Chapter Four

Adventurer Microeconomics: $pending That Ca$h

As previously acknowledged, lots of people don’t give a shit about the functioning of an entire economy. They assume everything will work out no matter what they do, they only keep track of headline item purchases (small things like ammo, daggers, and even lifestyle costs that characters can afford are not deducted from PC gold totals), money is handed out according to whatever module or campaign book or loot table the DM is going by without a thought given to what the PCs are capable of purchasing, and the only notable moments related to money are when someone says, “Hey, I have 20,000 gold, isn’t there something I can buy with that?” Then the other four people say the same thing, and they realize they can buy three galleys. They don’t, because they’re about to go under a mountain, but maybe they’ll find enough gold to buy a fourth galley once they come out…?

Sometimes the players buy those boats. Maybe they want to start a merchant fleet and work with the DM to figure out how to make that happen. Great! Or, they may not know what to do with them, but dammit, they want those boats. That’s fine too. There can be a real joy to this type of game, even if it starts venturing into the absurd. As much as I adore digging into the details of how national economies (both real and fantastic) work, I’ll never tell anyone they’re wrong for playing this way. If your players have fun buying a bunch of ridiculously expensive shit and rolling with whatever happens because of it, hey, go crazy. Your PCs are making money and spending it; you’re all doing fine.

However, there are a few other outcomes which are both more common and less good.

1. Many players aren’t interested in boats or strongholds or any of the other big-ticket purchases already in the game. They never spend the money. It’s useless, and thus worthless.

2. The DM creates a situation where the party is forced to use a large portion of their gold to complete some task. Sometimes this can make sense, e.g. if the party has created a good relationship with an area and now they need to help rebuild the local defenses against a battalion of orcs, but the problem persists if the players decide to find an answer that doesn’t require them to spend their own money.

3. The DM sees all that gold and creates an ad hoc thing for the party to purchase that she knows they’ll like. The players rejoice that their characters are no longer sitting on all that gold, and they’re glad to have something useful, so that’s good. However, because this method of spending appears from out of nowhere, it can be difficult to balance what’s offered between something that is way better than the characters should have, and something which the characters don’t really think is worth the money but they buy it anyway because they’re tired of carrying around all that gold.

4. The party might spend the money of their own accord, but only to spend it, not because the purchase sounds fun or they have a goal in mind. This not only reduces the joy of the purchase, but if you create conflict or adventure around that purchase—and if you’re a good DM, you’re always looking for avenues of conflict and adventure—they might think, “Gods, what a pain in the ass. I/we should have just sat on the gold.”

Luckily, if you’re not interested in tracking anything having to do with the broader economy, and all you want is to keep your players from becoming swamped with useless cash, all you need to do is make their cash valuable. This requires two things: expensive things for the characters to buy, and enough expensive things to make the characters prioritize how their cash is spent.

What’s on the Menu?

There’s a common concept put to use in games that want to give characters a way to spend lots of cash—the money sink. Technically, a money sink can be good/useful or bad/pointless, but the term “money sink” suggests that it’s just a place to sink your cash and doesn’t have any real value. The big-ticket purchases in the PHB and DMG are effectively money sinks, unless the characters have need of a boat or a castle, or the players enjoy the idea of playing around those items. Sometimes it’s appropriate for NPCs to drastically overcharge PCs for certain goods or services, which is another type of money sink, but that’s situational. If you overcharge PCs all the time to keep cash out of their pockets, you may as well stick with the book prices and just give them less gold in the first place.

As a DM, you don’t want crappy money sinks. You want to give the characters worthwhile expenditures (“good” money sinks). You can, and often should, tailor these potential expenditures to your group’s interests, but there’s one thing that basically every adventuring group has an interest in: magic items.

Magic items are supposed to be rare and nearly impossible to buy! I thought you were making minimal changes to the books.

According to the DMG, yes, the default game state is that “most magic items are so rare that they aren’t available for purchase” (p. 135). However, it’s also stated that the buying or selling of magic items is at the DM’s discretion, so creating a market for magic items is not a massive hack to the rules. Third edition, in fact, had this as a feature. Even though a spellcaster had to actually use their own earned experience to create magic items, which would seem to limit a person’s desire to make anything they don’t desperately need, the game included market prices for many standard magic items and a way to find market prices for anything not on their lists.

The upshot for 5th Edition is this: if it was considered plausible for spellcasters to sell items when they needed to use a piece of themselves to make one, it’s hardly strange to think that people will sell magic items when making them is simply a matter of time and money. The limiting factor in magic item creation now is not the personal (XP) cost, but the time required. In 3.5E, a Cloak of Elvenkind took two-and-a-half days to make; in 5E, it takes twenty. If a wizard has the time and money to invest, however, selling the odd magic item can be a tremendous way to fund her research. Likewise, clerics in a major temple might make items available to fund their religious practices, or only sell to the devout. For that reason, not only should the selling of magic items not be considered breaking the D&D code, it’s a logical outcome of 5th Edition’s item creation rules.

Finally, consider our goal. We want to give PCs something to spend money on. More importantly, we want players to feel like the gold their characters collect has value, which means there has to be something they’re almost guaranteed to want available for sale. Your particular set of players might think buying castles or ships or whatever is great, but creating a system that’s useful for the vast majority of DMs requires leaning into what the vast majority of players want. And in D&D, the most common thing the average character is looking for is magic.

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The key questions, of course, are that if we need to make magic items available, what should be for sale, and what should those items cost?

With regards to cost: there are different ways to buy goods, especially unusual or hard-to-find goods like magic items, and how a character acquires the item can have a substantial impact on the price. For example, a given item will likely be much cheaper if it’s sold legally by an old adventurer the PCs befriend than if it needs to be acquired through a string of black market connections. Of course, the easiest way for players to spend their money is for there to be a shop available which sells what they’re looking for. 

With that in mind, here’s a simple table for how much permanent magic items in this system should cost.

And here is an example list of permanent magic items sold in magic shops in an average campaign world, assuming the casters making them have the relevant spells available (* = should be sold for higher than the base price for that rarity):

• Common

  • Cloak of Many Fashions

  • Hat of Wizardry

  • Heward’s Handy Spice Pouch

  • Horn of Silent Alarm (possibly illegal; see Chapter Nine)

  • Ruby of the War Mage

  • Anything you think your party would find entertaining, and which you could see a noble with too much money buying for fun

• Uncommon

  • +1 Longsword and Longbow (change or add to this for any weapons in common use where the caster lives)

  • +1 Shield

  • Bag of Holding*

  • Boots/Cloak of Elvenkind* (possibly illegal; see Chapter Nine)

  • Gauntlets of Ogre Strength*

  • Headband of Intellect

  • Helm of Comprehending Languages (* if you feel enough civilians would buy one to drive up the price)

  • Wand of Magic Missiles

  • Wand of Secrets* (possibly illegal; see Chapter Nine)

  • Winged Boots

• Rare

  • +1 Armor (half plate or plate mail—add the armor cost to the total)

  • Glamoured Studded Leather

  • +2 Shield

  • Folding Boat (only where water travel is critical to the functioning of the area)

  • Wand of Fireballs

  • Wings of Flying

Those prices are insane. And some of them are even more? Fuck this, I’m out, you’re crazy—

Bear with me. I don’t blame you for thinking those prices are out of control, especially if you’ve seen lists like this online. But I promised explanations, so let’s get into them.