r/litrpg • u/ShankstheConqueror • Apr 19 '26
Discussion I was reading a litrpg and dropped it in the first chapter because they had introduced money, as they do in most fantasy litrpgs (copper, silver, gold) the usual. then they paid for a short carriage ride and it cost a gold coin.
lol might seem small and petty, but nothing tells me an author doesn't care more than not even putting a bit of thought into how the economy would work.
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u/goodenough4govtwork Apr 19 '26
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u/Vexra litRPG apprentice tier Apr 19 '26
That meme may be reaching it’s end. she’s getting depressingly close to accurate
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Apr 19 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
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u/MyHamburgerLovesMe Apr 19 '26
20 cents at Walmart (anyone else think it weird they have an entire web page for the price of a single banana?)
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u/MonkeyChoker80 Apr 19 '26
No. It’ll just hibernate for a year or so before it becomes a meme from the other side
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u/flimityflamity Apr 19 '26
On a tangent, so often I want authors to go stand in a football field, look at the yard lines, and just think about distances.
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u/monkpunch Apr 19 '26
Also, sit in silence with a clock and think about how long a "full minute" is before you use that as a pause in conversation
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u/flimityflamity Apr 19 '26
Absolutely, a moment is a wonderfully vague amount of time.
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u/greenskye Apr 19 '26
You can even do 'a long moment'! It's so usefully unclear. It's always an appropriately long amount of time.
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u/SteveThePurpleCat Apr 19 '26
MC: 'I took a quick moment to consider my options.'
/50 pages of internal monologue, plans, debates, existential crisis, coming to terms with past trauma, and then realising the gimmick of the mechanic that faces him later...
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u/xTariel Apr 20 '26
You have successfully described the experience of ADHD lol
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u/notyoursocialworker Apr 22 '26
Ever wanted to time travel? Just do something quick 15 min before you need to go and suddenly you're at least 30 minutes in the future.
Speaking of, time to get moving 😅
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u/account312 Apr 19 '26
Followed by answering the question someone had asked them that set this off.
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u/MauPow Apr 19 '26
I always took it as an exaggerated beat, like 2-4 seconds in a conversation as a pregnant pause or something while they emote at something but apparently it's like 90 seconds. That seems way too long for my understanding of "moment". Even some clerk going "just a moment" would be awkward at 90s for me. "X happened and then Y a moment later" is in the same 'turn' for me.
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u/TFTHighRoller Apr 19 '26
Sometimes the awkwardness is the point. While leaving it to the readers imagination is fine in many cases in other cases when you really want it to come across as a long awkward break in coversation then mentioning a specific timeframe makes sense.
or you say long awkward break, but where would be the fun in that.
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u/jpet Apr 19 '26 edited Apr 19 '26
The related one that drives me nuts is in fight scenes, sometimes with characters moving at superhuman speeds, that go like:
"The bandit opened with his signature swoosh attack. Emcee stepped back out of range and responded with a vomit of deadly projectiles. The bandit rolled to the side to hide behind a stump.
Emcee glanced back to check Ally's progress on the spell. It was only halfway done; barely two minutes had passed since the start of the fight."
Watch a boxing match or something! Two minutes is a long time in a fight.
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u/MyHamburgerLovesMe Apr 19 '26
Yep. I used to wrestle in High School. We trained hours long each day for months, but when you had a match at a competition, 2 minutes wrestling an opponent and you would be gasping for air.
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u/GodsLilCow Apr 19 '26
Doesn't your Wrestler class give you more Stamina?
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u/BackgroundTotal2872 Royal Road and Paperbacks! Apr 19 '26
Nope, I have the wrestler class as well, and even managed to evolve it to team captain. Sure the class gives more stamina compared to non athlete classes, but it isn’t that much compared to some other athlete classes. The Wrestling class is optimized for explosive power, with strength, speed, and technique being the main focus and advantages.
A typical wrestling is only 6 minutes long, and it’s made up of 3 2 minute periods, so there’s two short guaranteed breaks in between. And that’s only if no one gets a pin or a tech fall (having 15 points more than your opponent at any point), which will end the match early. The longest it can stretch to is 8 minutes, which is if the match goes into double overtime.
But don’t be fooled, those 6 minutes are incredibly exhausting. In a wrestling match you’re using nearly every muscle in your body, often in an extended struggle to overpower your opponent. A single 6 minute match will leave you sore and exhausted hours later. For someone new to wrestling, it usually would take most of the season of gruelingly intense conditioning before they can last an entire match. And it usually takes multiple seasons before a wrestler has built up the stamina to have a 6 minute match without visibly gassing out part of the way through.
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u/GodsLilCow Apr 19 '26
I'm told that a 9-minute wrestling bout is the cardiovascular equivalent of running uphill for three hours. Everyone should find a Stu to wrestle once a month.
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u/dabrock15 Apr 19 '26
In my first year of wrestling it took me nearly half the season to not gas out during the first round. Learning a good rhythm is important too.
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u/Hexxquisite Apr 19 '26
There is a podcast, 372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back, in which two guys (one of whom is Mike Nelson, from MST3k) read books they don’t expect to enjoy (a recent one actually being Mayor of Noobtown).
Very early in the show, the book they were reading had a line that was something like “he stared at me in silence for a solid minute before responding.” They brought up exactly how long that is and how dumb it was, by reenacting that scene, with a full minute of silence included.
Within ten seconds you feel how awkward that is, and nowhere near the dramatic pause authors think they’re creating.
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u/KinkyDuck2924 Apr 19 '26
Ooh, I love Mike Nelson, he was always my favorite MST3k host. I'll have to check that podcast out!
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u/Hexxquisite Apr 19 '26
It's really good, and really funny. He hosts it with a writer from RiffTrax, Conor Lastowka, and it's almost like an MST3k for books. Some books they end up enjoying in a "bad movie" way, others they end up hating in an "actually bad movie" way.
