I keep seeing the same idea come up in the AD&D training cost thread. The prevailing sentiment seems to be that some kind of money sink is necessary. Some way to get gold out of the hands of the player characters. This is sage wisdom and goes unquestioned.
Why?
If you don't have some mechanism for removing the wealth the player characters have obtained in their adventures, they will ruin the game by... fill in the blank
I don't know!
I don't consider it a problem. But then again I don't have Ye Olde Magick Shoppe for players to clean out and potentially break the game.
Like I said in the other thread, I provide opportunities to buy properties, titles (with holdings and duties attached), ships, and anything else that was normally for sale in the 13th to 16th centuries.
It is also very hard to keep a fortune of gold safe and secure.
AD&D assumes taxes, training costs, hirelings, etc.
Get rid of that and the PCs will soon be wealthy beyond belief.
This is not necessarily a problem, especially if you then go to domain management and they spend their money os castles, etc.
But simply carrying lots of gold is not a thing most fantasy heroes do. They only get wealthy if they get the appropriate titles of nobility. Elric, Conan, Aragorn, John Carter, etc.
My PCs considered retiring at level 6 once, but then decided against it. They gave their money to a "banker" (at 10% cost) they trust because it was too heavy.
Quote from: Corolinth on February 07, 2024, 11:02:12 AM
If you don't have some mechanism for removing the wealth the player characters have obtained in their adventures, they will ruin the game by... fill in the blank
Retiring.
Besides levelling up way faster?
Here's another argument for having things cost money:
Immersion, how the fuck do your PCs get paid if ANYONE can get the training for free?
Why would an animal handler teach you for free? You might then cut into his market share, thus cutting the money he needs to keep his family alive.
Don't get me wrong, people are free to play in a communist utopia if they like, IDGAFF, but then it's not D&D anymore.
Money is supposed to be the reward for adventuring. Something that's just a number on your character sheet is pretty boring. Money should be usable for something fun.
Also retiring.
I dunno, just put some magic items for sale or allow the PCs to do domain stuff. Both of those were the money sinks long ago when I ran those games. I think a lot of people don't like those two things, so they ban those and try to turn the money into something else.
Edit: missed a "don't" as in "don't like", which made my post not greatly coherent.
I don't have a problem with the concept of training and associated costs but the amounts for training as written almost always leave adventurers having to adventure for more cash without getting xp for it because they can't gain any more until they actually gain the level. This is especially problematic for low xp classes such as clerics and thieves at lower levels.
Quote from: Exploderwizard on February 07, 2024, 02:47:17 PM
I don't have a problem with the concept of training and associated costs but the amounts for training as written almost always leave adventurers having to adventure for more cash without getting xp for it because they can't gain any more until they actually gain the level. This is especially problematic for low xp classes such as clerics and thieves at lower levels.
So, by what percentage would you lower the training costs?
I'm not asking anyone to justify training costs. There is already a thread about that.
Why does a game need a money sink? What breaks if player characters amass lots of wealth?
I think a training cost is fine, however I do not use it as a money sink. I make it 100/level period and its done. Thousands per level is insane IMO. I am not a fan of a money sink. If you want to play a more sword and sorcery vibe there are games that simulate that better than AD&D IMO (GURPS and even the Conan game with 3.5 rules) and then wealth is burnt by bad decisions by the character. Which is realistic IMO people who live for adrenaline (IRL professional athletes, especially fighers) often BURN up cash all the time chasing the feeling they have when competing/doing their adrenaline activity and find themselves broke pretty fast if the money stops coming in.
I do not think AD&D ever really was sword and sorcery though, it was always more its own thing and the characters are almost always motivated by financial reward (even the Paladin who can only have as much wealth as he can carry on a horse has EXCELLENT gear and weapons and burns money like crazy on gear and upgrades) and it would make sense at some point the characters amass a bit of wealth. Protecting it can present a problem and IMO is a better in game mechanic to remove wealth...after all if you get rich enough at some point your manor will become some other group (evil or neutral) of adventurers "Dungeon" to be explored and looted.
I prefer to have the players look to spend on things they want and in the form of hirelings and henchmen there is a perfect mechanic to burn extra cash. Add in building some form of home or base that is fortified and maintained and its pretty easy to keep players using their money to constantly upgrade their lifestyle rather than looking for ways to suck money away from them. If they prefer to just stack money in a vault...I am fine with that too.
I would add this...putting some material advantage into using your money like a slight increase in a reaction check with a possible quest giver/lord/npc for having a set of gear/armor that is very appealing to the eye (enameled armor, exquisite engraving/inlays on armor and shields, gems in pommels of swords, etc) will drive players to consider making themselves look more like gold chased heroes instead of murder hobos in dirty gear...and as a side deal find a useful and fun way to use the rewards they have gained.
Quote from: Corolinth on February 07, 2024, 02:54:47 PM
I'm not asking anyone to justify training costs. There is already a thread about that.
Why does a game need a money sink? What breaks if player characters amass lots of wealth?
The main issue with players having to too much money in the first place is that most DMs today don't use the original rules and don't give out XP for the full cash value of magic items. If you do give XP for magic items, you won't need to stock your dungeons with nearly as much cash in the first place.
From what I've seen, most DMs want their PCs to be broke because it is much easier to run a campaign that way. In fact, many new game rules include some sort of method, such as "carousing," precisely to keep their PCs money hungry. The reason for this is that it is trivial to set an adventure hook up as "someone want to pay the party to do X". Without the need for money, DMs will need to come up with more creative reasons for getting the PCs off their proverbial couches.
Coming up with ways to motivate the PCs or allowing the PCs to come up with their own adventure ideas both require more work on the part of the DM. That's what "breaks" the game.
Quote from: Corolinth on February 07, 2024, 02:54:47 PM
I'm not asking anyone to justify training costs. There is already a thread about that.
Why does a game need a money sink? What breaks if player characters amass lots of wealth?
Depends on the campaign. Most old school campaigns don't let you buy even magic consumables, much less magic items. So the adventurers just get all this gold, and then throw it away or make a money bin. After even extravagant living expenditures, most adventurers will be rolling in cash. I remember having characters with hundreds of thousands of GP sitting on their character sheet, even after training and magic research and material components, and carousing.
So long as you don't let them buy magic items, nothing really breaks, except maybe when the players realize that xp for treasure is kinda silly and gold is valueless to adventurers past a minimum of upkeep.
Quote from: Ratman_tf on February 07, 2024, 03:17:03 PM
I remember having characters with hundreds of thousands of GP sitting on their character sheet, even after training and magic research and material components, and carousing.
How much does 100k gp weigh and where are you storing it? That's a king's ransom, my friend. Better build some sort of underground labyrinth to store it. Pay some monsters to guard it. You can even build a tomb down there, so you can be near it when you die.
