all that glisters should probably be denominated waaaaay smaller
January 12, 2025 8:41 AM   Subscribe

In Coinage and the Tyranny of Fantasy ‘Gold’, historical blogger Bret Devereaux takes a dive into historical coinage and accounting to explain why, when you get down to it, Dungeons & Dragons and most other historical/fantasy RPG settings are out of their goddam minds if they think people were lugging gold coins around on a daily basis.
posted by cortex (69 comments total) 33 users marked this as a favorite
 
When I played AD&D back in the day we were too lazy to track encumbrance, so carrying around a fortune in gold pieces was Just Fine.

Obviously that's nonsense (who could tote around a sack of metal on the regular, and fight with it, and run with it?!) but we were already fighting devils with fireballs, so.... elaborate shrug why let reality intrude in our game?
posted by wenestvedt at 8:56 AM on January 12 [10 favorites]


this blows past "well actually" right on into "municipal reservoir actually" territory
posted by phooky at 8:59 AM on January 12 [27 favorites]


The blog is called A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry, so that is par for the course.
posted by agentofselection at 9:07 AM on January 12 [32 favorites]


The picture of a Skyrim gold coin in front of a bunch of Mediterranean silver coins made me really want a pile of drachmae, denarii, and whatnot to add to the giant pile of Mardi Gras doubloons that covers my desk. Sadly authentic ones seem to *start* at $100 and go up from there.
posted by egypturnash at 9:19 AM on January 12 [1 favorite]


Also this paragraph struck me:

> “Monetizing” the countryside (an awkward term which really means ‘currency-izing’ the countryside) is typically something states have to intentionally do. The reason a state might want to do this is simple: the big advantage coinage has is to make transactions with unfamiliar parties (people you can’t trust to pay you back later) easier and the state often does a lot of business with unfamiliar parties, especially if it operates at scale.

In the context of D&D, the player characters are often wandering adventures, who are pretty much by definition not terribly trustworthy. So it makes a lot of sense to abstract away the actual complexities of a barter/account system in favor of coinage. Nobody's going to want to put you on an account for their yearly exchange of grain and sheep.

----

I also find myself wondering if there's an excuse for "Gold Pieces" in the form of assuming the original intent was pieces of coins, in the same way a piratical "pieces of eight" refers to the practice of splitting a gold coin up into halves, quarters, and eighths to make it usable for smaller payments than One Entire Fucking Gold Coin. That's a detail that easily gets lost when you're an eight year old kid with the entire D&D rulebook to try and comprehend, and never gets corrected when you grow up and keep on fantasizing that your little hoard of transparent plastic "gem" dice in your Crown Royal bag are actual gems with real purchasing power.
posted by egypturnash at 9:34 AM on January 12 [9 favorites]


This is great; I have to put a pin in it for later because I love his particular pedantry. I hope that he’s read Making Money by Terry Pratchett.

“I read somewhere that the coin represents a promise to hand over a dollar’s worth of gold,’ said Moist helpfully.

Mr Bent steepled his hands in front of his face and turned his eyes upwards, as though praying.

‘In theory, yes,’ he said after a few moments. ‘I would prefer to say that it is a tacit understanding that we will honour our promise to exchange it for a dollar’s worth of gold provided we are not, in point of fact, asked to.”

posted by Countess Elena at 9:55 AM on January 12 [21 favorites]


Gold pieces (well all coins) in original Basic and AD&D are 10 to the pound. Of course someone has done the math and
What I came up with is a 22 karat gold coin that is 3 mm. thick and 3.268 cm. in diameter, that is about twice the thickness of a US. quarter and 7 mm. larger in diameter than a US quarter. [EDIT: Correction, 3.268 cm is about 9 mm. larger than a quarter. A US silver dollar is about 3.8 cm in diameter.]
posted by Mitheral at 9:56 AM on January 12 [2 favorites]


MetaFilter: A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry
posted by axiom at 10:08 AM on January 12 [8 favorites]


You can get gold coins from the US mint down to 1/10oz, which is roughly the size of a dime.

On a related note, I'm always annoyed that none of the $1 coins here ever caught on. I remember when the vending machines in college would take Sacagawea dollars in the early 00s. Alas. They were not common. Though I made a point of using them when I got them. And to this day I remain envious of Canadians and their loonies and toonies.

As a broke college student all I wanted was to pay for things using my not-real-gold-but-legal-tender gold coins. Toss a coin to your Witcher^H^H^H^H^HTaco Bell cashier. I wanted to buy hardware from Best Buy and finalize the transaction by throwing a leather pouch full of them to the cashier. Was that too much to ask?
posted by howbigisthistextfield at 10:17 AM on January 12 [20 favorites]


> I wanted to buy hardware from Best Buy and finalize the transaction by throwing a leather pouch full of them to the cashier. Was that too much to ask?

god yes, there is a farmer's market locally that lets you turn bank credit into a handful of wooden coins and going around with a pocket full of those things and exchanging them for goods is *delightful* and I really should do this more often.
posted by egypturnash at 10:22 AM on January 12 [23 favorites]


but we were already fighting devils with fireballs

I think people are too quick to find flaws in works of fiction when it would be just as easy to find in-universe explanations.

