How Much Is That Warhorse In The Window? – Pricing Of Goods in D&D
It doesn’t take much more than a quick flip through the pages of “…And A 10-foot Pole” to realise that it’s an extensively-researched volume. Aside from breaking history into twelve periods covering everything from the stone age (prior to 9000 BC) to the information age (1980+), it divides commodities into standardised categories and gives prices for each item in a common currency, that used for I.C.E.’s Rolemaster (except for modern eras, which use US$) – in fact, it’s even more extensive than I remembered when I reviewed it for inclusion in my top-20 3.x supplements. And on top of that, it lists Weights, has an Availability subsystem, gives the manufacturing time, and illustrates many thousands of products. Heck, how many RPG supplements do you know of that have 24 referance books listed in the Bibliography – how many even have a bibliography, if it comes to that!? (You can click on the cover illustration below to be taken to the Amazon purchase page for the supplement in a new window).
It should come as no surprise, then, that one of the priority items on my to-do list when I set aside my TORG campaign (due to waning interest and availability of players), and dusted off plans for my first D&D campaign in over a decade, was to work out a conversion system to permit me to replace the one-size-fits-all-eras price list in the PHB (it’s been over a decade since that decision was made, and I’m now GMing more D&D campaigns than non-D&D, so I must have done something right when I made that decision!)
Since others might want to do the same thing, or might want to adapt the procedure to some other referance volume, I thought I would use this blog to explain what I did, why it didn’t work, and how I got around the problems, concluding with the conversion rates in use in my Fumanor Campaign. In a follow-up blog, I’ll describe the coinage that I use in that campaign and list some of the tricks that I use to keep my hair from going grey while enhancing the realism of the coinage system, and that you can use too. But that’s for later…
When Is Right Now, Anyway?
The first decision that had to be made was what era the game was in. I didn’t want black-powder weapons, so that established a pre-gunpowder era. The campaign was set in a fallen Empire that was struggling to emerge from a sudden dark age initiated by the slaughter of most of the Gods and most of the population 100 years earlier, so I decided that the empire had been on the verge of gunpowder but the fall from enlightenment had cost them close to 100 years of progress.
So I looked up the sections on Typical Weapons for the different eras and found the earliest firearms in the “Renaissance” chapter, p85. This chapter therefore identified the technology level of the Old Empire, falling just short of the invention of these weapons. That in turn defined the preceeding chapter as the technological setting of the inner regions (“The Middle Ages”) while the chapter prior to that identified the “Dark Ages” as the technological standard in the outer regions.
While more realistic, I don’t think I’d do it that way again, it made for too much work. Far better to pick an era from “10-foot pole” and simply tag anything not listed in the previous chapter of the referance as being a “lost technology” not available in the outer regions. In fact, when that first campaign concluded and the sequel campaigns began, I quietly updated the setting to an entirely “Middle Ages” standard.
The failure of the obvious
The Rolemaster system uses a coinage system with eight different denomenations of coin: Mithril, Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze, Copper, Tin, and Iron. Each of these is worth 10 of the next denomenation, enabling a price like “123456.78” to be read directly as “1 Mithril, 2 Gold, 3 Silver,” and so on. There are clear advantages to such a decimal system.
Until you know of the decimalisation of the Rolemaster currency, the obvious solution is simply to equate “1gp” in the D&D system with “1 Gold” in Rolemaster, “1sp” with “1 silver”, and so on. That solution falls apart immediatly when it is realised that the D&D ratios are not the same.
The next obvious solution is to use the Rolemaster solution exclusively; that doesn’t work either, because there are too many things in the game which have no equivalents in the Rolemaster product listing. How much is “+1 armour” worth? How about a Potion Of Healing, or a Ring of Invisibility? What of the gems and jewellery offered as treasures?
The next obvious solution is to pick one of the coin types common to both and define them as being equal in both systems. The question then becomes, which one? In an effort to resolve this question, I examined the prices for half-a-dozen items and commodities common to both sources – lanterns, arrows, swords, chain mail, a meal, and a pack horse. I was hoping for a consensus view, but some of these gave different answers, some didn’t give any satisfactory equivalents at all.
