In Defense of Grain Into Gold

It was a dozen years ago that we published Grain Into Gold, and it has been heavily discussed ever since.  Some of the criticism is valid, but certainly not all of it.  While we still believe the system works, and we use it in both the play-testing campaigns and our products, we didn’t always explain every little thing and why we did it that way.  So let’s hit a couple of points.

We had a critic argue both that we didn’t value silver in a historic fashion and that we shouldn’t disbelieve the gold: silver: copper 1:10:100 ratios.  OK, you don’t get to have it both ways!  We’ve gone through the whole thing in The Gold-Silver-Copper Conundrum so you can look there, but historically, this easy 1-10-100 ratio doesn’t make any sense.  Not only is it wrong, but the value of each of these commodities changes all the time.  BUT!!  This is a game and not a master’s thesis on commodity economics.  The only way to game master a world and not make it incredibly difficult (and probably boring) is to take some economic short cuts.  The easiest one is that gold is ten times more valuable than silver which is ten times more valuable than copper, and this stay the same.

Now on Earth, estimates are that 25 times as much silver has been mined than gold.  So if they are both generally the same difficulty to mine and smelt / refine, then gold based on its rarity should be worth 25 times what silver is, not x10.  So if we are going to say 1:10:100, then we have to say that these fantasy worlds have a different ratio of metal rarities than Earth.  So if the game World of Fletnern has a different ratio than Earth does, then at the same time criticism of wheat or bread costing too many grams of silver doesn’t work.  Roman comparisons don’t work.

But, that doesn’t mean that we can just pretend that everything works as it does because we say it does.  And that is the whole goal of Grain Into Gold!  We wanted to produce a fantasy economy that worked together.  Now if the number of grams of silver required to buy a loaf of bread doesn’t equal Greek or Roman times, that’s OK, as long as the grams of silver required to buy a loaf of bread works in the system, as compared to apples, beer, and armor and swords.  But let’s be a bit careful here too.  Armor and swords are based on steel, so the cost of iron/steel to silver has to be established, though it doesn’t have to match Earth.

One of the most thorough critical reviews we received brought up the idea of coal being used for heating.  The critic said that such a use of coal indoors would expose these people to incredibly dangerous gases and other risks.  He’s right.  Burning coal indoors does expose one’s family to the risks of various dangerous, even poisonous, gases.  We accept that to be true and considered it when we wrote it.  Far too often, these types of things happened - people doing dangerously bad things just to stay warm.  As we continue to expand Lifestyles of the Magical and the Mundane in our Small Bites editions, there are some folks who use coal, while others use coke.  We’re hoping to have rules for surviving your lifestyle soon, and coal will absolutely shorten your life, while coke and charcoal should be safer.  Not safe, but safer.

Another factor in the Earth based comparisons is that many of the Earth based governments were practicing all sorts of communism and welfare.  If you want to know what the value of wheat or bread is in a society, you have to compare apples to apples.  You cannot compare a fully free market system to the welfare that went on in Rome.  If the government is giving bread and flour away, then the price that people are paying in the markets isn’t real.  It isn’t being determined by the populace, but only those people who are buying their bread.  Now, I could argue that this would both raise and lower the costs, based on your opinions of the black market and how it works or possibly abuses the economy.  Let’s just agree that welfare, communism and/or a “palace economy” change the way commodities get priced.

We’ve also freely admitted, that if you really want to figure out a balanced economy, then a copper coin doesn’t work, at least not with the balance we’ve shown.  A pound of apples from an apple farmer would cost about 0.8 copper coins.  So what does one apple cost if it weighs half a pound or less?  How do you split the copper coin into smaller pieces?  While this seems important when you are trying to figure out how a poor person lives, it just doesn’t become that important in the life of an adventurer.  Honestly, knowing this, we still went ahead with the book as it is.  Knowing that this was an issue, we thought focusing on the lives of FRPG adventurers was what was important.  So admitting the priority and the focus, hopefully you give us a bit of leeway.

Some folks have questioned various labor requirements and labor costs that go into certain crafts.  So are we right or are they?  Well, both (probably).  It is impossible to compare to “the Middle Ages”.  First off, assuming you are comparing your fantasy world to a time on Earth, which time(s) and which regions?  The Arabian regions were advancing mathematics and other sciences during the Dark Ages.  The Chinese had gunpowder far earlier.  The American Indians were basically stone aged during a period of European firearms.  What period is the right one for fantasy?

Where technology is is exactly the point of labor costs.  The labor costs of weaving depend on whether or not they have the flying shuttle.  Many other manufacturing processes depend on whether you’re using animal power, water power, or wind power.  Where is the technology?  Someone might criticize what we went with, because we gave some easily missed detail about the use (or un-use) of a water mill.  If they are using a different style of tech, the labor costs will come out completely differently.

Again, our focus was to try and make everything comparable.  If the various levels of tech make sense in the different environments, then we tried to use that to set the prices.  We haven’t yet completed (and may never finish) our supplement about the cost of trade goods, which is going to take into account the various different costs / prices in the various different regions.  Trying to set prices consistently across the world pushed us to use averages for everything, and we made a really big deal about averages always being wrong.

We do want to defend our book, and we still feel it works for how it is supposed to work.  You don’t have to agree with us.  There are folks out there doing all sorts of things with their fantasy economies.  There is even an “economy” that only uses the following currencies:  silver coin, gold coin, bag of gold coins, etc.  Compared to that, ours is horribly complicated.  You need to make your best decisions for what works for your world.  We think our economy works, and more importantly works consistently.  We also think our economy gets you passed a huge number of these hard thought out reasonings, or perhaps rationalizations.  As always, it is up to you to use what you want, and make it your own.