In a universe where people regularly fight devils with fireballs it's not that much of a stretch to think that gold is much more abundant, easy to extract (especially with magical assistance), and easy to make extremely thin and light.

No they don't ever explain this but there's a ton of stuff that must exist in the universe of whatever movie, game, or book you care to mention.
posted by VTX at 10:23 AM on January 12 [5 favorites]


I do wonder if the goldbugs are right and we're heading back to a hard money regime later this century. if not decade

While I wasn't looking gold shot up 50% (gold was flat 2011-21 but has caught a bid since then).

While Weimar and Zimbabwe were unique conditions that don't necessarily obtain today . . . something is sure rotten in the state of Denmark and the system simply cannot do fiscal and monetary probity, we last tried that with mild tax rises in 1990-93*.

Japan made this nifty 20g gold coin to celebrate the Showa emperor's 60th anniversary, they ran into some counterfeiting problems since the melt value was lower than the ¥100,000 face value at some points (currently it's $1700 melt value vs $666 face value), but'd it be fun to have a stack of those now.

* (Bush acceded to the addition of the 31% tax bracket in 1990 and that pissed off the wingnuts, and the Dems barely managed to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy in 1993 and boy howdy did people howl and squeal about that. The electorate repaid the Dems in 1994 with the Gingrich takeover, of course.)
posted by torokunai2 at 10:27 AM on January 12 [2 favorites]


5e is a bit better, but not much

Did he check the 2024 Player's Handbook? Maybe they fixed it there.
posted by Lemkin at 10:34 AM on January 12


Well, I'm not a big D&D person, but I'm pretty sure what the coin-encumbered would do is wrap them in a cloth and lead pouch, bury them on the site of a future nuclear plant, and then forget to come back for them.
posted by taz at 10:48 AM on January 12 [12 favorites]


On a related note, I'm always annoyed that none of the $1 coins here ever caught on. I remember when the vending machines in college would take Sacagawea dollars in the early 00s. Alas. They were not common. Though I made a point of using them when I got them. And to this day I remain envious of Canadians and their loonies and toonies.

It's been argued that the reason Japan's coin-op/vending industry survived to a greater extent than the US is due to the existence of the 100 yen piece, which allowed operators to increase prices without requiring overly restrictive amounts of coin on the user's part or expensive and less reliable bill acceptors on the operator's part.

god yes, there is a farmer's market locally that lets you turn bank credit into a handful of wooden coins and going around with a pocket full of those things and exchanging them for goods is *delightful* and I really should do this more often.

More importantly, these systems are how farmers' markets collectively handle EBT transactions, allowing people to convert their benefits into tokens to buy food from the vendors - which is important in a lot of ways!
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:55 AM on January 12 [3 favorites]


This is hitting my nerddom both when it comes to thinking about fantasy settings and when it comes to RPGs. I may be making multiple comments here.

As much as I love learning real history with a geek-y tie in from Devereux, I feel learning about coinage practices from history gives us different fantasy lessons than, say, army logistics or siege tactics. These are physical things and usually the fiction establishes they work a lot like in our world.

But surely the question of how frequently gold coins are minted depends a lot on the abundance of gold! If you read that people in Lankhmar pay a gold coin for a night at an inn, seems to me the response would be to wonder what that tells us about the abundance of accessible, minted gold metal on Nehwon, not to assume Fritz Leiber is lying to us about prices! Fritz Leiber frequently cites scholars, so we know he's done his research.

And just because I love it, here is the currency chart in the Swords of the Serpentine RPG. It is a partial list of coins in circulation. In game terms it exists solely to prevent players and GMs from tracking coins:

3 bits = 1 iron tripenny
3 tripennies = 1 iron penny
13 pennies = 1 copper halfeel (one half-eel can keep you from starving between adventures)
2 halfeels = 1 copper eel
13 eels = 1 silver fish
3.5 fish = 1 silver cygnet
7 cygnets = 1 silver bridge (a silver bridge is enough to live comfortable lifestyle between adventures)
8 bridges = 1 gold halfswan
2 halfswans = 1 gold swan
9 swans = 1 quill
4 quills = 1 bell (bells are each hand carved, not minted)
posted by mark k at 10:59 AM on January 12 [4 favorites]


I also came here to say that the worlds of Greyhawk or the Forgotten Realms or whatever are just richer in gold than Earth is, so basically gold isn't gold. Gold is, eh, copper.

Maybe their world is closer to their regional supernova so the whole world is just richer in heavy metals. Or maybe their world went through a longer and heavier meteoric bombardment after its crust, likewise leaving it richer in gold... and platinum group metals... and radioactives. Or maybe a wizard did it.