Complicating Factors
Other questions came to mind; while the copper piece is the most common currency in D&D, for many commodities this was still too gross a measure, as many units of a commodity could be purchased for the price of a single copper piece (or a number of copper pieces not divisible by the number of units). Should I equate like with like, or would ‘like with unlike’ yield more useful answers? Should the value of a copper piece be related to that of a tin coin (or a silver coin?) from the Rolemaster system, instead of the more obvious copper to copper?
This was a question complicated by the fact that the campaign in question was designed to be run with AD&D (this was before 3.0 was released) and was actually being run using 2nd edition rules (I was persuaded by my players). That meant that it had “electrum pieces” in between copper and silver. I disliked these intensely because electrum is a naturally-occurring alloy of silver and gold, and for the life of me I couldn’t see why that should place it’s value as a coin where it was. I intended to rename these “Bronze Pieces”, but otherwise retain their value in the coinage heirarchy.
I was also disturbed to realise that one of my primary intended conveniences, the standardisation of coinage, would not be possible in the D&D system, simply because the ratio of values of precious metals by weight was not reflected anywhere close to accurately by the values of D&D coinage.
Still another complicating factor was that the politics of the campaign background was intruding onto the relatively straightforward questions (I’ll go into details in the next blog post on the subject). Suffice it to say that the Old kingdom’s coins had been supplanted by newer currency (as often happened in the Roman Empire when an Emperor died) and a number of sources of social and political tension were at play as a result. This was, in part, a bid to control how much ready currency the characters acquired, something that I discussed in my last blog post, but for the most part it was to give the characters complications to deal with as a way of having them interact with the game world beyond simply finding the nearest dungeon and stripping it down like an unlocked fancy car in a slum neighberhood.
Finally, I wanted to try and provide some coins with more realistic face values. Why should every coin be worth “1” of something? Why not coins in denomenations of “2” or “5”?
The Lowest Common Denomenator
Part of the answer came when I learned that the Romans, to make change, or pay for something that cost less than a complete coin of the lowest denomenation, used to cut up their coins. This meant that I could keep the copper piece as the lowest denomenation if I wanted to.
I resolved a second of the complicating factors by decided to peg the currency conversion to the ‘modern’ coins in the campaign and worry about relationships with the old coins as a seperate issue.
Another complication was resolved be realising that most coins in modern times were adulterated alloys, often bearing no more than superficial appearance to the metals for which they aren named by common usage. Between that fact, and the realisation that coin values in part represented the rarity of a particular precious metal – something that could be intentionally varied relative to ‘real life’ in a game setting – any ratio of values of precious metals necessary could be stated as the de facto reality.
What’s more, the presence of Dwarvish Miners made it all the more likely that there would BE such a variation; rather than weakening the plausibility of the campaign, this could be a subtle tool to enhance it. I would need to assess just how much more common gold and platinum had to be for the currency ratios to fit, but once I had reverse-engineered my way back to that information, I could then reflect it in the use of precious metals for decoration – gold thread in sewing, and in armour inlays, and so on. This meant that the standardisation of coinage, inspired by an article read with great interest in an issue of The Dragon more than a decade earlier, was back on the table.
That left only two complicating factors, the first being what I should tag as the ‘lowest common denomenator,’ and the other being the desiire for more realistic face values. The second was easily dismissed; the very concept of a ‘lowest common denomenator’ meant that all “10-Foot Pole” prices would have to be converted into that coin scale, exchanged for campaign coins, and that price then converted back up the scale to get the number of sp, gp, pp, and so on. Following this logic, and that in the preceeding paragraphs, I could establish the relative value of coins for the campaign as whatever I liked and then return to the initial question.
I also saw the opportunity to enact another change that I felt quite strongly about during this process. Historically, silver coins were the basis of the economy, the largest denomenation currency that any ordinary person ever saw or handled. Gold coins were rare, and ownership of such vast sums was usually ‘transferred’ with drafts from a bank or moneylender or from the royal treasury; these were the origins of banknotes. I wanted gold coins to be as rare as hens teeth, and platinum even moreso; silver was to be the currency of standard in the Fumanor campaign.
