Axioms of an Addled Antillectual

The Bullion in the China Shop

The tough thing about relating currencies in tabletop games is that, largely, they’re all completely made up. Contemporary RPG settings excepted, the fantastical, the futuristic, and often even the pseudo-historical currencies appearing in gaming are in most cases simply discrete and gameable abstract units of (often arbitrary) buying power—frequently serving as a game balancing element, perhaps with some real-world currency names or odd denominations thrown on top for flavor.

The short version: even within the confines of a single roleplaying game, concrete currencies (real-world or not) will never be entirely “accurate” from a real-world or even a simulative perspective. As an abstraction it doesn’t need to be, and arguably it shouldn’t be as a generality. Frankly such an attempt would be mad and, in most cases, a literally impossible pursuit for vanishingly little if any gain.

Here’s a fun read, with some related points:

Collections: Coinage and the Tyranny of Fantasy ‘Gold’ – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

Consistency is Key

ACKS is a little bit different from most RPGs here, in that its currency reflects concrete, definitive buying power not only to the player characters in the context of equipment lists and services within the game books, but also within the context of the game world itself.

It still has fantastical currency of course, and incredibly hefty currency at that (it is in-genre, of course), but in both the ACKS II Judges Journal and various Axioms (articles of varying topics on the Autarch Patreon) it’s been shown that nearly all of its internal relative pricings and economic assumptions are well-researched, based on and extrapolated from real-world historical data—including, but hardly limited to, cross-references within what’s commonly referred to as the 301 AD Edict of Maximum Prices under Emperor Diocletian—if somewhat abstracted and sanded down to make such figures more gameable and simple to extrapolate from.

Some of the same real-world demographical data and economic assumptions were used in Douglas Cole’s creation of the Norðlond setting for the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game.

Some examples…

Consulting the Judges Journal, one can find how much an unskilled laborer makes in a day and how much a master artisan can command, how much a quarter of wheat harvested is worth to a farmer either as a source of food or in trade, how much meat costs based on inputs such as how many corresponding livestock the average farm keeps and how long it takes them to mature, how much it costs to raise an army, how many people comprise a family either rural or urban and how much income an average family can bring in depending on available working days per year (and accounting for elements such as early mortality and inability to work due to age/sickness), how much they produce of each product yearly (if any), how much the local lord collects in the form of taxes, how much that lord effectively pays back to his supporters by throwing feasts and festivities, and so on and so forth.

There are abstractions for all sorts of useful things, such as market classes for towns and cities. Through exploration of the rules for mercantile ventures, domain management and similar we can discover how many longswords there are to purchase in a given city, why grain might cost more here than over there (and how to profit from that), how long it will take and how much it will cost to construct a castle, and similar. Thanks to its thoroughly researched, carefully calibrated and properly telegraphed demographics we can get an idea of how many wizards of a particular competency reside in a given city, or how many fighters compose the retinue of a lord of a specific station and charge, how competent they are, and how much they can command as payment.

This isn’t to say the valuation or buying power of currency in ACKS is 100% “historically accurate.” That is certainly not the case, but again it doesn’t need to be. The primary benefit here is that of consistency.

Consistency allows concrete systems to be designed and fitted into place, which all inherently make sense as far as how they integrate and flow into each other—the values associated with these extrapolations and abstractions follow logically from the economic systems they share contextual relationships with.

For Consistency’s Sake, Get to the Point!

With all this in mind then, the most important thing is not finding some exact currency conversion rate between ACKS GP and GURPS dollars, or GURPS dollars and a 301 AD Roman denarius (smack in the middle of a notoriously unstable time period as far as currency debasement, no less). Any rate we can come up with will be inherently approximate—no precise conversion rate will exist, due to differing game assumptions.

Rather, our goal here is finding a solid approximation for a conversion rate that represents the most consistent level of buying power between games. Lists of specific items will always vary between games in value… Even very similar items within the same game sometimes inexplicably differ greatly in value.

Back to Basics

OK, so all that’s interesting, but how then do we match ACKS‘ currency to “GURPSbux”?

