Money and Prices in Post-Apocalyptic Settings

 I've been puzzling over this one for a while.  The standard D&D money system with set price lists really doesn't feel right for a post-apocalyptic setting.  A good post-apocalyptic money (or barter or whatever) system should have two qualities:

First, there should be no set price list, because prices are going to vary dramatically in a world where trade isn't safe or regular, and shortages are frequent.  Also, I'm constantly going to be introducing new things for sale and I'd rather not obsess over finding the "right" price for it.

Second, whatever people use as money needs to have clear practical value as something other than money.  No fiat currency, obviously, but also no shell money.  Ain't no patience for fancy money in the wasteland!

So that leaves three options that I can see, and I'll show you what I settled on in the end, including how I set prices.  

Barter

Barter seems thematic for the fucked-up remnants of a fallen civilization on a blasted planet.  Trade animal pelts for lodging, a gun for some gasoline, some doodads from a ruined city for bullets.

The only problem is it gets incredibly tedious.  And imprecise.  And makes it hard to accumulate and store wealth.  Okay, barter sucks, which is why money is one of the first things humans invented.

Commodity Money

By commodity money, I mean the common expendable items everyone needs are now money.  Something like:

Cup of water– copper piece

Bullet- silver piece

Ration– gold piece

Can of gasoline– Platinum piece

This makes a lot more thematic sense.  Using bullets as money is metal as fuck.  It has a few problems though.

First, it strains realism, if you care about that.  Gasoline actually only keeps a few months.  Bullets might keep for years if they're well-made and stored properly, which they probably wouldn't be.

Second, what if the value of these commodities changes?  That's always true for money of course, but seems a more likely issue when the money is perishable.

Third, and most importantly in my mind, it negates one of the main challenge vectors of an OSR game: managing resource depletion.  As an expedition goes on, you should run low on food, ammo, torches/batteries and the like, while accumulating treasure.  At some point you have to make the hard decision to head back to town for rest and supplies.

So if the treasure you gain largely consists of the same resources you deplete during an adventure, much of the resource management aspect of the game is lost.

Alright, So Actual Money Then

But like I said before: no set prices that are consistent from village to village– or even month to month.  And the money has to be useful stuff, which after all money originally was.  Here are the coins I'll use in my campaign:

Copper penny– used for wiring, cookware, cups and plates, making bronze and brass

Scrap (or titanium– decent-quality pre-apocalypse alloys anyway) dime– used as a structural material for things that need to be tough like weapons, armor, and certain parts of vehicles and buildings.

Silver dollar– used for mirrors, jewelry, batteries, electrical contacts, weapons for use against supernatural threats, dental fillings, certain medicines, etc.

Gold pound– used for electronics, dental fillings, jewelry, or electroplated over other things to rust-proof it.  So-called because it's usually worth about a pound of scrap metal.

Platinum crown– used for catalytic converters in vehicles, high-temperature applications, certain electrical parts, and certain medicines.  And extremely fancy jewelry. So-called because you're rich if you have a few platinum coins.  

Like most games, each coin is worth ten of the next cheapest one, so a crown is worth 100 dollars, or 10,000 pennies.  

Items cost d4 coins by default.  What kind of coins?  Depends on the item.

Basic consumables like food, water, lodging, bullets and torches cost copper pennies.

Basic low-tech gear, minor luxuries like wine, and low-tech weapons and armor cost scrap.  By low-tech, I mean anything a pre-industrial culture could make, not withstanding that more advanced alloys may be used since there's pre-tech scrap metal lying around.

More specialized gear, small animals like cats, dogs and chickens, low-tech vehicles like bicycles, rowboats or wagons, and modern tech weapons and armor cost silver.