You might think that this will make the work that I did back then less valuable to the readers of this blog, unless they enact the same change, and I’ve described exactly how to go about it if you want to do that; but I’ve taken the liberty of doing the work for you, both ways.
Standard D&D
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Fumanor
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If you want to enact this change for yourself, here’s the procedure:
1. Convert character treasuries
- cp stay the same,
- sp are relabelled “bp”,
- extract about 90% of the gp, double the number of coins, and relable them “sp”
- keep the rest of the gp as “gp”,
- and double the number of “pp”.
2. Whenever you see a price or a treasure in an official source in sp, you read bp, whenever you see one in gp, you read sp, and whenever you see one in pp, you read gp.
3. You then have choices to make regarding the values of gems, artworks, and other valuables – either keep the value as written, keep the numeric componant but change the currency type (as for 2), or convert the values. I went with the middle of those three options to be consistant, EXCEPT that my campaign was taking place in a world where magic items were rare and hence more valuable, so those stayed ‘as written’.
4a. Consequences:
- of choice 1: the value of these immediatly doubles in real terms, ie buying power. It becomes twice as expensive to have these made to order. It can become cheaper to pay temple fees for low-level healing than to carry around healing potions.
- of choice 2: values stay the same in terms of number of coins, but the changed relationships of currencies mean that cheap things in the PHB become cheaper relative to things with the value in ‘gp’. This is slightly closer to being historically accurate.
- of choice 3: this is the most work and gives the most accurate conversion. But every price or value you ever see will need to be converted into copper pieces by multiplying by 1000 and then converted back into the new currency, which is a pain.
If I were doing it over…
Much of this stems from the legacy of ‘electrum pieces’ and the coinage conversions of 2nd Ed D&D and of the AD&D that preceeded it. These days, I would start with the 3e currency and do straight label exchanges: “sp” to “bp”, “gp” to “sp”, “pp” to “gp”, and then a new line for “pp” worth 10,000 coppers. It would make life so much easier. In fact, I’m strongly tempted to grandfather this change in – it’s something that I should have done when I converted the campaign to 3.0, but overlooked or decided not to, I forget which. I’ll have to discuss it with my players….
The Fumanor Basis Of Conversion
Getting back to the discussion at hand, I was more or less left back where I had been before all those complicating factors had tried to confuse the issue: with the question of what to peg as the basis of the exchange rate between the campaign and “10-foot Pole”. I was initially tempted to use salt, as that had been the standard currency used historically before coinage came along, but decided that a higher-value commodity would give more accurate results. That also excluded the price of a meal, or a standard night’s lodgings, and left me with a choice between a longsword, a pack horse, and a suit of chain mail.
The next step was to list those prices in detail, in all the different coin sizes:
Standard D&D 3.x | Fumanor | "10-foot Pole" |
1 Longsword = 15 gp: 1.5 pp or 15 gp or 150 sp or 1500 cp |
1 Longsword = 15 sp: 1.5 pp or 7.5 gp or 15 sp or 75bp or 750cp |
1 Longsword = 18 silver: or 0.018 mithril or 0.18 platinum or 1.8 gold or 18 silver or 180 bronze or 1800 copper or 18,000 tin or 180,000 iron |
1 Pack Horse = 75gp: 7.5 pp or 75gp or 750sp or 7,500cp |
1 Pack Horse = 75sp: 7.5pp or 32.5gp or 75sp or 325bp or 3,250cp |
1 Pack Horse = 45 silver: or 0.045 mithril or 0.45 platinum or 4.5 gold or 45 silver or 450 bronze or 4500 copper or 45,000 tin or 450,000 iron |
1 Chain Mail = 150gp: 1.5 pp or 15 gp or 150 sp or 1500 cp |
1 Chain Mail = 150sp: 1.5 pp or 7.5 gp or 15 sp or 75bp or 750cp |
1 Chain Mail = 65 silver: or 0.065 mithril or 0.65 platinum or 6.5 gold or 65 silver or 650 bronze or 6,500 copper or 65,000 tin or 650,000 iron |
Each of these gives radically different conversion standards (NB: this is comparing Fumanor currency with “10-foot pole”. The answers would be different for standard 3.x currency).