In theory, $1 in GURPS Fourth Edition “GURPSbux” is equivalent to a US dollar from about 2004. That’s not in the manual anywhere, of course—what the Basic Set will tell you is that $1 is supposed to be a “modern US dollar” (2004 was modern at the time Fourth Edition was published, after all) or in other periods, enough to buy you a loaf of bread or equivalent staple in whatever setting you’re playing in… the “Generic” in “GURPS” rears its head here, since that benchmark plus the general Economics section (pp. B514 – B519) and generic job tables (p. B517), the “Tech Level and Starting Wealth” box (p. B27), along with the “Cost of Living Table” (p. B265) are pretty much the extent of the guidelines you’re going to see.

ACKS talks a lot across various sources about extrapolating historical price comparisons from the 301 AD Edict of Maximum Prices, including prices for laborers (generally slaves, during the period they’re drawn from). However, we can go back even further in ACKS‘ history—back to the Autarch forums, where certain thought processes were being detailed in their relative infancy:

Starting from the Ground Up… Literally

The thoughts written at the link above nicely spell out exactly the process that went into establishing ACKS‘ currency benchmarks, and while eventually conversion work was done to period-appropriate denarii via value of grain by weight and etc. as detailed in the ACKS II JJ, this enables us to align our starting assumptions and benchmarks with Alex’s.

Biting the Silver Bullet

In ACKS (and the bulk of D&D-alikes):

1 Gold Piece (GP) = 10 Silver Pieces (SP) = 100 Copper Pieces (CP)

A SP in ACKS, per the link in the prior section, is there arbitrarily given equivalent value to a 13th-century English penny, which is 1/240th of a Troy Pound (which is silver, equivalent in weight to about 0.823 US Customary pounds). In GURPS Fourth Edition, a pound of silver represents $1000, or $823 per Troy Pound, making a SP worth $3.429 and a CP worth $0.3429, making 1 GURPS dollar equivalent to 2.916 CP.

This produces: $34.29 = 1 ACKS GP.

Since the costs published in the 13th-century Assize of Bread and Ale are what were used both for establishing the base value of a SP as well as the price for a quarter of grain (as described in the ACKS II Judges Journal, p. 443, “How ACKS Prices Were Set”), then by working backwards we can establish that if using the Pyramid #3/33 article “At Play in the Fields,” the base price per lb. of wheat would be about $0.57, putting it below the base price of even high-yield crops but above that of potatoes and, more broadly, tubers ($0.25 and $0.50 respectively).

That seems very strange, considering the Pyramid article puts low-yield crops like wheat at a base price of $2/lb. (or $1/lb. for sale at point of production), calling into question our conversion rate above!

However…

While acknowledging that the Pyramid article may or may not be more broadly friendly to historical realities (hard to know without understanding its sources and assumptions), and also acknowledging that historical price fixing statutes are often notoriously inaccurate to real-world historical values for a multitude of reasons: since these are the foundational benchmarks with which ACKS’ economics are calibrated, it makes sense to abide by them for purposes of conversion nonetheless.

Additionally, wheat during that period of time and in that region was considered a staple alongside barley, oats and rye, potentially effectively lowering its corresponding “At Play in the Fields” base price due to widespread production and availability (particularly in fertile regions, especially considering the potatoes listed as a cheap staple and easy source of calories in the Pyramid article didn’t even arrive in Europe before the 16th century!). This would make sense, considering wheat’s low relative price in the Assize of Bread and Ale and other historical sources for the time period and geographical area.

Given the points above, while keeping in mind ACKS‘ much higher specificity of benchmarks for its currency as compared to GURPS‘ setting-agnostic guidelines, we are going to stick with specific over general and continue with our conversion rate extrapolated earlier.

Spinning Dollars into Gold

The conversion rate above may be somewhat “accurate” according to the chosen approach, but it’s not really gameable or convenient. Let’s turn it into something more table friendly.

In the pursuit of smoothing out some of the rough decimal figures, we could take an SP = $3.429 to instead be equivalent to the GURPS 14th-century English silver penny ($4) as per B515. This would then put 1 ACKS GP at $40 GURPSbux, exactly half the value of a GURPS gold coin (worth $80) and 2.5 times the weight as well, incidentally—100/lb. in ACKS, rather than 250/lb. as is assumed in GURPS. CP would be valued at $0.4 per, or $1 = 2.5 CP.

If we worked backwards using Pyramid #3/33‘s “At Play in the Fields” as we did earlier, this then works out to a base grain price of $0.67/lb. Technically closer to $2 (and only technically), but really no more meaningful than it was before especially as we just deliberately fudged our numbers above. Still, doesn’t hurt to look.

