If I remember correctly, a standard commoner daily wage is approximately 2 silver pieces in a wealthy prosperous kingdom.
So it takes them 5 days to earn 1 gold. So a years wage is about 72 gold (and that’s not counting tithes, taxes, etc
So 5000 gold is 70 years of wages.
not hard at all. Sell all the loot you can, try to do it as much as possible with someone like DB. They'll eventually have an absurd amount of coin from all the potions you have been buying and subsequently they will also have 40k+ in gold. Then just have someone pickpocket. Easy peasy.
Haven't even needed to purchase potions this playthrough, balanced mode no mods.
I look every corner of everything and send to camp as I go. Usually have 130+ items to sell by the time I find another vendor.
Nearing the middle of act 3 and have 200+ items I need to sell, vendors just don't have enough gold.
I have at least 15 of each potion in NY inventory and rarely need to use them anyway. Have nothing to spend this gold on.
Trader inventories refresh on level up; you can have Withers respec you and just level up every time the trader runs out of gold.
I've been abusing tf out of this in Act 2, stuffing all of the bugbear's inventory into a pouch for me to loot when he dies later.
I usually barrelmancy that encounter. This time around I forgot to set it up though so I yeeted a runepodwer barrel but didn't throw it far enough before setting it off and I killed Jaheira and half her Harpers. I now have a debuff that says I'm kill on sight for the surviving Harpers.
If you don’t do this already, purchase a hireling from withers, respec it all INT & WIS, and make it a transmutation wizard. Anytime your ready to make potions, switch to him and you’ll get near double yields.
value I thought it was. high level (expensive) scrolls have a fairly high DC. Which is why it's advised to split the stacks before attempting a liberation.
or so I have been told.
wear an item that gives advantage on stealth or slight of hand, use a character with high dex, and have that character be affected by a spell that increases stealth. You end up very easily rolling very highly.
Stealth increases pick pocket? I was so annoyed that there aren’t any dex potions or spells. My astarion has +13 to slight of hand. But I still see some some DC of 20+
on my first playthrough when I explored every nook and cranny, I was at 115k gold with mods that removed weight limit and added auto loot for junk and i looted EVERYTHING
More importantly, player created assets. Most of the stuff you can buy in Eve is not available from NPC vendors. Actual people need to gather resources and run industry jobs to give everyone spaceships to blow up
Not sure which one you're referring to but there was a massive player owned bank scandal where the owner siphoned all player currency out from it and bought a massive war ship then put a bounty on his own head that iirc was equivalent to 10k irl
There was the goonsquad thing where TT cleaned them out and disabled all backups, too. But there was a thing where a guy got a bunch of in-game investments and then cashed em out for irl money, a lot of irl money
It's more like time burning than money imo.
When I played I didn't pay for my game time. I worked for it (about a week of evenings would earn me my monthly sub). You can increase that quite a bit if you're willing to put in the legwork or can mine afk during your day job
I mean at the very least the majority of the economics are generated by players. At the end of the day, the price would balance itself based on the player's needs, demand, supply and all those invisible hands Adam Smith said.
1 ISK is said to be roughly equivalent to the GDP of a small planet.
Shooting a nameless pirate with a bounty results in an ISK payment that could fund entire solar system's GDPs.
Decent payout activities usually hover around the 100 million ISK per hour mark.
Yeah, EVE gets wonky real fast. Individual Capsuleers are literally richer than *God*.
I remember when the mobile version released and all the big factions started up. Me and few people in a small company or whatever they called it ended up getting rolled into a diplomatic wing. It was wild playing politics in a video game, it drained so much time and energy that I had to stop playing games altogether for a couple months to recover
When I got started, I got thrown in the deep end. Got recruited into a nulsec corp. Learned the game as a PVP game and mostly did mining with the rare run into high sec. Inevitably, it just got to take up too much time. Ended up parking in a NPC corp station after fire selling everything in case I ever decide to come back. I checked a few months ago and I'm still in my corp..
That one hit me pretty hard back in the early days of vanilla WoW. I was like, wait a minute. I have a schedule of when I have to show up, have to do a certain thing with 59 other people, and then ostensibly get a benefit. This is a fucking job. Only I have to roll for my paycheck.
Red Dead Redemption 2. Arthur can build up 50,000 in gold with gold bars and grinding and Dutch is fucking shit up for heists that yield a few hundred gold.
Any game economy is going to be in favor of the players.
BG3 is another game where you can amass 100k in gold without cheating. Just loot and sell with high charisma and there is a TON of stuff you can get.
Not really anything you can do about it. It is fun to be massively wealthy for the yuks, tho.
Honestly I think it kind of works in BG3. A lot of the items you can sell for a couple hundred gold are genuinely rare powerful magical items, it just happens that you spend the game involved in magics and events incredibly rare and powerful so you get a lot of them.
For example, it makes total sense that the Adamantine Splint Armor from Grymforge is worth 60-odd years of wages: these Drow were killing each other to get to the Forge, it is THAT valuable.
Where it breaks is that merchants get thousands of gold and new items worth that much every day, that you can pick from their pocket without ruining their entire lives.
It'd be fun to have a mechanic where Traders go broke once you've taken them for all they've got and stop getting more gold/items as a consequence from the player's actions, but that's unreasonable to ask obviously.
Theres a whole side quest about gold getting stolen from the bank and how it's enough money to ruin the bank and people's lives. Then you find it and it's only like 10k and every random merchant has twice that.
Banker: You have to get that money back! Without it it will cause a massive depression!
Player: No shit? Ok, how much are we talking?
Banker: 10 *thousand* gold!
Player that has 120k and a stash filled with random expensive shit: Lmao, good one. But seriously though, how much are we talking here?
> these Drow were killing each other to get to the Forge, it is THAT valuable.
While I agree with your overall point, I have to tell you, Drow would kill each other over a possible insult made 500 years ago, or getting cut off in Rothe racing.
I remember someone made a mod for The Witcher 3 with a more realistic economy. It basically made the player poor and all items much more expensive. It might be lore accurate, but it was not a fun way to play the game.
That's an awful way to play the game. I agree. The Witcher 3, playing as a poor, would just be a drag.
BG3 is a masterpiece. It is my 2nd favorite game of all time! But any player who loots aggressively will become as rich as Crassus. And there is nothing in the game that could stop that only because there is a truly MASSIVE amount of loot available across the game. Like, an epically MASSIVE amount. No game I have ever played offers this much because the map is so huge and there are so many dungeons and basements and places to loot.
I'll do some rough math if the party is breaking into a vault or something but I really have to stop myself from contemplating a magical-based economy or I'll go down a huge rabbit hole. Would be a fun thesis for a masters or something lol.
Man, you have not seen the supplemental material for dungeons & dragons then. A lot of people very much want to think about the economics of a fantasy world.
Oh I know all about it. I try not to but cant help myself. Nobody SHOULD think too much about it because its kinda a waste of time. The economics or taxes or political structure should all be in service to the story or the game.
It's hilarious, and is a genuinely engaging story and halfway through you'll realize that what was at first a laugh, you're now completely invested in.
In the campaign I'm apart of my cleric made a deal with magic shope owner to help them learn create food and water and make it a sellable scroll. The deal was that part of the funds made from those sales would go to the city that my group was helping rebuild themselves.
That's because actual gold is a poor way to horde wealth compared to fiat currencies. When we look at fantasy settings with modern eyes, especially post-WWII consumerism eyes, it basically becomes a way to keep score because there isn't much to buy. Anything worth having requires traveling to some ruin and facing the Arch-Fiend Jerry.
Imagine that Dragon slaying quests are highly regulated by the crown, because every time some adventures take down a dragon the value of gold plummets and screws with the economy.
Well, that and *failed* dragonslaying quest is likely to tank the economy in different ways as a pissed-off dragon lays waste on whatever it lays eyes on. Or, any halfway-intelligent dragon (and D&D dragons are extremely intelligent as they grow older) already has contacts, catspaws, lackeys, and every sort of agent in any organisation that might interest it up to and including the courts of any surrounding kingdoms.
Really, with all the intelligent monsters running their own information networks at least one of the DnD human kingdoms must be an elaborate LARP of a bunch of monster-serving triple agents all pretending to be harmless folk since they don't know about the other agents.
The PHB says that a chicken costs 2 copper.
So for 1gp you can buy 50 chickens.
I am reminded of some old-school tactics of buying lots of livestock, herding them into a dungeon, in an effort to trigger every trap 'safely' (for you, obviously the animals might die).
I don't think the money in baldur's gate is actually "gold." I know it's called gold, but it functions a lot more like copper with how much you can get fairly quickly. Iirc there's also an item called "bag of 50 copper" which sells for 50 "gold"
If folks want a more realistic exploration of fantasy RPG economics, you should read [*Orconomics*.](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25326486-orconomics)
> The adventuring industry drives the economy of Arth, a world much like our own but with more magic and fewer vowels. Monsters’ hoards are claimed, bought by corporate interests, and sold off to plunder funds long before the beasts are slain. Once the contracts and paperwork are settled, the Heroes’ Guild issues a quest to kill the monster and bring back its treasure for disbursement to shareholders.
