[RPG] Simpler ways to keep track of the player’s wealth/purchasing power

system-agnostictreasurewealth

I'm about to run my first game of D&D as Dungeon Master. I've played a few sessions as a character, and one of the things that always annoyed me was keeping track of how much money we had. The most obvious problem was that the DM wanted us to keep track of gold, silver, and copper pieces. If we just kept track of gold and didn't worry about the smaller amounts, it would've made things a bit simpler.

But I'm looking to take it a step further. Somewhere I heard of system that just used a sort of wealth indicator that worked on a scale something like this:

0 broke
1 a meal
2 a few meals
3 a simple item ( dagger, 40ft of rope )
4 an uncommon or better quality item ( studded leather armor, well made sword or crossbow
5 a fairly rare or high quality item ( potion of invisibility, excellent plate armor) 
6 a rare and powerful item ( sword that deals fire damage as a bonus )
7 a rare and very powerful magical item ( staff that can create a radius 3 shield that is unbreakable for 5 minutes )

Every time you guys an item that's equal to your current wealth, your wealth level goes down 1 unit. If you buy 5 items at a value 1 below your current wealth, your wealth level goes down 1. If you buy >20 of something 2 below your current wealth, your wealth goes down 1, but is otherwise unaffected.

This does a few things:

  • wealth is easy to keep track of
  • you don't have to try to make up prices, you just give the wealth level of the item
  • You know when you have enough to 'comfortably' afford something

I plan on adding a small fudge factor if necessary, like maybe some items have a cost of 4.5 instead of just 4. The point of this scale is to save time, so I probably won't get too worried about stuff like this though.

Has anyone used a system like this? What are the major downsides to using a system like this? Does have a name? Any helpful links would be much appreciated. 😀

Best Answer

The issue with most wealth value systems, such as above, is the order you buy things becomes important. For example, if you have a wealth of 5 on that scale, generally your wealth would go down if you purchase anything at that value, to represent spending a significant income. This means if you buy lower cost things later, your wealth would be lower and you may not be able to buy them.

However, if you instead go in increasing order of value (with some optimizations based on the system), you suddenly get all the small stuff for free.

In the realm of neat economy systems that are also simple, there is Legend. Which takes away the idea of wealth, puts items as discrete level benefits, and gives you the option to trade it away elegantly.