Coins and Currency: As It Stands

Everyone knows that D&D's economy is... non-functional, to say the least. It is the subject of a ton of blog posts, reddit posts, forum threads, YouTube videos, and even an entire tome of a supplement that I reviewed. In college, one of my players--an economics major--and I set out to fix this system by thinking about the flow of trade in my world, establishing base prices and supply-and-demand curves, which would inform us about prices better. After hours of work and months of thinking about it, we gave up. "A fully functional economy" got added to my list, along with fully detailed Con Langs, of things that are simply too complex for me to work my way through when worldbuilding.

But I never said the same thing about currency and coinage. That's manageable!

While I'd taken stabs at thinking about currency in the past, I never sat down and actually fleshed it out. So, a whole bunch of reading and research later, and I now have a whole "currency as worldbuilding" system to present. This is going to be fairly long, as there are several aspects that I want to address and incorporate, which is why I'm splitting it up over three weeks.

The Outline

This week, I'm introducing the problem and talking about how coinage and currency is handled in D&D as it currently stands.

Next week, I'll talk about the history of coinage in Europe, realistic metals, and how to use that to build a foundational currency system. Subscribers to the blog will get to see how I put this foundational system into play for my own world--a practical example of what I'm talking about. So, if you're not subscribed to the blog, be sure to sign up below to unlock that in next week's post!

In week 3, we'll talk about what you can layer on top of this foundational system to highlight important themes and worldbuilding elements, so that your currency subtly reflects your world and can even teach about your world's lore. We'll take real lessons from history for this! Subscribers will get to see a couple of specific currencies I've designed for my world.

All three of these articles will be accessible through this mini-series, in addition to the larger Rethinking Fantasy series.

Dungeons and Dragons

The Gold Standard

It is useful to look at what already exists before starting any sort of "hack" for your game. The currency system of D&D is pretty setting-neutral by design, for any high fantasy world that uses hard, precious metal coinage as its main currency--our typical medieval/Renaissance/early modern high fantasy blend. But there's pretty minimal flavor baked into the rules.

The 2024 Players Handbook just lists the weight of the coins--1/3 of an ounce per coin, for around 50 coins per pound--and their relative conversion rate: 1 gold piece (gp) = 10 silver (sp) = 100 copper (cp). There's also platinum (10 gold) and electrum (5 silver), but those are rarer. Most DMs I know use just the easy, decimal gp/sp/cp cluster. It's easy to remember and compares nicely to most modern currencies like the Dollar or Euro where you have whole units and then cents.

But there's no real flavor to these, nor reflection of anything resembling reality.

In some of D&D's more specific settings like the Forgotten Realms, we get names for the coins. But we're still usually tied to this 1:10:100 three-metals system, with only the rare move to something like 1:10:1000 or 1:20:200. Even then, we tend to have a more or less universal currency that works across the whole world and which comes in nice, simple conversion factors.

There's a few problems with this from a worldbuilding perspective, even setting aside the fact that D&D's prices are purely designed around "gameplay" and not "logical prices between goods." Most of the complaints that I've seen online tend to revolve around the fact that an ounce of gold is currently priced in the thousands of dollars. As of the day of writing this, a single 1/3 oz "gold piece" from D&D, if it was pure, would cost about $1000, while a "silver piece" would only be about $10. Our conversion is already wonky, plus a $1k gold piece makes buying rope for 1 gold (PHB 2024 price) feel insanely expensive.

The Silver Standard

A common fix online for these issues is the "silver standard." While it has various implementations, one of the simplest is just converting everything to silver at D&D's rates and using those prices--just flavoring it as silver being the go-to metal. Rope goes from being 1 gold to 10 silver, which fundamentally changes nothing about D&D's math except that you're lugging more coins around. It takes that rope from being worth $1000 to being worth $100, in modern terms: still pricey, but a little closer to reasonable.

My preferred version of the silver standard is to just change all prices directly over to silver. That 1 gp rope becomes a 1 sp rope. Something that's one silver becomes one copper, and anything already in copper is divided in half. This fudges with D&D's numbers on the lower end of the spectrum, but its not that big of a deal since most everything you care about in the game--weapons and armor and most adventuring equipment--is in gold, and we're preserving the 1:10 ratio, just changing it to copper and silver instead of silver and gold. This brings our rope price down to $10, which is much more in line with our modern conceptualizations. It passes "rule of thumb" a little better.

All of these hacks are fine if you want to keep D&D's simple version of currency. Change your prices to silvers and coppers, give the coins a name, and your game will be fine. You'll have an air of better realism by switching to silver. Problem solved.

Hacking an Economy

But. Problem not solved. Or at least, if this was all you needed to do, you probably wouldn't come to the blog where I'm dedicating multiple weeks to thinking about more accurate and more worldbuilding-significant currency.

So, let's say that we throw everything out. We start from scratch. What's out there to help us build a currency system from the ground up?

The best resource that I've found for this is Grain Into Gold. You can pick it up for $9 on DriveThruRPG using the link I provided. While it is a really great resource that is filled with tables about agricultural productivity, while also not being a complete bore to read, and guides you through the logic of "how much time and effort does it take to make a day's bread? Ok, that should probably be tied to your currency foundation," it is also a ton of work.

Remember how I said that I will not let myself completely rebuild the economy from the ground up? Because that is an endless pit that will suck years from my life only to give me something I'm completely unhappy with at the end? How I've tried that and it is a mistake?

Oops.

I was about 15 hours into building my Grain Into Gold economy when I remembered the promise I'd made myself, looked back at my work, and realized I didn't like it, and I hadn't actually built myself any sort of clarity about my world's "modern" economy, while has a measure of early modern-style globalized trade.

If Grain Into Gold works for you, awesome! It is a really tremendous resource if you're willing to put the time in. But it is very medieval in its focus, and for my world that was more Renaissance/Early Modern in era, it just wasn't really working. Or even if it could, it would've been a ton of work to build the medieval economy and then appropriately evolve it. Its worth buying just for the tables, but I'm going to try to build something... a little simpler, and just stick to currencies.

Next Week

That's all for Part 1. We've diagnosed the problem. Next week, I'll talk about the history of coinage in Europe, realistic metals, and how to use that to build a foundational currency system. Subscribers to the blog will get to see how I put this foundational system into play for my own world--a practical example of what I'm talking about, so be sure to subscribe if you haven't already!

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