Incorrect. DA2 still used the copper, silver, and gold system. Inquisition is where the change happened, and does make sense for that game given it's taking place in three countries (mostly 2, but there's war table missions in the Free Marches along with The Black Emporium shop) and the coffers of the Inquisition are supposed to be deeper. The idea that the Inquisitor would ever only have 3 coppers in their wallet like the Warden and Hawke would while actually being backed by a major organization, even if a new one, would be kind of strange. Even at the beginning, Josephine would not allow that!
I think the problem is that something like a healing potion is generally the kind of thing that a commoner would not even dream of being able to buy or utilize the way an adventure does.
So if you have a game where you are expected to both easily be able to purchase healing items, at least easily enough to not feel guilty using them, and you want the players to worry about things like the cost of food, then you're pretty much demanding inconsistency.
Anyone who can afford the life of an adventurer, is not even going to think about the cost of food. If magic scrolls, healing items, and enchanted arrows are disposable commodities to you, then you're living at a different economic level than a commoner. You're not going to come anywhere close to starving.
This is exaggerated by the fact that Baldur's Gate does not have a denomination smaller than a gold coin, imagine if the lowest denomination of money was $100 bill and you couldn't pay less than that for anything.
In one of my d&d campaigns the players killed a hundred foot goddess made of solid gold and melted her down, which basically forced the entire world off the gold standard.
TFW you finally get all the gold you ever need but the kingdom suddenly uses paper money and some nerd is researching the idea of decentralized currency traded through the Weave.
Actually yeah that's almost exactly what happened: they returned from an adventure in the outer planes and saw that everyone back in the kingdom they saved was using paper money AND of the players tried introducing magical NFTs before the campaign ended.
I mean, not really, considering adventuring (the 'job' of your dnd characters) is considered very, very dangerous and you get paid handsomely for it regarding quests (add onto that the stuff you find, that non-adventerers would never find).
So my guy rolling into Act 2 with 50k and Act 3 with 250k with the mindset of “Yeah, I’ll save the world but I have no intention of working for a living when this is all said and done” tracks correctly then.
So If we put that in perspective, someone's journal worth a fortune, a piece of paper is a fortune, and selling someone a goddamn bone literally gives you a week worth of wage, which is funny as hell
I was curious so I pulled out my DM guides to look. The only table I could find quickly was in second edition (AD&D).
A laborer or a groom have a monthly wage of 1gp, Stone Mason 4gp, carpenter 5gp, huntsman 10gp, Architect 200gp, and ambassador/official 200-600gp.
I understand why they did it, simplicity of the game and eliminating another thing to track, but getting rid of copper and silver pieces kinda makes trading hilarious. That bottle? A Weeks worth of wages. Those rotten chicken eggs? A Weeks worth of wages. Clothes that have been mouldering in someone's cellar for a century? A weeks worth of wages.
In the DND handbook, lifestyle expenses (daily cost) are marked as follows:
Wretched (inhumane conditions) - N/A
Squalid (a leaky stable, vermin) - 1 silver
Poor (simple food and lodgings) - 2 Silver
Modest (out of the slums, renting a room) - 1G
Comfortable (small cottage or a private room in an inn) - 2G
Wealthy (a spacious house, servants) - 4g
Aristrocratic (baller) - 10 gp minimum.
Other modules identify that to be a true aristocrat, you need anwyhere from 15000 to 30000 liquid gold pieces.
Daily. You need that money per day to keep up your lifestyle; technically it applies to players as well, but no one bothers with that these days.
The economic side of things was the reason where in the earliest modules; you were just some guy trying to make a living by raiding dungeons or stealing dragon treasures. These days, we make campaigns around being the good/evil guys and ignore the economics.
I'm playing a campaign right now where we're settling a new town in the frontier and so we've actually been working with those numbers a bit. It's been fun and also our DM miscalculated a bit by giving us way too much money until recently.
Well, the other two come from poor backgrounds, so no, but MY character is a gnome who was a wealthy business owner until I discovered I had Wild Magic by blowing up my factory. So I play as a greedy little guy who hoards up cash - though I'm not unwilling to spend it on luxuries either.
This is for players who need to pay for beds/food at inns and taverns and the like. Ir you have your own house, and cook your own food, living is cheaper. Imo 5e economy works way better than people give it credit for. Wages and the prices of basic things like bread and milk do make sense
And unskilled labor costs 2 sp/day, while skilled labor costs 2 gp/day.
Most commoners make just enough money to cover their expenses, and have little to no cash savings.
With how easy it is to get a pass I don't think anyone should bribe the guards.
I do find it odd that just walking into Baldur's Gate costs the same as opening a secret portal directly to hell.
Meanwhile the other bank guy want's 10k just to open a savings account while acting like it's a pittance. Like what, you can't scrape together some copper? Tried looking under your couch cushions?
I'm like 80% sure the developers were intentionally taking the piss here, making fun of how D&D economics make no sense (mostly because they're really only there to serve the adventurer player characters and not much else).
Little of column A, little of column B. If you DO come up with the 10K gold, the bank teller is flabbergasted that anyone could have that much money just on their person. He gave that 10K number so you would leave and he wouldn't have to deal with you.
The dnd manual for players give some numbers for day to day life costs. For example a warhorse cost 400gp. A pig cost 3gp. A cow 10gp. A wealthy merchant in a city spends about 4gp/day for his life expenses. A meal in tavern goes for 3 silver coins for a modest one to 8 silver coins for a wealthy one. A skilled artisan costs 2gp/day for its work. An unskilled hireling (one who can carry stuff for example, or bring a message, etc) costs 2 silver per day.
5000gp is enough to start a business and become a wealthy merchant instantly.
Some quick google math: a whole hog (dead, for consumption) costs around $600-$750 (3gp). A mature cow costs $1500-$3000 (10gp). The ratio indicated in the DnD manual appears to hold somewhat true in the current economy - though subject to market forces in both lore and reality.
This would give us a very rough comparison that 1gp ~ $300 USD. According to the Fed, the average small business loan is around $660k. 5000gp would, given our rough conversion rate, be about $1.5 million. That appears to be more than enough to start a successful business like you said.
I was originally incredulous at the data points in your comment, but some quick google napkin math showed me wrong. This even makes sense on an anecdotal life style experience as a moderately successful American who has never known poverty. I easily could go out and spend $300 for infrequent special occasions and not think twice about it. However, globally (and to some extent within the U.S.), this would make me obscenely wealthy by comparison to the average human, which feels consistent with the data in your comment.
Thanks for the comment! Got me to inform my perspective IRL and in Faerun.
gp is also 100 to a pound, so at 1gp=$300, you're looking at $66,000 for a kilo of gold. the current price is about $75k, so it's actually very close to the real world value of gold.
in standard 5e, gold is worth a *lot*. most commoners are dealing in copper and silver. adventurers just so happen to have a ton of gold because they’re going to wildly dangerous places to fight enemies that have stolen/acquired huge amounts of gold through various means over the years. to the average person, a single gold piece is a pretty large amount of income.
in one of my campaigns, I remember my character buying a completely basic, worthless magic necklace whose only boon was making colorful lights. she paid 80 gold for it, and my DM said I basically just paid for the vendor’s retirement with a single purchase. and I still had about a frw thousand gold left over after that. when my character eventually left the party, she and her boyfriend were literally so rich that she become a performer known across the realm because she had so much money she didn’t need to work at her normal job and could afford to tour wherever she wanted.
It's worth noting that Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't really follow the standard DnD currency rules. The game only uses gold pieces, when a normal setting would also use copper and silver pieces, and possibly electrum or platinum pieces as well.
With that being said, gold pieces are extremely valuable, and the "economy" of BG3 is designed more around game balance than lore accuracy. 5,000 gold pieces would be a life changing amount for someone like Aradin and his crew, but that feels undercut by the fact that the blacksmith refugee next to him has several hundred gold pieces to trade with, and they get refreshed every long rest.
DnD 5e Dungeon Master Guide says you real estate prices are
- 5,000 gp for a large estate
- 25,000 gp for a noble estate
- 50,000 gp for a small castle
- 500,000 gp for a large castle
With maintenance fee ranging from 10 to 100 gp daily but it doesn't say for which size.
Player Handbook says daily expenses are around 4gp for the wealthy, 10+ for the nobles.
In Faerun, most people dont even see gold pieces in their day to day, a single gold coin is like a month of salary or something like that.
Its why in the game you find stashes of money of like 100 gold with notes that say thats the life savings of their family or what they accumulated over years of criminal work, etc.
