Money is as inescapable in tabletop games as it is in real life. The players want and need supplies, necessities, and fun, and all of those things generally cost money. It's your job as GM to have answers about everything about your world, and money is no different. To keep things consistent, you need your money to be predictable and balanced, or else money in the gameworld becomes meaningless. But balancing an entire economy can be complicated. Use this guide to develop your own economy or borrow it wholesale; the goal is that you can consistently use money in your gameworld in a way that makes sense.
In order to get values for our economy, the first thing we need to do is determine the distribution of wealth in the gameworld. I play with a high degree of inequality because I like stories about the divide between the rich and the poor, but you can create a more equitable world by just shifting the values around a bit. I operate on the premise that the poorest of the poor make about one copper piece per day of labor, which is just barely enough to cover food costs; this means it takes the whole family unit to manage a successful household. Meanwhile, the rich can make almost anything in an average day, but I rule that the average high roller makes about 5 silver per day minimum from their businesses. But in a more equitable world, these numbers would be closer together; the poor might make as much as 3 copper per day while the rich can only manage about 1 silver per day. Of course this all depends on how rich or poor an individual character should be for your story, but it's helpful to have a baseline. In my mystery campaign, I have established that the poor in Yamseth make as little as 4 copper a week (in a world with 9-day weeks), which means that the poor are struggling especially hard there, but your gameworld and your cities should match your plans for them.
Then we set the prices for common goods. A simple meal and an ale costs one copper, which exhausts the average poor person's resources for a day. Alternatively, the more equitable world has the poor using one-third of the wages to eat and the rest for whatever purpose they see fit. Along the same lines as this meal, which is designed as a tavern meal, a person could purchase ingredients for a meal for less than one copper. This means that copper is no longer the cheapest coin, because we would be spending fractions of a copper, so I introduce into my world the concept of copper chits; these small rounded chits represent one-tenth of a single copper piece, and so they are used for small purchases. A few reference costs: a chicken costs one full copper piece, a pumpkin costs three copper chits, a flagon of decent ale costs five copper chits, and a simple tool like a shovel costs 7 copper chits. I have found in my experience that because TRPGs like D&D place so much emphasis on expensive items like magical weapons that the cheapest items get lost in the mix. The copper chit system allows you to buy and sell simple, common items more precisely instead of all cheap things costing one copper piece. This also makes it more possible for the poor to subsist on low wages, narratively speaking at least.
Then we have common but less cheap items. The game rules set out costs for weaponry and armor, but what of less-adventure-oriented gear? What, for instance, does a simple house cost? This can be a complicated question, as houses are stratified into many different qualities. We need a sample house for the average poor person; a small shack big enough for a bed and a stove is enough to survive on, and it should be within reach of a poor person. Let's say that someone should have to save for most of the year to be able to buy a simple house--that means that a simple house should cost about 3 gold. Most poor folks won't be able to save up that much all at once, so there should be a lending industry in place to help them finance their homes. Interest rates in a fantasy world can be anything, but I set them a bit lower than real-life predatory lending practices. Let's say that a poor person borrows the 3 gold to buy a home and that they are charged another half of a gold (5 silver) over the course of the loan. Now we have an economic system in which the poor are likely in the process of paying back lenders. Meanwhile, a midsized house will cost 5 gold pieces, a fine house will cost 8 gold pieces, and a true mansion could cost as much as 12 gold. Custom work costs more as well, as much as 20% of the price of the house itself.
Most of the other details about prices are covered by the TRPG's rulebook. Prices for weapons, lodging, mounts, and more are all the domain of plenty of writing. It's these other details that complicate things. How many times in your GMing career have your players set out to buy a building? If you're like me, that answer is "plenty of times." Having a set price for a building is helpful for more than just having a fully conceptualized economy.
This covers most of the pricing issues you'll face, but there's another side to the economy: labor. What does the average person get paid for their work? As in real life, that depends on the job. Obviously, more complicated or difficult tasks will pay more--that's why the hard work of adventuring makes the players some of the wealthiest people in the gameworld. (In the mystery campaign, one of the player characters is Beor, a hermit-like barbarian/druid who lives a simple life. According to the official rules, Beor started with 40 gold pieces. 40 gold pieces! That's enough to build a custom mansion thrice and still have money left over. This is the kind of imbalance you're constantly fighting as a GM: you need to make the economy work well for non-adventurers, but also not let the economy break when player characters' wealth is added to the system. So what do we pay various professions for their labor?
As mentioned above, common labor labor doesn't pay very well: about a copper piece per day. Climbing the ladder, the next rung is hospitality work: tavern and inn employees. These indispensable folks make a bit more money as well as tips, so they're a bit better off than manual laborers. Let's say that the average tavernkeeper makes 2-3 copper per day, plus another copper's worth of chits as tips. Similarly, we have shopkeepers. Shopkeepers may own the store, in which case they take the business's profits as payment (more on this below), but they may also just be hired to take care of the business, in which case they would be paid according to how much money the shop makes--high priced items or high bulk of items would both mean that the shopkeeper gets a little extra. Let's say that this ranges from 2-4 copper per day in most shops and 4-6 copper per day for nicer shops. Then you have specialized labor: healers, enchanters, smiths, craftspeople, and others. The payment they can expect is generally tied to the perceived quality of their product or service; an expert healer or a master craftsperson would get paid more than a run-of-the-mill smith or a novice enchanter. On the low end, these experts make 5-8 copper per day and 9-12 copper per day on the higher end.
