I know the framing is mostly just an excuse to talk about history, but I feel like the author undermines some of his own points. Why does 5e and other roleplaying systems use gold, when it's such...
I know the framing is mostly just an excuse to talk about history, but I feel like the author undermines some of his own points.
Why does 5e and other roleplaying systems use gold, when it's such a large portion of money? Because player character's aren't peasants, and they buy expensive things, with cheaper things usually left unsaid. From some cursory googling, a medieval sword in England would be worth around 1 pound (which is, as the article describes, gold coin).
A PC wouldn't even be buying basic weapons like that, since it's starting equipment. A PC would buy things like potions, which sound mundane in a game world but imagine if there was actually magic liquid that could recover you from the BRINK OF DEATH in an instant, of course it's multiple gold piece, or magic weapons.
Even a lvl 5 player character in 5e would be a hero of the realm. You can, mathematically, one shot a normal human with basically every class, even the non-martial ones. At minimum, a lvl 5 PC can kill a person every 6 seconds without using much effort.
And that brings us to our first major conclusion: in most pre-industrial settings, a gold coin of any size is an impractical unit of exchange for ‘regular people.’
Does that sound like a normal person?
Secondly, this part
“Monetizing” the countryside (an awkward term which really means ‘currency-izing’ the countryside) is typically something states have to intentionally do. The reason a state might want to do this is simple: the big advantage coinage has is to make transactions with unfamiliar parties (people you can’t trust to pay you back later) easier and the state often does a lot of business with unfamiliar parties, especially if it operates at scale.
Well, random super-humans who wander around are certainly unfamiliar parties. You can't exactly set up accounts with people who will be in a different continent in a week.
Third, this assumes that the distribution of precious metals is the same as Earth, and when we're talking about the usual settings of 5e, that just isn't the case.
Not to mention things like how Wizards capable of casting 9th level spells can literally create an infinite amount of gold.
Yeah, it was a really interesting post and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it for the history aspects. E.g. I didn't even know of Lydia's existence, nor of them being the first to mint coins all the...
Yeah, it was a really interesting post and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it for the history aspects. E.g. I didn't even know of Lydia's existence, nor of them being the first to mint coins all the way back in the 7th Century BCE. But when it came to comparing real world economics to the world of D&D and other Fantasy settings, Bret was being a bit unimaginative, IMO.
Imagine for yourself what kind of drastic changes to our own economics would have occurred if there existed actual demons who traded conjured wealth for peoples' souls, gold hoarding dragons, genies who could grant wishes, monsters of all sorts in the wilderness who villagers needed slain, actual Gods who answered prayers, a plethora of demi-God-like beings everywhere, and insanely powerful heroes like from our own myths & legends (but with even stronger powers) wandering this planet; As well as countless ruins and wizard towers scattered around the world for those heroes to raid for wealth and artifacts. Not to mention the multiple sapient species with their own civilizations, many of which are obsessed with mining (Dwarves, Duergar, Deep Gnomes, etc) and lived entirely underground. I very much doubt anything like our own economic systems would exist in such a world, but Bret was treating it as if it would be nearly identical.
I'm sure it was a fun mental exercise for him to go through, it's a fun read, and a great jumping off point for further discussion here... but it's also probably not the most "realistic" take on what Fantasy world economics would actually look like. :P
I was surprised to not see it in the wiki, so to add another bit of history, in music the Greek modes come from Lydia and it's neighbors. The economy of scale I've heard so much about
I was surprised to not see it in the wiki, so to add another bit of history, in music the Greek modes come from Lydia and it's neighbors.
Do they even need to be that high? When your classes skills boil down to "break thermodynamics with an unseen force or just ignore normal human limits and also the average concept of time", I...
Not to mention things like how Wizards capable of casting 9th level spells can literally create an infinite amount of gold.
Do they even need to be that high? When your classes skills boil down to "break thermodynamics with an unseen force or just ignore normal human limits and also the average concept of time", I expect most economies to crumble if a player so intended loooong before 9th level spells are online.
Broken fantasy economies is almost always a massive problem. They are, usually, set dressing. Very very few games have remotely decent economic models because only nerds like me give a shit (plug for offworld trading company, amazing game). In fact the only one I can think of off the top of my head that has a quasi realistic one is EVE and that's because it both has to and is hilariously cutthroat (making it much easier, and yet still economic issues have occured).