As one of the occasional bits about how D&D etc are very different from actual medieval societies, even apart from elves and dragons, a piece like this is of course very welcome.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 11:09 AM on January 12 [5 favorites]


The digestive systems of dragons are alchemical wonders. They eat cows and knights and princes and princesses and then poop out those little gold discs in hoard-sized piles for years and years. Finally a band of adventurers comes along and manages to slay one, then some monarch stamps their face on these pieces of gold poo and that's how you end up with these gold coin based economies.
posted by Pryde at 11:11 AM on January 12 [17 favorites]


I'm thinking back to Skyrim, and the fairly low level transmutation spell that turns iron into silver and silver into gold. Which would mean that theoretically silver and gold would have no monetary value in the world as every iron mine owner would hire a gaggle of low-level wizards to glut the market with 'precious' metals.
posted by Clever User Name at 11:17 AM on January 12 [1 favorite]


who could tote around a sack of metal on the regular, and fight with it, and run with it?!

Bag of Holding, boom done.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:28 AM on January 12 [4 favorites]


Color me shocked to hear that I may see details that are ahistorical as I glide over the landscape on my gryphon, chugging potions of healing to deal with the steady rain of damage from the goblins' flak cannons. Fortunately I have prepared featherfall in case my trusty mount succumbs.
posted by SaltySalticid at 11:44 AM on January 12 [8 favorites]


We had a fellow who paid us in golden dollars at the art store where I worked. He'd reach into the front of his pants and pull out a leathern pouch full of them to pay, which is really something to experience if you've worked with the public for any length of time.
posted by blnkfrnk at 11:48 AM on January 12 [9 favorites]


Yeah, the whole thing with gold throughout history is that it's been valued for three reasons:

* It's shiny and pretty to look at,
* It's rather malleable and ductile, which makes it easier to work it into pretty, shiny things, and
* It's rather rare to find.

And while these days gold is now an industrial metal, primarily used in the plating of electrical contacts to resist corrosion and in the use of making certain medications, that's been a relatively recent development. For the majority of history, gold is valuable because it's pretty and pretty rare.
Making gold "more common" wouldn't fix things, it would just turn it into a trash metal for most people because it's not useful in a lot of cases.

That said, I wonder what Devereaux would think of the glorious mess that is currency in Final Fantasy XIV:


When a game gives you an actual submenu just to keep track of the stuff...So, one thing to note is that the game series as a whole doesn't use the generic "gold piece" (though English translations would go back to that), but instead uses a specified common currency - the humble gil. In XIV specifically, the game lore notes that many nations would mint their own currencies, but with the rise of the Eorzean Alliance, the city-states decided that a common currency would best serve their trading needs, so they resurrected the currency of ancient Allag to serve as that common currency.

Yep, we have the Fantasy Euro. (And artwork shows that while denominations are standardized, designs aren't - so gil minted in each of the city-states has its own unique look.)

But that's only one of the 20-odd currencies that your average Warrior of Light will handle - they wind up dealing with:
* Tomestones, used for getting certain high level gear and items. (These, by the way, are ancient data storage devices - so we're basically using USB drives as currency.)
* Ventures, which are special coins for giving your retainers orders to go do things on your behalf.
* Grand Company scrip, which is a currency issued by the militaries of the city-states for furthering their goals, and used to buy items from their quartermasters.
* Tradesman's scrip, which is issued by the trades collectives for working in the trades of crafting and gathering, and used to buy trade goods from their stores.
* Hunt scrip, issued by the hunting collectives for culling dangerous beasts based on their bounties (and there are different types of these depending on the issuing organization.)
* Manderville Gold Pieces (MGP, oft referred to as "mandergil" by players), which are casino tokens issued by the Gold Saucer, redeemable for prizes there.
* Societal currency, issued by tribal societies for rendering aid and unique to each one.

This, by the way, are solely the currencies tracked in the Currency submenu. There are also various currencies that wind up as items, and we even have regional currencies that are pretty much just mentioned in lore (like the Turalese pel, which is never directly used by the player outside of a single quest chain, but is routinely brought up in the region.)


posted by NoxAeternum at 11:50 AM on January 12 [4 favorites]


> In a universe where people regularly fight devils with fireballs it's not that much of a stretch to think that gold is much more abundant, easy to extract (especially with magical assistance), and easy to make extremely thin and light.

The actual content of the post is much more interesting than simply the relative abundance of gold. That's not really the point. The point is premodern economies based on systems of mutual social bonds are more interesting than reducing everything to a modern monetary system.

> Did he check the 2024 Player's Handbook? Maybe they fixed it there.

http://dnd2024.wikidot.com/equipment:adventuring-gear

http://dnd5e.wikidot.com/adventuring-gear

1 day of rations is 5 silver in both. 2024 has the same prices for things because it's supposed to be backwards compatible with 2014 rules.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 11:55 AM on January 12 [4 favorites]


It's silly to think people would walk around with sacks of gold coins.

