Values of Fictional Treasure

[Afgncaap5]

Most of us (I assume) have looked at some movie or book somewhere and said "Yeah, he's totally the group paladin..." or "Now that's a passed will save right there" or something along those lines. I do this with treasure on occasion and try to figure out a decent gold amount to represent it, but sometimes treasure is described just vaguely enough that I legitimately don't know how to gauge value. Reverse engineering the same treasure into D&D then becomes challenging. So, would you low-ball it and just say "let's assume it's only worth this much"? Would you say "Let's give those players some money!" and crank up the value? Or would you find the mean value between those two extremes?

I suppose the sensible answer is "Well, make it worth however much the players should get for the challenge that the treasure is a reward for" but I think we all know that's no fun.

(Incidentally, this thought exercise has come to me a number of times over the years, generally when I think about the first Zork game and its "twenty treasures". A lot of it is described narratively well without getting into the specifics of just how much you're acquiring. I think the only item that I could definitely price from it would be the "Bar of Platinum" which I believe Draconomicon priced at 500 gold. I mean, there could theoretically be different prices for different sizes of platinum bar, but it feels like a decent starting point.)

[Bronk]

One of the few times this has come up for me was trying to figure out how rich Harry Potter was, aside from just 'very'.

It starts with 'giant pile of gold coins' which sounds great, and we quickly see HP buy out the entire snack cart, which seems pretty cool at the time... at least for a kid.

The problem starts a few books in, when how much a gold galleon will buy starts to fluctuate, and it starts to seem like chump change. I just heard a couple days ago that one of the non big seven books nails the conversion rate to one galleon being equal to $17, which doesn't seem like much for a heavy looking gold coin. Maybe it's mostly filler, like Ankh-Morporkian coins? Luckily, they never really pin down how much Harry's family has to begin with, beyond 'enough to buy out a successful hair care company' or if it's all in the same bank vault, or if the bank vault had extentions, and so on, so I can't get too worked up about it.

[Afgncaap5]

I'd be comfortable with a galleon as being worth either a silver or a gold in D&D, really. Upper end for one, lower end for another.

And if someone wanted to run a D&D game in the Harry Potter world, making galleon's the gold equivalent would probably be the most convenient method.

[JoshuaZ]

The inconsistency of the Harry Potter coinage has been discussed and grappled with in some amusing ways in a lot of fanfiction. The two most obvious examples are "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (http://www.hpmor.com/)" and "The Arithmancer (https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10070079/1/The-Arithmancer)" (which are both worth reading aside from the economics).

That said, the economics of Harry Potter are really not consistent in general. Even adjusting treasure values for worlds with more consistency is tough to do in a balanced and reasonable fashion. Doing so with Harry Potter is tougher. If one does need to do so, pick something that makes sense for your campaign and doesn't create too many headaches and just use that.

[BowStreetRunner]

The economics of Harry Potter is demonstrative of the real challenge behind attempting to assign value to treasure in works of fiction. The real value of any fictional treasure is PLOT - whatever the story requires the value to be. Take the Maltese Falcon as a prime example. It is one of the archetypal mcguffins you hear discussed. No one ever knows its real value or why everyone wants it so much, and it really doesn't matter to the plot.

In D&D the value of treasure which the PCs acquire and are able to convert into resources over the course of the campaign should normally remain within the Wealth by Level guidelines laid out in the DMG. However, there are certainly exceptions to this. Treasure that the PCs acquire but are never able to truly incorporate into their personal wealth (i.e. they recover the crown jewels for the king as part of a quest) should have a value of PLOT. Likewise, if the DM needs them to have a certain amount of wealth temporarily (i.e. the players are going to be swindled or robbed and the DM is padding their WBL so that the story-line theft doesn't dent their actual WBL) then the value of that wealth should be PLOT.