Adventurer Economy

[Username17]

Why is the default assumption always that coins and gems accepted from adventurers make their way into the local economy? Why can't merchants and barkeeps just charge adventurers 3-10 times what it actually costs for the items or service and then sit on the difference so that they can rebuild when a monster or adventurer inevitably damages or destroys their stock and shop? Whether it's collected by a tax man for the good of the colony or stuffed in a mattress for the good of the owner, money that is saved for rebuilding after the latest adventurer failed to succeed a rainy day is money that is not crashing the local economy. It's not like there's a source of credit for peasants to use as an alternative to hoarding, and you potentially need a lot of capital to pay off traders and whatever to bring you material / stock after such a bust.

The issue is that if the barkeeps are charging the adventurers three times or a hundred times the amount of money the beer is "worth", that still doesn't change the fact that the beer has real value and the gold the adventurer is paying in has only symbolic value. So the barkeep and the town both have their real assets reduced when the adventurers come and buy their stuff no matter how much the adventurers pay.

The only way this can be a net positive is if the villagers can then turn around and purchase goods and services with those coins that they otherwise couldn't. And for that to be the case, the economy as a whole would have to have the capacity to make goods and services which it is presently not doing because there isn't any demand (that is: there isn't currency to buy it, so the resources to make it are left idle). In short: for "random adventurer walks into town with pockets full of gold" to actually be a good thing, the economy has to be perpetually depressed in a way that simply running printing presses could solve.

Which is perhaps unsurprising, because adventurers walking in with pockets full of gold pieces they found in a distant hole is roughly equivalent to the Federal Reserve getting up and printing a fuck tonne of hundred dollar bills for shits and giggles. In any sort of "full employment" situation that we would call "normal", that would drive up inflation and be basically bad for the economy. Only in a deeply depressed and currency starved economy could that be a good thing.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

Sure, but how many art dealers are kicking around your average medieval village?

How many art dealers are in a modern rural village? And yet modern rural people still consider works of art to be valuable.

One, no, several of them don't, two, modern rural people don't typically have to worry about freezing in the winter, starving in famine, or catching the plague, and with basic survival priorities met they have a use for luxuries that medieval peasants don't, three, modern rural communities exist under what is historically speaking an absurdly thorough and omnipresent rule of law which means their work of art is unlikely to make them the target of passing murder-hobos, and four, modern rural communities have access to transport and communications networks that allow them to sell a work of art to an art dealer with maybe twelve man hours of effort if they try to get a good deal and we include travel time to wherever they decide to make the exchange.

[Ancient History]

The offset to the Adventurer Economy is Peasant Vegas: locations designed specifically to extract and process excess currency from people. In this case, you have an adventurer-driven economy, but to keep everything from being Gold Rush-ish where the local church bingo game has 5,000 gp pots and an egg is 1 gp, you have to presume that Peasant Vegas a) focuses on nonproductive extraction (whores, gambling, shows) and b) absorbs a lot of excess productive capacity from the surrounding region and funnels it into one spot.

So Peasant Vegas, founded on the doorstep to the Dungeon of Despair, regularly imports loads of dungeon-delving goods for those that try their luck, and loads of corn-fed healthy adolescents as low-income staff and whores, and buys up wine from regions near and far, and has fabulous inns as good as anything anywhere else, employing carpenters and masons from very far away - all to separate the adventurers that come out of the Dungeon from their riches. (And, if Peasant Vegas lasts long enough, there develops some secondary trade to cover the needs of the workers and townsfolk.)

[hogarth]

Sure, but how many art dealers are kicking around your average medieval village?

How many art dealers are in a modern rural village? And yet modern rural people still consider works of art to be valuable.

One, no, several of them don't, two, modern rural people don't typically have to worry about freezing in the winter, starving in famine, or catching the plague, and with basic survival priorities met they have a use for luxuries that medieval peasants don't, three, modern rural communities exist under what is historically speaking an absurdly thorough and omnipresent rule of law which means their work of art is unlikely to make them the target of passing murder-hobos, and four, modern rural communities have access to transport and communications networks that allow them to sell a work of art to an art dealer with maybe twelve man hours of effort if they try to get a good deal and we include travel time to wherever they decide to make the exchange.