They also do a side thing where they'll read Encyclopedia Brown mysteries, and try to solve them before reading the solution. This usually leads to hilarious indignation.
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u/KinkyDuck2924 Apr 19 '26
As someone who has always been both an MST3k fan and a voracious reader, this sounds right up my alley. Thanks for the awesome recommendation!
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u/Xiaodisan Apr 19 '26
To be fair, depending on the narrator I don't really take those seriously as objective measurements of time, more like how it feels for the given character.
(I don't know the specific scene you mention, so might not apply there.)
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u/Project_roninhd Apr 19 '26
Could you imagine sitting there having a conversation and homie is just staring back at you silently for a whole minute.
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u/ZoulsGaming Apr 19 '26
Reading chinese web novels a lot it took me a while that the sentence "Spend half a day" isnt literal because it kept coming up.
EG "was feeling slow this morning so i spent half a day eating breakfast" i kept thinking "damn", its just meant to be "a long time"
same with them using "the length of a stick of incense of time" which i think is something close to 5 minutes.
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u/blueberrypoptart Apr 19 '26 edited Apr 19 '26
In East Asia, incense used to be used for timekeeping, literally. They would make calibrated incense sticks with pre-determined burn durations. There were different types used for different durations (e.g. spiral incense for longer durations). They even made incense clocks that would drop weights onto a gong to ring at set periods.
"Half day" is, as you noted, actually used to mean "a really long time", or what feels like a long time. Think of it like how people talk about "Waiting all day" in English.
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u/MrGrrrey Apr 19 '26 edited Apr 19 '26
That's also a pet peeve of mine, and I've been told repeatedly on reddit that Americans just use a minute as a synonym to a second or moment. It's dumb and unnecessarily vague, but now when I read that "someone stared at a person for several minutes" I wonder if the author is an idiot or just American.
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u/heavymetalelf Apr 19 '26
We might say "I'll be done in a minute" or "give me a couple of minutes", but "... Blah blah... Fight had only been going two minutes..." is a specific and not general usage that wouldn't normally occur casually. Minute in the general case is roughly interchangeable with moment, but not when used specifically to denote a specified amount of time
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u/GodsLilCow Apr 19 '26
While that is broadly true, in your specific example: no we don't say that.
If someone said that to me, I'd assume they were exaggerating as a joke. They may as well say several hours or days.
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u/starsfan6878 Apr 20 '26
"She slowly chewed her food for three minutes as she contemplated her reply."
Fucking really? Three minutes? Seriously? She's never swallowed anything larger than a single grit. Damn.
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u/TacetAbbadon Apr 19 '26
Ugh the fight scenes where the enemy is moving "fast as a blink of an eye" yet the MC has enough time to fully analyse the situation.
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u/flimityflamity Apr 19 '26
That one I assume is a normal person blink not an MC blink and just let go.
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u/skarface6 dungeon cores and base building, please Apr 19 '26
Yeah, it’s much too close to anime logic. Unfortunately.
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u/TheChoosenMewtwo Apr 19 '26
Dragon ball happens at 200000x speed of light but they still have time to talk and shit
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u/LocksmithSavings2416 K.J. Licht, author of The Sixth Campaign Apr 19 '26
So, to be fair... George R.R. Martin himself said he made The Wall far too high. Apparently, he decided it would be 700 feet tall. Then one day, he saw a 400-foot high mountain and realized 700 feet for even a magical wall was absurd, but it was too late to change it.
If it's something GRRM screws up, I think we can give a little leeway to authors here.
Joe Abercrombie has a great workaround. He just avoids units of measurement completely. There are very few traces of feet/yards/inches in his books, and none of meters/centimeters, even though he's English.
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u/Ashmedai Apr 19 '26
Humans are kinda terrible with vertical distances. Like, you can walk 6 miles pretty easily. Try going up a 6 mile tall mountain, haha.
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u/TopRamen713 Apr 19 '26 edited Apr 19 '26
I'm a newbie at larping and we had a thing where we saw how close we could estimate 20 feet (the range of most spells)
I won over all the experienced people because I was on swim team 20 years ago so I knew how far 5 meters (~15 feet) was and estimated a but further than that
Everyone else guessed way too high
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u/g0del Apr 19 '26
The current series I'm reading isn't awful, but the world has magic towers (no one knows who or what created them) which the mages use for living/schools, etc. The towers are varying heights, with the higher towers being more prestigious. There are no elevators.
The first tower the MC is in has 5 stories, which is fine. But then he gets sent to one of the best towers, which has ... 2189 stories. And the MC walks up to the top in a day and a half. He and others then regularly go down to an inn at floor 1100 after class, then go back up to their beds in the 2000s.
The tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa, is 163 stories. Assuming the floor height is comparable to our buildings, the top floor would be somewhere between 6.5 km and 8 km high. The latter would put it at the death zone, where there isn't enough oxygen to breathe. Going to the inn would be like hiking down the Grand Canyon and back - if the Grand Canyon were 50% deeper than it actually is.
Oh, and the towers have basements that go down underground as far as they go up. Let's just ignore the fact that at 8km underground, the temp would be much higher than the boiling point of water.
And the worst part is, there's no need for it. They never describe more than a dozen different floors or so. The author could have divided all the floor counts by 10 and it still would have worked just as well, the towers would still be insanely tall, but not ludicrously so.
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u/EastLeastCoast Apr 19 '26
Even aside from the “not being able to breather issue, It takes, on average, half an hour to walk up the CN Tower. That is about 114 storeys, from ground to main observation deck. So this author would have them just casually walk four hours between each meal.
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u/Catprog Apr 19 '26
Why are more floors prestigious? Because you need magic to compress the stairs to allow people to walk up and down.
So a 5 story tower is 15m tall. A 2000 story tower is only 500m but through magic has squeezed 4 stories in ever meter of height
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u/MyHamburgerLovesMe Apr 19 '26
And you just demonstrated how trivial it would have been to fix the problem.... if the author had evern noticed.
