The Economy of D&D – part 2
Hi everyone,
In our last article, we reached the conclusion that 1gp is worth about $ 175 usd. With this data point, we were able to estimate the “real” value of all the arms and equipment our PCs buy before an adventure. Hopefully, this information allowed our players to understand and appreciate the true value of the money pouch they got from a starving farmer.
The next logical step in my research, was to determine how wealthy nobles are in a fantasy world. It is very common to read stories about kings with massive amounts of gold, or dragons with treasures beyond the wildest dreams of any mortal. Unfortunately, it is hard to estimate how BIG those treasures are, if we don’t know what is a “reasonable” monthly income for a king.
Background research
Now, before doing a single calculation, I decided to validate if any of the published supplements for D&D already had that information. Although my rpg library is not as big as I would like it to be, I managed to find two 2nd Edition, Forgotten Realms supplements with useful data:
- In the The City of Ravens Bluff supplement (written by Ed Greenwood), it is mentioned that some noble families make most of their income comes from interests generated by loans made to other wealthy families. Apparently, not all nobles are well versed in the fine art of personal finance, thus they rely on loans from other families, to be able to maintain their life of luxury and excess. Although it is never mentioned how much they lend to other nobles, it is hinted that the average loan can easily over a million gold pieces.
- The second mention is in The Moonsea supplement (written by John Terra) where he mentions that if someone wants to have a seat at the city council, he/she must pay an “entry fee” of 100,000 gold pieces. Now, if there are no open seats available at the time, noblemen/noblewomen can offer the council a “small gift” of 2,000,000 gold pieces, and the council will gladly add a sit for them.
Although we never get a true gp value for the wealth of nobles in a D&D setting, it is obvious that nobility can throw around large amounts of money without breaking a sweat.
Thus, in order to estimate their level of wealth, I decided to take real-life information, and using the gp/usd exchange rate we calculated, extrapolate the values into their D&D equivalents.
The Richest people in the World
My starting point was the Forbes 2019 list of Billionaires (March update), and I took the top 17 names, along with their current Net Worth. For those not familiar with the term, Net Worth represents the value of all the financial and non-financial assets owned by a person, after you have subtracted any debts/liabilities they might have.
Net Worth DOES NOT represent the amount of cash a person has. As a matter of fact, it is estimated that the average billionaire does not have more than 1% of their fortune in cash or highly-liquid investments. Most of them have their money invested in a series of physical/financial assets, and they live off the dividends they get from those investments.
Now, here comes the tricky part. If we want to estimate the yearly “income” of these individuals, we need to estimate what is the rate of return they get for their investments. Since these returns can vary widely from year to year, I decided to go with an assumption of 10% per year, which should be close to the average historical risk free rate in the US, plus the average market premium received from a well-diversified portfolio (rounded up).
The results can be seen in this table:
Source: Forbes Billionaires – The Richest People in the World 2019 (1)
Now, using the 1gp/175usd exchange rate, their D&D equivalent income would be as follows:
As you can see, Jeff Bezos is the leader of the pack by quite a significant amount of money. After him, we have a tier of 12 individuals with fortunes between 50-100 Billion usd, followed by a group of 90 investors in the 10-49 Billion usd range. If we extrapolate this to a medieval social class hierarchy (King/Queen, High Nobility, Low Nobility, Aristocratic, etc..), we would get this distribution:
What do you think of this estimates? Do you agree with them?
- Bibliography
- (1) Billionaires 2019. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/#15a3c62d251c
- (2) Desjardins, J. (2019, March 09). Chart: What Assets Make Up Wealth? Retrieved from https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-assets-make-wealth/