I misunderstood what your objection was. I thought you were claiming that expensive items don't make sense in D&D-land, but you're really objecting to the fact that D&D-land is more like the modern world than real-wiorld medieval history. You're free to feel that way, of course, but that ship has sailed a long time ago.

[virgil]

Even assuming an extravagant lifestyle, that's 200gp for an entire month. That is a pittance of adventurer's income as they rise in level. Well and truly, the biggest money sinks are magic items, where half their value is just in components alone. Barring Wish Economy levels, where what the peasants do doesn't matter any more, all of those components have got to be a major source of industry.

[shadzar]

Why is the default assumption always that coins and gems accepted from adventurers make their way into the local economy?

because in WotC edition and pre-WotC tournament play everything could be turned into coin value. you COULD sell gems and such to a jeweler, or maybe a merchant would take them for X, but haggling is boring in games so a "price list" evolved and people lazily use it. no matter the treasure in like "treasure parcels" or "lairs" people jsut total the GP value and hand it out.

guess that would work when GP=XP, but since that time is long gone, so should converting everything found on an adventure to its GP value be gone?

Even assuming an extravagant lifestyle, that's 200gp for an entire month. That is a pittance of adventurer's income as they rise in level. Well and truly, the biggest money sinks are magic items, where half their value is just in components alone.

or you know the PC party building a home/fort/keep to adventure out of and pay people to work the land and keep up the area. this not only strengthens a local economy, but provides chance for it to grow as more people could come to live and have food grown of the PC land.

located in the proper place between two existing towns/kingdoms, then there is ample chance of adventure, protection of the keep while adventuring, battles to fight when at home if raids occur or protecting the neighboring towns/kingdoms....

it isnt just dumping the money and then leaving like people that go to Vegas. Unlike Vegas getting wares in RPGs isnt always as going ont he internet and ordering it, or ordering it from Aurora's.

n the magic items, the problem is they shouldnt be a moeny sink. they shouldnt just be there to be purchased, they should be free such as going on the adventure for the components, but that adventure costs money up front for supplies, and might return on the investment if you make more than you spent.

a system that says handwave accounting and such and just mark down X gp per month would fail in the long run to have enough of a money sink. likewise a system that has X gp income per month or what have you for adventuring would fail as you might need more than that. obviously someone working with an in-game economy wouldnt be jsut throwing out the accounting and tracking of money though.

[norms29]

Gold is not in fact something you can eat. Adventurers in history came back with porcelain, spices, dyes, and seeds that could change peoples' lives for the better. The D&D adventurer is basically just coming back with gold. For that to be a service at all, you have to posit that the economy is depressed in a way that minting up a bunch more coinage could solve. It has to be an economy running below full employment because there is not enough currency in circulation.

So you have blacksmiths and scribes living without food security and also not working most days while peasants let their grain rot in storehouses and get by without replacing broken tools. In short: you have a general glut and mass unemployment with unused capital resources that can be improved with the introduction of more currency alone.

-Username17

It might be relevant here that you established in the the Dungeonomicon, that the situation you just described is the exactly the case in vanilla D&D.

and I think that's pretty much the entire space of scenarios where bringing huge piles of coin out of a dungeon crawl.

the another possibility is, as shatner put it

There is also the "adventurers killed/drove off the orcish war band. Now we won't be raided every month and/or can once again send workers to the mine the orcs had claimed."

which is economically no different than if the locals were going to print money to pay them for killing the monsters.
with the exception that what the adventurers are paid is determined randomly instead of being negotiated. which makes it worse, economicly speaking

the only other way I see for adventures to be an actual aid to their society is if the "treasure" they bring back has some actual inherent utility, like; monster parts you can make things out of, or eat. or maybe gold has some actual (magic related) use.

which is really just a small variation of shatner's point. either way the adventurers are destroying (potentially)dangerous monsters to free up some resource for productive use.

I'm pretty sure that's the entirety of the solution space. either 1. adventurers are bringing in valuable commodities, or 2. providing a valuable service (like defense), or 3. bringing in commodity money to inflate a depressed economy.