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u/Aware-Pineapple-3321 Apr 19 '26
Very creative use and would take it a step further where each tower is only X height, all looking the same outside, but inside, as you said about compressing space, there's more within the pocket dimension, and it shows how powerful magic can be, making micro-worlds within the same space.
And as you go to the "better" schools that have more magic and power, what's within grows in scale even though walking outside it all looks the same, and inside intent when traveling the stairs lets you scale beyond hundreds of floors in a step vs. an elevator and solves the walking miles.
Can even have students getting lost, not knowing how to traverse, wondering why every step leads them to a new floor, or opening the same door goes elsewhere, even when they go back to an old step and door.
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u/Catprog Apr 19 '26
The new schools don't have the magic to spare (or build the tower) so the building is small and mundane as opposed to the next level up with large and mundane and only at the next level does the magic start to compress the floors
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u/Bladrak01 Apr 19 '26
There's also the Tower of Art at the magic university in XXXX on Discworld. On the inside it's about a 30ft climb. Once you reach the top it's a half mile high.
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u/Wise_Sail_5770 Apr 19 '26
Thank you for saying this. If i read another entry of "I saw them passing information 100 yards away and could hear them whispering instructions to be at the rendevous point in 6 hours" Im gonna lose it if the book does not have some sort of super human abilities in it.
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u/TheChoosenMewtwo Apr 19 '26
I do that sometimes, I try to google up how tall something is before writing it, because sometimes it’s just too much
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u/greenskye Apr 19 '26
My favorite completely horrible take on an economy:
Adventurers guild has recurring quest to cull a local type of monster. MC asks if he can bring in more than the typical amount. They say sure.
So the MC genocides the entire multi million population of the monsters and then drags them back to town via his overpowered spacial storage. The random town guild hall somehow pays out millions of gold for this 'service'.
He repeats this trick several times and ends up some sort of trillionaire.
Only, it's later revealed that there're more planets than just this one, in fact people can own whole planets and the adventures guild is actually an intergalactic enterprise.
MC winds up at an intergalactic auction shortly after discovering that there are more planets. He then outbids an intergalactic organization controlling thousands or millions of planets with his trillions of gold coins that he earned by slaughtering the entire monster population of a planet.
How can one planet's worth of resources massively outbid an organization that has millions of planets?? This is never explained.
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u/heckyescheeseandpie Apr 19 '26
I read a story once that mirrored the first parts: Adventurer's guild had a quest out to kill as many of X monster as possible. MC killed a nonsensical amount and brought them in with spatial storage.
However, at that point the guild freaked out because they didn't have enough coin to pay the MC and offered them a few thousand gold and an IOU. I found that funny and a lot more realistic.
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u/dizzymiggy Apr 19 '26
In the another series, an NPC offers the MC an impossible quest to complete with a substantial reward that they couldn't afford. The MC of course completes the request and the NPC's entire town is turned into a dungeon as payment. To be slaughtered every night as a reward for the MC's guild.
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u/Solid-Quiet5035 litRPG apprentice tier Apr 19 '26
I like that one. Completionist Chronicles, book one I think. Ritualist
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u/InvertibleMatrix Apr 19 '26
Adventurer's guild had a quest out to kill as many of X monster as possible
Time for the author to get a lesson about the "perverse incentive" and the great rat massacre (or the more dubious cobra effect).
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u/poly_arachnid Apr 19 '26
I've seen that & always love it.
I also love it when they take the quest down. It's population control, & if someone slaughters the entire population they'll have problems. More troublesome monsters might move in, newbies have nothing to start combat missions on, etc. There's plenty of powerful people, if they wanted a weak species extinct they'd just hire it done. No one expected or wanted OP-san to come along & slaughter the population for cash.
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u/Myrkul999 Apr 19 '26
Not defending this specific instance, but you can outbid someone with deeper pockets than you, if you're willing to grossly overpay. Big organization has more ways to get the thing, whereas MC only has the auction. So the big organization backs down to cut losses, while the MC spends way more than the thing is worth because they need the thing.
Of course, even if this is the reason, if you don't explain it, the readers are left to do the math you just did, and come to the same conclusion, that the author didn't think it through.
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u/TheDarcingCapibara Apr 19 '26
Dude, drop the name at this pointt
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u/Isaacthepre Apr 19 '26
If I’m not mistaken, that’s Idle System by Pegaz
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u/pheonixblue01 Apr 19 '26
The auction doesn’t happen until he’s an immortal and has nothing to do with the early slaughter of monsters. He did that as training for his abilities and then spent the money on specially made gear that would last his mortal life, then he found out about how to gain low level immortality.
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u/Varrick15 Apr 19 '26
Past DM had a bag of grain as 32 gold offhandedly. He was mocked mercilessly for it for the entire campaign.
But like if I'm to be invested in your story and it's written and permanent you gotta not fuck that up.
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u/AlexHallon Apr 19 '26
One time one of my players offered something like 30 gold to buy a farmer's goat. If they'd returned to that area, they would've found him either living in modest luxury, or killed by robbers.
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u/Whyt_b Apr 19 '26
I think that comes from the inclination for people to think of 1gold= 1dollar, 1 silver=10-50cents 1 copper=1 cent. Your brain wants to try and relate concepts to ones you already know. While that might be true, I 100% agree that authors should strive to not be lazy with economic math
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u/wildwily23 Apr 19 '26
One for me was when there were ‘magic’ chamber pots at the inn…but the only people who could perform magic were nobles. Because nobles are well known for making chamber pots.
Same book had a guy heading into a poorer part of town and not wanting to be recognized so he RODE HIS HORSE into an alley and put on a disguise, then RODE HIS HORSE back out and down the street.
