Problems with the Economic System in D&D Ⅱ

Introduction

I previously wrote about issues I found with the Dungeons & Dragons economic system in the post titled “Problems with the Economic System in D&D”, and not surprisingly, I’ve pondered quite a bit on the subject. After writing an article on the Canned Blog, “D&D: Konvertering av prislister Ⅲ”, and coming back here to check what I previously had written on the subject, I was a bit surprised to read what I wrote at the end of the article; I quote:

… to make the economic system work well, two changes have to be done. First of all, there has to be only one system, not two as it is now (one for Joe Commoner and another for the heroes). Secondly, the whole economic system has to be rethought and redesigned from the bottom up. This would cause the sums found by the adventurers to be something completely different, and the rare Gold Crown (the monetary unit in my system which I’ve set to 240 silver pence) would truly get a unique status.

Do I still hold to that idea? I’ll hereby provide a translation on my Canned Blog-post on price lists, and see whether I still agree with my previous thoughts.

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Edit: I found a few errors; some were minor, some were horrendous. I have corrected these now. My apologies.

Mr. K.

Problems with the Economic System in D&D

This post was previously posted in Norwegian at the Canned Blog.

Background for the Problem

I have previously written a bit about the monetary system in D&D (i.e. D&D: penger); what works well and what could have been corrected and improved. According to the books, amongst others the beginning of chapter seven in the PHB, one can read that the monetary system is based on the silver coin as the base unit, and that an unskilled labourer can expect to earn roughly 1 SP a day. At first glance this seems to be “right on the money” with what the reality of Mediaevil Europe was, but try scrutinizing it, and problems shine through.
First of all: The adventurers hardly lay eyes on a silver coin at all. The monetary system in D&D is in other words a twofold system; there’s one for Joe Commoner, based on silver-coins, and one for the adventurer, gold-coin-based. Secondly: The enormous amounts of money the adventurers get their hands on, is beyond all sensibility; an average hero should during first level earn a couple of thousand GP, in other words 10,000 SP, which equals around 27 yearly wages for an unskilled labourer; this during just a few weeks. How can this make sense?