[unnamednpc]

Or you assume the entire adventureconomy is sitting on and furiously inflating a massive gold bubble.
Gold is shiny, and it's "valuable" - after all, people regularly murder their way through dozens of layers of orcs and balrogs to get to that delicious, shiny treasure, so it has to be valuable, right?
So folks stockpile the stuff, and happily trade all their ale, and their wenches, and next winter's smoked ham, and all those XP young Yorrick earned pulling all-nighters at the Hommlet Wizarding Community College and promptly burned adding +1s to various doodads in dads trading post... they basically fall over themselves turning it all into cash, and after a while, they have so much of the stuff that any ol' smalltown blacksmith can easily pour whole barrels of platinum into your bag of holding when you wheelbarrow the next round of level-appropriate loot into his shop.
So, basically, all standard D&Dland economy assumptions are in place.

Until some day, a year down the line, people suddenly realize that old Greenpeace bumper sticker is right and you really can't eat money.

And then the bubble bursts, and you release the Economy Crisis on Infinite Oearth sourcebook.

[fectin]

Gold does actually have an intrinsic use: you can pay adventurers with it to solve your monster problems. Sometimes, you can cut out the middleman and directly pay monsters to go away/leave you alone. Monsters are common in DnD, and would otherwise deplete a village's stores of real assets much more, so villages really want to have a pile of ablative gold on hand.

Even just for taxes, having gold on hand means you can pay in gold instead of grain, thus keeping more grain, thus starving less (or convert some grain production to apples, boosting food variety and quality of life). You can possibly even pay taxes in art, which makes any art which villages can buy at a discount a great investment.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

Didn't someone around here at one point or another suggest that in D&D civilizations are constantly rising and falling, continually providing fresh ruins that plucky idiots with sharp-ish sticks can wander through and look for goods in? Also, I don't think this has specifically been brought up but it seems rather standard that someone with a significant amount of money under them will want all or most of that money interred with them when they die, and since graverobbing (I'm sorry, I mean adventuring) is so widespread that it will happen to any tomb eventually, most people in such a situation have their tombs wired up with as much magic and deathtrap as possible.

I don't know if this is enough to make this kind of situation realistic (In fact, I'm pretty sure it's not), but it's enough to make it plausible which really is all you can hope for in a game.

[squirrelloid]

I'm going to fork into another thread, since I don't want to talk specifically about adventurer economies, I want to talk about economies in general. (But it will get down to adventurer economies at some point).

[Ancient History]

Gold does actually have an intrinsic use: you can pay adventurers with it to solve your monster problems.

No. That only works if the adventurers can use the gold to buy things they need and/or want. Adventurers are not dragons that collect gold just to bed down on. Most of them can't metabolize gold. They want gold the way you want dollars - because you can buy shit with it. That's not an intrinsic use, it's an artificial one. If you flood the economy with enough gold, silver becomes rarer and is worth more. Then you pay adventurers with silver and use gold to pave the fucking streets.

Gold comes in handy only as an accepted unit of exchange - and as cash, it has value. Like you said, paying with cash is usually easier than turning over a tithe of the harvest. Lords like getting taxes paid in cash, because rice is less fungible a commodity. But that's nothing special about gold in and of itself, that's just society deciding to use gold as a medium of exchange.

[ishy]

Well if you want to price stuff based on rarity, then you're making a lot of changes to the default D&D scenario. Where everything is the same price no matter where you go or how rare it is in that specific place.


And if your town becomes really wealthy you'd attract a lot of dragons / monsters(including adventurers) etc as well.

[Ancient History]

The default D&D scenario is that there's a fixed weight/value coinage system based on tens: 1 platinum coin = 10 gold coins = 100 silver coins = 1000 copper coins. That's not terribad by itself, the pound-shilling-pence model was 1:20:240 and lasted for a couple centuries, with various local permutations and variations. However, that makes the basic assumption that the average unit of account for small transactions is the copper coin, and most of the D&D tables don't hold that out, because contemporary perception of worth/value is way the fuck off.

So for example, a loaf of bread costs 2cp according to 3e. Assuming that's a pound of bread and your lowest subsistence worker can afford one of those a day just to fucking survive, they need a yearly income of at least (365 x 2) 730 cp, or a bit more than 7 gp a year just to eat. By comparison, a no-nonsense longsword is 15 gp.

So understand that in a world where your average dirt-poor farmer is measuring their worth in cp and sp, and your average adventurer is measuring their haul in gp and pp, you can understand how the sudden appearance of massive amounts of gold in a village can and should disrupt the economy.

[ishy]

Say we have two towns, one in the open with lots of farmland and one deep in the mountains with lots of forges and mines. Is the price of longswords and grain going to be the exact same in both towns?

