I fucking love that orang cat in the back.
Imagine the medieval health inspector seeing last panel’s candle chandelier.
I love doing recreational math! I’m not trying to “debunk” the comic or anything, I just think this is fun
Assuming this is fifth edition D&D, there are a variety of ways you could derive an exchange rate between gold pieces and USD. My favorite is the cost of living, since that accounts for any discrepancies between availability/supply/demand of particular goods, and cuts right down to how much it costs to live a given lifestyle.
I make roughly $20,000 a year, which places me squarely in the “modest” section. I don’t go hungry or thirsty, my living conditions are clean and simple, and I’m able to maintain my equipment. In 5e, this costs me 1 gp per day. I can’t put much into savings, so I earn 365 gp/year.
$20,000/365 ≈ 54 USD per gold piece. I’m rounding it down to $50 because it’s easier. That $150 might buy them a couple days off work which is… more of a vacation than I’ve had in years
I think where it breaks down is that even 1 coin a day is already insanely high for medieval times. A modest person would earn maybe 10 coins a year, if they are somewhat qualified or really good at what they do. And that’s only for people living in cities.
For most people, living in the countryside, they would see very little currency. You’d mostly own what you could build, grow, raise or barter, and you’d rarely have enough surplus that you could sell for coin. To get 1 gold coin you’d have to sell 2 or 3 sheep but how often would a modest person have animals they don’t absolutely need to keep ? Not something that’s going to happen every year.
Even the innkeeper would not see 365 gold coins a year, that kind of revenue would be way upper class.
It’s basically impossible to equate D&D to real history because you can’t account for the differences in supply and demand (or even the prevalence of different natural materials) between medieval Europe and 15th century DR Faerûn, let alone account for the fact that wizards can literally make gold. The best we have to go off of is the official rules describing the different lifestyle tiers and how much they cost on average.
The average real life modern bar costs, what, $25,000–50,000 a month to run? Based on a lifestyle expense equivalent of $50–100 per gp, they probably see somewhere between 10 and 30 gp per day. And that’s just gold piece equivalent, most of it is probably in copper or silver pieces
No need to go through USD. If 1gp is a day of modest living, then 3gp will buy them 3 days of modest living - or a day and a half each.
Then again - they still need to pay city taxes on the tavern during that day and a half, and maybe rent too, so I don’t know take can afford even a single day with these 3gp…
$20k/yr where? In the U.S. that would be very tight, so the math might change a bit based on local cost of living.
I live in Wichita, KS, with roommates. I realize the cost of living here is lower than most places, so maybe I should double the value of a gold piece. It’s definitely very tight, but I think my situation (living in an apartment with roommates) is roughly equivalent to renting a room in a boarding house. I’m able to afford my cell phone and can get regular oil changes for my car, which I think counts as “maintaining my equipment.”
Really, I think modest living probably needs to be defined carefully here. Consider how medieval peasants actually lived (entire large families living in one room cottages, often sharing a single bed.) I would say that the modern equivalent would be sharing a studio apartment with four roommates.
A modest lifestyle in 5e is defined as
A modest lifestyle keeps you out of the slums and ensures that you can maintain your equipment. You live in an older part of town, renting a room in a boarding house, inn, or temple. You don’t go hungry or thirsty, and your living conditions are clean, if simple. Ordinary people living modest lifestyles include soldiers with families, laborers, students, priests, hedge wizards, and the like.
By modern first world standards, I’m definitely poor. By the standards of a medieval fantasy setting, I am comfortable
Yeah those are poverty wages in large swaths of the country
Hey, I don’t know if this is how you want to hear this, but 20k/yr is far below the poverty line in the United States. I don’t know if you are self employed/entrepreneurial but that comes out to just above $10/hr, which is below even the federal minimum wage requirements.
I’m aware. The thing is, the next lowest lifestyle bracket in 5e is “Poor,” which is described as
Your accommodations might be a room in a flophouse or in the common room above a tavern. You benefit from some legal protections, but you still have to contend with violence, crime, and disease. People at this lifestyle level tend to be unskilled laborers, costermongers, peddlers, thieves, mercenaries, and other disreputable types.
