By that I mean that the sheer number of coins that are expected to buy pretty much anything at mid-to-high levels is so absurd that it makes the old imagery of treasure chests full of the stuff feel not only underwhelming but burdensome.
If 50 coins equal one imperial pound, as the rulebooks typically state, you could just about melt down and hammer out a house or a boat approximating the prices in the book for such things. It gets even sillier when magic items are so obscenely priced yet at the same time a typical adventuring party picks up so many of them that they could, materialistically speaking, pull a Mansa Munsa on any quasi-medieval economy if such items are really priced that highly where a hand-me-down magic protection ring could set up a peasant in endless luxury for life.
I don't try to fix all of that mess, but I do tend to use a house rule where coins have as much written buying power as 100x the listed prices for most things, and the coins found in a listed lair are reduced by to 1/100th of the listed values, which also keeps coppers, silvers, and electrum relevant a lot longer. As long as all the players remember the conversion tables and don't forget them in a way that fucks up the bookkeeping, it works pretty well.
How about the rest of you? :d20:
I mean, if you looks at the costs of things, 'a cheap meal' is usually like, 1-5 coppers. So, copper is somewhere between $1-$5, very roughly speaking. Which would put even just a 100gp magic sword (a 'basic enchantment') be worth around $10,000. So like, a used car? And a single gold would be like $500, in the realm of a weeks pay irl. And, a platinum piece is $5,000.
But regardless, I assume banking exists, and a lot of these 'thousands of gold' transactions are done via banking guilds or w/e. Its not like the US prints anything bigger than $100 today, though of course a primarily digital economy is radically different from a DnD-esque primarily gold-standard one.
Additionally, I don't know about you, but I rarely award 'chests full of gold' to the players, its usually valuable items; rare gems, art pieces, or magic items themselves.
But yeah, those 'high level magic items' worth like, 100,000gp+, would be roughly analogous to things worth $10-100 million. Which, for 20th level adventurers fighting gods, doesn't seem unreasonable? Like, IRL, the richest people in the world have stuff priced individually at $100million, though those tend to be like, super yachts and mansions, not a single relic sword.
Regardless, the economy is pretty clear that adventuring, even at like level 1, gives quite a bit more money than a 'normal' job gives, even a decent one like a smith. But also, adventuring is pretty goddamn dangerous. (And, also, the game designers kinda need that to be true, otherwise the players should just run a tavern instead of adventuring, at least until the can buy better gear.)
At a tiny "get a meal, get a room" scale it sort of works, but if a platinum piece is 5,000 it makes it even more absurd to have that much money just sitting around in a mid-high level chest waiting for 3-6 looters to come get it without anyone else having done it before.
Sure, but that only makes the mountains of gold that are ostensibly a big part of a fantasy setting's aesthetic that much more unexciting and even inconvenient to find if it's just going to be bank notes.
Most d20 settings have raising the dead and resurrections with the only real limitation typically being money costs. It kind of reflects real life that way where the rich don't really have consequences for risk anymore. :capitalist-laugh: :d20-ah-fuck:
That final fight in the Baldur's Gate 1 expansion where party members can get permanently killed by a hidden spell effect that activates after a while, tho :porky-scared-flipped:
No wealth can save you when your body exploded and you're turned into a ghast.
While everything you say is true, the worldbuilding kinda needs it to be true. Because, otherwise, even lawful good characters questing out of charity would be idiots for not running a business on the side to fund their adventuring.
These worlds are like comic book worlds in a way. They aren't written to be rational, balanced things. They're written, first and foremost, to make adventuring the rational choice for the players.
Its why there's so many ruins full of gold, why the 'fallen civilizations' of thousands of years ago were so vastly more advanced than current civilization (at least in terms of making magic items).
And yeah, 'adventuring groups' are, pretty inevitably, rich fucks. Money is power, and the players generally gain most or all types of power as they progress from level 1-20.
There are ways around this. You can world-build money to not really be that important to questing (which, a lot of these games have something like a 'vow of poverty' or 'variant automatic progression' if you want to accommodate this). You can remove resurrection magic and maybe other spells that cost gold.
But, like a lot of questions of verisimilitude, its a never ending rabbit hole. Some groups won't be satisfied until they have mapped out continent spanning economic systems and financial schemes, with balanced costs for good. Others are fine with the thinnest veneer of 'the economy works fine, don't worry about it'.
Same thing with, like, survival mechanics. With travel. With carry weight, swim speed, religion.
And, either approach is good and fine, I support groups tailoring their games to their own tastes. But it makes it impossible to write a ttrpg for everyone, since to try to keep a sense of verisimilitude up for as many people as possible is to invite rules bloat, for mechanics that only some groups will care about.
My campaign found ways to reject that supposed truth :I-was-saying:
Mine still wasn't after the adjustments but at least acknowledged the old contradictions and established mistakes the way that my players acknowledge that "studded leather" doesn't really exist as the book claims it does (the studs are not the protective part, just the misunderstood rivets holding unseen strips of brigandine in place under the decorative leather).
My group preferred to improve society somewhat, and bless them for that. :improve-society:
Oh sure, and yeah, we should. I've been playing ICON recently, and I've generally liked it's take on 'economy'. Which is: money is a roleplaying concern, as is gear. Have whatever items you want to represent your stats/abilities. It is besides the point, at least as far as 'combat mechanics' go.
It does have 'Dust' as a 'currency' to enchant/fuel things, but its like crystallized magic found in the ancient empire ruins, more than it is 'money'.
This was very much literal in old D&D, where Gold=XP.
Edit:
Also, I don't really think this part is entirely unreasonable? There are actually like, a couple of old-ass Spanish treasure-galleons that are still sitting on the floor of the ocean somewhere with gold coins in tow, I'm sure.
If a given society had some kind of spontaneous cataclysmic collapse, that didn't come about due to something like a Migration Period (which is not impossible due to this being a fantasy game), I could definitely see some weird old monarch's treasure vault kind of just getting left for the pilfering later on.
That day/week/month wages works clean though. The peice fits for like a legendary painting or violin in real life
If only the offline world had hundreds to thousands of dormant stashes of "legendary" paintings and/or violins just waiting for a few armed looters to wander in and take them. :thinkin-lenin:
I reward, um....
I...
idk, I'll get back to you on that
Lol, maybe thats not the standard then.
I know 5e's "random loot table" generates most of its higher level gold value in items, gems, and art, with not too much bulk coin, and the PF2e adventure paths I've been running have generated the 'cash flow' to the players mostly with appropriately level magic items.
I don't really remember how 3.5 did it. I know Gygaxian dnd tended to lean on literal 'piles of treausure', so maybe some of the OSR games are still doing that, but I don't really know those games well.