How Medieval Price Wars Can Save Your DnD Economy

Your players just asked how much a war elephant costs, and you’re frantically researching “medieval livestock prices” while they wait. Meanwhile, another player wants to know why the village blacksmith has better inventory than the trading guild, and honestly, you don’t have good answers.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: D&D’s economy is broken by design. The designers admitted as much in the DMG, essentially saying ‘we know there are infinite wealth loopholes — sorry.’ Luckily, you don’t need economic precision to create meaningful economic choices. You need adventure-driving scarcity, relationship-based pricing, and consequences that matter.

How Economic Chaos Can Kill Your Game

Economic inconsistencies don’t just break immersion—they destroy player agency. When your fighter realizes that a handful of carrots or dining silver costs more than a ruby (looking at you, BG3), or when your party accumulates 500,000 gold pieces with nothing meaningful to spend them on, players stop making interesting economic choices.

Broken economies eliminate a fun avenue for strategic thinking. When prices are arbitrary and wealth has no consequences, you lose an interesting dimension of gameplay that drives exploration, creates social conflicts, and provides natural adventure hooks.

Unfortunately, the economy in Dungeons & Dragons (especially 5th Edition) feels less like a functioning system and more like a loose framework for adventurers to spend gold. To be fair, this is by design:

“The Game Is Not an Economy

The rules of the game aren’t intended to model a realistic economy, and players who look for loopholes that let them generate infinite wealth using combinations of spells are exploiting the rules.” -DMG p19

_{This quote is under the ‘Players Exploiting The Rules’ section of the DMG, and TBH this section is worth re-reviewing occasionally as you get into heated discussion with your players.}

The State of the Game

My opinion is that the designers actually did the right thing here. They focused on the gameplay instead of attempting to model a realistic medieval-fantasy economy. However, this means that all DMs face a common set of problems that can really hurt player immersion and engagement. Things like:

• Inconsistent Pricing: The costs of things are static, and based on a desired character progression rather than a real economic system.
• Adventurer-Centric Economy: The economy is designed around adventurers, so the cost of items, services, and wages aren’t logical. Commoners would struggle to afford basic things. Healing potions, weapons, and armor are priced in ways that would make them inaccessible to almost all of the population, so there would be little actual incentive to create them.
• Gold Inflation: Adventurers accumulate vast amounts of gold, but there’s little in the way of meaningful sinks to remove that excess wealth from the game (although callout to the new Bastion and updated Crafting systems from 2024, I see you trying). Over time, your campaign will evolve into an economic imbalance where players have more money than they can reasonably spend.
• Lack of Economic Rules: The game doesn’t provide detailed mechanics for trade, taxation, or economic stability. This does keep the focus on adventuring, but it makes world-building difficult for Dungeon Masters and players who want a more realism.

Many DMs just hand-wave these issues, or they house-rule basic economic systems (usually adding sinks) to make things more coherent. Some common tricks I’ve seen being used:

• Revised Item Pricing: Adjusting the cost of goods and services to make them more realistic.
• Taxation & Fees: Introducing taxes, guild fees, or maintenance costs for bastions to create meaningful gold sinks.
• Living Expenses: Requiring players to pay for food, lodging, and lifestyle expenses regularly to simulate a functioning economy and create more sinks.
• Magic Item Scarcity: Limiting the availability of magic items for purchase or crafting (this one is probably the most important, since it has a much stronger effect on all aspects gameplay).

All these are good options, and we’ll talk more about both issues and solutions in future posts, but for now lets focus on pricing.

Bandit Economics

Let me show you how economic thinking can transform random encounters into adventures. In my current campaign, players kept encountering bandits on trade routes — typical random encounters that could have been forgettable.

Instead, I started thinking economically. Why were bandits targeting specific caravans? Who was funding them? What did their success mean for local prices?

The players discovered that a rival noble family was funding bandits to selectively disrupt trade in enemy territories. This created a wonderful political conspiracy. But here’s where economic thinking really paid off: when the players exposed the nobles and cut off bandit funding, I didn’t end the story — I followed the economic logic.

With funding gone, desperate bandits escalated to raiding homesteads, and trade stopped entirely. One economic relationship — bandits disrupting trade — generated multiple sessions of interconnected adventures because I followed the logical consequences rather than treating economy as background decoration.

You could imagine going even further with:

• Weapon prices skyrocketing because the roads were now too dangerous to access.
• The blacksmith begged the party for help clear out the bandits and the mine.
• Regional politics shifting as neighboring monster clans begin raiding for metal goods.

Pricing Method 1: The Anchor System

Medieval economies operated on principles that can help solve pricing. Regional specialization created natural scarcity. Seasonal fluctuations drove urgent decisions. Transportation costs made distance matter. Most importantly, every transaction was negotiable based on relationships, risk, and immediate circumstances — giving you permission to be flexible with pricing while still feeling authentic.