The main anchoring point of conversion to remember is that here, $4 = 1 GURPS silver penny = 1 SP.

$40 = 1 GP is thus our final conversion rate for this approach to importing ACKS values, which are listed primarily in GP.

The Hidden Cost of Success

Alright, we have a conversion rate and that’s nice, but it exists in isolation.

That’s no good—we need to know what it looks like in application, and in relation to costs in each game. Calling back to our “approximate conversion of buying power” mission statement from earlier, given our final rate of conversion, does our buying power stay relatively consistent across games?

If $40 = 1 GP, this anchors the GURPS Status table (p. B265) category of “Average” (0) status in a similar range as the ACKS Standard of Living table’s (ACKS II RR, p. 123) “Adequate” living category, both based on minimum monthly cost to sustain their standard of living. The “Comfortable” category ranges from both games also align.

ACKS Standard of Living	GP Cost	$ Cost	Closest GURPS Status Equivalent
Wretched	1	$40	–2, Poor/Unskilled
Meager	3	$120	–2, Poor/Unskilled
Adequate	12	$480	0, Average
Comfortable	40	$1,600	1, Comfortable
Prosperous	100	$4,000	2, Wealthy
Affluent	450	$18,000	3, Very Wealthy
Sumptuous	2,000	$80,000	4, Filthy Rich
Luxurious	12,000	$480,000	5, Multimill. 1
Lavishly Opulent	80,000+	$3,200,000	5, Multimill. 1

GURPS Status	$ Cost	GP Equivalent
–2	$100	2.5
–1	$300	7.5
0	$600	15
1	$1,200	30
2	$3,000	75
3	$12,000	300
4	$60,000	1,500
5	$600,000	15,000
6	$6,000,000	150,000
7	$60,000,000	1,500,000
8	$600,000,000	15,000,000

The first point of friction…

As you can see in the first table, one downside here is that some resolution is lost on the low end. Status –2 is overrepresented and neither Status –1 nor its associated level of Wealth “Struggling” show up at all, buried somewhere in the “Meager” range leading up to “Adequate.”

I believe part of the difference in standard of living progressions between games is that the lowest end of ACKS is intended to model costs of essentially slaves or indentured servants, and other types of subsistence living. There are few such assumptions made in GURPS, and neither does GURPS‘ cost of maintaining Status change at all with Tech Level as job incomes and starting wealth do… Or at least, nothing I remember reading indicates such outside of the vague implication that they can be altered by the GM in paragraph two on B265, with the statement that its “Cost of Living Table” values by Status are “generic” and that the “amount of money involved” is “free to vary” according to the GM (shocker!).

The second point of friction…

Another highlight to note is that ACKS‘ highest Standard of Living begins at 80,000 GP and has no ceiling! This could imply that, functionally, certain GURPS Status values (at least, by imputed Wealth bonuses along with purchased Status alone) above 5 don’t exist in ACKS. Then, what about our Emperors with Status 8? They should be accounted for at Lavishly Opulent per the ACKS II JJ, p. 123!

You must remember, then, what’s written under Rank (pp. B29–30) which can raise Status (up to +3 imputed Status) in societies where Status and Rank coexist, without raising associated Cost of Living! It’s important to keep in mind that the Auran Empire is in many ways similar to Imperial Rome circa 3rd or 4th century AD… Had it been invaded by magically weaponized beastmen and its highest-level chain of command devastated by steppe nomads and was in the process of its centralized power structure utterly disintegrating, anyway.

In any case, what this means is that people in high-ranking administrative, religious and military positions (i.e. that of an Emperor) effectively receive Status from such stations. It makes perfect sense that having Wealth and Status in such a society only gets you so far—truly respectable social standing and its associated duties come from Rank!

One can even read published Fourth Edition guidance for a version of fantasy Rome circa 258 AD in the form of “Roma Arcana” in GURPS Fantasy, pp. 195–232.

Its guidance for setting-specific Wealth and Status begins on page 221, and arrives at a very similar conclusion—with any Status value above 3 associated with explicit Rank of one flavor or another.

A highly optional solution…

If desired, we could simply replace the GURPS Cost of Living table with the Standard of Living table from ACKS, tying specific Status values to each ACKS category as seems sensible, and few things are broken except perhaps altering a few “Status Supported” lines corresponding to a few jobs listed in GURPS… though since “fair” wages for “typical” jobs are actually ranges in GURPS (p. B517), and costs of living are themselves “generic,” this probably isn’t even itself an issue.