It's a shame because economies can actually lead to really interesting gameplay (resource scarcity in a 4x/large strategy game especially), but 5e is NOTORIOUS for having a whole bunch of looks good on the surface rules slapped together into a pile with "the dm will figure it out" written on the backside when everyone realizes it's just a cardboard cutout.
It would be really interesting to model an economy and society off the kind of magic present in games like dnd (something I think dwarf fortress was eventually looking at), but the actual dnd model even at its best is mostly a "fridge logic" kind of thing. Turns out the economy of a society where "a whole fuckpile of gold and things worth gold" is sitting at the bottom of some hellscape for everyone but a select few is a bit awkward (hell ACTUAL threats to the world are a big problem when someone says "so why doesn't one of the other 40 canon super adventurers just help?").
I also find the mentioning of BG's only gold economy a low blow. You know what most people hate? Why you guessed it, currency conversion!
Even if it's as simple as WoW/DnD's copper/silver/gold, doubly so with weight restrictions. Yes nerds like me love "why yes this room is filled with more wealth than you can imagine, but all in copper. How much can you carry again?", but again when you're working on something as complex as BG3, the last thing you want to debug is some currency calculator not handling the conversion on say, crafted iron daggers correctly (which yes is a nod to skyrim which is also hilariously easy to break and brings up the other point that the player has an infinite amount of time in which to acquire gold).
Hell that weight joke is arguably the main reason base dnd has currency types at all, as in the older editions getting the hell out of the dungeon with your loot was a huge part of the process (as gold was how you got XP), so a room full of silver and a room full of gold of the equivalent amount was not actually the same because your str 4 wizard could carry a hell of a lot more.
So yes, just about every adventurer party would both be a walking Mansa Musa style economic disaster AND you'd probably have a cottage industry of large armies hunting them down for their goods since their equipment and "i swear i'll remember this when I need it" pile could probably change the outlook of a nation.
All this being said, the article is very very interesting and absolutely worth a read. I just think this is a silly point to pivot off of. The base dnd experience by 5e is 100% tailored to "oh i fell down drunk yesterday and picked up a sword and decided to fight goblins" at level 1 and "go get another 20 or so people so we can call this a fair fight" by level 10, often progressing to that point in less than a years worth of in game time. It's supposed to go hyper fast through the ranks of prestige.
Oh and finally
As you can tell, basically no one is going to hand a party gold for defeating a bunch of goblin raiders or getting that Aboleth out of the lake
How dare you undersell the danger of an aboleth. If its JUST an aboleth in that lake and it's for some reason NOT in it's lair you'd still probably expect gold, and even then you should be wondering why the fuck that was the case and what that aboleth was planning (paid for by the committee to remind people that aboleths are criminally underrated bbeg's in 5e).
Even my personal crusade aside, it's a bit weird to see him compare a bunch of goblins (cr 1/4) to an aboleth (cr 10, and as many players will tell you probably deceptively so), but hey we can do a currency to challenge rating conversion table next and realllllly fuck the economy up when it comes to light you can slaughter a nearly infinite amount of goblins faster than raiding that one lich lair.
The propensity of adventurers to murder townsfolk for no particular reason other than that they're irritated also creates a wonderful argument for a danger surcharge from merchants as well.
The propensity of adventurers to murder townsfolk for no particular reason other than that they're irritated also creates a wonderful argument for a danger surcharge from merchants as well.
Most fantasy worlds still have ordinary towns, peasants, merchants, and so on. They're supposed to be vaguely historical, which saves effort with world-building. I think it's helpful to know what...
Most fantasy worlds still have ordinary towns, peasants, merchants, and so on. They're supposed to be vaguely historical, which saves effort with world-building. I think it's helpful to know what the baseline should be, before you start messing with the economics.
Apparently the simplest change would be to use silver instead of gold, unless there's a good reason not to?
For something like a 5e campaign set in Forgotten Realms, the worlds are just fundamentally too far from Medieval Europe for the comparison to be meaningful. I'd also say the article itself gives...
For something like a 5e campaign set in Forgotten Realms, the worlds are just fundamentally too far from Medieval Europe for the comparison to be meaningful.
I'd also say the article itself gives a good reason to denominate it in gold: because everyone you actually buy is too expensive. You don't really have a need to buy things like swords, which already are historically in the "gold piece" range. You actually buy things like potions, and magic weapons, and magic armor, and all that should be in the GPs.
