Chapter Two

What’s in This Book, Anyway?

Universal systems, with a minimum of changes to the base D&D ruleset. In other words, methods that DMs across the board can use to improve the economies in their games while working with the PHB and DMG, as written, whenever possible.

The first part of the book deals with the issue of excess gold and how to give players meaningful choices for spending it. That is the core issue with the D&D economy, and most DMs and players will probably be content if that problem alone is solved (or at least mitigated). Therefore, not only is the system detailed, the rationales for the decisions made in creating it are also included. This way you can understand the logic and more easily adjust it for your own game, if needed.

Afterwards, systems for running an actual economy come into play, at varying levels of complexity. This is to add a greater sense of realism to D&D worlds and offer DMs another avenue for showing players the consequences of their decisions (it’s highly unlikely a party will ever have reason to dump 10,000 gp into a farming community, but if they do, they shouldn’t be surprised if things look a little different two months later). Any extra effort required is loaded into setting up your world or your sessions to the greatest possible degree, so that you have the information you need before anyone sits at your table. Unless your players really dig the idea of working with the economy directly, they shouldn’t need to see much, if any, of what goes into the economic setup of the world.

If that sounds like a bunch of boring math… I won’t say there’s zero math in any of this, but if an adventuring party has a major economic impact on the world, that also shows up in places outside an accounting ledger. For example, if the players spend 4,500 gp on three suits of plate mail from the blacksmith in a small town, he might suddenly have a lot more local clout. If the party returns half a year later, they could find the blacksmith is now the mayor—or that there is no blacksmith, because he’s been executed for treason. People do things with the money they get, and that’s part of what these systems strive to represent. 

In brief, this book should serve groups who want to run roughshod through the world and don’t want anything more than a place to throw their gold in exchange for something useful, as well as story-focused groups who can use their money and effect on the economy to create new roleplaying situations (sometimes purposefully, sometimes not).