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?

Wages for Joe Commoner

Anyone who’s studied a bit of mediaeval history (and by that I mean “Anyone who’s taken a subject or two in mediaeval history in University”) knows that for an average family to survive the day-to-day challenges, hard work was required one’s entire life. The living standard equaled the minimum required for survival, and not before the 13^th century do we find people starting to prefer shopping with coins, buying objects in stead of making them themselves and thereby provide the basics needed for towns to appear. A regular apprentice or other unskilled labourer could not expect to earn more than one silver penny a day (I will here, and in the following, base my examples on source material from Mediaeval England; for references, please contact me by e-mail), and a master could perhaps expect to earn three to five times that wage. Jocelin of Brakelond tells us about how people struggled to pay the yearly penny for the abbey (actually, it was to halfpence every six months), forcing the cellarer to take furniture, animals or even the front door as payment of the yearly tax. A single day’s wage was in other words more than many were able to pay, which gives us a good image of how close to minimum sustenance people actually lived.

As mentioned above, it seems that the monetary system in D&D appreciates this, but this is as I in the following shall demonstrate not the case. If we start by looking at the division of the levels presented in the books, where level 1 through 6 is for the fresh and unexperienced, level 7 through 12 are for the skilled, and level 13 through 20 are for the true masters of adventuring, you can transfer this way of thought to the professions, where an apprentice is from level 1 through 6, a certified skilled craftsman from level 7 through 12, and from level 13 through 20 one has the right to call oneself a true master; the building of a cathedral one can imagine being supervised by a mason of minimum level 13. If we create a random person who shows some talent in masoning, we can say that he as a first level apprentice, i.e. level 1 NPC, has a wisdom socre of 13 (+1) and maximum number of ranks in his relevant skill: Profession (mason): total 5 = ranks 4 + ability (wisdom) 1. For an easier reading of this, I’ll tabulate it:

Potential income for a mason of levels 1, 6, 12 and 20
All sums are rounded down where needed. Base for character: generic person with Wis 13 (+1) and maximum ranks in Profession (mason); the person has maxed out his Wis and Profession all the way. The potential income has been calculated as such: (die roll + ranks + Wisdom bonus) / 2 = number of GP earned in a week (the same number of SP earned in a day (the ten-day week is assumed in the PHB). I have not included feats like Skill focus or similar; the results speak clearly enough as they are.
Class	Ranks	Wisdom	Potential income
			Minimum	Maximum	Average
Apprentice (fresh blood)	4	13 (+1)	3 GP/week	12½ GP/week	7½ GP/week
Apprentice (level 6)	9	14 (+2)	6 GP/week	15½ GP/week	10½ GP/week
Certified skilled (level 12)	15	16 (+3)	9½ GP/week	19 GP/week	14 GP/week
Master (level 20)	23	18 (+4)	14 GP/week	23½ GP/week	18½ GP/week

If you calculate a mason’s work year as rougly half a year long, and he pays about a third of his earnings in taxes, he’ll stilled be left with 130 GP after a year while still being a fresh-blooded apprentice; he has managed to lay aside, for his own sustenance 1300 SP which with the way things have been thought of in the book, and which should translate to the historical reality (1 D&D-SP one would imagine equals 1 English Mediaeval silver penny, since both in the D&D-world and in the real world an unskilled labourer would earn 1 SP a day), means that he’s been able to lay aside three-and-a-half times the amount of money even after he’s payed taxes and only worked half a year (during frost masoning could not be done) as what an untrained labourer would earn during a whole year with no taxes to pay, and still, actually more than what a real master did during this days. It seems clear something is broken here.

Suggestions for Change

I have already implemented a monetary system which attempts to focus on the silver as standard monetary unit, and at the same time by keeping the gold as a usable monetary unit, maintain the little fantasy element which makes finding treasures even more fun; more on this can be read in my post about money. But 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. When the heroes find a treasure like “Your search has revealed roughly four pounds of silver coins and seven copper farthings.”, they should be in heaven! They have just found a treasure consisting of roughly 1280 silver pence plus a few copper farthings (the latter of which actually is roughly equal to the mediaeval plumber’s salary for two days; in today’s money: a couple of hundred pounds of buying power!); the silver is – with today’s buying power – perhaps close to a year and sixty days of wage for a trained labourer, which equates to finding a treasure of £40,000 or more today! NB: I am in all these examples talking about buying power; in our modern times, we have very high wages due to being expected to buy most of our stuff instead of making it ourselves, and also for maintaining what we today consider an acceptable standard of living.

In Conclusion

Changes like these would naturally affect the whole game. Should the economic system be changed, it would have to affect the cost of regular items, weapons, armours, magic devices, potions, staffs, services; everything would have to be rethought and -designed. Would it be worth it? I don’t know yet, but I can see some interesting consequences, and comments on the subject are welcomed.

Mr. K.