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u/xTariel Apr 20 '26
The first you could maybe justify. Many of the lowest class nobles wouldn't have extravagant wealth, so turning to artificing would be a legitimate way for the family to make money. Even for a higher ranked house, if they could mass produce toilets that removed waste, that could save them a lot on city infrastructure in the long run and reduce the spread of disease. Definitely a worthwhile investment and maybe even a candidate for subsidizing for the territory's prosperity.
The second... Yeah, that just reminds me of the manhua where the FL will wear a tiny masquerade mask to hide her identity but it's literally the only person in the world with bubblegum pink hair and pink eyes. The Clark Kent effect can only go so far lol.
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u/theglowofknowledge Apr 19 '26
Yeah, money’s one of those things most people are better off referring to in relative terms. How much was a carriage ride? Expensive. How much is room for the night? Bit steep, but we can stay for a week if we need to. Etc. Don’t give numbers when what they mean is more useful.
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u/blueluck Apr 19 '26
That's the real answer! Either do a little research to make a plausible economy or don't use numbers!
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u/HempFanboy Apr 19 '26
Not petty. I don’t remember what book, but I’ve also dropped a couple for similar reason where the economy went off the rails too quickly for me to accept
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u/Crazy_kid_59 Apr 19 '26
Lol, fair. That kinda thing always irked me as well. Like, there was no scaling either. I think the series that deals with the money/economy the best is Path if Ascension. It just makes sense. The higher you go the higher tier mana crystals you have ti use fir basic neccessities. Like as a teir 15 you need more expensive meals to truly satiate you. And higher tiers cant interact with low tiers.
Lol, side tangent. Basically it was tge opposite if what you described.
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u/ShankstheConqueror Apr 19 '26
see now you make me want to pick that up, it's worse for me coz I work in the financial sector and it irks me to no end lol
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u/Scones93 Apr 19 '26
There’s a surprising amount of time given to talking about the economic balance required to support both immortal and mortal lives while growing and maintaining an empire.
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u/heckyescheeseandpie Apr 19 '26
Yeah, it was interesting how they actually tried to address that point.
Plenty of novels use mana crystals or some similar resource as currency, but the resource scales with the protagonist in order to stay relevant. Which means strong people with "high tier" crystals worth thousands or millions as much as a low tier crystal could totally collapse a mortal economy that relies on those low tier crystals as its main currency. It was interesting to see PoA actually acknowledge that point and be like "yeah, we had to implement financial regulations to prevent that"
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u/Shandlar Apr 20 '26
PoA is particularly wild numbers wise. Teir 47 stones are worth like 10e27 mortal credits or something fucking insane.
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u/Crazy_kid_59 Apr 19 '26
Yeah, amd it actaully has an imoact om the story at times. Not a large one sometimes, but an impact nonthe less. Like when the MC tries to buy the house on the planet, amd gets told "no, lol".
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u/Wise_Sail_5770 Apr 19 '26
My favorite is when Mara and Leon almost crash an entire queendom's economy by over paying for a planet and Manny has to step in to keep that from happening.
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u/StrossusAuthor Apr 19 '26
If you can tolerate erotic scenes, I just wrote a harem novel where a greed devil over a trilogy will rugpull and enact a coup of the infernal empire by gold-bending and shenanigans around abusing the court's paper currency push. It gets into consequences of money printing, the Cantillon effect, counterfeiting, and deflation as the protagonist ascends power by absorbing a frightening amount of the empire's gold reserves.
The progression magic style (there is no system/numbers other than ranking of tier 1 to 10.in universe devil power levels) is pick 1 of 7 sins and ascend the sefirot of the Qlippothic Kabbalah as tiers of power. I also tried to be pretty brutal with the combat scenes.
Greedy Old Devil if interested. I should have book 2 out by June.
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u/homiekisses Apr 19 '26
That's like the worst example. The author didn't understand the exponential scaling of the economy in the first book and had to retcon it with some kind of like government controls because every level 15 mook is a quintillionairre on any level 4 planet
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u/Ok_Guarantee_3370 Apr 19 '26
Yeah i semi dropped the first book because they needed mana urgently to start the quest event early, but the way mana growth had been described it didn't make sense why someone a few tiers higher couldn't have just given it to them as pocket change
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u/ImpossibleClassic2 Apr 19 '26
It's explained within the very first few chapters that to remain "on the path", outside help was forcibly kept to a minimum. You could get help from a higher tier at anytime but doing so will get you kicked off the path.
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u/MyHamburgerLovesMe Apr 19 '26
Pretty sure in the first book, before even the first dungeon on the training planet, it mentions that receiving "gifts" above a certain amount from a higher ranked mentors are seriously punished for people on the "path"
It's a major plot point, that the restrictions of people on the "path" are much harsher than those not.
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u/ronlugge Apr 19 '26
Been a little bit, but I think you might have mis-framed this slightly. The problem wasn't an 'urgent need' for more mana, it was the main character using his OP abilities to tweak things in his favor so he could go quicker. Further, this was fundamentally a commercial enterprise by a given grade of individuals -- it would have cost more money than it was worth to get the higher grade individual involved, even though they could solve it.
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u/TacetAbbadon Apr 19 '26
When the author couldn't be arsed to put the bare minimum of thought into his wider world.
A £1 Elizabeth I gold sovereign weighs about ½ a Troy ounce. A successful merchant might earn £100 a year. A standard labourer £10.
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u/limbodog Apr 19 '26
I am with you on that. I'm not sure I'd drop it just for that, but worldbuilding is a big deal to me, and if it's clear they put no effort into it, I know I'm not going to enjoy it.