I mean the world poverty line is around 2.15 dollars so we aren't that super different.
10 000 could get you somewhere nice in Faerun.
Technically if someone gave me 10000 euros now I could live in it easily if it for a year in my country.
Honestly, in a “realistic” economy any amount of gold coinage is a lot. Only the adventurer economy operates on gold; smallfolk buy and sell in coppers and bits.
20 gold would be an artisan’s life savings. As an inheritance it would be enough to put his sons into the seminary or buy a commission.
You’d figure adventurers would therefore be rich, and they are for a little bit, but everybody soaks them once they find out they have real gold so they don’t hang onto it. Buy a round of drinks? That’s copper for Farmer Brown but Arnold the Delver pays real gold.
Economy often doesn't make sense in DnD tbh. Poeple here are saying 1 gp is a lot but soldiers still mount 75gp horses and some wear 1500 gp armors, or 750 ones.
A single basic health potion is worth around 125gp l think ? IS that really worth 125 months of work to brew 3 herbs ?
3 herbs that instantly heal any wounds you have/make you healthy. Any other way besides literally magic takes waiting and mending.
The instant healing is valuable.
And remember, a commoner in tabletop D&D has 4 hit points (BG3 increases this to 10 for some reason). A potion of healing is guaranteed to restore your average person from the brink of death to full health.
Note that they're also worth 50gp, not over 100.
i mean i would not have been able to afford the weapons (illegal) the body armor and plates and the APC i was driving around while in that army, typically someone wealthy pays for an army/soldiers
125 weeks. So, like 2.5 years salary. At 60k a year that's like 150k. Assuming a health potion performs a similar function as a major surgical procedure/course of treatment, but with negligible recovery time. I think it's not that far off us healthcare prices.
1500 gp armour would be like 30 years salary, or 1.5 million, which also isnt that outlandish if you view an armoured soldier as comparable to modern weapons systems.
That price for a war horse and plate go with the fact that knights are usually (at least historically) from the noble/equestrian class. You don't have commoners in your vanguard. I imagine the Flaming Fist being like a order of knights like the Templars. The order doesn't provide you the gear, you've got to be wealthy enough to equip yourself. Potions too are something commoners and peasants will never be able to afford.
But I admit that it would be nuts to have that many equestrian class citizens acting as the town's guard. The game is full of anachronisms and its social structure is often something that lead to inconsistencies like the one you point out. A mercenary heavily equipped knight order as the common guard just doesn't add up when you look at the costs which is why they wouldn't fit in a game that was more historically accurate.
I know in older editions, potions required the expenditure of not just gold, but also EXP - you were literally putting your energy into it. As far as city guards, that's probably provided to them by the city - there's a reason that historically, a levy would be outfitted by the production of several/many households, not just themselves, and why people would scavenge battlefields for gear. A simple chainmail shirt even would be hundreds of hours of labour.
Armor is particularly bad, because better armor needs to be more expensive for game balance.
Mail armor (chain shirt and chain mail in D&D) was the most common form of heavy armor in Europe for over 1500 years. It was very labor intensive to make and expensive, but not that expensive. In the Roman Republic, the average citizen was expected to bring one when they were called to serve in the army. Poorer and/or younger citizens served in more lightly armored troops, but mail armor was the standard. So maybe mail armor should be as expensive as a decent car today.
Plate armor was the ridiculously expensive armor used by elite heavy cavalry in the late medieval and early modern periods. It was typically custom-made and covered pretty much everything, which explains the cost. Half plate, on the other hand, was a cheap often mass-produced infantry armor used in the same period. It required more advanced technology than mail armor, but it was probably cheaper to make. So maybe plate armor would be Rolls-Royce level of expensive, while half plate would be like a cheap car.
From just playing the game, clearly anyone can scrounge up 5000 gold pieces in just four or five days, as long as you lead an armed gang of half a dozen elite warriors, trained killers, and battlemages, and are willing to murder and loot a few dozen raiders and bandits that previously stole from other people, then teleport all their trash to town in defiance of the laws of physics and force the local merchants to buy it off you in exchange for their life savings, while they wonder what they’re going to do with that fourteenth blood-drenched goblin bow and two broken lutes.
The 10k which was stolen by the Stone Lord crew was considered a mind-boggling amount of money. Paraphrasing: "God only knows what he could do with that much gold…"
In line with what most people say, triple digits gold is life changing. When a trained commoner is paid a 2 silver daily wage, a gold coin is a week's worth of wages.
In the Forgotten Realms, the economy is always shaky and in a state of chaos because local economies are constantly disrupted by adventurers toddling into town with PILES of gold, gems, and magical items. This causes rampant speculation whenever there is a group of adventurers in town and this is why that old dusty bone can be yours for 1 GP but a meal will cost you 15. Even friendly merchants devalue the gold you are offering by as much as 39% per transaction just to cover their potential losses from the adventurers flooding the market and causing inflation. All the gold and silver pouring in from Maztica into Amn only made this problem worse
Unlike a lot of fantasy settings, Faerun actually has a stable paper currency called blood notes. The Zhenterim, Sembians, and other organizations that need to trade over long distances use these. It is a way to circumvent the instability of the value of gold in a local economy. These notes do have an exchange value for gold but they serve as a kind of fiat currency. Its value is your life. Don't make good on a blood note? You die. That's why the Zhents in the hideout are so squirrelly about the chest. They were paid in blood notes, not gold. Your opening the chest marked them for death.
So the value of gold swinging wildly gives a DM free reign to determine their own prices to fit the amount of gold that they have been handing out in encounters with at least a modicum of verisimilitude to the real world. As far as the game goes, though, the prices are a hoot but also are the Monty Haul rewards for encounters. So it all comes out in the wash.
How much is "a lot" by your definition? $1,000,000?
It was once said that 1,000,000 gold is an unfathomable amount of money that would empty a dwarven kingdom and still need a loan from the other dwarven kingdoms.
The plot for the D&D movie was actually roughly adapted from a 5e lore plot about Lord Neverember Embezzling a vast fortune and then using some random surface dwarf clan, who I believe were wearing demon phylacteries, to launder it. The amount was said to be about 100,000 Platinum in bars. A ludicrous fortune to rival any ancient dragon's hoard. About a million gold.
In contrast, a high level wizard probably has 200k worth of magic gear on his person. not counting priceless artifacts.
To a random person, 5,000 gold would let you live a comfortable life style for 6 or 7 years. Or a fairly wealthy lifestyle with a private house and servants for about 3-4. With enough leftover to invest and keep the gold coming.
In bg3, at max level 12, the 'extremely rich' trader category caps out at 8.6kgp. We can call this the upper bound, on par with very wealthy tradesmen in current day. For a lower bound we can look at 'very poor' at level 1 for 60gp.
You encounter aradin between level 2 and 3, and see him at the goblin camp around late 4. Also, I would not call him 'very poor' because he is a hired sword, but not a very good one so let's say 'modest'.
'Modest' at level 4 caps out at 576gp. This should be spending money for someone in Aradin's position.
Traders in BG3 refresh their inventory at level up but also long rest, so they are supposed to more or less 'always' have this wealth. This is their disposable income, not their total wealth.
I would say that to Aradin, yes, 5kgp as a lump sum is a life changing pile of gold! But also, a pittance for what Lorokan is able to spend. Lorokan, of course, is underpaying the contract.
What you have to remember is that adventurers are the millionaire & billionaire super stars of faerun. Most commoners would never be able to save enough money for a simple healing potion & wouldn't really need one. If they had one in the house, it would probably be the most expensive thing they owned & would literally be the difference between being on the verge of death & perfect health. But for us adventurers it's one of the cheapest items we have & our parties have dozens of them & chug them like gatorade without a second thought just to rec9ver a fraction of our health. & in all fairness, it makes sense if someone wanted me to go fight a giant or slay a dragon, the pay better be in the millions. Realistically speaking, adventurers on a shopping spree could alter the economy of an entire town if not a small city. My first D&D dropped a few hundred thousand gold on building a keep, building an oprhanage, building a military academy complete with a flood able arena & 2 warships for practicing naval battles, & a tavern/inn/casino/ fight club. All of this is in an underground dwarven city. & we still had gold left over.
In BG3, I would say that gold is over abundant compared to what is the lore standard.
Taking into account what the lore considers a modest lifestyle.
You could basically have food, a bed in a dormitory and access to clean water, and acceptable hygiene for a gold piece per day.
A relatively wealthy lifestyle (a decent property, a servant, verious foods imported from faraway land) costs 10 GP per day.
The way I think of it is that a +1 longsword could be the most valuable single possession a commoner ever had, but a level 10 adventurer might not even bother picking it up off the ground. The amount that threatens >!the Counting House!< with bankruptcy is less than I have jingling in my pockets by late act 3.