The Longsword standard gives a ratio of 75:180 for both copper and bronze, or 5:12, roughly 1:2. It also gives a ratio of 15 to 18 silvers, or 5:6, which isn’t all that far removed from a 1:1 ratio.
The Pack Horse standard gives a ratio of 325:450 for both copper and bronze, or 13:18, roughly 2:3. It also gives a ratio of 75:45 silvers, or 15:9, or 5:3.
The Chain Mail standard gives a ratio of 75:650 for both copper and bronze, or 3:26, roughly 1:8. It also gives a ratio of 15:65 silvers or 3:13, about 1:4.
All of these are potentially viable conversion rates, but by far the easiest to use is the longsword silver pieces rate – it’s so close to being 1:1. Furthermore, the fact that both the PHB (as filtered through ‘Fumanor Eyes’) and “Ten-Foot Pole” both list the price in silver pieces adds a further layer of temptation to the result, enacting the Silver Standard that I desired. So that’s how I worked it for Fumanor:
To convert a price from “10-foot pole”, convert it into sp (if it isn’t already) to get the price in Fumanorian SP.
A Standard D&D 3.x Basis Of Conversion
You only have to run your eye over the price comparisons to realise that the only values that are anywhere numerically close to 1:1 are the sp price in standard D&D for longswords and the bronze piece price from “10-foot pole”. In fact, the 150:180 ratio is exactly the same as the one we simplified to 1:1 when working on the Fumanor Standard. So:
to convert “10-foot pole” prices to standard D&D prices:
1. Convert the “10-foot pole” price into bronze pieces; and,
2. Read that as the price in sp.ie,
- If the price is given in “gp” in 10-Foot Pole, x100 gives the D&D price in sp, or x10 gives the price in gp, or the price can be read directly in pp.
- If the price is given in “sp” in 10-Foot Pole, x10 gives the D&D price in sp, or the price can be read directly in cp.
- If the price is given in “bp” in 10-Foot Pole, it can be read directly as the D&D price in cp.
- If the price is given in “cp” in 10-Foot Pole, 10x as much can be purchased for the D&D price in cp.
- And finally, if the price is given in “tp” in 10-Foot Pole, 100x as much can be purchased for the D&D price in cp.
NB: “10-foot pole” gives no prices in iron pieces for the “Middle Ages”.
Once again, though, if you wish to usea different historical era as the equivalent civilization within your campaign, you will get different prices from “10-Foot Pole”, and a different conversion rate.
Conclusions:
I wish that it had been simpler; it wasn’t. I wish that the authors of the various editions of D&D had been consistant in their definitions of currency; they weren’t. I wish that they had historically-consistant pricing of goods; they don’t.
I suspect that the authors tried to be too generic, too one-era-fits-all, when compiling the equipment price list in the PHB; there are too many details of armour types and other historical information for them not to have researched the prices. In part, there may have been a “this feels right” allocation of prices, but I prefer to think that they did their research but failed to render a consistant picture through a failure to place the price lists they found into context.
But that’s precisely why a more detailed and researched volume like “…and a 10-Foot Pole” is so useful, even today, a decade after its initial publication, and for ANY roleplaying system.
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August 10th, 2009 at 10:33 am
In my game, I did away with the copper piece. Too much bookkeeping.
(this is supposed to illustrate the vast differences between our DMing styles, while still being respectful)
August 10th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
Ancient and Medieval economics only remotely resemble what we have today. The real issue is how much will your players put up with!
I use authentic prices lists for as much of my economy as possible – they’re easy to find on the internet.
But price lists only
August 10th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Sorry, cut myself off
Part of the problem is that things that are quite cheap in our economy (clothing for example) were hideously expensive in the pre-industrial world. Did you know that historically, 20 arrows cost the same as a longbow?
But price lists are only part of the picture. In most societies you would trade favors or do payment in kind for services or goods. Using the longbow example, it took 3 YEARS to make one – most of that time, of course, was the wood seasoning in a drying shed. Ya didn’t just bend a stick!
Myself, I pulled an idea from John Vigor’s book “The Seaworthy Offshore Sailboat” (my other obsession): I set the basic unit of money as equivelent to one beer, or one standard loaf of bread (About $2 to $3 these days). The smallest unit of coinage is 1/10 of this.
