There are, broadly speaking, three ways to handle PC wealth in an RPG:
- Don’t track it or worry about it in any way
- Use an abstract wealth system
- Manage it in character (most typically by counting every coin)
All of these can work well, depending on what the game is focusing on and what effect you’re looking for. For example, when I’m running Feng Shui 2 the individual wealth of each PC is, at best, window-dressing to the pulse-pounding action.
A properly designed abstract wealth system, on the other hand, can be a valuable channel for communicating setting information. In Infinity, for example, I designed a system in which a character’s Earnings (an abstract value indicating how much income they have) can be used to provide a similarly abstract Lifestyle, with the Lifestyle you live determining your Social Status (which feeds back into the Psywar system for resolving social conflicts).
The cool bit is that instead of just one Lifestyle, there are four: Clothing & Fashion, Entertainment, Food & Drink, and Housing & Property. I could then provide short descriptions for each Lifestyle at each rating. For example:
Entertainment for the Elite and richer includes custom-designed experiences, niche happenings, and expensive participatory events: AR experiences mapped onto orbital insertions; pop-up nightclubs inside hollowed-out asteroids; recreation masques using morphing flesh-masks of historical figures; and other similarly unique opportunities.
This very light layer of structure let me really dig into what the panoply of day-to-day life was really like in this strange, almost alien setting existing on the transhuman cusp in a way that could still be easily accessed by the GM (what is this hyper-elite NPC wearing? where is the demogrant NPC living?) and also provide simple hooks for players looking to come to grip with their characters without needing to absorb the totality of every social class and circumstance.
On the other hand, consider Trail of Cthulhu: Here the emphasis of the game is on solving Mythos mysteries in the 1930’s. The game uses a single Credit Rating score which (a) has a very brief description to orient the reader to the historical epoch and (b) can be mechanically used to glean clues. Because that’s what the game is about.
COUNTING COINS
Which brings us to counting coins.
This is, of course, how D&D handles wealth. Which means that, like a lot of things D&D does, it has become an often unexamined default. Recently I’ve seen a number of designers and GMs decide that they don’t like tracking every copper piece, and their solution has been to count only a single, universal currency (i.e., only Gold or Credits or Cash).
Here’s my two bits (pun intended): If you’re tracking currency at all, then it’s worth tracking at least 3-4 types to give roleplaying flavor and logistical variation. If you’re NOT interested in currency-based flavor or logistics, then you shouldn’t be counting coins at all (and should instead use one of the other two methods I talked about above).
Flavor is ineffable, but there’s a difference between silver pocket change and coffers filled with gold; between the dive bar where people are sliding copper pieces across scarred bars and the high-class joint where people pay in gold. The noble who recompenses you with a small stack of platinum in a black velvet bag just feels different from the drug lord who pays you off with a coffer full of silver.
Note from My Player: I still remember that payment. My character kept that bag. It’s good stuff.
Logistics can include the encumbrance difficulties of lugging 10,000 cp out of a dungeon vs. 100 gp (prompting tough choices and ingenuity in problem solving). But it’s also stuff like currency conversions.
Such conversions can be nation-to-nation stuff that makes long distance travel visceral in its details, but it can also be the barmaid who bites the gold coin you tossed her, looks at your suspiciously, and says, “I can’t make change for this.”
Speaking of currency conversions: Many world-builders are drawn to the idea of having different currencies for different nations, but often these aspirational goals are abandoned due to the metagame logistics of tracking all that extra data: The players need to track all the different types of coins they receive, while the GM needs to both (a) stock the dungeon hordes with them and (b) figure out what each local market/merchant’s relationship with each type of currency is.
If this is an idea that appeals to you, however, you might try achieving the same effect WITHOUT increasing the number of coinage types being tracked by having each nation use a different metal standard of coinage.
For example, the Trade Federation uses silver coins; the Young Kingdoms prefer gold; and the Old Empire uses electrum. Copper is the common coin, used interchangeably by everybody. Platinum coins are mostly a currency of account (they don’t physically exist), but the ancient Draconic Empire used them and the richest cities/neighborhoods of the Old Empire use them occasionally.
HOW MANY COINS?
So why track three or four currencies instead of two or ten or forty?
In my experience, that’s generally the sweet spot where you get the benefits of flavor and logistics before hitting diminishing returns.
What you’re generally looking for is:
- A poor currency
- One or two currencies in the range of what the PCs typically use
- A rich currency denoting unusual wealth or power
With those relative values, you’ve gained the bulk of the semantic/narrative meaning to be milked from currency.
