Chapter Eleven

There’s No Good Bankruptcy Joke Here: Setting Up the Economy

(Note: This chapter explains how D&D economies are most likely to have developed and why, and thus serves as the rationale for many of the choices we’ll see in the chapters following this one. If you don’t particularly care why choices were made, you can safely skip to Chapter Twelve.)

If we’re going to determine how adventurers and their money impact the economy of the towns, cities, and even worlds in which they live, we need to know what those economies look like. Setting up the entire system from scratch would be a massive undertaking, but fortunately, it’s not necessary. 

With regards to wealth, the PCs rarely need to know the value of someone’s business or real estate. Likewise, exact tax rates don’t matter to PCs unless it’s a tax they have to pay. Their main concern is how much money (cash and cash-equivalents like gems and art) someone has. That’s much easier to deal with. All we need to know about any location is three things: how many people are there, how much money is there, and who has the money.

Relying on a few basic concepts, we can set up the monetary wealth of any town, city, or country in our campaigns.

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Concept 1: D&D worlds often mimic the Middle Ages, which means wealth is heavily imbalanced between rich and poor, and money possessed wildly skewed in favor of the rich.

If you’re familiar with medieval history, you may know that peasants and serfs frequently lived on a subsistence level—they made enough stuff on their farms for their own use and to pay their taxes, and that was it. If they had any money at all, it wasn’t much. Even if their taxes were assigned in silver, they often paid with something their farm made (e.g. butter) in an amount deemed equal to that amount of silver.

D&D relies more on the exchange of coin for transactions. As a game, that makes sense—trading butter or cows for shit they need might be an interesting one-off quest for a party, but PCs generally live a traveling, dangerous, combat-oriented life. They deal in coin. Because PCs might deal with peasants (please save us from the evil baron, good warriors!), it makes sense for peasants to have available coin that their real-world counterparts may not have possessed.

However, even if they do, the percentage of the local money supply they possess will be very low. A wicked lord might only allow the townsfolk enough to barely survive while he and his retainers have everything they could ever dream of, but even a good lord will hold the lion’s share of the local wealth. Well-intentioned nobility might spend freely to ensure their people live good lives, but they rarely give their gold away. 

In some areas, the wealth may not rest so heavily with nobles, but rather with local clergy or merchants. This may create a different base of power (e.g. a church with the majority of the wealth will likely have the most influence), or it may create a balance between entities relatively equal in wealth and power. In all of these situations, however, money rises to the top.

What is common among medieval societies is that tax burdens tend to fall on the poor. The reasons are a bit more complicated than the poor being the ones who can’t fight back, but in the end that’s mainly why it happened. There were different layers of nobility, with each noble owing fealty to someone above them until you reached the (usually) one person at the top, and there were certain requirements involved in these relationships—paying tribute or taxes, fielding armies when necessary, and so on. However, if resources were stretched and a king or high-ranking noble needed more, those requirements went down the line and were eventually squeezed out of the peasants.

Similarly, when merchants became more prominent, they started wielding the type of influence that let them avoid some of the taxation that the leaders of a city or country might want to implement. When this led to shortfalls in the government, the government took what it needed from the people who didn’t wield sufficient influence to stop them—the peasantry. Once again, wealth shifted from the bottom to the top.

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Now, let’s say you want to introduce a more egalitarian society (one which treats everyone relatively equally) into your D&D campaign. Let’s also assume you want to make this society as plausible as possible. What would cause such a society to exist? Or, perhaps more importantly, why did there tend not to be any alongside the great kingdoms of Europe?

Historically, the most egalitarian societies are the ones where everyone has to contribute whatever they can to ensure the survival of the group. This does not simply mean early human hunter-gatherer groups, barbarian tribes, and so on; while it can include those groups, some cultures were both very complex and relatively egalitarian (e.g. some Native American societies).

The pressure to be more hierarchical and oppressive often comes when there’s a race for land and resources. People fight over them, which means finding better methods of waging war, which includes fighting over power within one’s society as well as trying to roll over other nations. Europe became very good at this because they spent millennia fighting over everything. And, when they found people who weren’t used to that kind of life, they had a major advantage in war technology and ran those people over too.