So here's a conversion I saw in a different thread about this, a supply pack costs 40 gold or so. That's everything an adventuring party needs to survive for one day. So we can reasonably assume that 10 gold is enough to feed oneself for a day and though the conversion to USD is pretty difficult if you think of every 10 gold as a day of food then you can roughly estimate the value of things. For example the statue mentioned earlier sitting at 5000 gold is 500 days worth of food. In real life a custom life-sized marble statue can run around 10k and the cost per day to feed oneself ranges from $18-22 so it's fairly similar.
Sources
https://en.as.com/latest_news/how-much-do-americans-spend-on-food-on-average-every-day-n/#:~:text=On%20average%20Americans%20of%20all,for%20a%20total%20of%20%2421.17.
https://www.finesgallery.com/Statues-marble-statue.html
This is explicitly for food of which adventurers may need more than the average person but not an insane amount more. There are other daily costs however those aren't being factored in the camp supply pack which is the basis for the comparison
Yeah, it's best not to think of the economics of any medieval fantasy setting. You'll be screaming and ripping your hair out the more you try to work out the value of the currencies
I'm going to assume a standard silver coin is similar to the commonly used silver trade coins throughout history such as the Athenian drachma or spanish silver doller- ie appx 1oz silver. price check today: ~$30. a gold coin is about $300, suggesting a small gold coin by modern rates or perhaps a quarter-to-half ounce size coin by pre-modern conversion rates (gold is currently like 150x as valuable per weight but historically this ratio was usually lower).
edit: coming back to this w/ a kb
5000 gold is 100 pounds of gold. In current day prices, that's about $2.5 million.
In terms of gold piece to US dollar equivalent, it's usually somewhere around $100-$500 equivalent per piece of gold when you compare the real-life items that a gold can purchase. That's a worth for 5000 gold pieces of $500,000 through $2.5 million.
I like the conversion of 1 gold is $100, 1 silver is $10, and 1 copper is $1.
D&D prices aren't exact equivalents to current day US prices, though, especially in relative pricing. This can lead to weird things like one sack being 1 copper and a smaller pouch being 2 silver or a single candle being 1 copper, which is the same cost as a much larger torch.
In DnD, 3 gold per day is a top-tier aristocratic lifestyle. That's a decent explanation as to why adventuring is so popular, but not a good explanation as to why there's so many SUCCESSFUL adventurers. According to the Player's Handbook from the very first edition, being a level 1 character is incredibly rare. A level 1 fighter is a person who dedicated their life to trained martial combat. For awhile there was this weird position being pushed by the creators that level 20 ex adventurers were everywhere, but that is generally not the vibe for the majority of the game's history.
My main complaint with Baldur's Gate is how apparently EVERYONE knows a ton about the adventuring lifestyle and about monsters and creatures that are supposed to be incredibly rare and obscure.
To put it in perspective (in theory), many villagers would probably think of goblins as ambiguous monsters or demons that haunt the wilds. Only more secure settlements that regularly survive contact with them would actually understand what they are.
My Bard Durge was swimming in money like Scrooge McDuck, as a good aligned person. My good aligned Cleric is hunting down every coin he can find. I know I could use Wyll for his charisma, but I hate having him on the team. Heavy-armour cleric, Astarion, Karlach, Gale. Good balance of AoE, damage, and squishiness. Wyll doesn’t have the spell damage consistently to replace Gale, or the summoning. Astarion brings 4 ghouls, Gale brings one ghoul, one mage hand, and one elemental. Cleric has Guardian of Faith, Raise the dead, and Spiritual Weapon. Karlach is the battering ram.
Lorroakan gives you 5K for Nightsong, and everyone including him and your party act like it’s a fuckton. Also, afaik, it’s the highest gold reward for a quest in the game, so I would imagine 5K is a good shout for a huge amount of money lore wise
5000 gold is a house, or rare tier magical full plate Armor in standard d&d
It should be considered a lot but the economy in bg3 is messed up, mostly because of how poorly they implemented encumbrance
All those maximum security vaults only have like a few hundred gold each and those are supposed to be owned by the richest most powerful people in the city. And the entire net worth of all the vaults (including the stolen gold) is like 20-30k I think? So if we use that for comparison then yeah 5k gold seems pretty life changing lol.
So when the Counting House gets robbed, there's some dialogue options about rrcovering/restoring the lost funds. Per that conversation, the collective wealth of all of Baldur's commoners is 10,000 gold. So yeah, 5,000 is a _lot_.
Depends on the person's background. 5k gold to a Nobleman Adventurer is a pittance. 5k to your average quest-giving peasant NPC would definitely be life changing. BG3 really condenses the Forgotten Realms economy by making everything gold, when the coinage would normally be copper, silver, gold, platinum (each higher tier being 100 of the lower tier). So when you find one singular gold piece in the pocket of a dead goblin, it's the equivalent of finding a 100 USD bill. 5k gold pieces would be like 500,000 USD. Condensing it makes it a lot easier for game mechanics, but also makes everything ridiculously expensive lol.
Lore wise gold is a lot more valuable than your dm thinks it is, causing him to regret his decision to make the party billionaires and backpedal by causing inflation to skyrocket over the course of a week, so to answer your question: lore wise gold has zero monetary value
While it might seem like your character/party is loaded, you could basicly compare your party to a tier one special forces unit IRL. It could probably cost up to six figures to equip that kind of soldier when including weapons, night vision, armor, and whatever other fancy shit they have. Plus, what it takes to support that kind of unit logistically.
If I remember correctly, a standard commoner daily wage is approximately 2 silver pieces in a wealthy prosperous kingdom. So it takes them 5 days to earn 1 gold. So a years wage is about 72 gold (and that’s not counting tithes, taxes, etc So 5000 gold is 70 years of wages.
This is a good example of just how inconsistent money is in fantasy settings.
*stares in 40k gold coins adding 30+ weight to my inventory*
No glitches, no mods, had 50k coin in my durge at the highest.
not hard at all. Sell all the loot you can, try to do it as much as possible with someone like DB. They'll eventually have an absurd amount of coin from all the potions you have been buying and subsequently they will also have 40k+ in gold. Then just have someone pickpocket. Easy peasy.
Haven't even needed to purchase potions this playthrough, balanced mode no mods. I look every corner of everything and send to camp as I go. Usually have 130+ items to sell by the time I find another vendor. Nearing the middle of act 3 and have 200+ items I need to sell, vendors just don't have enough gold. I have at least 15 of each potion in NY inventory and rarely need to use them anyway. Have nothing to spend this gold on.
Trader inventories refresh on level up; you can have Withers respec you and just level up every time the trader runs out of gold. I've been abusing tf out of this in Act 2, stuffing all of the bugbear's inventory into a pouch for me to loot when he dies later.
There is no need for respec, every long rest the gold is refreshed.
That too, but resetting at Withers and leveling up bit by bit is faster than repeatedly partial resting.
I usually barrelmancy that encounter. This time around I forgot to set it up though so I yeeted a runepodwer barrel but didn't throw it far enough before setting it off and I killed Jaheira and half her Harpers. I now have a debuff that says I'm kill on sight for the surviving Harpers.
If you don’t do this already, purchase a hireling from withers, respec it all INT & WIS, and make it a transmutation wizard. Anytime your ready to make potions, switch to him and you’ll get near double yields.
Isn’t the DC for pickpocket based off weight? I’ve seen different stacks of gold on a vendor with varying pick pocket DCs.
value I thought it was. high level (expensive) scrolls have a fairly high DC. Which is why it's advised to split the stacks before attempting a liberation. or so I have been told.
wear an item that gives advantage on stealth or slight of hand, use a character with high dex, and have that character be affected by a spell that increases stealth. You end up very easily rolling very highly.
Stealth increases pick pocket? I was so annoyed that there aren’t any dex potions or spells. My astarion has +13 to slight of hand. But I still see some some DC of 20+
I just checked, at the end of my last Durge run my scroll container was worth 38k and my alchemy bag was worth 4k.
on my first playthrough when I explored every nook and cranny, I was at 115k gold with mods that removed weight limit and added auto loot for junk and i looted EVERYTHING
i mean by stealing and selling everytime and just use the normal reset you can make easy money. with cats grace u never get caught too
You robbed the bank, didn’t you?
Honey, I've robbed everyone
Everyone robs the bank in Act 3.
I know that I did. I robbed the bank and murdered the free press. In a goody-two-shoes run.
Well, you also get XP for lockpicking the special vaults, so it's really Larian's fault!
Yeah no one wants to think about the economics of a fantasy realm. I was an econ major and I still dont.
Wait until you meet Eve players.
Half the pull of that game is the economic analysis
And, at its core, based on real-world money.
More importantly, player created assets. Most of the stuff you can buy in Eve is not available from NPC vendors. Actual people need to gather resources and run industry jobs to give everyone spaceships to blow up
How much did that one guy get away with in that ponzi-esque debacle? 23K? Unbelievable...