In D&D that’s copper, silver, gold, and platinum.
In a campaign where the PCs are drug dealers, it’s the scale from garbage bags full of dirty $1 bills that need to be laundered to flashing Benjamins at the club.
In Firefly it’s bulky trade goods that need to be fenced, credits, and immunization ration bars.
Of course, if you’ve got player buy-in and you think it’ll be useful to break Firefly credits into platinum, ivoprovalyn, propoxin, and hydrozapam… great! Go for it! Complicated exchange rates between credits and Browncoat scrip used on the black market? Hard coin exchange rates based on the planet? Sure! I can see cool scenarios coming out of that!
But if it’s just one scenario, you can probably go one level up in the abstraction. If the players are just tracking silver pieces, you can still dip in at any time and say that these specific silver pieces – the ones they found on the would-be assassin – are Turcan chits, and that’s really weird because you’re in the Lasartian Dominion where they typically use Stantian roundels. I mean, you might occasionally see a Garsian slat, but a chit? No way.
That’s significant in the moment, but you don’t have to start tracking chits and slats and roundels forever after just because it was important to this specific situation.
The point, of course, is that even when you’re counting specific coins, you’re usually still looking at those coins through a layer of abstraction. The abstraction to choose (as well as when and how you choose to break that abstraction) is as much a channel for information about the game world as the Lifestyles from Infinity. So think about what information you’re choosing to communicate and to what effect.
I’ve been recently thinking about D&D coins after I typed up a list of item prices and decided I was unhappy with the long column of near-identical “XX gp” entries. Fifth edition has generally opted to use gp as their single universal currency wherever possible, but they did bring back electrum coins worth 5 sp or half a gold coin. That gives a hint of currency conversion flavor without the actual headaches of a real-world system. Unfortunately, flipping through the 5e PHB I don’t see any “ep” prices, so I suspect it’s an idea that fell through the cracks.
I’ve always felt counting coins were counted wrong.
Do you say I have a fifty dollars and twenty cents (American, I’m not familiar enough with the British coinage to not botch the example) or do you say “I have two twenties, a five dollar bill, five one dollar bills, a dime, a Nickle and five pennies?”
If you say that the weight/ENC is the same for 1 Gold as well as the equivalent in silver (lighter but more), or the equivalent value in copper (really light but lots more), etc everything becomes easy. Yeah some fudging required on that but most people fudge ENC anyway. Then if you want treasure piles to be magnificent you put in gems and jewelry.
I think a level of abstraction where currency is measured according to something fundamental to PCs is a good way of doing things. Exazmples include Sacks in Ultraviolet Grasslands (one week’s provisions for one person), Lumes in Veins of the Earth (one hour of light), or Rations from GLOG (one meal). Really, anything on Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs could be used to measure relative wealth, and once you’re past the point where tracking such things is necessary, the way PCs interact with money is also abstracted purely due to the logistics of handling those sums of money/goods. If you really wanted to keep tracking money past this point, Profit Factor from FFG’s Rogue Trader RPG would be the best place to start.
“occasionally see a Garsian slat, but a chit?” Like getting a Scottish banknote in Southhampton.
My current campaign includes Boon Chains, of which each link is 50 gp, used by nobles to reward adventurers for exemplary service. The links are fairly easily exchangeable for more negotiable currency at any jewelers or dealer in precious metals (and, consequently, can also be directly used for purchase at the more expensive type of establishment, although good luck getting the barmaid to change one), but also carry a certain prestige in themselves- wearing a boon chain, or a collection of them, signifies that you’re a ratcatcher of some prominence, and probably not to be lightly trifled with.
@ruprecht- Now, I could be wrong here, as I’m by no means a Historo-Numismatist but my understanding is that precious metal coinage was generally valued at the weight of the metal in question, and that government minted coins were meant as a guarantee that a coin was of a given weight and composition, thereby removing the need to weigh out each purchase (or, for the more suspicious, carry out a series of Archimedean tests to work out the specific density of a given coin, and thus determine its composition).
In this case, if a silver coin was worth one tenth of a gold coin, and also weighed one tenth as much, this would suggest that silver was of an equivalent value per weight to gold (and so on to copper in one direction and platinum in the other if your currency extends that far).