The players aren't going to ruin anything by being hyperwealthy since the D&D economy is stupid if you take it too seriously.
It's not like a money sink is a requirement. However, if you:
1. Want to give out large sums of money, and
2. Want to use pseuo-medieval, quasi-historic prices, and
3. Have players actually care about the cost of things.
Then your options are rather limited. You need a way to remove some of that gold that is coming in. Or you need some crazy inflated costs on things for them to buy (that they really want). Or you need to move the game into the "volume purchasing" area, which is kind of what building castles and domains and hiring armies does (amongst other things). Or something along those lines.
If you don't care about all three of the items on that list, then none of the latter stuff matters all that much (absent some other reason that is pushing it back to the forefront).
Finally, "money sink" is the game description of the process where this problem gets addressed. In the setting, it's a whole lot better if whatever you use for the sink is:
1. Relevant to the setting, and seems to fit.
2. Actually does the job on pulling money out of the campaign.
3. Serves other purposes besides just being a transparent sink.
Given some care and thought, "money sinks" are never just sinks, but are a natural outgrowth of a consistent setting.
It would be rather stupid to only value training costs for their money sink effect and keep them for that reason alone, not caring about anything else involved. A GM would be far better served to find another option. However, if you like training costs for other reasons, the money sink effect is a nice bonus.
Steven Mitchell (depending on how fast I type he's post above me), had a good point in that thread too: the part that sucks is the lack of options. You wanna level, you pay up.
I reread the rule and I think it makes sense. Yeah it's odd to give all that gold and then find ways to take it away, but it makes sense. You gotta give out gold so the players can level up, but you can't have them be too wealthy or they won't really have a reason to keep exploring and adventuring. The fighter might have 2,000gp after adventuring, but he's about to spend 1,500 of it to level up, which leaves him with 500gp for new equipment and hiring henchmen. But now he's got better stuff, which makes the adventuring go easier which means he keeps more, etc. I get the idea, but like Steven said: there's no options.
I agree with the others that said I should at least try it first before modding it, I mean that's how I generally run my games, I just wasn't sure about it. I have experience with 2e, but that game generally doesn't use gold = xp so you have less anyway.
That said, I like the idea of foregoing paying a trainer to save money, but you also take longer to level up. Something else I'd be curious to know is how Weapon Mastery and other secondary options could work in as a side to training. To explain, in BECMI you had the weapon mastery rules which required time and money to train, and in the end you got some sort of bonus in combat with your weapon of choice. I can already tell it was a way to get players to spend their money in order to directly upgrade themselves and increase survival odds. I honestly wouldn't mind trying to implement that into AD&D, but perhaps modify the weapon mastery rules to make them a bit more generic: bonus to-hit, bonus to weapon speed, and maybe a bonus to damage. Maybe even allow some weapons outside of class, but only to a certain point of mastery. Perhaps thieves can learn to use bows, but only to the very basics; they can't specialize since it's not a class weapon.
Another idea I really liked is the Glantri Schools of Magic. You spend an obscene amount of gold to access one of seven schools of magic, which give you special abilities you can use x times per day/week/month plus all the clout you can roleplay with it. It's sort of the same idea, and you can take it as far as you want to.
I like that sort of stuff in games and I know my players like it too. You're not forced to spend the gold to get those bonuses, but you can and if you do you're rewarded for it. It's not like it's cheap either: just to learn the basic skill level for a weapon is 1 week of training and 700gp. I guess I just wish there was more of that rather than paying 1,500gp. Almost as if you could keep your money, but divert it somewhere else like henchmen or buying some property or better equipment, etc.
Quote from: rytrasmi on February 07, 2024, 03:57:19 PM
Quote from: Ratman_tf on February 07, 2024, 03:17:03 PM
I remember having characters with hundreds of thousands of GP sitting on their character sheet, even after training and magic research and material components, and carousing.
How much does 100k gp weigh and where are you storing it? That's a king's ransom, my friend. Better build some sort of underground labyrinth to store it. Pay some monsters to guard it. You can even build a tomb down there, so you can be near it when you die.
Conversion into gems is the usual answer to that, if it didn't come in that way, which it usually did. And with all that cash, hiring guards and building a fortress is no problem. Though any low level mooks dumb enough to try and rob a party of (say) 9th level adventurers is gonna get what they deserve. High level adversaries usually have bigger fish to fry.
Quote from: Ratman_tf on February 07, 2024, 07:11:10 PM
Quote from: rytrasmi on February 07, 2024, 03:57:19 PM
Quote from: Ratman_tf on February 07, 2024, 03:17:03 PM
I remember having characters with hundreds of thousands of GP sitting on their character sheet, even after training and magic research and material components, and carousing.
How much does 100k gp weigh and where are you storing it? That's a king's ransom, my friend. Better build some sort of underground labyrinth to store it. Pay some monsters to guard it. You can even build a tomb down there, so you can be near it when you die.
Conversion into gems is the usual answer to that. And with all that cash, hiring guards and building a fortress is no problem. Though any low level mooks dumb enough to try and rob a party of (say) 9th level adventurers is gonna get what they deserve. High level adversaries usually have bigger fish to fry.
Guards are a weak link. So don't forget to hire guards to guard against the guards.
Gems are a good choice. Art and titles have also worked well for me. I have a simple renown mechanic that works with donations as well as heroic deeds, and some players enjoy wasting money on prestige.
The end game is normally building a castle or thieves guild or whatever and that requires a lot of cash. So the money sink idea is not to bankrupt them, but to keep them hungry for more treasure.
Quote from: rytrasmi on February 07, 2024, 07:22:50 PM
Quote from: Ratman_tf on February 07, 2024, 07:11:10 PM
Quote from: rytrasmi on February 07, 2024, 03:57:19 PM
Quote from: Ratman_tf on February 07, 2024, 03:17:03 PM
I remember having characters with hundreds of thousands of GP sitting on their character sheet, even after training and magic research and material components, and carousing.
How much does 100k gp weigh and where are you storing it? That's a king's ransom, my friend. Better build some sort of underground labyrinth to store it. Pay some monsters to guard it. You can even build a tomb down there, so you can be near it when you die.
Conversion into gems is the usual answer to that. And with all that cash, hiring guards and building a fortress is no problem. Though any low level mooks dumb enough to try and rob a party of (say) 9th level adventurers is gonna get what they deserve. High level adversaries usually have bigger fish to fry.
Guards are a weak link. So don't forget to hire guards to guard against the guards.
Like I said, pissing off a party of adventurers, especially if they pay well and treat their hirelings well, is usually not a healthy choice.
And if some guard snags a handful of gold, man, who's going to miss it? The stuff is everywhere.