I suppose that's true, but then, the whole notion of a "weapons store" or "armorer" that sells fantastically expensive things to the public for gold seems kind of unlikely, doesn't it? It seems...
I suppose that's true, but then, the whole notion of a "weapons store" or "armorer" that sells fantastically expensive things to the public for gold seems kind of unlikely, doesn't it? It seems like these people would be employed by powerful nobles, and the contents of the nobles' armories wouldn't be for sale to strangers?
Well, you're not part of the public per se, you're a 0.001% superhuman, capable of inhuman feats pretty much from lvl 1. The existence of what would practically be demigods walking around would...
Well, you're not part of the public per se, you're a 0.001% superhuman, capable of inhuman feats pretty much from lvl 1. The existence of what would practically be demigods walking around would change the power structure of the world.
In practice, there'd have to be a divide between individuals who are born to have an 8 strength score for the rest of the their lives, and the people who will grow to be able to create demiplanes, and the PCs are in the latter, not with the peasantry.
Yeah, I think vendors like this are a weird and shallow feature of role-playing games (tabletop or otherwise). I actually did play a D&D campaign once where access to weapons was significantly...
the whole notion of a "weapons store" or "armorer" that sells fantastically expensive things to the public for gold seems kind of unlikely, doesn't it?
Yeah, I think vendors like this are a weird and shallow feature of role-playing games (tabletop or otherwise).
I actually did play a D&D campaign once where access to weapons was significantly more expensive and tightly controlled. The DM played it like this:
We could only buy very basic or poor quality weapons and armor from blacksmiths and other relevant tradespersons, and it required (at least) one long rest before the order was fulfilled.
Magic items and better equipment could be bought from quartermasters, but only if we were in the good graces of their masters. That typically involved completing quests for the family or organization they represented, though we did have an "special thing" going with one guy who sold us magical items under the table.
We could scavenge weapons and armor from enemies we defeated, but if those enemies engaged us in combat before being taken down, their weapons and armor were "degraded". Such items had to be repaired, over a single long rest by a tradesperson, or multiple long rests by a party member. The DM did roll whenever we scavenged an item though, and if he rolled a natural 20, we got the item immediately.
Enemies we took down through sneak attacks would yield full-quality items depending on the takedown method used and dice rolls.
It was a bit cumbersome to keep track of all this, but the DM did a pretty good job of it. The campaign setting was "post-apocalyptic fantasy", so the scavenging and item repair rules fit better than they would have in a "regular" D&D game. Overall it was great fun.
I'm about to finish the Founders Trilogy of fantasy books, and in that series "scriving", and the magic items it produces, are almost exclusively the property of rich merchant houses, and rarely found outside of their militarized "campos". It creates a massive disparity of wealth and quality of life between the ultra-wealthy merchant house campos and the lawless and destitute "commons" area of the city. The trilogy's world and story is made much better because of how that disparity intertwines the narrative.
The scriving described by the book is also super cool. It basically involves writing arguments onto objects to convince (or at higher levels of scriving, edit) reality to be something it isn't.
It's a magic system built on a programmatic foundation, and the author takes the capabilities of the system to places I never would have thought of. Like there are "basic" scrived rigs like a crossbow that shoots bolts at the speed of sound, or a harness that allows the wearer to be unaffected by gravity (like in Dune 2), but the author takes it much further and weirder than that. The scriving magic has just been a ton of fun to read and think about. It has made me wonder what a roguelike game with a real-time, programmable magic system would be like. I could imagine players crafting spells from very granular building blocks, written in Lisp of course, and saving those "spells" (functions) to a grimoire that would keep expanding as they delved deeper.
Anyways, yeah, vendors selling ridiculously powerful magic items to random adventurers is weird. Like, really, you're just going to sell the murderhobo this extremely dangerous magical dagger, or nigh impenetrable suit of armor? Bonus points if said vendor is a scrawny little elf behind a counter, and has zero guards to protect them or their inventory.
Let's be real, and just call this phenomenon what it is: lazy and unimaginative worldbuilding.
Wait no, it's actually worse than that, it's lazy, unimaginative worldbuilding, and it's the default system for managing player inventories and the in-game economy for almost every role-playing game (again, tabletop or otherwise).
Sort of related, Shamus Young published a video called Who Broke the In-Game Economy? that I think gives a pretty good breakdown of why games fall into various traps of economy balancing.