We can see at this point that the inequality I wanted to create is very ingrained in these values. An expert healer can make as much as 12 times the amount a manual laborer can--that's quite the disparity. And yet, in the world of most TRPGs, inequality breeds narrative; the greed of the rich or the suffering of the poor are both rich with story potential, and indeed the mystery campaign has revolved around investigating the hyper-rich in ways that the poor cannot do for themselves. And as the end of the campaign will reveal (when the time comes, of course), that inequality is at the core of the story I want to tell. Adjust your economy to the story you want--it will be a vehicle for a great many adventures.
As I mentioned above, the rules are a little different for business owners. I generally create businesses where the owner is also the main shopkeeper, but that's more of a guideline than a rule. It depends more on the business and the personality of the business owner--is this business owner the kind of person who is hands-on and likes the public, or are they willing to forego some profits to stay out of the day-to-day workings of the business? A shopkeeper gets the wages described above, but a business owner gets to keep the profits, which is generally a more rewarding route. We can stratify businesses into categories: low, middle, and high quality. Quality may refer to the reliability of goods, the customer service provided by the shopkeeper, or how well the business serves its community. It may also refer to how many customers the business usually has. Low quality businesses (poor quality, few customers, or both) might net between 1 silver piece and 5 silver pieces per day. Medium quality businesses (average quality, average customers, or a combination of low and high quality indicators) might expect to make 3 silver pieces to 8 silver pieces per day. High quality businesses (good quality, many customers, or both) can expect about 5 silver pieces to 1 gold piece per day. Keep in mind that these are averages: a simple smithy that sells common tools might make lots of small sales in a day, whereas a magic item seller only needs to make one big sale in a period of several weeks to meet the same average. And of course, if you feel that a business is exceptional (it taps into a new market, its prices are substantially cheaper than competitors', it has both high quantity and quality of goods/services), it can and should make even more money.
This should cover your needs for the gameworld. But your players are a big part of the gameworld, and it is practically their goal to break the economy. How do you keep it intact when money is both hard to come by and required in great amounts for powerful items? This is where you can reduce the role of money in advancing your players through the game. Traditional TRPGs pose challenges to players, who are rewarded with currency in the game so that they can obtain boosts to their power. But with so many details floating around and such distortion between common uses of money and player uses of money, this can be much more than you've bargained for. That's why I often eliminate money as a reward for my players. If they want to make money, they must get creative and find a place in the world that can provide them with funds. But rewards that advance the players' powers can be separated from money; you can simply award appropriate items to your players via the story.
An example: in the last year, I started a D&D campaign with my immediate family. My brother and sister have both played before, but my mom is new to the game. We have a good time with simple quests and lots of roleplaying (my mom loves to threaten to light people on fire). When my family completed their first real quest, I wanted to reward them. But their characters are from a small town without lots of items available, and their main interest is in getting more powerful rather than amassing a fortune. So rather than add the middleman of money to the equation, I just reward them with magic items. My family's characters are a sorcerer, a cleric, and an Ancients paladin, so I offered a few classic D&D items: they offered +2 bonuses to charisma, wisdom, and strength, respectively. You'll notice that each of these items offers a boost to the most important stats of each respective class. This allowed me to reward my players with the kind of items that will help them the most, and all without the complication of awarding money which would only disappear as soon as they located a magic item vendor. I'll acknowledge that this removes some of the choice from the players--the cleric may have wanted to become stronger rather than wiser, or they may have wanted a magic sword which can light people on fire (which I'm awarding to my mom the next time we play). It's a trade-off you have to decide for yourself. My best suggestion is this: reward your players with items directly most of the time, but also give opportunities for obtaining the items of their choice. My favorite way to do this is to have a questgiver have access to an array of magical or otherwise powerful items, and they reward the party by granting them one item each from the collection. Then you can offer a variety of helpful items and put your players in the position of strategizing which ones they value the most.
The biggest key with money is not to be overwhelmed. It's exhausting and sometimes pointless to put a monetary value on anything and everything. My suggestion is to work on your economy as part of your worldbuilding and develop a mental sense of what you would charge for various items. Once you can comfortably come up with values for most things in your world, get to playing. As players buy, invest, haggle, or sell, help them to understand the values you're assigning. Your players have a sense of money in the real world where we live, but they're unlikely to immediately grasp the more abstract way that money works in the game. When players estimate a price that is too high or too low by a wide margin, take an out-of-game moment to confirm that they want to offer something that is noticeably different from agreed-upon values. Your players may want to be over- or under-pricing something, but you should allow them to revise their estimation if your explanation of a reasonable price changes their mind. You never want to penalize a player for not understanding something about the gameworld, as anyone who actually resided in the gameworld would not make these kinds of mistakes. Eventually, your players will get a sense of your economy, but until then, hold their hands. It will help get everyone on the same page.
That's all for now. Coming soon: how to manage a boss fight, how to design a custom TRPG, and how to roleplay learning new skills and abilities. Until next time, happy gaming!
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