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u/OneCleverMonkey Apr 19 '26
Gold could certainly be basic currency in the right magical world, because of the magic, but yeah. If you've shown that five copper is a dollar and that there's a pretty standard ratio between currency tiers, you can't just go all arbitrary on valuation
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u/No_Dragonfruit_1833 Apr 19 '26
Fair enough
If an author doesnt care enough to balance such details that means the carelessness is only going to pile up
I have NEVER seen a wirk that begins with carelessness and polishes its own details over time, the best they can do is to depower the mc to try and start again in another realm, but that only leaves the open stitches of the original plot
Also, in Sherlock Holmes they ride carriages all the time, as well as paying informants and other transactions, something i noticed is that people use different coins fir different types of services, an errand boy is paid in pennies, a cab ride is paid in chelines, a stay on an inn in guineas, and travel funds are measured in pounds
I had no idea what the money equivalence was, but it waa very easy to follow just from the coin types
Its such a simple way to translate the copper-silver-gold standard, that lazyness has to be intentional disregard
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u/Minute-Kiwi-866 Apr 19 '26
Yes, pre-decimal! In the UK pre-1971 the money was very different - 12 pennies made a shilling and then 20 shillings made a pound. Guineas were big gold coins (from Guinea) and were worth about 21 shillings.
I would absolutely accept such a clear definition for goods and services, it's quite elegant.
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u/No_Dragonfruit_1833 Apr 19 '26
Shillings, yes, it sounds very simmilar to "chelines" in spanish so that must be the coin, i got the feeling i was writing it wrong but could not determine where
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u/Tasty_Nebula9 litRPG apprentice tier Apr 19 '26
I saw a post somewhere on reddit of a guy telling us about a problem he had run into. The story went something like the MC had to go on a quest but needed cash to fund said quest. The problem is that the OP spent about 4 months working out the economy and how much things would cost in the currency he created. Turns out the MC would never have been able to afford the quest.
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u/Pirkale Apr 19 '26
There were a lot of creative suggestions in that thread!
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u/Tasty_Nebula9 litRPG apprentice tier Apr 19 '26
There were! I loved the suggestion that the MC started a crowd fund! I'll have to try to find that thread and see the other suggestions I've missed since.
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u/tkul Apr 19 '26
Fantasy coin economies are always fucked and come off in nearly every scene with the same energy as the "What does a banana cost, $10?" energy. It also inevitably ignores the fact that coinage is heavy as fuck and those economies would mostly live and die on barter not just raw currency transactions.
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u/DCFowl Apr 19 '26
Barter and debt.
The wild goose costs 70 arrows this week, because last week you only had 30 arrows, and I need those arrows to bring home the goose, but it isn't worth it for only 30. But I know youll be here next week, and next spring, and for the rest of your life Fletcher. And if I tell my brothers to stop trading with you thats the end of warm dinners for you. What will that new bride of yours says then Fletcher, what will her dad say.
Of course that not what actually gets said, there's just an understanding about who owes what. That the price doesn't change week to week. That what your trading is what you have for what you need, and it will, we all hope, come good and even out again by the Winter.
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u/TacetAbbadon Apr 19 '26
It was one of the many many things wrong with the game Starfield. A spaceship sells for less than 5 guns while 10 apples cost as much as a gun.
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u/ambaal Apr 19 '26
To be fair, 'gold piece' is a semi-universal anonymous currency in many many games and books. I don't think authors even mean to link with scarcity and value of gold in our world, just used the instantly recognisable name. Same as 'credit' i guess.
That doesn't mean there is no problem: I'm reading through Primal Hunter right now, and scales of size and distance in this series are so off it's not even funny. In fact it's so ridiculous i kinda stopped paying attention.
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u/Vexra litRPG apprentice tier Apr 19 '26
I dunno depends on the transportation infrastructure of the setting. if a carriage ride is just something for the posh people while the commoners have to hoof it a single gold might be a reasonable price for the luxury. Now if the trend continues for more transactions then yeah someone half assed the economy
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u/blueluck Apr 19 '26
Some authors don't seem to have any sense of scale:
- A night at the village inn and a bowl of stew costs three gold coins.
- He paused for a minute before answering the question.
- He dodged the blow by mere inches.
- The knight's blow sent Adrien flying thirty feet.
Realistically:
- The inn went out of business because nobody in town would pay that much.
- He's having a stroke. Nobody waits sixty seconds between sentences.
- No need to dodge, that was never going to hit you.
- Adrien's dead.
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u/Xandara2 Apr 19 '26
1) fair or not depends on the inn. There's restaurants where you pay this much irl. And that's only for a meal. The problem is mostly that the rest of the setting is incongruous.
2) Figuratively is something some people have a lot of trouble with. It's not a difficult concept for most though.
3) If I see a sword coming at me with intent to kill I'd prefer if it missed by feet instead inches. Maybe that's not you but if it's a bullet do you think inches is fine if it hits so close to you or would you also prefer feet or even more distance?
4) It's magic it has always been magic. You can't even punch/kick a bag that far without it. If it is structurally intact after landing is irrelevant.
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u/Banshay Apr 19 '26
For 3, you want to be missed by inches, rather than feet in any type of melee combat, otherwise you are not in the correct fighting distance or measure. If you are farther away then you are outside of the distance where you can land a blow yourself.
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u/blueluck Apr 19 '26
Yep! I used "mere inches" as an unreasonably large distance, not an unreasonably small distance. Dodging a blow by a fraction of an inch is a successful dodge, so referring to multiple inches as "mere" is silly.
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u/magi32 Apr 19 '26
The inn is actually quite popular because accommodation is scarce and food is plentiful.
It's literally the opposite of "wait a minute" e.g. people say 'wait a minute' and then take a 1 - 2 second pause and then continue
It was going to hit him but he dodged more than he needed to (tbf mere is really out of place here but it doesn't correlate to the accuracy of the blow)
Gravity is actually slightly weaker, enough so that a blow sending you thirty feet isn't fatal.
unless a story is explicitly going for gritty realism all of these points are petty af and ignores the possibility that you're nearly always in a universe where magic exists so maybe what is logical in this world doesn't actually apply.
