In discussing Lamentations of the Flame Princess, I touched on the subject of money, stating that LotFP has a much more sensible approach to gold and silver and prices for trading goods than my DnD favourite, B/X.

This issue — borderline idiotic prices and insane amounts of gold and silver flooding dungeons — plagues all editions of Dungeons & Dragons to varying amounts.

See, for example, these two articles from 2015 debating the topic and shedding some light on how it happened:

https://dmdavid.com/tag/why-dd-characters-get-tons-of-gold-and-nowhere-to-spend-it/

https://dmdavid.com/tag/dungeons-dragons-stopped-giving-xp-for-gold-but-the-insane-economy-remains/

A special sword worth hundreds of ships or thousands of riders is even more insane than my own example of a simple longbow; comparatively easy to construct with some time and access to wood; that cannot be paid with a months wages, or, counting food, clothing, and lodging, cannot ever be paid. In reality, some societies required their populace to own a bow and train with it. Were those societies Dungeons & Dragons societies, with 50 longbows in every village they would be filthy rich!

To escape the ever-increasing cycle of gathering inconceivable amounts of money and losing it through various crazy schemes of the Game Master, game designers found other ways to reward players, for example through Milestone XP (drawback: railroading-adjacent plots), XP for overcoming foes (drawback: murderhoboism), or reward for roleplaying (drawback: unfair punishment for shy players & subjective judgement by taste).

Not to forget: A real-world Spanish gold dubloon can be bought and sold for something between 2.500 and 3.500 US-Dollars. So even assuming smaller and less pure gold coins, one nice hand-crafted yew-longbow worth 40 gold pieces of only 1.500 USD worth still costs 60.000 dollars.

So, in conclusion: I find the economy of Lamentations of the Flame Princess rather okay, and I point to radically different XP-schemes, as in GURPS and Maze Rats (1 to 3 XP per session depending on active participation), Wushu (No advancement at all, in-game rewards through contacts and usable items instead) and Best Left Buried (Experience value of treasure calculated through descriptive words).

Uncoupling XP from gold allows for more sensible pricing, but the issue remains a challenge.

Picture source: ebay.co.uk/itm/PERU-1708-8-ESCUDOS-1715-FLEET-22kt-SOLID-GOLD-DOUBLOON-COB-TREASURE-COIN-/302580780682

Addendum:

The 1e DMG states on p 90

On the one hand, this explains the insanity of these unpayable prices and shows that at least a couple years after starting the series, GG himself was plainly aware of the nonsense economy of the game.

On the other hand, it does not help one bit. “Adjust as you see fit” doesn’t give a hopeful GM a lot to work with. It is more like a sendoff: “Go and research your own prices somewhere on the internet that will be launched to the public in a dozen or so years.”

Luckily, these dozen or so years have since passed several times, and we carry the internet in our pockets. Therefore we all can either Google ourselves a solid price range for equipment, play with ACKs and LotFP economies, or simply acquiesce the disconnect between wages and prices.