This manual swap would result in accounting for every Status from –2 through 6, up to “Royal Family, Governor” examples given in GURPS.

If we did decide we wanted the lowest monthly costs of living by Status (GURPS) and Standard of Living (ACKS) to match up exactly, we would have to pick which category to anchor the tables at—if “Average” and “Adequate”, that correlates to $50 = 1 GP but it still causes discrepancies in other categories… and the resolution problem on the low end remains either way.

Discrepancies between some categories of the Cost and Standard of Living tables is inevitable, no matter what the currency conversion—they simply have different progressions—so we’re forced to pick a balancing point. If we chose to align the floors of “Wretched” and “Poor,” that produces $100 = 1 GP… Painting a clear picture of how unstable this approach is in isolation.

Knowing the Value of a Hard Day’s Work

All that being said… Since our $40 = 1 GP conversion rate from earlier plays friendly with the Average/Adequate categories of each game already, we’ll continue with it as-is.

As one would expect, average income by Wealth level tracks pretty well according to job incomes and corresponding statuses supported, as listed in GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3 after being adjusted for TL2, which (mostly) fits ACKS‘ Auran Empire setting.

Looking at monthly incomes of the same professions over in ACKS, those values track pretty closely also, as well as corresponding daily and monthly rates of pay (accounting for both 20-day work months for skilled professions and 30-day work months for skilled and unskilled laborers).

Job Wealth Level	Avg. Monthly Pay (TL2)	In GP	Typical Status	Daily Wage (20-day mo.)	Daily Wage (30-day mo.)
Poor / Unskilled	$135	3.38	–2	$6.75	$4.5
Struggling	$337.50	8.44	–1	$16.88	$11.25
Average	$675	16.88	0	$33.75	$22.5
Comfortable	$1,350	33.75	1	$67.5	$45
Wealthy	$3,375	84.38	2	$168.75	$112.5
Very Wealthy	$13,500	337.50	3	$675.00	$450
Filthy Rich	$67,500	1,687.50	4	$3,375.00	$2,250
Multimill. 1	$675,000	16,875	5	$33,750	$22,500
Multimill. 2	$6,750,000	168,750	6	$337,500	$225,000
Multimill. 3	$67,500,000	1,687,500	7	$3,375,000	$2,250,000
Multimill. 4	$675,000,000	16,875,000	8	$33,750,000	$22,500,000

Checks and Balances

Whew… that’s a chunk of information to digest!

While the above breakdowns are hopefully enlightening, it’s still mostly just numbers in tables. We now know that, generally, our conversion rate plays pretty consistently well across both games as far as the costs present in the Standard of Living and Status table value ranges—inherent differences in their progressions notwithstanding.

Let’s now take a look at some specific spot checks and comparisons.

Costs of Labor

An ACKS unskilled laborer, indentured servant, or serf is paid approximately 1 SP per day, assuming a 30-day work month. That works out to $4 per day or 3 GP per month, which slightly under the average pay rate of GURPS‘ TL2 “Poor” category ($4.5 and 3.38 GP, respectively).

A GURPS Porter (LTC 3, p. 48), perhaps the least-skilled profession listed there, makes $134.4 per month adjusted for TL2, or $4.48 per day, supporting Status –2. It is easy to imagine a financially destitute panhandler or similar unskilled “job” making even less.

A GURPS Servant (LTC 3, p. 48) makes $151.2 per month adjusted for TL2, or $5.04 per day, supporting Status –2.

A GURPS Serf/Sharecropper (LTC 3, p. 48) makes $315 per month adjusted for TL2, or $10.5 per day (modified by margin of success or failure) and technically supporting Status –1. However, if assuming the lowliest serf is genuinely unskilled as per the ACKS categorization (i.e. operating from Default of IQ –5 for Farming) and assuming IQ 10, on average they will fail their job roll by 5 or 6. That means they receive 40–50% of the listed pay, or ~$4.73 per day, which is pretty firmly Status –2 territory. ~9.25% of the time they also critically fail, potentially meaning injury.

A Banestorm Beggar or Laborer (GURPS Banestorm, p. 211) each make a base wage of exactly 3 GP ($120) per month or $4 per day assuming the Beggar meets the minimum Panhandling skill level of 12, supporting Status –2. Ytarria is mostly TL3, but it remains an interesting point of reference.