Quote from: Ratman_tf on February 07, 2024, 07:11:10 PM
Quote from: rytrasmi on February 07, 2024, 03:57:19 PM
Quote from: Ratman_tf on February 07, 2024, 03:17:03 PM
I remember having characters with hundreds of thousands of GP sitting on their character sheet, even after training and magic research and material components, and carousing.
How much does 100k gp weigh and where are you storing it? That's a king's ransom, my friend. Better build some sort of underground labyrinth to store it. Pay some monsters to guard it. You can even build a tomb down there, so you can be near it when you die.
Conversion into gems is the usual answer to that, if it didn't come in that way, which it usually did. And with all that cash, hiring guards and building a fortress is no problem. Though any low level mooks dumb enough to try and rob a party of (say) 9th level adventurers is gonna get what they deserve. High level adversaries usually have bigger fish to fry.
I find it hard to accept that reasoning when that's exactly the type of adventure the PC's are doing all the time.
Quote from: rytrasmi on February 07, 2024, 11:33:23 AM
I don't know!
I don't consider it a problem. But then again I don't have Ye Olde Magick Shoppe for players to clean out and potentially break the game.
Like I said in the other thread, I provide opportunities to buy properties, titles (with holdings and duties attached), ships, and anything else that was normally for sale in the 13th to 16th centuries.
It is also very hard to keep a fortune of gold safe and secure.
The last sentence, says what I was thinking. Unless they can store their haul away in a pocket dimension; how successful can they possibly be, at hanging on to it? If they place it in some type of bank, instant taxes are going to be assessed; and the bank might even get robbed and lose it all. They don't have any supposed FDIC protection.
Quote from: GeekyBugle on February 07, 2024, 02:52:13 PM
Quote from: Exploderwizard on February 07, 2024, 02:47:17 PM
I don't have a problem with the concept of training and associated costs but the amounts for training as written almost always leave adventurers having to adventure for more cash without getting xp for it because they can't gain any more until they actually gain the level. This is especially problematic for low xp classes such as clerics and thieves at lower levels.
So, by what percentage would you lower the training costs?
Not quite sure by how much but from an economic perspective there really wouldn't be any adventurers over 6th level or so in the world. With training fees being what they are everyone would just open a school and train others instead of adventuring past that point. With just a handful of students they could make more money than they could adventuring without any risk.
Quote from: Mishihari on February 08, 2024, 03:42:20 AM
Quote from: Ratman_tf on February 07, 2024, 07:11:10 PM
Quote from: rytrasmi on February 07, 2024, 03:57:19 PM
Quote from: Ratman_tf on February 07, 2024, 03:17:03 PM
I remember having characters with hundreds of thousands of GP sitting on their character sheet, even after training and magic research and material components, and carousing.
How much does 100k gp weigh and where are you storing it? That's a king's ransom, my friend. Better build some sort of underground labyrinth to store it. Pay some monsters to guard it. You can even build a tomb down there, so you can be near it when you die.
Conversion into gems is the usual answer to that, if it didn't come in that way, which it usually did. And with all that cash, hiring guards and building a fortress is no problem. Though any low level mooks dumb enough to try and rob a party of (say) 9th level adventurers is gonna get what they deserve. High level adversaries usually have bigger fish to fry.
I find it hard to accept that reasoning when that's exactly the type of adventure the PC's are doing all the time.
Circle of life.
:D This sounds like your RPGs needs the solution of modern accounting business practices like double entry bookkeeping and tax itemization! Tell us how it goes! ;D Be sure to have players fill out VAT invoices in triplicate!
Has anyone considered maybe just handing out less treasure to begin with?
If the idea is to keep the PCs "hungry" then maybe not offering three year's wages per adventurer isn't a good idea?*
Similarly, why are the bandits living in a cave with enough treasure in their stash for all of them to be debauching themselves somewhere for the next month? Why are tombs so loaded down with gold and jewels that you could fund a year long military campaign with what's down there?
Just as an excercise, have the NPC hiring the PCs offer "enough coin to cover a month's worth of food and lodging" instead of a hard number of coins. Describe the value of a treasure as "you could fill your bellies at the tavern for a week with the treasure you just found."
The main reason you need a money sink is the disconnect between the value of a gold piece and real currencies. I know a lot of people who default to 1gp = $1 when it's realistically more like 1 CP = $5.
A 100gp/PC reward is like offering a $200,000+ bounty in the real world. In the United States that's the four times the average ANNUAL salary for a professional bounty hunter (probably the closest equivalent to a PC adventurer).
The only reason you need a money sink is because the cost of normal goods doesn't match the exorbitant inflation of the adventuring rewards. Bringing in a local bandit or killer should offer a reward of 10gp total (bounty hunters are typically paid 10% of the bail amount the jumper skipped on... $50k bail means the bounty hunter brings in $5k or 1000cp = 10gp)... not 100gp per adventurer (and certainly not paid in advance).
So either fix the size of the rewards or the price of normal goods to match the rewards and you no longer need a money sink.
* The average laborer makes 1sp/day, 3gp/month, or 36gp/year. I routinely see adventures where someone offering first level PCs 100gp each to go on the adventure.
Quote from: Jam The MF on February 08, 2024, 03:58:19 AM
Quote from: rytrasmi on February 07, 2024, 11:33:23 AM
Like I said in the other thread, I provide opportunities to buy properties, titles (with holdings and duties attached), ships, and anything else that was normally for sale in the 13th to 16th centuries.
It is also very hard to keep a fortune of gold safe and secure.
The last sentence, says what I was thinking. Unless they can store their haul away in a pocket dimension; how successful can they possibly be, at hanging on to it? If they place it in some type of bank, instant taxes are going to be assessed; and the bank might even get robbed and lose it all. They don't have any supposed FDIC protection.
The usual pirate solution is to bury the gold in an uninhabited place where only the PCs know. That's what the the dwarves did with the trolls' treasure in The Hobbit, for example. In the real world, this is very secure, the problem is just that you're not earning interest on the money.
The GM could come up with excuses to take buried treasure away - like gold-sniffing wandering monsters, but if those are common enough to scour all the wilderness, then the PCs should have a chance to know about them.
Quote from: Chris24601 on February 08, 2024, 10:53:46 AM
Has anyone considered maybe just handing out less treasure to begin with?
If the idea is to keep the PCs "hungry" then maybe not offering three year's wages per adventurer isn't a good idea?*
Similarly, why are the bandits living in a cave with enough treasure in their stash for all of them to be debauching themselves somewhere for the next month? Why are tombs so loaded down with gold and jewels that you could fund a year long military campaign with what's down there?
Just as an excercise, have the NPC hiring the PCs offer "enough coin to cover a month's worth of food and lodging" instead of a hard number of coins. Describe the value of a treasure as "you could fill your bellies at the tavern for a week with the treasure you just found."