Thus, the most likely situation in which an egalitarian society flourishes is when it’s able to develop without war being a primary concern. How likely this is depends entirely on your campaign world.

Of course, if you have more egalitarian societies in your campaign, they don’t have to be sitting ducks for warlike cultures who might come along. Perhaps they’ve been attacked and understand that threats exist outside their borders; perhaps members of their society have traveled and come back with stories of what might come for them someday. But they do tend to be small, because once societies grow and rely on more efficient methods of agriculture, more people can partake in activities beyond growing food, and those people get an opportunity to consolidate power and wealth. Needless to say, the leaders of such a society benefit most of all.

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So, highly egalitarian societies are hard to make work, but it might get kind of boring if the nobles, the churches, and the successful merchants have all the money. Is there a historical basis for societies not being highly egalitarian but having reduced wealth inequality?

Yes, in fact, but it kind of sucks.

Historically, what’s actually reduced income inequality to any substantial degree are catastrophes. The Black Plague, for example, gave laborers an enormous amount of power relative to what they had before, because nations in Europe still needed people to work but they had only half the population to draw on. Wars can be catastrophes on that level, but it requires something world-shattering like World War II. Medieval wars required so much time just to move troops and ready them for battle that they rarely created this type of situation. 

Even if you decide that this sort of massive destruction is correct for your campaign world, the reduction in inequality will take years of game time to occur. If you decide that a country, a continent, or even a world has become more egalitarian because of some catastrophe, it may be easier to have the catastrophe be something which happened many years prior to the time when the party begins adventuring, and the better condition of the peasantry/working class is noticeable.

Furthermore, the wealth split narrows between rich and poor, but it doesn’t close as dramatically as you might imagine. At the time of the Black Plague (mid-1300s), the richest 10% in Europe held about two-thirds of the wealth. In just a few years, that dropped to around 54%. The downward trend actually continued for some time, until 1450 or so, when the richest 10% held just under half the wealth in Europe. 

From this point on, inequality rose. The estimated share of wealth owned by the top 10% of Europeans in the year 1800 was around 77%. By some estimates, it reached as high as 90% just before World War I. The causes of economic inequality are many, and the puzzle of how such a monstrous percentage of European wealth rested in so few hands is still being investigated. However, historically, inequality rises the longer people go without a gargantuan calamity throwing their society on its head.

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Concept 2: Inequality is greater in wealthier societies.

This may seem like a somewhat odd statement from a modern perspective. The United States and numerous European countries are the wealthiest nations the world has ever seen, but robust safety nets exist to care for the poor in all of those countries. (I’m sure some people will point out that the U.S.’ safety net is noticeably less robust than in those European countries, but I have no desire to make this political. The fact is that by historical standards, the general welfare system, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are substantial programs.) Therefore, today’s nations must be less unequal than in feudal times, right?

First, it’s critical to note that these safety nets exist due to specific choices made by those countries to prioritize general public welfare. If the attitude towards public welfare was the same as in the Middle Ages—the general time frame we apply to D&D—it’s reasonable to assume that wealth inequality would be greater than is currently the case.

Secondly, many safety nets ensure people are able to live with food, housing, and health care, but do little to directly increase their wealth. It does impact wealth inequality by taking some resources from the wealthy to fund the safety net, but not so much by adding to the wealth of the poor. 

And thirdly… it really isn’t less unequal now. Remember that 77% number from Europe in 1800? That’s the same approximate level of wealth held by the top 10% in the United States in 2016. In Europe, that upper echelon holds between 65 and 70% of the total wealth, which puts them at the same percentage as the rich in Europe before the Black Death. These levels of wealth inequality are possible despite the safety nets at work because the sheer amount of wealth which exists in these societies, and which did not exist in the Middle Ages.

Bringing this back around to D&D… think about any tycoon you’ve ever heard of. What can they buy? Maybe it would be easier to ask, what can’t they buy? That list would be quite a bit shorter. 

Now imagine those are the people who run the territory your PCs are traveling through. 

Returning to the exchange rate of $35 for 1 gold piece, someone worth exactly $1 billion in 2018 would be worth, in D&D money, over 28.5 million gold pieces. Much of that would be in land, magic, etc., but if that person needed wizards or armies or whatever else to maintain their grip on power, they could get pretty much anything they want. And the richest people in the modern world are worth over one hundred times that amount.