I wear my wealth in arm-rings that I can cut up into hack-silver or bestow upon whichever gesiths have been most valuable as warriors.
posted by kyrademon at 11:57 AM on January 12 [17 favorites]


First footnote is the thesis:

> Which, to be clear, is fine if what one wants to do is simply tell a modern story in which people, for some reason, have swords. But I think fantasy, as a genre, is often more interesting when it is used to explore different societies, rather than just putting a bunch of characters with fundamentally modern outlooks in shields, swords and wizard robes.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 11:58 AM on January 12 [2 favorites]


I was always amused by Terry Pratchett's The Color of Magic where Twoflower is using gold coins the way a D&D player would, as slightly more valuable pocket change. Contrasted with the citizens of Ankh-Morpork whose economy was more historically based, most of whom had never even seen a gold coin.
posted by indexy at 12:26 PM on January 12 [5 favorites]


wenestvedt The problem is that IRL a vast fortune in gold was a couple of kilos at the most. While in D&D and other similar fantasy games gold seems to be worth a dollar an ounce or so at the absolute most and often less than that. It's a wildly unrealistic approach to coinage even ignoring the part where most people didn't actually use coins in day to day life in the medieval period.

I had a campaign once where the players were up against Glen Enemy-of-Gold, an accountant and economist who realized the entire continental economy was entering hyperinflation due to adventurers bringing up all that damn gold from dungeons so to counteract it he was robbing all the treasuries he and his minions could in order to throw the gold they looted into a volcano for the good of the economy.

It wasn't exactly a serious campaign, but it was kind of fun.
posted by sotonohito at 12:29 PM on January 12 [17 favorites]


GCU Sweet and Full of Grace Once, for a session -1, I used some rules I found for collaborative worldbuilding and the players and I made the world together. One of them decided to include a region with lots of volcanic activity that had resulted in massive gold deposits so we wound up having powerful international guilds that issued currency, paper and ceramic, that could be traded at one of their guildhouses for a fixed quantity of goods or a given service. A Hostler's Guild Mark was good for a private room and a meal at any inn operated by a member of the guild, for example.

Gold was used for jewelry, because it's pretty, cutlery because it doesn't tarnish, stuff like that.
posted by sotonohito at 12:33 PM on January 12 [1 favorite]


I constantly annoy the crap out of my players in D&D/Pathfinder by whenever they're outside a major town having every. last. villager. be like "a gold coin? Heavens to Betsy, I ain't even sure how much that's worth. Hey, Mama, come look at this!". If you make the gold coin the size of a US dime, you get super close to 100 of them to a pound, so we went with that a long time ago instead of 10 to a pound.

We keep track of encumbrance, ammunition, food, water and equipment with a set of little boxes and miniature poker chips: it works quite well. Pathfinder's encumbrance system (all items have a set amount of "bulk", and you can have up to your STR score in total bulk) makes it much easier. And "drinking a potion is a full-round action" is a hill I will absolutely die upon.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 12:34 PM on January 12 [6 favorites]


One fun argument for D&D gold literalism is that, for Gygaxian fantasy to work, 'normal life' needs by default to go unimaginably well. If one in three adults can expect to meet their end in a goblin murder-raid (and yet population be stable), if a relatively small agricultural population can support cities like Waterdeep, if every village can support a smith and every town a maker of ornamental plate, then the soil has to be incredibly fecund, the seas wildly full of fish, the mines brimful of riches...

Which makes sense, because the Gods are real, largely benign, and have trained intercessors!
posted by wattle at 12:36 PM on January 12 [14 favorites]


I really love the turtle coin.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 12:48 PM on January 12 [6 favorites]


> the Gods are real, largely benign

And then there's Dark Sun...
posted by I-Write-Essays at 12:59 PM on January 12 [4 favorites]


And then there's Dark Sun...

You are likely to be eaten by a gru^H^H^H halfling.
posted by howbigisthistextfield at 1:08 PM on January 12 [7 favorites]


Not sure about this piece. In the dark ages an ounce of gold had roughly $1k to $2k in modern-day purchasing power, 10x-20x the purchasing power of the same weight of silver. Merchants might rely upon barter, for sure, but any kind of military expedition was going to be highly reliant upon precious metal. Ten heavily armed adventurers on a year-long horse-back quest would probably need $200k plus of modern purchasing power and a fair amount of gold would certainly make sense on a weight-to-purchasing basis.
posted by MattD at 1:14 PM on January 12


One mission in my burglar class involved puncturing some rich dudes bag of holding that The courier was going to deliver. I suspected he may have cast a resist normal weapons and missiles onto the bag so I used a plus three bolt about 275 yards.

Olidammara smiled and I rolled a 19.

interesting as I was working on a post on the gold double eagle but that can only go so far, 18 million far.

I've always wondered if you took a box of holding and put it inside of a dark box, cover with a permanent illusion, write up a picture of the location and place it in a extra dimensional safe and then cast and forget spelling yourself.

of course and always, diamonds are the best means of financial conveyance.
posted by clavdivs at 2:02 PM on January 12


any kind of military expedition was going to be highly reliant upon precious metal

Devereaux discusses this: an empire has an interest in a coin-based economy, because it has an army that expects to be paid in silver.

The Chinese paid its western garrisons and allies in silk— 900,000 bolts per year during the Tang, at a time when a merchant might carry just a few hundred.