August 10th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
@ pachristian:
Yeah, it can definitely be hard for modern players to get themselves into the proper mindset, they are so used to modern industrialisation. The amount of timber they used to need for the casting of swords and iron implements is staggering. One adult tree yielded enough charcoal to smelt enough iron for one small statue or a dagger. A couple of pounds of cast iron – about right for a few swords – used an acre of forest.
August 11th, 2009 at 7:15 am
D&D is a fantasy game not a historically accurate learning experience. Figuring out the historical price of items based on real-world history isn’t going to contribute much to a game in terms of overall enjoyment. Time spent figuring it out historically accurate prices could be better used to craft an awesome adventure, plot-twist, character goal, etc.
In addition Rampaging dragons, powerful undead, beholders, and kobolds never appeared in history. Should we eliminate them from our games? No, because these non-historical things are what make this game exciting.
To conclude, D&D is played differently by different people. My advice is to forget about being historically accurate and get back to having fun with your friends/family. Isn’t that what D&D is all about?
August 11th, 2009 at 10:13 am
While I agree with the premise of your statement, I disagree with your conclusions, Adam. Yes, D&D is a fantasy game with many fantastic elements; to my mind, that only means that the non-fantastic elements should at least be within walking distance of historical accuracy just to make the game feel plausible. Without that, it’s hard for players to lose themselves within the game.
The object isn’t to contribute directly to the enjoyment of the game; it’s to help the game world “make sense” to the players, so that the more fantastic elements remain wondrous, and so enhance the enjoyment that those elements of the game provide.
August 11th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
@ Mike:
I respectfully disagree with the idea that taking the time to figure out the historically accurate price of an item makes the game world “Make sense” to the players therefore enhancing the more fantastic elements of the game. To me and my group of players the price of an item is just as abstract of a concept as Hit Points and exp. We don’t worry about why a barbarian has 12hp or why 1000 exp makes us 2nd level or why a dagger cost 2gp. These are simply underlying game mechanics that must be dealt with as we move the story along. Rarely does the price of an item come up in-game.
To me the extra time spent converting prices from arbitrary PHB prices into more reality based historical prices doesn’t grant that much of a benefit given the amount of time and energy spent on the task. Besides, most players wouldn’t know the differance anyhow.
August 11th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
This is why an abstract system like Burning Wheel’s Resources works well. It eliminates “bean counting” in favour of a broader idea that allows you to create fiction around buying/selling.
.-= Rafe´s last blog ..Luke Crane mentions Realm Guard! =-.
August 11th, 2009 at 9:09 pm
@Adam: I love it when people have a legitimate disagreement with me on a point like this, because it shows that no-one has all the answers or “the perfect formula”, and generally leads to really interesting conversations. My approach works with my group, and from what you’ve written, your approach works with yours. In part, this comes down to the players, in part to the relative strengths and weaknesses of the GM, and in part it’s due to the environment in which you game, something I intend to address in a future blog post. Suffice it to say for now that the environment in which my group operates is full of real-world distractions, making it harder for the group to ‘get into the game’, and anything that helps even a little in that respect is thoroughlly merited; that as a GM, designing “kick-ass” adventures comes fairly naturally to me and can often be done on the spot without the players being able to tell the difference, and that my players are anaraks who do notice these details – some of them have been at my table for more than 20 years, and one teaches History for a living. Also that my players like to have the campaign background dribbled out to them in ‘bite-sized’ chunks, instead of in big meaty slices.
I’m not sure whether that means that you got lucky when they were handing out players, or I did! Six-of-one and half-a-dozen of the other, I suspect; but the differences between gaming groups do create different standards of expectation in different areas of the game. Satisfying those expectations is the challenge faced by all GMs.
But, as a general principle, the more fantastic and high-fantasy the game, the more valuable it can be to anchor it to reality at one or two points, just to provide a common frame of referance.
@Rafe: Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve never looked at Burning Wheel’s Resources system; where is it written up (what book or website?) Maybe you could do a summary on your blog (I suspect it may be of interest to others, such as Adam, as well as to myself) and then drop a link into this discussion so we could all stop by and take a look?