The main reason you need a money sink is the disconnect between the value of a gold piece and real currencies. I know a lot of people who default to 1gp = $1 when it's realistically more like 1 CP = $5.
A 100gp/PC reward is like offering a $200,000+ bounty in the real world. In the United States that's the four times the average ANNUAL salary for a professional bounty hunter (probably the closest equivalent to a PC adventurer).
The only reason you need a money sink is because the cost of normal goods doesn't match the exorbitant inflation of the adventuring rewards. Bringing in a local bandit or killer should offer a reward of 10gp total (bounty hunters are typically paid 10% of the bail amount the jumper skipped on... $50k bail means the bounty hunter brings in $5k or 1000cp = 10gp)... not 100gp per adventurer (and certainly not paid in advance).
So either fix the size of the rewards or the price of normal goods to match the rewards and you no longer need a money sink.
* The average laborer makes 1sp/day, 3gp/month, or 36gp/year. I routinely see adventures where someone offering first level PCs 100gp each to go on the adventure.
In my 5e game I'm currently using 1 sp = £5, which is pretty much exactly what 1/50 lb of silver is worth right now. So 1 cp = 50p and 1 gp = £50. This helps me keep monetary rewards sane and spot when a published adventure is way off, like one I just ran was offering PCs 100gp for every CR 1/8 Bandit they killed. I made it 200gp for the whole gang, including the leaders, and rescuing a prisoner.
Quote from: jhkim on February 08, 2024, 12:38:33 PM
Quote from: Jam The MF on February 08, 2024, 03:58:19 AM
Quote from: rytrasmi on February 07, 2024, 11:33:23 AM
Like I said in the other thread, I provide opportunities to buy properties, titles (with holdings and duties attached), ships, and anything else that was normally for sale in the 13th to 16th centuries.
It is also very hard to keep a fortune of gold safe and secure.
The last sentence, says what I was thinking. Unless they can store their haul away in a pocket dimension; how successful can they possibly be, at hanging on to it? If they place it in some type of bank, instant taxes are going to be assessed; and the bank might even get robbed and lose it all. They don't have any supposed FDIC protection.
The usual pirate solution is to bury the gold in an uninhabited place where only the PCs know. That's what the the dwarves did with the trolls' treasure in The Hobbit, for example. In the real world, this is very secure, the problem is just that you're not earning interest on the money.
The GM could come up with excuses to take buried treasure away - like gold-sniffing wandering monsters, but if those are common enough to scour all the wilderness, then the PCs should have a chance to know about them.
Isn't it a myth that pirates buried their treasure? Nothing wrong with using myth, just sayin.
The problem with caching the loot is that, if the place is hard to find, then you probably should write down directions or a map, or at least memorize the directions with a mnemonic like a riddle or song. If you go into the backcountry IRL, trying to find an old spot, even a year or two later, it is easier than it sounds. You could RP the location and if the players forget, then tough luck. Or you could have them create a map, which of course could be stolen. Memorized directions could be discovered by torture or magic. Besides magic, there are also mundane risks, like curious woodsmen and swamp hags, who might have seen a motley crew of dangerous types hiking into the forest with a large load. It's a bit of a catch 22, the more secret the location, the harder it is for you to find later.
So, yeah, risky and very gameable.
Quote from: rytrasmi on February 08, 2024, 12:54:28 PM
Isn't it a myth that pirates buried their treasure? Nothing wrong with using myth, just sayin.
Generally yes, but Captain Kidd actually did so. Barbarian Kings and others have also done so.
The main problem is that the PCs will hire a small army of henchmen and hirelings. In fact, I've heard that the reason the 1E DMG procedure for hiring a henchman is so involved and pitfall-laden is that in the Original Campaign (before 1E) this is exactly what happened. You planned the adventure for a party of six low-level PCs, and now they have another six 1st level PCs following them and helping them!
Even if this doesn't make the adventure into a cakewalk, a good part of the game will be taken up by the supporting NPCs' actions and rolls, and it becomes a team management game instead of a game in which you play a heroic character (or a potentially heroic one anyway).
There's a number of ways you could do up a ratio of coin to modern salaries.
The main one I think of is with the bare minimum costs of housing and food for a single person in the cheapest state of the union as equivalent to what an unskilled laborer would be earning... which presently is right around $10k.
This doesn't cover taxes or gas or clothes (which bumps it up to just over $26k in South Dakota) it's establishing an absolute minimum boundry with the presumption that fantasy day laborers scrape by on 1sp/day (36gp/year) without having cars and their taxes coming from extra unpaid labor for their lord and not starving to death en masse.
$10k/year divided by 36gp/year gives you 1gp = $277.
$26k/year divided by 36 gets 1gp = $722.
If the national minimum wage for an 8 hour day = 1sp then 1gp = $580.
Offering 100gp for a job is like offering someone $27,000-$72,000 to do something.
1500gp/level training costs makes just getting to level 2 the equivalent of dropping $500,000 to $1 million for a weeklong training program on the conservative side.
From starting to level four is a minimum of $3,000,000 you've shelled out for your education.
To hit level ten you've spent $22.5 - $45 million.
And you thought the Ivy League was bad.
ETA: from some research and for comparison, the cost to the US taxpayer to train up a Navy SEAL is about $2 million dollars.
Basically, in terms of training costs, a Navy SEAL is about a level two fighter.
Quote from: Chris24601 on February 08, 2024, 02:35:42 PM
There's a number of ways you could do up a ratio of coin to modern salaries.
The main one I think of is with the bare minimum costs of housing and food for a single person in the cheapest state of the union as equivalent to what an unskilled laborer would be earning... which presently is right around $10k.
This doesn't cover taxes or gas or clothes (which bumps it up to just over $26k in South Dakota) it's establishing an absolute minimum boundry with the presumption that fantasy day laborers scrape by on 1sp/day (36gp/year) without having cars and their taxes coming from extra unpaid labor for their lord and not starving to death en masse.
$10k/year divided by 36gp/year gives you 1gp = $277.
$26k/year divided by 36 gets 1gp = $722.
If the national minimum wage for an 8 hour day = 1sp then 1gp = $580.
Offering 100gp for a job is like offering someone $27,000-$72,000 to do something.
1500gp/level training costs makes just getting to level 2 the equivalent of dropping $500,000 to $1 million for a weeklong training program on the conservative side.
From starting to level four is a minimum of $3,000,000 you've shelled out for your education.
To hit level ten you've spent $22.5 - $45 million.
And you thought the Ivy League was bad.
ETA: from some research and for comparison, the cost to the US taxpayer to train up a Navy SEAL is about $2 million dollars.
Basically, in terms of training costs, a Navy SEAL is about a level two fighter.
Is that just completion of BUDS though? Because SEALs do a TON of training after they leave BUDS and lots of it highly specialized and pretty darned expensive. I am not sure that is going to be the best comparison when you get to what the total costs were for a SEAL who did 16 years with the teams after BUDS.