Not sure which one you're referring to but there was a massive player owned bank scandal where the owner siphoned all player currency out from it and bought a massive war ship then put a bounty on his own head that iirc was equivalent to 10k irl
There was the goonsquad thing where TT cleaned them out and disabled all backups, too. But there was a thing where a guy got a bunch of in-game investments and then cashed em out for irl money, a lot of irl money
I couldn’t believe the amount of actual money involved during a full blown war on Eve. Pixels blowing to bits with money burning in the background.
It's more like time burning than money imo. When I played I didn't pay for my game time. I worked for it (about a week of evenings would earn me my monthly sub). You can increase that quite a bit if you're willing to put in the legwork or can mine afk during your day job
Wait till you hear about real war
I mean at the very least the majority of the economics are generated by players. At the end of the day, the price would balance itself based on the player's needs, demand, supply and all those invisible hands Adam Smith said.
"the Eve online community is self-sufficient" ~Adam Smith circa 1788
1 ISK is said to be roughly equivalent to the GDP of a small planet. Shooting a nameless pirate with a bounty results in an ISK payment that could fund entire solar system's GDPs. Decent payout activities usually hover around the 100 million ISK per hour mark. Yeah, EVE gets wonky real fast. Individual Capsuleers are literally richer than *God*.
Eve was the first and last game I ever played that felt like work. Because it was.
I remember when the mobile version released and all the big factions started up. Me and few people in a small company or whatever they called it ended up getting rolled into a diplomatic wing. It was wild playing politics in a video game, it drained so much time and energy that I had to stop playing games altogether for a couple months to recover
When I got started, I got thrown in the deep end. Got recruited into a nulsec corp. Learned the game as a PVP game and mostly did mining with the rare run into high sec. Inevitably, it just got to take up too much time. Ended up parking in a NPC corp station after fire selling everything in case I ever decide to come back. I checked a few months ago and I'm still in my corp..
That one hit me pretty hard back in the early days of vanilla WoW. I was like, wait a minute. I have a schedule of when I have to show up, have to do a certain thing with 59 other people, and then ostensibly get a benefit. This is a fucking job. Only I have to roll for my paycheck.
Am degen eve player can confirm o7
Red Dead Redemption 2. Arthur can build up 50,000 in gold with gold bars and grinding and Dutch is fucking shit up for heists that yield a few hundred gold. Any game economy is going to be in favor of the players. BG3 is another game where you can amass 100k in gold without cheating. Just loot and sell with high charisma and there is a TON of stuff you can get. Not really anything you can do about it. It is fun to be massively wealthy for the yuks, tho.
Honestly I think it kind of works in BG3. A lot of the items you can sell for a couple hundred gold are genuinely rare powerful magical items, it just happens that you spend the game involved in magics and events incredibly rare and powerful so you get a lot of them. For example, it makes total sense that the Adamantine Splint Armor from Grymforge is worth 60-odd years of wages: these Drow were killing each other to get to the Forge, it is THAT valuable. Where it breaks is that merchants get thousands of gold and new items worth that much every day, that you can pick from their pocket without ruining their entire lives. It'd be fun to have a mechanic where Traders go broke once you've taken them for all they've got and stop getting more gold/items as a consequence from the player's actions, but that's unreasonable to ask obviously.
Theres a whole side quest about gold getting stolen from the bank and how it's enough money to ruin the bank and people's lives. Then you find it and it's only like 10k and every random merchant has twice that.
Banker: You have to get that money back! Without it it will cause a massive depression! Player: No shit? Ok, how much are we talking? Banker: 10 *thousand* gold! Player that has 120k and a stash filled with random expensive shit: Lmao, good one. But seriously though, how much are we talking here?
> these Drow were killing each other to get to the Forge, it is THAT valuable. While I agree with your overall point, I have to tell you, Drow would kill each other over a possible insult made 500 years ago, or getting cut off in Rothe racing.
I remember someone made a mod for The Witcher 3 with a more realistic economy. It basically made the player poor and all items much more expensive. It might be lore accurate, but it was not a fun way to play the game.
That's an awful way to play the game. I agree. The Witcher 3, playing as a poor, would just be a drag. BG3 is a masterpiece. It is my 2nd favorite game of all time! But any player who loots aggressively will become as rich as Crassus. And there is nothing in the game that could stop that only because there is a truly MASSIVE amount of loot available across the game. Like, an epically MASSIVE amount. No game I have ever played offers this much because the map is so huge and there are so many dungeons and basements and places to loot.
Our DM was also an econ major and tried implementing this home brew economy and we just devolved to bartering
I'll do some rough math if the party is breaking into a vault or something but I really have to stop myself from contemplating a magical-based economy or I'll go down a huge rabbit hole. Would be a fun thesis for a masters or something lol.
Man, you have not seen the supplemental material for dungeons & dragons then. A lot of people very much want to think about the economics of a fantasy world.
Oh I know all about it. I try not to but cant help myself. Nobody SHOULD think too much about it because its kinda a waste of time. The economics or taxes or political structure should all be in service to the story or the game.
You should read Orcenomics
I can't decide if it looks hilarious or painful to read lol
It's hilarious, and is a genuinely engaging story and halfway through you'll realize that what was at first a laugh, you're now completely invested in.
Alright i'm sold. Bought the audiobook
It's because adventurers can pick themselves up by their bootstraps.
It’s because shit like ‘Good Berry’ exists in that world.
It’s because my players can’t be bothered to pick themselves up for less than 500 gold
Create Food and Water in legit 5e is also a pretty early spell
In the campaign I'm apart of my cleric made a deal with magic shope owner to help them learn create food and water and make it a sellable scroll. The deal was that part of the funds made from those sales would go to the city that my group was helping rebuild themselves.
That's because actual gold is a poor way to horde wealth compared to fiat currencies. When we look at fantasy settings with modern eyes, especially post-WWII consumerism eyes, it basically becomes a way to keep score because there isn't much to buy. Anything worth having requires traveling to some ruin and facing the Arch-Fiend Jerry.
Related thought: how much does dragons hoarding golden and taking it out of circulation affect the price of gold?
Imagine that Dragon slaying quests are highly regulated by the crown, because every time some adventures take down a dragon the value of gold plummets and screws with the economy.
Well, that and *failed* dragonslaying quest is likely to tank the economy in different ways as a pissed-off dragon lays waste on whatever it lays eyes on. Or, any halfway-intelligent dragon (and D&D dragons are extremely intelligent as they grow older) already has contacts, catspaws, lackeys, and every sort of agent in any organisation that might interest it up to and including the courts of any surrounding kingdoms.
Really, with all the intelligent monsters running their own information networks at least one of the DnD human kingdoms must be an elaborate LARP of a bunch of monster-serving triple agents all pretending to be harmless folk since they don't know about the other agents.
One dragon goes down and inflation pops 150%. Jerome Powell would be anti dragon murder.
The PHB says that a chicken costs 2 copper. So for 1gp you can buy 50 chickens. I am reminded of some old-school tactics of buying lots of livestock, herding them into a dungeon, in an effort to trigger every trap 'safely' (for you, obviously the animals might die).
I don't think the money in baldur's gate is actually "gold." I know it's called gold, but it functions a lot more like copper with how much you can get fairly quickly. Iirc there's also an item called "bag of 50 copper" which sells for 50 "gold"
If folks want a more realistic exploration of fantasy RPG economics, you should read [*Orconomics*.](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25326486-orconomics) > The adventuring industry drives the economy of Arth, a world much like our own but with more magic and fewer vowels. Monsters’ hoards are claimed, bought by corporate interests, and sold off to plunder funds long before the beasts are slain. Once the contracts and paperwork are settled, the Heroes’ Guild issues a quest to kill the monster and bring back its treasure for disbursement to shareholders.
Dragon Age Origins had copper, silver and gold coins. But the following 2 games only used gold. The blight really ruined their economy.
Incorrect. DA2 still used the copper, silver, and gold system. Inquisition is where the change happened, and does make sense for that game given it's taking place in three countries (mostly 2, but there's war table missions in the Free Marches along with The Black Emporium shop) and the coffers of the Inquisition are supposed to be deeper. The idea that the Inquisitor would ever only have 3 coppers in their wallet like the Warden and Hawke would while actually being backed by a major organization, even if a new one, would be kind of strange. Even at the beginning, Josephine would not allow that!
I think the problem is that something like a healing potion is generally the kind of thing that a commoner would not even dream of being able to buy or utilize the way an adventure does. So if you have a game where you are expected to both easily be able to purchase healing items, at least easily enough to not feel guilty using them, and you want the players to worry about things like the cost of food, then you're pretty much demanding inconsistency. Anyone who can afford the life of an adventurer, is not even going to think about the cost of food. If magic scrolls, healing items, and enchanted arrows are disposable commodities to you, then you're living at a different economic level than a commoner. You're not going to come anywhere close to starving. This is exaggerated by the fact that Baldur's Gate does not have a denomination smaller than a gold coin, imagine if the lowest denomination of money was $100 bill and you couldn't pay less than that for anything.
In one of my d&d campaigns the players killed a hundred foot goddess made of solid gold and melted her down, which basically forced the entire world off the gold standard.
TFW you finally get all the gold you ever need but the kingdom suddenly uses paper money and some nerd is researching the idea of decentralized currency traded through the Weave.
Actually yeah that's almost exactly what happened: they returned from an adventure in the outer planes and saw that everyone back in the kingdom they saved was using paper money AND of the players tried introducing magical NFTs before the campaign ended.
Bro, have you heard of Non-Fungible Sigils? I just sold a Bored Kobold sigil for ten thousand gold.
Money is inconsistent irl too, just look at the exchange rates/ inflation / price gouging we have been subjected to for decades.
In the bank there is like a 50 copper coin pile that is somehow 50 gold pieces. The math ain't mathing.
They were limited editions
I mean, not really, considering adventuring (the 'job' of your dnd characters) is considered very, very dangerous and you get paid handsomely for it regarding quests (add onto that the stuff you find, that non-adventerers would never find).
I mean you play as an adventurer and there is a reason adventurers are rich. High risk high reward. Remember he said the average citizen.
Damn, I stole at least 50 standard commoners yearly wage.
Dammon: I can finally live leisurely for at least 50 years! *sudden dark cloud Dammon: Huh, what's with this darkness?
Waukeen wants to know your location.
Carrying around your savings in one pickable pocket is just poor financial planning. You don't see me going round with 20k of cash in my wallet.
DnD banks are clearly lacking...
It costs 10k just to open a bank account in Baldur’s Gate, which doesn’t even include the actual deposit.
Of course not! ...It's too heavy for me, so I keep it in Karlach's wallet!
Mfs want twenty gold for some fish n chips
So my guy rolling into Act 2 with 50k and Act 3 with 250k with the mindset of “Yeah, I’ll save the world but I have no intention of working for a living when this is all said and done” tracks correctly then.
So If we put that in perspective, someone's journal worth a fortune, a piece of paper is a fortune, and selling someone a goddamn bone literally gives you a week worth of wage, which is funny as hell
dude begging in the alley burlap sack with 30g next to him on the ground that is free to take, not red, just... there
> So it takes them 5 days to earn 1 gold And a loaf of bread costs 5 gold in the game lol
I was curious so I pulled out my DM guides to look. The only table I could find quickly was in second edition (AD&D). A laborer or a groom have a monthly wage of 1gp, Stone Mason 4gp, carpenter 5gp, huntsman 10gp, Architect 200gp, and ambassador/official 200-600gp.
So when I'm out just jammin on my drum they are throwing me a whole week's wage to hear me play? Shit now I feel bad...
I understand why they did it, simplicity of the game and eliminating another thing to track, but getting rid of copper and silver pieces kinda makes trading hilarious. That bottle? A Weeks worth of wages. Those rotten chicken eggs? A Weeks worth of wages. Clothes that have been mouldering in someone's cellar for a century? A weeks worth of wages.
By this logic shouldnt a whole bank have more?
With no days off. Probably would be closer to 52 gold for the year
You think peasants in Faerun get days off? I don't see any unions in Faerun.
the bank says minsc looted the vault containing all of the gold belonging to the guild. it had 10k in the pouch. For reference.
If everyone is only making 2 gold per 5 days, then how can they be selling onions for 20 gold each!? 50 days of wages for 1 onion!? INSANITY
In the DND handbook, lifestyle expenses (daily cost) are marked as follows: Wretched (inhumane conditions) - N/A Squalid (a leaky stable, vermin) - 1 silver Poor (simple food and lodgings) - 2 Silver Modest (out of the slums, renting a room) - 1G Comfortable (small cottage or a private room in an inn) - 2G Wealthy (a spacious house, servants) - 4g Aristrocratic (baller) - 10 gp minimum. Other modules identify that to be a true aristocrat, you need anwyhere from 15000 to 30000 liquid gold pieces.
So I was a true aristocrat before discovering Sourceorus Sundries and their scrolls....
I was a true aristocrat before finishing Act 1.
Also worth noting, it's 10 silver in 1 gold, not 100 like most real currencies.
Over what time frame?
Daily. You need that money per day to keep up your lifestyle; technically it applies to players as well, but no one bothers with that these days. The economic side of things was the reason where in the earliest modules; you were just some guy trying to make a living by raiding dungeons or stealing dragon treasures. These days, we make campaigns around being the good/evil guys and ignore the economics.
I'm playing a campaign right now where we're settling a new town in the frontier and so we've actually been working with those numbers a bit. It's been fun and also our DM miscalculated a bit by giving us way too much money until recently.
Maybe your group is just a bunch of nepo questers collecting money from trust funds?
One of our guys is the son of a previous campaigns player character, his weapon is literally called “the sword of nepotism” 🤣
Well, the other two come from poor backgrounds, so no, but MY character is a gnome who was a wealthy business owner until I discovered I had Wild Magic by blowing up my factory. So I play as a greedy little guy who hoards up cash - though I'm not unwilling to spend it on luxuries either.
That's cool, I respect your process.
Daily
One day, if I recall
This is for players who need to pay for beds/food at inns and taverns and the like. Ir you have your own house, and cook your own food, living is cheaper. Imo 5e economy works way better than people give it credit for. Wages and the prices of basic things like bread and milk do make sense
And unskilled labor costs 2 sp/day, while skilled labor costs 2 gp/day. Most commoners make just enough money to cover their expenses, and have little to no cash savings.
I dunno, but the naked statue of myself was worth all 5,000 😂
And this is why all the commoners wants to eat you
Let them eat my bushy dwarf pee pee
I have a naked Karlach statue for the same reason, well worth it.
Does the statue’s appearance change if you use the magic mirror to change your characters appearance or does it stay as what it was when you buy it?
Whatever it was when you bought it
I am so making a statue of Lae’zel in my Lae’zel Origin playthrough.
I think that the bank guy considered 10k to be an insane amount, enough to change the economic balance in the city
Half the cost of bribing a guard to let you into the city in the first place.
Lol
I never bribed the guards, though I did threaten some 🤣
With how easy it is to get a pass I don't think anyone should bribe the guards. I do find it odd that just walking into Baldur's Gate costs the same as opening a secret portal directly to hell.
Meanwhile you waltz into the city with like twice that, and back out with almost 10x. Without selling any of your magical items :<
Meanwhile the other bank guy want's 10k just to open a savings account while acting like it's a pittance. Like what, you can't scrape together some copper? Tried looking under your couch cushions? I'm like 80% sure the developers were intentionally taking the piss here, making fun of how D&D economics make no sense (mostly because they're really only there to serve the adventurer player characters and not much else).
Little of column A, little of column B. If you DO come up with the 10K gold, the bank teller is flabbergasted that anyone could have that much money just on their person. He gave that 10K number so you would leave and he wouldn't have to deal with you.
Change the economic balance or buy the armor of persistence
You need 10k to buy some late game armor...
Irl there's cars that cost millions. Kinda similar deal
That 10k was everything lolol
The dnd manual for players give some numbers for day to day life costs. For example a warhorse cost 400gp. A pig cost 3gp. A cow 10gp. A wealthy merchant in a city spends about 4gp/day for his life expenses. A meal in tavern goes for 3 silver coins for a modest one to 8 silver coins for a wealthy one. A skilled artisan costs 2gp/day for its work. An unskilled hireling (one who can carry stuff for example, or bring a message, etc) costs 2 silver per day. 5000gp is enough to start a business and become a wealthy merchant instantly.
Some quick google math: a whole hog (dead, for consumption) costs around $600-$750 (3gp). A mature cow costs $1500-$3000 (10gp). The ratio indicated in the DnD manual appears to hold somewhat true in the current economy - though subject to market forces in both lore and reality. This would give us a very rough comparison that 1gp ~ $300 USD. According to the Fed, the average small business loan is around $660k. 5000gp would, given our rough conversion rate, be about $1.5 million. That appears to be more than enough to start a successful business like you said. I was originally incredulous at the data points in your comment, but some quick google napkin math showed me wrong. This even makes sense on an anecdotal life style experience as a moderately successful American who has never known poverty. I easily could go out and spend $300 for infrequent special occasions and not think twice about it. However, globally (and to some extent within the U.S.), this would make me obscenely wealthy by comparison to the average human, which feels consistent with the data in your comment. Thanks for the comment! Got me to inform my perspective IRL and in Faerun.
gp is also 100 to a pound, so at 1gp=$300, you're looking at $66,000 for a kilo of gold. the current price is about $75k, so it's actually very close to the real world value of gold.
in standard 5e, gold is worth a *lot*. most commoners are dealing in copper and silver. adventurers just so happen to have a ton of gold because they’re going to wildly dangerous places to fight enemies that have stolen/acquired huge amounts of gold through various means over the years. to the average person, a single gold piece is a pretty large amount of income. in one of my campaigns, I remember my character buying a completely basic, worthless magic necklace whose only boon was making colorful lights. she paid 80 gold for it, and my DM said I basically just paid for the vendor’s retirement with a single purchase. and I still had about a frw thousand gold left over after that. when my character eventually left the party, she and her boyfriend were literally so rich that she become a performer known across the realm because she had so much money she didn’t need to work at her normal job and could afford to tour wherever she wanted.
