Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback D&D Money - It's Not Just Gold

I know just using gold is easier. It makes the trade system simpler. It's how DOS2 worked. Hell, it's how the first two Baldur's Gate games worked. But in D&D, gold is not the only form of currency. There are multiple forms of money in D&D, and they may be trickier to implement but it really would make the game feel much closer to the actual P&P world. Peasants and commoners are much less likely to have gold on hand, and many things can be paid for with copper and silver.

So please consider adding other RAW forms of D&D currency. You can skip electrum though, because nobody uses that anyway.

hmm. Not that it's common in the game but I did manage to find some copper and platinum coins, so there's that atleast

The copper and platinum pieces are all worth 1gp and are treated as items separate from the 'proper' currency though, lol.

I really do think it might be better to just move to a copper-based currency with the other denominations serving for powers of ten values of copper pieces. A lot of games, particularly rpgs do this sort of thing-have 2 copper pieces, pick up 9 copper pieces, now you have 1 silver piece and 1 copper piece, etc.

It could also iron out some of the economical oddities-a lot of items would be ridiculously overpriced even at even at 1gp...a value which is essentially worthless in game. You can essentially become rich beyond a commoner's dreams by stealing all the plates and forks out of some poor fools pantry, at the same time that gp doesn't get you very far in this game. Using cp as a base would allow some more nuance into a system that currently has you paying for apples with the equivalent of hundred-dollar bills, while giving a greater range for items to be valued in.

Honestly, as much as it wouldn't be the most important thing, adding copper and silver and platinum and all that would really be nice for immersion sakes and being true to 5e.

We got soul coins 😉

+1 for Platinum / Gold / Silver / Copper
But if you mean any other currency than this ... or Soul Coins for minions of hells ... i would say that is kinda too much for single studio to handle. :-/

As long as they're nice confusing multiples; pounds, shillings, pence type of thing rather than this newfangled decimalised malarky.

I don't really see a reason for it until it serves a purpose. I very much appreciated how different faction's in Deadfire dealt in different currency - though of course the game didn't force players to fiddle with it. Still a nice worldbuilding detail.

I have seen anything in BG3 so far, that would support or require multicurrency trading.

"Now, to take the fairy cost a nickel, and in those days nickels had pictures of bumblebees on them 'give me five bees for a quarter you'd say! Now where were we? Oh yeah, the important thing was I had an Onion on my belt...which was the style at the time!"

-Abe Simpson

I don't believe the U.S. ever had anything close to as complicated as pre-metric currency in Britain, not to mention anything remotely as confusing as using L to mean Pounds, and d to mean pence. Ha'penny, Penny, Thruppenny bit, Sixpence, Shilling, Two-bob, Guinea, Half a crown, Crown, Half Sovereign and a Sovereign, if that confuses you imagine how confusing BG3 would be if it adopted a similar system for multiple currencies.

The reason that they aren't using different currencies - at least at the moment - is because money is a physical item in the inventory, and right now there is no system for say, dragging 35 copper pieces onto a pile of 21 silver to create a pile of 23 silver and 5 copper, or for taking 3 silver and turning it into 30 copper.

In theory such a system could be designed, but I don't know if there are any plans for implementing such a system. They might not think it worth the design effort to implement.

Such a system also needs to take into account all sorts of potential issues with closing the inventory or the player in a multiplayer game suddenly being disconnected, which may or may not be added complexity compared on top of normal inventory management.

The thing is, it doesn't really matter to me that BG3 doesn't require it. D&D itself likely doesn't require it. Just like how people argue over the value of the alignment system, there are things about the game that people may feel are unnecessary, but they are staples of the core mechanics and they provide a layer of depth beyond the surface that may not feel important to everyone. It's a function that is built into D&D, and as someone who loves D&D as it is, understands and appreciates its mechanics, I want BG3 to operate as closely to P&P D&D as possible. I understand that the vagaries of game development may prevent it from being implemented, but that doesn't mean I don't still want to put the suggestion out there, in the hope that it can become a reality.

If they build it properly, I see this game as a long-term platform for D&D content. If they build the mechanics as close to RAW as they can, I believe that it could be a really attractive venue for developing digital modules like Neverwinter Nights, and I feel like even small things like currency can go a long way to making the game feel much closer to the P&P experience.


One thing I'd like to see is a way to easily separate currency from the rest of the inventory, like a coinpurse that automatically accepts all currency upon loot, but still treats currency as physical objects so you can move and split into stacks manually. Otherwise I don't see how multiple forms of currency would complicate the system overmuch. If you'd like to convert currency into higher-value forms like gold and platinum, there are banks for that.

Having copper and silver might be interesting for immersion purposes. But unless Larian add items with prices that require the use of those coins - they will be just a cosmetic addition, that will only confuse some players, who don't know conversion rates.

Agreed, I don't see what this adds to the experience other than needless complication. The only game I can think of that did this was Temple of Elemental Evil and I never felt it really added anything to the game except slight frustration.