Quote from: Mishihari on February 08, 2024, 03:42:20 AM
Quote from: Ratman_tf on February 07, 2024, 07:11:10 PM
Quote from: rytrasmi on February 07, 2024, 03:57:19 PM
Quote from: Ratman_tf on February 07, 2024, 03:17:03 PM
I remember having characters with hundreds of thousands of GP sitting on their character sheet, even after training and magic research and material components, and carousing.
How much does 100k gp weigh and where are you storing it? That's a king's ransom, my friend. Better build some sort of underground labyrinth to store it. Pay some monsters to guard it. You can even build a tomb down there, so you can be near it when you die.
Conversion into gems is the usual answer to that, if it didn't come in that way, which it usually did. And with all that cash, hiring guards and building a fortress is no problem. Though any low level mooks dumb enough to try and rob a party of (say) 9th level adventurers is gonna get what they deserve. High level adversaries usually have bigger fish to fry.
I find it hard to accept that reasoning when that's exactly the type of adventure the PC's are doing all the time.
It's a game. If you think about it, dungeons full of treasure held by level-appropriate-foes are silly. But when you tie xp to treasure and then make it the main source of xp, you have to provide a sufficent amount of treasure in an adventure whether it makes sense or not.
Quote from: Chris24601 on February 08, 2024, 10:53:46 AM
Has anyone considered maybe just handing out less treasure to begin with?
That's what I've been banging on about in both threads. The problem is if you tie xp to treasure, you have to give out enough treasure to give the characters a reasonable amount of xp.
A solution, the one I've been using for years, is to reduce the xp award for gp value to some fraction. Say 1/4, so 4gp = 1 xp. Bump up the xp award for fighting, and then give a sum of xp for completing the adventure. If you're feeling frisky, you can break down the "general" sum into categories like exploration, social interaction, figuring out puzzles, etc. But that's a good starting point.
When you have a gold = XP system, I like to tie the XP to when you spend the gold, not when you earn it. So, PCs end up enriching the town either through sales or building investments like shops, farms, fortifications and the like. I think it is neat to see those dungeon border towns grow over time and more people move in etc. I generally don't use Taxmen directly since the PCs are way too likely to incinerate or decapitate them. But, if the mayor can vouch for the PCs as being 'good citizens' that grow the kingdom's power, that's another way for the PC to interact with the setting.
[edit for typos]
Quote from: rytrasmi on February 08, 2024, 12:54:28 PM
Quote from: jhkim on February 08, 2024, 12:38:33 PM
Quote from: Jam The MF on February 08, 2024, 03:58:19 AM
Unless they can store their haul away in a pocket dimension; how successful can they possibly be, at hanging on to it? If they place it in some type of bank, instant taxes are going to be assessed; and the bank might even get robbed and lose it all. They don't have any supposed FDIC protection.
The usual pirate solution is to bury the gold in an uninhabited place where only the PCs know. That's what the the dwarves did with the trolls' treasure in The Hobbit, for example. In the real world, this is very secure, the problem is just that you're not earning interest on the money.
The GM could come up with excuses to take buried treasure away - like gold-sniffing wandering monsters, but if those are common enough to scour all the wilderness, then the PCs should have a chance to know about them.
Isn't it a myth that pirates buried their treasure? Nothing wrong with using myth, just sayin.
The problem with caching the loot is that, if the place is hard to find, then you probably should write down directions or a map, or at least memorize the directions with a mnemonic like a riddle or song. If you go into the backcountry IRL, trying to find an old spot, even a year or two later, it is easier than it sounds. You could RP the location and if the players forget, then tough luck. Or you could have them create a map, which of course could be stolen. Memorized directions could be discovered by torture or magic. Besides magic, there are also mundane risks, like curious woodsmen and swamp hags, who might have seen a motley crew of dangerous types hiking into the forest with a large load. It's a bit of a catch 22, the more secret the location, the harder it is for you to find later.
So, yeah, risky and very gameable.
Everything has some risk. It's risky to keep their treasure in a pocket dimension like a Portable Hole or spell, because the hole could be stolen or the wizard could be tortured into revealing the secret to opening that pocket dimension. How much do they really know about pocket dimensions? An extraplanar monster might snatch it.
With burial, what risks there are can be minimized by simple strategy. They don't have to announce they're going off into the wilderness in a trip specifically to hide their gold, and then come back unladen. Many fantasy PCs spend most of their life outdoors, and they're already traveling across the wilderness with a train of supplies (food, tools, etc.). After burying treasure, they're carrying just as much - it's only that some of their packs/chests now have dirt instead of gold, that they dump days travel away. And it's easily possible to write down personal mnemonics and leave markers near the site that only the person writing understands the meaning of, rather than a treasure map with clear instructions.
At some point, it seems like the rigamarole of making players strategize about how to keep their money, and GMs thinking of ways to take it away -- it would be easier to just not have as much treasure. The back-and-forth doesn't feel like fun gaming to me.
Again...I really do not as a GM being the in the role of the IRS and trying to find ways to fleece players. If they earned/won the treasure I let them have it. If they are fools with it...that can open a game avenue. If they have any sort of effort at security though I will simply give them options as to how they spend it. Some will have the best looking gear, look to have a manor and full time staff. Others will lock it in a vault and come count their coins in their spare time. I do not care. The whole point of adventuring is to go out and do things most sane people would not do to get rewards most regular people completely lack the nerve for. If this means that through saving and hoarding they end up with a fortune, so be it. I get 1e RAW was adversarial in many ways from the puzzles, to the traps, to the monsters to the keeping your money. I am maybe too much a fair tax sort to go trying to retroactively snag the loot the players got fair and square. Now if I screwed up and gave them too much...it is also not fair for me to cook up some way to "take them down a peg".
I prefer to give some ways to spend it if they want to (I find this actually ends up getting them to use their money and they buy things along RP lines for their character) and if they want to hoard it or use it to get all kinds of political power so be it. I have never had an issue with a player saying he did not want to go on an adventure because his ROI's on investing in local shops was looking so good he was considering retiring.
I mean don't we all have enough issues with someone trying to take what we earn IRL enough to NOT have this in a game? Plot wise for some villain to steal from them I *might* do, but most of it always struck me as adversarial and meta means to hold them back.
Since we are talking about giving away less money, that's what I do, I give 1/4 the gold. Training and monthly expenses are also 1/4 RAW values. Coins are also smaller, 50 to the pound. Gear costs stay the same. The XP for the 'gold not given' comes from achieving the adventure's goals. It's worked well.
Well, in my own current games, I use a silver standard, and am rather stingy with even that. It's 50 silver or more to buy many weapons, and players are happy to find that much silver, total, in a typical, low-powered adventure. As I said already, if you don't have any particular incentive to give out large sums of money, then it's a different dynamic.