Verdict: Close Enough.

An ACKS skilled laborer or apprentice artisan is paid approximately 2 SP per day, assuming a 30-day work month. That’s $8 per day or 6 GP per month, which is slightly under the average pay rate of GURPS‘ TL2 “Struggling” ($11.25 and 8.44 GP, respectively).

For GURPS equivalents of “skilled laborers,” without listing each one-by-one in detail, the LTC 3 jobs I would consider within this category are as follows: Fisherman, Gatherer, Hunter, Animal Driver, Building Laborer, Charcoal-Burner, Courier, Herdsman, Miner, Sailor, and skilled Serf/Sharecropper. They each provide “Struggling” Wealth and support Status –1, each of them pretty well in the same ballpark as the above ACKS example.

For GURPS apprentice artisans, these are accounted for in the box on LTC 3, p. 49 “Apprentices and Masters”—Apprentices have one step lower Wealth than professional craftsmen, i.e. “Struggling” instead of “Average.” Happily then, the following LTC 3 jobs I consider to be within this category line up with “Struggling” Wealth and Status –1 after accounting for apprenticeship status: Brewer, Carpenter, Clothworker, Glassblower, Illuminator, Mason, Miller, Potter, Scribe, Shipwright, Smith, Tailor, Tanner, and (unmodified for level of competency) Village Blacksmith. Similar to the previous paragraph, these line up closely with ACKS benchmarks throughout several sections in the RR and JJ. Feel free to individually compare using the tables in the books as compared to those above, if in doubt!

The same pattern for artisans continues according to competency up through Masters commanding a level of Wealth above their profession’s norm, remaining at similar income ranges to their equally skilled ACKS counterparts.

Verdict: Close Enough.

Cost of Goods

In ACKS, one of the fundamental benchmarks used to help establish prices and values elsewhere is the price of one quarter of wheat at 4 GP. If we were to compare this directly using our conversion rate, it would be close—not exact, but only because we chose to fudge the exchange rate for ease of handling earlier. We have already established why we will not remain beholden to the Pyramid #3/33 “At Play In the Fields” article as well.

So, what else can we compare?

Individual gear listings plucked from adventurer-oriented tables is an incredibly tenuous and haphazard form of comparison, but we could for instance note that:

Knives are 1 GP in ACKS, and a Large Knife is $40 in GURPS Low-Tech which matches perfectly.

Two-handed swords are 15 GP in ACKS, while the Bastard Sword in GURPS LT is $650 which is only $50 off the mark.

However, there are many weapons, armor and other equipment entries which are not even close… Namely, weapons with Special qualities in ACKS such as spears which are given very high values relative to the speculative costs of material and labor involved. Here we must note that ACKS gear prices are also adjusted according to certain game mechanic values (weapon costs perhaps influenced by special weapon qualities and damage, most armor costs definitely influenced by amount of AC provided, etc.) for game balance considerations.

ACKS gear prices are also adjusted for in-setting rarity and difficulty of manufacture, since while the ACKS Auran Empire setting (effectively emulating Late Antiquity) is generally TL2 by GURPS standards, it also “imports” many TL3 and even some TL4 features (as far as that geographical area is concerned) for convenience and genre convention as noted in the ACKS II JJ—a few examples being stirrups, grappling hooks, lanterns, ‘advanced’ carts and wagons, certain types of armor which weren’t possible until certain metallurgical techniques were developed, and similar.

Due to the above, for individual equipment listings, unless you’re explicitly trying to play a campaign in the Auran Empire setting, we are better off using the preexisting GURPS book values of its weapon, armor, and other individual purchase prices (particularly those in Low-Tech).

Instead, we can use our conversion rate to compare between GURPS list pricings and a few (themselves probably tenuous) historical sources. After all, way back towards the beginning we found out ACKS SP was given the same value as a 13th-century English penny… For fun, let’s take a peek!

The links below are hardly reputable or consistent historical sources (although one can find those as well, in fact there is a list of references in the first link included at the end), but for ease of eyeballing these “pre-chewed” lists will do for a quick comparison.

Medieval Price List

Medieval Prices | GURPS Wiki | Fandom

Using our rate of $4 = 1 SP = 1 penny, the costs at the links above are in many cases not far askew from those found in GURPS—even some of the armor prices line up quite well with Low-Tech: Instant Armor when assembling suits popular within the time period and area, with both links referring to pricings mostly from the 13th–14th centuries (so mostly near-ish the same time period, at least).

