Introduction
This essay asks a simple question: in fantasy tabletop role-playing games, how do characters carry their money?
The Encumbrance Problem
I’ll only link to the D&D 3.5 encumbrance rules. D&D 5e is somwhat simpler (and optional): character’s can carry their Strength score × 15 lb. Other games rate encumbrance as number of “items”. In the Clash of Steel RPG a character can carry 8 + their MIGHT score in “items”. (Starting character MIGHT ranges from 1 to 4.)
The problem is that coins have weight. Specifically in D&D 3.5 and D&D 5, 50 gold pieces weigh one pound. In Clash of Steel, each 100 silver coins counts as one item. (CoS doesn’t use gold.)
The Highway Robbery Problem
So what if a group doesn’t use encumbrance. The party can just carry all its money with them, right? That’s fine, if you want to play that way.
But what if an adventuring party is robbed on the road? This is less likely to happen to D&D characters, especially D&D 5, but it could happen. But what if it’s a lot of robbers? Or the Big Bad looking for revenge? Two party members are gone, one is captured, and one flees for his life. Where is all that money? Distributed among the four? Carried by the party leader, who was first to die?
The Trust Problem
So let’s assume the players do want to use the encumbrance rules for verisimilitude, and don’t want to lose their whole fortune to the Big Bad or one unlucky day. They can leave the bulk of their money with some trusted person or institution, right? Except, who would that be?
The rest of this essay will try to answer that question.
Adventurer’s Guild
A couple of years ago I came up with one solution: a multi-city “Adventurers’ Guild”, perhaps partnering with a Merchants’ Guild, allows adventurers to store their loot in a strongbox. Better yet, the Guild credits currency (gold and silver) to the adventurer’s or party’s account so they can withdraw cash when necessary.
While I argued that an “Adventurers’ Guild” makes sense in a setting where a lot of people are dredging up loot from old ruins, exterminating monsters, and so on, many may resist an ahistorical “guild” drawn from JRPGs. In the real world, the guild system lasted for only a few centuries. Without reliable travel or magical communication a multi-city, multi-kingdom, or empire-wide organization would have trouble distributing account information among its many branches.
GMs and players may be OK with a region-wide Adventurer’s Guild holding their money with the promise that they could get it all back from any chapter. But, especially in a low-magic setting, this makes less sense.
Banks
Historically, banks or bank-like instititions have been around since merchants gave grain loans to farmers and traders somewhere 2000 BCE. Ancient Greek and Roman temples accepted deposits, changed money, and gave loans. Modern banking began in Italy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and spread to northern Europe by the sixteenth century.
So maybe a modern-style bank in a medieval fantasy RPG isn’t so out of place? Well …
Assume trusted people will hold onto your gold and give it back. Commonly, the trusted party will issue a “bank note” with the signature of a “banker”. Originally the value of these bank notes was the exact amount deposited. Then they began issuing multiple notes in standard amounts, e.g. 1 gp, 5 gp, 10 gp, etc. … thus inventing paper money, which was easier to carry.
However, early banks faced a problem redeeming bank notes from other branches or other banks. First, the banker would have to know the bank was genuine; maybe the signer of the bank note was a relative, or the banker had a book of signatures. Perhaps the note has other forgery-foiling measures. If the note looked valid, the banker would have to estimate the risk that the note was a very good fake, and the expense of sending someone up to the originating bank to get their money in hard silver or gold. The usual solution was to redeem only part of the face value of the note, less local taxes and other fees. Not ideal.
The Knights Templar, thanks to a papal decree, did not need to pay tithes to the Church, but could collect tithes for their own profit. This, and their huge investment in land and the movement of people during the Crusades, meant that one could deposit money with one Templar castle, receive a bank note, and then withdraw that same amount with another Templar castle.
So all you need is a widespread, wealthy, mildly corrupt religious order, right?
Temple
Clash of Steel, which prompted this whole essay, contains this line:
[Adventurers’] savings should be lodged in a temple, with its god passing knowledge of this wealth to its other temples, allowing PCs to withdraw funds from any of that god’s temples.
So SWIFT is a divine miracle?
That’s a little more interventionist than I like my sword & sorcery gods. And what if there’s a run on the temple? Does the god teleport silver from another temple?
And are we trusting the entire financial system to priests?
A few paragraphs up, the text also says:
Most people are dirt poor, commoners living in villages with little or no coinage, bartering for what they want.
So where is all this silver coming from? Wars? A rising merchant class? Unearthed troves of treasure? (Well, OK, maybe the last one. It is a FRPG, after all.) But absent a divine miracle the sword-and-sorcery world of Clash of Steel lacks the easy money of the Renaissance or the widespread travel in the period around the Crusades.