I don’t have to contend with violence or crime, and the only reason I have to contend with disease is because I live in the US. Like, even people living a Comfortable lifestyle live in fear of our “healthcare” system.
By modern first world country standards, I’m definitely poor. By medieval fantasy standards, I’m pretty comfortable
Federal minimum wage in USA is $7.25 USD. It’s even shittier than you were told.
What’s the income required to share a studio apartment with six people, never have healthcare, and subsist on a diet of simple grains? That’s the modern equivalent of a Medieval peasant lifestyle. Remember, in this era, it was common for entire large families to share a single bed.
Our party visited a pub where the only beer was “fish beer”. So my dwarf ordered one, drank from it, was not impressed. But he still asked what it cost, and the bartender answered “half a copper piece”. So my dwarf put a copper piece on the bar top, but when the keeper tried to take it, I told the DM “I’ll take my axe and cut it in half between his fingers”. He told me what I needed to hit for that, and my dwarf cut the coin in half without scratching the keeper. He drew his hand back, my dwarf took half the coin and left the other, and pulled the battle axe out of the bar. The bar keeper did not complain about the damage…
the only beer was “fish beer”.
This is why my games always run on the silver standard. Each unit of currency is 100 times the value of the previous unit Instead of 10, and the listed prices that would have been gold are now in silver.
This makes it a lot less weird when dropping coin on watered down ale, stale bread, and a cot. And it also makes finding gold coins for the first time a lot more exciting. And when your characters start getting wealthy enough to actually carry gold and buy big ticket items with it, it actually feels like you’re getting rich.
And then there’s platinum. A single platinum coin becomes an event, the kind of thing that causes the greedy to become reckless and the experienced to become paranoid. It’s the perfect schmuck bait, a massive fortune in a single coin, all you have to do is pick it up. [Cue evil laugh]
Really, silver shouldn’t even exist until players are level 5-6 or something.
A copper shouldn’t be thought of as a penny, but I think a lot of people think of it that way. It should be much more like a dollar. A mug of ale is 4 copper pieces. A loaf of bread is 4 copper pieces. A taxi is 1 copper.
Because D&D is a world without cash registers or price stickers, bargaining should be common. And you’re not going to bargain over the last penny, but maybe over the number of dollars (i.e. coppers).
I also think 1 silver should be 100 copper. But, you should only start seeing silver once you’re dealing with people who are used to dealing with things costing hundreds of “dollars”. 100 copper would be a pain to manage, so they use silver. A typical adventurer’s pub might only rarely see silver because all their prices are in copper, and there’s nothing even approaching 100 “dollars” on their menu.
In this system, gold similar to $10,000 per coin. Because of that, the only kinds of stores that might see gold coins are high end magic shops, or shops dealing with upper-level nobles or royalty.
I also think it’s hard for people to put themselves in a mindset of a “medieval” sort of world. We’re used to a hotel room being hundreds of times the cost of a loaf of bread. That’s a modern thing where both farming and baking are automated. In the past things weren’t nearly that efficient. So, if a poor quality stay in an inn (you’re sharing a bed with other random guests, and there’s a thin mattress) is $100, a loaf of plain bread should be $10.
Sounds stingy. Everyone knows level one goblins have a dragon’s stash of gold in their hovel, you’re just being a dick by making it impossible to find it. I’m gonna go pick pocket that guy across the bar. I expect a low DC because he’s drunk and I put two skill points into it. He better have a bag of diamonds on him or so help me I’m quitting.
If you wanted to be more accurate to actual gold and silver, the historical exchange rate is only 20:1 silver to gold, which is why there are 20 (silver) shillings in a (gold) pound piece.
Fun fact: gold is currently over two times as expensive as platinum!
Love it. These ridiculus “gold” prices in games and mangas etc have always been a pet peeve of mine
This hand-crafted, gold necklace with diamond, ruby sapphire, and emeralds adorning the intricately carved centerpiece?
5 gold pieces.
That moldy slice of bread you picked up accidentally from a barrel in the bottom of a 1500 year old shipwreck?
… I’ll give you 3 gold.
Well, they do take place in a fictional universe, where we can assume scarcity is different.
