The Ecstasy of Gold: Money in RPGs

Money in D&D

For a while now I’ve been dissatisfied by the way The World’s Most Popular¹ Role-Playing Game(tm) has handled commodity money.

In D&D, 1 gold piece (gp) equals 10 silver pieces (sp) equals 100 copper pieces (cp). Electrum pieces (ep) are worth 5 sp and platinum pieces (pp) are worth 10 gp, but they’re not as common. 4th Edition tried to add “astral diamonds” as a currency above platinum, but they never caught on.

Meanwhile, in the modern world, gold is worth about 80 times more than silver per ounce, and copper’s price is negligible compared to silver. In the D&D world we can posit that gold is far more common than in ours. In any world we can assume that copper (or bronze in other games) is more of a representative money, i.e. ten copper pieces can be exchanged for one silver piece.²

So, problem solved, right?

Not quite. This problem of cheap gold, it tasks me. It tasks me, and I shall “fix” it.

This Is Fantasy, Right?

So, why is cheap gold such a problem?

A recent blog post by historian Bret Devereaux, entitled “Coinage and the Tyranny of Fantasy ‘Gold’”, makes the case better than I ever could. Devereaux reviews the use of coins in the ancient and medieval world. In brief, the ancient Greeks used silver drachmae, the Romans used silver denarii (until they weren’t silver), and Charlemagne used the livre, sou, and denier, all at least notionally in silver. (In practice, only the denier – 1/240th of a livre and 1/12th of a sou – was in widespread use.) We could hark back to the Romans who used the bronze as (1/10 or 1/16 of a denarius, depending on the era), but the later ancient Greeks split their drachma into six silver obols, so it’s a bit of a wash.

The Romans minted gold coins, like the aureus and later solidus, but a gold coin was more than a Roman soldier was paid in a month. In the late medieval period as Europe got richer various nations issued gold sovereigns (each worth a literal pound of sterling silver), gold ducats, and gold florins, but by that time the humble silver penny, silver denier, and other common (mostly silver) coins weren’t worth as much.

In short, most people of those eras used silver and copper:

And that brings us to our first major conclusion: in most pre-industrial settings, a gold coin of any size is an impractical unit of exchange for ‘regular people.’ Instead, what your aurei or ducats or florins are for is facilitating the storage [of] substantial amounts of wealth and enabling large-scale transactions by merchants and elites, either of bulk goods or luxury goods. They could also, of course, function notionally as units of account (like the Greek talent or the Carolingian livre). Day to day currency was almost invariably minted in silver or copper (or copper-alloys).

(Emphasis in the original.)

The post makes additional points that a lot of activity in the pre-industrial world didn’t use coins at all; people just kept track of who owed what to whom, often wrapped up in social and/or legal obligations. From that perspective, then, having currency in three different metals (or more) is at least one metal too many. It would be simpler to keep track of all prices in silver (and fractions of a silver piece) or copper.

Granted, adventurers don’t really want to tote around literal pounds of silver. The TTRPG Clash of Steel offers a simple solution: put your adventuring loot in a temple acting as a bank. I have some quibbles about this approach, but the basic idea is better than toting around only a tenth as many gold coins.

Making Gold Great Again

I’m not going to do a survey of real-life or game values of gold and silver. I will only note the following:

• GURPS typically assumes the base currency in fantasy worlds is silver, denoted by the “$” symbol. (America, woo.)

• Lamentations of the Flame Princess, while following D&D in many ways, puts the value of a gold piece at fifty silver pieces.

• Warhammer Fantasy has copper, silver, and gold coins, but in imitation of pre-decimalized British coinage: a silver shilling is worth 12 copper pennies, and a gold crown is worth 20 silver shillings.

All this points me to an alternate currency scheme for D&D and similar games:

1. Convert to a silver standard, i.e. all prices in silver pieces or fractions of a silver piece. We’ll still use “sp” as the symbol for a silver piece.

2. Redefine a gold crown as worth 100 silver pieces. Only nobles deal directly in gold, though, so most common transactions will use silver.

Our “reformed” coinage then becomes:

A gold coin weighing as much as a shilling is only about half the volume of a silver piece, due to gold’s higher density.

We can then add additional coinage, expressed in silver.

Historically, platinum has been more expensive than gold, but as of this writing gold is more valuable than platinum. I’ve split the difference and made gold equal in value to platinum per unit of mass.

D&D 5e assumes that 50 coins weighs a pound, which makes each coin a respectable 9 grams. A “pound sterling” is literally a pound of silver, so fifty coins. That said, a pound sterling is mainly a currency of account, on bank notes and ledgers. Who would be mad enough to walk around with pounds of silver …?

Electrum is a natural alloy of gold, silver, and other metals, generally paler than gold. Here I assume that the mix is nearly 50% gold.

For a more piratical flair, one can add the following:

This is based on the Spanish Dollar, which was worth eight reales and often split into halves, fourths, or eighths. You could also do this with a standard silver piece, but one-eighth of a 9g coin is 1.125g, which is more like a splinter than a unit of money.

Other Solutions

Some games move away from commodity money to representative money, where all prices are stated as multiples (or fractions) of a dollar, pound, franc, mark, or credit. This avoids the silver vs. gold question, but still requires players to track said currency. (Examples: Traveller, most games set in the modern era or near future.)

Other RPGs I’ve seen use more abstract measures of money:

1. Credit Rating provides a number to roll against if the player wants to make a large purchase; failure indicates they can’t afford it. (Examples: Call of Cthulhu, Everywhen.)

2. Wealth is a small number reflecting (usually) the order of magnitude of a character’s net worth. Thus a Wealth of 3 indicates someone twice (or ten times) as Wealthy as someone of Wealth 2. Instead of counting every guilder and florin, those with Wealth can afford to spend any amount well within their Wealth level. Only a big purchase, like a sailing ship, threatens to reduce their Wealth. (Example: 7th Sea)

In both cases “small” purchases as defined by the GM aren’t tracked at all, and in practice PCs may buy any reasonably common item without a second thought. Both mechanics also work best in Early Modern to near-future scenarios, as most residents of those eras have steady jobs (or inherited wealth) and easy access to shops where wonders like flashlights and binoculars are commonplace.

On the other hand, D&D and many other fantasy RPGs assume that adventurers own only what they can carry, and that innovations like banks, credit cards, and mass production are at least centuries away. D&D in particular began as a game of resource tracking, including money.³ Thus tracking gold, silver, and copper makes sense. That said, most DMs and GMs fudge things like the cost of daily food, clothing and shelter.

Still, if some enterprising DM wants to retrofit a Wealth or even Credit Rating system onto D&D, I’d be interested in seeing it.

Appendix A: 5e SRD Prices in Silver

Armor

Weapons

Adventuring Gear

Tools

Mounts

Tack, Harness, and Drawn Vehicles

Water Vehicles

Trade Goods

The following changed to reflect the new values of silver and gold.

Expenses

Lifestyle Expenses

Food, Drink, and Lodging

Services