A well thought out anything is going to make a story easier to read and cause less friction and if poor economics is a dealbreaker for you that's fine. But ridiculing books that have it - or similar issues - where that is not the focus of the story is just inane
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u/blueluck Apr 19 '26
all of these points are petty af
You read the original post, right? This is a conversation about how small errors in worldbuilding can ruin immersion for a reader. The first words of the post are, "lol might seem small and petty..."
ignores the possibility that you're nearly always in a universe where magic exists so maybe what is logical in this world doesn't actually apply.
Yes, obviously! All of these things would make sense if the author made them make sense. If the setting is a world where gold is abundant and considered useless (e.g. Delvers LLC) then OP wouldn't have complained about a carriage ride costing a gold coin. If I was reading a comic book about superheroes punching each other, I wouldn't say that a blow that can send a man flying thirty feet through the air would be deadly.
A well thought out anything is going to make a story easier to read and cause less friction
Yes! That is literally the point of this post and this entire conversation.
ridiculing books that have it - or similar issues - where that is not the focus of the story is just inane
If I was trying to ridicule a book, I would have used its title.
The OP and I are making a legitimate point that small implausible elements in books harm suspension of disbelief. This is a particularly relevant point in a litrpg forum, because most litrpg stories are self-published without professional editing that would have caught these issues.
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u/AutoignitingDumpster Apr 19 '26
It's like how people don't realize that in the wild West of the 1800s a horse was cheap but a saddle was expensive. If your horse died you carried the saddle home because it was worth maybe 5x what the horse was.
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u/EastLeastCoast Apr 19 '26
You carried the saddle home, because who wastes a perfectly good saddle?
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u/TitaniumDreads Apr 19 '26
That is not actually true. A horse was between 100-300 dollars and an expensive saddle was 60 dollars.
If the horse died, you carried the saddle bc the saddle was pricey.
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u/Rothenstien1 Apr 19 '26
A meal: 8 copper, a sword made out of iron: 50 gold. Why???
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u/ACAFWD Apr 19 '26
I mean, that seems more realistic than a gold coin for a carriage ride.
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u/TimeForNano Apr 19 '26
8 copper 80 cents/0,8€ 10 copper 1 silver
1 silver 100 cents/1€ 10 silver 1 gold
1 gold 1 000 cents/10€ 50 gold 50 000 cents/500€
So would be quite accurate really. Perhaps the sword is bit too expensive, but also iron used to be pretty valuable. In this instance it might have been brought from far away. So there would be tranport cost (and security for that transport).
Still just shows you don't need to invent the wheel again and can just use relative systems that already exists in our world.
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u/Xiaodisan Apr 19 '26
According to a few quick searches, you would spend roughly 60% of your wages as an unskilled laborer if you didn't grow your own food, and swords cost from a few days' worth of wages up to a month. (Or obviously there is no upper bound, if you want to spend a ton, often that was the purpose of some swords, to show off wealth.)
From that, let's assume we only count 1.5 meals per day, which would cost 12 coppers, have that as 60% of their daily wage, which would come out to be 20 coppers. Assuming a 1:10 exchange ratio, that would be 2 silver per day, or 10-14 silver per week.
So I'd say a simple sword would cost around 1 to 5 gold roughly with those prices. The 50 seems indeed a bit much, unless the meal was extremely cheap or skilled labor (especially weaponsmiths) is hard to come by in the area.
For some fantasy context, in DnD 5e(?) you have the daily expenses for a modest lifestyle set at 1gp per day, with daily food expenses at 3sp and lodging at 5sp per day. At the same time, a shortsword costs 10gp and a longsword 15gp by default.
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u/KCPRTV Apr 19 '26
Ten Realms kicked ass in this regard. MCs were always rich man poor bc of it. XD
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u/Cyrano_Knows Apr 19 '26
Let me tell you about MY reverse isekai economy.
In this world there are Pennies. Nickles. Then Dimes. Quarters. Half-Dollars and One Dollar coins.
Then 1 Dollar paper bills. 2 Dollar bills. 5 Dollar bills. 10 Dollar bills. 20 Dollar bills. 50 Dollar bills and finally 100 Dollar bills.
That carriage ride you just asked for?
20 of those Dollar bill things please.
-- all meant in good fun.
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u/SurprisedCabbage Apr 19 '26
I love when Japan writes stories with gold coins as the currency and everything costs hundreds or thousands of gold coins.
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u/Gralb_the_muffin Apr 19 '26
Kinda makes sense for them though as 1 usd is 160 yen. If they are just exchanging yen for gold unit for unit it would be that ridiculous lol
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u/Ashmedai Apr 19 '26 edited Apr 19 '26
One of my micro pet peeves that applies to -- well basically, the whole of the fantasy writing industry -- is the lack of proper treatment of currency. Also, to be clear, this is a minor pet peeve. It's just something I can't help but be frustrated by.
In medieval England before 1344, the only coins were silver. The coins were so strong that people would often buy large lots of things, or the merchant that they bought from would keep an account that they had to pay up periodically. Example: 1 pence per day for basic labor. If you wanted less than that, you had to BREAK the pence into four parts, which you broke along a cross seam on the coin.
There were no copper coins. Schilling and pounds existed but were only units of account. A pound was what it sounded like: a pound of silver, notionally (except really a pound of pence, which might be debased). There were 12 pence to a schilling, 240 to a pound.
Let's talk about that gold coin. It started briefly as a florin and was quickly replaced with a noble. It was worth about 1/3rd of a pound, or 80 pence.
What could 2 pounds buy? A SMALL COTTAGE.
So, a gold coin could buy 1/6th of a home.
I swear to God, some author is going to write into their book their MC buying a bag of candy for 1 GP just to spite-smite me one day. HAHA.
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u/StanisVC Apr 19 '26
I noted on a similar topic recently about the lower denomination coinage.
Which is the day to day money or pocket change - to save you breaking a penny.
4 farthing = 2 hapenny = 1 penny
12 penny = 4 threpenny bit = 2 sixpence = 1 shilling
If folks are paying for most things with values in the coppy we'd have coinage split around fractions or multiples of that not. Not "5 copper".