Still metallurgy is not cheap in terms of energy when you only have wood to burn!
$150 per gram of gold. 30 grams per coin. 3 coins. $13,500. That’s some really premium beer.
let’s be more specific, the meme sort of implies medieval economy, rather than a DnD economy.
time for some googling…
https://seekingalpha.com/article/59244-value-of-gold-over-the-ages
Lets go 1400s, so about 3000Usd/troy ounce ounce
One troy ounce is about 31 grams (about a coin).
So that’s about 9000$
Honestly, it is still alot, definitely a lot. but we need to compare it with the cost of living back then. but it is hard to put a $ value on cost of living for a middle ages peasant. so I invite anyone to continue this thread.
You guys are lugging around some hefty coins. Granted, I don’t think there’s any sort of back of napkins maths that can be done to make the DnD economy make sense, but it’s a fun exercise anyhow.
Showing my work here, because I’m bad at math so someone should check me.
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1lb = 453.59 grams
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1 oz = 28.35 grams
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1 troy oz = 31.1 grams
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1 coin ≈ 9.26 grams (per the 2014 PHB: “A standard coin weighs about 1/3 of an ounce, so 50 coins weighs a pound.” Those figures return a coin weight between 9.45 and 9.07 grams, which I averaged out to 9.26 grams)
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Cost of pure gold per troy ounce IN JUNE 2014 (roughly corresponding to when 5e was released) ≈$1300. Therefore cost of pure gold per gram ≈ $41.80.
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One pure gold coin then ≈ $387.07.
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Of course, assuming coins in circulation are gold bullion is a big stretch. As part of The Great Debasement (which sounds like a helluva a party until you learn it’s about monetary policy), King Henry VIII reduced the standard fineness of English currency from 23 karat (95.83% pure) to 22 karat (91.667% pure). This standard was further reduced when the United States Mint struck their gold dollar coin in 1849, when they dropped the fineness to 21.6 karat (90% pure).
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Tangent regarding the size of gold coins mostly unrelated to DnD economics, but maybe interesting if you’ve already read this much. The Type 1 American Gold Dollar was only 12.7 mm in diameter, or half an inch. That’s TINY, and one of the chief reasons people opposed the striking of a gold dollar at the time. For folks familiar with American currency, the dime is 17.91 mm in diameter, so you’d be hunting for a coin 2/3 the size of what is already an inconveniently small coin (imo). I didn’t find a direct causal link cited between these points, but I assume part of the reason for lowering the fineness from 22 karat was to eke out a slightly bigger coin for the same monetary value. Here is a visual aid showing how tiny the Gold Dollar was in comparison:
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Which brings us, finally, to DnD coinage. Let’s assume 90% purity, with the remainder having a negligible monetary value. Decimating the value of my hypothetical pure gold coin, we arrive at a value of 1 GP ≈ $348.36.
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Given one gold coin is what a skilled (but not exceptional) craftsman could expect to earn from a day’s work, that seems relatively in line with expectations.
This took forever to write on my phone, so someone may have already hit these points, but it kept me amused during a slow day at work. Edit quickly to add that inflation from 2014 -> 2026 increases all values by roughly 1/3. In today’s dollars then, 1 GP is about $463. Ish.
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Most people didn’t see any gold coin in their entire life. Gold was something for nobility and royalty. Silver and copper were used. And many places worked keeping tabs, usually just chalk marks on a slate, and do a regular reckoning or settlement and “clean the slate”.
that’s true,
wonder if that tavernkeeper can go to the nearest Lord and ask to change the gold coins for equal value silver/copper coins.
Also. no banks, so travelling with 9000$ in cash would be extremely dangerous…
would 9000$ in silver coins something that’s easy to hide?
Very roughly 1 gold is 10 silver in history. So that would just be a small bag of 30 something coins. It’s not that big in size, but it’s still about a kilogram (2 pound) so a bit heavy to keep in your pocket.
Too much to make it easy to hide.
When your adventuring party Mansa Musas the local economy.
Did you see that Simpsons where Moe left the bar for a moment and Barney opened the beer tap directly into his mouth?
I’m loving the increase in ttrpg content here