And premodern armies normally got their food as they went not so much by buying as by stealing. One reason to try to keep the armies on the other guys' land.
posted by zompist at 3:10 PM on January 12 [4 favorites]


gygax's reasoning was literally 'it's fun to get giant bags of gold' so it's not surprising it doesn't hold up very well
posted by Sebmojo at 4:08 PM on January 12 [2 favorites]


that said (after a quick page through my 1e DMG, now pleasingly age-spotted like a grimoire) he both said the above and also said 'give your monsters real stingy treasure' and also also said 'a fourth level character with average performance will need 18,000 gold pieces to level up' so i suspect he wasn't that good a game designer
posted by Sebmojo at 4:18 PM on January 12 [2 favorites]


Well, not to dis the guy since he did basically invent the entire genre, but yeah there's a LOT that's wrong with 1e D&D. THAC0, + modifiers to armor turning into subtraction from Armor Class, frankly the whole AC and HP thing for all that it's all but universal in some video games these days is a terrible idea, the XP system was broken as all get out especially since each class required different amounts of XP to level up, the class system was also broken from the get go, wizards went from having 1d4 HP and being able to cast a single spell while otherwise being totally worthless in combat to being demigods capable of demolishing entire armies by themselves at level 10 while warriors advanced to level 10 and got.... 1d10 level 1 followers. Psionics in 1e was truly messed up.

Oh, and let's not forget the part where some classes are only available if you're incredibly lucky at rolling 3d6 and getting the exact numbers you need in the exact sequence you need. Want to be a Paladin? Well I hope you can roll 3d6 six times and get, in this exact order, a number >=12, any number, >=13, any number, >=9, >=17. If you can't then you can't be a paladin. Did you roll an 18 but roll it second? Too bad, you can't be a Paladin.

Per the D&D first edition rules as written you rolled 3d6 six times and recorded those as strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution, and charisma in exactly that order. No, you can't rearrange the numbers. Gygax said this was to encourage randomness and to get players to try new approaches rather than going in with one particular character in mind. In later supplemental materials Gygax did grudgingly admit that maybe there might be other, less worthy, ways of rolling up characters but the actual text of 1e did not mention any method other than 3d6 x 6 in exactly that order.

They didn't get rid of THAC0 until 3e....
posted by sotonohito at 4:50 PM on January 12 [2 favorites]


If you can swallow the dungeon ecology/economy as originally envisioned in D&D, getting worked up over gold pieces is… well, focusing tightly. The whole “murder hobo” thing doesn’t really make a lick of sense and doesn’t even exist in D&D’s literary DNA. Even Conan was more embedded in society than that (for short periods of time, sure, but still…).
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:00 PM on January 12 [3 favorites]


Even Conan was more embedded in society than that (for short periods of time, sure, but still…)

My mind immediately went to Conan O'Brien - and the sentence still fit, because yeah I remember the whole 'Tonight Show' thing, that was a shame. I don't think he went so far as to become a murder hobo though.
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:14 PM on January 12 [4 favorites]


> getting the exact numbers you need in the exact sequence you need.

I only started playing during AD&D 2E, but my understanding was that the stat generation rules were worded ambiguously, and "roll 6 times in order" was only one way of interpreting them, not the universal norm.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 5:39 PM on January 12


Something else that would affect the use of coinage in D&D-like worlds is that these are all cultures that reached their current level of technological advancement thousands or even tens of thousands of years ago and thought, "This is good, let's stop here."

They've have a little bit to standardize and circulate some coins.

Since wizards and spell scrolls have been common-ish for so long there should be a lot more enchanted mundane stuff around. Like a set of "flatware of constant cleanliness" and the like.

Can I get like, a hat that magically repels mosquitoes?
posted by VTX at 6:16 PM on January 12 [2 favorites]


Well now I feel silly, I shoulda checked. I was sure it was 3d6 in order, but apparently that's not the case. The 1st Edition DMG includes four different methods all of which are more flexible.

VTX Well, that's actually fairly in keeping with a lot of the D&D source material. Tolkien, for example, basically had society frozen in time or in a decline from a prior golden age since the rise of Numanor if not earlier. No one was inventing new things that's for sure.

As for the rest, I agree that's the way things would play out in reality. But like superhero comics/movies are supposed to be "today but with dudes who can shoot lasers out of their eyes", the classic fantasy RPG is supposed to be the popular misconception of Medieval Europe plus dudes who can cast fireball.

Magic exists sort of alongside the setting rather than being integrated into it. There's the setting over here, and over here are some wizards who basically do nothing but create monsters (for the evil ones) or sit around in towers twiddling their thumbs (for the good ones), or go out and blow shit up (for the adventuring ones). The idea of wizards actually doing something useful just never comes up because if they did it wouldn't be the dung ages plus fireballs anymore.

If you actually try to contemplate how magic would really fit into a society and how society would change with magic you wind up with a specialized sort of science fiction rather than the boring Tolkien derivative fantasy setting.

And note that Tolkien had a grand total of three named wizards in Middle Earth: Gandalf the Gray, Saruman the White, and Radagast the Brown and Radagast is mentioned only briefly in passing. Two nameless blue wizards are mentioned, and there's the "White Council" (sounds a bit Klanish if you ask me) but who sits on it is kind of unmentioned.