The way to understand these coins is this: these societies had already been using metals – measured by weight – to define abstract, notional units of value for accounting purposes and in some cases physical transactions. This is important to note: money in the abstract sense (and debt, for that matter) come first and coinage comes second. In practice, what a coin was simply a pre-measured amount of precious metal, stamped by the authorities to attest that it was the amount it claimed to be.
...
[I]n most pre-industrial settings, a gold coin of any size is an impractical unit of exchange for ‘regular people.’ Instead, what your aurei or ducats or florins are for is facilitating the storage is substantial amounts of wealth and enabling large-scale transactions by merchants and elites, either of bulk goods or luxury goods. They could also, of course, function notionally as units of account (like the Greek talent or the Carolingian livre). Day to day currency was almost invariably minted in silver or copper (or copper-alloys).
...
But part of the reason these coinage systems work they way they do is that they operated in societies in which a lot of economic activity was non-monetary or at least, non-coinage. And here, we should go back to our ‘money’ vs. ‘currency’ or ‘coinage:’ remember, money came first. So let’s say you live in a small community – like a peasant village working beneath a large landholder’s manor – and you need to transact some things, but you don’t have any actual silver because coins are scarce and valuable (and being a subsistence farmer, you grow most of what you need yourself), how do you do it? Well, one way is to do it ‘on accounts’ – you need wool and so when the shepherds come down from the hills, you trade for some of their wool during the shearing with a family you know and both you and they make a mental note that you owe them for the wool. You might express that amount of debt in silver (as a unit weight – see how we get to coinage as a pre-measured weight of silver?) but there’s no reason to measure out silver (even if you had any) because you see these folks every year and next time they’ll ask you for some grain and so on.
Note that this is not the same as the concept of ‘barter’ – there is, in fact, a notional ‘money’ intermediary, it’s just not a physical coin or bill, its expressed as an account, a purely notional unit of value.
Meanwhile, that small farmer also owes ‘taxes’ or rents to the state or the Big Man who owns their land – the line between ‘rents’ and ‘taxes’ in pre-modern states is very fuzzy – are also likely to be paid in kind. What that means is instead of paying in coin, a certain slice of the harvest or a certain amount of grain or a certain numbers of days of corvée labor is owed. That obligation too may have a notional monetary value, enabling fines or repayments for services to be docked against tax liability, once again removing much of the need for a physical currency.
...
The result is that the basic normal condition of the pre-industrial countryside is generally non-coinage (if not non-monetary). “Monetizing” the countryside (an awkward term which really means ‘currency-izing’ the countryside) is typically something states have to intentionally do. The reason a state might want to do this is simple: the big advantage coinage has is to make transactions with unfamiliar parties (people you can’t trust to pay you back later) easier and the state often does a lot of business with unfamiliar parties, especially if it operates at scale. Consequently, it is often good for the state to be able to collect taxes in silver so that it can pay for goods and wages in silver. This is, of course, especially true if the soldiery the state relies on expects to get paid in silver [...]
I know the framing is mostly just an excuse to talk about history, but I feel like the author undermines some of his own points.
Why does 5e and other roleplaying systems use gold, when it's such a large portion of money? Because player character's aren't peasants, and they buy expensive things, with cheaper things usually left unsaid. From some cursory googling, a medieval sword in England would be worth around 1 pound (which is, as the article describes, gold coin).
A PC wouldn't even be buying basic weapons like that, since it's starting equipment. A PC would buy things like potions, which sound mundane in a game world but imagine if there was actually magic liquid that could recover you from the BRINK OF DEATH in an instant, of course it's multiple gold piece, or magic weapons.
Even a lvl 5 player character in 5e would be a hero of the realm. You can, mathematically, one shot a normal human with basically every class, even the non-martial ones. At minimum, a lvl 5 PC can kill a person every 6 seconds without using much effort.
Does that sound like a normal person?
Secondly, this part
Well, random super-humans who wander around are certainly unfamiliar parties. You can't exactly set up accounts with people who will be in a different continent in a week.
Third, this assumes that the distribution of precious metals is the same as Earth, and when we're talking about the usual settings of 5e, that just isn't the case.
Not to mention things like how Wizards capable of casting 9th level spells can literally create an infinite amount of gold.
