Reviewn June 9: Realistic Gold And Silver

Every few days in June I’m picking a TTRPG book that’s been languishing on my shelf or hard drive, reading it, and writing a review. I don’t believe in attempting a full critique of game content I haven’t run or played, so my focus will be on discussing the work’s best ideas and keeping criticisms to text-level quibbles.

Today I’m looking at Realistic Gold And Silver, by Worshipful Satan. It’s a 21-page “guide to bringing the realistic value of gold and silver into fantasy role-playing, based on medieval England.” Arguably more about world-building than roleplaying, it aims to give “a realistic representation of the medieval value of gold and silver”, which although not “necessary or desirable in every fantasy setting, [...] should be an option available to you.”

It's a bit niche. Few games are set in medieval [implied:] Western Europe, or even in a fantasy alt-history version thereof. I don’t think there’s any reason for other Earth-like planets to necessarily have similar quantities of silver and gold ores deposited in their crusts near the surface, let alone wherever the technology to mine them has been developed. And that’s even if said planets are formed by mundane processes rather than fantastic ones.

But all of that said, I am a fan of grounding fiction in real information. The real world is full of details that the first pass of the imagination often fails to create. And for those who want a historicalesque feeling to their gameplay, getting things like coinage right is a must.

Most of this text’s content was matter I’m already familiar with, but I’m a wonk when it comes to this specific intersection of history and economics and gaming, so I think other readers might get a lot more out of it. Realistic Gold And Silver is a good primer. I'm going to look at it on its own terms: it’s a plaintext document exported to PDF, not a polished thesis.

‘Realistic’ gold and silver values

The text admits that its initial premise is something of a canard, that the wide range of places and times and specific contexts means “that we must arbitrarily choose prices for gold and silver which fit our gameplay needs.” I don't think many people approaching a read like this are going to be surprised by that.

I think that working out all coin values by weight of metal is actually a very elegant approach to the TTRPG nightmare of trying to provide a plausibly wide variety of different denomination coins as the adventurers rampage across the landscape, looting archaeological sites. I like it a lot!

• The mechanism boils down to “Large purchases are made by measuring the weight of coins rather than by counting a specific number of coins”.
• It means that you can have the PCs find a big bag of Somewherian silver florins and half-florins and pour them into their sack of local groats and Elsewheric ‘new pence’ and imperial sestertii and you don’t need to consider either number or face value of coins, only the weight of the silver.
• It even works alongside bullion bars and hacksilver, and, as the author points out, works with the damaged, cut, underweight, and clipped coins that you would realistically get in any system without the technology and state power to prevent that.
• Note that this does require that all coins of a particular metal have similar levels of purity. That abstraction may be a stretch for some people who are really into this idea, but they could easily add in e.g. one lower level of purity and track those lesser-quality coins separately.
• Personally, unless I was leaning into the pseudo-historical aesthetic, I would pick a name other than ‘pence’ for the unit of measure/account if I was actually using ‘pennies’ as coins.

It’s interesting that the text recommends this for silver and then treats gold coins as special, counted individually rather than being weighed out. I think this against depends on whether you need that pseudo-historical feeling, but also the degree to which your campaign ramps up. If the PCs are meant to be finding hoards at tenth level that are worth thousands of times what they were getting at first level, then you might start out counting coins and face value variations for each kind of coinage, and transition to measuring each one in turn by weight as (e.g.) silver, electrum, gold, then platinum become commonplace.

I think the text’s attempt to approximate an equivalent modern-day value for medieval coins might give people some wrong ideas. The economic realities were so fundamentally different, states worked differently and their economies were less monetised, most people were growing most of their own food, and so on. People were spending proportionally much more on food because yields were lower and harder to produce at the same time as other costs were proportionally cheaper (e.g. housing could be made quickly by non-experts from cheap materials without regulation and overheads).

Instead, just let the prices speak for themselves. Which the author does:

Equipment and prices

The plausible price list for equipment is nice. It covers a fair amount of ground, mostly matching early D&D equipment lists. The author is clearly aware that you can’t really put together a reliable price list for even a relatively well-attested historical setting, and hedges appropriately (I would appreciate distinguishing in the text which prices are historically supported and which are just guesses, but again, I'm an outlier, most people aren't going to care).

• I like the authorial commentary on little bits of the equipment list, giving context on things like the German zweihänder, the price and usage of caltrops, and disparaging the typical ahistorically high-lux fantasy oil lamps. The text includes a scattering of fantasy gear for specific purposes. I also like spices as loot.
• I think the author overstates the case for not having gemstone faceting. But I have often thought that intaglio should be a much more common kind of treasure!
• Amethyst was a precious stone comparable to diamond and ruby up until the 1700s. The author doesn't mention this, but I suspect had this fact in mind, as the text prices amethyst alongside the other cardinal gemstones (albeit assigning it the lowest value of them).
• The text makes the good but oft-made point that any remotely dragonworthy hoard of gold is simply too much for verisimilitude. The author just advises against having them. My own opinion is that fantasy problems demand fantasy solutions. I can think of a few ways to set up the cosmology and world so that dragons can still have huge valuable (but not completely society-altering valuable) hoards. You do have to abandon attempts at a medieval feel, and consider the knock-on effects, though.

The classic explanation for D&D prices as gold-rush-induced-wealth-disparity has also been done to death, but the author lays it out elegantly. I would have eagerly read any extra material on these speculative fantasy parts, with guidelines for setting ‘true’ prices vs inflated ‘dungeon rush’ prices for equipment and staples, how buying vs selling are differently effected, considerations about prices of dungeon treasure based on proximity to the rush, etc.

Minor text quibbles:

• This is a plaintext document, not fancied up. Design simplicity can be strength! In this case, though, the ragged right edge justification is hard to read.
• The text also would benefit from an editing pass. There’s various typos, some grammar problems, and not much conclusion. Even some of the fundamentals are missing: the reader has to work backwards from disparate numbers to calculate that the author has chosen to value gold at 15× silver by weight.
• A few intersections with game terms (rounds, xp per coin) are highly D&D-specific, but the text doesn't acknowledge this.

My favourite bit:

The last couple of pages provide very important context and commentary, and I thoroughly enjoyed them. They provide a primer on certain game-relevant aspects of pre-modern “adventure economics”. These extrapolations and speculations about fantasy economics are the kind of thing I love reading.

Where to get it:

On itch at: https://worshipful-satan.itch.io/realistic-gold-and-silver