Min/Max Boards

Another way to avoid coin trimming. Arcane Mark the coins. This means for an active kingdom, minted currency is backed...by the mage corps. Doctoring them is a promise to get your ass rearranged by some wizards.

I had a similar thought as well, if the local government had a group of mages and a special dye/press/etc to make that regions coins (or notes), then the coins could have an enchantment of some kind where they could glow faintly when a command word (known by most people) was spoken or placed near a special 'checking' coin (which could be brought readily). The enchantment would be created by the press in such a way that it would be extremely difficult for a mage to recreate the enchantment on counterfeit currency without the press.

Amusingly, D&D already has something like that in the Epic Level Handbook. The epic economy uses money minted by the temple of the god of wealth, and every bill is backed with the promise of spellcasting. Which means, if you look at it in a certain way, that epic level characters are using spell scrolls as money.

That's an interesting idea, how about if each currency could be backed by the promise of high level spell components (for the sake of simplicity lets use the 4e Astral Diamond, which would be a universal currency on the planes).

OK, so, if you remove all the 'creation' spells which result in matter being permanently brought into the universe from nothing* or ruin the game economy, and make spells like create water/food transmutation spells require an equal if not greater amount of materials to cast and are high level spells so most wizards wouldn't bother casting them unless they were desperate (transmuting lead to gold would require vast amounts of effort for little gain and bring the wrath of the gods on you). Then you can start to create a somewhat respectable economic system, although this still leaves spells like fabricate a potential breaker (maybe place tighter restrictions on these spells?).

*Although, when you cast a spell like that what you are effectively doing is converting arcane energy into matter via something similar to E=MC^2, but this would ultimately result in the the universe running out of arcane energy if the result was permanent. This is equally bad, as wizards would ultimately turn to other energy sources for their spells (such as corruption magic in the Dark Sun setting).

People will go to healers to heal them, and it will cost more money than most people make in a year, due to labor/demand/cost.  Remember than healing spells usually just heal damage, not disease, so they won't help with sickness most of the time.  This should keep the peasants down, and the medieval flavor of the setting.

Unless of course the healer in question receives his abilities from a divine source (which most would), in which case if he decided to charge huge prices for a service such as healing the sick then he would likely have is powers cut off (not really lawful good if you charge more than an entire years income for casting Remove Disease once, since you are clearly serving yourself without regards to others). That's not to say however that he wouldn't turn away those who he deemed not needing to be cured and would perform the service for free (would most likely take a donation for his church). For higher level spells like Resurrection he would obviously charge very high prices for as the people who would be needing a spell like that would be wealthy and taking vast amounts of money from them would be seen as just provided it was used further the work of his deity.

Wow, re-reading this the following morning makes me feel like a bit of an idiot (serves me right for rushing that out in one night). I realize that the DMG2 has rules for businesses but they are far from in depth and the cost of setting up a business is so high that no one under level 10 could do it (which raises the question of how low level NPCs do it).

Yes, supply/demand effects everything, if an item is useful people will demand it, but if that same item is cheap and easy to make then a lot of people will try and make it. While a weapon is useful to an adventurer, if the number of smiths (say 1 to every 50 people) couldn't meet the demand and had to jack up their prices to the SRD type prices then lots more people would want to become smiths. What I will likely do is some kind of weighting factor, where each group of item (swords, potions, etc) would be subject to pseudo supply and demand using a similar system to the currency, with story events like war modifying the score of certain types of items.

And while the existence of spells like wish and fabricate would break the game economy, this is mostly intended for E6/T5, where spells as powerful as wish don't even remotely exist (except by gods) and fabricate would take a group of the most experienced wizards an entire day to cast.

I am ignoring the fact that a lot of small towns would have been under the feudal system, lets just assume for now that everyone is under a slightly more modern system (yes, I know).

I was considering something similar to what Tarkisflux suggested, smiths would have made mostly generic items like short swords and spears, and the because of this the price of those items would have been far less then what the SRD says, but weapons like great swords would have been far less common and more expensive. Also, the quality of the common swords and spears would have been far from ideal. What I will do is make the price and quality of a few common weapons very low, armies wouldn't have been too concerned with the quality of the weapon, only that they could buy X of them in Y time, and the characteristics would represent that (might give it something like a -1 to hit). If adventurers want a better sword then they can pay extra for various degrees of quality (ie, normal, masterwork, etc).

Also, with E6/T5 obviously armor is far more important, and the AC of armor like chain mail and plate would be worth the relatively huge price as access to magical weapons and armor, as well as the max BAB of +6 means that your plate is far more effective then what it is in standard 3.5e.

