Comic Strips

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.

Yeah those are poverty wages in large swaths of the country

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."

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

It isn't, it's a little bit more:

$15,960

Federal minimum wage in USA is $7.25 USD. It's even shittier than you were told.

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 doing pretty good

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.

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.

• 1lb = 453.59 grams

• 1 oz = 28.35 grams

• 1 troy oz = 31.1 grams

• 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)

• 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.

• One pure gold coin then ≈ $387.07.

• 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).

• 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:

• 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.

• 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.

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".