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

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.

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.

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.

I want four denominations actually, including platinum. Five if you count electrum, but let's be honest, electrum is rarely used because it does tend to overcomplicate things and it wasn't even used in previous versions of the game. That being said, I would still be happy to have it if Larian wanted to implement it. I want this game to be as close to RAW as a CRPG can be, because it's how the source material works and that's what makes sense to me. If I choose to develop a module for the game, I want to be able to write it in such a way as it feels grounded in the actual P&P systems. Simple things like currency ground the world and make it feel more real. You may not think it's important, but to someone who cares about setting, it matters. Obviously I feel like it matters or I wouldn't continue to reply to you. We're clearly not going to agree but I hope you can see my point.

And believe me, I understand the concept of development hell. I backed Star Citizen in 2013. And yet, here I am, asking for this and defending my point to you, because it's something that matters to me. I know, crazy, right?

Plenty of other games have multiple denominations-and it doesn't hurt the gameplay experience one iota.

I still feel like this is a niche thing that can simply be modded - is there any reason you cannot undertake this project?

It doesn't add anything to them either, I'm not going to get all bent out of shape if Larian add denominations but personally I'd prefer the development time going into more important aspects of the game. They only have so many people with so much time and I'd like to play the finished article sooner rather than later.

+1. The addition of currencies (assuming the game automatically handles conversions from 10cp->1sp, etc) would be great for immersion, reasonable item prices (apples should cost like 1 cp, not 1gp), and would make finding gold at early levels more exciting. We should start out finding cp and sp from dead enemies, with gp being a rarer and thus more exciting find, and then throughout the game begin to acquire more and more gold as you face more powerful and rich enemies.

As opposed to how it is currently, where you start out finding gp and can end level 4 with tens of thousands of gp. I can only imagine that the party will have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of gp by game's end.

Also, gold really doesn't need to take up inventory space. Just give every character a "gold held" attribute and automatically increment/decrement that when they pick up gold or buy/sell/trade.

Finally, BG3 has the potential to be an amazing resource for creating and running D&D campaigns. Having currencies that match PnP isn't the most important thing, but it definitely would help people directly adapt 5e campaigns using the expected (assumed?) BG3 DM mode.

I disagree with you there. In the early days of WoW, gold actually had great value and was a huge part of the game progression. And like mrfuji3 mentioned, there has already been complaints about the abundance of loot and characters ending up with more gold than they know what to spend it on, and that as a lvl 4 in act 1 before even finishing the EA. With a better denomiation system where items would be more realistically valued the developers can give us players more tactical options. IE we can only afford one of two or three good items right now so we have to choose which one would give us the greatest benefit(or we just steal them all, putting emphasis on having a good rogue in the party).

Also, in the Witcher series(well, I've honestly only played the 3rd game) there are different currencies that needs to get exchanged at the bank. A minor side activity but one that reminds us that Geralt isn't just running around in crypts and forests, slaying monsters, he's actually traveling and finding work in several different states, all with different politcal agendas, cultures and yes, currencies. A huge improvement for immersion.

BG3 has the potential to become a great game and it better, with all the hype behind it. Because of that it's important to not skip on the small details. Sure, some will play the game just for the exploration and action. Others will play it for its story and rp possibilities.

And personally, I'd rather play the finished product when it's well-polished and near perfected than a product that was rushed.

The biggest issue I have with multiple currency's is ... Weight of coins. Not sure if any of you noticed, but your coinage weighs, and if you are playing a class with low strength that weight matters. If I had to deal with copper, silver, gold, and platinum... I would be trying to convert most of that to the higher denominations for weight savings alone. On the positive side it could bring up a nice RP issue... when some NPC says.. "I don't have enough change for that gold or platinum piece" and that's all you have to pay for it with. But that also could be really annoying for some players as well, as they have to micro manage their finances which can take away from game enjoyment.

I personally think that conversion should be handled via banks, because automatic conversion is a magical mechanic that sort of makes the whole point of having multiple denominations moot, and I think that having a coinpurse that you can use to contain all of your currency would be nice to have. So we disagree on a couple of minor things, but the most important thing is that the mechanic is implemented. Thanks for your response

-1 for making the system more complex, more prone to bugs, taking development time away from things we care about and making the game more fiddly and worse.

Lots of opinion here. Clearly, you're part of a contingent that doesn't care about this, but don't claim to speak for everyone by using "we", because we obviously don't all agree.

+1

I'm also allergic to people using "we" without stating who they are speaking for

Okay "we, the people playing the game and awaiting its release"

There are a LOT of core issues that need attention. Even if everyone in this thread would rather this be added than fixes to the shonky implementation of light or backstabbing or dipping those are still issues that the community nigh universally agrees are important.

Okay "we, the people playing the game and awaiting its release"

There are a LOT of core issues that need attention. Even if everyone in this thread would rather this be added than fixes to the shonky implementation of light or backstabbing or dipping those are still issues that the community nigh universally agrees are important.

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

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:

https://www.toolsofchef.com

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.

Not exactly what you meant, but I remember I think it was AD&D (1st Edition), it went something like: 10 Coppers = 1 Silver, 10 Silver = 1 Electrum, 20 Silver or 2 Electrum (less common) = 1 Gold, 5 Gold = 1 Platinum.