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Currency is at the heart of most adventurers’ interests; it’s his means and ends. However, the currency presented in the PHB/DMG is greatly simplified as the publishers assumed that most people want to do the following:
1 – Kill things.
2 – Take their stuff and money.
3 – Sell stuff for more money and use that money to get better stuff.
4 – Repeat until the character has enough money to retire.
Why would a player want to deal with different currencies when travelling from one country to the next? For most players, all they want to do is deduct a number of gold pieces from their total and receive an item.

But what if someone didn’t want to use that system? What if they wanted to have to deal with different currencies and their respective values? What if they didn’t want to go adventuring and instead make a living forging or trading currency?
Well this is for those players.

Today, a coin in use as an official currency has its value is determined by the value and face stamped on it, in D&D it’s determined by the value of the metal it’s made from. This leads to several problems, which I stated above. These problems can be ignored by players not interested in this stuff, but for those who like realism it’s a letdown.

One solution for this is to introduce currency specific to a region or state, no longer determined by the value of the metal but instead the value and face stamped on it. Each region or state could either have their own currency, or, for those who regularly trade, share a currency (similar to the EU the Euro). The relative worth of each currency could either be determined by rolling a dice to determine if its value should rise or fall and/or be story driven.

A method for doing this is to have at the start of the campaign roll 2d100 to determine the starting score for each currency, then, at an in game interval decided by the DM, roll 1d6 to see if and how it changes in score.
1d6 result:
1 - Reduce score by 2
2 - Reduce score by 1
3 - Unchanged
4 - Unchanged
5 - Increase score by 1
6 - Increase score by 2

A score of 100 means that when buying goods or services with that currency (if the recipient accepts it) then it is purchased at a 1:1 rate with the price in standard coins. For each point above 100 the price in that currency decreases by 1%, for each point below 100 the price increases. No score can be 0 or 200.

Example: The warrior Fleycher wants to buy a new sword, he has both Dynostian (with a score of 150) and Anoghalian (with a score of 50) currency, the smith accepts both currencies. He decides to pay with the Dynostian coins as they are worth more and recently the value for them has been decreasing, while the Anoghalian coins have been slowly increasing in value after their war with Knothal has ended.  He pays 5 Dynostian kerbs (equivalent of 10 standard coins) and receives his new sword.

For the sake of simplicity, the system of each subsequent coin being worth 10 of the coins below it will be kept, although DMs could feel free to do otherwise. Currency exchange will likley be a big part of the world economy, and traders will most likely only accept their own or neighboring states currency.

The material from which most coins would be made would is copper, with high value coins being made from silver. Gold, if its found by the adventurers will most likley be found as ingots for jewelers, occasional it will be in the form of coins, but almost no traders would accept them as they have probably never even seen one. As most coins will be made of the same material, forgery could be used to melt down low value coins and re-cast them as higher value ones, turning a profit. This would also make forgery a worthwhile skill for most characters so they can spot fake currency when receiving it.

For the rest of this homebrew the currency used will be SC, or standard coins, which the values of items will be in, and campaign specific currencies will be compared to.

For me, the problems with the usual economy and monetary system of 3.5e are:

Adventurers earn far more then what they should compared to a non-adventurer, enough that they could leave their village/town/city and return a year later with enough wealth to retire. Although adventurers live a dangerous life, if they can potentially earn that much in a single year then why don’t far more people do it? Why would a soldier, with comparative skills to an adventurer stay in the army when he could be striking it rich in a far away land?

Most items are either vastly overpriced or vastly under priced, in D&D even a short sword is a huge investment for a commoner, while in the Middle Ages a similar sword could be had for roughly half a week’s wages.
In medieval England the lowest paid were unskilled laborers (same as today), who earned around 40 Shillings a year, a common sword (not good quality, but a sword none the less) cost around 6 Pence (half a shilling). In 3.5e, a short sword costs 10gp, the income of a commoner (from the PHB and DMG) is 3gp a month (I will ignore the income he would gain by skilling Profession [X] for the time being). Of course, one could argue that the commoners wage is far below what it should be, but looking at the cost of food and comparing it with the real world medieval prices he is actually earning roughly what he should be.

The money used are coins or platinum, gold, silver, and copper. These are universal coins and can be spent anywhere in the campaign world. The only way for this to work is for the value of the coins value to be standardised is if they have a given weight (ie, the value of the coin is determined by the value of the metal it’s made from).

Hi

The PnP game I play mostly is 3.5 (particularly like E6) and joined to write up a few houserules to hopefully fix a few of the gripes I have with the game.

Also play a lot of computer games such as Dota and CS, other hobbies include fabrication (making stuff out of metal) and cars.

Home country is New Zealand.