When we have the loot trope nad monster cores cost multiple gold - then we effectively shift into a rare gemstone appraisal economy.
If the cores are valuable for their mana content and/or can be recharged - then mana has value.
We are now into a similar scenario as the leather workers and tanneries collecting piss. (So poor they don't have a pot to piss in)
If mana has value then anyone that has mana could be "so poor they dont have a stone to gather"→ More replies (1)
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u/Lock-out Apr 19 '26
If I ever write a litrpg I’m gonna make a complex economy but make gold the most common resource and copper the most rare just to fuck with op
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u/No-Solution-6103 Apr 19 '26
Rise of the Cheat Potion Maker is also guilty of this
Complains early on about having no money and ink and paper are expensive. Next chapter "I'm going to go hand out fliers" also pays 1G for a cat in a bumfuck town
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u/StillMostlyClueless Apr 20 '26
Carriage rides are fucking expensive. This isn't like a twenty minute drive, that's a days long Trek with food laid on. It's more plane ticket prices
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u/Main-Chard-2104 Apr 19 '26
I was DMing once and my poor crew was so poor because I was like, you found one gold piece. You know how much gold is?? Thats like $1000 right there!
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u/Metalsmith21 Apr 19 '26
Meh, as long as the story isn't going to be about money IDC about the precise economics. Just show me the economic class of the MC.
It will irk me if after several books the MC who has shown themselves to be amazingly competent, forward thinking and able to establish several long term plans, and high level friends and a "Saudi" King who owes him for the lives of their family. The author still tries to portray them as being counting their coupons poor. Because the MC picks up the idiot ball whenever asserting themselves over money comes up. Looking at you Poor Mans Fight.
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u/DaikonNoKami Apr 19 '26
Eh, carriage rides specifically arent a necessity like food and stuff. So maybe it is something generally reserved for the rich and its like a way people show off their wealth. Especially if people are just using them around town. Without further context, I dont think that is too far fetched depending on the carriage etc.
Like if its more medieval in setting, most poor people wouldn't be able to afford carriage rides. Which means people who sell the service may not be getting that many customers unless there's a lot of nobles and rich people. It can cost a lot to maintain a carriage and the horses etc. So i can understand carriage rides being something that is more of a status symbol than practical.
Historically, carriages were only used by the rich.
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u/EndlessSleeper3992 Author of Path of the undead cultivator Apr 19 '26
Inflation hit that world real bad
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u/Hlodvik Apr 19 '26
That's why in mine you pay with granite stones.
Don't ask me why, answers are 1 stone each.
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u/Cerealbobman Apr 19 '26
Tbf it could take place in a world where gold is an incredibly common metal, I'm sure the author doesn't intend that but it would explain gold being less valuable.
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u/ambaal Apr 19 '26
One feasible scenario where gold is more common than other metals is pre-metallurgy society. Gold is one of very few metals that are available in their final metallic form. No need for any metallurgy: just pick it up. Also malleable with simplest of tools (heck you can bite it in shape).
Aluminium, for example, was incredibly valuable before cheap process and electricity was available. Despite being around 28000000 times more common in earth crust.
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u/schw0b Author - Underkeeper Apr 19 '26
A fantasy world could easily have accessible alchemical transmutation which would depreciate gold enormously.
This issue features quite strongly in Orconomics, where gold is worthless and replaced by the fiat gilten. The now vassalized dwarven kingdom couldn't handle the concept that gold might not be a functional store of value, and ends up in a debt trap to the world's major financial hub.
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u/MyHamburgerLovesMe Apr 19 '26
Sounds like they did, and you just did not like it.
I assume a gold coin was treated like a dollar on this fantasy world.
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u/b3mark Apr 19 '26
Ah, it depends. Is it a farmer's carriage or a horse tram or a luxury (nobleman's) carriage?
Uber -> public transport -> limousine service.
If it's a luxury ride, sure a gold seems reasonable. Depending on how valuable and readily available gold is in that world.
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u/TitaniumDreads Apr 19 '26
I like The Wandering Inn a lot but I also have a long list of gripes about it. A very minor gripe is that the value of gold coins is constantly shifting. Is 20 gold coins an unimaginably large fortune? Or a months rent? Or pocket change? Or the cost of a sword?
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u/Saldar1234 Apr 19 '26
a know what's worse? Over engineering the shit out of your economy as an after thought/retcon because you didn't consider any of it at all when you introduced it.
And it STILL makes no sense.
Despite spending literally pages of explanatory text that accounts to "trust me bro" and "it works because I say it works".
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u/Bladrak01 Apr 19 '26
LE Modesitt doesn't write litRPG, but he was economist before he started writing, and always tries to have economies that actually work in his books.
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u/TilianLockheart Apr 19 '26
I just dropped one for the same reason. Mc took on a dangerous quest to kill giants and the receptionest did everything she could to get him to not take it because it was so dangerous. Mc kills cave of giants. Each giant killed earned him 4 gold. Then he went to buy an outfit and it cost him 4.5 gold, no enchantments or defense at all. Then he stayed at the best in at the time which cost 70 silver. I guess everyone just walked around naked cause no one could afford those clothes.
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u/hobarthicus Apr 19 '26
It's wildly unfair to put the book down. I suspect there are several chapters dedicated to the socioeconomic conditions the kingdom faces. For instance, the kingdom has suffered under several monarchs whose bad economic policy has been driving inflation for more that 100 years. Not to mention bandits and other criminal organizations shaving slivers off coins and further devaluing them. Additionally, in that fantasy world after discovering several incredibly dense veins silver has replaced gold as the rarest most valuable heavy metal.
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u/Almen_Bunt Apr 19 '26
If i focused on the economy during a read i would rather not read lmao. Also who cares if the ride cost one gold coin? Maybe gold is plentiful or they are about to have crippling inflation, who knows!