The second link even lists the price of a quarter of wheat: 38 pence, or (38 x $4) $152 and 4 GP (per the ACKS JJ), which shakes out to 1 GP = $38 as a conversion rate. That’s pretty close to the $40 = 1 GP conversion rate we already came up with!

This grants some additional confidence that our conversion rate provides relatively consistent results in the form of buying power across each game, adjusting for the assumptions in each.

Verdict: Close Enough.

The Roundup

The rates of ACKS pay by skill level and profession average slightly lower (around 88–90%) than their counterparts in GURPS under a certain Wealth threshold, which is both probably fine and also not entirely unexpected. After all, we fudged our conversion rate earlier for convenience—from $3.429 = 1 SP to $4. That means we artificially inflated the value of our GURPSbux. Had we left the conversion rate as-is, the GURPSbux equivalent to an SP would be ~86% of our chosen $4 rate, which accounts for the bulk of the discrepancy.

From where I sit, this isn’t really an issue—it’s something to keep in mind in the event we stumble into something unexpected later on, but it doesn’t break anything.

Equipment pricing is always going to be dubious to compare, but after looking at a few benchmarks it appears that we’re not too far off the mark in most cases there either in terms of buying power—particularly after making some casual comparisons to semi-applicable historical prices using our conversion rate.

Our chosen conversion rate has held fairly steady, but let’s make one last little spot check to put a bow on it—what about the generic value given to $1 that GURPS says should be enough to buy you a loaf of bread or equivalent staple in a given setting?

According to “Foodstuffs,” ACKS II RR, p. 130, each of the following is valued at 1 SP ($4):

• Bread, White (4 lbs.)
• Bread, Wheat (8 lbs.)
• Bread, Coarse (12 lbs.)

Assuming GURPS is referencing a ~1 lb. loaf from a US grocer, and ignoring the reality that different doughs do in fact have different densities, this results in the following prices per loaf:

• Bread, White (1 lb.)—$1 or 2.5 CP
• Bread, Wheat (1 lb.)—$0.5 or 1.25 CP
• Bread, Coarse (1 lb.)—$0.33 or 0.83 CP

So, $1 in GURPSbux affords you quite literally any old loaf of bread!

Final Spot Check Verdict: Close Enough.

It’s My Money and I Need It Now!

Alright, alright, I can hear you attempting to play me offstage you scoundrels.

Our “lessons learned”:

• $40 = 1 GP
• $4 = 1 SP
• $1 = 2.5 CP (or 1 CP = $0.4)
• We want to use GURPS book $ figures and equipment lists as-is for mundane purchases.
• Going forward, we will likely want to use ACKS book GP figures (converting to $ as needed) for subsystems heavily entrenched in its economic assumptions—those relating to more than one of material costs and availability, labor, logistics, etc. Such subsystems include, but aren’t limited to: building construction, hirelings/mercenaries, mercantile ventures, domain management, and so on.

Loose Change

Is that it? That’s the answer? The holy grail?

Well, no, not really. This is just one of our three primary critical decoder rings and I’ve only presented a single approach for it, though I’ve also explored several others in detail behind the scenes.

A sample of some other obvious approaches:

• What if we used Pyramid #3/33, “At Play in the Fields” in combination with the price delta between types of grain listed in the translated 301 Edict itself to establish how many GURPSbux are in a GP instead? (answer: probably $100 but up to $150, which solves some friction points and creates and exacerbates others)
• What if we converted GURPSbux directly to denarii and then used the ACKS II JJ to decode it? (answer: bad idea)
• What if we converted by weight of gold, after accounting for the difference in assumed coin weights and volumes between games? (answer: $125, but also not a great idea)

At this point, I would direct you back to the beginning of this post, putting you into an infinite feedback loop—any conversion to GP from around $40 to around $200 can be justified, depending on which approach you use and what benchmarks you use to calibrate it.

However, within this article I hope I’ve provided some assurance that we’ve achieved one rate of generally stable buying power that will be friendly to other decoder rings we build and the subsystems we later import.

There are many implications in this article which beg further exploration and extrapolation, but those are (literally) posts all to themselves…

Kicking the Coin

So, what’s next in our GACKS series? Why, some of the most important things of all…

Decoding Adventurer Progression & Gold-as-XP! Yippee!