Medieval merchants didn’t consult standardized price lists — they negotiated in real time based on rarity, relationships, and risk. This gives you permission to be flexible with prices. To introduce some pricing variances, start with the magic item rarity progression from the SRD, but apply it to everything:

Rarity:

• Uncommon: ×4 cost (special order, takes time)
• Common: ×1 cost (easily found locally)
• Rare: ×40 (significant connections required)
• Very Rare: ×400 (major quest component)
• Legendary: ×2000 (centerpiece of story arc)

Risk Multipliers:

• Safe: ×1
• Questionable legality: ×4
• Definitely illegal: ×400
• Suicidally dangerous: ×2000

Regional Modifiers:

• Coastal towns: Cheap seafood, salt, spices; expensive grains, worked metal
• Mining settlements: Cheap weapons, armor, gems; expensive food, textiles
• Agricultural centers: Cheap grains, livestock; expensive everything else

Example: Pricing a War Elephant

Player: “How much for a trained war elephant?”

The process:

1. Anchor to known item: Heavy warhorse costs 400 gp
2. Apply multipliers: Elephant is rarer (×4), more powerful (×2), harder to transport (×4)
3. Quick calculation: 400 × 4 × 2 × 4 = 12,800 gp

Tip: Downtime economics:

Some players really love haggling over each and every thing, but in my experience most players don’t. There are few things more excruciating than listening to two people roleplay their trading scenario in the session, unless it’s a key part of the story. Haggling and strange pricing requests are sometimes best solved offline. Our group has a discord channel specifically for this sort of thing.

Method 2: “Yes, And…” Economics

Instead of shutting down unusual requests, transform them into story drivers. Every economic question is really asking “how does this work in your world?”

Player: “We want to buy a flying ship.”
Your Response: “House Lyrandar has one they might sell — for 100,000 gp, a binding exclusive transport contract, and proof you can handle the political consequences of owning it.”

Player: “Can we hire wizards to research this?”
Your Response: “The Academy would love the project — for 5,000 gp per wizard per month, access to your research findings, and a guarantee you’ll defend them if their experiments go wrong.”

Notice how each response includes three elements:

1. Base cost (using anchoring)
2. Ongoing obligations (creating a future adventure hook)
3. Potential complications (driving story)

This gives you realistic pricing while creating natural adventure opportunities. That war elephant isn’t just expensive — acquiring one becomes a quest that could involve exotic animal traders, international politics, and transportation logistics.

Method 3: The Help Action

There are existing pricing tables that you can easily house-rule – a couple favorites of mine:

• Saidoro’s list of Sane Magical Prices https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8XAiXpOfz9cMWt1RTBicmpmUDg/view?resourcekey=0-ceHUken0_UhQ3Apa6g4SJA
• Expanded living expenses from Roll20 https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Expenses

Using expanded prices like these helps take the cognitive load off your brain each time a player wants to buy a thing.

You can also crowdsource. When players catch you completely off-guard, ask them: “What do you think would be fair cost and time to acquire this?” Then double whatever they suggest. Players are usually more reasonable than they initially appear, and involving them in pricing decisions creates buy-in for whatever complications you add.

When players catch you completely off-guard, use these emergency responses:

• Acknowledge creativity: “That’s a clever idea! Let me think about what would be involved.”
• Buy time: “Give me until next session to price that properly.”
• Stall with skill rolls: “Make some Investigation checks and tell me what you discover about acquiring something like that.”
• Inject a Complication: “That’s not something you buy—that’s something you earn or find.”.

Implementation: An Emergency Pricing Kit

Quick Pricing Reference:

• Take any PHB item as anchor
• Apply rarity multiplier (×1 to ×2000)
• Apply risk multiplier (×1 to ×2000)
• Add regional modifiers (×0.5 to ×2)
• Include story complications

Emergency Responses:

• “That’s expensive, but possible”
• “You’ll need special connections”
• “That purchase comes with obligations”

Adventure Conversion:
Every unusual purchase should generate:

• An immediate quest (to acquire it)
• Ongoing complications (maintaining it)
• Future opportunities (what it enables)

Start simple, use the anchor system for unusual requests, add complications that create adventures, and remember that the journey to acquire something can be more interesting than simply owning it. When your players start having heated discussions about trade routes and regional costs, you’ll know it’s working.

Better Than Gold: Economic Gameplay

Remember that your players aren’t trying to break your economy — they’re trying to engage with your world creatively. When someone asks about buying a war elephant, they’re really asking about your world. They want to learn more about its politics, transportation systems, and power structures.

Also remember that the goal isn’t economic realism — it’s about providing meaningful player choices. Medieval merchants understood that every transaction was a relationship, every price was negotiable, and every deal created new opportunities or obligations. You can play your campaign economy in the same way.

Your economy shouldn’t necessarily simulate reality — it should drive story. And if a player asks how much that war elephant costs, smile and start imagining all of the adventure hooks.