August 12th, 2009 at 9:25 am
Hey, Mike. The post about the abstract wealth system that BW uses has been made on my blog. The link should be just below this main text.
.-= Rafe´s last blog ..Abstract Wealth =-.
August 12th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Thanks, Rafe. I just read it; you explain it fairly well, at least to someone who’s played plenty of board games. While it wouldn’t fit any of my current campaigns, I’ll have to try adapting it to D&D (where you don’t expend character construction points) at a future time. I’ll also have to think long and hard about whether it’s a better system than the rather more complicated one partially devised for my superhero game, which is based on a completely customised version of the hero system rules, where it could make a lot of sense in a superhero context.
August 25th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Wow … umm … I think the debate between Adam and Mike has pretty much taken care of anything I might have added. Once upon a time I used to try and make sensible, functional monetary and economic systems for my D&D settings, I would work out bestiaries and religious orders, calendars, holy days, detailed histories, detailed lists of items …
… but I have to admit I’ve never really found all that work to make much of a difference to the quality of our games. Especially considering how much work it took. So I tossed it all out, left a large part of the idea-making to the PCs and embarked on a more “interactive story-telling” approach.
I know you argue for “anchoring” through believable details, but I think going into such detail on money is just too … arcane. We usually anchor our game world through real-politik, horrible human failings, monty python humour and the like. Different strokes for different folks.
:)
.-= Lukc´s last blog ..Thought: Those Who Enjoy [Be]moaning =-.
August 25th, 2009 at 10:34 pm
Nice to hear from a different perspective, Lukc. I agree, ‘arcane’ coinage details are only one of a number of different ways to ground a campaign’s plausibility, and not one that I would ever have chosen if I didn’t have access to “10-Foot Pole,” which had done so much of the work already. With that volume at hand, though, all that was needed was a little thought and a conversion mechanism; it took me longer to write the Blog post than it did to carry out the work it describes! And that’s why I thought the post of potential interest to others; with both the supplement and myself doing the heavy lifting, what might have been far too much work for a GM to contemplate for limited returns becomes a practical and practicable approach.
Make no mistake, you and I are using the same primary weapons to anchor our campaigns, but they are weapons that only become effective once players have gotten their heads into the campaign, learnt the factions and their positions, and generally immersed themselves in the campaign for a while. I wanted a tool to use to convey some of that information early in the campaign, even before play, but with a relatively ‘tangible’ ongoing reminder.
It even produced a pythonesque running gag for a short while, as stamping errors and poor production quality gave the faces on the coins slightly different expressions; one PC became very superstitious, drawing at random from his coin pouch each time a plan was proposed and assessing whether or not the Gods smiled on the plan by whether or not they got a ‘happy face’ or a ‘frowning face’!
August 26th, 2009 at 6:52 am
You give a lot of detail! I have studied different articles written by other people on the subject, and must admit that your experiencea showed and made your points compelling.
November 7th, 2013 at 4:11 pm
i must agree that a basis in reality is fundamental to having a good game. for example in my current campaign there are two city-states going to war, each is seeking allies. i track the troop strength of all the armies involved. city A has more ‘soldiers’ but city B has more ‘myth units’ (giant eagles). each potential ally can contribute so many troops, myth units or heroes. the pc’s have a good idea of their strength and their enemies and can see just what each ally can bring to the table. intelligence reports are also very important to this style. if i did not track this much of the sense of urgency and accomplishment would be lost. they’d feel like i arbitrarily decided who won the battles. they would feel a lack of control and understanding. the same applies to money and anything else in the game. give them understanding and give them control. one is meaningless without the other.
November 7th, 2013 at 7:12 pm
Exactly right, David. Of course, in the game you describe, secret allies and misinformation/counterintelligence would also be serious subjects for the GM to contemplate. Just look at the impact of the Pact Of Steel on the shape of World War II.
December 19th, 2013 at 6:55 pm
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September 23rd, 2014 at 1:00 am
[…] and converting the “middle ages” prices to standard 3.x using the process outlined in How Much Is That Warhorse In The Window? – Pricing Of Goods in D&D, I get 8.5sp per sheet, 6.5sp per sheet, and 8sp per sheet for paper, parchment, and vellum, […]