Planescape: Torment used three currencies, but those were stored as numbers in the inventory page, not things you could split or drag and drop.

I'm curious...since you're familiar with a comparatively ancient game like Temple of Elemental Evil (I'm assuming you're talking about the Troika remake)...have you actually played P&P Dungeons & Dragons? You seem averse to creating a game that is closer to the way D&D has been played in P&P since it was originally released. Things like this add depth. Other mechanics have come and gone throughout the decades, but forms of currency (and alignment, which we discussed in my other thread) have remained because they make sense. They may not seem like they have a point if you don't choose to think about how the world works. They may not seem like useful mechanics. They may seem only to overcomplicate things. But if you consider that most people who live in the various worlds of D&D see gold to be something of much higher value, then encountering a peasant with even one gold coin would feel strange, or uncommon at the very least. You might want to check this out:

http://www.kenthedm.com/blog/2019/8/7/how-much-is-a-gold-piece-worth-5e

Most people in D&D do not deal in gold. They spend their days working for copper and silver, and gold isn't something that even enters their thoughts because they're farmers and laborers who are just trying to scrape by and provide for their families. Gold is for merchants and nobles. It's treasure. I know it seems like I shouldn't care so much about this, but when I think about how people really live in a world, it just doesn't feel right to me that everyday folk would have a bag of gold on their belt, and so that's why I want the standard D&D currencies. Because it's how the world is supposed to work.

You want a game based on how the world is supposed to work but you also want one where people have their alignment bolted to their heads when you meet them so you know exactly who you are dealing with? At least be consistent.

I have played pen and paper D&D. But this isn't that, and the more you try to make it that, to try to shoehorn this into being that the more dumb systems you end up creating. A CRPG of D&D is its own separate thing and you have to cater to what the majority of people will find fun and challenging.

You also want to avoid what is called "Development hell" so you run an equation based on ROI (Return on Investment) of development time. How many X hours of development time would be required to add system like this and what would be the ROI for that?

The fact is Larian has been doing an amazing job focusing on what matters. They are evolving the genre in ways no one else is. Do they have to make adjustments? of course and they have to streamline because I don't think most people would love having to track 3 different kinds of currency. An essay on what a Gold piece is worth in a make believe place? Pass, you can make it worth whatever it needs to be worth.

Do I care if a system is added that creates three separate currencies, not really. Do I want it to delay the game by 20 minutes to get something like that. Nope.

But if you want to make a MOD that does this, then nothing is stopping you.

Jesus, that's needlessly hostile. I don't know why currency denominations is such a thing to get enraged over, but the D&D currency system isn't exactly something terribly exotic. Heck, it's less complicated than the US dollar. It's not like people are asking for Moons or Steelpence or Brass toals. Copper/Silver/Gold/Platinum is a simple as having 1, 10, 100 and 1000 dollar bills, and currently the game has us paying for everything in the equivalent of hundred dollar bills....which is a bit weird because BG IIII has a lot of 'vendor trash'-forks and empty bottles and apples etc that are obviously worth far less than 1gp. Copper pieces is just a more sensible baseline for the sort of economy Larian has set for the game.

Plenty of other games have multiple denominations-and it doesn't hurt the gameplay experience one iota. What it *does* help, is giving it that verisimilitude that's nice to have in video games.
Off the top of my head Dragon age, World of Warcraft, Drakensang all use different denominations, to no detriment to the player. Most games convert from one denomination to the other automatically as well, so there's no record keeping by the player.

Now if it's as easy as you think for Larian to just switch over that it'd be easy to mod, than by no means is it anything that's going to throw the game into 'development hell'. It would only improve the game by enabling a more sensible price range that allows for more nuanced pricing of goods and services. This is an area where the game could be improved and I for one would love to see Larian give it a go over. They probably should give currency a go-over at some point anyway because of some of the wonkiness with trading and currency being stored on different characters etc etc.

Well I am, so there. As summed up by Messrs. Blackheifer & Jericho:


ISTR the LSD thing is explained not so much by the psychoactive substance (though it may seem that way) but libra, sommat*, denari.

* not quite accurate but I can't remember offhand and I'm too lazy to look it up.

Edit: I'm also old enough to have used proper money before they introduced that nasty cheap new stuff in the early '70s but I don't remember a lot about it. I mean I can't remember what I was doing this morning never mind 50 years ago.

Honestly, I like there being multiple denominations of currency as it makes a world feel alive, and if it is simple as DnD denominations are, then it won't be problematic. The game could in the buying and selling screen tally up the value of your currency, it could all be stored in a money pouch so it could be both handled like an item that you can remove, and like currency used to buy an sell. And change can be automatically handled so say you maybe have 100 gold but try to buy a one copper item, you would end up with 99 gold and 99 copper (or 99 gold, 9 silver, and 9 copper) and your currency screen could display it in a simple way of 99.99 gold with the option to display it more like dragon age which would display the gold silver and copper separately (but dragon age would automatically round it up so if you had 100 silver it became 1 gold).