Well the answer is there isn’t actually a universal idea of what a unit of currency is worth on the individual level.
ELECTRUM PIECES 5E FULL
What exactly is that handful of coins worth? How many coins to a full sack of grain? How many coins to a cow? So now our barter can happen on a more precise level.
The cow is now worth 2 sacks and this handful of coins. One of the best uses of money for a couple of villagers trying to do business together is if they agree that a whole cow is worth more than 2 sacks of grain but less than 3 sacks, they now have an extra representative unit that they can use to express that difference. This is the core of how I actually treat currency in my DnD games. Money Doesn’t Replace Barter, It Augments It The prime interpersonal benefit of currency is that now we have a value middleman for our transactions. Having the individuals within your society able to interact with this new economic unit of value increases the flow of goods through a society. This is still a societal benefit though, not an interpersonal one.
ELECTRUM PIECES 5E PORTABLE
Having a portable unit of currency with a relatively consistent value is far more helpful to me.
If I travel from my village to the nearest city I can’t very well walk my entire herd of cows there so I can barter them away in exchange for the goods I need. In this context money also broadens economic possibility. Money is a far more elegant unit of value. It wouldn’t do well to have a bunch of government cows producing milk so that they give milk to labourers in exchange for building a road. For a government, currency creates a unit of value that they can gain and spend to carry out necessary functions of governance. The emergence of currency does a couple of things, some of which happen on the societal level and some of which happen on that transactive interpersonal level. If both parties felt that one sack of grain was worth three quarts of fresh milk then that was the relative value of those things for that transaction. There was no ‘universal metric’, value was determined during the course of an exchange. Most people have a tacit understanding of this already, but at one point all exchange was done through barter and a thing was essentially worth whatever you could trade it away for. To understand what this means we need to have a bit of an understanding about why currency exists in the first place and the general history of using money as a means of representing value.
Money isn’t worth what the PHB says, it’s worth what the NPC says. It all runs off one simple principle with wide-reaching consequences: The end result is something that is all at once far more simulatory while also being far more robust when it comes to managing the economy of your game worlds.
The solution I’ve found is to completely change mine and my players’ thinking about how currency works. The PHB’s price lists relative to villager wages are fucking bonkers, scarcity is never accounted for, and frankly some objects like spell scrolls don’t have useful prices at all. You may well have come up against these problems yourself. In the endless strive to have my games feel more immersive I’ve started running up against a few problems when it comes to money. So this has been loosely on my mind for a while.
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