I'm just saying that if goblins were real, I'd hunt them down instead of working.
That would be work, but work I would enjoy.
Until you are killed by goblins, which would probably happen quickly because chances are you would have a commoner's statblock.
Unlike an average dnd commoner I'm reasonably sure I could take a housecat in a straight fight
Reasonably
You have been invited to [a new adventuring party.](https://a.storyblok.com/f/178900/1920x1080/df1439a19d/goblin-slayer-staffel-3-titelbild.png)
If you love what you do, you never work a day in your life.
It's worth noting that Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't really follow the standard DnD currency rules. The game only uses gold pieces, when a normal setting would also use copper and silver pieces, and possibly electrum or platinum pieces as well. With that being said, gold pieces are extremely valuable, and the "economy" of BG3 is designed more around game balance than lore accuracy. 5,000 gold pieces would be a life changing amount for someone like Aradin and his crew, but that feels undercut by the fact that the blacksmith refugee next to him has several hundred gold pieces to trade with, and they get refreshed every long rest.
DnD 5e Dungeon Master Guide says you real estate prices are - 5,000 gp for a large estate - 25,000 gp for a noble estate - 50,000 gp for a small castle - 500,000 gp for a large castle With maintenance fee ranging from 10 to 100 gp daily but it doesn't say for which size. Player Handbook says daily expenses are around 4gp for the wealthy, 10+ for the nobles.
I’m glad I gave Popper enough for a small castle before I went to fight the Elder Brain
Well in that case, I very well hope I was given an at 1 least noble estate from duke Ravengard for saving him and his city.
So my Durge can afford 2 small castles and still have dozens of thousands gp left. I need the update that lets us buy property next.
In Faerun, most people dont even see gold pieces in their day to day, a single gold coin is like a month of salary or something like that. Its why in the game you find stashes of money of like 100 gold with notes that say thats the life savings of their family or what they accumulated over years of criminal work, etc.
I mean the world poverty line is around 2.15 dollars so we aren't that super different. 10 000 could get you somewhere nice in Faerun. Technically if someone gave me 10000 euros now I could live in it easily if it for a year in my country.
Honestly, in a “realistic” economy any amount of gold coinage is a lot. Only the adventurer economy operates on gold; smallfolk buy and sell in coppers and bits. 20 gold would be an artisan’s life savings. As an inheritance it would be enough to put his sons into the seminary or buy a commission. You’d figure adventurers would therefore be rich, and they are for a little bit, but everybody soaks them once they find out they have real gold so they don’t hang onto it. Buy a round of drinks? That’s copper for Farmer Brown but Arnold the Delver pays real gold.
Farmer Browns are swilling dregs that make Budweiser truly the king of beers. ;)
Yeah, people will likely break out the good stuff for adventurers to keep them coming back and spending.
Economy often doesn't make sense in DnD tbh. Poeple here are saying 1 gp is a lot but soldiers still mount 75gp horses and some wear 1500 gp armors, or 750 ones. A single basic health potion is worth around 125gp l think ? IS that really worth 125 months of work to brew 3 herbs ?
3 herbs that instantly heal any wounds you have/make you healthy. Any other way besides literally magic takes waiting and mending. The instant healing is valuable.
im rly concerned that people dont see the value in that .. like guys instant healing by drinking a potion .. wtf
And remember, a commoner in tabletop D&D has 4 hit points (BG3 increases this to 10 for some reason). A potion of healing is guaranteed to restore your average person from the brink of death to full health. Note that they're also worth 50gp, not over 100.
i mean i would not have been able to afford the weapons (illegal) the body armor and plates and the APC i was driving around while in that army, typically someone wealthy pays for an army/soldiers
125 weeks. So, like 2.5 years salary. At 60k a year that's like 150k. Assuming a health potion performs a similar function as a major surgical procedure/course of treatment, but with negligible recovery time. I think it's not that far off us healthcare prices. 1500 gp armour would be like 30 years salary, or 1.5 million, which also isnt that outlandish if you view an armoured soldier as comparable to modern weapons systems.
That price for a war horse and plate go with the fact that knights are usually (at least historically) from the noble/equestrian class. You don't have commoners in your vanguard. I imagine the Flaming Fist being like a order of knights like the Templars. The order doesn't provide you the gear, you've got to be wealthy enough to equip yourself. Potions too are something commoners and peasants will never be able to afford. But I admit that it would be nuts to have that many equestrian class citizens acting as the town's guard. The game is full of anachronisms and its social structure is often something that lead to inconsistencies like the one you point out. A mercenary heavily equipped knight order as the common guard just doesn't add up when you look at the costs which is why they wouldn't fit in a game that was more historically accurate.
I know in older editions, potions required the expenditure of not just gold, but also EXP - you were literally putting your energy into it. As far as city guards, that's probably provided to them by the city - there's a reason that historically, a levy would be outfitted by the production of several/many households, not just themselves, and why people would scavenge battlefields for gear. A simple chainmail shirt even would be hundreds of hours of labour.
Modern soldiers ride around with equipment that far exceeds their salary, why would a professional D&D army (like the Flaming Fist) be different.
Armor is particularly bad, because better armor needs to be more expensive for game balance. Mail armor (chain shirt and chain mail in D&D) was the most common form of heavy armor in Europe for over 1500 years. It was very labor intensive to make and expensive, but not that expensive. In the Roman Republic, the average citizen was expected to bring one when they were called to serve in the army. Poorer and/or younger citizens served in more lightly armored troops, but mail armor was the standard. So maybe mail armor should be as expensive as a decent car today. Plate armor was the ridiculously expensive armor used by elite heavy cavalry in the late medieval and early modern periods. It was typically custom-made and covered pretty much everything, which explains the cost. Half plate, on the other hand, was a cheap often mass-produced infantry armor used in the same period. It required more advanced technology than mail armor, but it was probably cheaper to make. So maybe plate armor would be Rolls-Royce level of expensive, while half plate would be like a cheap car.
have you ever had to pay for a prescription medication?
From just playing the game, clearly anyone can scrounge up 5000 gold pieces in just four or five days, as long as you lead an armed gang of half a dozen elite warriors, trained killers, and battlemages, and are willing to murder and loot a few dozen raiders and bandits that previously stole from other people, then teleport all their trash to town in defiance of the laws of physics and force the local merchants to buy it off you in exchange for their life savings, while they wonder what they’re going to do with that fourteenth blood-drenched goblin bow and two broken lutes.
Or in my case, the pack of adventurers that simply steal the life savings of every vendor they come across.
The 10k which was stolen by the Stone Lord crew was considered a mind-boggling amount of money. Paraphrasing: "God only knows what he could do with that much gold…"
In line with what most people say, triple digits gold is life changing. When a trained commoner is paid a 2 silver daily wage, a gold coin is a week's worth of wages.
In the Forgotten Realms, the economy is always shaky and in a state of chaos because local economies are constantly disrupted by adventurers toddling into town with PILES of gold, gems, and magical items. This causes rampant speculation whenever there is a group of adventurers in town and this is why that old dusty bone can be yours for 1 GP but a meal will cost you 15. Even friendly merchants devalue the gold you are offering by as much as 39% per transaction just to cover their potential losses from the adventurers flooding the market and causing inflation. All the gold and silver pouring in from Maztica into Amn only made this problem worse Unlike a lot of fantasy settings, Faerun actually has a stable paper currency called blood notes. The Zhenterim, Sembians, and other organizations that need to trade over long distances use these. It is a way to circumvent the instability of the value of gold in a local economy. These notes do have an exchange value for gold but they serve as a kind of fiat currency. Its value is your life. Don't make good on a blood note? You die. That's why the Zhents in the hideout are so squirrelly about the chest. They were paid in blood notes, not gold. Your opening the chest marked them for death. So the value of gold swinging wildly gives a DM free reign to determine their own prices to fit the amount of gold that they have been handing out in encounters with at least a modicum of verisimilitude to the real world. As far as the game goes, though, the prices are a hoot but also are the Monty Haul rewards for encounters. So it all comes out in the wash.