Even in 1e or OSRIC I tend to go with "give out less cash, give more XP from other sources, and let them get wealthy".
One thing about 1e in particular is that the treasure tables are pretty stingy, but NPCs are often loaded down with hugely valuable items, and it's those magic items that tend to generate most cash, along with gems and jewelry.
I typically:
Keep cash hoards as-is but lower coin weight to 1/100 lb
Reduce gem/jewelry value to 1/10 or less the listed numbers
Reduce sale value of most magic items. If running 1e I may use the lower XP value for gp sale value.
I also tend to be more careful these days what magic items I give to NPCs.
Give monster XP more like OD&D, without a reduction for higher level PCs, eg 100 XP for a 1 hd creature.
Give quest award XP, typically 1/20 what a Fighter would need to level up, so 100 XP per PC at 1st-2nd level.
Trying to recall what I did re training when I last GM'd 1e/OSRIC a few years back, I think it was 100 gp/level. Might have been less though.
For my own post-post-apocalyptic sci-fantasy setting most places are barter (don't underestimate barter as a reward system) or precious metals with a silver cent (1 percent of a pound of silver) being the standard daily pay for an unskilled laborer). Barely sufficient food for a day in most cities runs about 1/2c if you prepare it you or 1c at a tavern (good food is 2c, exceptional meals might run 5-10c).
Skilled labor typically earns 2-5c per day. Bounties on criminals are typically 5-10c a head, though exceptionally dangerous local ones might reach 100c. Anything beyond that isn't something you put on a bounty board, it's something you hire professional contractors for and their fees will be the result of negotiations.
An average longsword costs about 60c, a munitions-grade brigandine vest and helmet will run about 100c, a full-suit of munitions grade armor will run as much as 400c. A single-chamber musket/rifle with bayonet runs about 140c.
Really expensive stuff gets measured in full pounds of silver (£)... though payment at that level would typically be gold coins (roughly one imperial oz. to the silver pound... 16:1 being a fairly typical gold:silver exchange rate historically) or precious gems.
Advanced-grade weapons and armor cost significantly more, a suit of reinforced heavy armor is £40, an advanced alloy blade will run you £6 (basically two-years wages for a laborer), a functional semi-automatic assault rifle akin to an AR-15 is £300 (and modern bullets for it 10c ... 10 days wages for a common man... each). You don't buy these things in a market, you go to a dealer who will arrange terms and delivery.
Lostech, when you can even find it, costs probably 10 times even that. Heavy armor as light as clothing or with an integral energy shield (£400), beam swords that melt through armor (£100), man-carried rail guns (£1000+), etc. You need to know a guy to even know who the dealers at this level even are and their stock is limited and may not even be deliverable immediately (think the market for mega-yachts and art with a price tag in the millions).
Outside of bounties and the smattering of coin humanoid opponents might have (typically less than a week's pay), treasure is generally in the form of useable goods that could be used or sold by the PCs; a case of advanced grade fuel cells or rack of munition-grade rifles found in a ruin could keep your group fed and housed for a week, a still functional arcane engine could be traded for enough to afford a suit advanced-grade armor (or a very nice house), a hoverbike or advanced rifle is probably something you're keeping for yourself and just trying to unload the thing for more fungible assets could become its own adventure.
Because somewhere along the way, EGG figured out he was giving out staggering amounts of wealth every few adventures, and he tried to figure out how to get rid of it.
There's no point in tracking a resource if there's no chance of the players running out. So if you're going to let your players maintain a massive fortune, you might as well skip tracking money and save on the pointless book-keeping.
It really depends on the needs of the Campaign. AD&D is designed around a detail-oriented, large-scale campaign with long and frequent sessions. In that kind of campaign, it might make sense to hand out large sums of money with concordant large expenses to spend them on. The design is essentially bolting a management sim on top of the dungeon-crawling gameplay.
Personally, I run a biweekly game in a tight 3-hour timeslot, so I tend to want to trim off anything that gets in the way of keeping the adventure moving. That means minimizing money management as much as possible and trying to let it be done between sessions. The best solution for that is games that use an abstracted money system of some kind. In D&D-likes, I can get away with modifying the XP ratios and just giving out less money. In my Dolmenwood campaign, I'm operating on 0.5x XP for Gold and 10x XP for encounters. I'm trying to keep the treasure hauls in the range where they can be spent on useful items like horses, herbs, etc. There's no magic items for sale and no domain rules, so a big pile of cash would just be a hassle for them.
Quote from: pawsplay on February 09, 2024, 05:36:28 PM
Because somewhere along the way, EGG figured out he was giving out staggering amounts of wealth every few adventures, and he tried to figure out how to get rid of it.
I think this is dead on. Random loot tables hit too many magic items that players immediately sold for their nutty prices rather than kept for use. So he cooked up insane prices to level up and was concerned with "powering down" the group after making a mistake with giving too much. Other wise if treasure is a tad more stingy the crazy costs for leveling make adventuring look a lot less like seeking a fortune and simply running on a hamster wheel to pay training taxes.
It's kind of inevitable when players start needing over a million xp to level up with the lion's share of that coming from treasure or the value of magic items they get. You wind up with high level adventurers with enough precious metal coinage to collapse the entire economy sitting in a Scrooge McDuck money vault somewhere. I think a more sensible solution is to drastically reduce they money they are getting and have much more of their xp come from other things.
Quote from: yosemitemike on February 11, 2024, 08:16:00 AM
It's kind of inevitable when players start needing over a million xp to level up with the lion's share of that coming from treasure or the value of magic items they get. You wind up with high level adventurers with enough precious metal coinage to collapse the entire economy sitting in a Scrooge McDuck money vault somewhere. I think a more sensible solution is to drastically reduce they money they are getting and have much more of their xp come from other things.
If you like XP coming from money, but don't like the runaway inflation dynamic, by far the easiest route is to read all gold as silver, silver as copper, and copper as some made up minor coin. Change prices to match (at your discretion) but not labor rates. Then give out XP based on silver found. This effectively leaves the XP from treasure ratio the same, but without all that gold floating around. Hiring services just got relatively more expensive.
In fact, that kind of thinking is the starting point of the economy in my current campaign and the system around it. Since a system is supporting it, I've built it into all the prices lists. Then tweaked the costs of a few things back up to reflect scarcity, but the basic idea is "read gold as silver".
Have you played 5E and noticed the players all have several ways of completely retarding any danger whatsoever and that only increases as they level up? Well, whilst that wasn't completely the case with AD&D, I've noticed that players do get a lot of money as they get up in levels. And they can absolutely use that money to buy all kinds of things they can use to cause shinanigans. And eventually they just end up getting bored of the characters because they can buy anything they could possibly want. So you need to find some way to keep them hungry for loot and gold. Otherwise they'll just stop playing.
