Introduction

Dungeons and Dragons is the most popular tabletop gaming system in the world. This is because it does many things well—though which things, exactly, can be a matter of disagreement. What’s important to the vast majority of players is that it doesn’t screw up anything you need to play the game. The mechanics of character creation, equipping one’s character with items and magic, and partaking in combat are all sufficiently good to allow players to enjoy their time playing with friends, except for the miserable bastards who can’t let us have nice things (and who we pray don’t end up in our games).

One part of the game that doesn’t get quite as much love from players is the economy. Much like in the real world, a D&D economy is largely invisible when it’s working and very noticeable when it’s not. Players can have both positive and negative experiences with the systems regulating combat, skill checks, and other heroic activities; they rarely consider buying a set of plate mail to be a positive experience, apart from anticipating how it will help them in a fight. Even when the economy is working perfectly on a numerical level, if they have to spend too much time interacting with it to get what they want or need, it still becomes a drain on their joy.

And that’s fine! For most players and DMs, the D&D economy lets them pick up what they need to go smash (or outwit) villains, and that’s enough. They need goals more than gold. And when they do collect a boatload of gold, the 5th Edition Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide do offer ways to dump it back into the world if the PCs want to sit on something more interesting than a pile of cash—if the items for sale interest them.

But a not-uncommon occurrence is that, eventually, a player sees the gold they’re collecting and thinks, what is the point of having all this money? It’s not necessarily enough for them to complain that the game suddenly sucks, but it does detract from the sense that money is really the reward it’s supposed to be. If that leads to the question, “Why do I do this?” then the game can be less fun, and that’s a problem. Likewise, because the core books don’t offer substantial guidance on what to do with the party’s growing sums of cash, every DM who tries to fix this problem has to cobble together an ad hoc solution. Sometimes it’s brilliant. Sometimes… not.

The goal of this book, therefore, is to create a streamlined system (or, to be more precise, multiple coordinated systems) so that players can feel like the gold they earn matters no matter their level, and the DM can make their world’s economy as simple—or complex—as needed to keep the party’s interactions with it entertaining and fun.