Now, I don’t mean to single out Clash of Steel. I quite like the system. Clearly the author was inspired by the financial activity in ancient Greek and Roman temples. But it’s just a little too much of a handwave for someone like me who actually thinks about the details of his fantasy fiction.
Investing
Lamentations of the Flame Princess has rules for adventurers flush with cash to invest it in a money-making enterprise: a bar, a rooming house, a farm, a business, and so on. Then again, LotFP is geared toward the early modern era, particularly after the financial innovations of Italy and Holland. Except for farms, pre-modern societies have few if any avenues for investing. Furthermore, the nobles and churches own the majority of land in “civilization” so one might need a noble title first.
Then, too, investing ties up money, and requires upkeep. The venerable stronghold provides a place to stay and keep stuff, but it also requires guards, servants, a steward to care for the place when the adventurers are away, and other staff depending on its amnities. It’s possible to lose money over time. The GM might like the idea, but some players may want to hoard their piles of cash for a rainy day.
Finally, investing doesn’t solve the problem of ready cash on the road. It ties up cash. Any income earned stays at the location of the investment until someone authorized comes and gets it.
Bag of Holding
The typical D&D solution is to keep all your worldly possessions in a Bag of Holding. To quote the d20 3.5 SRD:
The bag of holding opens into a nondimensional space: Its inside is larger than its outside dimensions. Regardless of what is put into the bag, it weighs a fixed amount.
The rest of the entry adds caveats: don’t overload the bag, don’t pierce the bag, don’t turn it inside out, don’t put a Portable Hole inside it, etc.
Still, a Bag of Holding is a classic solution for carrying one’s life savings. It’s always available and it weighs not very much.
A few points against the Bag of Holding:
- What if the Bag is lost, to accident, theft, or malevolent dungeons?
- Who holds the Bag?
- How much gold can a Bag of Holding hold? Is that enough?
- What if Bags of Holding don’t exist?
Conclusion
All these solutions are fraught with problems. In a low-magic or no-magic world all the human institutions have the following problems:
- How to identify one adventurer among hundreds (thousands?) of customers.
- How to prevent forging of bank notes or identifying tokens.
- How to move an adventurer’s account information from one branch to another.
- How to have enough cash on hand to pay for a non-local to cash a bank note or withrdraw from theif account.
An Adventurer’s Guild issues an identification card (#1), which presumably uses all available art and magic to tie the adventurer to a card (#2). Adventurer’s Guild chapters keep in touch through messengers, carrier pidgeons, and if possible magic (#3). (If it worked for the Medicis, it can work for us.) Adventurer’s Guilds receive treasure deposits from adventurers, so they can dip into the existing cash supply (#4).
Banks, by definition, have plenty of seed money. Technically they don’t need identification at all if the local authorities don’t care; if they do, the authorities should provide it themselves (#1). They use all their art to design bank notes, and use signatutes of known branch presidents for further security (#2). Banks can redeem other bank notes at a discount, or if that’s not acceptable they can transfer information much like the Adventurer’s Guild (#3). Since banks are swimming in money, they can afford to spot a regular customer some money from their account while they wait for cash or account records to come in (#4).
Churches, too, receive plenty of donations. Depending on the era they own land which provides revenue. If an adventurer wants to deposit money, they simply add it to the pile, maybe returning a deposit token or identity token of some kind (#1). The token can uses the same techniques of art and magic to ensure it’s not forged (#2). The god informs the high priestess of all account information instantly … or if that’s too hokey, the temples exchange information just like a Bank or Adventurer’s Guild (#3). Large temples have plenty of available cash; a small temple might have to dip into the collection box and send a sharp note to the head temple (#4).
Investing requires people who know who the owner or investor is (#1), maybe with some ahistorical ID of some kind (#2). Income stays with the investment (not #3) until the owner gets it personally or leaves instructions as to where to send it (maybe #4).
And then there’s the Bag of Holding: someone’s holding the bag (#1, #2), there’s a pile of cash because magic (#3, #4). While convenient for a game in a fantasy world with most of our physical laws it would require sophisticated space-warping interdimensional magic to make. In a low-magic world it totally kills the vibe.
Of these solutions, I like the Adventurer’s Guild best, although it’s a big ask for a world to dedicate so much time and money to tomb robbers and monster slayers. If you’re going to have something like a bank, it may be best to just have a bank … but those concerned with anachronisms may object. Churches and temples may be the Bronze Age and Iron Age precursors to true banks, but I have qualms about their trustworthiness, and the supernatural explanation for their accounting efficiency. Investing solves the problem of what to do with a lot of cash, but adds problems of its own. And the Bag of Holding requires a high-magic setting like D&D’s default.
Which one works in a particular game world depends on the players and GM. I prefer to use as little magic as possible (including accountant gods). Your mileage may vary.