Traverse Fantasy

I wanted to normalize Skerples’ list of medieval prices to make it easier to compare items! I took copper as the standard, so silver pieces are multiplied by 10 and gold pieces are multiplied by 100. That being said, there are probably many costs listed that are probably better accounted for in silver or gold (too expensive, probably, for a commoner to even fathom). Keep in mind that the minimum wage, so to speak, seems to be maybe 50 copper pieces a month or 600 pieces each year. If we assume, for convenience's sake, that one-twelfth goes to the state and another twelfth to the church (not an exact tithe, but whatever), we can say that a commoner has maybe 500 copper / 50 silver / 5 gold to spend each year. (If this were OD&D , that would be a nice 100 silver / 10 gold). Normalized Medieval Prices Food & Cooking Town Country Animal Feed 3 2 Beer, Small 2 1 Cheese (20 lb.?!) 50 40 Cookpots 10 20 Eggs (12 c.) 7 3 Fruit (1 lb.) 20 10 ...

Realized lately that the amount of money that characters start with in classic D&D is kind of obscene. I've attached a screenshot of Fantastic Medieval Campaigns above, which does not account for price variation between the different versions of the game but otherwise illustrates this point. Let's suppose our typical character starts with 100 gold pieces, and they purchase the following starting equipment: Backpack (5 gp) Sword (10 gp) Shield (10 gp) Shortbow (25 gp) Quiver (20 gp) Rations (5 gp) Waterskin (1 gp) Wine (1 gp) Rope (1 gp) Lantern (10 gp) Flask of oil (2 gp) Pole (1 gp) Iron spikes (1 gp) Mallet & stakes (3 gp) Mirror (5 gp) That's 100 gold pieces, sparing no expense—going out of my way to ball hard and reach that total number. Here's the thing, though: there is a great disparity in costs, especially between "worn" equipment, random adventuring gear, and consumable resources. Since our total is 100, each of the costs listed above also s...

My friend WFS at Prismatic Wasteland came up with the following algorithm for using dice to randomly determine the money-value of your treasure : So when the party decides to sell, they tally everything they want to sell in the following categories: […] (d4) magic items, relics and artifacts, (d8) gems, jewelry, and art objects, (d12) trade goods, (d20) undamaged arms, armor, and equipment, and (d100) miscellaneous (but not worthless) junk and trinkets. Then roll all of the dice and tally how many dice roll 1, 2 or 3. The total sale is 200 gold per each such die plus 1 gold for each item sold. Let’s look at a table showing the average gold pieces earned by each item category; this is calculated by multiplying the likelihood of a result of 1-3 times 200 gold pieces. Category Die Avg. Gold Junk and trinkets d100 6 Undamaged tools d20 30 Trade goods d12 50 Gems, jewelry, and art d8 75 Magic items and relics d4 150 He gives one example: imagine tha...

Quick ways to help make costs in OD&D / FMC more internally consistent! Inspired by Delta's D&D Hotspot and some discussions on the ODD74 forum. :) Characters start with 3d6 × 10 sp. Treat item costs as if they were in silver. Treat armor improvement as cumulative (i.e. leather costs 15 sp, chainmail costs 20 + 40 = 60 sp, and plate mail costs 20 + 40 + 60 = 120 sp; changed individual costs to reflect ascending AC). Treat classed hireling cost as if it was in silver (100 sp / 10 gp). Experience points are 1:1 to silver pieces instead of gold pieces. Living expenses are 1% of total experience in silver.  Divide tax revenue by 10 (so it becomes 1 gp), or read it as silver instead of gold. Keep monthly wages for soldiers as gold (minimum: 1 gp / 10 sp). Divide specialist costs by 10, or read them as silver instead of gold. The main effect is that individual costs tend to be measured in silver and particularly great costs in gold.

Imagine your basic D&D . Your character starts with about 100 gp, so you buy a basic weapon (10 gp), maybe a shield (10 gp), maybe some light armor (20 gp), a backpack (5 gp), some resources for crawling (10 gp). I'm high-balling most of this, and you still end up with 45 gp leftover. Maybe you spend all that on some additional tools. But then you go to a dungeon and you end up with maybe like 200 gp. All you spent at character creation is pocket change. After a while, money stops meaning anything. You want it, you got it. A couple months ago, I tackled a different issue which was the persistence of coin-based economy even into slot-based games . Abstract it all! I said. Turn it all into slots! Unit quantities! Abstraction! I think that the approach was right, but that there was also a deeper problem left unanswered. What is money good for anyway? We take for granted a certain question that, once you advance in D&D , what do you do with all the gold you acquire? The standar...

I think 90% of people take for granted that Dungeons & Dragons (1974) has a market economy totally unlike whatever predominated in medieval Europe, i.e. rent and social credit. Then, 9% of people acknowledge that D&D has a market economy because the setting is really a fantastic reimagining of the early modern period, in particular the American (Wild) West. That is totally correct on the level of cultural criticism, but it does not tell us much about how that economy factors into D&D at large. Let’s start with a new set of questions: how does the market economy impact play, especially as prescribed by the classic TSR books? In this post, I’m going to take a systematic look at the role of gold pieces in D&D between different contexts of play: exchange, encumbrance, and experience. Then I will see how, despite this symmetry, D&D fails to be fully consistent or intuitive in practice. Finally, I will develop an alternative to D&D ’s economic system, that reta...

I’m worried this post is going to make me look stupid, so I wanted to say first that I really enjoyed David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years as an anthropological work and as a critique of the barter myth which has persisted since Adam Smith imported it into the western economic field. Learning about the origin of money not as a medium of exchange but as a unit of account is really enlightening, especially considering how debt generates the preconditions of the market which we take for granted. This is my sincere attempt to engage with Graeber and to salvage what I think are the useful bits from the bits which still carry presuppositions about social value and relationships. Debt is a historical argument about the origin of money from credit, or how units of account have emerged in the past from attempts to quantify relationships between people. The key point about relationships in general is that they are predicated on a give-and-take, where by doing things for other people (or...

This is a simple scheme for character age and campaign time records in Mausritter , where you play as mice. To summarize on mouse age and campaign time: Mice have short lifespans, about 12-18 months. There are six seasons (each two months long) in the year. A mouse’s age is measured in seasons. Roll d6. One season is the duration of a downtime turn. The season changes between every session, if possible. This all has implications for long-term play, focusing on intergenerational developments in mouse families. To summarize on township play: To govern mouse society even in one hex is a great feat of social organization. Each hex should be governed by one mouse, i.e. by one player via their character. Additional hexes must be ruled by family members or by subordinate governors. Event dice are rolled for each hex, rather than for the whole region. 1,000 to 6,000 mice live on each hex. They generate o...