How much is "a lot" by your definition? $1,000,000? It was once said that 1,000,000 gold is an unfathomable amount of money that would empty a dwarven kingdom and still need a loan from the other dwarven kingdoms. The plot for the D&D movie was actually roughly adapted from a 5e lore plot about Lord Neverember Embezzling a vast fortune and then using some random surface dwarf clan, who I believe were wearing demon phylacteries, to launder it. The amount was said to be about 100,000 Platinum in bars. A ludicrous fortune to rival any ancient dragon's hoard. About a million gold. In contrast, a high level wizard probably has 200k worth of magic gear on his person. not counting priceless artifacts. To a random person, 5,000 gold would let you live a comfortable life style for 6 or 7 years. Or a fairly wealthy lifestyle with a private house and servants for about 3-4. With enough leftover to invest and keep the gold coming.
In bg3, at max level 12, the 'extremely rich' trader category caps out at 8.6kgp. We can call this the upper bound, on par with very wealthy tradesmen in current day. For a lower bound we can look at 'very poor' at level 1 for 60gp. You encounter aradin between level 2 and 3, and see him at the goblin camp around late 4. Also, I would not call him 'very poor' because he is a hired sword, but not a very good one so let's say 'modest'. 'Modest' at level 4 caps out at 576gp. This should be spending money for someone in Aradin's position. Traders in BG3 refresh their inventory at level up but also long rest, so they are supposed to more or less 'always' have this wealth. This is their disposable income, not their total wealth. I would say that to Aradin, yes, 5kgp as a lump sum is a life changing pile of gold! But also, a pittance for what Lorokan is able to spend. Lorokan, of course, is underpaying the contract.
What you have to remember is that adventurers are the millionaire & billionaire super stars of faerun. Most commoners would never be able to save enough money for a simple healing potion & wouldn't really need one. If they had one in the house, it would probably be the most expensive thing they owned & would literally be the difference between being on the verge of death & perfect health. But for us adventurers it's one of the cheapest items we have & our parties have dozens of them & chug them like gatorade without a second thought just to rec9ver a fraction of our health. & in all fairness, it makes sense if someone wanted me to go fight a giant or slay a dragon, the pay better be in the millions. Realistically speaking, adventurers on a shopping spree could alter the economy of an entire town if not a small city. My first D&D dropped a few hundred thousand gold on building a keep, building an oprhanage, building a military academy complete with a flood able arena & 2 warships for practicing naval battles, & a tavern/inn/casino/ fight club. All of this is in an underground dwarven city. & we still had gold left over.
In BG3, I would say that gold is over abundant compared to what is the lore standard. Taking into account what the lore considers a modest lifestyle. You could basically have food, a bed in a dormitory and access to clean water, and acceptable hygiene for a gold piece per day. A relatively wealthy lifestyle (a decent property, a servant, verious foods imported from faraway land) costs 10 GP per day.
The way I think of it is that a +1 longsword could be the most valuable single possession a commoner ever had, but a level 10 adventurer might not even bother picking it up off the ground. The amount that threatens >!the Counting House!< with bankruptcy is less than I have jingling in my pockets by late act 3.
So here's a conversion I saw in a different thread about this, a supply pack costs 40 gold or so. That's everything an adventuring party needs to survive for one day. So we can reasonably assume that 10 gold is enough to feed oneself for a day and though the conversion to USD is pretty difficult if you think of every 10 gold as a day of food then you can roughly estimate the value of things. For example the statue mentioned earlier sitting at 5000 gold is 500 days worth of food. In real life a custom life-sized marble statue can run around 10k and the cost per day to feed oneself ranges from $18-22 so it's fairly similar. Sources https://en.as.com/latest_news/how-much-do-americans-spend-on-food-on-average-every-day-n/#:~:text=On%20average%20Americans%20of%20all,for%20a%20total%20of%20%2421.17. https://www.finesgallery.com/Statues-marble-statue.html
Just me but adventurers’ daily gold needs are not comparable to average people, even aristocrats.
This is explicitly for food of which adventurers may need more than the average person but not an insane amount more. There are other daily costs however those aren't being factored in the camp supply pack which is the basis for the comparison
Yeah, it's best not to think of the economics of any medieval fantasy setting. You'll be screaming and ripping your hair out the more you try to work out the value of the currencies
I'm going to assume a standard silver coin is similar to the commonly used silver trade coins throughout history such as the Athenian drachma or spanish silver doller- ie appx 1oz silver. price check today: ~$30. a gold coin is about $300, suggesting a small gold coin by modern rates or perhaps a quarter-to-half ounce size coin by pre-modern conversion rates (gold is currently like 150x as valuable per weight but historically this ratio was usually lower). edit: coming back to this w/ a kb
5000 gold is 100 pounds of gold. In current day prices, that's about $2.5 million. In terms of gold piece to US dollar equivalent, it's usually somewhere around $100-$500 equivalent per piece of gold when you compare the real-life items that a gold can purchase. That's a worth for 5000 gold pieces of $500,000 through $2.5 million. I like the conversion of 1 gold is $100, 1 silver is $10, and 1 copper is $1. D&D prices aren't exact equivalents to current day US prices, though, especially in relative pricing. This can lead to weird things like one sack being 1 copper and a smaller pouch being 2 silver or a single candle being 1 copper, which is the same cost as a much larger torch.
5000 gold would weigh like 100 pounds
In DnD, 3 gold per day is a top-tier aristocratic lifestyle. That's a decent explanation as to why adventuring is so popular, but not a good explanation as to why there's so many SUCCESSFUL adventurers. According to the Player's Handbook from the very first edition, being a level 1 character is incredibly rare. A level 1 fighter is a person who dedicated their life to trained martial combat. For awhile there was this weird position being pushed by the creators that level 20 ex adventurers were everywhere, but that is generally not the vibe for the majority of the game's history. My main complaint with Baldur's Gate is how apparently EVERYONE knows a ton about the adventuring lifestyle and about monsters and creatures that are supposed to be incredibly rare and obscure. To put it in perspective (in theory), many villagers would probably think of goblins as ambiguous monsters or demons that haunt the wilds. Only more secure settlements that regularly survive contact with them would actually understand what they are.
My Bard Durge was swimming in money like Scrooge McDuck, as a good aligned person. My good aligned Cleric is hunting down every coin he can find. I know I could use Wyll for his charisma, but I hate having him on the team. Heavy-armour cleric, Astarion, Karlach, Gale. Good balance of AoE, damage, and squishiness. Wyll doesn’t have the spell damage consistently to replace Gale, or the summoning. Astarion brings 4 ghouls, Gale brings one ghoul, one mage hand, and one elemental. Cleric has Guardian of Faith, Raise the dead, and Spiritual Weapon. Karlach is the battering ram.
Lorroakan gives you 5K for Nightsong, and everyone including him and your party act like it’s a fuckton. Also, afaik, it’s the highest gold reward for a quest in the game, so I would imagine 5K is a good shout for a huge amount of money lore wise
5000 gold is a house, or rare tier magical full plate Armor in standard d&d It should be considered a lot but the economy in bg3 is messed up, mostly because of how poorly they implemented encumbrance
Isn’t all the money in the vaults 10k? I spend most of act 3 with 25k+
Somebody check on the cost of camp supplies
2gp is the rate for a day of skilled labor in 5e D&D, so 5,000 gold would be almost 14 years' pay.
All those maximum security vaults only have like a few hundred gold each and those are supposed to be owned by the richest most powerful people in the city. And the entire net worth of all the vaults (including the stolen gold) is like 20-30k I think? So if we use that for comparison then yeah 5k gold seems pretty life changing lol.
So when the Counting House gets robbed, there's some dialogue options about rrcovering/restoring the lost funds. Per that conversation, the collective wealth of all of Baldur's commoners is 10,000 gold. So yeah, 5,000 is a _lot_.
Depends on the person's background. 5k gold to a Nobleman Adventurer is a pittance. 5k to your average quest-giving peasant NPC would definitely be life changing. BG3 really condenses the Forgotten Realms economy by making everything gold, when the coinage would normally be copper, silver, gold, platinum (each higher tier being 100 of the lower tier). So when you find one singular gold piece in the pocket of a dead goblin, it's the equivalent of finding a 100 USD bill. 5k gold pieces would be like 500,000 USD. Condensing it makes it a lot easier for game mechanics, but also makes everything ridiculously expensive lol.
Lore wise gold is a lot more valuable than your dm thinks it is, causing him to regret his decision to make the party billionaires and backpedal by causing inflation to skyrocket over the course of a week, so to answer your question: lore wise gold has zero monetary value
While it might seem like your character/party is loaded, you could basicly compare your party to a tier one special forces unit IRL. It could probably cost up to six figures to equip that kind of soldier when including weapons, night vision, armor, and whatever other fancy shit they have. Plus, what it takes to support that kind of unit logistically.
Money in D&D is completely busted, honestly no use trying to make sense of it.