There is only so much you want to track and have time to track. And D&D by default doesn't do any, anything at all.
You can't look at default D&D prices if you want an idea what the economy would look like.

[shadzar]

Adventurers are not .... that collect gold just to bed down on.

Says who? Ever seen a thieves guild? bandit hideout? pirate lair?

Well if you want to price stuff based on rarity, then you're making a lot of changes to the default D&D scenario. Where everything is the same price no matter where you go or how rare it is in that specific place.

only 3rd and 4th edition. no idea what 5th will yield. OD&D ~ 2nd had things like haggling or appraising. you could in 3rd as well, but MOSTLY people didnt.

So for example, a loaf of bread costs 2cp according to 3e. Assuming that's a pound of bread and your lowest subsistence worker can afford one of those a day just to fucking survive, they need a yearly income of at least (365 x 2) 730 cp, or a bit more than 7 gp a year just to eat. By comparison, a no-nonsense longsword is 15 gp.

So understand that in a world where your average dirt-poor farmer is measuring their worth in cp and sp, and your average adventurer is measuring their haul in gp and pp, you can understand how the sudden appearance of massive amounts of gold in a village can and should disrupt the economy.

yup feudalism had a caste based society, different coins for different castes. and such system still exists in the world today so long as minted/printed money exists.

[hyzmarca]

Gold is not in fact something you can eat. Adventurers in history came back with porcelain, spices, dyes, and seeds that could change peoples' lives for the better. The D&D adventurer is basically just coming back with gold. For that to be a service at all, you have to posit that the economy is depressed in a way that minting up a bunch more coinage could solve. It has to be an economy running below full employment because there is not enough currency in circulation.

So you have blacksmiths and scribes living without food security and also not working most days while peasants let their grain rot in storehouses and get by without replacing broken tools. In short: you have a general glut and mass unemployment with unused capital resources that can be improved with the introduction of more currency alone.

-Username17

What if you could drop a gold coin on an empty plate, say a prayer to Dionysus, and have that coin replaced by a four-course feast?
If the problem with gold is that you can't eat it, then arbitrarily supplying a method of magically turning gold into food that is accessible to the masses should go a long way.

Actually, I think that's probably one of the better ways to have gods that actually do stuff without totally ruining the campaign with overstatted (or statless) DM dick characters who could solve the problem in five minutes, but don't. If the gods run the cosmic vending machines then they're important to the campaign setting without necessarily shitting all over the PCs.

they seriously left an entire troll corpse just laying there. I mean, who leaves behind something like that!? That could feed OFF the entire village for a month.

fixed that for you being that you know... trolls regenerate and all that...

Once the troll is unconscious you just securely chain it up so that it can't fight back. Then you periodically cut pieces of it off to use for whatever. You can feed a family indefinitely by this method, if they don't mind the taste of troll flesh.

[shadzar]

and now D&D has troll farmers. domesticated trolls, etc. i guess they have gelatin for dessert from the captured gelatinous cubes that are mined for the... just NO!

[Username17]

I'm pretty sure that's the entirety of the solution space. either 1. adventurers are bringing in valuable commodities, or 2. providing a valuable service (like defense), or 3. bringing in commodity money to inflate a depressed economy.

Pretty much this. There's actually a bit of overlap between 2 and 3, in that if you remove the chimerae who periodically eat local sheep, the productive capacity of the local village will increase. They won't need to spend as many hours patrolling, and they will have more sheep come sheering season. So if you rid the area of some rampaging monsters, the amount of currency needed to bring the area to full employment will actually be a larger amount. So if the economy was at full employment, with the new standard of peace dividend, the economy would be depressed and would need more money to inflate it.

-Username17

[Avoraciopoctules]

Gold is not in fact something you can eat. Adventurers in history came back with porcelain, spices, dyes, and seeds that could change peoples' lives for the better. The D&D adventurer is basically just coming back with gold. For that to be a service at all, you have to posit that the economy is depressed in a way that minting up a bunch more coinage could solve. It has to be an economy running below full employment because there is not enough currency in circulation.

So you have blacksmiths and scribes living without food security and also not working most days while peasants let their grain rot in storehouses and get by without replacing broken tools. In short: you have a general glut and mass unemployment with unused capital resources that can be improved with the introduction of more currency alone.

