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.

Alternative Rules - Wounds and Vitality

This article was first published at the Canned Blog titled D&D: Fordeler med Vitality and Wounds-systemet.
I haven’t written everything that’s relevant for introducing the system in this post, only the most important points. If you’d like to read the whole ruleset, I recommend you drop by The d20 System Resource Document and read through its contents.

Health Points

Background and Advantages

Nothing makes a player more scared when playing role playing games than the idea of the character’s death. In many games there are ways of reawakening the character to life, but it commonly is very expensive, and unless the caster has access to the strongest magics, the character is punished with a lower level, less experience points and in general will have to struggle to get back to the level one was at before the accident happened.
But all these are good things! It keeps the player sharp and not to power hungry, overeager or intrepid. There are as many systems for representing health as there are role playing systems – maybe even more – and in D&D the Hit Points (or Health Points) system is what matters. The system has many advantages: It’s easy to keep track of the status of the character, the system is internally coherent, and with a quick look one can get an idea of the character’s welfare; a higher hit point total means you’re better at avoiding attacks, so that an attack one as a low-level character wouldn’t have the time to respond to and thus would hit and do maximum relative damage, would at the higher levels only be a glancing hit; and in addition it represents you being hardened, so that one in general can take more. Gary Gygax explained it like this in AD&D 1e DMG page 82:

“It is quite unreasonable to assume that as a character gains levels of ability in his or her class that a corresponding gain in actual ability to sustain physical damage takes place… Why then the increase in hit points? Because these reflect both the actual physical ability of the character to withstand damage—as indicated by constitution bonuses—and a commensurate increase in such areas as skill in combat and similar life-or-death situations… Each hit scored upon the character does only a small amount of actual physical harm—the sword thrust that would have run a 1^st level fighter through the heart merely grazes the character due to the fighter’s exceptional skill, luck, and sixth sense ability which caused movement to avoid the attack at just the right moment.”

Disadvantages with Health Points

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?