Quote from: King Tyranno on February 12, 2024, 11:28:24 AM
Have you played 5E and noticed the players all have several ways of completely retarding any danger whatsoever and that only increases as they level up? Well, whilst that wasn't completely the case with AD&D, I've noticed that players do get a lot of money as they get up in levels. And they can absolutely use that money to buy all kinds of things they can use to cause shinanigans. And eventually they just end up getting bored of the characters because they can buy anything they could possibly want. So you need to find some way to keep them hungry for loot and gold. Otherwise they'll just stop playing.
I've run into the opposite problem as well: when the rewards for adventuring aren't extravagant enough compared to mundane earnings, the players start indulging in Merchants&Middlemen instead of Dungeons&Dragons. Even during the Gold Rush, the folks that made the biggest fortunes were the ones selling picks and shovels.
Quote from: Zalman on February 12, 2024, 11:32:54 AM
Quote from: King Tyranno on February 12, 2024, 11:28:24 AM
Have you played 5E and noticed the players all have several ways of completely retarding any danger whatsoever and that only increases as they level up? Well, whilst that wasn't completely the case with AD&D, I've noticed that players do get a lot of money as they get up in levels. And they can absolutely use that money to buy all kinds of things they can use to cause shinanigans. And eventually they just end up getting bored of the characters because they can buy anything they could possibly want. So you need to find some way to keep them hungry for loot and gold. Otherwise they'll just stop playing.
I've run into the opposite problem as well: when the rewards for adventuring aren't extravagant enough compared to mundane earnings, the players start indulging in Merchants&Middlemen instead of Dungeons&Dragons. Even during the Gold Rush, the folks that made the biggest fortunes were the ones selling picks and shovels.
I think some of that can depend on the IRL initative and buisness sense of the players but a GM should create a balance there between having too much or too little gold. A player should feel rewarded for braving danger but still feel like they need to do more braving danger to get more gold. Gold is part of the progression system in RPGs and progression exists to incentivize playing the game. It's very psychologically manipulative in that sense. And that's why Games Design is a hard job. Creating a balance of things being not too hard and not too easy is difficult. You need to understand the psychology of players and create those little breadcrumbs that lead them to satisfying things that they think are fun.
Quote from: Zalman on February 12, 2024, 11:32:54 AM
Quote from: King Tyranno on February 12, 2024, 11:28:24 AM
Have you played 5E and noticed the players all have several ways of completely retarding any danger whatsoever and that only increases as they level up? Well, whilst that wasn't completely the case with AD&D, I've noticed that players do get a lot of money as they get up in levels. And they can absolutely use that money to buy all kinds of things they can use to cause shinanigans. And eventually they just end up getting bored of the characters because they can buy anything they could possibly want. So you need to find some way to keep them hungry for loot and gold. Otherwise they'll just stop playing.
I've run into the opposite problem as well: when the rewards for adventuring aren't extravagant enough compared to mundane earnings, the players start indulging in Merchants&Middlemen instead of Dungeons&Dragons. Even during the Gold Rush, the folks that made the biggest fortunes were the ones selling picks and shovels.
I've had players talk about doing that. No one has actually tried to take the game in that direction. I wouldn't allow it anyway because honor, daring, and glory should be bigger motivators than a secure income. There's something seriously wrong with the player or the campaign if becoming the florist is seen as a better option to adventuring.
Quote from: rytrasmi on February 12, 2024, 03:27:59 PM
I've had players talk about doing that. No one has actually tried to take the game in that direction. I wouldn't allow it anyway because honor, daring, and glory should be bigger motivators than a secure income. There's something seriously wrong with the player or the campaign if becoming the florist is seen as a better option to adventuring.
Heh, I might be too much of a softy and allow it. But then, I would have patrons show up requesting rare flowers, man-eating plants, strange dungeon fungi, and assorted plant based alchemical reagents. Basically using the player's reputation against them. And of course, there's now a whole town of hostages *cough* neighbors to protect.:-)
I am running a fairly long-standing (by now) AD&D 1e campaign, and the party is finally starting to get to the middle levels, and, being 1st edition, they
have found/earned/stolen VAST amounts treasure by now... but, as they say, easy come, easy go. There's a host of ways to part players with their hard
won treasure.
Often they party needs the aid of a higher level cleric, this will cost a good 1000 gp per spell level on average. Seizure from local lords (if their alignment
reflects such unscrupulousness) or 10% taxes paid upon a border crossing, on occasion they party CAN find magic items for sale, but at prices as high or
higher than the DMG's listed price. And, of course, rival parties, rival thieves guilds, and Monsters have all managed to rob the party before. During an encounter on a fortified keep over a river not long ago saw the party's horses and pack animals stolen when an enemy fighter pulled off a bend bars/lift gates roll to open the portcullis to the lower gatehouse where the party's horses were kept, unguarded with their saddlebags. As everyone was sniping the enemy from the top of the gatehouse. Heh-heh. Even though I dispensed with training costs for the most part, I've never had much difficulty parting them from their gold.
And that's WITH lowering encumbrance weight of coins considerable. Despite that, the group has TWICE buried vast amounts of silver and electrum in
utter pirate style, with a map included. Due to being unable to carry coins with all the other junk they port about. They'll doubtless have SOME sort of
difficulty recovering it, if they ever do. And if they are all killed off, maybe someday another group will find the map they made somehow.
Got to do SOMETHING about the vast amounts of treasure the group needs to level up, luckily there are plenty of options. Once they hit name level,
whatever base/tower/keep they found will drain finances steadily as well. Though they're a ways off from that yet. Magical Items are far more
important that mere treasure in any case, and I am fairly stingy about giving those out, though they do have a few nice items.
Made it to the next town, and a restoration spell and a new batch of horses cost them more than they'd made along the way. But since they CHOSE to
spend it, they just shrug and move on, since I might have them get robbed or ripped off by the merchants, it's a result of their own choices, not just
arbitrarily stripping them of gold.
The ludicrous amouts of gold in the old editions isn't such a huge problem, just need to be creative to make it work.
RPGs do not need money sinks. They simply need viable uses for in-game assets. If wealth is an in-game asset, it needs to have a use case. That use can be a money sink (training cost) or it can be a money investment (researching magic items, building a castle or army) but if no uses exist then wealth is not an in-game asset. Of course, it's entirely possible to play with wealth not being an asset; it could just be used as a metric for tracking XP, and that's that. But then it raises the question of why there are equipment prices and mercenary wages and so on.
As far as inflation from adventuring, its effects are way over-exaggerated because people aren't able to fathom the size of actual ancient economies. The mines at New Carthage alone produced 9,125,000 sp per year. The Roman economy as a whole mined 50,000,000sp a year. You have to be at the scale of Alexander's capture of the Persian treasury, or Caesar's capture of millions of Gaulish slaves, to make a difference.