Point is that in your typical high fantasy setting there weren't many wizards, and typically not really in the party. Conan fought some necromancers from time to time, Fafhard and the Gray Mouser had wizardly advisors who did very little and occasionally ran into a fell wizard, Tolkien actually had one of the more active and involved wizards in classic fantasy and he wisely had Gandalf actually do very little.

Then you hit D&D where people want to play wizards and suddenly you have this idea of wizards being if not common at least not completely rare and suddenly we have the Reed Richards is Useless (DANGER: TV Tropes Link) problem popping up as it applies to magic.
posted by sotonohito at 6:35 PM on January 12 [2 favorites]


What makes Tolkien fantasy work is that magic is not common. Gandalf isn't just a wizard, he's a demigod or angel - in the context of middle earth the two are synonymous. Ordinary folk can't just learn magic, you have to be special. The magical species don't integrate into human society, and there's no real way to industrialize the magic that exists in the world. The only one who tries is Saruman, and stopping that is plot.

Low fantasy D&D settings tend to stay true to that, and it's the high fantasy settings where not enough thought went into it.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 6:54 PM on January 12 [4 favorites]


It was Leguin who thought through what ubiquitous magic would be like.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 6:55 PM on January 12


I thought Final Fantasy 16 also did a pretty good job of thinking through the consequences of ubiquitous magic. It is their technology, and when it goes away, people find themselves unable to do something as simple as lighting a fire.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 6:58 PM on January 12


There’s a really fine line between trying to do a “realistic” DnD campaign and just making everything incredibly unfun and depressing, but there’s a lot here that might help with that. Bumping everything down to silver, where gold is something that exists, but would be a) life-changing to acquire, and b) almost impossible to spend could be a hell of a lot of fun. I also like his “gifts as an alternative to payment” idea, where the party gets given weapons and armor by the lord as a reward, but it’s all tied into the idea that the gift comes with an expectation of further service.

That’s kind of the sweet spot for me, all the little areas where you could make things (even in a world where magic exists and gods actively intervene in mortal affairs) more realistic, and all of the new avenues for stories that come from that. The village asks the adventurers for help, and the goal is making the feast the village holds for the party a meaningful in-game experience. It’s the chance to do something where the players will remember that feast longer than any random assortment of results from a loot table.
posted by Ghidorah at 7:35 PM on January 12 [6 favorites]


Re: Wizards, you’re missing Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, which was a huuuge influence on Dungeons and Dragons, where wizards were dime a dozen, and spent hours painstakingly memorizing spells that would be erased from memory once spoken aloud.
posted by rodlymight at 7:44 PM on January 12 [4 favorites]


It shouldn't be that difficult to backfill reasons why gold is both more common than on our Earth and retains some sort of value as a rarity. For example: Gold mines are richer (you have to extract less rock for a given quantity of gold, so the labor cost is significantly lower) but the mines are all in dwarven territory. And those pesky damn dragons can sniff out where humans have large quantities of gold and tend to raid them or even make their nests in them, making it risky to form great merchant cities or for the nobility to gaudily adorn their property. Human civilization thus stays relatively dispersed across the fertile territories they occupy, civilization never really advancing the way it does where cosmopolitanism can flourish.

Human economies are awash with precious metals due to trading with the dwarves who like fresh fruit and grain (and, of course, the booze from them) as relief from their diet of mushrooms and underground-dwelling creatures. The dwarves, of course, have to deal with dragons as well but dragons (in this scenario) don't like being underground all that much so the dwarves are safe as long as the entrances to their underground cities are fortified...
posted by at by at 8:04 PM on January 12 [1 favorite]


Also, if you're interested in a series that does focus on medieval mercantilism and trade, let me recommend Spice and Wolf (either the original or the remake.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:56 AM on January 13


A history prof I had once described the Middle Ages as "millions of people living in shit" and that's not exactly the sort of fantasy I want to portray in my weekly game. Dystopian income inequality and classism are bad enough in the real world. In my games if there's a king or an aristocrat, they are just as much a monster as demon spawn.

Much of the inspiration for fantasy tropes lies more in the Renaissance than the Medieval period proper. Look for its roots in the exploration and "taming" of the New World, and the enormous influx of precious metals that accompanied same and deformed European economies. You could definitely write an interesting game that grapples with those historical realities, but I'm not sure that's what I want to play with my friends.
posted by rikschell at 5:17 AM on January 13 [1 favorite]


I guess where this guy misses the mark is that modern fantasy tends to transcend feudalism in the same way that it transcends sexism, racism, comphet, etc. Most players aren't looking for a Medieval Simulator, so while his insights are interesting in their own right, they aren't as useful for most D&D games as he seems to think.
posted by rikschell at 5:30 AM on January 13 [3 favorites]


I run into this in the campaigns I'm the DM for. One of the many, many rule changes in character creation for our games is that you cannot be a tiefling, which for those of you who don't play the game is a person who has demons or devils in their ancestry. There are two reasons for this: 1) tieflings are overpowered, especially if you make them hexblade warlocks, which is why hexblade and multiclassing into or out of warlock is also banned, and 2) I don't want to have to play Fantasy Jim Crow, because there's no way any remotely sane peasant or townsfolk is going to do anything to someone with obvious marks of fiendishness other than lynch them or run them out of town. They're a literal devil! My regular players all get this, but once or twice a year someone doesn't read the rules and there's a real conflict about it.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 7:11 AM on January 13 [2 favorites]




> in the same way a piratical "pieces of eight" refers to the practice of splitting a gold coin up into halves, quarters, and eighths to make it usable for smaller payments than One Entire Fucking Gold Coin.