Yeah, it was a really interesting post and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it for the history aspects. E.g. I didn't even know of Lydia's existence, nor of them being the first to mint coins all the way back in the 7th Century BCE. But when it came to comparing real world economics to the world of D&D and other Fantasy settings, Bret was being a bit unimaginative, IMO.
Imagine for yourself what kind of drastic changes to our own economics would have occurred if there existed actual demons who traded conjured wealth for peoples' souls, gold hoarding dragons, genies who could grant wishes, monsters of all sorts in the wilderness who villagers needed slain, actual Gods who answered prayers, a plethora of demi-God-like beings everywhere, and insanely powerful heroes like from our own myths & legends (but with even stronger powers) wandering this planet; As well as countless ruins and wizard towers scattered around the world for those heroes to raid for wealth and artifacts. Not to mention the multiple sapient species with their own civilizations, many of which are obsessed with mining (Dwarves, Duergar, Deep Gnomes, etc) and lived entirely underground. I very much doubt anything like our own economic systems would exist in such a world, but Bret was treating it as if it would be nearly identical.
I'm sure it was a fun mental exercise for him to go through, it's a fun read, and a great jumping off point for further discussion here... but it's also probably not the most "realistic" take on what Fantasy world economics would actually look like. :P
I was surprised to not see it in the wiki, so to add another bit of history, in music the Greek modes come from Lydia and it's neighbors.
The economy of scale I've heard so much about
<Ba Dum Tish> ;)
Do they even need to be that high? When your classes skills boil down to "break thermodynamics with an unseen force or just ignore normal human limits and also the average concept of time", I expect most economies to crumble if a player so intended loooong before 9th level spells are online.
Broken fantasy economies is almost always a massive problem. They are, usually, set dressing. Very very few games have remotely decent economic models because only nerds like me give a shit (plug for offworld trading company, amazing game). In fact the only one I can think of off the top of my head that has a quasi realistic one is EVE and that's because it both has to and is hilariously cutthroat (making it much easier, and yet still economic issues have occured).
It's a shame because economies can actually lead to really interesting gameplay (resource scarcity in a 4x/large strategy game especially), but 5e is NOTORIOUS for having a whole bunch of looks good on the surface rules slapped together into a pile with "the dm will figure it out" written on the backside when everyone realizes it's just a cardboard cutout.
It would be really interesting to model an economy and society off the kind of magic present in games like dnd (something I think dwarf fortress was eventually looking at), but the actual dnd model even at its best is mostly a "fridge logic" kind of thing. Turns out the economy of a society where "a whole fuckpile of gold and things worth gold" is sitting at the bottom of some hellscape for everyone but a select few is a bit awkward (hell ACTUAL threats to the world are a big problem when someone says "so why doesn't one of the other 40 canon super adventurers just help?").
I also find the mentioning of BG's only gold economy a low blow. You know what most people hate? Why you guessed it, currency conversion!
Even if it's as simple as WoW/DnD's copper/silver/gold, doubly so with weight restrictions. Yes nerds like me love "why yes this room is filled with more wealth than you can imagine, but all in copper. How much can you carry again?", but again when you're working on something as complex as BG3, the last thing you want to debug is some currency calculator not handling the conversion on say, crafted iron daggers correctly (which yes is a nod to skyrim which is also hilariously easy to break and brings up the other point that the player has an infinite amount of time in which to acquire gold).
Hell that weight joke is arguably the main reason base dnd has currency types at all, as in the older editions getting the hell out of the dungeon with your loot was a huge part of the process (as gold was how you got XP), so a room full of silver and a room full of gold of the equivalent amount was not actually the same because your str 4 wizard could carry a hell of a lot more.
So yes, just about every adventurer party would both be a walking Mansa Musa style economic disaster AND you'd probably have a cottage industry of large armies hunting them down for their goods since their equipment and "i swear i'll remember this when I need it" pile could probably change the outlook of a nation.
All this being said, the article is very very interesting and absolutely worth a read. I just think this is a silly point to pivot off of. The base dnd experience by 5e is 100% tailored to "oh i fell down drunk yesterday and picked up a sword and decided to fight goblins" at level 1 and "go get another 20 or so people so we can call this a fair fight" by level 10, often progressing to that point in less than a years worth of in game time. It's supposed to go hyper fast through the ranks of prestige.
