D&d Gold Coin
D&d Gold Pieces To Dollars
How Much Is 1 Gold In D&d

How much gold is too much? It is a question that is asked quite often, and responses are invariably off each other by orders of magnitude. Some responses offer estimate ranges based on lifestyles or the cost of magic weapons. Others offer educated guesses based on what the party’s wealthy patrons can afford (or which their enemies can hoard). And, of course, there is the ubiquitous but unhelpful answer, ‘As much as the DM wants’.

Dungeons and Dragons (5e) currency exchange rate calculator. Use this tool to convert lower value coins to higher value coins. Additionally, evenly split coins between team members. The district is comprised of Bronx, Dutchess, New York, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, Sullivan, and Westchester Counties. Contains forms, local rules and directory. Welcome to Walt Disney World. Come and enjoy the magic of Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, FL. Plan your family vacation and create memories for a lifetime.

Yes, the last one is the only factually accurate response, but facts alone aren’t enough; they must be put in their proper context and used to test different options. Ultimately, too much or too little gold is going to cause issues, but it takes some careful consideration to determine where those thresholds are. And that is why we’ve written this article to help you determine for yourself how much gold your players should be receiving.

A Short History of Gold in D&D

Drifting around the Internet, one might occasion upon a character sheet from way back in the first edition of the game. No small amount of shock is likely to ensue when it comes to the amount of money the character has—likely exceeding 1 million gp! What was the idea there?

Well, back in the day, characters used to earn 1 XP for each gp they collected, and this was a large part of how they advanced. On page 45 of the D&D Basic Rulebook (1981), Tom Moldvay estimated that characters might earn as much as three quarters (³/₄) of their experience through accumulating treasure. And given that experience point thresholds for advancement roughly doubled for each consecutive level, things escalated. Estimates for the amount of money 8th level adventurers had to accumulate exceed 40 tons!

Of course, this money wasn’t intended to permanently sit as a figure on a character sheet. Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax both planned their campaigns (Blackmoor and Greyhawk, respectively) such that the endgame involved becoming leaders of massive armies that would be played out with the original tabletop army battle rules that had led to the creation of D&D. And such leaders need coin to build fortresses, raise armies, amass fleets, et cetera. The original rules included prices for such massive investments like castles and ships, as well as to hire the men-at-arms to put in them.

The problem with this was, of course, that this ‘endgame’ play didn’t hold the same interest with most of the player base. It wasn’t even just new players who were more interested in the dungeons, it was the original players themselves who kept returning to the monster-filled underground labyrinths in hope of another score. Dave Arneson’s crew spent so much time in the dungeons beneath Castle Blackmoor—originally intended as a minor diversion to the war on the surface—that he eventually declared his players had lost the above-ground conflict by forfeit! D&D, it would seem, was to be a game of slaying monsters and collecting treasure hoards to make Scrooge McDuck blush in envy.

As might be expected, in subsequent editions, gold rewards were slightly scaled back. But more significantly, we got bigger gold sinks. Much bigger gold sinks. In particular, the rules for magic item creation, which Gygax had envisioned as an activity solely for high-level characters (ideally as a hobby picked up in retirement), were expanded to the point that characters would constantly be dumping the wealth of a small city into crafting some new sword or wand. This, of course, led to a proliferation of magic items, meaning that they became less wondrous and more like commodities, much to the chagrin of many players.

To combat this, Fifth Edition went back to the drawing board with magic items, with new rules for their creation and a deliberate attempt to curb the so-called ‘magic item economy’. But by minimizing such a significant gold sink, many parties now don’t have too much to spend it on, meaning that Dungeon Masters are often asking their peers whether they’re doing something wrong, and if anyone can offer guidance on an appropriate amount of gold to give out.

Recommended Gold Rewards

So how much, then, is the right amount of gold for a Fifth Edition party to receive? This is a difficult question to answer, as each table and each campaign are very different. If you are running a low fantasy campaign, possibly one where actual money is scarce and most trade is done with bartering or jewellery (as was the case, for example, in early medieval England after the value of Roman coins tanked and people melted them down for their precious metals), then you probably aren’t going to want to dump an entire economy’s worth of coins on your players. On the other hand, if your campaign is of a more high fantasy style, finding tonnes of coin might suit the theme.

The official books, for all they emphasize that every play style and setting are valid, seem to keep at their core an assumption that campaigns are going to be on the epic side of fantasy, where every town larger than a few dozen people has at least one wizard or cleric; orcs, goblins, and trolls prowl just beyond every hill; evil cults infest the underbelly of every moderately affluent society; and great feats of magic-empowered heroism are regularly needed to save the day. The rules presented in the books all support this, including the recommended gold rewards, which far exceed most people’s expectations.

On page 133 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide, we are told:

Over the course of a typical campaign, a party finds treasure hoards amounting to seven rolls on the Challenge 0–4 table, 18 rolls on the Challenge 5–10 table, twelve rolls on the challenge 11–16 table, and eight rolls on the Challenge 17+ table.

D&d Gold Coin

That’s just the treasure hoards, mind you. If you fight 1,000 enemies along the way to claiming these hoards, those enemies might be carrying coins, gems, or art objects with values you can determine by rolling on the Individual Treasure tables (DMG 136). On 30 orcs you would find an average of 14,913 cp (497.1 × 30), much of it in larger coins and other more convenient forms of transferable wealth. With no way to determine how many enemies will be fought along the way, it’s impossible to say how much extra cash would be claimed this way, so it’s easier to think of it as simply covering the party’s lifestyle expenses.

So how much money is this? Well, if you average out the results (see the Methodology section at the end of the article), this is what a typical party is expected to get in a 20-level career:

Level	Coin Gain (gp)	Coin Total (gp)
1	0	0
2	877	877
3	877	1,753
4	877	2,630
5	13,634	16,263
6	13,634	29,897
7	13,634	43,530
8	13,634	57,164
9	13,634	70,797
10	13,634	84,431
11	72,425	156,856
12	72,425	229,281
13	72,425	301,706
14	72,425	374,131
15	72,425	446,556
16	72,425	518,981
17	672,050	1,191,031
18	672,050	1,863,081
19	672,050	2,535,131
20	672,050	3,207,181

This means that, by level 20, a party of four adventurers will each have about 800,000 gp. That’s enough for each person to build a small castle and run it for 20 years (longer if they actually use such a resource to generate income by collecting tolls, charging rent in the surrounding lands, growing crops, raising cattle, breeding horses, and so on).

Just holding all 16,000 lbs of their gold would require 32

D&d Gold To Real Money