-Username17

What if you could drop a gold coin on an empty plate, say a prayer to Dionysus, and have that coin replaced by a four-course feast?
If the problem with gold is that you can't eat it, then arbitrarily supplying a method of magically turning gold into food that is accessible to the masses should go a long way.

Actually, I think that's probably one of the better ways to have gods that actually do stuff without totally ruining the campaign with overstatted (or statless) DM dick characters who could solve the problem in five minutes, but don't. If the gods run the cosmic vending machines then they're important to the campaign setting without necessarily shitting all over the PCs.

That does sound like it could make for a pretty cool setting. Do we need to figure why the gods want the gold? Or is just that they've got a formula for how to use their powers in exchange for symbolic sacrifices?

[Grek]

One assumes that the church uses the gold to equip adventurers to go on holy quests.

[Torko]

Gold is petrified god blood, shed into the world during the Aeon War. Weakened from their cursed wounds, the gods command their clergy to make offerings of gold to restore their vigor.

[shadzar]

That does sound like it could make for a pretty cool setting. Do we need to figure why the gods want the gold? Or is just that they've got a formula for how to use their powers in exchange for symbolic sacrifices?

cause Baccus likes to throw wild parties and the bills sure add up!

oh and the church hires people to erect statues of the gods and has to pay someone for it, maybe something to the king to build a 4000th statue of God X in his kingdom, in order to spread their faith.

why do churches need money now? why does Jim and Tammy Faye need it or Pat Robertson, Bernie Madoff, Martha Stewart, Sally Struthers, etc...

Theocracy using the church offerings to keep the population in check and control them, such as that is all money really was designed for as a system of control. Golden Rule: He who has all the gold, makes all the rules.

[hyzmarca]

In such a setting we really don't need to know why gods want or need gold, only that they do, unless we want to have games that center around messing with the gods or being a god.

My idea was that Gods are literally the thing that they embody and their time and effort is spent doing their jobs, for which they may or may not get paid. In this scenario, if you stab the god of gravity to death then suddenly everyone flies out into space and suffocates.

The Prayer infuses the coin with a little bit of soul energy and they take it and use it as cosmic currency or to fuel gods things or whatever. Actually answering the prayer doesn't take much effort, even if they do it on a global scale.


So, if you're a normal guy you wake up in the morning, say a prayer to the God of Gravity, and drop a copper coin on the floor, which vanishes into the divine realms. This ensures that you will continue to fall down throughout the day and not randomly fall in some interesting but ultimately unpleasant direction. Otherwise he might just "forget" to provide you with his services for a scant period of time necessary for you to ascend to a lethal height before catching his mistake and restoring them or "accidentally" make a maladjustment and cause you to fall face first into a brick wall across the street.

It's similar in principle to sacrificing the hearts of your enemies to ensure that the Sun God stays on the job and everything rises in the morning, except that some of the effects are a bit more practical. And, also, prices are standardized.

The bigger expenditure of godly effort you want, the more you have to pay. Past a certain point, it becomes more cost effective to do it yourself, especially if you're high level. The god always makes a profit because a waste of his time can literally cause world-shaking repercussions.

This is also why the gods don't solve their problems themselves. The God of War can't smite the big bad because as soon as he steps off his treadmill fighting stops being an actual thing and violent conflict simply doesn't exist in the universe even as a concept or a possibility. So he needs adventurers powerful enough to do it for him. Likewise with other gods. They take enough time off to fight the bad ( or good in some cases) guy they want defeated and fundamental aspects of the universe simply stop existing.


So they use it to buy favors from other gods, to power divine spells, to keep the universe running, and all that. And to pay adventurers, of course.

[Vebyast]

The Gods, after getting bored with the whole perpetual party-on-olympus-and-everybody's-invited thing, decided to pivot and reorganize around more modern economic techniques. The god of tomorrow is a competitive for-profit entity that leverages its portfolio of natural and philosophical forces to provide necessary services in exchange for magical and monetary compensation. The god will then use this revenue to run churches and empower champions to spread belief, defending the god's portfolio from hostile takeovers and attempting to expand it into new markets and enhance revenue streams.

I like this setting quite a bit. Simultaneously fixes economic bugs, gives some good mechanics for gods providing spells, explains why gods have overlapping portfolios, and provides opportunities for hilarious RP.

Also, I've discovered that I'm bad at speaking marketroid. I guess all that practice writing papers paid off.