Instead of referring to monetary values, you could also say something like “This chest contains treasure worth 100 XP” or “This goblin has trinkets worth 10 XP in their pockets”. This doesn’t translate quite as well for spending money, but it might work for GMs who deal directly with handing out treasure etc.
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Possibly worth another topic is the general concept of by what standard is wealth measured, and how that affects the prices of everything. I’ve been working off the idea that a basic day’s wage - and food & lodging - is 3gp and trying to base other costs off that, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t accurately reflected a realistic value of things.
It’s like trying to describe things in kilos and occasionally switch to pounds while not having a great concept of weight in general.
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I’ve moved the relevant message to a dedicated topic, so we can have both discussions in parallel.
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Neat - good idea!
So, while setting certainly does make a huge difference on values, does anyone have a general rule of thumb when calculating prices?
I quite like the idea of having everything measured by how many days’ work it is worth, which could make things easier to transpose across systems as well as reinforce the somewhat subjective nature of cost in a faux-medieval setting. Is my idea of half a day’s work the same as yours? Do you really think that sword is worth eight day’s work?
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I think that, depending on what you want to achieve as a module designer, you can go two ways:
- Refer to some common object (like the Big Mac for the Big Mac Index) if you want to get a more immersive feeling; like “the dragon’s treasure can buy 10.000 swords”
- Use an XP reference, if you want to go for a more immediately gameable content; like “the dragon’s treasure should be enough to bring 4 PCs from level 4 to 5”
Both are extremely subjective and converting from one to the other might not be easy: maybe in your system selling 10.000 swords will give you enough experience to advance a party of 4 from level 1 to 10.
Another thing that could work is make some assumption at the beginning and let the GM do the conversion, like “this dungeon is worth 4 levels”, but this will slow down the conversion. In the end, I think it’s a trade off between precision and ease of conversion.
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I hope self-referencing my own blog content is ok? Still figuring out the etiquette here. 
But this seems directly relevant to this conversation. Earlier this month I wrote a blog post about a streamlined way to handle wealth and treasure in semi-abstract terms, ‘borrowed’ from an obscure PbtA game called “A Land of Ice and Blades.” I like this idea because you don’t need exact answers to the different prices between, say, a 3-copper Big Mac and the 4 copper variant with extra cheese - but, on the other hand, this system still gives more detail and feels more ‘real’ than a purely abstract system. In case it’s of interest:
https://gundobadgames.blogspot.com/2020/04/streamlining-play-rules-for-wealth.html
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I’ve been doing something similar to ground prices in my campaign. If available, I add the labor costs of the ingredients plus the labor cost of the final product times 2 or 3. This is because I think the price of a commodity shouldn’t be enough to just make profit over the one exchange, but to be able to reproduce that the commodity again to continue the cycle.
For example, I saw a thread on Reddit regarding 5e, where the DM was asking whether 50 gp is too high a price for a health potion that costs 25 gp to make. Not if you consider that you only have 25 gp leftover, enough to make another potion but not enough to have any more wealth accumulate!
In my campaign, I’ve set one copper equal to one hour of labor such that one silver equals ten copper and one day of labor. That way, there’s decent granularity with prices for lower-valued items.
I love this system you’ve outlined! Having different currencies for different scales of society is really nice. It reminds me of the system from D20 modern where you have a Wealth attribute, and you can either roll above the attribute to see if you can afford expensive items, or not roll if your Wealth is above the Wealth value of the item. Except the system you wrote about is much more streamlined and easily understood in the world of the game. I love this!
It can also serve to highlight distinct lifestyles and economic classes, provided that ‘translating’ from copper to silver to gold is largely prohibited for simplicity’s sake. A peasant could buy a donkey or pack horse, but could never dream of buying a warhorse like a noble can. This strict separation might require another leap of faith on the players’ part, and would also require extra thinking on what constitutes XP. Does all money count for XP, or is there an underlying kind of value? Maybe that value is XP.
But I think the article you wrote does assume that there can be conversion between different currencies, which means this isn’t a big problem!
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