this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2026
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[–] Zos_Kia@jlai.lu 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I think where it breaks down is that even 1 coin a day is already insanely high for medieval times. A modest person would earn maybe 10 coins a year, if they are somewhat qualified or really good at what they do. And that's only for people living in cities.

For most people, living in the countryside, they would see very little currency. You'd mostly own what you could build, grow, raise or barter, and you'd rarely have enough surplus that you could sell for coin. To get 1 gold coin you'd have to sell 2 or 3 sheep but how often would a modest person have animals they don't absolutely need to keep ? Not something that's going to happen every year.

Even the innkeeper would not see 365 gold coins a year, that kind of revenue would be way upper class.

[–] starman2112@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

It's basically impossible to equate D&D to real history because you can't account for the differences in supply and demand (or even the prevalence of different natural materials) between medieval Europe and 15th century DR Faerûn, let alone account for the fact that wizards can literally make gold. The best we have to go off of is the official rules describing the different lifestyle tiers and how much they cost on average.

The average bar costs, what, $25,000–50,000 a month to run? Based on a lifestyle expense equivalent of $50–100 per gp, they probably see somewhere between 10 and 30 gp per day. And that's just gold piece equivalent, most of it is probably in copper or silver pieces