Land (in town– land in the middle of nowhere is free to whoever can hold it), cobbled-together modern tech vehicles (motorcycles and small buggies), and small futuristic tech devices, weapons and armor cost gold, as do really fancy luxuries

Magic items and small futuristic vehicles cost platinum

Move up a coin size if it’s particularly fancy, i.e. fine food rather than cheap food, a private room in the inn rather than the common room, a custom car rather than a beater, a decent sword rather than a spear or dagger, chainmail rather than padded.  Move up two coin types if it’s really fancy, i.e. plate armor, a rare vintage of wine, or a bazooka.  

Move up a coin type for every order of magnitude of size above personal items– car, house, ship, fortress, etc.    

Move down a coin size if it's a piece of shit– a care that might break down any time now, spoiled food, a rusty weapon, etc.  

Items cost d4 coins.  If size is relevant like with armor or meals, d4+1 if sized for someone big, d3 if sized for someone small.  Double, triple or quadruple the price if there’s a shortage.  

If there's a glut of an item, you might get a small discount on one, but you can get much bigger discounts for buying in bulk.  In other words, if there's a surplus of something it's meant for export to other towns.

Examples:

Plate armor: low-tech armor is scrap, but custom-made plate armor is extremely fancy and expensive, so that's gold.  If you can't afford that, mass-produced 3/4 plate is silver. 

A modern sniper rifle– modern weapons are silver, but sniper rifles are kinda fancy, so gold.  If you can't afford that, a lower-quality bolt-action hunting rifle could be silver.  

A crappy modern-tech motorcycle would cost gold.  A big all-terrain van that can hold the whole party plus hirelings, gear and loot would cost platinum, as would a really good motorcycle.  A really good big ATV would cost tens of platinum!  On the other hand, if you really want a ride for the whole party at cut-rate prices, you can get a sketchy battle van for gold.  Your funeral.

Whatever price you roll, that's the price in that town for the near future.  Yes, the same item might cost 4x as much in the next town over.  If so, there's a reason why prices haven't equalized, like bandits preventing regular trade between the two towns, or the towns just don't get along.  Figure out what the reason is, and turn it into an adventure seed.   

An Abstract Wealth System for OSR Games

I've been trying to figure out how to do this for ages, and I think I've figured out a system that works alright, at least.  Not playtested yet.

This is meant for modern and futuristic games, but could work for games set in the past as long as the characters are embedded in society.  Like, they have jobs and money in the bank, they're not hobos whose wealth is all carried.  For futuristic games consider using this with reputation network rules. 

Treat wealth, mechanically, as working like an ability score.  It has a raw value from zero to twenty (or thirty if your system allows that) and a modifier calculated like any other ability score modifier.  It represents a combination of savings, non-adventuring income from whatever your day job is, and social class.  

A wealth score of 10 roughly represents the average American, so monthly income of around five thousand dollars, net worth of around a hundred thousand.  

However, because it combines income and savings, a person with a decent wealth score could theoretically have negative net worth combined with a good income, maybe.  That happens with abstracted systems.  

Generate a starting wealth score at character creation.  If you want players to start out poor like in most games, they start with something like d4 wealth plus a few items.  If you're fine with them starting out rich– and presumably getting rich isn't the object of the game– you can roll 3d6 like every other ability score.  Or any other method.  Up to you.  

Wealth score goes down (usually temporarily, sometimes permanently) when you buy stuff, and up if you acquire enough money to raise it.  It takes damage just like your ability scores can. 

Super important note: You need to have guidelines for how many dollars wealth levels and purchases represent, and I provide them.  That doesn't mean you should actually count dollar prices all the time, which defeats the whole point of an abstract wealth mechanic.  Just view all of them as very approximate guidelines.  

Making Purchases

Conceptually, there you can think of all purchases as falling into one of five categories.  

Trivial purchases that will never be significant no matter how many you make.  Putting a few bucks in the parking meter, buying a cheap fast food meal.  

You can generally make as many of these as you want.  If you abuse that, like by buying stiff for the whole group, these start to count as minor purchases instead.

Anything that costs up to (Wealth) dollars is trivial.

Minor purchases that you generally don't think twice about, but that would add up to being significant if you made them routinely.  Eating at somewhat nicer restaurants, going to the movies, stuff like that.  

