This week over on his blog Jay Barnson has been discussing the quirks of RPG economies, mostly in relationship to the pen and paper world. Fantasy economies have always been something I’ve wrestled with, and while I don’t think I’ve finally found the perfect solution in my current system, I’ve at least been satisfied with it.

Back in the beginning, before the homebrewed campaign worlds and house rules, my economy system was right out of the books with no changes. It was safe, but safe is often just another word for dull. At the time though it really didn’t matter, as there were more issues with our games than the economy. This was right at the start of 1E AD&D, and let’s just say we were young and dumb. Hey, it was the ‘70s! It wasn’t until shortly after 2E came out, and I was turning into a campaign creation gawd, that I began to tinker with how the economy worked.

Sometimes I just added coins to the basic system of copper, silver, electrum, gold, and platinum pieces. Once I had a scrip system and throughout the years I’ve also used an ingot system—ingots being just another form of scrip. Then there was the time I decided to get just a tad bit insane…

The campaign world I was running at the time consisted of one main continent broken down into about twenty different nations, most of which were not associated with one another (in my current campaign the nations are all under a mutual defense alliance). The first thing I did was create a currency system for each nation. While there were some standards across the board, the number of coins each nation used varied. After that I created exchange rate tables. Then I decided to go further.

Grabbing all the available books at that time which included price lists for equipment I made out a list of every single purchasable item. I then used a base value for those items and created categories based on the quality of the item: poor, average, excellent, superior. This was followed by remarks on what resources each item used in its creation (e.g. an axe would be metal and wood). Since this was the late ‘80s I hand wrote all this out, filling up a three-ring binder. I wasn’t done yet, though.

Looking at my nations I came up with their basic trade goods, and their general availability based on other nations’ locations and the time of year. Of course there were also variables such as the chance for bandits or natural disasters.

So basically this is how it would work. A player would be shopping for fifty feet of rope. I would then check to see which nation they were currently located in. Then find out the quality of the rope they were looking for. Then compute the going rate of said rope due to trade status (affected by resources, trading partner distance, season, etc). And oh, finally let’s not forget the exchange rate if they were using foreign currency.

After about ten minutes consisting of lots of page flipping, dice rolls, and chart lookups I would have the price. And let me tell you something, the bastards better still be interested in purchasing whatever item they were looking at after all that trouble!

Now, if you’re thinking to yourself that was a hell of a lot of work just to figure out the cost of fifty feet of rope, well, yeah. Now imagine doing that for a standard laundry list of items that a party needs to replace in between adventures. A trip to the general store would take five real time hours to accomplish. But hey, it was the most detailed fantasy economy system I had ever done, or have ever encountered! That’s gotta count for something, right?

It didn’t take long for me to grow extremely sick of my own system. I tossed out the system; in fact, I tossed out the entire campaign world. It just didn’t end up clicking for me for a number of reasons, none of which are important to talk about now.

From that experience I decided that you know what, sometimes simple—while not entirely realistic—is best. Ever since then I’ve used a fairly basic system that I continue to this day. My coins are standard, although I place a different value on them than standard book prices. Instead of a silver piece being the starting point I use the gold piece, with everything adjusted in accordance. I do add some flavor to the currency by having specific names for the coins, along with minting periods, so depending on the age of the coin it may be more valuable than face value (which in turn makes even finding copper in an ancient catacomb worthwhile). Additionally, I use some basic resource rules as far as scarcity goes, but nothing as detailed as the old system.

There’s a little more to the current system, but you get the basic idea of what I’m doing. Instead of totally reworking the suggested economic system, I’m just enhancing it. The campaign gets flavor but it never becomes a burden.

If I talk to a dozen other gamers I’ll probably discover a dozen different other ways they do they economies. Heck, I haven’t even talked about how I do magical items and that’s one more factor that you need to consider.

Here’s the thing I find most interesting: considering how important fantasy economies are in RPGs why are in-depth studies on them lacking? While over the years there have been countless books on specific classes, races, magic items, and monsters, I can’t think of a single book detailing possible economic systems for your game. Oh sure, there’s a few pages in the various rulebooks, but nothing really detailed.

Why is this? How money functions in your campaign world is just as important as the ways of magic or the ecology of bugbears. True, fantasy economics 101 is nowhere nearly as sexy as kewl new ways to blast/gut/freeze/annihilate your foes, but really, how many books with variations on magic missile do we need?