Oh and finally
How dare you undersell the danger of an aboleth. If its JUST an aboleth in that lake and it's for some reason NOT in it's lair you'd still probably expect gold, and even then you should be wondering why the fuck that was the case and what that aboleth was planning (paid for by the committee to remind people that aboleths are criminally underrated bbeg's in 5e).
Even my personal crusade aside, it's a bit weird to see him compare a bunch of goblins (cr 1/4) to an aboleth (cr 10, and as many players will tell you probably deceptively so), but hey we can do a currency to challenge rating conversion table next and realllllly fuck the economy up when it comes to light you can slaughter a nearly infinite amount of goblins faster than raiding that one lich lair.
The propensity of adventurers to murder townsfolk for no particular reason other than that they're irritated also creates a wonderful argument for a danger surcharge from merchants as well.
Most fantasy worlds still have ordinary towns, peasants, merchants, and so on. They're supposed to be vaguely historical, which saves effort with world-building. I think it's helpful to know what the baseline should be, before you start messing with the economics.
Apparently the simplest change would be to use silver instead of gold, unless there's a good reason not to?
For something like a 5e campaign set in Forgotten Realms, the worlds are just fundamentally too far from Medieval Europe for the comparison to be meaningful.
I'd also say the article itself gives a good reason to denominate it in gold: because everyone you actually buy is too expensive. You don't really have a need to buy things like swords, which already are historically in the "gold piece" range. You actually buy things like potions, and magic weapons, and magic armor, and all that should be in the GPs.
I suppose that's true, but then, the whole notion of a "weapons store" or "armorer" that sells fantastically expensive things to the public for gold seems kind of unlikely, doesn't it? It seems like these people would be employed by powerful nobles, and the contents of the nobles' armories wouldn't be for sale to strangers?
Well, you're not part of the public per se, you're a 0.001% superhuman, capable of inhuman feats pretty much from lvl 1. The existence of what would practically be demigods walking around would change the power structure of the world.
In practice, there'd have to be a divide between individuals who are born to have an 8 strength score for the rest of the their lives, and the people who will grow to be able to create demiplanes, and the PCs are in the latter, not with the peasantry.
Yeah, I think vendors like this are a weird and shallow feature of role-playing games (tabletop or otherwise).
I actually did play a D&D campaign once where access to weapons was significantly more expensive and tightly controlled. The DM played it like this:
It was a bit cumbersome to keep track of all this, but the DM did a pretty good job of it. The campaign setting was "post-apocalyptic fantasy", so the scavenging and item repair rules fit better than they would have in a "regular" D&D game. Overall it was great fun.
I'm about to finish the Founders Trilogy of fantasy books, and in that series "scriving", and the magic items it produces, are almost exclusively the property of rich merchant houses, and rarely found outside of their militarized "campos". It creates a massive disparity of wealth and quality of life between the ultra-wealthy merchant house campos and the lawless and destitute "commons" area of the city. The trilogy's world and story is made much better because of how that disparity intertwines the narrative.
The scriving described by the book is also super cool. It basically involves writing arguments onto objects to convince (or at higher levels of scriving, edit) reality to be something it isn't.
It's a magic system built on a programmatic foundation, and the author takes the capabilities of the system to places I never would have thought of. Like there are "basic" scrived rigs like a crossbow that shoots bolts at the speed of sound, or a harness that allows the wearer to be unaffected by gravity (like in Dune 2), but the author takes it much further and weirder than that. The scriving magic has just been a ton of fun to read and think about. It has made me wonder what a roguelike game with a real-time, programmable magic system would be like. I could imagine players crafting spells from very granular building blocks, written in Lisp of course, and saving those "spells" (functions) to a grimoire that would keep expanding as they delved deeper.
Anyways, yeah, vendors selling ridiculously powerful magic items to random adventurers is weird. Like, really, you're just going to sell the murderhobo this extremely dangerous magical dagger, or nigh impenetrable suit of armor? Bonus points if said vendor is a scrawny little elf behind a counter, and has zero guards to protect them or their inventory.
Let's be real, and just call this phenomenon what it is: lazy and unimaginative worldbuilding.
Wait no, it's actually worse than that, it's lazy, unimaginative worldbuilding, and it's the default system for managing player inventories and the in-game economy for almost every role-playing game (again, tabletop or otherwise).
Sort of related, Shamus Young published a video called Who Broke the In-Game Economy? that I think gives a pretty good breakdown of why games fall into various traps of economy balancing.
From the article:
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