Of course, the reason these people are worth so much is because of the economic activity provided by billions of people across the planet. The Middle Ages had a substantially smaller population; the world population was perhaps a half-billion, and only Constantinople and a few cities in China reached even 500,000 population. In Europe, the largest cities were around 200,000. Most likely your D&D world will be somewhere near these numbers. The wealthy in your campaigns, therefore, can collect all the money they want, but there will still be some limits to what they can buy.

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Concept 3: Population sizes are determined by agriculture.

If you want to play significantly with the population of your campaign, this is by far the main thing you need to consider. (I mean, yes, you can come up with any reason you want, but… you know what I’m saying.) Modern medicine has done incredible things to help people live longer, and maybe you want a world where many people are trained clerics and paladins who serve a similar purpose. That will help, certainly. Likewise, a world filled with constant warfare will deplete its population even with strong agricultural output. But in the end, the sustainable population is the population that can be fed.

You don’t need to get too deep into the exact agricultural technologies that exist. Some of the ones that allow more land to be farmed, such as crop rotation, horse-drawn wooden plows, and irrigation, were invented well before the time frame D&D seeks to mimic. Likewise, technologies that did a great deal to reduce the number of people who had to work on a farm to maximize its output didn’t come along until the 19th century. It’s reasonable to assume people in your D&D world have access to the same ideas and technologies that real-life people did.

The second question is, what’s the climate like, and what can they grow? India and China have over one-third of the world’s population now because those areas had relatively high populations from the time people showed up. The main reason is that those climates support rice farming, and rice is an extremely good crop for giving people the calories they need to function. Furthermore, rice farming is extremely labor-intensive, which means they needed a lot of people (read: big families) to cultivate rice. This simultaneously required and allowed the populations in these areas to boom.

Europe, on the other hand, has relied on other crops, like wheat and potatoes. Although these can feed a substantial population, they are not nearly as calorie-efficient as rice. Therefore, areas modeled on European-style crop development (everyone eats bread) will have substantially fewer people than areas modeled on Asian-style crop development (everyone eats rice). Cities will generally max out at around 200,000 and 500,000, respectively, based on the available food supply. Larger cities will usually require imports of food; ancient Rome maxed out around one million people, for example, but they spent a major part of their strength bringing in enough food from around the empire.

Of course, we’re talking about D&D, which means somebody might make friends with some druids. If a country has a deal going with a circle of druids, for example, those druids might hold a month-long festival where they cast Plant Growth on every farm in the nation or around the capital. Plant Growth doubles the output of the land, so you could say the country has tons of people because they have twice as much food as the land would naturally support. (Perhaps this results in those extra people spreading out and farming more land, increasing the population even further.) Alternately, they might have a more normal population but not nearly as many people who need to actively farm, which means lots of people partaking in more economically valuable activity and increasing the overall wealth of the nation.

You might ask, if we can rationalize a wide array of populations just by adding or subtracting druids, why do we need to think about agriculture at all? To be clear, I’m only including this as something to keep in mind, not as something which needs substantial consideration. If you think of an area as having historical-style farming and populations, that’s basically the D&D default, and you’re fine. 

But, if you want something different, you can put some of these ideas to work to create adventures. For example, say the nation of Sembia sees a massive boom in population and wealth because they gave the druids of the Dalelands a druidic artifact in exchange for improving their farms. What happens if the druids come under threat from an adult green dragon that wants the artifact in order to leave and neither take over the forest nor destroy it? If the dragon isn’t stopped, tens of thousands could starve or be forced to relocate in order to avoid the battles over food which will occur if the druids can no longer provide their yearly blessings. The party is the best option the nation has, but they may not be strong enough to directly battle the dragon. Can they still face it down, or find a different way to convince it to leave?

A not-uncommon problem D&D groups run into is a question of motivation. The players may wonder why their PCs would be interested in something, but they may also wonder why the NPCs think something requires their immediate attention. It may sound boring to say, “Consider the agriculture of your campaign world,” but the primary goal of living beings is to eat. Threatening that gives people the most primal and obvious motivation they could ever want. Take advantage of it.