By that I mean that the sheer number of coins that are expected to buy pretty much anything at mid-to-high levels is so absurd that it makes the old imagery of treasure chests full of the stuff feel not only underwhelming but burdensome.
If 50 coins equal one imperial pound, as the rulebooks typically state, you could just about melt down and hammer out a house or a boat approximating the prices in the book for such things. It gets even sillier when magic items are so obscenely priced yet at the same time a typical adventuring party picks up so many of them that they could, materialistically speaking, pull a Mansa Munsa on any quasi-medieval economy if such items are really priced that highly where a hand-me-down magic protection ring could set up a peasant in endless luxury for life.
I don’t try to fix all of that mess, but I do tend to use a house rule where coins have as much written buying power as 100x the listed prices for most things, and the coins found in a listed lair are reduced by to 1/100th of the listed values, which also keeps coppers, silvers, and electrum relevant a lot longer. As long as all the players remember the conversion tables and don’t forget them in a way that fucks up the bookkeeping, it works pretty well.
How about the rest of you? :d20:
I mean, if you looks at the costs of things, ‘a cheap meal’ is usually like, 1-5 coppers. So, copper is somewhere between $1-$5, very roughly speaking. Which would put even just a 100gp magic sword (a ‘basic enchantment’) be worth around $10,000. So like, a used car? And a single gold would be like $500, in the realm of a weeks pay irl. And, a platinum piece is $5,000.
But regardless, I assume banking exists, and a lot of these ‘thousands of gold’ transactions are done via banking guilds or w/e. Its not like the US prints anything bigger than $100 today, though of course a primarily digital economy is radically different from a DnD-esque primarily gold-standard one.
Additionally, I don’t know about you, but I rarely award ‘chests full of gold’ to the players, its usually valuable items; rare gems, art pieces, or magic items themselves.
But yeah, those ‘high level magic items’ worth like, 100,000gp+, would be roughly analogous to things worth $10-100 million. Which, for 20th level adventurers fighting gods, doesn’t seem unreasonable? Like, IRL, the richest people in the world have stuff priced individually at $100million, though those tend to be like, super yachts and mansions, not a single relic sword.
Regardless, the economy is pretty clear that adventuring, even at like level 1, gives quite a bit more money than a ‘normal’ job gives, even a decent one like a smith. But also, adventuring is pretty goddamn dangerous. (And, also, the game designers kinda need that to be true, otherwise the players should just run a tavern instead of adventuring, at least until the can buy better gear.)
That day/week/month wages works clean though. The peice fits for like a legendary painting or violin in real life
If only the offline world had hundreds to thousands of dormant stashes of “legendary” paintings and/or violins just waiting for a few armed looters to wander in and take them. :thinkin-lenin: