

@Guizonde:

Don´t go there, Genosse, or anywhere near it, as the answer to it can only be depressing.
IRL, Adams would put a 12 gauge to his head right now, knowing how we screwed up the ask and demand market mechanics.

We apparently are "neighbors" within the EU, so we must live with the fact that total cost of living is more an artificial and political thing than based on actual market values.

Edit: This is no political comment. It´s just knowing and understanding the difference between France <> Germany <> Poland in regard to the 1GP question.

mein deutsch ist horribelen, freund, so i'll reply thusly:

tu as totalement raison, mon camarade! i was trying to explain my way of rationalizing two different economics systems. i'd wager a drink my pint is costlier than yours, whereas your baguette is pricier. screw economics, let's have a drink!

[Mendicant]

Real midieval societies based their currencies on the value of silver, which usually remains relatively constant compared to the highly fluctuating value of gold.

Using this (http://dungeons.wikia.com/wiki/Silver_Piece) for reference with today's silver values, 1 sp would be worth ~$5-6, which seems reasonable for a pre-industrialized unskilled day laborer.

HOWEVER, today's silver values don't tell you much about the purchasing power, only the value of the coin itself if you were to sell it today. For purchasing power, it might be better to look at prices under the Roman Empire (https://web.archive.org/web/20130210071801/http://dougsmith.ancients.info/worth.html), which were more standardized. Circa 1 AD, a soldier made ~1 silver denarii a day, which is an easy comparison to 1sp.

That's a great link, and it points up why trying to assign a stable value to the gp using item prices is fun but futile. There's no reason to expect that even items like bread and sandals that have direct modern equivalents would have stable price relationships.

Most goods are fundamentally much cheaper now because of industrialization and global trade networks. How much they've dropped in price varies, so which good you decide is your benchmark is totally arbitrary.

As opposed to goods, services do not experience quite as dramatic fluctuations in price. Baumol's cost disease says a barber or doctor, for instance, will continue to pull down similar wages relative other workers even as those other worker's productivity goes up. The barber still has to eat, but there's no real way to change her productivity.

In other words, the only way to get an even close to accurate value for the GP vs. a local currency is to tie that GP to wages. Unskilled labor is hard to price because where you live probably requires a minimum wage, a legal intervention that's not really in keeping with the general assumptions of a D&D world.

Skilled labor is sort of weird on the other end, because the rules for hirelings give a minimum wage that doesn't match up at all with the rules for profession and craft. Seriously, somebody who somehow manages a +0 bonus to their profession roll is still going to average ~5 gp per week. I prefer the outcomes from the skills rather than the DMG table. Given the numbers in this (http://medieval.ucdavis.edu/120D/Money.html) list, it seems like a 1/3 ratio for unskilled to skilled is too low even when talking about entry-level craftsmen and professionals. An apprentice armorer or a thatcher's mate was making at *least* 5-6 times what a porter or groom was making, and kitchen servants made even less.

So, using the skill rules, and assuming that a typical 1st level professional or craftsman puts in max ranks and also has some combination of feats, ability modifiers, tools and other circumstantial bonuses that totals to ~+3 (+1 ability and +2 tools, +0 ability and skill focus, etc), he or she is earning around 450 gp per year.

The SRD lists "masons, craftsmen, scribes, teamsters" as its examples of standard "trained hirelings," so I'm going to find analogues for those. Google-fu tells me that in the US, an entry-level trained trucker (teamster) makes an average of 41 grand per year. An entry level mason makes around 36 grand. A highschool teacher's (scribe) starting salary averages around $41,000. A starting elevator mechanic (craftsman) makes 52,000, and a computer programmer (scribe and craftsman hybrid) averages around 50 grand starting. These are all obviously not representative if you live in expensive or cheap areas, but they're close ebough for our purposes. Overall, people working in that "trained hireling" camp start around 44 thousand. Changes your choices for craftsman or scribe and it moves around, but 44 is nicely similar to 450.

A GP is around 100 bucks.

[Ualaa]

In Hero Lab (for the Pathfinder system), 50 of any coin weighs a pound.
There are sixteen ounces in a pound.

50 coins, divided by 16 ounces = 3.125 coins per ounce.
An ounce sells for $1,268.80 USD, right now, according to the first google hit.

Those dollars, divided by 3.126 = $406.016 USD per coin.



As an aside, gold isn't really so much an investment as it is a hedge against inflation.
If you check back throughout history, you can buy a very similar number of loaves of bread with the same quantity of gold.

[Elkad]

In Hero Lab (for the Pathfinder system), 50 of any coin weighs a pound.
There are twelve Troy ounces in a pound.

FTFY. You can redo the rest of the math.

Or just use 9 grams to the gold coin, much easier.
And coins are probably closer to 22k, so knock off another 9%. (yes, this means that a 1lb pure gold bar is actually worth more than 50gp if you struck it into coins. Assume the moneychanger fee eats that.)
8.25 grams each. Minus whatever the dishonest people shaved off.


And there is one more thing we've mostly neglected to cover. Who says a D&D pound is 453.6ish grams? Weights and Measures were pretty arbitrary for a long time.
Or that gravity is the same?

[Desiani]

I posted this a week or three ago about someone complain about preform income. It really comes down to buying power:

First I think that 1 GP is around 25 USD iirc.

Even if 1 GP is worth 25 modern USD the prices for common commodities is way off. 2 GP is a luxury inn (>$50), a days worth of higher end meals out is only 5 sp (~$10! Good luck eating a meal out ANYWHERE for that now). 1 GP gets you 50 loafs of bread. ~50cents a loaf.

~200GP will get a ~5 star Inn + top tier meals for almost three months. Which is about $5000 USD in income. I doubt most people could live luxuriously for ~$1600 USD today. Essentially if you convert gold to actual modern money your still way off as buying power makes relative wealth in 3.5 worth easily 5-15 times what it is today. This is all of course before you even get into magic items. Even the basic 2 GP/week From a decent profession check by a level 1-2 commoner (100% possible, there is a thread on it) is probably closer to 400-600 USD a week. That is GOOD money.

Taco bell has a great meal value of 5 USD it's like almost 3 pounds of food xD. :p and that is still eating out.

[Mordaedil]

And now we see why we moved from gold standard to fiat currency.

Though the current index price for gold is for gold to be used as jewlery.

[zergling.exe]

Seems that somewhat between 90$ and 120$ is a reasonable value if you ask me. Never thought about converting gp to dollars but I might try to do some maths for a more precise numbers.

Please don't necro year old threads, no matter how badly you want to chip in your 2 cents.

[Ashtagon]

A chicken costs 2 pc.

I'd gladly take two PCs over a chicken. Unless they were monks, of course.