Quote from: amacris on February 14, 2024, 03:53:14 PM
RPGs do not need money sinks. They simply need viable uses for in-game assets. If wealth is an in-game asset, it needs to have a use case. That use can be a money sink (training cost) or it can be a money investment (researching magic items, building a castle or army) but if no uses exist then wealth is not an in-game asset. Of course, it's entirely possible to play with wealth not being an asset; it could just be used as a metric for tracking XP, and that's that. But then it raises the question of why there are equipment prices and mercenary wages and so on.
As far as inflation from adventuring, its effects are way over-exaggerated because people aren't able to fathom the size of actual ancient economies. The mines at New Carthage alone produced 9,125,000 sp per year. The Roman economy as a whole mined 50,000,000sp a year. You have to be at the scale of Alexander's capture of the Persian treasury, or Caesar's capture of millions of Gaulish slaves, to make a difference.
That's the scale of countries. We're talking about a party of 6 adventureres dropping thousands, tens of thousands and at the top end, hundreds of thousands of gold worth of coin, gems and misc into a single town, keep or city at once.
Quote from: Ratman_tf on February 14, 2024, 04:30:56 PM
Quote from: amacris on February 14, 2024, 03:53:14 PM
RPGs do not need money sinks. They simply need viable uses for in-game assets. If wealth is an in-game asset, it needs to have a use case. That use can be a money sink (training cost) or it can be a money investment (researching magic items, building a castle or army) but if no uses exist then wealth is not an in-game asset. Of course, it's entirely possible to play with wealth not being an asset; it could just be used as a metric for tracking XP, and that's that. But then it raises the question of why there are equipment prices and mercenary wages and so on.
As far as inflation from adventuring, its effects are way over-exaggerated because people aren't able to fathom the size of actual ancient economies. The mines at New Carthage alone produced 9,125,000 sp per year. The Roman economy as a whole mined 50,000,000sp a year. You have to be at the scale of Alexander's capture of the Persian treasury, or Caesar's capture of millions of Gaulish slaves, to make a difference.
That's the scale of countries. We're talking about a party of 6 adventureres dropping thousands, tens of thousands and at the top end, hundreds of thousands of gold worth of coin, gems and misc into a single town, keep or city at once.
Indeed. Even on the country scale even a single hoard is a lot.
50 million sp (Rome as a whole) is 5 million gp.
A single type G hoard might have up to 120,000 gp; a dozen gems, up to half a dozen art objects and any 5 magic items... conservatively it's 2% of the entire Roman Empire's economy from a single haul.
For comparison, that's about like dumping half a TRILLION dollars into the US economy from ONE roll on the treasure table and we've all seen what the Fed pumping that sort of money into the economy has done.
It's not like that's going to be the PC's only haul in their career either. That's just one of the single biggest ones (barring critters you roll multiple times for).
This also needs to be considered in relation to the setting as well. Default AD&D isn't set in the Roman Empire at its height; it's set in a post-Roman collapse medieval world with much smaller and more isolated economies.
That one hoard is more than an entire large town's annual GDP being dumped on it overnight.
Now imagine PCs doing that monthly or even weekly.
At best the result should be hyperinflation. At worst you collapse the economy as people need wheelbarrows full of coins just to buy the essentials and the king can't afford to pay his peacekeepers enough to feed their own families.
The flip side to that is how did that money end up there? And, the economic loss that hoard represented to the prior kingdom that had failed. Yes, logic has its limitations, but it is a fun bit of world building to consider. :-)
Quote from: zircher on February 14, 2024, 11:47:34 PM
The flip side to that is how did that money end up there? And, the economic loss that hoard represented to the prior kingdom that had failed. Yes, logic has its limitations, but it is a fun bit of world building to consider. :-)
That would depend on if it was attrition over time or "city sacked" overnight sort of depletion.
Regardless; it's more the shock to the system from the rapid availability (or lack) of currency that would be terribly disruptive.
In real terms, the relative non-fiat values of things don't change much. It has often been cited that if you convert an ounce of gold into US dollars at various points in our history, what it can buy is about the same... what's changed is the value of the fiat currency and the value of the labor that currency is used to provide compensation for.
D&D currency is essentially a fiat currency in the sense that, no matter how much silver you dump on the market, a unit of gold will always be worth ten units of silver. No matter how scarce gold becomes, ten units of silver will always be worth one unit of gold.
Similarly, the coinage of D&D is never debased or the edges shaved; causing general inflation.
Fundamentally, the problem with dropping 2% of a continental empire's GDP onto a single town in the form of mountains of precious metals is that the system isn't actually dynamic enough to handle it with any realism.
Quote from: Chris24601 on February 15, 2024, 07:26:17 AM
Quote from: zircher on February 14, 2024, 11:47:34 PM
The flip side to that is how did that money end up there? And, the economic loss that hoard represented to the prior kingdom that had failed. Yes, logic has its limitations, but it is a fun bit of world building to consider. :-)
That would depend on if it was attrition over time or "city sacked" overnight sort of depletion.
Regardless; it's more the shock to the system from the rapid availability (or lack) of currency that would be terribly disruptive.
In real terms, the relative non-fiat values of things don't change much. It has often been cited that if you convert an ounce of gold into US dollars at various points in our history, what it can buy is about the same... what's changed is the value of the fiat currency and the value of the labor that currency is used to provide compensation for.
D&D currency is essentially a fiat currency in the sense that, no matter how much silver you dump on the market, a unit of gold will always be worth ten units of silver. No matter how scarce gold becomes, ten units of silver will always be worth one unit of gold.
Similarly, the coinage of D&D is never debased or the edges shaved; causing general inflation.
Fundamentally, the problem with dropping 2% of a continental empire's GDP onto a single town in the form of mountains of precious metals is that the system isn't actually dynamic enough to handle it with any realism.
Mansa Musa is probably the only thing I've ever heard that would be close to adventurers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa
Musa went on Hajj to Mecca in 1324, traveling with an enormous entourage and a vast supply of gold. En route, he spent time in Cairo, where his lavish gift-giving is said to have noticeably affected the value of gold in Egypt and garnered the attention of the wider Muslim world.
I always liked carousing tables for getting players to waste gold. I always felt like PCs would act like Conan, ending up just partying and spending all the gold they found. I think the more "money-wise" population of the world probably wouldn't become adventurers in the first place. It seems like a profession for those that are pretty foolish and don't think that far ahead.
I estimate that a 'historically accurate' (ie, close enough for gaming purposes) campaign would have treasure on the order of 80 gp/level. So an adventure 'for levels 1-3', averaged to 2, would have a grand total of 160 gp worth of treasure in it.
Or to put it another way, divide treasure values by 20.