Whether this is important to you game and playstyle will vary table to table, of course. Those tables really interested in the subject might wish to introduce the concepts of coin clipping (removing part of a coin to collect the precious metal as scrap and then passing the coin on as still having it’s full face value), counterfeiting (producing a coin that appears to be guaranteed by the Royal Mint to contain a specific ratio of precious metals, while in fact it’s considerably baser), and the fluctuation of various currencies’ values (Banknotes issued by the Dwarven Clan Thaurox were long considered to be just as good as gold since they included an Iron Oath to redeem them immediately upon presentation to the Clan Treasury. Since Clan Thaurox’s territory has since been claimed by a Red Dragon, many merchants are hurrying to divest themselves of the suddenly dubious paper before its value collapses entirely).
Other players may stare blankly and go “Man, I just want to buy a horse. Do I have enough to buy a horse or not?”
I’m not convinced that counting individual coins is warranted unless it specifically supports what the game is *about*.
D&D, in editions where 1gp = 1xp, is *about* finding treasure. Other games might be *about* limited resources – maybe we’re all kids in the 80’s and we need to pool our allowance to play arcade games.
But unless it’s a mechanism for meaningful choice all I see is needless bookkeeping.
The system used by Fremen on Dune is an interesting example of an abstract wealth system as it is used primarily to drive story. In other words we don’t see Fremen exchanging individual water markers for rations but we do see debts resolved, wealth denoted, and what is more we learn something important about their culture.
Another magnificent topic.
Here’s something Marc Miller (of Traveller/GDW Fame) said “Traveller is not meant to be accounting in space”) – a paraphrase.
The point is, your characters are there to go to unusual places, get into trouble, get out of trouble, and then buy good gear or have a great holiday or buy a retirement chunk of land then get back out there and head to the next place because they aren’t the type to sit around (until they are dead or retire a second or third time in Traveller mechanics).
With that in mind, I have this notion:
When my players are a certain level and want something appropriate at their level and it is available, they can buy it. If it was a stretch, then maybe they can’t live as high on the hog. If they have been miserly perviously, they can buy a bit more. If the item isn’t a stretch, you might not be able to buy another immediately, but it doesn’t slow down your day to day spending.
But here’s the thing for most adventurers: Money is a push or a pull to adventure. Conan won and lost fortunes. PCs should do that – go out, win the big win here and there, and then blow it again, have it stolen, or need it to do something useful but that leaves them broke again… and off they go for the next big score.
If you want to play stock investors, that’s up to you I suppose, but you are supposed to be adventurers, burning your way across lands, sea, and maybe air so that your name lives in legends and people will tells stories for decades after just a passing interaction with your group.
With that in mind, the party’s money states (or individual if their views are very divergent) boils down to:
“I have a whopping pile and need to buy good gear and great experiences”
“I have a sufficient amount to not need to chase anything right now, but I’m just enjoying myself a bit and not going overboard because I’ve blown a significant pile of my big score already”
“I am getting low and am having to work part time, sell some of my keepsakes, or live really frugal until my next opportunity arrives…”
“I’m broke and need to work at the first opportunity…. no matter how sketchy….”
That’s really all you need to know as players and GM.
Time tracking is about the same. Players have to cross a huge desert with one or two threats, two encounters and just make it 14 days or 40 days as you see fit.
We played a 19 year D&D campaign that saw about 19 different players (and at the end, 2 of the originals from the first session were there and several others from the early years… many short run guest gamers showed up and went (university years) but the core group stayed together because of the game IMO). Characters aged about 12-15 years in game time during that time.
We assumed winter and early spring was often too nasty to travel in, the late spring through mid-fall were good adventuring times, and late fall through to early was some training, study, levelling, crafting, spell research, having a rest, and staying warm, etc. so no adventuring happens there.
So you basically had about 3 months of expeditioning each year. That might be one long story arc or maybe two to three smaller ones with some recovery breaks in that period. Early years, we might have got 1.5 levels, late years, we might have got half a level. The characters ended up with the highest about L12 with most L10-11 effectively and that means we averaged somewhere between 0.66 levels/year to 1 level/year.
And by the time peopel became leaders, their characters had the grey hair and their level and skills made them heard and respected. It wasn’t the 1st to 10th level in an adventuring season… that never made sense to any of us.
So Time and growth also are some things that should flex to fit a GM and group’s sensibilities just like cash management.
And it’s a lot less time spent on minutiae that don’t really play a role much beyond L0 to L2 in any case.
I was just reading another setting design article, and it was talking about how a more abstract wealth system in the vein of d20 Modern’s system (where each PC has a Wealth bonus that can go up or down, and has to roll against some kind of availability DC to acquire gear) does a good job of conveying the flavor of a more Dark-Age setting, where there isn’t really an economy in the sense that we would think of it and most trade is done through barter rather than coin. And it would really do the same for any low-civilization setting, whether that be Dark Ages or post-apocalypse or 10,000 B.C.