You're kind of making TFA's point for it, with that: A "Piece of Eight" was a silver coin, not gold. They cut up silver coins to make useably small amounts of money. Now multiply that by like 25 for gold.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 7:15 AM on January 13 [1 favorite]


Devereaux does an awesome job in other sections of his blog debunking the myths about Sparta being all about bravery and honor when it was in fact a brutally violent and fearful society that contributed little if anything we would now consider historically significant much less admirable. (Which may in fact be more applicable to modern fans of Sparta than I originally intended.)
posted by RandlePatrickMcMurphy at 10:26 AM on January 13 [3 favorites]


Hard to run with the weight of gold

Gold is really , really heavy.

When you go to pick up a brick of gold, you know it's going to be heavy. You expect it to be heavy
You know in your head that it is but you're still shocked at how heavy it is.
Almost like it was glued to the table
course that brick would buy a Toronto house, but still

To compare ;

Density of iron or steel is 7.85 gm/cm3
density of silver 10.5
density of lead 11.3
Gold density 19.3

It's double that of silver or lead and almost 3 times that of iron.

All those Hollywood gold heist movies are just pure bullshit. That stuff is seriously heavy
Seriously difficult to move
posted by yyz at 1:41 PM on January 13 [1 favorite]


To the larger point that Devereaux makes, that the best way for a lord to pay adventurers for killing a dragon or clearing out a dungeon or whatever would be to make them vassals. They'd get steady support and the lord would turn otherwise potentially dangerous lunatics into assets. Of course, this would get in the way of the typical "wandering adventurer" frame, so it's a problem for the story and system.

There are a few games that have worked on incorporating fantasy characters into societies, notably Heroquest and the other games set in Glorantha and, perhaps, Blades in the Dark (although it's an undersociety). Maybe the Dark Elf society in the Spire games count as well (if you want to play malcontented revolutionaries under the jackbooted rule of the High Elves) -- where what the player characters do has more to do with the interests and aspirations of their society than with specific individual aspirations (although those are important, too).

Im always a little amused by Exalted, an over-the-top fantasy world in the World of Darkness line, where there's a throw away line than almost all the mages (and it's tough to become a mage unless you have "exalted," which only a few hundred people can) spend most of their time doing "elemental charms": making boots that repel water or stay warm in the cold or tools that cut stone more easily, and that sort of thing. Not as flashy as a Fireball, but more useful to society.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:59 PM on January 13 [3 favorites]


> I guess where this guy misses the mark is that modern fantasy tends to transcend feudalism in the same way that it transcends sexism, racism, comphet, etc. Most players aren't looking for a Medieval Simulator, so while his insights are interesting in their own right, they aren't as useful for most D&D games as he seems to think.

I don't think Devereaux, whose professional specialty is Roman military history, is trying to hit the mark you think he is. ACOUP uses things like gaming and fantasy as launching points for discourses on history. His lengthy series on how the LOTR books and movies treat warfare is a lesson not only on what Tolkien got right and Jackson got wrong, but how pre-industrial warfare actually worked. His insights are meant to be interesting in their own right, not guides to playing the associated games.
posted by lhauser at 5:37 PM on January 13 [10 favorites]


They're a literal devil! My regular players all get this, but once or twice a year someone doesn't read the rules and there's a real conflict about it.

Well, that's no surprise, as your rules are frankly kind of shit - the sort of shit that is why it took until the 2020s for people to realize that defining the dark skinned elves as innately evil was rather fucked up.

Rule 0 exists for a reason. If you're running a world where the response to tieflings is pitchforks and torches based on them having "demonic taint", that's on you, buddy, and I'm glad that people are calling you out on it.

(I'll also note that that this is is yet more evidence that alignment is one of Gygax's quarter-baked ideas that deserves to be tossed into the scrapbin of history (and to their credit, WotC does seem to be doing exactly that.))
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:46 PM on January 13 [1 favorite]


I loved how in Metaphor: ReFantazio, the 'tieflings' are actually the dominant race in society, which was important for the themes it was trying to explore. Rule 0 indeed. A related concept is called the Nuremburg Defense of Gaming.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 5:52 PM on January 13


His insights are meant to be interesting in their own right, not guides to playing the associated games.

Moreover, Devereaux makes the point that the media we consume shapes how we think about things in a lot of his work (which is why he does historical criticism and analysis of such.) He's arguing that how D&D handles money distorts how we see these practices in history, and that the actual history is a lot more interesting and provides better storytelling hooks.
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:55 PM on January 13 [2 favorites]


Briefly put, the critique of the Nuremburg Defense of Gaming goes like this:

The internal consistency of your world is not an excuse for including disruptive content at your table, because your world/character isn't real, and you made the choice to shape it the way it is. The responsibility for the consequences of those choices still lies with you; you could have made different choices.