A minor purchase here and there doesn't cost wealth.  If you make (Wealth) minor purchases in quick succession– like within a week, or an adventuring session– your wealth score suffers one point of temporary damage. 

Anything that is more than trivial and costs up to (Wealth squared) dollars is minor.  

Significant purchases are things you can afford to pay cash for, but they're expensive enough that you do have to budget for them and make up for the cost by being frugal elsewhere.  For middle-class people, electronics like phones, TVs, and laptops generally fall into this category, as do small vacations like a weekend ski trip within driving distance.  

A significant purchase inflicts a point or more of temporary wealth damage.  

Anything up to (Wealth cubed) dollars is significant and causes one point of temporary wealth damage.  

Anything up to twice that much causes three points of temporary wealth damage, anything up to (wealth cubed times three) causes six points of temporary wealth damage, anything up to (wealth cubed times four) causes ten points of temporary wealth damage, and anything up to (wealth cubed times five) causes fifteen points of temporary wealth damage.

Temporary wealth damage means you've dipped into your savings, but not had to go into debt (or at least not serious long-term debt), nor sell of significant assets to finance your purchase.  You just have to live frugally for a while to make up for your purchase.  You can't make a purchase if the temporary wealth damage would take your wealth below zero.

Major purchases are things you can't afford to pay cash for.  You either have to finance them with a loan, or sell off some investments to free up cash for them.  Stuff like cars and homes usually fall into this category, as might a major vacation.  

Major purchases permanently reduce your wealth score by a point.  

Anything up to (Wealth to the fourth power, times five) dollars is a major purchase.  

If you want to purchase something bigger than that, calculate how many dollars the next wealth level down is worth.  Like if you're wealth 10, major purchase is 50k, but wealth nine is 32k, so dropping down from wealth 10 to wealth 8 would let you purchase something costing up to 82k.  

Finally, there are things you just can't afford, period.  

It's okay to be approximate with all of these numbers– the whole point of systems like this is to avoid having to actually count money.  As long as you're not off by more than a factor of two, maybe three, this system works fine.  If you're off by an order of magnitude then it breaks down.  

Restoring Temporary Wealth Damage and Increasing Wealth

Temporary wealth damage "heals" at a rate of one point per month during downtime.  During adventuring, you can heal it by acquiring cash equal to however much a significant purchase would be to you.

Increasing wealth is simply the reverse of making a major purchase.  If you're at wealth 5, then buying your way up to wealth 6 will cost (6^4 x 5) dollars, or $6,480.  Again, you can be very approximate with this and you don't need to make players count money.  "A few thousand dollars" would be good enough in this example.  

If you want your game to be a gritty realistic crime game like The Wire, then money has to be laundered before you can use it to buy up your permanent wealth score– but "dirty" money can still be used to restore temporary wealth damage.  

But What About the Wealth Modifier?

The wealth modifier could get applied to rolls where your social class is important, like a test to get into some exclusive high-class club.  

It would also apply when you're trying to use your money to accomplish something, but simply having money is necessary but not sufficient to succeed.  Like if you want to systematically bribe a lot of people, it helps to have more money but it's still not guaranteed that you can find people to bribe or that they'll take a bribe.  

Overall though, the modifier maybe won't get used much, but it's there if you need it.

But What About Billionaires?  

If you've done the math then you've realized that even a wealth 20 individual has a net worth of only a few million dollars, and a wealth 30 individual has somewhere in the low tens of millions.  There are two ways to portray higher wealth.

First, you could just let wealth get as high as it needs to, but stop increasing the modifier, or increase it more slowly, beyond a certain point.

Second, you could not use this system, and instead use a domain game mechanic to represent larger amounts of wealth.  Beyond a certain point, a rich person's wealth is basically an organization unto itself.  I prefer this method, and I'm working on a system for representing organizations that I'll share someday.  

That said, this method is more than enough to get your party beyond the point where they'd either retire or move their focus to domain-level play.