Gold. It’s the perfect representation of the reward mechanic from the earliest days of the White Box. Hell, it even used to represent experience! As a companion piece to our 19th episode on RPG Economics, Tony, Chris, and Dave delve into not just how to make things worth using the gold for, but also the idea of how do you, or DO you, account for the treasure that the party finds?
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1:19 Will Ferrell as Neil Diamond.
1:30 Episode 19: RPG Economics.
2:40 Getting players to agree to how much gold they’ve amassed.
5:31 A quick gold tangent: How much gold did Smaug have in The Lonely Mountain?
6:40 The party accountant, appraisal, and the endless dividing of coins and gems.
9:55 Is it worth it to add the crunchiness of appraising and haggling for the sale of gems?
11:50 Is 100 gold pieces a lot? What does it cost to live in your world?
16:33 Gold needs to be able to purchase things that are important or it’s just a number on a sheet.
18:05 How much magic should you be able to purchase before it loses its uniqueness?
22:10 The pitfall of trying to account for all the gold of your world.
25:35 “Treasure shouldn’t feel like accounting”: Play into the rush of finding treasure.
27:15 The cost of upkeep: Strongholds, Followers, Kingdoms, and Warfare!
29:18 A shop in the middle of the Underdark… Finding AND moving the treasure you find.
31:50 Hirelings in the OSR vs. 5e.
34:30 A quick tangent on using Sidekick mechanic from Tasha’s in our Dragonlance campaign.
37:09 Final Thoughts
In the current two campaigns I’m playing in I’ve simplified keeping track of money by just not having any 🙂 One character has basically taken a vow of poverty and gives away all of her loot (beyond basic living expenses) to the poor. The other one spends it on booze, women, or gambles it all away when we get back to civilization. It has worked okay so far, although the vow of poverty character just had her weapon and armor badly damaged by a black pudding and I don’t know how she’s going to replace them. 🙂
$62B? Forbes is crazy. I did a little back of the napkin math on Smaug’s treasure hoard. Assuming he’s an ancient dragon I’d guess he has a wingspan of about 50′. He certainly had room to fly around under the mountain. Using some very conservative numbers lets assume the cavern measures 500′ x 1000′. That would be enough to fly around without crashing into things, but not very large as far as mountains go. Let’s also assume that the hoard was 10 feet deep and that a gold piece roughly measures the size of a quarter. You can fit around 100 quarters into a solo cup, so super conservatively, you can therefore fit 1000 quarters into a cubic foot of space. If one oz of gold at today’s value is $2000. 500′ wide x 1000′ long x 10′ deep x 1000′ pieces x $2000 = 10 TRILLION dollars. ..and that’s not counting gems, which would be considerably more valuable.
And just for fun, that’s about 80,000 completely full bags of holding.