It's called the Nuremburg Defense because players/DMs will often try to defend their choices by saying "That's just what the character would do." which harkens back to the "Just following orders" of the Nuremburg trials.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 6:03 PM on January 13 [2 favorites]


the actual history is a lot more interesting and provides better storytelling hooks.

It is not at all clear whether they are better gaming hooks, though. I honestly think this claim is thinking as a writer, maybe a cRPG player, but less a tabletop GM, and definitely not as a ttRPG designer.

It's not impossible to do. The best I know of--mostly from reputation, I haven't played a full campaign--is Pendragon. It really tries to put the PCs in the armored boots of a knight, with oaths and religious strictures interacting with your drives and reputation to have big impact on what you can do. There's a whole list of types of service and what happens as you climb the ranks. I love the game when I've tried it, but a lot of players chafe at the constraints. They don't want their fantasy time to be spent being told what to do by liege lord or the church.

So the half the game design challenge is that you and I and Devereux might think it's a great story, but are all 5 players at the table going to agree that it's the right story for their character? The ranger patrolling the woods doesn't necessarily dream of a fiefdom; the appeal of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser was that they were swords without master. (One of the secrets of D&D is that the genre is not medieval fantasy, it's the Western. Adventurers are prospectors on the frontier, with barely a higher power to answer to, just with swords instead of six guns.)

So for gaming reasons the rewards end up as money. Much like the real world, money lets the players convert the rewards to what they want. Most games with social advancement end up giving PCs money, then let them spend it on status if they want to (e.g., the default Blades in the Dark gameplay loop is to do a heist for coin, then convert coin to gang power & prestige.) But the guy playing the rogue can just sink it into a magic sword and skip doing the retainer spreadsheet.
posted by mark k at 12:09 AM on January 14 [3 favorites]


(One of the secrets of D&D is that the genre is not medieval fantasy, it's the Western. Adventurers are prospectors on the frontier, with barely a higher power to answer to, just with swords instead of six guns.)

After watching a good deal of Matt Coville's videos, I'd argue that D&D was built around pulp fantasy initially (hence why authors like Jack Vance were so influential on the development of the game), and the switch to high/heroic fantasy starting with 3e has...not always gone swimmingly, because the game was designed around the pulp fantasy conceit.

But reflecting on Coville, I'm reminded that he's said that one of his favorite D&D settings is...Birthright, which is built around courtly intrigue and politics of varying means. I'll also point out that the success of Vampire: The Masquerade - a game heavily built on social maneuvering and politics - illustrates that there is an audience for that sort of setting. Also, the fact that there is such an outcry over the whole "murderhobo" idea illustrates that people recognize that the conceit of the frontier myth (which is at the heart of both the Western and pulp fantasy) doesn't actually work, and that even in our fantasy worlds, you still live in a society. Your ranger might not want a fiefdom, but they would also prefer not be hunted down as an outlaw, either. And your rogue is going to have to deal with the local underworld one way or the other.

(Also, from what I know about Pendragon, I imagine that chafing at the strictures is the point of the game - it's built around chivalric fantasy and courtly romance, so the whole "getting pulled in five directions" aspect of such is part of the conceit.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:44 AM on January 14 [4 favorites]


people recognize that the conceit of the frontier myth (which is at the heart of both the Western and pulp fantasy) doesn't actually work

Personally, I think the fantasy-frontier works really well in adventure. It's certainly still hugely popular.

But the fantasy isn't to be outside society, it's to be outside hierarchy. The magnificent seven get to defend a village precisely because there is no one to tell them that the village is a bunch of poor peasants and talented gunmen should be protecting the bank, the gold mine, and the stagecoach with the payroll.

from what I know about Pendragon, I imagine that chafing at the strictures is the point of the game

Characters can be conflicted, struggle with dilemmas, etc. Players aren't supposed to be chafing against the system, they're supposed to be having fun.
posted by mark k at 8:55 PM on January 16 [1 favorite]


Characters can be conflicted, struggle with dilemmas, etc. Players aren't supposed to be chafing against the system, they're supposed to be having fun.

The thing, though, is that this often means that the game isn't for them. Again, the whole point of Pendragon is chivralric fantasy - it's not just about knights and swords, but the systems of oaths and bonds at the heart of chivalry, and how your character navigates them. The game's morality system makes that clear, with chivralric virtues in tension with one another, and you're expected to exemplify all of them. It's a game that knows its themes, and you need to go into it acknowledging that - and that goes for any game.

My bigger point is that I don't think our societal infatuation with the frontier myth is particularly healthy, as it too often speaks to a disavowal of social concerns. The fact that "murderhobo" is a term in wide use in the TTRPG sphere for a sort of antisocial playstyle built around unfettered players inflicting their will violently I think speaks to that. It's also both ahistoric and goes against common sense - people are skittish around heavily armed people with no local reputation, and for good reason!
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:20 PM on January 17 [1 favorite]


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