In particular, I think the fact that the PCs will never be entirely certain what they can or cannot buy does a lot to ward off complacency. There’s always the chance that they’ll roll well and score something that they couldn’t get in a more defined wealth system, but conversely they might find that they suddenly can’t lay their hands on some staple supplies and have to improvise or do without. A unique effect that you can really only get with a more abstract wealth system.
And of course it means that the PCs have a much better motivation to hang on to any magic items or particularly good gear they find, even if it’s not perfect for their build, because they can’t guarantee they’ll be able to get another such piece if they pass this one up. And hopefully this will seem like less of a screwjob because you’ve gone to the trouble of establishing that this is how things are across the board and for everyone, you’re not just arbitrarily denying the PCs the gear they want.
One real-life example of a system of multiple coinage where the difference between the coin types really mattered is Edo period Japan, which actually had four different kinds of money, and a highly stratified society, where a samurai paying in copper, or a peasant paying in gold would have attracted a load of attention.
Three currencies were actually the classic coin metal triad: Copper (actually Bronze), Silver and Gold. All three were technically weight-based, but of course their face value and weight started differing pretty quickly. And they were pegged against each other in multiple contradictory ways that would cause negotiations every time an exchange was needed.
The peasant’s coin was the copper Mon, the Japaneses version of the Chinese cash coin (the one with the square hole) – for a long time, these were literally just Chinese coins stolen or traded off them. A dirty back-of-the-envelope calculation puts it value at maybe 5 cents. If you needed to pay for expensive things, you strung Mon coins onto a string and handed that over.
The nobles used gold, the base unit of which was the Koban, which was technically pegged against the Mon, except via three different definitions resulting in inconsistent exchange rates. Firstly, it was 4000 Mon. Secondly, it was the worth of one Koku of rice (enough rice to feed one person for one year). And thirdly, it was one Ryo (a unit of weight) of gold. Except of course, the rice price was fluctuating based on supply and demand, and because there wasn’t enough gold, a one Koban soon didn’t weigh exactly one Ryo but rather less to have more of them in circulation.
And to make things worse, you very likely wouldn’t exchange directly from Copper to Gold, because of the social differences of the people who owned that. Instead, you’d have Silver as an intermediary, which you’d find among the chonin, the middle class of craftsmen and merchants (except of course they were considered lower class in the Edo Period, but that’s another story). And silver had only a customary exchange rate to gold of 5:1, subject to negotiation based on how much use each party had for each type of coin. And Silver to Mon had no base scale at all, but was only defined by the roundabout silver to gold to copper conversion with all the volatility inherent in both.
Which meant that having two 100-Mon strings or having a Silver Ichibuban (nominally worth 200 Mon) was qualitatively different and would allow you haggle-free purchasing with very different people.
And lastly, there were scrips, promissory pieces of paper worth a certain amount of silver when presented to the daimyo who had issued them. Technically they were worth their face value in silver, and a lot lighter to carry, but they were only good for that one daimyo, and therefore only usable in their domain (or Edo, where they all could be found half the time). And if a succession happened, or worse, the domain of the clan got shuffled around because of some power play in the shogun’s court, there was no guarantee the new ruler would honor the old scrip. If you were lucky, they’d be honored at a fraction of their face value, or you might end up broke. Which meant that scrip could fluctuate in purchasing power even more than the metals. Some people would accept it at face value, others would just refuse it outright.
here’s the big problem with later editions of DND: People think coins and especially platinum are a good deal. Arguably they are undereducated because the gems are where the real action is. leaving aside the 1 in 6 chance to upgrade the vale of a gemstone through polishing sure if people think of gold as approximately 1$ a platinum is a 5$ ( it isn’t but yet another story) the sheer amount of fudgery one has to go through with coins makes money worthless. A pouch of small coins is about all someone wants to deal with. A suit of nonmagical plate (say for a henchman fighter) is 200 gp which means 20# of gold pieces. Platinum is too uncommon (specifically designed so by Gygax)as well so from there you have to go for gems and jewelry in order to make any significant purchase by hand. Paper money/scripts has all the problems listed above for Daiyamo script (and in fact is listed in the OA book as being worthless in the asiatic lands) Gems are easily shown as having correlations to the American money system (5, 10, 50, 100, 500, 1000 etc…)