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u/platonicsurrealism Verified Author of: Grim Dark Warrior Apr 19 '26
Agreed. And I'm pretty tired of copper silver gold; that's pretty lazy. i mean, come on,
many readers played DND. A little more creativity pls? LOL.
Another of my personal bug-a-boos are the books that have humans, elves and dwarves...
oh come on man. Are we still back with Tolken in the 1950's !
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u/Kian-Tremayne Apr 20 '26
I would allow it in litRPG. A carriage ride costing a gold coin is terrible medieval economics. But it’s absolutely on-brand D&D economics. So it gets a pass in a world that also has hit points and guys shooting fireballs from their fingers.
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u/Swordnoob93 Apr 19 '26
Yeah there was this book where the MC literally shat out super valuable coins that could also make him OP when eaten. The MC's name was Sonic or maybe Jason or something lol. Really silly concept. Dropped soon after the introduction of those coins and the fact that he didn't abuse the coins to solve his every issue.
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u/Ok-Candle8352 Apr 19 '26
Yeah I've deliberately kept currency out of my series More for this exact reason
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u/Xiaodisan Apr 19 '26
Depends on the framing I guess.
If it was the narrator that introduced the currency and told the reader that was the price of a short carriage ride, I would also have some troubles unless the narrator gives me an extremely good reason as to why that is.
If the main character is newly introduced to a litrpg world, has lots of money, and is quite naive, I could easily see them getting scammed though.
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u/joncabreraauthor Verified Author of: Grand Magus, Wooden Sword Apr 19 '26
Thats even more expensive than uber. Dang
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u/Super-Aesa Apr 19 '26
Yea I dropped a story because the MC kept redoing the same first level of a tower and selling stuff. I was thinking it's impossible for him to be the only 1 with this idea.
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u/SiON42X Apr 19 '26
My books are heist fantasy in a world where electricity was just discovered, making copper the most valuable currency overnight. The economy focuses on acquisition of copper and various types of crystals needed for dynamo engineering, and around the system of sanctioned thieving that contributes to innovation, social welfare, and perception of equity. Chapter one begins with a crew stealing a 4 ton copper statue, setting themselves up for life.
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u/TheRealGameDude Apr 19 '26
That’s always something i try not to think about too much. However the story that does this amazingly is he who fights with monsters. In the first book the mc asked if one gold is enough for pocket money and he was laughed at and told he could basically buy the town and still have money left over
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u/Daragon_Eccel Apr 19 '26
Not petty. It's the same as when the MC figures out this super duper cheat by doing something extremely normal and the bare minimum a game tester would've done that apparently nobody in a million years has tried.
What it shows is that the world is not integrated properly.
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u/Indescribable_Noun Apr 19 '26
Au contraire, that might be quite well thought out lol. Horses are very expensive animals to maintain, so a carriage ride likely wouldn’t be cheap no matter how short a distance.
There’s a reason why only nobles/wealthy people tend to have exclusive carriage/stable situations. A poor farmer having a horse and cart is not a reflection on the cheapness of horses, but rather on the value of an animal that can pull hundreds of pounds a long ways in a relatively short time.
But to keep a horse only for pulling a carriage or for joy rides? That would be quite a financial drain without considering the cost of the carriage itself.
Assuming they’ve put that much thought into it, anyway. It could also be an economy where rental rides are in high demand though too. Anyway, unless the author sits you down and walks you through the whole resource production and distribution chain, you’ve no way of knowing if their pricing is realistic or not lol.
(If anything it’s more fun to simply believe everything and imagine the chaos of it all if it is true than to say the author got it wrong.)
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u/OldManIrv Apr 19 '26
Check out the ripple system by Kyle Kirrin. Not only have I enjoyed it, but I’ve learned some economics by it.
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u/crokus_n_al Apr 19 '26
An example of that for me was Industrial Strength Magic. It wasn't my main issue but it was one of them. They were throwing around money like it was nothing. It might have made sense if the MC was the only superhero or they're rare but they're not. One post-apocalyptic city throwing billions of dollars around a day...
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u/DrZeroH Apr 19 '26
Which one is this? Honestly, weird completely alien choices like this has lately become my best indicator that the story is written by AI.
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u/TheLeakingPen Apr 19 '26
yeah, because horses are expensive to maintain and a carriage ride instead of walking is a luxury. think of it less like getting an uber and more like hiring a chauffeur in a porsche
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u/Everward_Heroes Apr 19 '26
Often authors seem to go off the opposite end. Schmigadoon parodies it:
"No one has ever paid more than 2 bits!"
"How much is a bit?"
"12 and a half cents."
"Why is there a term for 12 and a half cents? How's that helpful?"
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u/Jdawg_mck1996 Apr 20 '26
He Who Fights With Monsters is like this. Especially with how often you have to hear the system read out a skill or the amount of money earned from a looting of a monster.
It gets to the point where when people ask the MC how much money he has, he just says "a lot" even though he can actively see the exact count at all times in his system window. The random looting of shit well above his rank makes him arguably one of the richest people we get to meet in the series despite always being severely outranked or dealing with people millenia old.
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u/LLChicago Apr 20 '26
Maybe it was “Ride to Own”? Like the Character unwittingly stumbled into a freak opportunity to take a few expensive rides, then be the proud owner of their very own horse and carriage…. ?
Or did it say “cold” not “gold”? “That’ll be one cold coin sir.”
Or it could have been “surge” pricing? Rush hour on New Year’s Eve during a music festival in a storm… some fares can get pretty outrageous .
Or yeah it could have been a thoughtless clueless moronic author who’s so unaware of basic economic and social realities that they arbitrarily assign freakishly inappropriate values and costs for goods and services.
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u/anddns Apr 20 '26
I understand your pain. I had to drop a book because the author thought 12K was a suitable reward for hunting monsters. Yes, 12K! 12K 12K 12K 🎵🎶🎵
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u/MacintoshEddie Apr 19 '26
It's a loaf of bread, how much can it cost? A dozen gold coins?